How political pressure and public opinion affect science at American universities

Beverly Gage is professor of history at Yale University who works on modern U.S. political history and the relationship between democracy and violence. Her acclaimed biography G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. She recently co-chaired a committee at Yale that wrote a widely discussed report on the status of public opinions of Yale and higher education generally. She is also the author of a new book, This Land is Your Land, that tells the story of America through visits to sites important in its history. These two activities make her particularly well suited to discuss why science at American universities is under political strain.