We at the Greater Good Science Center recently learned that one of our books was pulled from the shelves of the United States Naval Academy Nimitz Library, as part of a larger systematic purge of 381 books that mostly explore issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

Beacon Press published Are We Born Racist? New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology in 2010. Drawn from the pages of Greater Good magazine, many of its essays were written by scientists about their own investigations into how we form racial categories and hierarchies in our brains; other pieces took that work a step further into domains like workplaces, community, and family, highlighting best practices for living in a multiracial world.

What other books were removed alongside ours?

The first one to jump out at me is Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , the classic memoir about growing up in racially segregated Arkansas in the 1930s and ’40s. Another is a more obscure and recent science fiction novella by Becky Chambers called A Psalm for the Wild Built , which happens to be a favorite of mine. It tells the gentle story of a monk who travels around an alien world setting up a tea station and inviting local people to share their stories. Why in the world was this book censored? The only thing that comes to me is that the main character is non-binary (pronouns they/them) and polyamorous.

Many of the deleted books are academic histories of racial minorities in America, like Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting in World War II at Home and Abroad and The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority . A rather substantial number are books of nerdy cultural history and criticism: Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1877 ; Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics ; and Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films . The list goes on and on.

What books were preserved? Well, our country’s future Navy officers can still check out The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life , by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which argues that European Americans are naturally smarter than non-white people—even as a scientific critique of that book was censored: Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined .

Hitler’s Mein Kampf remains in the library, but gone are books like Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory . The library also kept copies of at least two openly white supremacist novels that I found in its database: Farnham’s Freehold , by Robert Heinlein, and The Camp of the Saints , by a fellow named Jean Raspail .

The Nimitz Library purge is not an isolated incident; though it touches our work directly, it’s not even remotely the most important. Since President Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has attacked free speech and educational institutions on multiple fronts. The list of these acts is so long that it becomes numbing to read, which is most likely the administration’s intent.

The president of the United States has tried to use state power to persecute news organizations, weaken the 83-year-old Voice of America, and strip public radio of funds for coverage he does not like. He has sought to punish Republican government officials for even minor criticism of his administration. He’s gone after foreign-born students who have peacefully protested against Israel’s war in Gaza, literally snatching some off the streets in acts reminiscent of the authoritarian countries from which many immigrants have fled.

And then there are the actions aimed at scientific research, schools, universities, libraries, and museums. For example, school libraries on military bases have been told to pull books the Department of Defense describes as “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics.” Meanwhile, the administration is gutting federal funding for public libraries—and has altered or removed thousands of federal web pages to prevent “public access to information on a range of topics related to science, health, equity, and foreign assistance programs, among others,” according to the American Library Association.

The administration is slashing funds to museums, including refusing to disburse already-approved grants, in order to restrict their exhibits, facilities, and activities. For example, the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services withdrew a 2024 grant awarded to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis that was intended to help the museum “reduce barriers for visitors with disabilities by planning and implementing interpretive tools and programs for learners with disabilities.” At the same time, cuts to funding for the Science Museum in St. Paul hobbled a data and community engagement project on climate action and a professional development collaboration on diversity and inclusion with 20 smaller museums in the Midwest, among other projects.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is exerting legal and financial pressure on school districts to remove curricula and books that tackle race, gender, and sexuality. It has threatened to pull billions of dollars in funding from universities for not toeing the administration’s ideological lines, especially around diversity programs. The president is trying to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard and other universities for not complying with his demands, despite lacking the legal authority to do so.

But it’s cuts to federal funding of science that stand to have the worst intellectual and economic impact. The administration has fired thousands of government scientists and indiscriminately frozen or cut billions of dollars in research funding in almost every area of science, from medicine to computing to astronomy, including cuts to research into cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

The cuts of course affect our beat, “the science of a meaningful life,” as my colleague Jill Suttie reports today in Greater Good . When we surveyed our network of almost 400 researchers, we discovered that many of them are seeing years of work destroyed by the cuts. Some were intentionally targeted for studying non-white populations, women, and gay, lesbian, or transgender people.

Across all domains, these measures add up to a coordinated effort to limit the expansion of scientific knowledge; squash free speech and debate; control cultural and scientific institutions for political purposes; and erase the experiences of women, people of color, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. These are not and should not be partisan issues. They’re attacks on what actually has made America great—fundamental ideals and principles that have bound this country together since its inception.

In the face of these attacks, scientists and institutions have started to band together. We’re seeing examples like the 200 scientists who were working on the National Nature Assessment, which studies the role of the natural world in America’s health, economy, and well-being. When the Trump administration came for their funding, they created United by Nature , “an initiative to provide evidence-based, nonpartisan insights into the changing state of nature across the country,” as one of the scientists, Phillip Levine, writes in The New York Times .

“When knowledge is threatened, don’t just mourn it,” writes Levine. “Build around it. Not with rage but with the kind of resolve that moves through spreadsheets and shared documents, late nights and collective purpose. Because science is only as resilient as the people who refuse to let it die.”

Libraries are resisting these assaults with their own efforts. The Data Rescue Project is tracking “who is rescuing which data and where it can be found now,” says the American Library Association. “The project’s website also highlights libraries across the country providing patrons with information on how to access federal data and help preserve it.”

After having initially acceded to the administration’s demands, universities have started coming together for self-protection. In April, more than 400 campus leaders signed a statement opposing attacks on academic freedom. As the statement says, “We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” These words and actions resonate with us here at Greater Good magazine: Our work relies on researchers’ unfettered exploration into what gives life meaning; we simply cannot fulfill our mission if this science is obstructed.

For what it’s worth, I applaud and support the work of leaders across sectors to stand up for science and academic freedom–and I believe it will become crucial for each of them to band together across their respective domains. When libraries are threatened, universities should speak out for them; if museums are being told to exclude particular cultures or ideas, every educational and media organization should mobilize on their behalf. An injury to one must become an injury to all. Without that institutional solidarity, science and learning don’t stand a chance.

This is not a movement confined to institutional elites. It’s something that all of us can embrace wherever we are, at every level—and many of us can serve as bridges between our employers and grassroots activity. At some point in the past three months, America crossed a line into a civil emergency . No one wants this to be true, but it’s a truth that must be faced . We urge our readers—Republicans and Democrats alike—to act in whatever ways you can to counter the attacks coming from Washington, D.C., to limit academic freedom and scientific inquiry.

We can look abroad for inspiration. When a xenophobic, authoritarian political party called the Law and Justice Party came to power in Poland in 2015, the country’s lawyers and judges took an unusual step . They traveled around Poland explaining how principles like due process and judicial independence affect ordinary people, and why they were critical to a functioning democracy. Not necessarily at universities or elite forums, but in churches and union halls, and through popular media.

Many of the judges and lawyers were politically quite conservative, and could make the case for the rule of law from that perspective, using Poland’s recent experience with Communism to inform their arguments. They didn’t tell anyone how to vote, but focused strictly on public education . This effort did not produce overnight results; the Law and Justice Party was not voted out until 2023.

That’s a model—combining popular education, non-partisanship, and patience—we need to emulate in the United States . As independent judges are arrested in America and lawyers are punished for representing the wrong clients, the legal profession is starting to mobilize in its own defense. But in this country, I believe scientists and scholars must make a similar effort, going to the places where Americans meet to make the case for science and academic freedom in terms everyone can understand. Making the case for science is inherent to our mission here at Greater Good , and it’s a task we are undertaking now with great urgency.

It’s important for those opposed to what is happening to remember that a little over half the electorate voted for the administration propelling these measures, and the president made small but significant inroads with populations that had previously spurned him, like Latinos and youth . There should be a place for soul-searching and humbly asking ourselves why research and education appear to have lost so much support in this country. That’s something else we can do at Greater Good magazine.

At the same time, however, we need to bear in mind that this is not even close to being the first time in history that political leaders have turned on teachers, scientists, librarians, curators, journalists, and other finders, organizers, and disseminators of knowledge. We don’t need to guess what will happen when politicians and political parties attack knowledge workers because we’ve seen it before. From Nazi Germany to McCarthyism in America to the Great Purge in the Soviet Union to the Cultural Revolution in China to Pol Pot’s Cambodia to ISIS in the contemporary Middle East, the results have never been good. Anti-intellectualism transcends left and right political categories; it cuts across social classes and cultures and religions. It’s a tool of control that history looks back on with horror and shame, never nostalgia.

It’s important to be fair. It’s important to listen and empathize. Facts and accuracy matter; the fight within ourselves against various kinds of bias is never over. Those are core values for us here at the Greater Good Science Center. In my view, however, in the situation Americans are facing, doubt, humility, and empathy should be pathways to clarity and purpose, not paralysis and moral confusion. In these much-too-interesting times, we’re going to need to be courageous and at least a little fierce in defense of the principles and institutions that try to cultivate the best in us.