The Closed Mind Society: JD Vance’s Hillbilly Approach to Academic Excellence

It turned out that JD Vance, Trump’s Vice Preseident, is a hillbilly after all, when it comes to America’s science and higher education.

With the Trump administration’s assaults on research institutions, universities, and international students, a brain drain is happening right in front of our eyes.

There were the three prominent Yale professors of philosophy and history who left the country to join the University of Toronto in Canada because of the “political climate” and “Trump fears” at home. There was Charles M. Lieber, former professor at Harvard and a leading nanotechnologist, who was once charged by the FBI and convicted for concealing ties with China, joining Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School in China as a highest-ranking professor promising to co-create a global scientific hub there.

There was the poll in the publication of Nature of 690 postgraduate researchers, with 548 saying they were considering leaving the U.S. There was the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, which usually sent its talents to U.S. labs but is now looking elsewhere including Austria, Australia, and Japan.

And then there are the U.S.-based scientists of Chinese descent, who have played an outsized role in U.S. science for more than two decades, according to a Stanford University report. The drain started during the first Trump administration, when the so-called China Initiative targeted Chinese scientists for spying. “U.S. science will likely suffer given the loss of scientific talent to China and other countries,” Stanford’s report said.

VP Vance sees nothing wrong in this exodus. Asked about the brain drain in an interview with Newsmax, he said, “This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject it.”

Note “a foreign class of servants”! I wonder how Vance would face his in-laws, originally from India, who are successful academics in mechanical engineering and molecular biology in California.

Vance obviously has no idea how America prides itself as a melting pot with people of all races and ethnicities from around the world, and as a magnet for the best and brightest, especially in science and higher ed.

In 1957, two Chinese American physicists, Zhengdao Li and Zhen Ning Yang, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the violation of the parity law in weak interactions. They had come from China to the U.S. first as international students. There was also their colleague Chien-Shiung Wu, the “First Lady of Physics,” who made significant contributions to the Manhattan Project, and whose “Wu experiment” proved the work of Li and Yang. She had immigrated from China and earned a Ph.D. from Berkeley.

Vance should also know that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, immigrated from Russia. And Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla founder, and recently of DOGE, was from South Africa. And Katalin Karikó, who developed the mRNA technology for COVID-19 vaccines and shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, immigrated from Hungary. Or Fei-Fei Li, AI scientist, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, winner of the 2025 Webby Lifetime Achievement Award, who was born in Beijing. Or Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, the world’s largest semiconductor company, was sent to the U.S. as a child by his Taiwanese parents.

At least Vance has to know that his once mentor/sponsor the venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal Peter Thiel immigrated with his parents from West Germany.

In response to Trump’s hostile policies towards America’s own science and higher-ed communities, the European union launched a program called “Choose Europe for Science” with an investment of €500 million over the next three years “to make Europe a magnet for researchers.” The same destructive move by Trump also definitely benefits China, which had long in place a recruiting program called the Thousand Talents Plan. With its successful enrollment of many Chinese as well as international experts over the years, the plan has just landed its biggest catch, Harvard’s Charles M. Lieber.

JD Vance may have left Middletown, Ohio. But one can only hope that his mindset could grow out of the small town to understand that it is a good thing that the United States stay the leader of science and higher ed, welcoming and not expelling talents from all over the world. He might start by having a conversation with his wife Usha’s parents.