The Trump administration’s assault on America’s universities by cutting billions of dollars of federal support for scientific and medical research has called up from somewhere deep in my memory the phrase “duck and cover.” These were words drilled into American schoolchildren in the 1950s. We heard them on television, where they accompanied a cartoon about a wise turtle named Bert who withdrew into his shell at any sign of danger. In class, when our teachers gave the order, we were instructed to follow Bert’s example by diving under our desks and covering our necks. These actions were meant to protect us from the nuclear attack that could come, we were told, at any time. Though even in elementary school most of us intuited that there was something futile in these attempts to shield ourselves from destruction, we dutifully went through the motions. How else could we deal with the anxiety caused by the menace?

The anxiety greatly increased in October 1957, when Americans learned of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1. The vivid evidence of the technological superiority in rocketry of our Cold War enemy provoked a remarkably rapid response. In 1958, by a bipartisan vote, Congress passed and President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most consequential federal interventions in education in the nation’s history. Together with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, it made America into the world’s undisputed leader in science and technology.

Nearly 70 years later, that leadership is in peril. According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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For the moment, American universities still have the enormous advantage of their resources and their autonomy, and their joyous imaginative freedom. I walk through Harvard Yard on my way to teach a freshman course on great books from Homer to Joyce, and I am continually astonished by what I see and whom I meet. There are students from all over the world — from Mongolia as well as my hometown, Newton, Mass., from Athens in Ohio and Athens in Greece — and there are colleagues who have been immersed in a wide range of pursuits, from creating the first image of a black hole in space to deciphering the words on a scrap of ancient papyrus. We need to get up from under our desks and persuade our fellow citizens that the institutions that they have helped create with their tax dollars are incredibly precious and important.