I feel compelled to write another Letter from Newark, but from Bethnal Green. I’ve just finished a call with a friend who works at a U.S. unuversity. (I’m deliberately not naming him or his university.) He is one of the most optimistic, high-spirited people I’ve ever met. We haven’t spoken properly since the full implications of Trump’s return to office began to hit home, something that has assumed even greater force in the last week or so.

After initial pleasantries, it became quickly apparent that my upbeat friend is very down. When I asked him how things are looking, both at the university and beyond, he repeatedly said “I just don’t know”. He reported that the institution where he works has had to delete parts of its website relating to “DEI”, just as many others are doing. But this did shock me because most of the students (and staff) where he works are people of colour. As he said, the words are less important than the practice and because of the nature of the city where the university is based, for as long as it sees itself as an “anchor institution” in the community, diversity, equality and inclusion will continue.

But while separating the possibly symbolic from the substantive, he also expressed anger with other academic institutions, particularly Columbia University, that have bent the knee to the Trump agenda. As he says, by conceding ground, they make it easier for the MAGA brigade to advance in others.

More worryingly though, my friend was expressing concern about academic freedom, an issue I wrote about in Times Higher Education in January. He obviously feels some hesitancy about the content of the syllabus he teaches, and he feels this is being absorbed by students too. They, he thinks, will be increasingly worried about writing things that appear critical of the government’s revanchist agenda. For some, this nervousness could be compounded by their family’s immigration status.

When I was in the U.S. last year, the suggestion that writing an essay questioning government policy or ideology, could be picked up via social media, or other surveillance methods, and lead to someone being arrested on the street, imprisoned without trial and possibly deported, would have seemed far-fetched. Today, it seems entirely realistic.

This is chilling. There is much debate about whether Trump is a fascist. So far, I still lean towards rejecting this categorization. But what my friend describes is pure McCarthyism. During the Cold War (and at other times in U.S. history), people lived in fear of expressing opposition to the government. They risked losing their jobs, reputations, homes and lives. In three months, Trump has taken the U.S. back seventy years.

To confirm my fears, since I started writing this, a U.S court has ruled, citing a piece of Cold War-era legislation, that Columbia University student and Palestinian activist, Mahmoud Kalil, can be deported, even though he has commited no crime.