After the US President Donald Trump’s order of banning citizens from seven Muslim countries, over 20,000 faculty members from the most prestigious universities across the US have signed the "NoToImmigrationBan" petition, opposing the order.
Denouncing Trump’s travel ban, a section of Indian-origin researchers based in the US, who have joined 51 Nobel laureates and over 27,000 academics from across the globe have warned against such prohibitions extending to any group of people.
Veena Das, the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University, urged everyone to join against the ban.
While talking to a news agency, Veena said, "Scientists and scholars in India should also rally against the slow corrosion of intellectual autonomy that has been happening in India, perhaps slowly, but surely.”
"Responsibility toward knowledge is not a national enterprise but one that will either nourish or corrode the human spirit. It is up to us to crush the rising tide of stupidity," she said.
Arvind, the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), questioned the justification of the order.
"It is a ban on Muslims only because Christians are explicitly excluded. Should all Muslims pay the heavy price of dashed dreams because of a few Muslim terrorists?" he said.
Apart from academics, 171 leading scientific, engineering and academic organisations in the US have called on Trump to rescind the executive order declaring it damaging to scientific progress, innovation and US science and engineering capacity.
