Under the Trump regime, ignorance has been manufactured and weaponized, twisted into a force that shrouds lies as truth and redefines education as an act of violence. In the U.S. and across other authoritarian regimes, a culture of lies along with the deliberate erasure of reality serves as a mask for tyranny. Trump, with his grotesque parade of over 30,000 lies during his first term, continues to poison the public mind, even now refusing to concede his loss in 2020. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, in a monstrous distortion, somehow blamed Marxists for the murder of a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a crime committed by a Trump supporter. This was no mere falsehood but a sickening expression of a deeper, unspeakable evil.

The right-wing media, spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch’s empire, lost a legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems over their lies about the election. Yet such lies and conspiratorial rhetoric continues to spread unchecked, drowning reason in its wake. The mainstream media is largely silent about Benjamin Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza, until they become too obvious to ignore. For the most part, it has also avoided discussing Donald Trump’s bombing of Iran as a violation of international and a reckless act of militarized violence. In the hands of the far-right and MAGA mobs, truth has become a dangerous weapon to be destroyed. Critical thinking, once a hallmark of an informed society, is now suspicious, and largely exiled from our libraries, schools and mainstream media.

The American public is sinking into a pit of civic illiteracy, a curse that will only grow as the complicity of so many feeds the machine of violence. This is not merely a crisis of knowledge; it is a catastrophe of reason, politics and morality, a national surrender to the forces of darkness and destruction. The growing threat of fascism thrives on the deliberate cultivation of ignorance, where lies are paraded as truth and a public all too willing to surrender to conspiracy theories finds solace in the comfort of unquestioned illiteracy. At stake is what David Levi Strauss, citing Jerome Kohn, calls “the public spirit” — the essence of democracy, where citizens engage in dialogue, debate and struggle, working together to promote the common good. In this perilous alliance, the very foundations of democracy are being torn asunder, and with them, any hope for a future brave enough to confront the truth.

The death of civic consciousness and the erosion of culture pave the way for a chilling fusion: the Disneyfication of society, where sanitized illusions mask brutal truths, and the rise of a zombie politics, ruled by the living dead — soulless figures with blood on their lips. As Chris Hedges has observed, America is a decaying regime, its vitality drained, clinging to spectacles like Trump’s grotesque military parade that serve only to feed the pathologies of a diseased society. Culture, under the grip of gangster capitalism, has become a vehicle for magical thinking, a tool for distracting the masses from the cruel realities of economic stagnation and social inequality.

In this world, the population is increasingly conditioned by a mass culture dominated by sexual commodification, mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, and is taught to blame itself for its own failure. Thoughtlessness has not only been normalized but has become the very precondition for the rise of authoritarianism. This is the terrifying terrain we now occupy, where the loss of critical consciousness has created fertile ground for the spread of cruelty and control.

The first casualty of authoritarianism is the critical mind. This is not only a political issue but an educational one. As Paulo Freire understood, education is never neutral. It either functions as an instrument to reproduce the existing order or becomes a tool for liberation. In the face of escalating fascism, education demands reclamation as a moral and political project whose task is to cultivate the knowledge, skills, values and civic courage necessary to challenge injustice and imagine alternative futures. It must be rooted in critical pedagogy, a moral and political practice that enables students to speak, write and act from positions of agency and empowerment.

In the age of the neoliberal university, many educational institutions have abandoned these responsibilities. Under the weight of privatization, standardization and corporate influence, their democratic purpose has been hollowed out or abandoned entirely. Universities have become sites of credentialing, training and conformity, rather than inquiry and critique. Driven by the ideological and instrumental dictates of gangster capitalism, the logic of the market has reduced students to consumers, faculty to managed labor serfs and knowledge to a commodity.

Ranking systems, performance metrics and austerity budgets have supplanted public investment, intellectual freedom and pedagogical citizenship. As universities submit to far-right ideological pressure, chase corporate funding and refuse to define themselves as defenders of democracy, they abandon the mission of cultivating critical, engaged citizens capable of imagining a radically different future. Aligned with the forces of predatory capitalism, they erode public conscience “while celebrating unrestrained self-interest, extreme individualism, deregulation, and privatization.”

Yet an even more insidious force is at work. In addition to market-driven logic, higher education is being re-engineered to serve authoritarian control. In both subtle and overt forms, universities are increasingly being transformed into an apparatus of white Christian nationalist indoctrination and citadels of fear. They have been criminalized by the Trump administration and collectively transformed into an enormous crime scene. What we witness across the country is not merely the erosion of democratic education, but its replacement by a theocratic and ethnonationalist vision rooted in exclusion, historical erasure and moral authoritarianism. Curricula are being purged of “divisive concepts,” anti-racist scholarship is demonized, and educators who teach about settler colonialism, gender or Palestinian liberation are being censored, surveilled or fired.

In the New Republic, Indigo Olivier argues that Trump’s war on education extends beyond the suppression of campus dissent. It is a concerted effort to seize the essence of higher learning, reshaping it in the image of authoritarian ideology, an ideology built on power, control and the erasure of critical thought:

In recent months, Trump has: signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, suspended student loan repayment programs and $400 million in funding to Columbia University, and threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after freezing over $2 billion in federal funds. Dozens of universities now face federal investigations as part of Trump’s anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion campaign. Perhaps most disturbingly, he has encouraged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to target international students involved in Gaza solidarity protests for deportation; several are currently being held in a processing facility in Louisiana…. Taken together, these actions have been widely seen as a chilling assault on academic freedom and institutional self-governance that threatens to undermine the character of American higher education itself.

This project mirrors, with chilling precision, the ideological reengineering of higher education under past fascist regimes. In Nazi Germany, universities were purged of Jewish professors and political dissidents, while academic disciplines were reshaped to propagate racial pseudoscience and Aryan supremacy. In Mussolini’s Italy, intellectuals were coerced into swearing loyalty to the fascist state, and scholarship became a tool of nationalist propaganda, intertwining classical myths with imperial ambition.

As Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, “Leftists, liberals, and anyone who spoke out against the Fascists were sent to prison or forced into exile.” In Franco’s Spain, the university was subjected to Catholic authoritarianism, with philosophy, history and literature marshaled to serve an ultra-conservative, patriarchal order. In Chile, as Ben-Ghiat writes, under the brutal regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet, universities were condemned as “hotbeds of Marxism and targeted…for ‘cleansing.’ She notes that by 1975, 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed, thousands imprisoned and tortured, and entire philosophy and social science departments disbanded.

In an article at The Conversation, education scholar Iveta Silova notes how swiftly and systematically German universities were transformed under Hitler: “Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge, they served power.” The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle DEI programs, censor dissenting faculty and freeze funding to elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard echo this dangerous legacy. These are not random acts but part of a calculated attempt to remake higher education into an instrument of ideological control. The pattern is clear: Authoritarian leaders understand that universities must either serve the state or be silenced.

In each case, fascist regimes recognized what many Americans understand: Education is a powerful site for shaping memory, constructing identity and legitimizing power. Today’s attacks on academic freedom in Florida, Texas and beyond, where bills ban courses on systemic racism, rewrite histories of slavery and Indigenous genocide, and promote “patriotic education,” are not aberrations but continuities in a long history of authoritarian attempts to control the imagination of the future by erasing the truths of the past.

Under Trump, this war on education has reached a fever pitch, with the attacks on Columbia and Harvard  serving as key elements of a broader strategy. By branding campus protesters as “terrorists,” labeling faculty as “enemies of America,” invoking false allegations of antisemitism against any vestige of dissent and threatening to revoke federal funding, Trump is mobilizing state power to crush intellectual resistance and remake the university in the image of racial purity, blind obedience, and de facto white and Christian nationalist mythology.

Yet even amid this reactionary onslaught, resistance is burgeoning. Across campuses in the U.S., Canada and around the world, students and educators are refusing to be conscripted into authoritarian narratives. From the pro-Palestinian encampments protesting genocide in Gaza to the nationwide student walkouts opposing book bans and censorship, young people are transforming educational spaces into laboratories of dissent and collective imagination. These acts of defiance recall earlier waves of resistance, from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley to the student uprisings in 1968 Paris, from the Black campus revolts of the 1970s to the anti-apartheid university occupations of the 1980s, as well as a historical moment when women, refusing to be confined by patriarchal norms, broke through the walls of misogyny to demand autonomy, equality and liberation.

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Resonating with past movements, today’s students are reclaiming education as an act of resistance, not a preparation for conformity and ideological indoctrination. They are forming assemblies, teach-ins and counter-courses, horizontal spaces where knowledge is co-created, solidarity is forged and the university is reimagined as a site of justice rather than domination. Faculty, too, are pushing back, filing lawsuits, penning public letters, creating sanctuary classrooms and insisting that pedagogy must serve not power but freedom. This is why fascists hate higher education and are waging a full-fledged attack on it.

In this context, critical pedagogy transcends mere academic method; it becomes a political act, a refusal to surrender the university to fascism and a commitment to making it a space where new forms of collective life can be imagined and fought for. In cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, students are joining with immigrants, workers, artists, activists and some politicians to resist Trump’s ruthless immigration policies, the criminalization of dissent “and his unfolding conspiracy to establish a military dictatorship under his personal control.” This convergence of struggles signals a growing recognition that education cannot be separated from the broader fight for human rights, sanctuary and democratic life — resistance movements now under threat from the unfolding authoritarianism of Trump’s regime. It is through these alliances that a new critical pedagogy of resistance is emerging, one rooted in memory, insurgent hope and an unshakable belief in the possibility of a different future.

Drawing upon the lessons of history and the radical value of critical education, the Foro de Sevilla collective writes, “Auschwitz was much more than a concentration camp, it was a laboratory of dehumanization.” Gaza, too, has become such a site, where children, schools and entire futures are being systematically annihilated. Education, in this context, is not just about knowledge transmission but about moral reckoning. It must preserve memory as a living force, capable of shaping civic courage and alerting us to the dangers of silence, complicity and ideological manipulation. From Auschwitz to Gaza, from Nazi Germany to Trump’s America, we see the same dangerous arc: a politics of exclusion that depends on erasure, that turns classrooms into sites of fear rather than freedom.

To meet this moment, educators must embrace a form of pedagogy that is inseparable from politics. Critical pedagogy begins not with answers, but with probing questions about history, justice, identity, power and possibility. It refuses the notion that teaching is a technical act, a homage to an empty instrumentalism divorced from context, insisting instead that education is always implicated in the struggle over meaning and memory. As Pierre Bourdieu warned, some of the most powerful forms of domination are symbolic and pedagogical. If authoritarian regimes aim to control not only public institutions but the public imagination, then our task as educators is to illuminate, disrupt, protest and reimagine. In this struggle, education and culture are not peripheral. They are central to politics, for shaping mass consciousness is the bedrock of any genuine resistance.

Education does not exist in a vacuum, but on a battleground for identities, values and power. As such, it carries the potential to either suppress or empower — or often, to be a complex mix of both. Freire warns us that pedagogy can become a tool of oppression when it reinforces entrenched power structures. Yet he powerfully extends this argument by emphasizing that education is a site of struggle, where its potential for both oppression and liberation is constantly negotiated. It can awaken consciousness, empower individuals and resist the forces of injustice. In this sense, education becomes a critical site where the struggle for freedom, dignity and transformation is waged.

Let us be clear: the relentless attacks on higher education by authoritarians like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and the Trump regime at home expose a deeper truth: Universities have always been incubators of resistance to authoritarianism and its ever-shifting forms of fascist politics. This is precisely why they are viewed as a threat. As public institutions, their core mission is to defend and nurture democracy, however fragile or imperfect, making them a formidable challenge to those who seek to dismantle it.

This means embracing education as a public good and a site of collective responsibility. It requires curricula that foster a culture of inquiry, equip students with the knowledge and skills to hold power accountable, challenge dominant narratives, and cultivate a historical literacy that can dismantle the myths sustaining fascist ideologies. It calls for defending the university not as a corporate entity or site of theocratic indoctrination but as a democratic commons — a space where a culture of critique and academic freedom can thrive, and where students are empowered to define themselves and break free from the continuum of manufactured ignorance. It demands a language that links freedom with social responsibility, agency with solidarity and critical thought with civic engagement.

As Homi Bhabha once said, civic education must disrupt the consensus of common sense. It must fracture the settled order of things to make space for the not-yet-imagined. In an age where language is stripped of meaning and culture is weaponized by the far right, education must reclaim its capacity to name injustice and summon hope. We need a language of critique and a language of possibility. One that refuses both fatalism and false neutrality.

As the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis has observed, there is no democracy without an educated public and no justice without a language to critique injustice. In dark times, education must do more than transmit knowledge; it must cultivate the political and moral imagination necessary to resist tyranny and build a future rooted in equality, dignity and shared responsibility. To make education central to politics is to insist that the fight for democracy begins not only in the streets or at the ballot box, but in the classroom, in the slow, transformative work of teaching people to think otherwise, so they might act otherwise.

As Castoriadis reminds us, democracy is not merely the absence of censorship or the formal guarantee of rights, it is the collective power of the people to shape the conditions of their own existence. Its antithesis is unfolding before our eyes under Trump: a regime that wields power not to serve the public good but to impose a form of internal military occupation, hollowing out the very foundations of democracy and replacing them with fear, surveillance and authoritarian control. From Nazi Germany to Mussolini’s Italy to Orbán’s Hungary and Trump’s America, the pattern is disturbingly familiar: The attack on education always precedes the broader collapse of democratic life. The classroom is one of the last spaces where the future can still be imagined differently. That is why it is under siege, and why we must defend it with everything we have.

The stakes of resisting fascism and fighting for radical democracy — both in the U.S. and globally — could not be more dire. In an age when authoritarianism works to erase memory, dismantle agency and extinguish the very conditions for democratic life, education must be reclaimed as a radical act of hope and resistance. We must reject the cynical belief that schools are mere sites of economic, social and political reproduction, powerless in the face of capital and coercion. We must reclaim them instead as contested spaces where the struggle over meaning, history and possibility is ongoing.

As Stuart Hall has insisted, culture and, by extension, education “is a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled.” The task before us is not simply to critique the fascist drift of our institutions, but to organize, teach and fight for an emancipatory vision of education, one rooted in historical memory, ethical responsibility and collective imagination. Against the politics of cruelty and Trump’s empire of ugliness, cruelty and communities of racial hatred, we need a pedagogy of solidarity. Against the forces that would erase the past, malign the present and cancel the future, we must teach, and live, as if the future depends on our refusal to forget, our capacity to dream and our courage to act. Because it does.

The post We can still save education — and that’s the key to saving democracy appeared first on Salon.com.

In the spirit of ruthless equity firms and asset-stripping hedge fund managers that dominates the financial realm, pedagogies of conformity, silencing and ethical abandonment now proliferate, either under the guise of budget cuts or as overt attempts to transform higher education into white nationalist indoctrination centers. Universities are now viewed as businesses, students as clients and faculty as a serf-like, casual labor force. Furthermore, administrative leadership has regressed, embracing a market-driven ideology that clings to the irrational belief that the market can solve all problems and should control not only the economy but all aspects of social life.

Central to this hedge-fund neoliberal ideology is a moral vacuity that separates economic activity from social costs. Fundamental to this educational/ideological mantra is the notion that  historical consciousness, critical thinking, informed faculty, social responsibility and critical pedagogy are at odds with the market. Consequently, it posits that government and institutions such as higher education only exist to further market interests and avoid holding the power of markets and the financial elite accountable. At its worse, it embraces a larger principle of authoritarian societies — what Evan Osnos in The New Yorker (writing about China) calls “governance by repression.”  

Pedagogies of repression now take place in the name of financial cuts, a politics of precarity and hollow appeals to efficiency or, as in the politics of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, outright calls for turning higher education into indoctrination centers. Moreover, this approach to administrative leadership embodies and legitimizes a reactionary ideological stance that mirrors the practices of hedge fund managers and the ruthless values of gangster capitalism. This model of leadership prioritizes the accumulation of capital over ethics, human needs and basic human rights. By shutting down freedom of speech on campuses and using the police to enforce such restrictions, it fuels a culture of unaccountability that  enables the Republican Party to prioritize threats of revenge and violence as part of its ruthless drive to amass political power. This is leadership in the service of authoritarianism.

University leaders now follow policies that resemble the suffocating profit-driven values of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, rather than the democratic values of John Dewey. At the same time, billionaires such as Bill Ackman, Leslie Wexner, Jon Huntsman and Robert Kraft now exercise extraordinary influence over higher education policy, particularly at the elite universities. They wield accusations of antisemitism and leverage the power of their wealth to silence criticism of the right-wing Israeli government, call for the firing of professors deemed too critical and outspoken regarding genocidal crimes, and dox and punish students for their criticism of scorched-earth Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.

Furthermore, they advocate for silencing protests on campuses by calling in the police, effectively transforming higher education into a precinct of the police state. Certainly, Donald Trump echoes this authoritarian view, indicating his willingness to use military force to suppress student dissent if he is elected in 2024. He has referred to the protesters setting up encampments on college campuses as "radical-left lunatics" who must be vanquished, adding that "they've got to be stopped now." 

For a criminal defendant recently convicted of felonies, Trump's hardline stance on "law and order" is decidedly ironic, especially since he described the large-scale arrests of Columbia University students by New York police as "a beautiful thing to watch." In essence, what Trump and his followers are endorsing in these attacks on students is a broader view of policing as a vanguard of suppression and white supremacy. What we are witnessing here is the weaponization of authoritarianism: The punishing state has become the organizing force shaping a range of institutions, extending from university campuses to the Supreme Court and the House of Representatives. 

Refusing to acknowledge any moral responsibility for their investments in weapons of war and death, university administrators align with far-right political figures and the mainstream media. They divert the narrative away from the immense suffering and death inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza, focusing instead on the weaponization of antisemitism and alleged widespread threats against Jewish students, marginalizing those Jewish protesters advocating for Palestinian freedom.

At the same time, when democracy is scorned and some political leaders call for illiberal alternatives — a society in which difference is feared and equality is disparaged — it is often forgotten that without informed and knowledgeable citizens, democracies die. Even more crucial is the recognition that democracy demands more than informed citizens; it also needs institutions fostering a “richly textured democratic culture," in the words of Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and that cultivates the “habits and dispositions necessary for its flourishing.” Amid mass conformity, standardization and repression, the conditions necessary to combat white supremacy, patriarchy and staggering levels of inequality are dwindling, and by suppressing dissent and freedom of expression, many powerful university administrators are contributing to the rise of authoritarianism.   

Hedge-fund politics and pedagogy exemplify gangster capitalism's destruction of institutions that champion free speech, social responsibility and strong democracy. This influence is pernicious, echoing fascist politics of the past, and undermines free speech and the critical role of higher education. What we are witnessing is a new form of McCarthyism, cloaked in the alleged wisdom of a ruthless billionaire elite. This ideology has been normalized, perceived by the public as a permanent social formation for which there is no alternative. The education promoted by the hedge-fund crowd aims to dismantle the university as a democratic public sphere and convert democracy itself into what one of their heroes, Viktor Orbán, calls "illiberal democracy" — one that, as he puts it, is free of mixed races and any vestige of liberal values.

What has become clear is that elite universities value big-money donors over students and are more than willing to clamp down on free speech and academic freedom, and to summon the police to do the bidding of the billionaire class. This display of cowardice is breathtaking. It symbolizes the death of the university as a democratic public sphere, as well as the willingness of its hedge-fund administrators to clamp down on student protesters in order to stay employed. Will Bunch observes that we are witnessing history repeat itself as tragedy:

The moral insanity of America's long war in Vietnam — protested by 1960s kids who were on the right side of history, even if the grown-ups didn't see it in real time. History doesn't repeat but it rhymes, gratingly. As a new generation of young people speaks out against attacks on women and children halfway around the world — this time in Gaza — college administrators from Boston to L.A. are racing to call in heavily armored riot cops to shut down protest encampments at campuses they'd sold to applicants as bastions of academic freedom, open expression, and historic demonstrations that had changed the world. They are destroying the American university in order to keep it "safe." In a week when decades happened, the lowest moments in what became a nationwide assault on college free speech by militarized police veered from shock to tragicomical irony.

We get a glimpse of what Trump’s not-entirely-accidental call for a “unified Reich” portends in his call “to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses [and] expel student demonstrators from the United States.” Let me be clear in stating that the current war on campus protesters makes this fascist project all the easier to legitimize. In this self-cloning hedge-fund ideology, budget cuts become a cover for a discourse that reveals an astonishing vacancy of vision regarding the public and democratic purpose of education. Cuts are routinely made to valuable and critical educational programs in the name of economic expediency and fear of deficits, echoing the language of accountants in pencil factories. Under such circumstances, the liberal arts and humanities are disparaged either because they are labeled “woke”— an idiotic, self-serving label used to undermine the critical role of education — or because they do not serve the immediate interest  of creating depoliticized workers for a global economy marked by staggering inequities, increasing deregulation and exploitative working conditions. 

It is worth noting here that "punishment creep" has a long legacy in the U.S. and can be seen in the modeling of schools after prisons, the gradual hollowing-out of the welfare state, matched by an expansion of the state’s policing functions, and the increasing criminalization of social issues ranging from homelessness and truancy to poverty. The reach of the carceral state has now been expanded to include higher education.

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More is at risk in the current right-wing attacks on higher education, and potentially on dissent in general. While there has been considerable reporting on students' calls for a free Palestine, financial transparency and the severing of ties with industries that profit from and fuel Israel’s war and occupation, there has been little coverage of the plight of dissenting academics. As Natasha Lennard points out in The Intercept, professors and researchers in fields such as “politics, sociology, Japanese literature, public health, Latin American and Caribbean studies, Middle East and African studies, mathematics, education, and more have been fired, suspended, or removed from the classroom” for[expressing pro-Palestine speech. It would be wise to heed the words of Anita Levy, senior program officer with the American Association of University Professors, who states that “we are at the dawn of a new McCarthyism. This may be the tip of the iceberg.”

In an age when the landscape of tyranny casts a dark shadow across the globe, the weight of conscience carries both a burden and the potential for a profound moral and political awakening. This courageous generation of students exemplifies that when social responsibility is guided by the demands of moral witnessing, politics can effectively challenge the pervasive influence and grasp of an emerging authoritarianism. In such times, conscience emerges as an unwavering force, compelling individuals to stand firm and resist the rising tides of ultranationalism, racism, state violence and militarism. It urges them to resist the encroachment of oppression upon those individuals and groups who, in their struggle for freedom, are too often deemed disposable.   

Students across the country and indeed the globe are making it clear that if we wish to talk about democracy in the United States and other countries, we must confront the rise of authoritarianism. Only by awakening the stirrings of morality and embracing an emancipatory notion of politics can we envision a strong democracy that ignites, inspires and energizes the public imagination, galvanizing the burden of conscience to action. Today’s student protesters recognize that the military-industrial-academic complex, aligned with gangster capitalism, is writing them out of the script of democracy, while engaging in the slow cancelation of the future. Instead of vilifying campus protesters, as so many liberals and conservatives have done, we need to acknowledge that they represent the moral conscience of a new generation — one that is on the right side of history.  

The campus protesters exemplify the courage and moral conscience needed in times of crisis. By doing so, they direct their politics toward an imagined future where democracy is truly in the hands of the people. Their resistance to the genocide taking place in Gaza showcases the power of critical thought and analysis, as well as a commitment not only to think critically but also to transform consciousness and existing power structures. This protest represents both a courageous call to resistance and a crucial claim for justice.

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I intend to work my way back around to the instructive case of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who apparently believed she could galaxy-brain her way around the protest crisis — and avoid the fate of ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay, among others — by capitulating in advance to the House Republicans’ witch-trial caucus, taking a hard line against alleged or actual antisemitism, and finally calling the cops on her own students. Spoiler alert: None of that was a good idea, and she probably didn’t save her job anyway.

First of all, it’s more accurate to say that the media-consuming public is riveted by the contentious political drama surrounding those scenes of campus discord than by the protests themselves, which are a striking sign of the times but hardly a brand new phenomenon. My own college graduation, in the mid-1980s, was disrupted by a student walkout over the university’s involvement in nuclear weapons research and its non-divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa. Strident moral positions and overheated rhetoric are features of student activism, which is sometimes effective and at other times purely symbolic; every generation, it’s fair to say, inherits or creates its own iteration.

It’s also worth noting that America’s extraordinary narcissism — another quality shared across the political spectrum — creates a global distortion effect whereby the deaths of at least 34,000 people in a conflict on the other side of the world are transformed into a domestic political and cultural crisis. Nobody actually dies in this domestic crisis, but everyone feels injured: Public discourse is boiled down to idiotic clichés and identity politics is reduced to its dumbest possible self-caricature. When the apparent issues are about who has said the most hateful things, who feels more “unsafe” and in what context, and which political party can get away with twisting events to suit its preferred narrative, then we’re stuck in the TikTok reboot of Plato’s cave, staring at flickering shadows long since severed from reality. 

None of that is the student protesters’ fault, exactly, although they have played an instrumental role in reprocessing the Gaza war — launched, of course, in response to the horrifying Hamas attack on Israel last October — as a theatrical spectacle or “simulation,” full of signs and symbols whose meanings are subject to endless debate. Most of them are expressing genuine (if histrionic) outrage that the U.S. government, self-appointed avatar of democracy and defender of the “rules-based order,” is funding and supporting Israel’s campaign of mass killing, wanton destruction and systematic deprivation against a virtually imprisoned civilian population. 

Exactly how much this student movement has been contaminated by intemperate, hotheaded or outright antisemitic rhetoric is, shall we say, a question of interpretation — but not one that can be credibly answered by Bibi Netanyahu, Elise Stefanik or Mike Johnson. As for those who seek to what-about the current wave of protests by observing that worse things have happened in recent history without driving the students of Emerson College to risk mass arrest in the Boston streets, they are correct while deliberately missing the point. 

Whatever world-historical culpability the U.S. may have had for the genocidal conflicts in Darfur or Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, for Russia’s massively destructive war in Chechnya or China’s brutal oppression of the Uyghurs or whatever atrocity you’d like to name, those events were not the direct results of U.S. policy and did not carry the White House seal of approval. The Gaza war is, and does. 

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a longtime friend and admirer of Joe Biden, wrote last week, “Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign,” in much the same way as the Vietnam War permanently stained the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who was undermined by the massive antiwar demonstrations of 1968 — including the student rebellion at Columbia, exactly 56 years ago this week, as it happens. 

Biden made a series of catastrophic miscalculations in the wake of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, Kristof argues, and the net effect has been to make the U.S. look weak, hypocritical and profoundly cynical. Longtime British politician and diplomat Chris Patten, a pillar of center-right establishment thinking, told Kristof that Biden had made “a terrible, terrible error” that fed into “Chinese and Russian narratives that the West employs double standards and doesn’t really care about principles.”

I would describe Biden’s predicament as a symptom of the moral and political failures of liberalism, as well as the peculiar status of the United States, a still-dominant global superpower now in irreversible decline. The president did not or could not grasp how rapidly and decisively world opinion would turn against Israel and the U.S., or how little the world trusts American foreign policy after the last six decades or so of misbegotten wars and disastrous blunders. 

Furthermore, and this one is amazing too: Neither Biden nor anyone in his inner circle seemed aware that core Democratic constituencies — Black voters, younger people, progressives — already sympathized with the Palestinian cause and viewed the current Israeli government as a criminal rogue state (or worse). Or perhaps they didn't care: Mainstream Democrats tend to dismiss the significance of the youth vote, assume that Black voters will stick with them no matter what, and are eager to purge or bulldoze the activist left on any available pretext.

But those failures, all damaging enough on their own terms, were amplified and undergirded by Biden’s inexplicable faith that Bibi Netanyahu would somehow turn out to be a responsible leader and partner in a time of crisis, rather than a power-mad racist zealot with years of experience at manipulating American presidents. This miscalculation may seem mystifying when you consider Biden’s long years of public service and his vaunted expertise in foreign policy; Kristof certainly finds it so.

It makes more sense if we understand liberalism, of the 21st-century Biden variety, as faith in the power of human reason, and specifically in its power to bridge differences between competing interests and establish common ground for civil discourse and political compromise. If we lived in a world of rational, self-interested beings willing to acknowledge the perspectives of others — a world of liberals, in other words — that might work out. But we don’t, and in the real world Biden’s miscalculation regarding Netanyahu was a potentially fatal mistake — fatal for Biden’s presidency, fatal for Israel, fatal for the future of the Middle East.

That brings us back at last to Dr. Renat Shafik, who prefers the nickname Minouche, and whose full title in the British House of Lords is the Right Honorable Baroness Shafik DBE. She arrived at Columbia last July, with no experience in American academic life, touted as a champion of diversity and inclusion. (By birth and parentage, she is both Arab and Muslim.) Less than a year later, she summoned the NYPD to the Morningside Heights campus for the first time since the legendary student takeover of 1968. If Joe Biden represents the tragedy of liberalism in its pathetic form — no reasonable person can doubt his good intentions — Shafik represents something darker, and almost farcical. 

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If you wanted to choose one individual as the face of “neoliberalism” for an encyclopedia entry, you could do a lot worse. Shafik holds an economics PhD from Oxford and a résumé of high-ranking positions at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England, three institutions that have been instrumental in driving developing nations into unsustainable debt in pursuit of a disastrously failed model of progress. She came to Columbia after six years of pushing fiscal austerity as director of the London School of Economics, where just last spring she helped defeat a student/faculty strike, reportedly by slashing salary payments and lowering graduation requirements to hustle student protesters out the door.

After the Gaza protests erupted at Columbia, Shafik evidently surrounded herself with high-priced lawyers and consultants drawn from the orbit of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who persuaded her that she could save her job by abasing herself before the Republican witch-hunters in Congress and giving them everything they wanted, up to and including confidential university documents they had no right to see. 

This spectacular abdication of any pretense of academic integrity made her look like a liberal of the most craven and spineless kind, the kind who would rather surrender to a police state than stand up for the frequently uncomfortable principles of free speech. To the surprise of absolutely no one, or at least no one outside Shafik’s neoliberal policy bubble, that did nothing to placate Stefanik and Johnson and the rest of the House Republicans, who did not want to be placated and had no interest in reasonable dialogue. 

They wanted to watch Shafik squirm and grovel and then they wanted her head on a spike, while amplifying a largely invented crisis that delights their base and divides core liberal constituencies against each other. They have already achieved two of those three goals, and after alienating nearly everyone on the Columbia campus through her appalling cowardice, Shafik is surely numbering the days. 

Given her record, no one could have expected her to behave differently than she did. The real question is what we might learn from Shafik’s failure, and from the larger set of cultural and political failures it represents. After this disastrous week, one might be tempted to conclude that the slow, agonizing decline of American higher education has finally reached its nadir, and that American liberals will finally be forced to recognize that reason is useless against the enemies of reason. I’m not holding my breath.

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Decades ago, universities across the country began making cuts to the liberal arts. The humanities, fine arts and social sciences are endangered everywhere, as evident by the staggering variety of state colleges and private universities no longer invested in their survival. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated its world languages department, reduced its education department by a third and slashed its programs in art history, music, architecture and natural resource management. In the same year, Lasell University, a small private school in Massachusetts, killed five majors, including English and history. In Ohio, numerous of the state's best-known institutions of learning have announced cuts to the liberal arts, including Kent State, the University of Toledo, Miami University, Youngstown State, Baldwin Wallace University and Marietta College.

But the academic carnage in the Buckeye State is hardly an outlier. A quick Google search reveals intellectual wreckage piling up across the nation. The University of New Hampshire permanently closed its art museum, the University of Tulsa eliminated degrees in history, and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin system has instructed all 25 of its campuses — which enroll more than 160,000 students every year — to prepare for reductions in liberal arts programs.

My alma mater, Valparaiso University, is now preparing to join in the self-destruction. A Lutheran liberal arts college on the shores of Lake Michigan, 50 miles or so southeast of Chicago, Valparaiso recently announced that it is considering the “discontinuation” of 28 programs, including philosophy, public health, theology and the graduate program in English Studies and Communication, where I earned a master's degree. When I graduated in 2010, Valparaiso had a regional reputation as a small, private institution with excellent educational standards, bolstered by an emphasis on the arts and humanities.

The English Studies and Communication program was a hybrid, requiring study of creative writing, journalism, English literature and mass communication theory. Professors collaborated with the directors of the campus art museum and instructors in the social sciences and business departments, to demonstrate that knowledge is impossible to segregate or compartmentalize. A truly educated person should be adept at making connections across disciplines, cultures and different sectors of society.

Gore Vidal defined an intellectual as “someone who can deal with abstractions.” Valparaiso, at its best, did exactly that — equipping its graduates with an ability to handle abstractions, while showing that abstractions aren’t all that abstract. What might seem abstract in the academic context, as recent American history ought to have taught us, may soon transform into the concrete, creating situations of urgent social consequence. Arguments about democracy, disinformation, the public good and moral philosophy are inseparable from such issues as climate change, gun violence, the effects of new communication technology and the struggle to defeat autocracy.

In the 14 years since my graduation, Valparaiso has suffered from poor leadership that has caused consistent damage to its reputation. In 2020, it shut down its law school after years of lowering its standards to attract enough more students. Last year, the university's current president, José Padilla, launched a bizarre crusade to fund the renovation of a first-year dormitory by selling off a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, along with other signature works of art from the campus museum. Despite widespread opposition from students and faculty, and condemnation from the American Alliance of Museums, Padilla seems determined to proceed with this philistine maneuver (I wrote about the proposed sale for the New Republic.)

The potential gutting of Valparaiso's liberal arts programs is one small part of a much larger social and cultural trend of viewing education as nothing more than a business proposition. As Matthew Becker, a theology professor at Valparaiso, wrote, this decision, "if implemented, will completely dismantle the stated mission of the university":

Valpo will no longer be "grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith," nor will it really be preparing students "to serve in both church and society." With the elimination of foreign languages, music, the theology programs, and other programs in the humanities, Valpo will no longer be a liberal arts university.”

My nephew, Justin McClain, a recent graduate of the endangered public health program, stated the obvious: “On the heels of a pandemic that resulted in millions of lives lost and trillions in economic losses … educational institutions should be embracing students interested in joining a field that has proved far too valuable to the functioning of society at large yet remains chronically understaffed.”

Becker identified Valpo's plan of self-destruction as “completely market-driven,” and that's a critical point. Padilla and other university leaders have offered exclusively economic reasons to explain their agenda.

Time and again, college and university leaders across the country have cited financial justification and a business-model imperative for transforming their institutions into glorified vocational schools. And this wrecking-ball campaign runs in parallel with an ideologically motivated war on learning.

Right-wing governors and legislatures in many states, including Florida, Texas and Tennessee, have attempted to strip-mine universities, often by eliminating diversity, equity and Inclusion programs, prohibiting instruction in topics related to race and gender, and even threatening to deny loans to students who want to major in an “impractical” discipline.

This anti-intellectual campaign of destruction against higher education takes place alongside book-ban campaigns in many of the same states, where astroturf organizations funded by right-wing groups have worked to remove books from school curricula and libraries that focus on issues of racial justice or LGBTQ equality. 

It may be worth noting that many of those who claim to hate education are blatant hypocrites. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a defender of book bans who routinely bashes institutions of learning, also has a Harvard Law degree, as well as a B.A. in public policy from Princeton. Even Donald Trump — despite his incoherent rambling and his impressive lack of knowledge on almost every conceivable topic — doesn't technically qualify as “poorly educated.” Although exactly how and why Trump was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania in the first place remains unclear, he holds a B.S. in real estate from Penn's Wharton School. 

For all their phony anti-educational posturing, Republican officials and pundits have succeeded in selling ignorance as virtuous to their voters and viewers. A 2022 Pew Research survey found that 76 percent of Republicans now believe that colleges “affect the country negatively,” while 76 percent of Democrats said they believe colleges “affect the country positively.”

A good rule to follow is never to trust highly educated people who tell you that education is a waste of time. A good question to ask, after that, is why they want so many people to remain ignorant.

If democracy is to function as intended, it demands a well-informed and reasonably sophisticated citizenry. Without an intelligent electorate, democratic governance is under threat from despots and demagogues who can acquire power by appealing to base emotions and instincts. Thomas Jefferson called information the “currency of democracy.” America is now at risk of bankruptcy.

Jefferson was also one of the founders of the University of Virginia, where organized a committee to develop a holistic program of learning that, in today’s ruthless, profit-obsessed climate, would not survive at Valparaiso, at West Virginia University or at countless other schools. Its program was to include “ancient and modern languages, mathematics, physio-mathematics, physics, botany and zoology, anatomy and medicine, government and political economy and history, municipal law, and Ideology (rhetoric, ethics, belles lettres, fine arts).”

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George Washington advocated for a national university that would teach the arts and natural sciences, along with literature, rhetoric and criticism. But the father of our country might now have pariah status on most campuses — perhaps as an adjunct instructor with no health benefits, begging for a summer course.

In an age of extreme partisan rancor, there is dispiriting bipartisan unity on one point: Most Americans are increasingly hostile to the liberal arts. While only Republicans are overtly hateful of higher education as a whole, many students and administrators no longer claim to see the value in programs that, according to their standards, lack immediate and practical application to the job market. Recent data indicate that only 10.2 percent of college students major in any humanities discipline, and barely over 1 percent major in history or political science.

High schools across the country, meanwhile, have been cutting courses in civics, the social sciences, humanities and fine arts for decades.

Richard Hofstadter, one of the premier historians and public intellectuals of the 20th century, explained in his 1963 classic, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” that most Americans view intelligence as merely functional. Brainpower, in this view, should serve some practical and tangible purpose, typically one that can be measured in dollars and cents. Abstractions, to return to Gore Vidal’s remark, are seen as irrelevant distractions from learning the skills that can earn a bigger paycheck.

One of the numerous things people seem to have forgotten amid this rat-race competition is the question of how to maintain a democratic system of governance. Representative government is complicated, and often moves slowly. It requires sustained wrestling with the complex and thorny questions of ethics, personal freedom versus social responsibility, and balancing the progress driven by new knowledge and new ideas with the benefits of existing norms and traditions.

That kind of intellectual labor is taxing enough for those with a decent formal education, but with no training in the study of government, culture or mass communication, Americans are increasingly likely to fall for bad arguments and stupid ideas. Divorcing education from philosophical, political and social ambitions creates a culture in which people view public-health measures during a pandemic as stepping stones to the gulag, convince themselves that a racist con man most famous for hosting a game show could not possibly have lost a free and fair election, or believe that information about transgender people is more dangerous than assault rifles.

Democratic voters hope — as should everyone else with a conscience — that Joe Biden can overcome his poor approval ratings and doubts about his age by appealing to Americans' belief in democracy. He will have to consistently remind the electorate that his opponent presents an unprecedented threat to the system that millions of voters take for granted. For many Americans, however, democracy is a hazy concept at best. Survey results consistently show that large proportions of the American public don't understand the Bill of Rights, cannot name the three branches of government and are unfamiliar with the most important and basic facts of U.S. history.

Tech journalist Kara Swisher, author of the new history and memoir “Burn Book,” recently observed that leading figures in Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, have "no sense of history." If so, they are little different from the average citizen in that regard, yet they are routinely heralded as geniuses. It is hardly surprising that they’ve allowed hate speech, deceitful propaganda and other harmful material to proliferate on their platforms.

A society actually grounded in the liberal arts might see Zuckerberg and Musk as allegorical characters, perhaps as archetypal warnings against the reckless pursuit of wealth and the refusal to balance technical wizardry with more mature forms of insight and wisdom. But that is not our society. The outsized influence of Zuckerberg and Musk — not to mention Donald Trump —makes clear that we are at risk of handing our country over to cynical, power-mad morons who are, at best, indifferent to hate, poverty and violence. A little education might help.

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Here is who I did see. Leslieann Hobayan, a poet and single mother with three teenage daughters who makes $28,000 a year teaching creative writing as an adjunct professor and could not afford health insurance last year. Hank Kalet, who, by teaching seven courses a semester at Rutgers, Brookdale Community College and Middlesex College as an adjunct professor (a full course load for a semester is normally four courses) as well as teaching summer courses, can sometimes make $50,000 a year. But even he only has health insurance through his wife’s employer. Josh Anthony and Yazmin Gomez, graduate workers in the history department who serve as teaching assistants, and who each struggle to survive on $25,000 a year, $1,300 of which is deducted by the university for library, gym and computer fees.

Rutgers, like most American universities, operates as a corporation. Senior administrators, who often have MBA degrees but little or no experience in higher education, along with athletic coaches who have the potential to earn the university money, are highly compensated while thousands of poorly paid educators and staff are denied job security and benefits. Adjunct faculty and graduate workers are often forced to apply for Medicaid. They frequently take second jobs teaching at other colleges, driving for Uber or Lyft, working as cashiers, delivering food for Grubhub or DoorDash, walking dogs, house sitting, waiting on tables, bartending and living four or six to an apartment or camping out on a friend’s sofa. This inversion of values is destroying the nation’s educational system. 

Rutgers, in a questionable campaign to become a national powerhouse in sports, has an athletic department debt of more than $250 million with half of that being loans to cover operating deficits, according to an investigation by NorthJersey.com.

“Even as Rutgers athletics continued to rack up annual operating deficits of $73 million — covered in part by taxpayers and student tuition revenue — athletics showed little restraint as it dropped millions on credit cards to pay for Broadway shows, trips to Disney, meals at destination Manhattan restaurants and other perks for its coaches, athletes and recruits, including a luau and beach yoga at sunset in Hawaii, a guided snorkeling tour in Puerto Rico, ax throwing in Texas, luxury hotels in Paris and London, and chilled lobster, seafood towers and Delmonico steaks back home in New Brunswick,” the NorthJersey.com report reads. “For more than a year, Rutgers University football players enjoyed a pricey perk that few other students had access to — free DoorDash food deliveries from restaurants, convenience stores and pharmacies, paid for by the university, and ultimately by taxpayers and students. And the costs piled up. Football players ordered more than $450,000 [paid by the university] through DoorDash from May 2021 through June of this year, according to a review of invoices and other documents obtained by NorthJersey.com.” 

Rutgers’ football team, with a terrible win-loss record over the last decade, rarely fills its 52,454 seat stadium.

The members of Rutgers American Association of University Professors – American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT), Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union (PTLFC-AAUP-AFT) and Rutgers American Association of University Professors – Biomedical and Health Sciences of New Jersey (AAUP-BHSNJ) represent more than 9,000 faculty, part-time lecturers, graduate workers, postdoctoral associates and physicians. Union leaders, who shut down 70 percent of the university’s classes, are demanding increased pay, better job security and health benefits for part-time lecturers and graduate assistants. They’re also asking the university to freeze rents on housing for students and staff and extend graduate research funding for one year for students who were affected by the pandemic. Tenured professors, in an important show of solidarity, agreed not to accept a deal unless the lowest paid academic workers’ demands were addressed. Last weekend the unions called for a pause to the strike pending a possible agreement. Talks are continuing, but no resolution has been reached and some workers want to return to the picket line.

I have been teaching as a part-time lecturer, or adjunct, in the Rutgers college degree program in New Jersey prisons for a decade. I’m a member of the union and joined the strike. We have been without a contract for eight months. The 2,700 adjunct professors, who are usually informed only a few weeks in advance if they will be teaching a course, are responsible for 30 percent of the university’s classes. Adjuncts are paid about $6,000 a course. 

A little more than 10 percent of faculty positions in the U.S. were tenure-track in 2019 and 26.5 percent were tenured, according to a study last year by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Nearly 45 percent were contingent part-time employees or adjuncts. One in five were full-time, non-tenure-track positions. Universities, by radically reducing tenure-track and adequately paid positions, are becoming extensions of the gig economy. 

Rutgers laid off 5 percent of its workforce during the pandemic, throwing many into extreme distress, even as the university’s net financial position — total assets minus total liabilities — “increased by over half a billion dollars to $2.5 billion, a 26.7 percent rise in a single year,” according to Rutgers AAUP-AFT’s review of the university’s financial records. Rutgers’ savings, which can be used for financial emergencies, grew by 61.9 percent to $818.6 million. 

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Strikes are taking place at other universities, including at Governors State University in Illinois, the University of Michigan and Chicago State University, and are poised to take place at Northeastern Illinois University. The University of California, New York University and Temple University have also seen strikes. These labor actions are part of the fight to take back universities from corporate apparatchiks.

These institutions, including Rutgers, often have the funds to pay a living wage and provide benefits. By keeping faculty underpaid and refusing to provide job security, those who raise issues that challenge the dominant narrative, whether about social inequality, corporate abuse, the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and apartheid, or our regime of permanent war, can be instantly dismissed. Senior university administrators, awarded bonuses for “reducing expenses” by raising tuition and fees, cutting staff and suppressing wages, pay themselves obscene salaries. Wealthy donors are assured that the neoliberal ideology that is ravaging the country will not be questioned by academics fearful of losing their positions. The rich are lauded. The working poor, including those employed by the university, are forgotten.

“Rutgers sports programs lose more money than any of the other Big Ten schools,” Kalet, who teaches writing and journalism, said. “This says a lot about the priorities of this administration and previous administrations. It is a large part of the argument we’ve been making. We know you guys have the money, you’re running a big surplus, you have a huge $868 million reserve account which has been growing.’They’re taking in more money than they’re spending. They have a growing endowment. They’re giving money to the coaches, but refusing to pony up for adjuncts and grad workers who are paid poverty wages.”

And then there is the rank hypocrisy, with universities such as Rutgers purporting to defend values of equality, diversity and justice, while grinding its teaching and service staff into the dirt. Holloway, the university’s first African-American president and a labor historian, called the strike “unlawful” in a university-wide email sent out before the strike began. He has threatened to use the power of injunction to punish, impose fines and arrest those participating in the strike. The lead negotiator for the university is David Cohen, who was the head of labor relations when then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was engaged in open warfare with the state’s teachers’ unions. Christie referred to the teachers’ unions as “New Jersey’s version of the Corleones,” the Mafia family from “The Godfather,” and suggested that the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers “deserved a punch in the face.”

The nation’s universities have been deformed into playgrounds for billionaire hedge fund managers and corporate donors. Harvard University will rename its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after the billionaire hedge fund executive and right-wing Republican donor Kenneth Griffin in honor of his $300 million donation. A decade ago, Harvard renamed the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research after Glenn Hutchins, a private equity oligarch who donated $15 million to the institute. Harvard, to save face, said the famed Du Bois Institute was subsumed into the new entity, but the fact that Du Bois, one of America’s greatest scholars and intellectuals, would have his name replaced by a white equity mogul lays bare the priorities of Harvard and most colleges and universities.

The public defunding of universities, along with their seizure by corporations and the über-rich, is part of the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. The goal is to enforce conformity and obedience, to train young people to fill their slots in the corporate machine and leave unquestioned the status quo. The accumulation of vast wealth, no matter how nefarious, is prized as the highest good. Those who mold, shape, inspire and educate the young are neglected. Rutgers, like most large universities, pours resources into Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) programs that “Corporate America” values. The fundamental aim of an education, to teach people how to think critically, to grasp and understand the systems of power that dominate our lives, to foster the common good, to construct a life of meaning and purpose, are sidelined, especially with the withering away of the humanities. 

“When I was applying to grad school and talking to my professors about getting a PhD, most of them told me not to do it,” said Anthony, bearded and wearing a black T-shirt with the word “Solidarity” and a logo with a raised fist clutching a pencil. “Almost all of them said, ‘This profession is dying, you’ll never get a job, you’re going to be paid so poorly while you’re in grad school’ and ‘Make sure you have your funding, what matters most is what your funding package is.’ I thought very, very seriously about not doing this, but I was in love with history. I’m good at it. It’s the thing I’m meant to do.”

“It’s really tough,” he added. “There are a lot of times when you’re looking at your bank account and trying to figure out what you can give up to pay the rent.” 

Most adjunct professors and graduate workers hang on because of their students, enduring economic instability and job insecurity for those sacred moments in the classroom.

“I feel like I need to be checked into a mental hospital because I keep teaching despite these poverty-level wages,” Hobayan said as she surveyed the picket lines where strikers were chanting, “We’re not a corporation! We’re here for education!”

“I love sharing the knowledge that I have gained with other people,” she went on. “I love seeing what happens when the lightbulb goes off in their head. You see it on their faces. They’re like, ‘Oh, this is possible! This is what can exist outside of my bubble of knowledge!’ I talk to them a lot about their bubble of knowledge because everyone is in their silos, right? And I say, ‘Have you considered this perspective, or have you considered trying this out?'”

She spoke about a student who was a talented writer but who studied engineering because he wanted a job where he could make money. Hobayan steered him towards his passion. He became an English major, got a masters degree and is now an ESL teacher in northern New Jersey.

“He’s happy,” she said. “It sucks that we don’t get compensated for the things we love, the things that change people’s lives, that change the world.”

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But some faculty members felt concerned, reading between the lines in a state that has become ground zero for the nation’s education debates — where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump-style Republican with his eyes on the White House, has imposed gag orders and mandates on K-12 schools and described universities as “hotbeds of stale ideology” and “indoctrination factories.” 

Flagler’s institute would, the proposal said, promote “free inquiry” and “critical thinking,” which struck some faculty members as a confusing restatement of what was already their primary job. Then there was the promise to promote “a balanced world-view,” “the value and responsibilities of citizenship,” or what the college’s president characterized as classical education without an “ideological slant,” which sounded like potentially coded language for the sorts of measures DeSantis and his allies had been promoting. 

It didn’t help that one Flagler trustee perceived as being a key driver of the proposal, John Rood, a former ambassador under George W. Bush, also chairs the governing board of the Jacksonville Classical Academy — part of the nationwide charter school network created by Hillsdale College, a private Christian college in Michigan that has become a major player in America’s culture wars. To some faculty, the proposed institute felt like an attempt to “make Flagler College the Hillsdale of the South.” 

RELATED: Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College

Flagler’s vice president of academic affairs, Arthur Vanden Houten, said in an interview that while Rood had “enthusiastically responded” to plans for the institute, he wasn’t its only supporter or inspiration. If the proposal is ultimately funded, Vanden Houten said — it was approved by the legislature in March but still awaits DeSantis’ review — it will only help Flagler continue the work it already does. 

While the outcome at Flagler is still unclear on multiple levels, there were legitimate reasons for faculty to be alarmed, given the range of recent conservative assaults on public education, particularly but not exclusively in Florida. At a number of prominent colleges and universities around the country, big-money conservative interests are proposing and creating a roster of educational centers dedicated to conservative ideology or laissez-faire economics, often wrapped in the language of “classical education,” “civics” or “freedom.” The concept in itself isn’t new; right-wing philanthropists have been creating academic programs in their own image for decades. But these days, the model has been adopted by Republican-led legislatures too, effectively using taxpayer dollars to implant conservative ideology in public institutions. 

“It’s not that the faculty suspect the administration is scheming or duplicitous in any way,” said Flagler history professor Michael Butler, director of the school’s African American studies program. “The concern is that the culture wars of 2022 are moving into higher education, and we’re not sure what that means for Flagler College. This proposal does not come in a vacuum.” 

Ron DeSantis and the response to “critical race theory”

When Flagler faculty pictured what they didn’t want the institute to become, they didn’t have to look far. Also included in Florida’s proposed 2022-23 budget — or, more specifically, in an education bill attached to the budget, which details how Florida’s new restrictions on teaching about racism in higher education should be enforced — is a similar proposal to create a think tank at the University of Florida in Gainesville, the state’s flagship higher-ed institution. In more explicit terms than the Flagler proposal, the “Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education” at UF would be dedicated to “the ideas, traditions, and texts that form the foundations of western and American civilization.” 

That plan has gotten little attention so far, beyond approving mention in conservative publications like Campus Reform or the College Fix. Gov. DeSantis’ combative spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, has called it an important part of the administration’s crusade to foster “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity within higher education.” 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

According to the legislation, the center would be tasked, along with two other schools — the Florida Institute of Politics at Florida State University in Tallahassee and the Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom at Florida International University in Miami — with helping create materials for the state’s recently overhauled K-12 civics curriculum, whose stated aim is now to create patriotic, “upright and desirable” citizens. 

Specifically, these centers will help develop a series of “oral history resources” called Portraits in Patriotism that will include, for example, videos of Florida immigrants who fled countries like Cuba and Venezuela, to impress upon students “the evil of communism and totalitarianism.” When DeSantis discussed the project with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in 2021, he suggested that this project would also serve as Florida’s response to “critical race theory.” It also seems these centers may become training grounds for Florida’s K-12 instructors; DeSantis has previously offered $3,000 grants to teachers who undergo training in the new civics standards. 

All this, of course, takes place against the larger backdrop of Florida’s ongoing attacks on public education: Within the last year or two, DeSantis and the GOP-led legislature have enacted broad bans on teaching about racism and LGBTQ issues, barred numerous materials from classroom use and empowered citizens to sue schools they believe are “indoctrinating” students. While the first wave of that assault was largely directed at public K-12 schools, it’s increasingly expanding to higher education as well.

This spring, Florida’s public universities began conducting annual surveys of students and faculty to ensure that campuses contain sufficient “viewpoint diversity,” in accordance with a law passed last year. Schools that appear to lack conservative viewpoints, DeSantis has suggested, may lose state funding. That same law also granted students broad permission to record their professors during classes or lectures. Other recent measures require faculty to undergo new reviews every five years to fight “indoctrination,” effectively ending the tenure system, and also require extensive documentation of resources used in course instruction and complicated new procedures for university accreditation. 

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The last measure, in a strange way, is seen as an attempt to shield the University of Florida from the consequences of its own defensive moves to crack down on academic freedom. Last fall, UF sparked tremendous backlash after first blocking three political science professors from testifying in a lawsuit about Florida’s new voting restrictions — their testimony, the university suggested, was contrary to the interests of the state — and then demanding that a professor revise a course that had the words “critical” and “race” in its title. Those incidents prompted investigations by both Congress and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, which provides UF’s accreditation. 

“Our university is well known for anticipatory obedience,” said Meera Sitharam, vice president of UF’s faculty union. Neither Sitharam nor two other faculty members at the university said they had been told much of anything about UF’s proposed Hamilton Center, but from the little they had learned, they also had concerns. 

“There’s nothing particularly wrong with saying there should be more Western canon and classical liberalism in the classroom,” said Sitharam. “What I’m against is the idea that this should replace CRT. I don’t know what one has to do with the other.” 

She expressed similar concerns with the plan for the institute to curate DeSantis’ Portraits in Patriotism series. “You can teach what the problems of authoritarian regimes are, but why single out the communist ones? Look at Pinochet, look at Argentina — there’s been more than enough right-wing authoritarianism in Latin America, even if we’re restricting ourselves to Latin America for some reason,” she said. “The one-sidedness is what’s problematic. They’re always seeing it from one side, then claiming they are the ones who are critically thinking.” 

Malini Johar Schueller, an English professor who joined UF’s Coalition for Academic Freedom after last fall’s controversies, was more emphatic. “I think it’s thoroughly shameful of UF to accept an educational endeavor, if you can call it that, which is so blatantly racist,” she said. When it comes to terms like “Western civilization” and “American exceptionalism,” she continued, “We all know what those are about. Those are code words for people who feel they’ve had enough of books teaching the histories of minorities.”  

What does “classical education” mean, anyway?

Back at Flagler College, religious studies professor Timothy Johnson said that if Flagler’s proposal had been framed with such an explicit emphasis on Western civilization, there would have been even stronger pushback. “Not because we’re not in favor of Western education,” he said, “but because that comes nowadays with certain ideological baggage.” 

But to a certain extent, added Butler, the Flagler history professor, “classical education” has become an equally loaded term. “Is the purpose of ‘classical education’ to teach the classic works of literature?” he asked. “Is it to return to ‘Western traditions’?” When schools like Hillsdale use the term, he said, “they make no bones about what they’re trying to accomplish.” 

By strict definition, “classical education” refers to a series of liberal arts emphases on subjects like grammar, logic, rhetoric and math. Multiple approaches to classical education exist, from varied ideological perspectives. But in recent years in the U.S., the term has been freighted with additional meaning. Right-wing publications like the Washington Examiner, National Review and the American Conservative have all rolled out the phrase to mean the most conservative model of education or “the natural replacement” for “critical race theory and other liberal curricula.” Ryan Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, which campaigns against CRT, suggested in the early months of the pandemic that conservatives should seize the opportunity of disrupted classrooms to remake education along classical lines, since that approach alone could offer “a perspective on history that doesn’t teach [children] that the American system of government is inherently evil.” 

“It’s tricky to know what’s going on because classical or liberal arts education is not merely an ideological project adopted by the American right,” said Lorna Bracewell, a political theorist at Flagler. “I understand myself to be involved in classical and liberal arts education, and I’m basically an anti-fascist lesbian. So I don’t think it’s only code, or only a dog whistle. And yet, because there has been this concerted effort by the American right to appropriate that language, it makes one wary.”

Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida (David Gutierrez/Creative Commons)

But for most of those who’ve turned “classical education” into a buzzword or a franchise in recent years, it basically means exalting Western civilization, American exceptionalism and the notion that America was founded on “Judeo-Christian” principles. Hillsdale College’s classical education offerings, for instance, include its “1776 Curriculum,” a right-wing answer to the “1619 Project” that declares the U.S. “an exceptionally good country,” casts slave-owning founding fathers as covert abolitionists and calls progressivism “a rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as well as the form of the Constitution.” 

Among the classical public charter schools Hillsdale has helped found, some proclaim their unapologetic focus on the works of white men, which are said to represent the best of Western thought and the foundational heritage of any American student, no matter their racial or ethnic background. At the Jacksonville Classical Academy (overseen by one of Flagler’s trustees), the mission statement emphasizes a vision to “train students to be stewards of the Western Tradition and the pillars of a free society.” The largest classical charter school network in the country, the Texas- and Arizona-based Great Hearts America, was engulfed in scandal in 2018 after one of its public charters directed students to balance the “positive” and “negative” aspects of slavery.

“What they’re trying to do is stop the clock on what counts as ‘canon,'” said Bethany Moreton, a historian at Dartmouth College who has written extensively about the right and is author of the forthcoming “Perverse Incentives: Economics as Culture War.” The enshrinement of a core “Western canon” to represent classical education, she notes, is not some timeless tradition, but a relatively recent creation born in the 20th century with the goal of assimilating new demographics of university students into a common national culture. Today’s renewed conservative focus on the model, Moreton continued, has similar aims. “This is not an innocent selection of the greatest that was ever said and thought. This is an identity project in itself.”  

“A separate patronage system” for right-wing thinkers and activists

In early April, Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist and Manhattan Institute fellow widely credited with driving the right’s crusade against “critical race theory” (CRT), delivered a speech at Hillsdale College, calling on conservatives to “lay siege to the institutions.” While the most headline-grabbing aspect of his speech was Rufo’s admission that the best way for conservatives to lure people away from public schools was to surround them with endless controversy — over CRT, pandemic health measures, LGBTQ students and whatever else — a brief aside during the Q&A session was arguably just as important. 

Responding to the widespread conservative belief that liberals are winning the culture war, no matter what happens in Washington, Rufo suggested that the right should fight back by staging its own institutional takeover. Specifically, he said, Republican state lawmakers should dedicate public funds to establish “conservative centers” within flagship public universities. These could serve multiple purposes, he said, acting as “magnets” for conservative professors, creating right-leaning academic tracks that would influence incoming generations of students and, not least, founding “a separate patronage system” for conservative thinkers and activists. 

“Some people don’t like thinking about it that way,” Rufo continued. “But guess what? The public universities, the [diversity, equity, inclusion] departments, the public school bureaucracies are, at the end of the day, patronage systems for left-wing activists. And as long as there’s going to be a patronage system, wouldn’t it be good to have some people representing the public within them?” 

That may be a fair description of UF’s proposed Hamilton Center. But it’s not the only example.

In 2020, the Florida legislature also created the Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom at Florida International University in Miami. Headed by former Trump official Carlos Díaz-Rosilla, the center’s stated mission includes studying “the effect of government and free market economies on individual freedom and human prosperity,” especially in the Americas.

Green Library at Florida International University in Miami. (Andres Limones Cruz/Creative Commons)

Six years earlier, in 2014, Florida’s legislature also funded a professorship at Florida State focused on “economic prosperity.” That one position has since been transformed, with the help of private donations from the network of right-wing libertarian mega-donor Charles Koch, into a full-scale institution, the L. Charles Hilton Jr. Center for the Study of Economic Prosperity and Individual Opportunity.

“It’s funny” that the right claims a need to create a separate patronage system for conservative academics, said Bethany Moreton, “because they’ve been doing this since the mid-1970s.” For decades, right-wing donors have sought to establish beachheads in colleges and universities across the nation, from which they hoped to create an academic foundation for conservative or libertarian policies.

In her 2017 book “Democracy in Chains,” Duke University historian Nancy MacLean chronicled the creation of the first such center, founded at the University of Virginia and later moved to George Mason University. This flagship program, nurtured by the vision of right-wing economist James Buchanan and then fattened with Koch foundation funds, helped inspire conservative funding of academic departments, endowed chairs and standalone centers at more than 300 universities in the decades since. 

Institutes like George Mason’s Mercatus Center today serve as “nerve centers” for conservative policy agendas, said MacLean, and also as talent pipelines, allowing funders to boast that they are rearing the next generation of staff for conservative think tanks and advocacy groups. And that’s by explicit design. 

A 2018 report by the progressive organization Unkoch My Campus describes Charles Koch’s conviction that right-wing donors should focus less on targeting unreliable politicians to enact a pro-business agenda and more on building support for their ideas through donations that could trigger a long chain of outcomes. In a 1974 pamphlet, “Anti-Capitalism and Business,” Koch wrote that conservative philanthropy should aim to achieve a “multiplier effect,” and that for that purpose, “education programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.” 

That perspective was elaborated by Koch’s key adviser, Richard Fink, then the president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, in a much-referenced paper from 1996 entitled “The Structure of Social Change.” Fink argued that grants to universities to support the work of economists committed to radical free-market capitalism could inform policy proposals from conservative think tanks. That work, in turn, would inspire advocacy organizations (either grassroots or astroturf), which create the appearance of broad public support, which ultimately leads politicians to pass laws that deregulate capitalism or defund the welfare state.

“They see it as this industrial process where they fund all four stages and the end product is social change,” said Ralph Wilson, founder of the progressive watchdog group Corporate Genome Project and coauthor of the recently-released “Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War.” Wilson began researching the impact of the Koch network on education years ago while a student at Florida State, which made an unsavory deal with Koch donors, taking their money in exchange for allowing them a say in hiring and curriculum decisions, and, at one point, having a Koch-funded economics program create pro-capitalism lesson plans for both college and K-12 instruction. (One product of that agreement, Wilson noted, was a K-12 curriculum called “Common Sense Economics,” which included, incredibly, a paper titled “Sacrificing Lives for Profit,” which argued, “Corporations routinely sacrifice the lives of some of their customers to increase profits, and we are all better off because they do.”) Within that process, Wilson said, “the university is recognized as the key first stage of investment for social change, so the more they can capture universities, the more successful their political program will be.” 

That model, added MacLean, works in tandem with the steady defunding of higher education over many years. “As taxes are driven down by the same [conservative] elected officials, school administrators are just desperate for funds,” said MacLean. “So they become a willing audience, and in some ways even accomplices, to this expansion of right-wing influence in higher education that has not been earned on the merits of any intellectual argument or research.”

At the University of Florida, religious studies professor Bron Taylor recognized that pattern. Taylor said he personally believed that “teaching the history, philosophy and religion of the so-called Western world is something we should be doing, and doing well,” and worried that certain traditional subjects had fallen so far out of fashion that students might graduate without a strong grounding in basic civics. But he said he also believed that outside funding with strings attached could distort the educational mission. 

“When big money comes into a university, of course the university tends to welcome that. It’s one of the ways they accomplish things they want to accomplish,” he said. “But it’s also the case that in an institution that’s supposed to be run by faculty governance, you end up with administrators whose status and prestige interests are served by raising money, and the donors then can exercise undue influence on the priorities of the university.”

“In this kind of case the devil’s in the details,” Taylor continued. “Who is going to decide the shape and priority of this institute? Will the donors have any say in who is appointed to lead it?” Under current conditions at UF, he said, “DeSantis doesn’t have to say, ‘If you do X, we’ll cut your funding,'” because administrators already know. “There’s always this Damoclean sword hanging over the university, that if you stray from their political agenda, you’ll be looked at disfavorably when it comes to budgets.”

For the last 10 years, Wilson, who previously helped found Unkoch My Campus, has focused attention on academic centers funded by private donors. As that pattern has become more widely known, efforts to build or expand Koch-related centers at numerous schools have encountered pushback from students and staff, as with a recent effort to build a free-market Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Brown University. 

But now the right has a new playbook: Leveraging direct funding from state governments. 

“Using state legislatures as an avenue for the creation of these centers seems to be a new tactic,” said Wilson, which can expedite the entire enterprise. “There’s no decision-making process that involves a faculty legislature” if state governors and lawmakers are making the decisions. “It removes any avenue for students, faculty or administrators, for that matter, to have a say in the creation of these centers.” 

“A late-stage example of corporate capture of the state”

That’s largely what happened in Arizona five years ago, when the state’s right-wing legislature poured millions of dollars into transforming two “freedom schools” at Arizona State University, initially created with funding from the Koch network, into a new program, the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, which was deemed necessary because, according to a group of conservatives hired to develop the program, ASU suffered from “conformity of opinion” and “lack of debate.” 

“The legislature basically held the university hostage to force them to create tenure-track faculty lines for the freedom center,” said MacLean. Writing in the Washington Post, Matthew Garcia, the former director of the school’s historical, philosophical and religious studies department, argued that what had once been two conservative centers subject to the normal process of faculty oversight and hiring procedures became an unaccountable institution exempt from normal governance, which spent lavishly on first editions of “foundational” books and subsidized international trips for its students, and where a university official allegedly said the program “would never hire anyone that Koch doesn’t approve.” Garcia resigned, and now teaches at Dartmouth. 

But Wilson added that the program at ASU now receives so much direct state funding that the Koch network has largely been able to drop its support. Both ASU’s new center and another Koch-backed “freedom” center at the University of Arizona have been called upon to develop the state’s K-12 civics curricula. In January, Arizona Republicans proposed their own “Portraits in Patriotism” oral history series, much like Florida’s, as a requirement for high school graduation. 

“This is a late-stage example of the corporate capture of the state,” said Wilson. “As these donors are trying to gain intellectual and cultural influence for their ideology, they’ve been frantically trying to set up shop in universities that will help legitimize their movement.” In states like Arizona, Texas and Florida where far-right donors have amassed considerable political influence, “they have so much control that they can start implementing their agenda from the top down. They can use the state to help them further capture the state.” 

Since the changes at ASU, there has been a flurry of similar proposals for new conservative centers at flagship public universities.

In Texas last year, a new state initiative, championed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, allocated an initial $6 million to create a think tank at the University of Texas at Austin, “dedicated to the study and teaching of individual liberty, limited government, private enterprise and free markets” and envisioned as a $100 million public-private partnership modeled on Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Documents obtained by the Texas Tribune made clear that university administrators worked closely with Republican lawmakers and school donors who saw the center as a means of bringing “intellectual diversity” to the campus. 

One such document describes the institute’s mission as educating students “on the moral, ethical, philosophical and historical foundations of a free society” and included plans to create a related civics course for high school students, much as in Florida and Arizona. 

Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Another document noted that the center was necessary because a “growing proportion of our population lacks a basic understanding of the role liberty and private enterprise play in their well-being.” What “liberty” and “free society” mean in this context may be clarified by the involvement of private donor Bud Brigham, a libertarian oil tycoon who blames academics for fostering the “global warming scam” and funded the production of not one but two movie adaptations of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” 

The Liberty Institute at UT Austin was controversial from its inception, with student government calling on administrators to reject the offer and faculty expressing frustration with the lack of transparency. The documents obtained by Texas Tribune also suggest that some of the project’s supporters called for the institute to be exempt from the university’s normal governance process, with its own budget and the power to appoint its own faculty. 

In February, the institute came into the news again in the aftermath of Patrick’s angry vow to eliminate tenure at Texas’ public universities following a resolution passed by UT Austin’s faculty council supporting scholars’ academic freedom to teach critical race theory. Patrick responded by writing on Twitter, “I will not stand by and let looney Marxist UT professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory. We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed. That’s why we created the Liberty Institute at UT.” 

Similar plans have also arisen recently in Tennessee. When Gov. Bill Lee delivered his “state of the state” address in late January, the biggest headlines were reserved for his announcement that Tennessee would partner with Hillsdale College to roll out more “classical education” charter schools, funded with taxpayer dollars, across the state. But Lee also said that the “informed patriotism” that characterized that endeavor “should stretch beyond the K-12 classroom and into higher education.” 

“In many states, colleges and universities have become centers of anti-American thought, leaving our students not only ill-equipped but confused,” Lee continued. “But, in Tennessee, there’s no reason why our institutions of higher learning can’t be an exceptional part of America at Its Best.” 

To that end, Lee announced, he was budgeting $6 million to create a new “Institute of American Civics” at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which he said would serve as “a flagship for the nation — a beacon celebrating intellectual diversity at our universities and teaching how a responsible, civic-minded people strengthens our country and our communities.” 

This move came in the wake of pressure from Tennessee Republicans to drop plans to address diversity at several state universities, including both UT Knoxville and the University of Memphis. In April, after students at Yale Law School protested a speaker from the anti-LGBTQ legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom, Lee released a statement saying that his new Institute for American Civics was designed “to be the antidote to the cynical, un-American behavior we are seeing at far too many universities.” 

Are you teaching history “the right way”?

At Flagler College in St. Augustine, it’s still not clear where the proposed Institute for Classical Education fits into this complex picture. Much of the faculty uncertainty or apprehension isn’t about what Flagler administrators have actually proposed but rather the context surrounding it: the coded meanings of “classical ed,” the updated model of state-funded university infiltration and the overall atmosphere of hostility to public education in Florida and around the country. 

Earlier this year, Flagler historian Michael Butler was supposed to deliver a training seminar on the civil rights movement to Florida elementary school teachers. It was canceled by local officials who feared it might fall afoul of new prohibitions on teaching about race. When he tells people he’s a historian these days, he said, they increasingly respond by asking him whether he teaches history “the right way.” 

“The whole dynamic has to be understood in the broader context of what’s happening in Florida with regards to education and how people interpret that,” said Flagler’s Timothy Johnson. He doesn’t think Flagler’s proposal is a “Trojan horse” for a particular political project, he said, and if the state wants to support the school’s efforts to retain first-generation college students, that’s a good thing. If, however, he said, “the state of Florida wants to give $5 million to the college and dictate the concept and content of ‘classical education,’ then I completely oppose the initiative.”

Flagler’s administration has taken pains to distinguish their proposed center from the larger swirl of polarization, saying that any hiring or curriculum decisions would go through the traditional process of faculty oversight, not outside interests from either the board of trustees or state government. When eight professors, including Butler, Johnson and Bracewell, brought a resolution before the faculty senate in April, affirming that the center would remain “under the jurisdiction and control of the faculty,” it passed unanimously, with senior administrator Art Vanden Houten and the college president in support. 

Whatever ultimately happens at Flagler, versions of this model, and the accompanying controversy, are certain to be replicated elsewhere, in schools with less supportive administrations. At the University of Florida, Malini Johar Schueller said the school’s failure to solicit faculty input about its proposed center was “quite in keeping with this administration.” She expressed little optimism that things would improve soon.

“This is going to continue, unfortunately,” she said. “All we can do at the university level is not be cowed down, do what we have to do and put up a good battle.” 

“The right was thinking long-term when they started doing this in the ’70s, thinking ahead to a moment like this one,” said Bethany Moreton. “They do not support education as a good in itself, but as a means to an end that they should define. And the further you remove education from democratic oversight, the more likely it is that freestanding institutes like this become a way to have what they always dreamed of: a university without the disruptive forces of actual thought, contestation and new knowledge.”

Read more on the American right’s latest wave of assaults on education:

• A new age of fascist politics brings a war on youth — but young people are ready to resist
• Betsy DeVos and Ron DeSantis: GOP dynamic duo team up to defund public schools
• What is “social emotional learning” — and how did it become the right’s new CRT panic?

The post EXCLUSIVE: Now the far right is coming for college too — with taxpayer-funded “classical education” appeared first on Salon.com.

In mid-February, the Faculty Council of the University of Texas in Austin voted to approve a resolution proactively “affirming the fundamental rights of faculty to academic freedom in its broadest sense, inclusive of research and teaching of race and gender theory.” The resolution rejected any efforts to restrict curricula at UT, and called on the school’s president to fight any attempts to dictate what professors can teach that might arise down the line.  

Most of the time, resolutions like this — which carry no actual force — are destined to be archived and quickly forgotten. But this one was different, as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a far-right Republican and a hero to conservatives across the nation, responded vehemently on Twitter, writing, “I will not stand by and let looney Marxist UT professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory. We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed.” At a press conference several days later, Patrick added a new threat to end tenure in Texas for all future faculty hires and to revoke tenure for any faculty members who teach CRT, in order to fire them. 

RELATED: The critics were right: “Critical race theory” panic is just a cover for silencing educators

“To these professors who voted 41 to five telling the taxpayers, and the parents and the Legislature and your own Board of Regents to get out of their business, that we have no say in what you do in the classroom, you’ve opened the door for this issue because you went too far,” Patrick said. “We’re going to take this on.”

But the UT resolution was just one among a number of forceful statements that have emerged in recent weeks, many of them shaped by the advocacy of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), a progressive think tank cofounded by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, a foundational scholar of critical race theory and intersectionality, and political scientist Luke Harris. 

After conservatives began to attack the supposed spread of CRT in late 2020, says AAPF’s director of strategic initiatives Sumi Cho, the organization sounded an early alarm about how school politics might be weaponized against civil rights. The group launched a new campaign, the Truth Be Told initiative, to defend accurate race and gender education in schools. In partnership with the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University, the initiative also runs a hotline for educators facing harassment or threats of termination for what they teach, in addition to campaigning for colleges and universities to release faculty resolutions in support of academic freedom. It also created a model resolution that faculty at higher ed institutions could use to formalize their response. To date, AAPF says some 20 colleges and universities, in at least 16 states, have introduced a version of their model resolution, or one with similar intentions, with others likely to join soon. 

Cho spoke with Salon in late February. 

How was the Truth Be Told initiative started? 

As soon as President Trump announced Executive Order 13950 in September 2020, primarily targeting diversity training by federal agencies, AAPF recognized the danger this would have to a range of things. We joined other civil rights organizations to support litigation against the order. When President Biden was inaugurated, he promptly rescinded the order and replaced it with one pursuing equity in federal agencies. But that didn’t eliminate the problem of the issue spreading to the states, in part because of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the coordination of conservative legislation measures at their December 2020 summit, which specifically targeted critical race theory (CRT) for state action. We saw a proliferation of legislation throughout the states, funded by dark money and promoted through Fox News and other sources. 

From the spring of 2021 through the end of the year, we saw over a dozen states pass legislation seeking to restrict the discussion of race and gender justice. But by the beginning of 2022 it became an even meaner and more extreme campaign, in both quantity and severity. There were 66 bills introduced in 2021, while in January 2022 alone there were more than 70. A lot of the original “white discomfort” bills in 2021 drew from ALEC’s December 2020 workshop and focused on things like “divisive concepts,” “discomfort” or race and sex stereotyping. That was the template for those bills, and as a result, a lot of them were very vague in terms of what they would prohibit, but they definitely had a severe chilling effect. 

With the election of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, politicians began to see they might fulfill their ambitions for higher office by riding this anti-CRT train. It spawned a race to the bottom with more extreme bills in 2022, which, in addition to targeting CRT and prohibiting teaching about systemic racism or sexism, sometimes also target higher education. In 2021, only Idaho, Iowa and Oklahoma did that; now there are over 20 states with pending legislation targeting higher education. 

RELATED: Evangelicals do battle with “critical race theory” in new online video course

The 2022 legislation also includes a lot more mandatory punishment. Oklahoma’s pending bill gives parents the right to object to any book in a public school library. If that book isn’t removed within 30 days, the librarian must be fired and cannot be rehired for two years and the complainant is eligible for $10,000 a day in damages until the book is removed. In Wisconsin, there are monetary damages up to $50,000. It’s obvious these measures are designed to cripple public education. 

You also see private causes of actions that follow from the Texas anti-abortion bill, where you give parents and individuals the ability to sue teachers and school districts. That led to the phenomenon of Moms for Liberty essentially putting a bounty on teachers‘ heads, offering $500 for whoever could turn up the first violation of the New Hampshire gag order. 

We also see the scope going beyond race and gender to the “Don’t Say Gay” bills, which in Florida were so egregious that their proponents had to pull back their proposal for mandatory outing — that if an administrator, teacher or even a student reported another student was not heterosexual, that information would have to be reported to the parents within six weeks. 

These are the surveillance states being set up to monitor teachers and chill the environment for free inquiry and critical discussion, with the overall purpose of undermining public education and multiracial democracy. 

Can you talk more about how these attacks add up to an assault on public education as a system? 

The conservative think tanks that have promulgated this entire disinformation campaign — like Christopher Rufo’s work with the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation — have made clear their attempts to undermine public education through vouchers, charter schools and opposition to teachers’ unions. In November, just after the Virginia elections, Rufo bragged about his success to New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, saying, “We are right now preparing a strategy of laying siege” to these “public schools [that] are waging war against American children and American families.” In response, he proposed using the traditional school choice agenda of private school vouchers, charter schools and homeschooling to combat this existential threat he perceived. 

RELATED: The secret plan behind Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill: Bankrupting public education

So you don’t have to take my word for it. The architect of this entire campaign, who’s also been clear that he doesn’t know what CRT is and doesn’t care, is simply trying to put all the “cultural insanities” under one brand to render it toxic. 

Considering AAPF founder Kimberlé Crenshaw’s role in creating the CRT framework, what is it like, as an organization, to be at the center of this storm? 

It’s like ground zero. On the other hand, it’s quite a testament to the power of the work and the persuasive function it’s had around the world, among very diverse audiences, especially young people. And I think that is the threat, because this is within the pattern of backlash that we’ve seen since Reconstruction whenever there is racial reform. 

AAPF’s Truth Be Told campaign is primarily concerned about the long-term effects of this backlash on the broad ability to research, teach, talk and think about race, gender and social justice issues, due to this coordinated campaign to undermine the public’s belief in public education, multiracial democracy and intersectional justice. Kimberlé Crenshaw is concerned that this current backlash, like the one following Reconstruction, will endure for not just a season, but a century. 

Can you talk about how the campaigns targeting schools have expanded, from teaching about racial discrimination, to book bans, to proposals that schools actually out their LGBTQ students?

It does seem mind-boggling. When you read the UT resolution, it’s very modest, simply saying, “Let’s support the principles of academic freedom and the right of faculty to teach CRT and about race and gender justice.” Why would that prompt the unhinged outburst by Lt. Gov. Patrick, saying he wants to fire any critical race scholar in Texas and then remove tenure for all new hires?

But I think you have to go back to a quarter century ago, when George H.W. Bush accepted his party’s nomination in 1988, and announced that he would be campaigning on the theme of a  “kinder and gentler” America, perhaps recognizing a need to be more inclusive amid the changing demographics of America. This was back when we had real voting rights, of course. And so now, when you fast-forward to the evisceration of voting rights and the rise of white nationalism under Trump, we see that strategy has dramatically changed. It’s no longer about accepting the promise of a multiracial democracy. It’s quite the opposite. 

RELATED: From “crack pipes” to “critical race theory”: GOP’s 2022 midterm strategy is overt racism

It’s a very cynical attempt to win back the white suburban vote — the white women who may have marched against the murder of George Floyd — with this manufactured “parental rights,” “your child is being branded a racist” campaign. I think it started there, to reach into the darkest fears politicians thought they could take advantage of, but it was always intended to grow larger.

How did AAPF’s model resolution for college faculty come about, and what role are these resolutions playing? 

All along, the Truth Be Told campaign has made very clear that we don’t think the goal is simply to defend against these negative things, but to proactively stand up for a robust vision of what multiracial democracy means and requires. We don’t simply want to push back against these bills, but to create dynamic learning environments for all of our children. 

That’s the province of faculty, that through their research and scholarship, they need to be the primary unit involved in curriculum, and administrations have to support that. Almost all of them do. So this is a proactive campaign we developed, thinking about the foundations of higher education being grounded in academic freedom and using it to say, that must be respected, whether you agree with or teach CRT or not.

That’s what the campaign was about: providing a template for faculty to be able to say as a unit, “This is important. We see this important principle on which higher ed is being breached currently by outside forces, and we call upon our administrations to defend this important principle.” 

What has the process been like when it comes to collaborating with these schools? 

After we held a 2021 CRT summer school, we drafted an open letter notifying people about this campaign and our template for defending academic freedom. We posted the template, and various suggestions and tools people could use, on our website. We have tireless faculty working out of our Truth Be Told education working group, like Jennifer Ruth at Portland State, Valerie Johnson at DePaul University, Emily Houh at University of Cincinnati, and Ellen Schrecker, the foremost expert on McCarthyism, who believes we are now witnessing the new McCarthyism. We had a strategy of reaching out to every public university flagship in the 50 states and hoped it would ripple out from there, which it has. We just heard today that UC Riverside passed the resolution. 

But governance is a process, and you need to introduce things. At UT Austin, it had to go through three separate committees. So it can be a months-long process. We launched this back in the beginning of the school year, and it’s just now beginning to bear fruit. We do believe that it will bear further fruit, especially after all of the national publicity around Lt. Gov. Patrick’s unhinged reaction. 

I’ve heard from faculty at other schools trying to introduce resolutions like this who are frustrated by the slowness of the process, at a time that seems to call for more urgency.

Faculty are notoriously bad at the resolution process because of the endless nuance they attach to every single word. Given this tendency, it’s even more impressive that nearly two dozen academic senate faculties have considered and debated these issues before passing these resolutions, typically by an overwhelming margin.

That’s also why we offered a template, knowing a lot of common questions would come up and giving people a starting place, but inviting them to modify it according to their own institutional needs and history. We welcome whenever people do modify it, like the University of Alabama did. But yes, it does seem as though there is a wildfire, and many people in higher ed haven’t quite noticed that it’s actually at their doorstep. 

The long game of these conservative think tanks that are intent on eliminating public education, not only at the K-12 level but also in higher ed, implicates and reaches all of us. And we need to be as on top of it and as coordinated as ALEC was back in December 2020, when they held their anti-CRT seminar for state legislators. 

The expansion of these attacks to higher education seems surprising, given how much of the rationale for the K-12 bills and laws was protecting impressionable children from “indoctrination.” 

I think that that speaks to this race to the bottom, with the meaner and more extreme versions of these various bills in 2022, just to make a national name for oneself. But it does leave the proponents unprepared for scrutiny, as the Indiana sponsor found out when his bill essentially demanding a both-sides approach to teaching about Nazism was properly ridiculed. 

I think we’re seeing people who don’t know anything about CRT, don’t know anything about academic freedom or free speech, and don’t know anything about higher education writing these bills filled with contradictions and incoherencies. They can’t even answer for what they’re putting in their bills, like still sticking with the “parental rights” language they used to power the K-12 legislation without realizing that, in higher ed, you’re talking about young adults who are supposed to be their own creators of knowledge. 

If we’re facing a new McCarthyism, how do people fight back? 

The new McCarthyism is not unlike the old McCarthyism, where you just blend something with ad hominem, and freeze the conversation by putting it into this negative category you hope people won’t touch. I think by engaging history — what happened then, what was wrong with it and what we don’t want to repeat — those are exactly the sort of lessons we are undertaking with CRT. We look at the problems, the mistakes we’ve made in the past as a country in terms of structural subordination, unfairness and the ways in which even in an allegedly colorblind society with civil rights laws we are still reproducing rampant, visible and durable inequalities. And if we want to change that, we have to get to the essence of the analysis. That’s what these bills are trying to prevent.

As a parent with two kids currently in college — at USC, of all places — it strikes me that the politicians and parents behind this closing of the American mind are doing just as big of a disservice to their young people as the parents arrested under Operation Varsity Blues. If you read about the children involved in those scandals, they’re angry at their parents for not believing in them. In a similar way, I think that people undertaking these actions are also doing a disservice to their young adults by taking away their ability to engage in the very conversations that students from every neighborhood, of every race, religion and background, desperately want to engage in. They understand the challenges of living in a multiracial society and are very hungry for these conversations, whether they agree with all the conclusions or not. 

The politicians claiming they know what’s best for students and even parents taking up the mantle are in for a rude surprise: These efforts are really not appreciated by their own students. 

The post Fighting back against CRT panic: Educators organize around the threat to academic freedom appeared first on Salon.com.

Since the 1980s, higher education has been subject to devastating attacks as a result of punishing neoliberal austerity policies and ongoing attempts by conservatives to both privatize and defund public institutions. Right-wing attacks on the public good, the corporatization and militarization of higher education and a growing authoritarianism in the culture have led, as Christopher Newfield observes, “to the abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses.”

The effects are visible in the gutting of tenure-track positions, increases in tuition, an onslaught of administrative positions, and the redefinition of higher education as a competitive and profit-making institution. The attacks on tenure have been especially effective in transforming higher education into an adjunct of corporate interests. Writing in the College Post, Marianne Besas reports that “in 2018, 23.7 percent of faculty members at institutions across the country were tenured, and 10.2 percent were on a tenure track.” Tenure, along with the power of faculty, is in absolute decline. Only about one in five of the overworked and beaten-down faculty members in the academic labor force have tenure. 

At the same time, students are relegated to the status of clients. No longer viewed as a democratic public sphere, post-secondary education has forfeited its willingness, if not its responsibility, to instill in its students and the wider public the shared values, ideals and social practices crucial to developing democratic institutions and an informed and critically engaged public. Instead, it has become complicit with a cultural and political crisis — characterized by lies and bungling political leadership — which on the one hand has turned lethal with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic and on the other hand has been mostly silent regarding the threat to democracy posed by the growing racism and authoritarianism in the wider society.

Under such circumstances, higher education has failed to create on a mass scale not only a shared national civic purpose, but also a wider formative culture promoting the habits, sensibilities, dispositions and values crucial to democracy’s survival. It has detached itself from the obligations of citizenship and social responsibility, while harnessing itself to economic interests. Defined by neoliberal values, higher education has surrendered its purpose and mission to a culture of commercialism and exchange. The new normal in higher education is based on the brutalizing assumption that knowledge, ideas and visions are only valuable if they can be measured and aligned with the culture of business and the market. Everything is rated according to its monetary value and turned into an object of consumption — nothing appears to escape its regressive spiral of commodification, social atomization, and reification. 

Neoliberalism freezes the scope, range and depth of education in the culture of market fluctuations and investor interests. This is especially detrimental to the role of higher education as a public good, considering that the fate of democracy’s future is linked to the domain of culture — a domain in which people have to be educated critically in order to fight for securing freedom, equality, social justice, equal protection and human dignity. Agency is not being eliminated; it is being reconfigured in the image of an instrumental rationality, a market-driven model that conceals its own aggression in the name of choice, meritocracy and individual interests. 

RELATED: Fighting back against the age of manufactured ignorance: Resistance is still possible

The signs of higher education’s failure to define itself as a public good are everywhere, but such signs are particularly resonant in its indifference to the dark and menacing forces of a racist and totalitarian cultural politics that now engulfs American society. The collapse of conscience is widespread in a system of higher education that defines itself as a satellite of corporations. One consequence is a growing indifference to addressing larger political and social problems such as the rise of right-wing extremist movements, the spreading racial hatred and the increasing resort by the state to violence against Black people, undocumented immigrants, public health workers, school board members and women arguing for reproductive rights. 

 Without apology and most distinctively, the legacy of Jim Crow, with its layered racist rage and propensity for violence, has returned, asphyxiating the United States in a toxic cloud of voter suppression laws, the resurgence of police assaults against Black people and the emergence of a right-wing cultural politics. Cultural politics has become a powerful medium for social and civic death, endorsing white nationalism, pseudo-appeals to patriotic education and ongoing attempts by right-wing politicians to implement a form of apartheid pedagogy at all levels of schooling. 

Rethinking cultural politics as an educational force

Education has always been a compelling element of politics yet is rarely understood as a crucial site of struggle over culture, agency, identities, values and the future itself. As Stuart Hall once noted, what has been lacking is a sense of politics being educative in order to change the way people see things and understand the larger world. The latter is an especially important insight given how the right-wing has weaponized social media as a pedagogical medium in order to spread its racist and anti-democratic ideas and values. Driving such a politics is a counterrevolutionary political and educational movement whose methods and goals are to destroy civic literacy and freedom and undermine the values and institutions necessary for sustaining human development, the planet and a thriving democracy.

What is new in the current historical moment is that right-wing cultural politics have influenced higher education and the larger society with unprecedented success. That is, as Paul Gilroy says, “the weaponization of culture and information has been much more successfully exploited by the neofascists than their disorientated opponents.” 

The culture wars waged against “critical race theory” have a broader political function, in that they are part of a larger battle waged by right-wing white nationalists to control and destroy education as a critical site of power, especially in its capacity to foster the common good and equip young people to hold power accountable. In the current historical moment, educating a critically literate citizenry has become dangerous. In the age of Trumpism, culture has become a battlefield, and the war is being won by extremists in the political and corporate worlds.

The current wave of Republican Party extremists understand a fundamental lesson about the power of culture, one that was brilliantly articulated by the great Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci. He noted that culture deploys power and that such power is always pedagogical. Moreover, in the current age culture is a crucial site and weapon of power and has assumed an unparalleled significance in the structure and organization of agency, identities, knowledge, social relations and the question of who inhabits the public sphere and who doesn’t.

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Unfortunately, resistance on the part of universities to the cultural assault waged by the current wave of white supremacist politicians has been timid. Nobel-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee is right in arguing that resistance has been “weak and ill organised; routed, the professors [have] beat a retreat to their dugouts, from where they have done little besides launching the intermittent satirical barb against the managerial newspeak they are perforce having to acquire.”

Repressive forms of education no longer exist on the margins of society, nor are they present in only public and higher education. They are now being enabled from the centers of power. Education infused with a neoliberal racist orthodoxy now permeates a range of corporate-controlled sites that extend from newspapers to the new digital platforms, which inundate the public with massive amounts of information defined mostly by the script of cost-benefit analysis and the need for ever-increasing profits. At the core of these repressive educational practices is a resurgence of white nationalism, a culture of fear and contempt for the truth. One result is not only the deterioration of political culture but also, as Gilroy observes, “The archive of ineffable horror [has drifted] into an indeterminate space where information is untrusted.”

White nationalist educational practices, infused with neoliberal racist orthodoxy and the politics of disposability, operate increasingly through state repression, the passing of racist and sexist policies, and sanctioned police violence. They are also present in the colonization of identities, the production of manufactured ignorance and the power of a cultural politics that creates zones of abandonment where those marginalized by race, class, and religion become voiceless and unknowable. This widespread assault on rationality and truth is part of an image-based and ocular pedagogy engaged in a politics of falsehoods and erasure. In its most extreme pedagogical forms, a politics of racial hatred and exclusion cloaks itself in the false claims of “patriotism” and the right-wing call for “patriotic education,” functioning largely as a form of  trickery, deceit, and organized irresponsibility. 

Historical amnesia coupled with a culture of lies runs amok in American society, assuming the force of a national disease, corrupting the public imagination and civic culture. Education as a vehicle for white supremacy now moves between the reactionary policies of Republican legislators who use the law to turn their states into white nationalist factories and a right-wing social media machine that uses the internet, Facebook and other online services to spread racial hatred and undermine the necessity to be reminded of the horrors of history that are resurfacing once again. White supremacy has once again turned deadly and has put democracy on trial.  

The spectacle of Trumpism and its brew of white supremacist ideology and disdain for the truth undergirds the further collapse of democratic visions in higher education and broader public spheres. This is reinforced by a pandemic-generated obsession in higher education with methodologies, the growing dominance of instrumental reason and, as Peter Fleming observes, the return of “unforgiving management hierarchies that have replaced academic judgment, collegiality and professional common sense.”

Universities increasingly define themselves as part of a business culture and education industry, which “incentivize students to envision themselves not as citizens of a republic but as self-marketing, indebted buyers and sellers.” This shift away from its civic mission makes it all the easier for higher education to become obsessed with technocratic methods focusing on delivery platforms such as Zoom and Teams. The robotic language of instrumental rationality is everywhere in higher education. The English critic Marina Warner sums it up well:

As universities are beaten into the shapes dictated by business, so language is suborned to its ends. We have all heard the robotic idiom of management, as if a button had activated a digitally generated voice. Like Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, business-speak is an instance of magical naming, superimposing the imagery of the market on the idea of a university – through ‘targets’, ‘benchmarks’, time-charts, league tables, ‘vision statements’, ‘content providers’ [terms] that accumulate like dental plaque.

The Return of Jim Crow politics and the attack on “critical race theory”

Jim Crow politics are back with a vengeance, worn as a badge of honor. The signs are everywhere. Both during and in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the Republican Party has dropped any pretense to democracy in its affirmation of authoritarian politics and embrace of white supremacy. Moreover, it has become a party of unhinged cruelty. This has been evident in the weaponizing of identity, support for a range of discriminatory policies of exclusion, construction of a border wall that has become a symbol of resurgent nativism and, under the Trump regime, the internment of children separated from undocumented parents at the southern border.

The rush to construct a homegrown form of authoritarianism is also clear in the passing of a barrage of voter suppression laws introduced in Republican-controlled state legislatures, all based on baseless claims of voter fraud. Voter suppression has become the new currency of a rebranded form of racialized fascist politics. As of Sept. 1, 361 bills had been put into play in 47 states, while 19 states had enacted 33 laws that make it harder for Americans to vote, particularly poor Black people.  

Voter suppression laws breathe new life into white supremacy and fit nicely into the racist argument that whites are under siege by people of color who are attempting to dethrone and replace them. In this case, such laws, along with ongoing attacks on equality and social justice, are defended by right-wing extremists as justifiable measures to protect whites from the “contaminating” influence of immigrants, Black people and others considered unworthy of occupying and participating in the public sphere and democratic process. Similarly, voter suppression laws are defended as legitimate attempts to provide proof that votes are cast by “real Americans,” code for defining people of color as “counterfeit citizens.” In actuality, these laws are not only racist in intent but also meant to enable permanent minority rule for the Republican Party, the endpoint of which is a form of authoritarianism. 

The attacks on critical race theory are a barely disguised effort by white supremacists to define who counts as an American, and form part of a long legacy in which those groups deemed unworthy of citizenship disappear. The language of historical and pedagogical erasure extends from the genocide inflicted on Native Americans to the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. It includes the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the current rise of the racialized carceral state. Forgetting has become a convenient adaptive strategy for privileging the eternal present while emptying the past of its contradictions and genocidal horrors. There is more at work here than the whitening of collective identity, the public sphere and American history. There are invocations of whiteness, as Paul Gilroy suggests, that enhance “the allure of [a] rebranded fascism.” 

The Republican Party’s labeling of critical race theory as “ideological or faddish” both denies the history of racism as well as the ways in which it is enforced through policy, laws and institutions. For many Republicans, racial hatred takes on the ludicrous claim of protecting students from learning about the diverse ways in which racism persists in American society. For instance, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has stated, “There is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.” DeSantis has not only labeled critical race theory as “false history,” but has extended the discourse of his unhinged attack on any vestige of critical education and critical race theory to almost unrecognizably repressive lengths. As Eric Lutz points out, DeSantis has taken

the deranged culture war a step farther, signing laws that will require students and staff at public universities to be surveyed on their political beliefs; bar higher education institutions from preventing access to ideas students may find “uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive;” and force-feeding K-12 students “portraits in patriotism” that contrasts America with communist and totalitarian regimes.

In this updated version of apartheid pedagogy and historical cleansing, the call for racial justice is equated with a form of racial hatred, leaving intact the refusal to acknowledge, condemn or confront the history and tenacity of racism in American society in the public imagination. Apartheid pedagogy transforms the criticism of racial injustice and structural racism into a breach of law and makes it an object of malignant state oppression and violence. Borrowing from Judith Butler’s critique of the criminalization of knowledge in higher education, apartheid pedagogy interprets the call for democracy as sedition, and the call for freedom as a call to violence.  

The attack on critical race theory restricts what educators can say and teach in the classroom and does so by invoking the language of fear and retaliation. Many teachers are not just confused about what they can and cannot say in the classroom about social justice issues but also live in daily fear over the consequences they may face “for even broaching nuanced conversations about racism and sexism.” Such fears point to more than the curtailing of freedom of expression and the idealizing of history by whitewashing it. They also identify America’s slide into a rebranded fascist politics that is difficult to ignore. The threat of white supremacy has even been acknowledged by President Joe Biden in a speech he delivered marking the centennial of the Tulsa race massacre. Biden warned that U.S. democracy was not only in danger but that Americans had to recognize and challenge the “deep roots of racial terror.”

Legalizing racial oppression and apartheid pedagogy

The racialized climate of fear, intimidation and censorship is spreading in the United States. This is evident in the fact that anti-CRT bills have become law in eight states, while 15 state legislatures across the country have introduced bills to prevent or limit teachers from teaching about the history of slavery and racism in American society. These reactionary attacks on critical thought and emancipatory forms of pedagogy echo an earlier period in American history. Such attacks are reminiscent of the McCarthy and Red Scare period of the 1950s when heightened paranoia over the threat of communism resulted in a slew of laws that banned the teaching of material deemed unpatriotic “and required professors to swear loyalty oaths.”  

Such repression is never far from an abyss of ignorance. Right-wing attacks on critical race theory also ignore work by prominent Black scholars ranging from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois to Angela Y. Davis and Audre Lorde. There is no mention of Derrick Bell, the founder of critical race theory in the 1980s. Nor is there room for complexity, evidence or facts, just as there is no room for either a critique of structural racism or the actual assumptions and influence that make up CRT’s body of work. Such attacks raise fundamental questions about the goal of higher education and the role of academics in a time of mounting authoritarianism.

This is especially true at a time when higher education has become a site of derision, an object of censorship and a way of demonizing faculty and students who critically address matters of racial inequality, social injustice and other crucial social problems. Let’s be clear. For the Republican Party, higher education has become a battleground for conducting a race war waged in the spirit of the Confederacy, conducted through the twin registers of censorship and indoctrination.

Right-wing politicians now use education and the power of persuasion as weapons to discredit any critical approach to grappling with the history of racial injustice and white supremacy. In doing so, they undermine and discredit the critical faculties necessary for students and others to examine history as a resource in order to “investigate the core conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom, and equality, and a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion.” Novelist Francine Prose observes that educating young people through the indoctrinating policies and practices of  “patriotic education” will further America’s slide into

 a nation of con artists and their hapless marks, a country of liars and of people who have never been taught how to tell when they are being lied to…. Children who are prohibited from discussing the most critical issues of the day will gravitate into progressively more atomized and irreconcilable factions, unable to participate in the free and open exchange of ideas on which our democracy depends.  

Apartheid pedagogy is about denial and disappearance. It promotes a manufactured ignorance in the service of civic death and a flight from ethical and social responsibility. The right-wing attempt to impose “patriotic education” on educators is part of a longstanding counterrevolution that conservatives have waged since the student revolts of the 1960s. The calls in that decade to democratize the university and open it up to minorities of race and color were considered by many liberals and conservatives as dangerous expressions of dissent. In one famous instance, this was duly noted by ruling-class elites such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in the Trilateral Commission of 1973, who complained about what was called an “excess of democracy” in the United States.

This counterrevolution also fueled the ongoing corporatization of the university, in which business models defined how the university is governed, models that viewed faculty as part-time workers and students merely as customers and consumer-spectators. Another register of this ongoing counterrevolution with its embrace of apartheid pedagogy includes an attempt by university trustees to remove faculty from making decisions regarding matters of administrative governance, faculty appointments and control of tenure. 

In addition, right-wing legislators have introduced laws to limit funding for higher education institutions that teach critical race theory. For instance, Ohio state Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur, a Republican, introduced a bill titled the “Promoting Education Not Indoctrination Act,” which threatens to cut state funding by 25% to any Ohio public university that allows the teaching of critical race theory. Arthur’s disdain for democracy was also evident in her attempts to erase from state-mandated curriculum guidelines any mention of the notion of the common good, a view in sympathy with her repugnant views of racism, environmentalism and critical thinking itself. 

Such attacks are being funded by foundations such as the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, which often rely on the endorsement of conservative scholars such as Thomas Sowell. Some of the most powerful enablers of the attack on “anti-racist programs” in higher education and elsewhere include organizations such as the Koch brothers’ foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The latter is particularly pernicious given that it increasingly provides the template for anti-critical race theory bills, which are then used by many state legislators. This is apartheid pedagogy parading as educational reform. 

Rethinking higher education as a democratic public sphere  

The U.S. slide into the chasm of white supremacy demands a revitalized understanding and rethinking of the relationship between democracy and higher education. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students and others is the need to address the role and mission of higher education in a time of tyranny. Central to such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy. What will it take for higher education not to abandon its role as a democratic public sphere? What work must educators do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? What kind of language is necessary for higher education to redefine its mission, one that enables faculty and students to work toward a different future than one that echoes the authoritarian present, to confront the unspeakable, to recognize themselves as agents, not victims, and to muster up the courage to act in the service of a substantive and inclusive democracy? In a world where there is an increasing neglect of democratic and egalitarian principles, what will it take to educate young people and the broader public to be critically engaged citizens? 

Addressing this challenge means recognizing that over the last 40 years, under the reign of neoliberalism, the role of education in cultivating a critical citizenry capable of participating in and shaping a democratic society has been undermined, if not lost. Lost also is an educational vision that takes people beyond the world of common sense, functions as a form of provocation, teaches them to be creative, exposes individuals to a variety of great traditions, embraces the arts and creates the pedagogical conditions for individuals to expand the range of human possibilities.

Under the rule of a market-based society, higher education is largely defined as a financial investment whose goal is to ensure that young people are trained to compete in a global economy. In this logic, colleges and universities are reduced to sites for training students for the workforce — a reductive vision now being imposed on higher education by Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Netflix and Google that advocate what they call the entrepreneurial goal of education.

Increasingly aligned with neoliberal interests, higher education is mostly primed for teaching business principles and corporate values, while university administrators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in an audit culture. Many colleges and universities have been McDonaldized as knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity, This results in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu while devaluing knowledge that stresses humanistic values.

In the age of precarity and flexibility, the majority of faculty have been reduced to part-time positions, have been subjected to low wages, have lost control over the conditions of their labor, and have seen their benefits slashed or eliminated. Many of these academics are barely able to make ends meet because of their impoverished salaries, and some even receive food stamps.

If faculty are treated like service workers, students fare no better, and are relegated to the status of customers and clients. They are not only inundated with the competitive, privatized and market-driven values of neoliberalism, but are also punished by those values in the form of exorbitant tuition rates, astronomical debts owed to banks and other financial institutions and, in too many cases, a lack of meaningful future opportunities once they graduate. 

What might it mean to make pedagogy meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative? What might it mean to defend education as a bulwark of a democratic society and use higher education as a protective space where young people can articulate their needs and learn how to write themselves back into the script of democracy?

Given the crisis of education, agency and memory that haunts the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new political and pedagogical language. Such a language needs to be self-reflective and directive without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that education is always political because it presupposes a vision of the future, legitimizes specific forms of knowledge, values and social relationships and, in doing so, produces particular forms of agency. 

Educators also need to connect the rigor of their scholarship with the clarity necessary to address a wider public. They must be attentive to the everyday conditions that shape people’s lives, and be willing and able to speak to them. In this case, academics need to use a language in which people can recognize themselves and the problems they face. They need to merge theoretical rigor with the language of accessibility, without compromising either. At stake here is a pedagogical principle that recognizes that for a successful mode of communication to take place, there has to be a moment of identification on the part of the reader. To put it differently, such interventions must engage in a form of pedagogical recognition that sheds light on the everyday problems under which most people labor in the public domain.

There can be no authentic politics without a pedagogy of identification. Lacking this understanding, pedagogy all too easily either becomes irrelevant or is reduced to a form of academic jargon, one that assaults and shames, in one instance, and obfuscates and confuses in the other. At the same time, if academics are going to function as public intellectuals, they need to combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen while developing a language that connects everyday troubles to wider structures and presses the claim for economic and social justice. Such a language must offer a comprehensive politics capable of connecting diverse issues, move beyond a regressive notion of self-interest, reject a notion of freedom tied exclusively to consumerism and individualized responsibility, and develop a form of pedagogical citizenship that, when practiced thoughtfully, embraces a solidarity grounded in mutual responsibilities. In addition, such intellectuals can develop modes of pedagogy, along with a broader comprehensive vision of education and schooling, that are capable of winning struggles against those who would deny education its critical function — and this must apply to all forms of dogmatism and political purity across the ideological spectrum.  

One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students and others is the need to address the question of what higher education should accomplish in a democracy. How can educational and pedagogical practices be connected to the resurrection of historical memory, new modes of solidarity, a resurgence of the radical imagination and broad-based struggles for an insurrectional democracy? How can education be enlisted to fight what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once called neoliberalism’s most brutal weapon: “the slow cancellation of the future”?

Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality and endless assaults on the environment, and which elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes and market values, and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society. Education and pedagogy should provide the conditions for young people to think about keeping democracy alive and vibrant, not simply training students to be workers. Yes, we must educate young people with the skills they need to get jobs. But as educators we must also teach them to learn, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote in 2001, “to live with less or no misery [and] to fight against those social sources” that cause war, destruction of the environment, “inequality, unhappiness, and needless human suffering.” 

As Christopher Newfield argues, “democracy needs a public,” and higher education has a crucial role to play in this regard as a democratic public good rather than defining itself through the market-based values of neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, if such a role is to emerge, the conditions of labor for faculty have to change. Educators must be given the opportunity to speak the truth to the dominated, and bring ideas to the public realm that bear on society as a whole. This is especially important at a time when neoliberalism, through the dictates of a finance-obsessed managerial elite, overwhelms faculty and students with what Terry Eagleton has called “commodity breeding.” The heads of universities are expected to govern as if they were running Goldman Sachs, the value of research is determined by its ability to secure grant funding, and faculty are expected to occupy academic silos from which they preach market values and disciplinary irrelevance.

Instead of students being provided with opportunities for civic responsibility and cultural literacy, they are offered high tuition rates, student centers that mimic the mall and crushing debts that close off the dreams of a dignified future. What gets lost here are not only radical ideas, socially engaged students and socially responsible academics, but also, in Eagleton’s words, “the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present.” As universities are turned into training centers, no longer invested in the life of the mind and its crucial connection to the common good, the toxic cloud of fascism and white supremacy expands, engulfing the nation in a fog of anti-intellectualism, manufactured ignorance, hate and a growing propensity for violence. 

One of the most serious challenges facing administrators, faculty and students in colleges and universities is the task of developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect classroom knowledge, values and social problems with the larger society, and do so in ways that enhance the capacities of young people to translate private troubles into wider systemic issues while transforming their hidden despair and private grievances into critical narratives and public transcripts. At best such transcripts can be transformed into forms of public dissent, or what might be called moments of rupture or empowering transgressions. Democracy cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, self-judging, curious, reflective and independent — qualities that are indispensable for students if they are to make vital judgments and choices about participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reform and governmental policy. 

Resistance in this sense begins with the refusal to accept a crudely functional view of education that only values those modes of research, knowledge and teaching that can turn a profit. It rejects educational views that consign administrators, faculty and students to the prison-house of common sense and cynicism. In this instance, education becomes a terrain of struggle, which refuses one’s erasure or voicelessness and resists the dictates of an audit culture. It is a type of resistance that speaks out against the power of bean counters to align educational research with the idolatry of data, which attempts to define the unmeasurable, promotes a deadening instrumental rationality that suffocates consciousness and rewards empirical frenzies that turn courageous ideas into ashes, all the while degrading civic virtue and ignoring the dark shadow of a fascist politics engulfing the globe. 

Elements of an alternative vision for higher education 

I want to offer several recommendations, however incomplete, that provide an alternative to some of the oppressive conditions now shaping higher education in the age of multiple pandemics and the rise of fascist politics. 

First, higher education needs to reclaim and expand its democratic vocation and, in doing so, align itself with a vision that embraces its mission as a public good. Educators need to promote a national conversation in which higher education is defended as a democratic public sphere, and the classroom as a site of deliberative inquiry, dialogue and critical thinking. The project of defining higher education as a democratic public sphere should also provide the platform for a more expressive commitment to reaching across national boundaries in order to develop an international social movement in defense of public goods. This is a vision driven not by profits, instrumental rationality, and military interests but by the battle over democracy itself. 

Second, educators need to acknowledge and make good on the claim that there is no democracy without informed and knowledgeable citizens. This suggests placing ethics, civic literacy, social responsibility and compassion at the forefront of our pedagogical practices. This necessitates taking seriously those modes of knowledge, ideas, values, traditions and histories that promote a sense of dignity, self-reflection and compassion. In addition, students need to learn to understand how power works across social, cultural and political institutions. This is crucial if they are to learn how to govern rather than merely be governed. Education should be a place where students realize themselves primarily as critically engaged and informed citizens contributing not simply to their own self-interest or self-development but to the well-being of society as a whole. 

Third, higher education needs to be viewed as a right and needs to be free, as it is in many countries such as Germany, France, Norway and Finland. When education is not free, it not only limits access to those who lack the wealth and resources to get into higher education, but also allows higher education to function as a sorting machine that largely reproduces social, racial and class hierarchies. Moreover, free access to higher education enriches a student body, through its diversity and the richness of its possibilities, to promote dialogue across a range of identities, backgrounds, religions, gender, class and ideological positions. Such diversity keeps alive the critical function of higher education at the level of everyday classroom and social interactions. In addition, by not saddling young people with crippling debt — a form of colonial control — it gives them the opportunity to choose careers dedicated to public service. 

Fourth, educators need to enable students to engage in multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture. They need to become border-crossers, who can think dialectically and learn not only how to consume culture but also how to produce it. This presupposes learning how to situate ideas, facts and knowledge historically and relationally. Not only does historical memory become a consequential resource for thinking and acting, it also enables students to connect isolated issues to a comprehensive vision of society that does not rely on banking modes of education, insular disciplinary narratives and deadening forms of instrumental learning. A critical pedagogy needs to incorporate practices that enable students to become cultural producers both to expand their sense of agency and politics and their ability to shape the world in which they live. 

Fifth, critical education is about more than the search for truth, appropriating work skills and developing a broad and comprehensive form of literacy; it is also about the practice of freedom. Such a task suggests that critical pedagogy should shift not only the way people think but also encourage them to shape the world in which they find themselves for the better. As the practice of freedom, critical pedagogy arises from the conviction that educators and other cultural workers have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble consensus and challenge common sense. This is a view of pedagogy that should disturb, inspire and energize a vast array of individuals and publics.

Such pedagogical practices should enable students to interrogate common-sense understandings of the world, take risks in their thinking, however difficult, and be willing to take a stand for free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, multiple ways of knowing, mutual respect and civic values in the pursuit of social justice. Students need to learn how to think dangerously, push at the frontiers of knowledge, and support the notion that the search for justice is never finished and that no society is ever just enough. These are not merely methodical considerations but also moral and political practices, because they presuppose the creation of students who can imagine a future in which justice, equality, freedom and democracy matter and are attainable. 

Sixth, in opposition to increasingly dominant instrumental views of education, I want to argue for a notion of education that is inherently political — one that relentlessly questions the kinds of labor, practices and forms of teaching, research and modes of evaluation that are enacted in higher education. While such a pedagogy does not offer guarantees, it defines itself as a moral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations, because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, our physical and social environment and the future itself. What it rejects is a form of politicizing education that imposes dogmatic certainties, refuses critical dialogue and engages in what might be called a form of pedagogical terrorism. In opposition to politicizing education, political education is directive and opens up the possibilities for students to learn how power works, engage in critical analysis, think beyond common-sense assumptions, learn how to be self-reflective and engage the conditions that bear down on their lives.

Neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. It does not exist outside relations of power, values and politics. Educators need to cast a critical eye on those forms of knowledge and social relations that define themselves through a conceptual purity and political innocence, clouding the fact that the alleged neutrality on which they stand is already grounded in ethico-political choices and never removed from relations of power. Higher education is a crucial space for creating knowledgeable, critical and engaged citizens.  

Seventh, another serious challenge facing educators is the need to make despair unconvincing and social change a possibility. Despair does more than undercut social change; it also isolates, alienates and ultimately depoliticizes people often paralyzed by cynicism. Without a mutually informing language of critique and what I call educated hope, educators become complicit with a culture of ignorance and repression now being reproduced at the highest levels of power, one that has become a signature feature of the current Republican Party. The effects of such ignorance are on full display when school board members are threatened for implementing rules to save children’s lives, COVID-19 testing centers are attacked, adults who wear masks are bullied while accompanying their children to school and science is undermined through the proliferation of conspiracy theories. This suggests not only a failure of politics and the collapse of conscience, but also the failure of education.

 A radical shift in consciousness on the part of the public is needed in order for matters of truth, justice and science to offer the resources necessary to protect human life and sustain an informed public. Learned ignorance is never innocent. In the face of a tsunami of lies, hope becomes senseless, and ignorance combines with rage and conspiracy theories as the first resort of the powerless. When shaping a mass movement, ignorance does more than expand the disintegration of political culture; it also makes possible the reproduction of the horrors of racial cleansing and violence as tools of governance. 

Conclusion

If higher education defaults on its role as a critical institution, it becomes either irrelevant or complicit with totalitarian politics. In the face of the rise of white supremacy and a fascist politics, students need to stretch their imagination to be able to think beyond the limits of their own experience. They also need to reject the disparaging notion that the future is nothing more than a mirror image of the present. In this instance, I am not referring to a romanticized and empty notion of making the impossible possible. I am suggesting an education that refuses an obsession with self-interest, expands the imagination, teaches students to live without illusions and embraces the practical difficulties and risks involved in meaningful struggles for real change, while at the same time being radically optimistic.

The late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman insisted that the bleakness and dystopian politics of our times necessitates the ability to dream otherwise, to imagine a society “which thinks it is not just enough, which questions the sufficiency of any achieved level of justice and considers justice always to be a step or more ahead. Above all, it is a society which reacts angrily to any case of injustice and promptly sets about correcting it.” While hope has fallen on hard times under the dark shadow of the resurgence of white supremacy, a sense of collective passion and struggle is far from a historical relic. 

As educators, we have a responsibility — as Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, once warned — to recognize that “Every age has its own fascism.” In a society in which democracy is under siege, it is crucial to remember that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs is a precondition for making radical change possible. At stake here is the courage to take on the challenge of what kind of world we want. What kind of future do we want to build for our children? How might we reassert a notion of the social that reclaims through the radical imagination the terms through which we are connected to each other and the planet? What is the role of hope in an age of racialized visceral terror? Philosopher Ernst Bloch insisted that “hope taps into our deepest experiences and that without it reason and justice cannot blossom.” 

In his “Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin went a step further, adding a sense of urgency and a call for resistance to this notion of hope. He wrote: “The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible has to examine society and try to change it and to fight it — at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”

Baldwin’s words are more resonant today than ever before. Democracy is in free fall and has reached a dangerous turning point. The horrors of a past committed to racial cleansing and a fascist politics are with us once again. But the tactics used in the past to fight fascism must be rethought and updated. The power to change consciousness by making education central to politics has to be married to the need to change material relations of power. There is more at stake here than the repudiation of manufactured ignorance, the scourge of white supremacy and a corrupt political system. In the shadows of this escalating crisis, it is crucial to mobilize a mass movement to uncover and fight on multiple levels this rebranded notion of fascism and its mounting wreckage before hope becomes an empty slogan and democracy a relic of the past. 

More on the education wars of the Trump era:

• Betsy DeVos and the politics of fear: A not-so-fond farewell to Trump’s education secretary
• How higher education has been weaponized in the age of Trump — and how it can be redeemed
• This is real resistance: Teachers strike back against neoliberal assault on public education

The post How higher education can win the war against neoliberalism and white supremacy appeared first on Salon.com.

Yet Singapore’s dismissal of Yale, announced late last month, illuminates a lot of what has driven the Taliban’s far-more brutal expulsion of America from Afghanistan: Americans’ own addiction to a drug cocktail of evangelical arrogance and materialist, militarist blundering.

As if to confirm its anti-democratic intentions, Singapore has followed its dismissal of Yale’s liberal education by introducing a Foreign Interference Act that, “under the guise of defending national sovereignty, will enable the government to designate any independent media outlet as a foreign agent and to censor its content,” according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Asia Sentinel reports that the act will shutter the independent website Online Citizen, one of the only Singapore-based outlets that tells readers what the government doesn’t want them to know.

Willful innocence of other countries and cultures has driven many American military and pedagogical misadventures abroad, and it has generated bitter ironies that might be instructive if they weren’t so often forgotten. For one, Yale is named for Elihu Yale, a governor of the East India Company, one of the world’s first multinational corporations, which acquired the island of “Singapura” for the British Crown in 1812. 

For another, Yale missionaries in Singapore and China a century later pursued “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” a goal of the American Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, whose archives rest, fittingly, in the Yale Divinity School. Yale’s would-be evangelists in China parented future Yale missionaries of a different kind: Both Henry R. Luce, co-founder of Time magazine, herald of the American Century in the 1940s, and John Hersey — whose novel “The Call” depicts Christian missionaries’ blindness to host cultures’ alien cultural depths — were born in China to missionary parents near the turn of the century.

Another century later, in 2003, Yale “missionaries” figured significantly in the design and prosecution of the Iraq War: President George W. Bush; Vice President Dick Cheney (a Yale dropout, but still), Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (who, as a Yale professor, had taught a student named I. Scooter Libby, a future top Cheney aide), “axis of evil” White House speechwriter David Frum and the neoconservative polemicist Robert Kagan (shown here preening about American power and being flattened by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin). 

In 2011, other Yale professors and their National University of Singapore counterparts sat in a mansion on a hill atop New Haven, designing a curriculum for Yale-NUS College, a “new community of learning.” That community’s first president, Yale comparative literature professor Pericles Lewis, declared that he was witnessing “the liberal arts experience made manifest” and prophesied “a place of revelatory stimulation” in the campus that Singapore was building on the other side of the world.

Skeptical of such prophesies and resentful at not having been consulted or even informed about Yale-NUS before its contractual commitment was a fait accompli, most Yale faculty at a meeting in New Haven passed a resolution warning that liberal education would be hobbled by Singapore’s “lack of respect for civil and political rights.” The American Association of University Professors sent a public letter to the Yale community and to 500,000 American professors expressing its “growing concern about the character and impact of the university’s collaboration with the Singaporean government…. In a host environment where free speech is constrained, if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education, to the extent it can exist in such situations, will suffer.”

Yet Yale’s trustees and administrators and some faculty marched jauntily into the clutches of Singapore’s structures and strictures. Some trustees held material interests in Singapore, as I reported at the time. As a tightly-run, relatively safe port in the storms of global capitalist exploits, Singapore welcomed the Yale investors as advisers and officers of its sovereign wealth fund, the Government Investment Corporation, chaired by the prime minister, and Temasek Holdings, which designated Yale trustee Charles Goodyear IV as its CEO in 2009.

Another trustee, Fareed Zakaria, sketched the ideological interests in “The Future of Freedom,” praising Singapore’s model of state capitalism and even Lee Kuan Yew, then its brutally authoritarian, racist ruler.

Yale President Richard Levin, an economist and apostle of a neoliberal, “World is Flat” vision, believed that the new college would enhance and enrich Singapore as a global capitalist hub with a humanist global management and investment ethos that deflects nationalist, authoritarian undercurrents.

But those swift, dark undercurrents have resurfaced with a vengeance against neoliberal gambits and dreams. Authoritarian state capitalism is rising, not only in East Asia. Even Britain may become China’s virtual island colony off the coast of Europe, somewhat as Hong Kong and Singapore became Britain’s island colonies off the coast of Asia.

In 2013, a year after the Yale faculty resolution opposed collaboration with Singapore, former Harvard president Derek Bok told me that a “run-in” with Lee Kuan Yew years earlier had convinced him not to trust authoritarian rulers who ride the golden riptides of global finance, communications, labor migration and consumer marketing, using state coercion to enforce the cohesion that their societies once drew from Confucian, Islamic or even Western colonial traditions but that they’re losing to global capitalist inequities, escapism and consequent social crises.

Rulers in Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi and other countries have also tried to harness liberal education to finesse the brutality and hypocrisy of “go-go” economic development, seeking American colleges’ imprimaturs and instruction in the “critical thinking” and felicity in writing and speaking that a liberal education can impart to their investors, managers and spokesmen. Recalling how Lee Kuan Yew invoked “Asian values” to justify imprisoning an officer of the Harvard Club there, Bok told me, “Nothing in that experience would tempt me to try to establish a Harvard College in Singapore.” 

Reinforcing such skepticism in 2015, John Berthelsen, editor of the independent website Asia Sentinel, reported that Lee Kuan Yew’s son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, speaking at a ceremony with Yale President Levin and Yale-NUS president Pericles Lewis inaugurating the new college, warned that education there “cannot be a carbon copy of Yale in the United States if it is to succeed. Instead, it has to experiment and adapt the Yale model to Asia.”

An irony in Lee’s warning hasn’t escaped Kenneth Jeyaretnam, former secretary general of Singapore’s opposition reform party, who told me that the Singapore government “thought that it could have the trappings of a world-class liberal arts college without the freedom that goes with it, and that it could be tightly managed and spun to show the superiority of Asian values. It didn’t work out that way.”

Lee and his father’s invocations of “Asian values” veiled their narrowly instrumentalist, meticulously repressive policies: In 2013, a five-part Wall Street Journal series documented Singapore’s abuses of migrant Chinese bus drivers, a paradigm of how it treats rights-less migrants who are one-third of its population. The country’s 2014 Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, is 0.478, one of the widest in the world. The Economist, hardly an anti-capitalist or human-rights organization, publishes a rigorous Democracy Index that ranks Singapore down with Liberia, Palestine and Haiti on its measures of political freedom. 

Reporters Without Borders’ index of press freedom in 180 countries currently ranks Singapore near the bottom — No. 160, below Belarus and Sudan, its lowest ranking in the 10 years I’ve watched it drop down the list. The organization’s Index classifies Singapore as “very bad,” noting that “Despite the ‘Switzerland of the East’ label often used in government propaganda, the city-state does not fall far short of China when it comes to suppressing media freedom. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s government is always quick to sue critical journalists, apply pressure to make them unemployable, or even force them to leave the country.” (For the record, Afghanistan ranked No. 122, although that has not been updated since the U.S. departed.)

The prime minister and ruling People’s Action Party have a long record of using fine-spun, Kafkaesque legalism to block freedom of expression. Jothie Rajah’s invaluable Authoritarian Rule of Law describes their methods. Even university faculty and opposition-party leaders who speak out have been convicted by Singapore’s judiciary, bankrupted when they couldn’t pay the exorbitant fines, and, in some cases, effectively exiled.

Small wonder that Yale-NUS has been kept ever more tightly in its paymaster Singapore’s pocket. The “Yale” in its name designates merely a hired consultant. As of 2025, even that name will be gone. The many students and professors who feel betrayed by having been admitted this year under false pretenses to a college that will cease to exist after their graduation in 2025 are protesting vigorously, but to no avail.

A comprehensive, Sept. 7 Yale Daily News story reports Singapore’s claim, seconded by former Yale President Richard Levin, that the closure reflects only financial, not political problems. But Levin believes that the financial problems were surmountable. Some Singaporeans consider Yale-NUS an objectionably elitist enclave, with too many international students (approximately 40 percent of the student body), but opposition-party leader Jeyaretnam tells me that “elitism doesn’t seem to have been an issue, since 14,000 students signed the petition opposing Yale-NUS’ closing.”

Part of Singapore’s reason for dismissing American pedagogy is “navigational” in a geopolitical sense: Lee Hsien Loong likens his country to a small but doughty craft breasting powerful riptides of global economics and politics. As Beijing and Washington vie for influence in East Asia, Foreign Policy magazine reports that “China … is working hard to influence Singaporeans to take a more accommodating position toward Beijing.” Most Singaporeans and rulers are ethnically Chinese and regard China more favorably than do people in Malaysia, Indonesia or Australia. Singapore’s removal of Yale may be what it considers a modest concession to China and a way to control the college ever more tightly amid the sea change.

But a deeper reason for Singapore’s expulsion of Yale is the same one that’s been given to justify America’s expulsion from Afghanistan: For all its glitter and wealth-generating capacity, American liberal capitalism has been undermining itself with manic speed, along with the civic-republican institutions, beliefs, and liberal education that have given the system its legitimacy. Today’s ubiquitous, intrusive casino-like financing and algorithmically driven consumer marketing are groping, goosing, intimidating, surveilling, addicting, stupefying and indebting so many millions of Americans that the United States has less and less of value to export to Afghanistan or Singapore.

As I reported in Dissent magazine in 2018, the private equity baron Stephen A. Schwarzman has donated $150 million to Yale, his alma mater, to transform its historic Commons into a hive of junior business startup platforms, performance spaces and lounge areas, all of it renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center. You don’t have to believe that Afghanistan will be better off for spurning such glitter, or that Singapore will be better off for repressing criticisms of its lockstep discipline, to acknowledge that the philosopher George Santayana’s vision of the American as “an idealist working on matter” and a bearer of the requisite civic virtues has been hollowed out by Americans’ obsessions with buying and consuming “matter.”

Unable or unwilling to do for New Orleans or Detroit what we couldn’t for Kandahar or Kabul, Americans are losing their mastery of the arts and disciplines of their own domestic nation-building and democracy promotion, along with liberal education’s great conversation across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit. 

Yale excelled at these pursuits in 19th- and early 20th-century America, but it has lost its way. We’ll need to renew our own civil society’s institutions, including its colleges, as “places of revelatory stimulation,” where the experience of liberal education is “made manifest” more vividly than it has been in most of our lifetimes.

The post Yale’s failed Singapore venture: More American arrogance in Asia appeared first on Salon.com.

“It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said in a press conference last week. “Unfortunately now, the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted and other viewpoints are shunned, or even suppressed. We don’t want that in Florida.”

Though the motivations behind the measure seem clear enough, the bill’s language evades any explanation of what the survey’s findings might be used for. Florida Republicans have largely stayed mum on this point — except for DeSantis himself, that is, who last week suggested the data might be used to dictate state funding. 

“We do not want [universities] as basically hotbeds for stale ideology,” DeSantis said. “That’s not worth tax dollars and not something we’re going to be supporting moving forward.”

Given the Republican obsession with “cancel culture,” DeSantis’ threat to go after “thoughtcrime” (in George Orwell’s phrase) could have a chilling effect on the Sunshine State’s educational landscape. 

State Sen. Lori Berman, a Democrat who opposed the bill in Education Committee meetings, told Salon that she thinks DeSantis made “a serious threat” that could dampen the free speech rights of professors and students.

“It’s quite possible this could result in certain professors being dismissed on the university level,” she said. “I wouldn’t put it past our governor to pull funding from universities if they don’t dismiss these professors or change some things they’re not happy with.”

Though the bill has already been enacted, it remains unclear precisely how the surveys will be conducted or what questions will be asked.

Berman noted that the bill does not require participation from students; it merely mandates that the surveys be distributed to students. This could lead to significant participation bias, where students who feel ideologically at odds with their surroundings are overrepresented among respondents.  

Democratic state Sen. Tina Polsky, who also serves on the Committee on Education, echoed Berman’s concerns, telling Salon that HB 233 has “so many problems.”

“We have no idea what the implications are, whether it’s getting professors fired, or having to hire professors of different ilks to fill some kind of ‘thought diversity’ quota,” she said. “And of course, funding is a concern.”

“No one really knows what the point of the surveys is,” Polsky added. “Nobody knows who’s going to fill it out, how many students, or whether it’s going to be accurate.”

Salon reached out to more than two dozen professors and school administrations throughout Florida’s public educational institutions to gauge their feelings toward HB 233. 

The University of Florida, the state’s flagship research university, responded with a statement: “In keeping with the best traditions of higher education, the University of Florida is a marketplace of ideas where a wide variety of opinions are expressed and independent inquiry and vigorous academic deliberation are valued. We believe the survey will reflect that, and we look forward to widespread participation across campus.”

No administrators at other colleges or universities responded to Salon’s inquiries.

Berman said that Florida’s state schools are “in a position where they’re not going to want to speak out against anything the governor and Republican leadership is supporting,” adding, “If it comes to it, I hope they support their faculty.”

Dr. David Canton, director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Florida, told Salon in an interview that the bill is “a political stunt – a diversion or way to carry over to November 2022 [i.e., DeSantis’ re-election campaign] due to a lack of any policies.”

“If you look at the data and numbers,” he added, “the reality is that it’s hard to get a diversity course as a requirement; you get so much resistance from some students.” Florida colleges and universities, he said, are “not liberal bastions of indoctrination.”

Canton also noted that the bill does not serve the state’s long-term economic interests because it could drive top-tier scholars away from graduate programs or faculty positions in Florida schools. 

Other provisions in HB 233, beyond the mandatory surveys, have also become controversial. One such provision allows students to “record video or audio of class lectures for their own personal educational use.”

While the state of Florida has a two-party consent law — meaning that all individuals in any form of communication must consent to being recorded — the bill appears to carve out a specific exemption for college and university classrooms, which have previously been understood as private spaces. 

Karen Morian, the president of United Faculty of Florida, one of the state’s faculty unions, told Salon in an interview that the provision “was created to allow the creation of ‘gotcha’ videos or reputation-destroying videos,” in which conservative students record and leak evidence of their professors promoting “radical leftist” views. 

During the bill’s consideration, Morian said a host of concerns arose around illegal sharing of such videos, the potential for deceptive editing, and the non-consensual recording of minors. “All these questions were raised in committee and debate, but none of them were clarified nor was the language revised,” she said.

In recent years, professors at many academic institutions across the country have been the subjects of “whistleblowing” by conservative students who feel their voices have been stifled. In April, the Intercept reported on an organized “whistleblowing” effort by Campus Reform — a billionaire-backed conservative nonprofit that trains student activists to expose “liberal bias” in higher education. It found that the conservative group targeted hundreds of professors with “online harassment campaigns, doxxing, threats of violence, and calls on universities to fire [them].” According to a survey this year by the American Association of University Professors, 40% of professors targeted by Campus Reform reported receiving threat by email, phone, or social media.

In 2016, Turning Point USA, another conservative youth advocacy group funded by right-wing billionaires, similarly launched the Professor Watchlist, an online registry of academics who it suggested “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The site also led to a number of threats made against professors, including threats of rape and lethal violence. 

Apart from video and audio recordings, HB 233 also addresses attempts by school administrations to “shield” their students from discomfort. The measure defines “shielding” as “limit[ing] students’, faculty members’, or staff members’ access to … ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive” and prohibits the practice altogether, which conceivably restricts or removes administrators’ ability to decide who should be given a platform on campus. 

Morian told Salon that administrators “have the safety of students to consider when making those decisions.” 

In 2017, the University of Florida allowed neo-Nazi Richard Spencer onto campus to give a speech, a move that was angrily rejected by much of the student body. After the event, police arrested three of Spencer’s supporters who made “Nazi salutes, repeated Hitler chants and then shot at a group of protesters.”

Administrators should have the flexibility to deny such speakers access to university platforms, either for educational or campus safety reasons, Morian said. “The legislature has seemingly taken those decisions away from our institutions. So we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Though HB 233 has received considerable media attention recently, it is best understood as part of Florida’s broader effort to crack down on the perceived or apparent influence of the left in both K-12 and higher education. 

During this year’s legislative session, the state Senate attempted to pass a bill to reduce the amount of scholarship money given to students who major in lower-paying fields in the humanities. That bill failed to reach the governor’s desk. 

More recently, DeSantis signed a bill last week that will require Florida K-12 schools to teach their students that communist governments are undesirable. The governor said Florida’s public school curriculum will now paint “portraits in patriotism,” and provide “first-person accounts of victims of other nations’ governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States.”

Polsky, the Democratic state senator, called the latest attempt by conservatives to wrest control over Florida’s educational system especially ironic. “It’s a big government situation,” she said. That’s what “they say they’re against.”

The post Rising GOP star Ron DeSantis goes after campus thoughtcrime with vague, threatening new law appeared first on Salon.com.

“Without knowing it, we leave our own footprints in life; over half my life has been in the Chicana/o Movement and related to Chicana/o studies,” Acuña writes in his essay, “Footprints: The Activist Scholar.” He continues: “Some of us are very fortunate because the footprints we leave can easily be traced. In my perception, footprints revive memory and memory is what prays us out of purgatory. This is important to me because I do not believe in a hereafter and I know that I will be part of this world as long as I am remembered. Purgatory is the place where the forgotten are abandoned.”

Far from forgotten, Acuña remains a key figure in the corridors of cultural and ethnic studies, as a mentor to generations of scholars, and as the author of numerous seminal works in Chicana/Chicano history, including the widely read “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos.” The index to his archives underscores his legacy. Yet, despite winning three Gustavus Myers Awards for the outstanding book on race relations, and receiving of the John Hope Franklin Award in 2016, Acuña has been forced to fend off or embrace the label of an “activist scholar” for a half century, including its ramifications in his successful lawsuit for discrimination against the University of California, Santa Barbara. “For the past 25 years, I have been at war with American historians,” Acuña wrote in his introduction at the American Historical Association. Thirty years ago, the Los Angeles Times deemed him the “Mexican American Socrates.”  

“In 1989, I was awarded the NACCS (National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies) Scholar Award, which in theory was supposed to go to a Chicano or Chicana with a lifetime of activism and scholarship,” Acuña writes. “I have never considered myself an activist scholar or vice versa. I consider myself a Chicana/o studies professor who uses life experiences to instruct his research and teaching.” 

The end result, Acuña says, matched his research topics with his own life struggles. Since he walked the picket line with Hollywood strikers with his father in 1937, Acuña has been in the trenches on all levels, as he recorded in his book “The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe.”

“In the 1960s I was involved in Head Start, voter registration, civil rights, antiwar activities and Chicana/o studies,” Acuña notes. “My first three books were for public school students because I had taught junior and senior high school students as well as junior college. ‘Occupied America’ was motivated by my involvement during the ’60s, and represents the disillusionment with the United States brought about by the Vietnam War, and its suppression of the civil rights and Chicano movements. (I had the illusion that change would come if we worked hard enough).”

While Acuña’s training is as a historian, his vocation remains teaching — and his commitment is to the untold thousands of students and colleagues who cite his influence in their own lives, studies and work. “I was on academic probation, I was a troublemaker, I just wasn’t really interested in school,” Pierce College professor Angelita Rovero said in an interview in 2019. “Rudy, he changed my life. He really mentored me. He put a little spark in me.” 

“I want to be known as a teacher who cares about his students,” Acuña tells me, adding, “but I need to finish this book, and I have little time before I sleep and the sharks have scattered my work.”

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

When you served as the founding chair of Chicana and Chicano Studies at CSU Northridge in 1969, where did you think the program would be in 50 years? Describe the areas in which you think it has and has not achieved such a vision.

Frankly, I knew I was one of 50 Chicano PhDs, so I just wanted to get it started and then transfer to a more leisurely environment. However, when I saw the challenge I was seduced. I had taught grades 1 to 12 and community college. Also, this was after the East L.A. blowouts and I knew it was important to give these students who had been shortchanged by the schools a place to succeed. Mexicans could learn, so I gradually was seduced. I had no vision for the future, but I knew education, and being a structuralist at heart developed curriculum. For me education is about motivation and then teaching skills. I was fortunate to build not only PhDs but good teachers such as Gerald Resendez and later Jorge Garcia. Without them we would not have survived. The reality is that we were a teaching institution and it was our job to equip them with the skills to succeed. Nothing fancy. I never thought that the program would grow as much as it has because the initial enrollment was just not there. So we concentrated on leveling the ground. 

This past winter, CSUN revoked the naming of its main library after former president Delmar T. Oviatt, which students had objected to for years, dating back to his crackdown on student protests and failure to support cultural studies programs.  Two years ago, the Students of Color Coalition wrote an open letter noting “the evidence of racism on campus is invisible to those who have not studied the origins and progression of history in our university,” and called out “the traditional role university administrators have played” in this process.  How would you describe the role of former president Diane Harrison in this regard, who recently retired after eight years of overseeing major changes at Northridge?

President Harrison was clueless. You had the feeling that she followed advice. The Fall 2020 Issue of CSUN Magazine had a cover of her commemorating her resignation. The magazine appeared to be a memorial to a white campus and featured few people of color, almost to the point that it was to attract foreign students to CSUN. Although CSUN is roughly 42 percent Latino, there were few brown faces. Harrison was not only following advice but following orders. She was a puppet. The chancellor [who runs the entire CSU system] promoted her not for her abilities, but because she was close to him. She was the president of the smallest campus, CSU Monterey Bay. To put it bluntly, she was a cheerleader who was very close to the chancellor. 

As universities struggle with COVID and post-COVID scenarios, state budget issues and crises, how do you see Chicana and Chicano studies and all ethnic studies programs building on their legacies, their decades of engagement with students, staff, faculty and the local communities, and evolving over the next decade at institutions like CSUN and across the country?  

It depends. Both CHS and ethnic studies are fighting over the crumbs; we will be getting the major share just because we have more students of Chicana/o or Latina/o backgrounds. However, if we are committed to ethnic studies we should be part of the solution. First, African American enrollment has fallen to 3.6% — it should be at least 10%, but this would be at odds with the business model of the neoliberal university. But we will not truly reflect L.A. until Black Americans are part of our community, so a priority should be to rebuild African Studies. So we should have a capstone course called Ethnic Studies, team taught by all departments in the family. This is the perfect time, since we can include images reflecting the multiplicity of CSUN. The pandemic is not an excuse for mediocrity. 

In 2015, you wrote extensively about your concerns over neoliberalism in academia, calling it the worst threat to education. You wrote: “In order to offset the lack of public funding, administrators have raised tuition with students becoming the primary consumers and debt-holders. Institutions have entered into research partnerships with industry shifting the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of profits.” To accelerate this “molting,” they have “hired a larger and larger number of short-term, part-time adjuncts.” This has created large armies of transient and disposable workers who “are in no position to challenge the university’s practices or agitate for “democratic rather than monetary goals.” 

Yes, neoliberalism is hegemonic. It affects all minority communities. Unfortunately, Chicana/os and others begin to identify more with the institution than they do with their own people. That is why you have so many Hispanics for Trump. They take on the identification of the oppressor. I can say that we produced or educated more Chicana/o teachers than any institution, but cannot get even $100 for scholarships. They identify with the beauty of the buildings rather than the needs of the immigrant and in-need students. In the past, when they were here, students paid $10 a semester and an apartment was $85 a month. Now, a bed in a dorm is $900 a month. They have to buy meal tickets because the refrigerators and the stoves have been removed. There is no feeling of community or feeling of responsibility to the poor. CSUN is a teachers’ college. My parents were immigrants, my grandparents were immigrants and my wife is an immigrant. I will not follow any rules or laws that discriminate against them. 

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In response, campus workers at Georgia College in Milledgeville, part of the University System of Georgia, are holding an on-campus “die-in” Friday to protest what employees see as the school’s “willful negligence” in failing to control the coronavirus through the first weeks of classes.

The COVID tracking page on the school’s website has posted 495 cases since June, 450 of those among students who have returned to campus since the week of Aug. 17. The New York Times college case tracker ranked the school 14th nationwide in total cases Thursday. That number represents about 7% of Georgia College’s total 7,000 enrollment, easily the highest rate of the top 25 schools on that list.

By comparison, the Times’ tracker ranks infections at the University of Texas in ninth place overall — but that represents just 483 reported cases out of 50,000 enrolled students. Aside from Texas Christian University, which has about 10,000 students, and University of Alabama at Birmingham — a ranking that some of its 17,000 students and administration both protest — none of the schools ahead of Georgia College on the Times’ list have fewer than 20,000 students, and no school has reported more than 1,000 cases. Large state schools with enrollments of 50,000 or more, such as the University of Michigan, University of Florida and Penn State, have fewer cases than Georgia College.

(Disclosure: The reporter attended Georgia College for graduate school and later taught.)

The workers’ action is part of the United Campus Workers of Georgia’s (UCWGA) statewide campaign to hold the University System of Georgia Board of Regents responsible for outbreaks due to what a UCWGA press statement calls a “forced campus reopening.”

“Union members demand choice in online teaching and learning, increased testing capacity, quarantine housing for positive students, hazard pay for all essential workers, and no layoffs in the event of campus closure,” the statement says.

A non-tenured faculty and union member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the school is “acting as if they can’t do anything, but there are a number of reasons to believe they could be doing more,” pointing to in-person regulations.

The die-in is in solidarity with Georgia College’s sister school, the state flagship University of Georgia, which held one earlier this year.

The action, scheduled for two hours from 8 to 10 a.m. will feature faculty and staff lying on the grass — socially distanced — with signs with messages such as, “We don’t want to die” and “We don’t want our students to die.”

Georgia College President Steve Dorman posted a welcome video last week urging students to practice social distancing. Administrators plan to work with private off-campus apartment complexes to dissuade students from holding large gatherings, which the school holds responsible for most of the surge.

A tenured faculty member told Salon that the circumstances were “some dark shit.”

“I think what I fear the most is that they’ll get away with it — with treating faculty, staff and students, not to mention the local community, as utterly expendable. This is some dark shit,” the professor said. “You can feel the long arm of the Republican money machine all over it.”

Faculty were reportedly told that they could teach remotely only if they could prove one of a dozen or so health conditions on a list — such as high blood pressure, or being over 65 — but that did not extend one degree further, for example, to faculty members who may live with someone who is elderly or ill or has underlying conditions.

“Many faculty and students here are very, very disturbed by the willful negligence on the part of the USG and our own administration,” another faculty member told Salon, again on the condition of anonymity.

In a statement provided to Salon, the university supported the right to free speech and concern for well-being on campus. 

“Georgia College fully supports the freedoms of speech and expression for our faculty, staff and students,” the school said, adding that “The health and well-being of our students and campus community will always be our top priority.”

“The university and it’s faculty members are doing all they can to ensure that students have an outstanding academic experience. For students in quarantine, faculty members will work to make sure learning continuity continues until they are able to return to campus safely,” the statement said.

However, faculty argue that the school has not established independent quarantine facilities, and the school did not answer Salon’s specific question about the matter.

Faculty working groups developed a multi-part reopening plan over the summer, including rules and policies, one of those being that classes must be in-person but office hours and student meetings could be virtual. Though faculty were included in these policy groups, multiple professors told Salon that many concerns were dismissed out of hand, and they did not expect that in-person teaching would continue if case numbers surged as they have.

“Most people in these groups, I think, thought that if case numbers went up, they would go to the all-remote plan, to ensure everyone’s safety,” the tenured professor said. “So here we are, two weeks in. Some people have 50 percent of their class populations in quarantine or isolation.”

Campus workers say that the university administration seems to be displacing blame onto students, threatening them with suspension if they attend parties and sending students who fall ill home, with no reserved quarantine locations in place.

The school, which pointed out that it has spent “the past several months” preparing for in-person classes with social distancing and “other mitigation measures,” pointed to the students in its statement.

“We continue to remind our students that COVID-19 can spread rapidly at off-campus social gatherings, where social distancing and other mitigation measures are not maintained. With only 21 employee cases at Georgia College since June, our data is showing that the spread of COVID-19 is largely happening in off campus locations among our student population,” the statement said.

“I think most faculty find this appalling,” a professor said. “Those in the wrong are the people running the show, who brought the students back into what was, in early August, already a precarious environment.”

That environment extends to Milledgeville — which has itself registered as a coronavirus hotspot, month after month — a relatively poor city of about 19,000 residents, with the college campus dominating its manicured antebellum downtown.

The Milledgeville Union-Recorder reported earlier this month that Navicent Health Baldwin Hospital’s intensive care unit has been full since the pandemic hit the city in mid-March.

Todd Dixon, the hospital’s CEO, told the paper that they have experienced about a 3% overall increase in admissions from previous years.

“We also have seen a 26 percent increase in our average daily census,” said Dixon.

On the other side of Milledgeville — which was the capital of Georgia from 1804 to 1868, and was left untouched by Union Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s scorched-earth march through Georgia during the Civil War — sits another campus: The empty, cratered brick dorms of Central State Hospital, which was originally called Georgia Lunatic Asylum and was once the largest mental hospital in the world, with 12,000 inmates.

Central State has seen at least 10 coronavirus deaths, according to local news reports, including staff.

Shawn Brooks, vice president for student affairs at Georgia College, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week that no students have reported serious symptoms, a claim faculty say is flatly false.

One non-tenured professor told Salon that students had in fact been admitted to the hospital for “quite serious symptoms — not one, but multiple,” but would not provide further details out of fear that it might reveal identifying information to the administration.

The school, which has mandated masks on campus, struck a partnership with the state to provide testing at a local health outpost, private providers and two local pharmacies, but results can take up to a week, according to faculty and reports in the Journal-Constitution. There is reportedly no mechanism in place to compel students or employees to report results to the school, so public statistics are derived entirely from self-reported cases.

Brooks told the Atlanta paper that the spike traced to students who were overexcited after returning to campus in August.

“They get off campus and relax their methods of masking and social distancing,” he said.

However, faculty members told Salon that the school had reneged on its promise that fraternity and sorority rushes, held before classes start, would not occur in person. Furthermore, students weren’t required to be tested before arriving.

The school did install distanced desks and tables in classrooms as well as plexiglass barriers, and loaded up on hand sanitizer — though it is still not available in all classrooms.

“Rooms are only cleaned once a day, and many of us still don’t have hand sanitizer in the classroom,” a professor said. “There was none in buildings for first two weeks.”

“It’s not easy to take collective action here. As you can imagine, many are afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation,” the tenured faculty member said. “But the lack of ethics and of general humanity is stunning. And apparently it’s largely about housing revenue.”

Rolling Stone reported Aug. 11 that it had seen documents that a property-management company called Corvias had pressured the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia not to impose limits on dorm capacity this fall.

In response to the letter, Rolling Stone reported, the Board of Regents considered directing at least one school, Georgia State University, to lift its 75% occupancy cap on all dorms controlled by Corvias.

The post Union workers at Georgia College to stage “die-in” to protest nation-leading COVID rate appeared first on Salon.com.