Even in the old mill towns where I grew up, we occasionally had a kid go to Harvard or some other Ivy League school. They might catch some good-natured ribbing about suddenly being too good to hang with us -- the kind of banter our fathers perfected in the mill -- but those kids knew that we were proud of them. They were our own best and brightest.

But there is nothing good-natured about the Trump administration's war on Harvard, other colleges and universities, scientific research and knowledge. It has the makings of an American tragedy that could doom us for decades.

As of mid-May, according to NPR, Trump had cut about $11 billion in university grants -- affecting things like cancer research, diabetes treatments, technology, farming and domestic violence research. And Trump has threatened the non-profit tax status of Harvard and others, along with their ability to enroll foreign students.

For scientists and researchers, the future in America is grim. A recent article in The Economist -- "America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain" -- estimates that more than 80,000 researchers could be out of work, and the funding for academic research in the United States is likely to fall behind China and the European Union.

Former Northwestern University professor Matthias Doepke, who has already moved to the London School of Economics, told The Economist, "Trump's government is taking a chainsaw to American science, pulling grants, revoking researcher visas and planning enormous cuts to the country's biggest funders of research. Academics talk of a 'war on science.' "

These cuts surrender America's role as the world's leader in science and knowledge. A May 14 New York Times article, "The World Is Wooing U.S. Researchers Shunned by Trump," reported that world leaders see this as a "once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity."

France, Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Canada, Portugal, Austria and Australia are all making pitches to those scientists who a Spanish minister described as "despised or undervalued by the Trump administration." An Austrian minister said, "We are working on programs to provide a safe haven for students and scientists at risk."

The Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole recently wrote, "The idiot wind now howling through the United States is also blowing a potentially transformative windfall across the Atlantic. Instead of wringing our hands about the danger" of tariffs, Ireland should be "stealing American scientists."

"We don't in fact have to steal it -- Trump is giving it away for nothing ... firing some of the world's best biomedical researchers" and "creating a hostile environment in which science itself is the enemy of the people." O'Toole concluded, "Trump is complaining that we pick America's pocket. Fair enough -- we should instead pick America's brains."

Our scientists are listening. In a March poll conducted by the journal Nature, 75% of those who responded -- more than 1,200 scientists -- said they are "considering leaving the United States." Europe and Canada were their top choices.

Petrarch called the 900 years after the fall of Rome the "Dark Ages," an era of intellectual darkness. In his article "The New Dark Age" in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer compares that time to "the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking -- a deliberate destruction of education, science and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome's fall."

Let's pray that he's wrong. In the meantime, let us remember what former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust said about this crisis: "We are not being asked to run into cannon fire. We just need to speak up."