For a campus screening, the email’s copy was unusually compelling. It was itself cinematic. Peck’s film, too, isn’t like the film society’s usual offerings; it’s not a dazzling Hollywood blockbuster. The screening brought something different: A confrontation with Orwell’s words and their lasting resonance, rather than a typical celebration of a premiering film. 

Given Yale’s silence on matters worthy of speech, the event was timely. Orwell’s warnings about the corruption of language felt suddenly relevant.

As a sophomore at Yale, I’m concerned, as so many are, about the Trump administration’s efforts to seize autonomy from universities across the country. On Friday, Cornell University announced it would pay a $30 million fine to the federal government and devote another $30 million to fund agriculture and farming programs on its campus after the administration accused the institution of antisemitism and discrimination in admissions. In return, the government will restore hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and research grants, which had been frozen since April. 

Cornell’s announcement follows similar agreements between the administration and at least five other institutions. In September, President Donald Trump announced that Harvard University had agreed to pay $500 million to settle the federal government’s barrage of attacks against it. Columbia University had hundreds of millions in grants frozen, which were released only after the university agreed in July to federal policy changes. Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia have also reached agreements with the administration, and according to the New York Times, the University of California has entered negotiations with the government.

So far, Yale’s federal funding has not been explicitly targeted by the Trump administration, making it the only Ivy League university to evade being singled out.

But the evasion of direct funding cuts and the ominous threats of administration directives comes at a different expense, one that is perhaps costlier than any financial sum. Like other universities, Yale has adopted a policy of “institutional neutrality” in all but name. 

The screening of “Orwell: 2+2=5” presented me with the chance to ask Peck, an Orwell scholar, what a term like “institutional neutrality” might mean in the context of the late writer’s words.

I decided to attend.

The origins of institutional neutrality

When Hamas attacked concertgoers in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, institutional neutrality was already around. Anthropologist Peter W. Wood wrote about the origin of the term in the aftermath of those events, underscoring why a century-old concept had reentered the lexicon at that particular moment. The concept, he explained, was first framed by Arthur O. Lovejoy in 1915, as a “principle aimed at curtailing the readiness of academic administrations to take sides in disputes in which some of their faculty members were on the other side” and was “intended to protect academic freedom.”

In 1967, institutional neutrality reemerged when the University of Chicago issued its “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action,” subsequently dubbed the Kalven Report after a professor at the law school. The document contains passages that remain pertinent, including one that I recalled as I watched the film: “There is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”

The report’s principal idea — that universities should not comment on political issues unless they threaten “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” — read as honorable restraint in 1967. Now it sounds more like paralysis.

“The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity,” the report reads, in a passage that was written nearly two years before President Richard Nixon took office in 1969 — and more than a half century before the days of President Donald Trump’s unprecedented, sustained assault on universities and intellectual life.

While reflecting the time in which it was written, the Kalven Report has been misinterpreted — its important contingency about threats to a university’s existence has been largely discarded and gone unheeded. But if institutions of higher learning are to preserve the freedom of dissent among its students and community — let alone ensure that such dissent continues to thrive — then they must respond when these very values are under attack.

Doublespeak

After the screening I wasn’t sure how to pose my question to Peck, but I was curious how he might view the policy that Yale adopted one year ago: “Institutional voice,” which many of us here know to be institutional neutrality. 

The policy emerged from a committee appointed by Yale President Maurie McInnis during her first few months at the university as president. Its co-chairs, in a Yale Daily News op-ed, wrote that the committee “did not recommend that University leaders adopt a position of neutrality.” But their report did state that Yale, and particularly university leaders such as deans and department heads, should not make statements on matters of public importance.

In her first year, McInnis has faced broad threats to federal research funding, such as research cost reimbursements from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and growing skepticism about higher education. She formed committees on “institutional voice” and “trust,” increased lobbying in Washington and signed a joint statement condemning federal interference — but she declined to comment on Harvard’s defiance of the Trump administration. McInnis has said she prefers “behind-the-scenes work” to public pronouncements and believes it “respectful” to refrain from commenting on peer institutions.

But not everyone at Yale agrees with McInnis’ silence. 

In a blog post titled “The Institutional Neutrality Trap,” Amy Kapczynski, who serves as the John Thomas Smith Professor of Law at Yale Law School, wrote that the committee’s report had been wrongly interpreted as establishing “institutional neutrality.” But Kapczynski conceded that the report “does too much to encourage silence” and “too broadly casts forms of collective speech as problematic.”

For its part, the committee has insisted its recommendation that the faculty and administrators of the university refrain from making public statements is not institutional neutrality. But the distinction feels like a retreat into semantics — or what Orwell might refer to as “doublespeak.” The writer of “Politics and the English Language” recognized such convoluted reasoning and the dangers associated with it:

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.

I thought about those words, and the committee’s actions, as the closing credits of Peck’s film crawled up the screen. Whether acknowledged overtly or not, Yale has, in fact, adopted a policy of institutional neutrality — and the committee’s deliberate efforts to evade being accused of doing so are dangerous. 

The report seems to want to have it both ways: Deciding that institutional neutrality should be effectively instated at Yale, while allowing the university, at the same time and with deceptive accuracy, to dismiss accusations of institutional neutrality.

Orwell had something to say in his famous essay about such verbal gymnastics. “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way,” he wrote. “That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”

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At the screening, I stood up to speak. “This year,” I told Peck and the audience, “Yale decided to become institutionally neutral, which means it now says nothing of importance about anything of importance. Would you consider a term like ‘institutional neutrality’ to be ‘Newspeak’?” (Orwell explains newspeak as a language that uses English grammar but with a shrinking vocabulary that reduces complex thoughts to simplistic terms.)

Peck smiled and joked, “Can you assure my getaway?”

He answered my question, telling the largely student and faculty audience, “To be neutral is to have a political position. There is no such thing as ‘neutral’ in a society. Neutrality is not an option. How can you be satisfied with the state of the world? It’s a position of fear — especially in a place of education. That is the only place where you can have real discussion. If that space becomes ‘neutral,’ I don’t know what it is.”

In April, Variety reported that Peck spoke before a sold-out masterclass at Visions du Réel, a Swiss film festival. Before ever being asked about institutional neutrality, Peck said, “Words don’t mean anything anymore. Science doesn’t mean anything. There’s no truth — there are ‘alternative facts.’ We’re living in a world that’s upside down, where no one says anything.”

“Terror,” he said, “comes slowly.”

Boots on New Haven Green?

Yale has a proud legacy of addressing events of the day and defending the principles of civility in a free society. University presidents such as Kingman Brewster Jr. and A. Bartlett Giamatti, for example, spoke out about the Vietnam War, the Black Panthers and May Day protests.

But with its silence this past year, Yale has abandoned its local and national responsibility.

Last fall, “YaleNews,” the university’s press arm, published an article about Yale’s relationship with the town of New Haven, Connecticut. The story celebrated the number of my classmates who had graduated from local high schools, called one of its own programs an “outrageously awesome concept” and insisted that Yale and New Haven share an “interwoven interdependency.”

But this summer, when a Wilbur Cross High School student was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the university said nothing. Three weeks ago, when ICE abducted eight people at a car wash two miles from campus, Yale said nothing.

Orwell warned us about the power of abbreviations like ICE, words that sound neutral but that conceal violence. In his novel “1984,” political contractions such as Ingsoc, Minitrue and Miniplenty echo the clipped speech of Nazi and Soviet regimes, like “Gestapo” and “Comintern.” Each was designed to mask ideology in plain sight. Today, “ICE” bears the same chill: An acronym that flattens cruelty into three clean letters. 

The university hasn’t spoken about Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s assault on more than a century of medical progress either — even the advances that Yale itself helped to shape. Its researchers produced the first medical X-ray images, introduced penicillin and chemotherapy to the United States in the 1940s, developed the first artificial heart pump, discovered melatonin, identified Lyme disease, built the first insulin pump and were the first to use DNA sequencing to diagnose a disease. As the Trump administration cuts funding for scientific research, Yale’s scientists continue their groundbreaking work despite the tightening budgetary constraints.

The university has said nothing about Trump’s recommendation that military generals use U.S. cities as training grounds for war. Will Yale wait until there are boots stomping across the New Haven Green? As Orwell wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

The results of silence and cowardice

Each time Yale absents itself from public discourse, it makes a political decision. Perhaps the university fears that, just like Harvard and Columbia, it could become a target for the Trump administration.

In recent weeks, after the administration offered a compact for preferential federal funding to nine universities in exchange for policy changes, Brown University — after settling with the government in July — and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first institutions to reject the demands outright. (Five of the other universities have since rejected it, but the University of Texas and Vanderbilt University have remained open to signing it.) The compact offer, which requires colleges to agree that “academic freedom is not absolute,” was later expanded by Trump himself via Truth Social to include any university. Yale’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) urged the university not to comply, according to the Yale Daily News. 

The AAUP’s own history illustrates how far interpretations of institutional neutrality have strayed from the phrase’s origins. Formed in 1915, the same year that Lovejoy coined the term, the AAUP now finds itself a vital voice speaking into the void left by the universities it represents.

Only a month ago, President McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis speculated, half-jokingly during parents weekend, that Yale has been spared only because “Y” came at the end of the alphabet. It’s never that simple, of course. Believing so — or poking fun at threats to academic freedom — causes concerned students to wonder whether university leaders are, in fact, prepared to meet this moment. After all, our four years of college overlaps with Donald Trump’s second four years in office.

We already know the results of silence and cowardice in the face of totalitarianism. There are far too many examples.

When Peck was growing up he “had a very physical relationship with fear from growing up in Haiti,” under François Duvalier’s dictatorship, he told writer Cian Traynor. “My father was arrested under the dictatorship of Duvalier, so I know the fear of disappearing; I know the fear of roadblocks where you feel there are people in uniforms, armed in the dark, who can do whatever they want to you. That prudence in front of uniforms has never left me.” His father was later arrested a second time, and Peck said authoritarianism always starts the same way: One by one, journalists, judges, academics are picked off and isolated. 

Once you are alone, they have you.

It’s Orwellian how the Trump administration bends storied institutions that are older than the country to its will. The government announces it is “cautiously encouraged” by certain conduct and promises to “keep an eye on the situation and aftermath” — when the “situation” happens at a private university and the “encouraging conduct” is capitulation to the government’s overreach. In “1984,” Big Brother survives by wielding absolute power; freedom is flattened by the thudding steps of a goose-stepping soldier and by language that makes those steps seem necessary.

Trump says “it doesn’t matter” when he jokes about fixing elections. He spews contradictions that leave words meaningless. “I’m saying you don’t have to vote — it doesn’t mean we’re not gonna have elections!” He reverses a post-World War II decision that renamed the War Department the Department of Defense, returning its meaning to “war.”

Some institutions, including Yale, say nothing. That’s their policy.

Solidarity

After the screening, Peck joked about his getaway. ICE has already targeted or taken students and professors from Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard and Georgetown. Institutional neutrality, I thought, might be why they haven’t yet come for Yale.

But it’s hard to believe that it will be silence that saves us. So I said to Peck, “I’ll walk out with you.”

The post At Yale University, things are getting Orwellian appeared first on Salon.com.

In what has been billed as the greatest country on Earth, democracy is being unraveled because a majority of the nation’s white inhabitants voted for a 79-year-old man who is temperamentally unfit for any public office, much less one that comes with nuclear weapons. A once-proud nation of immigrants is being subject to military occupations because a man, in a marriage to an immigrant, says that foreigners are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, and that they are to blame for all that one finds wanting in life.

Perhaps the end of the flawed American project comes as no surprise, but even the most jaded observer — one aware that the land of the free was also the home of the slave — has had to marvel that the collapse could be brought about by this, of all guys; not by some charismatic general, skilled at feigning empathy for the common people, but an elderly conman who’s only selling them crypto.

Take some solace, then, in that you are not crazy for thinking this is insulting, in all of its dystopian absurdity. Those who study and teach about America, abroad, also think the country has become a frightening shell of its past, imperfect glory.

At a packed Oct. 4 forum in Vienna, Austria, academics who have taught thousands of students about the culture and history of the United States expressed shock and dismay at how quickly the liberal future imagined, if not realized, with the election of Barack Obama has given way to the ugliest form of American reaction.

“We’re all also overwhelmed by the situation,” said Alexandra Ganser, a professor of American Studies at the University of Vienna. A former Fulbright Scholar who studied in the U.S., she lamented that the country’s descent into authoritarianism was “all pretty new” and required rethinking how academics approach their work.

“We need to prepare ourselves better, maybe also on a departmental level — [and] prepare students who are traveling to the U.S.,” she said, the forum coming as part of a conference dubbed “Ruptures, Fractures, Discontinuities: Troubled American Studies.”

Already, she noted, those thinking of heading to Trump’s America are being warned not to bring their own phones and to “get other computers when you travel.”

That guidance comes amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on academia and, in particular, foreign-born students.

Rümeysa Öztürk, a Ph.D. student at Tufts University and a former Fulbright Scholar, did nothing more than lend her name to an op-ed urging her school to take seriously students’ concerns about its relations with Israel. For that offense, she was grabbed off the street by a half-dozen plainclothes federal agents and detained for weeks in a decrepit ICE facility, thousands of miles away.

Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident, attended a sit-in at Barnard College over Gaza. For that non-crime, the Trump administration sought to deport her to South Korea, a country that she left at the age of 7.

There are now countless such stories of students and tourists being arrested and detained over perceived slights to MAGA America. And top U.S. officials have promised there will be more.

“Visiting America is not an entitlement,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has lectured those who wish to study at the universities that have accepted them. “It is a privilege extended to those who respect our laws and values.”

Now, even academics whose specialty is America — well aware of its virtues and flaws, even before its recent authoritarian turn — are afraid to visit the object of their studies, at least so long as the present regime is in power.

“I thought to myself, If I were 10 years, 15 years younger, and I have no kids, I would absolutely do it, because I want to,” Ganser said of her own security assessment. “I want to feel it. I want to see it — I want to see what’s happening to you… With two kids, I cannot. It’s too risky.”

In November, the American Studies Association is hosting its annual conference. It’s in Puerto Rico, a fact that organizers seem apologetic about. The conference website, seeking to address safety concerns, explains that the organization is contractually bound to host events in the U.S. for the next couple of years.

“We have inherited a conference model based on mid- to late-20th century assumptions about higher education and about the world,” the group states, one that does not account for “politically motivated attacks” on academia and efforts “to outlaw critical analysis of American political, social, and cultural institutions, ideologies, and practices.”

But it’s not as if the post-war liberal order in Europe can be taken for granted, either. That’s another lesson from developments in American politics, observed Ingrid Gessner, a professor at the University of Education Vorarlberg in Austria.

As president of the European Association for American Studies, she plans on attending that conference in Puerto Rico (this year’s topic: “Late-Stage American Empire?”). But living in Austria, where a far-right party out-polled all its rivals in the last election — and where illiberal hegemons are now to both its East and West — the threat to democracy and intellectual inquiry cannot be dismissed as just an American thing, Gessner noted.

Even so, the MAGA brand is no doubt a contributor to an unsettling trend in politics, everywhere.

“I was probably not as much aware as I am now that I do have students, especially young male students, who would actually give anything to attend a Trump rally,” Gessner said. “That is very real in the classroom.”

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Confronting right-wing populism, American-style, is one thing when it’s a European classroom. Most European academics appear less willing to risk a confrontation with its manifestation on American soil.

Heike Paul, chair of American Studies at Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, was blunt about whether she planned to attend any more conferences in the land of the free.

“I’m not going to the United States,” Paul said with a laugh. She noted that a conference hosted by the Bavarian American Academy, previously held in Berkeley, California, has now been moved to Montreal.

“Thank God for Canada,” she said, “because I think that also many other associations have done the same thing … and [decided] not to come to the United States.”

That the country these academics have devoted their professional careers to studying and teaching about is no longer safe to visit is a sad and unexpected development. In 2015, most European scholars — like most American liberals — could not have imagined a budding dictatorship led by a guy from “The Apprentice.” Since Trump’s rise and return to office, Paul said, the U.S. has fallen into the same category as countries like Russia and China.

“Now, when I think about going to the U.S., I talk to a lot of my colleagues in Sinology. I talk to a lot of my colleagues who travel to Egypt and many other [authoritarian] places,” she said. And she, like others who have witnessed the loss of what was once assumed to be stable democracy, must ask: “What does it mean to travel to a place where certain things can no longer be taken for granted?”

The post “Too risky”: Scholars who study America say they won’t visit appeared first on Salon.com.

Alter, a tenured professor, was fired earlier this month and accused by Texas State University President Kelly Damphouse of “inciting violence” for a recent speech at a socialist conference. Far-right activist Karlyn Borysenko had posted a clip of Alter, misleadingly shorn of context, of him describing a confrontational strain of anarchist thought that arose in connection with protests of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City.” The shared clip did not include his criticism of that tendency.

The clip circulated in right-wing circles on social media, eventually resulting in Alter’s firing by Damphousse, who was chosen to lead Texas State University by the Texas State University System Board of Regents. Members of the board are appointed by the governor of the state, Greg Abbot, a Republican.

But Borysenko, whose exclusive coverage of the event immediately preceded Alter’s firing, has herself repeatedly espoused extreme rhetoric on social media, even publicly embracing “fascism” and revisionist histories of Nazi Germany.

For example, in a post from August 2024, Borysenko said, “Hitler went to heaven. I do not apologize.”

This post was in response to another post from her in which she said, “Everyone who died in the Holocaust choose [sic] to die in the Holocaust before they were ever born because they [collectively] wanted to understand the experience of ultimate oppression. That’s why Hitler went to heaven.”

That exchange came as part of a years-long record of insisting that the leader of the Third Reich went to heaven, which includes saying things like, “You mean the JEWS don’t believe Hitler went to hell either???”

Borysenko has previously responded to criticism of her comments, saying, “Heaven is real. It’s the spirit realm we all go to after we die. hell is not real. It’s an invention of religion to control people,” and “Hitler was an evil person on a human level. He still didn’t go to hell. Hell is not real.”

In another exchange from September 2024, Borysenko said, “We were all lied to about World War II. They traumatized us in school with atrocity propaganda.”

“Hitler was fighting communists and made multiple attempts to end the war. Most deaths in the camps were from typhus. Winston Churchill is one of the most evil men who ever lived,” Borysenko said.

Later in the same thread, Borysenko responded to a reply that was criticising her for Holocaust denial, saying “You’re literally Jewish,” adding, “Your opinion means nothing to me.”

In response to a request for comment, Borysenko said, “I’m rather shocked that you’re not smart enough to do your own research and fine [sic] any number of the videos or statements I’ve already made commenting on it. Since you obviously need me to do your job for you, what would you like to know? I will be documenting this exchange publicly on X to my 90,000 followers.”

In a brief phone call with Borysenko, she did not respond to a request to explain her past comments about Hitler, World War II and her efforts to “question the Holocaust.”

Borysenko describes her work as an effort to shed light on the danger of the left.

“Karlyn Borysenko infiltrates their meetings, collects their materials, decodes their language, and exposes their ideas,” reads her description of her Substack.

Broysenko has also recently been welcomed by Fox News as an “expert” and “an undercover investigative journalist,” in the words of prime-time anchor Jesse Watters. Borysenko, in an appearance last week, painted a dire picture for Fox’s audience, claiming that the left’s “primary goal is the violent overthrow of the federal government.”

Watters did not mention Borysenko’s avowed support for the far-right, including her stated belief that “fascism might actually be our only option to actually defeat the left.”

“From a real-world perspective, I right now am of the opinion that fascism might actually be our only option to actually defeat the left. I’m not actually joking again,” Borysenko said. “At my heart and core, I am a Libertarian. I believe in voluntarism. I believe in individualism. I believe in the free markets. I believe in all this stuff. But from a practical perspective, I kind of just feel like the conservatives cannot be trusted to make any decisions at all, and they will never defeat the left. They are way more committed to sending all our money to Israel than they are in actually fixing this country.”

Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.

In a Sept. 8 post concerning Alter, Borysenko, who was a Libertarian Party candidate for governor of New Hampshire in 2022, winning just over 2,700 votes, boasted that the clip was from her “exclusive coverage” of the conference.” A search of X also shows that her post about Alter was the one that widely circulated ahead of his Sept. 11 firing.

Liz Yates, an expert on political violence and bigotry at the Western States Center, an organization that monitors right-wing extremism, told Salon that people like Borysenko have taken on an increasingly prominent role in right-wing movements.

“Streamers have become increasingly visible and relevant in anti-democracy and bigoted networks. They film live or online events and interactions and post video content that is often full of disinformation or conspiratorial narratives,” Yates said. “Their goals are to gin up support for bigoted and authoritarian policies, encourage harassment of political activists and people from targeted communities, and even attempt to trigger federal or state action. They’re basically the cheerleaders and enforcers of those who are leading assaults on our multiracial democracy.”

Yates cautioned that “streamers’ depictions of events are often false or misleading, so we must promote accurate and complete information — without engaging these disinformation spreaders or platforming their content.”

Since his firing, Alter has sued his former employer. His attorney, Amanda Reichek, told Salon that, “Dr. Alter was terminated because he espoused views that are unpopular in today’s conservative, politically-charged climate, in violation of his First Amendment right to free speech.”

Reichek also disputed the account provided by Borysenko.

“On September 7, a Sunday, Dr. Alter spoke during an online conference organized by Socialist Horizon,” he said. “He never represented that his opinions were those of Texas State University. He spoke in his individual capacity, on his own time, and his connection with Texas State University was revealed only by another participant.”

“Unbeknownst to the conference organizers,” Riechek continued, “a self-described fascist influencer registered and attended the conference and violated the conference’s policy of no recording or streaming of conference proceedings by attendees. Afterwards, she posted Dr. Alter’s comments to her YouTube channel.”

Damphousse had initially accused Alter of inciting violence. In the lawsuit, Alter said that he was told he was fired after the university received a complaint.

“Conduct that advocates for inciting violence is directly contrary to the values of Texas State University,” Damphousse said. “I cannot and will not tolerate such behavior.”

The clip circulated by Borysenko and later by other right-wing accounts begins with Alter saying, “As anarchists, these insurrectionists explicitly reject the formation of a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class to power. Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven mad organization in the history of the world, that of the US government?”

However, in context, it is clear that Alter is criticizing a strain of anarchist activism in the United States.

“Another strain of anarchism gaining ground recently is that of insurrection, insurrectionary anarchism, primarily coming out of those that were involved in the Cop City protest. These groups and individuals have grown rightfully frustrated with symbolic protests that do not disrupt the normal functioning of government and business. They call for more direct action, shutting down the military-industrial complex and preventing ICE from kidnapping members of their communities. Many insurrectionary anarchists are also serving jail time, lost jobs and face expulsion from school. They have truly put their bodies on the line. While their actions are laudable, it should be asked what purpose do they serve?” Alter said immediately preceding the clipped section.

The move to fire Alter is part of a larger campaign from administrators in Texas’ university system to crack down on speech that the right deems offensive.

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Melissa McCoul, a professor at Texas A&M, was fired earlier this month after a video surfaced of a student confronting McCoul for saying in class that there are more than two genders. The student then went on to say that McCoul’s statement conflicted with President Donald Trump’s executive order, which asserts that there are only two genders.

“I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching because, according to our president, there’s only two genders,” the student said in the video.

The video also led to criticism of McCoul from Republican lawmakers in the state. The president of Texas A&M has since resigned.

More recently, Texas State expelled a student for allegedly mocking Kirk’s death in a video circulated by another right-wing activist on X. In the video, the student is shown saying “Charlie Kirk got hit in the neck, b—h,” before seemingly reenacting Kirk’s death.

Damphousse’s office, in response to a query from Salon, said that it does not comment on active litigation.

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“In my in-person classes, there’s this tension of what they can and can’t say, [and] then we have a code of ethics to follow,” said Woodson, whose social work program’s embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion is at odds with the law. “Prior, I feel like my professors taught very [openly] and there were no questions, hidden tones.”

Nearly a month has passed since students returned for the 2025-26 academic year, and already some say they’re reeling from the effects of Senate Bill 1. The GOP-sponsored legislation, which eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs, scholarships and policies from public universities, among other measures, took effect in late June after a grassroots campaign to put its potential repeal to a vote in November failed.

A number of institutions had started complying with the bill months ahead of SB 1’s enactment, shuttering campus identity centers, terminating DEI staff and eliminating degree programs. Since returning to campus in August, students from universities across the state told Salon that they’ve lost much-valued support, funding and scholarships, and freedom to express themselves under SB 1. Some also fear the legislation will serve as a model for other states across the country, as GOP-led efforts to axe DEI provisions, sanitize U.S. history and reshape higher education through an ultraconservative lens take hold in places like Florida and Oklahoma.

Woodson said the bill has created a culture of self-censorship in her classes, threatened the accreditation of her program, and cheapened her academic experience.

“It definitely just feels like we have to tiptoe around things, which I think gets in the way of having productive conversations in class,” Woodson said. Students hesitate before volunteering their opinions in class, while faculty appear more cautious, even including disclaimers in their syllabi. “There’s this clear thing of ‘Can we talk about this? Like, am I going to be stepping on toes?”

SB 1, also known as the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, is a sprawling statute that Republicans billed as fostering academic freedom on the state’s college campuses. The bill regulates classroom discussions on “controversial beliefs” like immigration, closes campus identity centers for marginalized students and evaluates professors on students’ opinions of whether they created an unbiased classroom environment.

“Our Founders treasured diversity of thought so highly they made free speech our very first guaranteed right,” said state Sen. Jerry Cirino, the Republican lawmaker who authored the bill, in a January news release. “It’s time to bring that right back to campus.”

Its passage in late March — and swift authorization by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine a few days later — was enough to convince then-Cleveland State University student Dylan Repertorio to make his exit. He told Salon that he transferred to a university in Albany, New York, because he saw how the law would limit courses in foreign policy and political science that he was interested in, diminish the quality of his education and strip students of support systems.

“Part of the reason why I left as a whole was [because] my degree is not going to be worth as much,” Repertorio, now a junior studying emergency management and homeland security at another institution he declined to name, said in an interview. “I’m not going to be able to learn the things I want to learn when I’m paying for my degree. But also, why would I contribute to an economy in a state that doesn’t care about me? Why am I here?”

Repertorio said that the bill does the opposite of what Cirino claimed, “resulting in less freedom” for students. He believes such legislation will spread to other states as GOP lawmakers across the country, with help from the Trump administration’s pressuring of universities, attempt to push the boundaries of higher education further.

“If they could do this to higher education, it’s going to spread into other parts of people’s lives,” he said.

At The Ohio State University in Columbus, changes came as early as February, a preemptive response to both the expected passage of the legislation and the Trump administration’s executive orders on campus antisemitism and DEI that threatened universities’ research funding. The university has shuttered its Center for Belonging and Social Change and eliminated DEI offices and staff. Most recently, the school has banned students from writing on university sidewalks with chalk — a move critics believe is meant to quell pro-Palestinian speech on campus — and decorating their residence hall floors with a non-OSU-theme.

Eloni McClain, a pre-law junior studying neuroscience at OSU, said that while not directly impacted, she feels that her instructors can no longer openly discuss the scientific contributions of women and people of color, or “equality in science” without fear of repercussions, a huge loss — one coupled with the Black Student Association losing funding and the CBSC closing.

“It just feels like there’s less safe spaces for students to go to based on their identity,” McClain said.

The bill passed the Ohio Legislature despite receiving a record number of opposing testimonies, prompting faculty at Youngstown State University to lead a seven-week, statewide legislative effort to put the future of the bill to a vote this November. The petition team fell short of the roughly 250,000 signatures needed to pass the ballot referendum — garnering just over 195,000 signatures — and the bill went into effect.

While those faculty members told Salon at the time that they would not be changing anything about how they do their jobs, students have noticed the changes to DEI policy YSU made to comply.

“On the first day, [in] every class I went to, a professor had to give a disclaimer, saying that they’re not trying to indoctrinate us or force us to believe anything,” said Samantha George, a senior at YSU. “And that was something that never really had to happen prior to this.”

George, who’s majoring in English education, told Salon her program’s been hard hit. Some of her professors appear nervous to speak too much or share a stance in their classes as they had before SB 1. Plus, the university has nixed what was once a required class on diversity and equity in the classroom from the program altogether, she said. A YSU lecturer separately confirmed that the class had been pulled. She also worries about how these rollbacks will affect her future as a teacher because nothing is stopping lawmakers from also attempting to extend such limitations to K-12 education.

“All it really feels like is them trying to restrict education to the people they think deserve it,” George said. “Removing DEI and all these other things that ensure people who maybe wouldn’t have the chance to get an education actually can go get one — it just feels like they’re trying to make education so inaccessible that people just can’t do it.”

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Nica Delgado, a graduate student of library science at Kent State University, told Salon that it feels like SB 1 has stolen “a lot of joy” from the campus. She and other students are feeling the absence of Hispanic Heritage Month events, chatter about the LGBTQ+ center’s rainbow run and the now-closed Multicultural Center’s annual kickoff that would have otherwise happened.

“It feels really lifeless and exclusionary, and the love that those centers had for their students — that love hasn’t found its place back to campus yet,” she said in an interview. “As someone who is so involved with the Multicultural Center, it kills me. It breaks my heart.”

Delgado said she lost a world of support she’d fostered in the Multicultural Center as an undergrad, including Cupida Transiciones, a program for incoming college students of color. SB 1 has also eliminated scholarships she had planned to apply for to offset the cost of her master’s degree, forcing her to take out a $20,000 loan after previously completing her bachelor’s at the institution debt-free.

“The legislators that pushed this through took something from our students in Ohio that they will never understand, and they took programs from us that truly saved lives and kept people in school,” Delgado, president of the Kent State Ohio Student Association, said.

“It’s doing such a disservice to history, and it’s doing a disservice to the future of Ohio,” she added.

The post GOP’s “free speech” law leaves students afraid to talk appeared first on Salon.com.

But for Mark Vopat, Cryshanna Jackson Leftwich and Mandy Fehlbaum, three faculty union leaders at Youngstown State University who spearheaded the ballot referendum effort aiming to repeal the new law, that means doing absolutely nothing at all.

“I’m not changing anything,” Vopat, a YSU professor of philosophy, told Salon. “I don’t accept the premise that our classrooms have been indoctrinating or biased in a way that is inappropriate in any way.” So he sees no reason to make any changes, he said.

“I read through the bill, and honestly, it doesn’t say that as faculty, we’re required to do anything,” added Jackson Leftwich, a YSU professor of political science. It’s up to campus administrators at Youngstown State, she said. “It’s their responsibility.”

The professors’ grassroots attempt to get Senate Bill 1 on the November ballot came to a disappointing end one day before the law’s June 27 enactment date, with the announcement that they had not collected enough signatures. In the seven weeks from their petition’s certification in May to the June 25 deadline, organizers and volunteers gathered 195,157 signatures across all 88 Ohio counties. That, however, fell short of the roughly 250,000 signatures from 44 counties required by the secretary of state’s office to pause the law and put it to a vote.

Fehlbaum, Vopat and Jackson Leftwich contend that if they’d had a little more time — Vopat estimated another 10 to 14 days — and greater support from other, larger organizations, they would be telling a different story.

Fehlbaum, who teaches sociology at YSU, said the petition drive was delayed by two weeks while “waiting for another group to come forward that had infrastructure and funding,” which ultimately did not happen. Other groups, she suggested, did not take the ballot referendum push seriously, sought to prioritize challenging the legislation in the courts instead, or concluded that a ballot initiative would be too difficult and too expensive.

In addition to ending DEI programs at the state’s public colleges and universities, SB 1 limits faculty unions, places new requirements on faculty and tenure reviews, and regulates classroom discussion around “controversial beliefs,” including climate policy, marriage, immigration and electoral politics.

A number of Ohio institutions began to comply with the law in the spring, shuttering DEI offices, eliminating a number of majors in the humanities and social sciences, and postponing racial affinity events.

The YSU professors said they want to see how students will react to the rollback in resources when they return to campus in the fall. They also voiced concerns for the future of higher education in the state, warning that this law is likely to drive students away from Ohio’s schools, fuel grade inflation — as faculty attempt to assuage accusations of bias — and create a pathway for the Republican-dominated state legislature to attack K-12 education next.

“When you allow the state legislature to dictate how your colleges and universities run, you take away a lot of integrity, you take away best practices, you take away what universities stand for,” Jackson Leftwich said.

While they’re still regrouping from their defeat, Vopat and Felhlbaum said they have taken one important lesson away from the effort: They’re not alone.

“There are worse things than failing, and that’s being alone. No one is alone here,” Vopat said, retooling a “Ted Lasso” quote. “One thing that I really got out of this is that there are a whole bunch of people in this state who are very unhappy with the way things are going. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people out there who are saying we’re going in the wrong direction.”

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Their fight isn’t over, the activist professors say. The trio told Salon that they are pursuing new strategies, along with their network of more than 1,700 volunteers, about other legislative avenues they can pursue to stave off the effects of the bill. They’re not yet ready to discuss details about next steps and further options, but said that with the infrastructure they’ve built and the support they’ve garnered, the petition’s failure is a setback but not a final defeat.

“If anything, it just shows me how wrong-headed some individuals are about how much it takes,” Fehlbaum said, pointing to the mass of volunteers who used their own resources to print the pre-certification petitions, and then spent days collecting signatures and many hours scanning completed petitions, all on their own personal time. “It doesn’t take hiring paid petitioners. It doesn’t take hiring paid staff. We can do this on our own. That’s what real democracy looks like.”

The post Activists failed to repeal Ohio’s GOP education overhaul — but the fight isn’t over appeared first on Salon.com.

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.

Three people briefed on the matter said Ryan informed UVA’s board on Thursday that he would step down. In a letter to the board’s chair, according to the Times, Ryan said he had originally planned to leave at the end of the next academic year but decided “with deep sadness” to resign earlier “given the circumstances and today’s conversations,”  The board accepted his resignation, though it remains unclear when it will take effect.

“For the leader of one of the nation’s most prominent public universities to take such an extraordinary step demonstrates President Trump’s success in harnessing the investigative powers of the federal government to accomplish his administration’s policy goals,” stated the Times report.

The Justice Department had recently warned UVA officials that its investigation had identified “widespread” use of race in admissions and other programs. A June 17 letter signed by Civil Rights Division head Harmeet K. Dhillon and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Gregory W. Brown stated: “Time is running short, and the department’s patience is wearing thin.”

Both officials are UVA alumni, and Brown had previously sued the university in a private capacity.

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In recent days, board members appointed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin engaged with senior Justice Department officials and were told that resolving the matter would require Ryan’s resignation.

The two Democratic Senators from Virginia, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, released a statement criticizing the development.

“It is outrageous that officials in the Trump Department of Justice demanded the Commonwealth’s globally recognized university remove President Ryan—a strong leader who has served UVA honorably and moved the university forward—over ridiculous ‘culture war’ traps,” the statement read. “Decisions about UVA’s leadership belong solely to its Board of Visitors, in keeping with Virginia’s well-established and respected system of higher education governance. This is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future.”

The post Trump forces out University of Virginia president as part of federal war on diversity appeared first on Salon.com.

“There was such passion against SB 1 whenever it was being pushed through the legislature, so why isn't that passion still there?” Mandy Fehlbaum, a sociologist and the grievance chair for YSU’s chapter of the Ohio Education Association, recalled wondering in a phone interview. “Some people were saying, ‘Oh well, we worked so hard. Now we're tired, and we just have to accept it.’ And like, no, we don't have to accept it.” 

So they set out to reverse it.

While other education unions are weighing legal action to overturn the law, which aims to overhaul the state’s higher education system, Fehlbaum, YSU-OEA president Mark Vopat and union spokesperson Cryshanna Jackson Leftwich chose to go political. They began an effort in April to get a referendum on the November ballot, starting with gathering signatures from the 1,000 registered Ohio voters necessary to have their petition certified to the secretary of state. They collected over 6,200 signatures from registered voters in just over a week and certified the petition in early May.  

Now, the petition committee is taking on its greater challenge: gathering more than 250,000 signatures in at least 44 of the state’s 88 counties by June 25 — just two days before the law is set to take effect. If their grassroots cause is successful, the law will be paused until Ohioans vote in the general election on whether SB 1 remains law or is ultimately repealed.

“There were three of us that said we are fed up, three individuals… who said, ‘We want to do the right thing, and we want to do something,’” Jackson Leftwich, who also serves as a political science professor at YSU, told Salon. Sometimes you just have to do something, she added. “You can stop or fight against [something] — and you might not always win, but you can make your voice heard. You can have some opposition. You can give these people some pushback to make them think twice.”

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill into law on March 28, less than 48 hours after it hit his desk. The legislation, a 42-page revival of previous legislation taken from model bills devised by the conservative National Association of Scholars, implements regulations on classroom discussions on “controversial beliefs,” including climate policy, marriage, immigration and electoral politics. It also strikes diversity, equity and inclusion programs, policies and scholarships as well as related spending; prohibits faculty strikes; and blocks unions from negotiating tenure among other provisions.  

Proponents of the bill, including Republican sponsor state Sen. Jerry Cirino, argue that it enhances freedom of speech and academic freedom, promotes intellectual diversity, and “installs a number of other worthwhile provisions,” including establishing post-tenure periodic review and banning political and ideological litmus tests in hiring, promotions and admissions decisions. 

“Our Founders treasured diversity of thought so highly they made free speech our very first guaranteed right,” Cirino said in a January news release announcing the bill’s introduction. “It’s time to bring that right back to campus.”

But that’s where the petition committee’s qualms come in. They argue the legislation is actually a censorship bill, replete with union-busting measures and a vague maze of anti-DEI stipulations that stymie students’ access to social support, financial resources and needed accommodations. Meanwhile, course regulations said to bolster diversity in thought place professors in a confusing bind over the content they can teach and problematic ideas they must entertain in class. 

“Students who want to hold views like, ‘Slavery was good,’ — I shouldn't have to take class time to seriously entertain certain ideas like that,” Vopat, a philosophy professor , told Salon.

Vopat, Fehlbaum and Jackson Leftwich also flagged other glaring issues. The law, they argued, effectively ends tenure by folding tenure policy into the purview of each public institution's board of trustees. Plus, it requires the inclusion of a question about whether a professor creates an unbiased classroom environment on student evaluations, the answer to which they fear could spur investigations into faculty as the law regulates discussion of controversial subjects. Altogether, they say the law has the potential to drive students away from Ohio's public universities.

“This bill… at least in my experience, in my 20-plus years at Youngstown State and higher ed, it just dismantles what higher ed's supposed to be,” Vopat added in a phone interview. It makes the university into a business where profit is king and faculty are “just replaceable.”

The term-limited governor’s signature began a 90-day timeline for any interested Ohioan to launch an effort to challenge the legislation. After consulting with other education unions and hearing nothing about a ballot referendum in the works, Vopat, Jackson Leftwich and Fehlbaum — with the support of YSU-OEA’s executive committee — decided that they would be the ones to take up the charge. 

Their effort felt like a race against time, one that Vopat said they knew from the beginning they wouldn’t be able to win alone. They drafted the initial petition language, had it reviewed by a former YSU student-turned-lawyer and sent calls out to their network of unions to set the process in motion. 

As more and more people requested access to it, their work to certify the petition to stay SB 1 and get the law on the ballot gained momentum. In just 10 days, they obtained 6,253 signatures across 423 part-petitions, according to the Ohio SB 1 petition website. 

While Vopat said he initially pegged the ballot referendum a “long shot” and a “Hail Mary,” he now regrets that characterization. 

“Now, I think we're actually in the game, like there's time, because once we announced, we've had a huge groundswell of support. I mean, it was shocking how many people,” Vopat told Salon.

Since their petition was certified on May 5, the group has secured a cohort of more than 1,500 volunteers statewide to help with signature gathering and garnered the backing of more than a dozen organizations, including Blue Ohio, Indivisible and the Ohio Democratic House Caucus. They’ve also fundraised just under $40,000 and founded the Labor, Education, and Diversity ballot issue political action committee to support the referendum effort. 

All of the money they’ve raised thus far goes toward materials, mainly printing the 18,000 petitions and counting currently in circulation across the state. While Fehlbaum said the process has presented a “steep learning curve” — relying on volunteer help, navigating the particulars of scanning each copy of the petition and starting a PAC for the first time — she, Vopat and Jackson Leftwich have been blown away by the support their effort has received from Ohioans thus far. 

Fehlbaum, who leads the petition committee’s outreach and organizing arm, declined to share exactly how many signatures they’ve collected since certification because the organizers don’t want the numbers to encourage their opposition to push harder. Fehlbaum did say, however, that they’ve collected signatures in 82 of Ohio’s 88 counties — blowing one of the requirements out of the water — and saw huge returns from Memorial Day weekend. Pride events throughout June and Juneteenth present other ripe signature-gathering opportunities they hope to capitalize on. 

“It's an uphill battle for sure,” Fehlbaum said, describing the challenge of informing voters about the bill and their petition. “We realize we are underdogs in this, but we are doing our best to put a concerted effort there, and I think that it's very feasible we'll be able to do it.”

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Ohio’s public academic institutions have been rolling out changes to comply with the law as the state closes in on the deadline for SB 1 to take effect. Much to the dismay of its students and faculty, Ohio State University was ahead of the curve, announcing diversity office closures and staffing cuts in February in compliance with federal directives to slash DEI programs and in preparation for a then-progressing SB 1. In late April, the University of Toledo discontinued nine undergraduate majors — including Africana studies, Asian studies, disability studies, Spanish and Women’s and Gender Studies — to adhere to SB 1’s low conferral rate requirements. 

Ohio University also announced a week later that it was sunsetting its Division of Diversity and Inclusion, which housed its Women, Pride and Multicultural Centers, and established six working groups to implement the law’s new requirements. The southeastern Ohio institution also generated backlash when it paused a Black Alumni Reunion event in an apparent reaction to the bill.    

Jackson Leftwich, Vopat and Fehlbaum see these changes in a broader context. The state’s upending of Ohio colleges through SB 1, they said, is a microcosm of the Trump administration’s battle against higher education, cowing public and private universities into compliance with anti-DEI, anti-immigration and anti-protest measures or slashing funding from institutions that refuse.

“If the federal level held strong, then the state couldn't get away with it, because people could file federal lawsuits against the state,” Jackson Leftwich said. “But the state sees the weakness in the federal government, and so they're like, ‘We can get away with doing the wrong thing.'”

But Vopat said he also sees possibilities for nationwide change in that connection. He hopes that seeing their effort to protect higher education — no matter how successful it ends up — will show other Americans that they have the power to fight back, too. 

“I'm hoping that people realize that there is a chance that you can do this, that there are other people who feel the same way — that things have gone too far — and [that] we need to pull back and stop some of these things that are happening, not only in Ohio, but in Florida, Indiana, other places across the country.”

The post “Just three people” took on Ohio education law — and sparked a movement appeared first on Salon.com.

No, this is not a threat from President Donald Trump in 2025.

It is an excerpt from an August 1967 letter from Ronald Reagan, who had been elected the governor of California six months prior, to Glenn Dumke, the chancellor of the California State University system.

Trump's ongoing attacks on higher education echo the right-wing playbook that Reagan created nearly six decades ago. In a 2024 campaign video, Trump declared that "We are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America." The goal, he said, would be to take back "our once-great educational institutions from the radical left."

In recent weeks, Trump has threatened to withhold $9 billion in federal money from Harvard and another $575 million from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Both Reagan and Trump knew they were tapping into popular discontent with elite universities. For Reagan, it was the mass protests and arrests resulting from the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. For Trump, the source of public anger came from the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments held at dozens of universities in early 2024.

A dissatisfied American public

Trump, like Reagan, sees political dividends in his attacks. In 2012, 26% of Americans said in a survey by the Pew Research Center that colleges had a negative effect on the way things were going in the country. Last year, Pew revealed those negative views had climbed to 45%.

In 1966, Reagan won an upset election against incumbent Gov. Pat Brown by vowing to "clean up the mess at Berkeley." Once in office, he acted on his verbal threats by firing Clark Kerr, the president of the multi-campus University of California system. Kerr was widely admired in academic circles, but to Reagan, he was "soft" and had "appeased" campus protesters. The next year, when the Black Students Union lead a campus-wide strike that shut down San Francisco State College, Reagan called for police intervention and said the campus should be kept open "at the point of a bayonet if necessary."

In February 1970, five days of noisy anti-war protests erupted when local police arrested a student carrying a wine bottle. A full-scale riot ensued, with buildings and police cars set on fire. The police confronted the rioters with guns and shot and killed a university student (ironically, not one of the protesters). Reagan later defended the police response, saying anti-war campus protests had to be stopped. "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with," he said. "No more appeasement."

Steve Brint, a historian at the University of California, Riverside, observed that by repeatedly cracking down on university protests, "Reagan created a blueprint for the long-term success of the Republican Party as the voice of conservative 'middle America' and 'the silent majority.'"

While Reagan was the first Republican candidate to score a major political win by assailing higher education, the party's animosity to the liberal atmosphere on many college campuses can be traced back to the 1951 publication of William F. Buckley's "God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom."

Caste rule at Yale

Buckley, a devout Catholic from a wealthy Connecticut family, graduated from Yale in 1950. Buckley's book became a surprise best-seller. He would go on to publish the National Review and host the PBS interview program, "Firing Line."

In an introduction to the book, John Chamberlain, a conservative editorial writer for Life magazine, endorsed Buckley's accusation that Yale had set-up "an elite of professional untouchables . . . The elite would perpetuate itself as it chose. Departments would select their staffs without reference to alumni or parental or undergraduate opinion . . . This is caste rule as applied to education, it might be unkind to call it 'Fascism,' but it certainly is not democracy."

Chamberlain said he endorsed Buckley's criticism that Yale faculty was "skeptical of any religion and interventionist and Keynesian as to economics and collectivist as applied to the relation of the individual and government."

While many conservative Republicans agreed with this condemnation, they found little traction with the public in the 1950s. Universities were filled with veterans on the G.I. Bill. President Eisenhower, who had briefly served as the president of Columbia University before the election, believed American colleges were important to a rising middle class and endorsed generous funding for them.

While running for president in 1980, Reagan vowed to eliminate the Department of Education, decades before Trump. Reagan could not get a Democratic-led Congress to accept that pitch. During his two terms, however, he cut the federal budget for education, both primary and higher, by 25%. He ended a number of federal grants for college students and pushed for private loans.

Since then, every Republican presidential candidate has vowed to reform higher education, with numerous attacking "Marxist" or "radical left" university faculty.

So far, the Trump administration has not deployed law enforcement to tamp down on student protests, but it has detained nearly a dozen students and faculty members on college campuses, individuals with student or work visas, who are alleged to have participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

The State Department has revoked at least 300 student visas, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day," he said at a recent press conference in Guyana. "Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas."

Universities on the defense

Trump's attacks on "radical left" universities have taken a toll on their leadership. Since the spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protests, six college presidents have resigned, including two at Columbia.

Universities are not without resources, however, and many have begun to fight back. University leaders have started meeting directly with members of Congress, as well as hiring lobbyists. Some 50 institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Stanford, have hired lobbying firms since the election.

A February poll of some 100 college and university presidents by the Yale School of Management found that 100% of respondents agreed that their schools needed "to do a much better job of conveying their value proposition."

Perhaps they will invoke the advice of one founding father, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote that "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."

The post The right’s 60-year war on higher education appeared first on Salon.com.

If Trump takes the White House in November his administration could abolish the Department of Education, as called for by Project 2025; levy fines on universities and use them to fund an online university called American Academy; replace college accreditors as part of their crusade against the “radical left;” roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and implement a host of other disastrous measures.

While many academics have sounded the alarm about Trump’s plans to gut academia, Trump is not without supporters in higher education. I have studied 198 leading conservative professors and found that 109 support Trump: “academic Trumpists.” These are professors who advocated and voted for Trump in 2016, supported his administration despite all its turmoil, and challenged the legitimacy of Biden's win in 2020. A few even supported the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol. They are overwhelmingly white, male and tenured. Some, like Marshall DeRosa, Professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University, express their support in blunt terms. In 2016 he said, “I’m looking forward to voting for Trump, because I see him as a wrecking ball and I want to see those sons of bitches squeal in Washington, to be quite frank.” Trump now gives every indication that he will take his wrecking ball to higher education and, if he does, he’ll find some professors there to welcome him. 

The most influential academic Trumpists include Victor Davis Hanson, fellow at the Hoover Institution and Hillsdale College, regular Fox News contributor, and whose book The Case for Trump was briefly on the New York Times best seller list; John Eastman, former professor at Chapman University School of Law, who spoke at Trump’s January 6, 2021 rally and presided over the legal rationale for Trump to believe he could obstruct the Congressional certification of Biden’s electoral victory; Peter Navarro, formerly at the University of California-Irvine, who as Trump’s White House economic advisor, advocated a trade war with China and claimed that it was “statistically impossible” for Trump to have lost the 2020 election. (Navarro was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress and served prison time). 

Not surprising, many academic Trumpists bemoan what they see as a stifling liberal campus culture. For Mark Bauerlein, retired from Emory University, academics are caught in a bind that only Trump can break: “bow down to diversity or risk your academic career.” Only Trump will fight against “identity politics [that] have overtaken scholarly standards.” In Out of Order: Affirmative Action and the Crisis of Liberalism, Nicholas Capaldi of George Mason University calls political correctness doctrinaire liberalism.”

They participate in and benefit from a vast conservative network beyond the academy. Three-fourths of the academic Trumpists affiliate with prominent conservative and powerful think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, the Independent Institute, and the Federalist Society. A few Trumpists affiliate with smaller neo-Confederate think tanks such as the League of the South, the Abbeville Institute, and Stephen D. Lee Institute, which embrace white nationalism. The Claremont Institute stands out as the network hub. Eighteen of the academic Trumpists affiliated with the institute also have ties to 32 other conservative think tanks. There is no similar clustering of anti-Trumpist conservative professors around such right-wing centers.

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Despite the spectacular controversies surrounding the Trump White House only eight of the 109 Trumpists have rescinded their support since the 2016 election. Fourteen — notably John Eastman — joined Trump in claiming that the election was stolen from him by voter fraud.

In a polarized political environment, it can be easy to forget that political camps are not monolithic. To be a conservative is not necessarily to champion Trump. Conservative professors who don’t support Trump include Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield who considers Trump a “demagogue.” Robert P. George, at Princeton University, “fiercely opposed” Trump the candidate, saying he was “a person of poor character.” Jon A. Shields at Claremont McKenna College, said “I wouldn’t vote for Trump under any condition.” 

Right-wing populism—the kind that Trump evokes when he condemns higher education as a bastion of sinister elites—is the key dividing line. The academic Trumpists support it, the anti-Trumpists professors do not. In their book, Passing on the Right, Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn noted that “conservative professors…look askance at the populism that has shaken up the Republican Party in recent years.”

It is these conservative professors who liberal academics must unite with to stand against Trump’s increasingly strident attacks on academia. Our political differences may be vast, but we agree on the value of higher education and understand that to lose it would be devastating for generations of Americans to come. 

The post Donald Trump wants to dismantle the Department of Education. Some professors would welcome it appeared first on Salon.com.

At its core, democracy means the ability of citizens to exercise effective political agency and power in their society. Today’s Republicans and so-called conservatives fundamentally reject that principle. They want to return the United States to the Gilded Age — if not before — as they transform the country into a new apartheid Christofascist plutocracy.

The American (and global) right’s revolutionary project to end multiracial pluralistic democracy involves taking over not just the political realm but every aspect of society from culture to technology to the economy and education. The right-wing and its neofascists and other authoritarians know that by controlling the country’s educational system they can create compliant citizens who will be drones, trained to obey and not to practice critical thinking or otherwise resist the powerful. The struggle for America’s future and its democracy is taking place in America’s classrooms today.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of "Erasing History: How Fascists Change the Past to Control the Future." In this conversation, he explains the role that education plays in a democratic community and how colleges and universities can better defend themselves against attacks by the Trumpists, neofascists, "conservatives," and other enemies of democracy and freedom. The myth of “liberal higher education,” Stanley notes, is belied by the fact that neofascists such as Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attended some of the country’s most elite universities yet are now working to undermine and delegitimate such institutions. Stanley also reflects on how the right-wing has weaponized such concepts as DEI and free speech in their campaign against education and democracy.

Stanley has a warning for liberals and progressives: Do not fall into the trap of being useful idiots by engaging in political debate with intellectually dishonest people during this time of ascendant fascism.

How are you feeling? How are you making sense of where we are in the story that is the Age of Trump now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic Party nominee? 

This is an existential election. It is even more so than in 2020 because Trump has surrounded himself with a group of advisors and policymakers who are very serious about ending democracy. With Project 2025, Trump's own Agenda 47, and other plans, they are ready from day one of his regime to move to authoritarianism. It's “all hands on deck” right now. There is really no excuse for not being involved in this election. The choice between Harris and Trump is the most important election in the world right now. 

Joy is not a strategy. That having been said, joy and hope can help to power the Democrats and the larger pro-democracy movement to victory over Trump and the other neofascists. I am worried that too many people are too happy much too soon because Harris is the nominee which means they may not be willing to do the hard work now to defeat Trumpism. Given their premature exuberance, they may be brought crashing down to earth once the reality of how close the election is going to be finally sets in. If Trump wins it may break them psychologically and emotionally. This is a war, not a battle; it will likely last decades. That is the approach that is necessary for the pro-democracy movement. Help me balance my pessimism and optimism. 

It’s nice to feel a little joy and to not run an election solely on the fear that the opposition will win, in this case, Trump and the MAGA Republicans and the other anti-democratic forces. I think it's motivating. We need to do two things simultaneously. We need to give people hope, and we need to warn them of the dangers. I like the focus on freedom from the Democrats. Authoritarianism requires a culture of fear, and that's why the fascists erase history and are targeting our schools and educational programs and harassing teachers. We need to counter that atmosphere of fear and intimidation with one of joy and hope — and we must do it very quickly because we are running out of time. 

The Democratic National Convention was a type of pedagogical event. The Obamas for example, really did some powerful public teaching about democracy and competing visions of freedom. This is going to be the theme from Kamala Harris and the Democrats going forward. The American people are experiencing a national “teachable moment” about democratic theory. I worry that many of them are not able to appreciate or apply properly. 

The Democrats are running the election on a classic philosophical topic, which is the difference between negative and positive freedom. Freedom "from" versus freedom "to". So, as Obama said in his speech, the billionaire class thinks of freedom as freedom from taxes and freedom from regulation. Freedom to or positive liberty is the freedom a person will have if they are free to pursue their life goals without obstacles. It is not possible for people to pursue their life goals if they are burdened with debt, or don’t have health insurance unless they take the first job that comes to them. In this framework, the Republican and larger right-wing conception of freedom is not really freedom, it is something else that when taken to its logical conclusion is antidemocratic because true freedom is only available to those who have the wealth, money, and power to exercise it. 

From this right-wing and neoliberal point of view, the only agency that a citizen has is through the so-called free market. We are seeing this play out with how the Republicans and “conservatives” are so adamantly opposed to eliminating student debt. They want to force people to look at work and survival as their main roles in society as opposed to thinking about being active democratic citizens. Americans are so laden with debt that they cannot truly be free. Moreover, the free market, especially in this late capitalist regime, is far from “free.” It is actually a system of monopoly capitalism that is anti-free markets because the very richest individuals and corporations can rig the system to their advantage. Autocrats and authoritarians can take control of such a system because its players truly believe they can make a bargain with them. Look at Russia. Vladimir Putin showed the plutocrats how he is in control and if they don’t support him then they will have their money and perhaps even lives taken away. If Trump takes power the billionaires and other plutocrats will have to bend their knee to him as well –- and he knows it and is planning on it. 

How does the American right-wing view the role of the university and education in a democracy?

The American right has always been leery of universities. This is true of the United States and other countries as well. Universities are supposed to be political. They're supposed to be places where hegemonic power and ideologies are challenged and criticized. At its best, the university is supposed to be an engine of democracy that prepares people with the tools to participate as citizens who have an input on the laws and policies that govern them. By comparison, the right wing just wants universities to be glorified job training programs.

How do you make sense of the myth of liberal higher education and how it is supposedly overrun by Marxists and Communists? 

It is right out of the Nazi political playbook. Hitler argues that all democratic institutions, such as the news media, the entertainment sector, the schools and universities are run by Marxists. In essence, anything democratic is labeled Marxist. I teach at Yale University. There are not many orthodox Marxists here. That is certain. Elite universities are stocked with centrist liberals who voted for Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders had almost no support at elite institutions. Today’s Republicans are largely anti-intellectual fascists, which explains why you do not see many of them as faculty or in leadership roles at good colleges or universities. Thus, the irony if you want to describe it as such: many of the leaders of the American fascist movement went to elite universities. Ron DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard. JD Vance graduated from Yale Law. Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. Their kids are going to go to Yale and Harvard and Princeton and other Ivies, but they want your kids to be trained by Prager University.

DeSantis and Vance and that ilk want to maintain these elite institutions and the social capital they confer. But the bigger plan is to shape elite institutions of higher education to fit their right-wing extreme ideology and agenda. Many of our universities are being intimidated by the right-wing in what is an example of “anticipatory obedience.” We saw this with their surrender to the right-wing reaction to the Gaza student protests. Elite institutions are ultimately about power; the elite of our society comes from institutions such as Yale and Harvard. The elite authoritarians are going to send their children to these institutions for that very reason.

When you saw the huge pile of banned books on such topics as race, gender, and sexuality that were thrown out like garbage when DeSantis’s people took over the New College of Florida, what were you thinking?

I saw the mass book burnings by the Nazis in 1933. 

What specific suggestions do you have for America’s colleges and universities in this time of democracy crisis? And for liberals and progressives more broadly?

First, this must be viewed as a war against democracy by the right-wing and the other fascists, illiberals, and authoritarians. In a war, you do not enable or help the other side. For example, you do not engage in conversations based on “mutual respect” and “the free exchange of ideas” and such niceties and quaint idealized assumptions with enemies of democracy. They only say they want a conversation because they want to get a foot in the door to take over. If you don’t realize that – and here I am speaking to so many liberals and progressives – then you are being used as dupes by these right-wingers. You're complicit. There once were intellectually honest conservatives. I hope they return. Today’s conservatives and Republicans do not care about “tradition” or “norms.” They want to up-end everything. It is a radical movement. Today’s “conservatives” are neofascists and authoritarians. They are not Edmund Burke.

Two, recognize that you can change the narrative. University administrators should not accept things, such as current public opinion, and adjust to the accepted narrative. The job of a university president is to change the narrative. Do not accept that people are hostile to the humanities and so you have to cloak your institution in the veil of STEM. Change the way people think about the humanities.

Three, stand up for your values. Institutional neutrality is a myth and a cover to get you to hide your democratic values. You should be actively defending the democratic values of freedom and equality. A democratic institution IS a political institution because it's defending democracy against other political systems such as authoritarianism in its various forms. By its nature as a democratic institution, the university is a political institution.

I receive all these emails from programs that are trying to bring Democrats and Republicans, Trump supporters and MAGA people, and those who oppose them, together for conversations to "understand one another" so we can have “civility” and “maintain community” and “get to understand each other better” to find “common ground” because "we are more alike than different." I have no interest in any of this. There is nothing to discuss. Am I being unreasonable? There are good and decent people who actually believe that engaging with neofascists and other enemies of democracy is somehow productive. 

This is the classic philosophical problem of tolerating the intolerant. You don't tolerate the intolerant by treating them as if they're tolerant. That's just foolish. Recognize that the people you are dealing with on today’s right-wing don't want to have a discussion. They want to take over your institutions, and they want to transform American society from a democracy into something else. Again, don’t be a liberal dupe or some type of useful idiot.

You are an expert in language and propaganda. How was the American right-wing able to weaponize DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs in higher education and elsewhere in service to their goal of ending multiracial pluralistic democracy?

The way the right-wing weaponized and distorted DEI programs is as American as apple pie. What they are basically saying is that any Black person in a position of power, particularly any Black woman, is not legitimate. Why? because positions of power should be held by white people – and preferably white men. Any other outcome is “anti-white” or the result of quotas or reverse racism or some other nonsense and racist white fantasies.

Donald Trump has made explicit xenophobia acceptable, and explicit racism more acceptable. But it is still the case that in America you need some code words for racism. DEI is such a code word and racist dog whistle. 

Part of this war on education in this time of democracy crisis involves the monitoring and harassment of teachers by the right-wing for thought crimes. This is happening across the country in public schools as well as at colleges and universities. An important and foundational question: why shouldn’t parents have the “right” to monitor a teacher in the classroom? Or the public or the larger community to monitor a college course and what is being taught there, especially at a publicly funded institution?

Educators are afraid of the fascists and other bullies. There's a group of people in this country, and any society really, who don't want minority perspectives taught. So, if the people observing you are members of dominant groups who want to exclude minority perspectives, then you know it’s not just your job, but your life that could potentially be at risk. 

Even in a less high-stakes situation, a teacher cannot do their job when they are under surveillance because that makes free discussion of ideas impossible. When you're constantly observed then you're worried about saying something that will offend someone. That is antithetical to free thinking and the democratic project in the classroom — a democratic culture. In such a classroom we are creating drones and not critical thinkers because the teachers are afraid of controversy. 

If Donald Trump and the Republicans win the upcoming election, are you staying in the country or are you leaving? You are most certainly on the enemies lists that Trump and his forces have already drawn up of people who are to be “punished” for disobedience to MAGA as enemies of the state. You could face prison or worse. I asked you this question the last time we spoke here at Salon. Where are you now?

I have had offers to teach in other countries. But I have turned down those offers even though it would be safer for me and my children. America is my damn country. It doesn’t belong to the fascists and authoritarians. I am not leaving. 

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Millions of Americans like Vance have lifted themselves out of hardship using federal education funds. I know this because I am one of them. As an education policy scholar, I know that Vance and I were lucky to be born in a country that makes such stories possible.

As described in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance overcame a hardscrabble childhood and attended Ohio State University on the federally funded GI Bill, which provides grants for thousands of veterans, including not only Vance but his vice-presidential rival, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Vance then received a partial scholarship from Yale Law School, likely supplemented by federal loans. 

My own story was not so different. It involved a chronically unemployed single parent, a stopover in foster care, and lots of packing up and moving around the South. Like Vance, I made my way through fancy universities thanks to their financial generosity and that of federal taxpayers.

But the policies that enabled journies like ours are fragile. The U.S. Department of Education that Republicans want to eliminate is in fact an economic engine. More than half of its budget goes toward Pell grants and federal loans for students who cannot afford college. Access to these dollars depends only on students’ financial need, not on their test scores or creditworthiness.

How might a Trump-Vance administration change that? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 presidential blueprint, spearheaded by a friend of Vance, lays out a plan. It would privatize the student loan market and get rid of the interest holidays and rate caps that make borrowing viable for low-income students. It would also end loan forgiveness for public service, a step that could even imperil the GI Bill that helped both vice presidential candidates. Project 2025 cites cost savings, explaining that “[i]t is not the responsibility of the federal government to provide taxpayer dollars to create a pipeline from high school to college” (p. 361).           

But isn’t it? College is costly. Pipelines exist when governments make them possible. 

On the day Vance was nominated at the Republican National Convention, I was in rural Mexico chatting with a bicycle-taxi driver who told me that his young son loves architecture but is unlikely to pursue it as a career. Tuition in public Mexican universities is low, but access for the rural poor depends on strong test scores and the ability to forego full-time work while living far from home.

If private markets could create pipelines for the poor, the bicycle-taxi driver in Mexico would see a path to college for his child. And perhaps he will yet find one. Global access to college is rising, though access for the poor remains low in three out of five countries. 

Surely JD Vance knows this. By calling universities “the enemy” for teaching racial inclusivity instead of celebrating their power to change lives, he undermines his own story. Trump tapped him as an avatar of working-class voters. But those voters need a champion, one who widens their path to opportunity. Those of us who found that path, including Vance, understand how narrow and bumpy it is. To block it further would hurt not only low-income youth but our nation’s prosperity.

Indeed, the cynicism of Project 2025 grows clearer as the presidential race evolves. Republicans now face off against Kamala Harris, who expanded education access in the justice system, and Walz, who made free school meals universal in Minnesota, an effort Project 2025 wants to “eliminate” as “wasteful” at the federal level (p. 303).

America’s future depends on investing in people, especially young people from families the economy has left behind. If Vance cares about working people, he should denounce ideas that would starve them in body and mind.

The post JD Vance knows better 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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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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It is not a matter of supporting a political party or issue. We in higher ed must stand up for the values that make free inquiry and teaching possible. We must defeat a movement that has already promised to seize control of how we study, conduct research, and teach. This is no time to seek refuge in doctrines of neutrality. Such doctrines led to the kind of flaccid, lawyerly responses we heard from Ivy League presidents testifying in front of Congress last week. “That depends,” is not an answer you want from someone whose job it is to protect students confronted with calls for their annihilation. 

Recently there has been a spate of articles about whether leaders in higher ed should speak out about atrocities or war crimes that, however distant, are having an impact on campuses. Some college presidents may be relieved to be told that they should stick to their core responsibilities (raising money) and avoid controversy. The abysmal performance of the presidents at a Congressional hearing will certainly encourage other leaders to keep their heads down.

While commentators rail against high education’s efforts at inclusion and the cultivation of so-called woke ideologies, students are increasingly choosing to focus their studies in fields more quantitative than value-laden. Disengagement, not protest, is the norm. Even some humanists urge their colleagues to stick to disinterested scholarship and preserve the “contemplative mood.” According to the author of an ill-timed recent NYT op-ed, this will somehow make those in the Humanities especially “irresistible.” 

We must resist this kind of intellectual isolationism – from presidents and from their institutions generally. 

We must refuse the privileges of “internal exile” in the face of tyranny and reject the ironic stance of professors who imagine that tenure is enough protection – at least for them. 

Why worry so much about another Trump presidency, some say, when we already survived one? Democrats, they argue, aren’t so great either.  Evasiveness comes easy. 

But Trump has put his cards on the table, making his positions known even more clearly than he did in 2016. Back then I wrote: “You don’t need a fascistic theory of government to use the inflammatory tactics of fascism. It is clear enough: given his rhetoric and behavior, Donald Trump’s election would undermine the foundations of the republic and cause fundamental harm to the country.” That’s exactly what Trump did, and the election denialism of 2020 and the failed coup of January 6 2021 are precursors of what’s in store for us if he prevails in the coming year.

It is foolhardy and immoral to imagine that we in the academy will be fine if we just keep to our scholarship. Whom do we think Trump has in mind when he attacks (however nonsensically) “the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”? “Vermin” was a favorite trope of Hitler’s, and the vermin Trump has in mind no doubt includes us in higher ed.    

Colleges and universities have long claimed that promoting civic participation and liberal learning through engagement in the public sphere is central to their mission. Professors and administrators often find themselves in disagreement, but there has been wide support for the idea that schools should help students develop civic preparedness, the ability to work across differences for the public good. 

Four years ago, Wesleyan University joined with other colleges and universities in Engage 2020, a project highlighting ways in which students develop the skills of citizenship. E2020 was centered on three principles:

1. Developing civic preparedness is a core element of the mission of American higher education.
2. Participating in American political life helps students learn from a diversity of ideas and people while developing skills for lifelong, active citizenship.
3. Empowering students and teachers to engage with the complex issues facing the country are crucial facets of higher education’s contributions to the common good.

More than three hundred schools from across the country were part of the E2020 network, from small colleges to large research universities. Although many of our plans for public activities were derailed by the COVID pandemic, we were able to motivate students to take up the challenge of democracy during an important election year.  

The urgency of this work has only grown, and now we’re calling for schools to double down on student democratic participation in 2024. We hear talk almost every day about the threats to our democracy – not just that one’s preferred candidate might lose but that the electoral system and the civic culture in which it is embedded is at profound risk. In order to do our part to shore up democracy and combat the rampant cynicism about elections, we must seize this moment to galvanize learning through political participation. By defending democracy, we will deepen learning; by deepening learning we will defend democracy. Both will make our educational institutions more effective, and this will create a virtuous circle of civic preparedness for the country as a whole.

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Many schools already belong to organizations like Campus Compact and All-In Campus Democracy Challenge that encourage voting; many already are focused on promoting free speech and civil dialogue on their campuses, like the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and Interfaith America. Such work strengthens civic culture, but schools now need to do even more. Those affiliated with E2020 are well positioned to collect best practices that can inspire students in the coming months to work on campaigns, or to organize in the public sphere around specific issues. Call it Democracy 2024.  As Danielle Allen has noted, “Any stable democracy must have a supermajority of citizens who are willing to invest time, talent and treasure in the healthy operation of the system itself, and that supermajority will necessarily span ideological divisions. The supermajority has to work together on democracy renovation to ensure that we have a stable system for contesting matters of substantive policy.” Colleges and universities have a responsibility to help build that supermajority and to help make it as inclusive as possible. D2024 can be a start. 

The inflammatory Donald Trump has promised to destroy the “healthy operation of the system itself.” We have been duly warned that he means it by people from across the political spectrum. Republican Liz Cheney has cautioned that we are “sleepwalking into dictatorship,” and Robert Kagan, usually called a neo-conservative, has sounded a similar alarm in The Washington Post. In an entire Atlantic issue devoted to warnings about a second Trump presidency, liberal David Frum writes that “for democracy to continue … the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants.” Now, he notes, we are “careening toward breakdown.” And Princeton political theorist Jan-Werner Müller reminds us in The Guardian that if Trump wins, he will take it that the people “have decided in favor of revenge and destruction.”

We in higher education should not be focused on poor presidential answers to a MAGA warrior’s questions. This amounts to fiddling (however irresistibly) when flames threaten to engulf the republic. We must affirm the core principles of civic education and take specific actions to defend democracy while it is still possible to do so. When the Kalven Report counseled schools to stay neutral in 1967 (rather than support civil rights or criticize the Vietnam War), even its cautious authors made an exception for moments when “the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.” This is such a moment. Whatever party or candidates one supports, colleges and universities must defend democracy to defend their very mission, to defend their values of free inquiry and teaching. At this time that means calling out the dangers of tyranny while inspiring democratic practices among young people (through efforts like D2024) so that we can defend our country from the incendiary forces now gathering around Donald Trump.

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As part of the class’s final portfolio, students were required to write a 3-4 page review of the poetry collection by John Murillo, winner of the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his powerful explorations of identity, desire and violence in the modern world. At the end of the spring semester, while trying to grade final projects to be submitted to the registrar’s online platform, I came across a student’s review that scared me. It was problematic and disappointing, yet more than that — frightening. The student had not read the poetry collection. The premise of their entire review was based on the state of contemporary American poetry beginning in the 1950s, which was inaccurate and had nothing to do with the collection at all. The student didn’t even care to investigate what the three Ks meant in Murillo’s book title.

It was then I realized I was looking at my first AI-generated paper, likely written by ChatGPT. The student had plagiarized to my eye, submitting their final portfolio with supreme confidence that I had little to no intelligence, that I would not notice the subtle nor the blatant imperfections. Upon further investigation, all the flash fiction and poetry appeared to have been AI-generated. My emotions went from anger to disappointment to sadness to reading between the tea leaves — or, as they say in my home state of Alabama, I could peep through mud and see dry land. I understood, at that moment in time, that I was staring at the reordering of the ordered order and possibly my own death as a writer, one who is committed to independent thinking and uses creativity and language to deconstruct the intricate ills of society, but also the joys and humanism of everyday life.

Through the mud and peeping onto dry land, I was confronted with the possibility that writers are now in a battle to confront: their very existence as creative minds, not to mention their intellectual property, as the Writers Guild of America’s ongoing strike in Hollywood shows. On that dry land, I stood witness to ruin and rubble against the backdrop of an invisible message resting on a cloud in the darkened sky that offered this cautionary tale: For all the good AI can and will bring, it will also leave devastation in its wake, and writers will drown in the undertow.

Dear Reader, with supersonic speed new constructs of artificial intelligence (AI) are being integrated into the contours of societal living, and for all the wonderful things AI can and has accomplished, there is also an underlying sentiment of concern on college and university campuses, and more specifically in English and creative writing programs. The scramble has now begun within these academic programs to address not only what this means to pedagogical practices, but how these practices will affect the act of writing going forward. Me, personally, I am not feeling the process of submitting a set of parameters to have artificial intelligence craft a draft of a poem I did not create myself, let alone place my name on it. Dear Reader, I also thought long and hard before writing this essay. I never want to sound like that person that time has passed by, a relic screaming in a dark ocean about nostalgia, the good old days, standing in the way of progress or advancement of the human race.

To be clear, we have been living with AI for a while. According to Forbes, these are some of the ways AI is already integrated within our everyday lives: “opening your phone with face ID, social media, sending an email or messages, Google Search, Digital Voice Assistant, Smart home devices, Banking and Amazon recommendations.” I would also add TVs, the weather, Siri, aviation control, space exploration. The list can go on and on.

I have never wanted to be the unprogressive, afraid-of-technology type of writer or professor.  

However, this ain’t that. This is different.                    

If there is such thing as a crossroads — that real or mythological place at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where legendary bluesman Robert Johnson was said to have met a bent-over elderly man walking with a cane and cap over his forehead (whom many would call Papa Legba or Eshu or Eleggua, that trickster orisha in African theology who seeped into the lexicon of American life via the slave trade, always reemerging to subvert) who gifted him an unexplainable talent that came with consequences and perhaps even his poisoned death — I would argue we are now at that intersection, a converging point where writers must collectively ask themselves if they are willing to sell their creative souls for the convenience of a hand clap, some sort of ego-derived praise, to take the easy-lazy path that requires no deep investigation, no deep learning, where you drive up, place your order, and pick up a short story to go.

To further understand this problem, I reached out to writers in administrative roles to get their take on the state of AI.

“We are going to have to find ways to teach students how to use AI as a tool and not a crutch,” said Dr. Jaqueline Trimble, an award-winning poet who lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, and is chair of English at Alabama State University. “Nothing is going to stop cheating 100%, but if we learn to use AI creatively and teach students how to do it, they may be less likely to cheat, especially if we have better-designed assignments that are more cheat-resistant.”

Dr. Christopher Dowd, chair of my English Department at the University of New Haven and a fiction and nonfiction writer, said he worries that AI will damage the learning of some students in English courses if they use it to bypass doing the work. 

“I also worry that it will damage English Departments long term as some students going forward will not see value in being able to read critically and write well, as they believe those are tasks that can just be delegated to AI,” Dowd said. “This could lead to a decline in the perceived value of English and the presence of English Departments in the future. And this would come concurrently with a potentially grave decline in literacy and basic writing ability of college students.”

I asked both writers how alarmed they are at the ease and speed with which AI technology is being introduced. Do they think the practice of creative writing — poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction — is in jeopardy? Where does AI leave the writer? 

“I can mimic Toni Morrison, but I can’t sustain that mimicry for a whole novel nor provide the million nuanced understandings that came from a lifetime of living from her particular perspective. Every bit of technology changes the practice of writing — the pencil did, the printing press did, the word processor did, Amazon did, but we are still here,” she said. “Amazon will be able to produce a lot more cheap, predictable books. Some networks will be able to churn out a lot of cheap, predictably plotted stories, but brilliant writing will rise to the top, and some people will tire of the snacks and want a satisfying meal.”

“Clearly, there is a widespread perception of danger to the creative arts (not just writing),” Dowd said. “The current writers’ strike in Hollywood is in part responding to the danger of AI replacing writers’ jobs. Similar concerns are out there about replacing visual artists, musicians, and even actors. If AI can do these jobs faster and for less money than human artists, it will certainly impact the livelihoods of creative artists.” 

When asked the same set of questions, Sonya Huber — an essayist, memoir writer and journalist who is associate professor of creative writing at Fairfield University and director of the low residency MFA program — said she was “so torn” about AI. 

“I’m already working ChatGPT into my classes because I know we have to engage with it and be open about its strengths and limitations,” she said. “But as an author and researcher I’m deeply uneasy that our hold on what is ‘fact’ will become even more tenuous as we get used to computer applications that can fabricate viewpoints and information through predictive text with no acknowledgment of what is human and what is real.”

Dr. Shauna Morgan, a poet as well as associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky — a faculty member in one of the most diverse MFA programs in the country in terms of alumni, faculty and students — was quick to point out that she “initially felt some trepidation when AI topics first became a part of our regular discussions.”

“I am, admittedly, still mainly a paper and pencil writer,” Morgan said. “I find the conversation intriguing, however — particularly for the questions it raises about language and the evolution of meaning-making.” 

Morgan also invoked Toni Morrison in response to the threats that AI could pose to the creative writer. 

“I keep returning to what Toni Morrison said about Black art in her essay ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.’ The point she shares about her ‘struggle to find that elusive but identifiable style’ characteristic of Black writing demands that we acknowledge the constraints of AI when it comes to making art,” Morgan said. “In ‘City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black Fiction,’ an essay published in 1981, [Morrison] offers a prescient observation about the state of (then) ‘mainstream’ writing in this country in contrast to Black writing. One statement that stays with me is ‘writer after writer after writer concedes that the ancestor is the matrix of his yearning.’ What is the yearning of AI? Of its programmers? Of the corporations who develop it?” 

My conversations made it clear to me that there is not one singular solution, thought or approach to AI in the English classroom or in the writer’s practice. 

When the fall semester began, I was hellbent on trying to correct what I saw as AI encroaching on what is essential to a great classroom experience. I lectured my Intro to Creative Writing class for 45 minutes straight on how I felt about AI technology as it relates to the writer and its place in my creative classroom. I told them they were handwriting all drafts in a writing journal that would be graded each week. I need to know that they were writing original work. However, that night at home in my study, upon reviewing what I shared in class, I did not feel good about it. I thought about my conversations with other writers and academics. I told my class what I wanted and thought, but I never asked them what they wanted or thought. I was talking at them and not with them. I did not give them any kind of grace. I, of all people, should know better. In each class I teach, I constantly challenge the notion of what it means to be an ex-con or convict or inmate, those stereotypical monitors (that I do not believe in) that are more about perception than reality. I judged my students, and that was wrong.

I told them so in the next class, as I apologized for not asking what they thought. We spent that entire period talking about what they do and don’t like about AI. When it comes to creative writing, they also feel that is sacred ground.

I still do believe we are at a crossroads in terms of what AI means for the future of creative writing. I know also that each younger generation has battles to face. This generation is now on deck and must address and define this issue going forward for the generations after them. I decided the classroom is right where I need to be, to mold and help shape this generation of potential writers while embracing their truth, their reality, their languages.

I remember watching “The Jetsons” as a kid. The scientific technology imagined in that cartoon was futuristic, way ahead of its time. Now technology has caught up and is headed for an unknown destination. Will it be guided by the creative writer, or will the future reveal the death of the writer?

Only time will tell. The first step is to talk about it.

The post Are we witnessing the death of the writer? Facing the AI crossroads in class and on the page appeared first on Salon.com.

In all, today’s right-wing revanchist-controlled Supreme Court is doing the work of returning American society to the Gilded Age (if not before) as part of a neofascist revolutionary political project to end the country’s multiracial democracy and pluralistic society.

In her dissent, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is the first Black woman Supreme Court Justice in the history of that institution, focused on the absurd reasoning and claim that American society is fundamentally “colorblind”:

With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.

No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain. If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.

And in her dissent, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is the first Latina on the court, wrote:

[T]he Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter….The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society. Because the Court’s opinion is not grounded in law or fact and contravenes the vision of equality embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, I dissent.

Of course, Donald Trump, the twice-impeached ex-president and presumed 2024 Republican presidential nominee felt compelled to issue a statement in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to kill affirmative action. On his Truth Social disinformation propaganda platform, Trump celebrated that:

This is a great day for America. People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success, including future greatness for our Country, are finally being rewarded. This is the ruling everyone was waiting and hoping for and the result was amazing. It will also keep us competitive with the rest of the world. Our greatest minds must be cherished and that’s what this wonderful day has brought. We’re going back to all merit-based—and that’s the way it should be!

The never-magnanimous Trump would later claim credit for the ruinous Supreme Court decisions of these last few terms, declaring that “his” justices are “gold.” 

Trump’s statement in response to the SCOTUS affirmative action decision is rife with white racist lies, white rage, distortions and abuses of historical facts, white racist fantasies and white victimology, prejudice, white supremacy, anti-rationality, ignorance, intellectual dishonesty, and a deeply held belief that any outcome in American society where a white person (or white people as a group) do not automatically “win” or otherwise get their way is somehow unfair and unjust. The unifying thread in Trump’s statement and the racist imagination it represents is white entitlement. It is what American Studies scholar George Lipsitz has compellingly described as “the possessive investment in whiteness.” 

Trump’s statement proceeds from the racist fiction and lie that “affirmative action” is some type of “quota” for “undeserving” Black people. In a recent interview here at Salon, Berkeley law professor Khiara M. Bridges intervenes, explaining that, “Race-based affirmative action specifically says that we ought to be conscious of a student’s race when making admissions decisions, because a student’s race might help us understand their grades and standardized test scores. Race contextualizes those numbers. Despite what conservatives say about it, affirmative action is not some type of ‘handout’ like ‘welfare’ for lazy and unqualified Black and brown people.”

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Unfortunately, Donald Trump is not just speaking for himself. He is a fountain and mouthpiece for White America (the not so “silent majority”) writ large and the delusional and paranoiac belief that somehow it is white people, not Black and brown people, who are the “real victims” of racism in America. In the world as it actually exists white people in America control every major political, social, and economic institution, and by extension the vast majority of the country’s income, wealth, and other resources.  

Donald Trump said that the Supreme Court’s decision was a “great day for America.” Who is included in his “America”? Who was it in fact “great” for? Most certainly not the Black and brown Americans and others who will be denied a fair opportunity to enroll in some of the country’s most elite institutions of higher learning, and by doing so improve their chances of accessing the American Dream and contributing their talents and skills to the betterment of American society at the highest levels. It is also not a “great day” for the white students and others who greatly benefit from being in classrooms and other spaces with Black and brown people and other students from racially diverse backgrounds. Who are these people with “extraordinary ability” who have somehow been denied their “rewards”?

Donald Trump is most certainly not speaking about how American society from before the Founding to the present continues to deny equal and fair opportunities to extraordinary Black and brown people and members of other marginalized groups because of the color of their skin. Here Trump is also assuming that Black and brown people are intellectually inferior as compared to white people. The greatness that Trump is yearning for as the leader of the neofascist MAGA movement and larger white right is to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy by returning the country to the “good old days” when Black and brown people were second-class citizens, women were not considered equal to men, and gays and lesbian people were disappeared from mainstream public life. 

Trump’s “merit-based” society is white privilege and white power and white domination unrestrained and unchecked. America has never been a “merit-based” society. Moreover, Trump himself is a living embodiment of how American society is not “merit based”. Trump inherited and was loaned large sums of money from his father that he in turn used to start his business(es). He gained admission to Wharton Business School, most certainly not based on intellectual merit or ability, but because of family connections. One of Donald Trump’s professors at Wharton described him as “the dumbest goddamned student” he ever had. In many ways, Donald Trump’s entire life is a story of the types of privilege and other unearned advantages afforded to rich white men in America.

He has also convinced himself that ending affirmative action programs will make America “competitive with the world.” The actual data shows, however, that more diverse and inclusive groups, organizations and societies are more dynamic, innovative, successful and prosperous.

The real story of a given Supreme Court decision is in the footnotes. This is especially true of the recent decision to end race-based affirmative action in higher education. In that vein, the following footnotes and annotations would illuminate and rebut the incorrect beliefs and conclusions that Donald Trump’s statements about affirmative action — and by implication the color line in America — represent.

In this 2020 interview, sociologist Joe Feagin explains how what he describes as “the white racial frame” distorts how (most) white people understand the realities of race and racism in American society:

For centuries, that white racial frame has provided a dominant worldview from which most whites (and many others) regularly view this society. While it includes racist prejudices, even more important are its racist narratives about society, its strong racist images, its powerful racist emotions and its inclinations to racist actions. Especially important is that this broad white framing has a very positive orientation to whites as generally superior and virtuous (a pro-white subframe) and a negative orientation to various racial “others” substantially viewed as inferior and unvirtuous (anti-others subframes).

This frame motivates and rationalizes white racist discrimination targeting African Americans, including police brutality and violence such as that involved in the cases of African American men and women that you mention, and hundreds of others. The likely motivation for such police malpractice is more than racial bias. These events typically involve a white racial framing that not only stereotypes and interprets Black people and their actions in negative terms as unvirtuous — e.g., dangerous, criminal, violent, druggies — but also portrays whites, including police officers, as virtuous, manly, superior and dominant. Also central in many such incidents appear to be white emotions of anger, fear, resentment or arrogance. The way in which whites view themselves in these settings is at least as important as their negative views of those they target with discrimination.

In her book “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide”, historian Carol Anderson highlights the power of white rage and the harm it causes Black and brown people:

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement. It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather, it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is Blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished Black resilience, Black resolve.

In his essential book “When Affirmative Action Was White,” historian Ira Katznelson details how government policies and laws have systemically given resources and other opportunities to white people and denied them to nonwhites, especially Black Americans:

When Affirmative Action Was White is one result of this endeavor. It reveals how policy decisions dealing with welfare, work, and war during Jim Crow’s last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s excluded, or differentially treated, the vast majority of African Americans. It also traces how inequality, in fact, increased at the insistence of southern representatives in Congress, while their other congressional colleagues were complicit. As a result of the legislation they passed, Blacks became even more significantly disadvantaged when a modern American middle class was fashioned during and after the Second World War. Public policy, including affirmative action, has insufficiently taken this troubling legacy into account.

I wonder who white folks will now blame for their life failures and other frustrations and disappointments now that affirmative action in higher education — and soon across American society — is dead? Who will they rage against when they and/or their “best and brightest” and so “very smart” and “special” and “unique” children don’t get admitted into their first choice of a college or university? When they, who of course are the “best at their job”, are not promoted because a “minority” supposedly “took my spot!”

Will that frustrated white entitlement shrivel and explode or will it become something else?

I know the answer. It will be the same one that it has always been for centuries in America. Nonetheless, the question still demands to be asked because of what the answer reveals about the character and nature of American society and the enduring power of the color line in these horrible days of the Age of Donald Trump and beyond.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article identified Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black Supreme Court Justice; she is the first Black woman to serve in that role. The story has been corrected. 

The post Who will entitled white people blame now that affirmative action is over? appeared first on Salon.com.

This was almost 20 years ago, when going to college felt like the answer to everything. Today, I have been a college professor myself for more than 10 years. And with the mountain of uncertainty and chaos we log onto every day, including the student debt crisis, I am questioning whether I want my own child to go to college. The LA Times recently reported on food influencers‘ ability to make and break restaurants, with some charging up to $10,000 for an Instagram post about a single meal. That’s the entirety of many people’s student loan forgiveness in one reel. Should I have my daughter start an influencing career now instead? 

The streets sucked the life out of me by my mid-20s. By 2005, most of my remaining friends were in one of two places —the penitentiary or deep in one of the city’s many cemeteries. I was lost. I didn’t have any real direction outside of guys like Bo pushing me toward school. 

“Listen to me, D,” Bo said. “You still young. F**k the streets, man. Don’t settle for no job. I gotta job. Man, job’s not the way — you have no power. But college — college people run everything!” 

“I’ll never touch another drug again,” I responded. “That’s on everything I love. I need to do something.” 

That wasn’t my first time thinking about or attempting to go to college. I had been accepted to a number of universities coming out of high school and even attended briefly, but dropped out due to depression, culture shock and a lack of guidance. 

“My man from up top went to a community college. Two years of school and he makes like $190k a year, boy!” Bo continued. “That’s better than dope money, because you can keep it!”

My eyes lit up at the thought of making a small fortune, having an office and a daily agenda. But clearly there were questions I should have asked at that moment that I did not: 

• Why didn’t Bo go to college, if it’s so simple and so lucrative?
• Why didn’t “his man” have a name?
• What community college did he attend?
• What did he major in?
• Who paid him that kind of money and what did he do? 

I was young and green in all matters dealing with being a productive citizen in a legal, structured society. Street smarts and living like an outlaw had been the foundation of my existence. I had never really known a person from my neighborhood who had graduated from college. Maybe they existed and were making so much money they didn’t have time to come back and mentor a guy like me. Maybe the people who used education as a way to escape poverty figured out the secrets of financial stability and weren’t hungry to share them. But if these imaginary people did it, then maybe I could do it too. And if I’m being 100 percent honest, once Bo mentioned that earning potential, I could not see myself doing anything else with my life. I left that corner, hopped on the nearest computer and scoured the Internet, looking for schools to attend.

I enrolled in the University of Baltimore, a small liberal arts college in the middle of the city, as a criminal justice major. I figured that I would have an edge because I’d spent some years as a criminal, and I believed in justice for us. 

My advisor, a sharp woman with an aggressive smile, welcomed me with open arms. 

“You are young and in search of education,” she told me, patting my shoulder a bit too hard. “They could use you on the force!”

“Force?” I answered, clearly confused.

“Yes, young man. The city needs more educated Black police officers.”

This woman clearly had no idea who she was talking to, so I didn’t hold anything against her. But in my first criminal justice class, I found myself in a room full of cops — or at least, men and women who looked like cops, dressed like cops and smelled like cops. I dropped that class and my other criminal justice course and scheduled another meeting with the advisor.

“I’m not the cop type,” I told her. “I need out of this major.”

I replaced the cop classes with philosophy courses. Lucky for me I had also enrolled in a political history class, taught by a brilliant professor named Dr. Eric Singer. 

Dr. Singer, who was finishing his Ph.D. at the time, was young and energetic, and he had a way of explaining history as if it was a colorful soap opera full of heroes and villains and people who acted as both throughout different parts of their lives. After his first lecture, I knew I would go on to take every class this guy ever taught. Two weeks after starting his political history class, I switched my major to history, even though the research skills I was learning had quickly taught me that history majors weren’t being handed entry level positions that paid $190,000, or even $90,000, and maybe not even $60,000. But suddenly the money didn’t seem as important. In that first semester, the information I consumed started feeling way better than the mountains of cash Bo had initially sold me on. I learned about Black Americans during Reconstruction, poor drug policy, and how toxic Ronald Reagan really had been. And it was fun. There were important parts of me missing before I attended university — gaping holes in my personality, spirit, understanding of the world and ability to dream that were being filled with my college education. And I would love for my daughter to have the same feeling one day.  

I dropped out of my first try at college when I was 18 because I attended a predominantly white school, where my fellow students came from money and generations of advanced education. Culturally, I stuck out like a sixth toe. I was 25 when I got to UB. And my peers, especially the students I connected with the most, were first-generation college students and a little older, just like me. We didn’t bond at frat parties or during drinking games. Our connections were rooted in our takes on society as we worked full-time while trying to graduate. We weren’t first-generation college students because our parents were ignorant or didn’t understand the power of education. We were all from poor families, and college for the poor is still a relatively new phenomenon in America. 

The Higher Education Act of 1965 was birthed out of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. One of its primary initiatives was to provide low-income students with the resources needed to attend college. Prior to the Higher Education Act, college was either a rich person’s game or designed for people who could work to pay their way through. Johnson’s policy opened up higher education for the rest of us. Before the cost of living and tuition skyrocketed, higher education for all was a beautiful idea; however, I’m sure Johnson didn’t know he was planting the seeds that would eventually grow into the $1.75 trillion-dollar forest of student debt we currently reside in. 

“You look good, boy, you taking care of yourself?” Bo said to me at our alma mater Dunbar High’s homecoming game the year after I finished undergrad. The two of us, draped in the school’s maroon colors, watched the game from the top of the bleachers. “You good?”

“I’m good man, just looking for a job. I want to use this degree,” I said. “Where your homeboy work, the one that gets $190k a year?” 

“Ah, man, I didn’t tell you?” Bo chuckled. “Dude is in federal prison. He was a scammer. He never went to school!” 

My first job out of college ended up being as a long-term substitute teacher at a Baltimore City public high school. On the first day, I made my way past blunt guts and crumpled up pieces of paper lining the floor around cracked-in-half desks and shells of machines that used to be computers piled in the hall right in front of my classroom. It was the most chaotic place I had ever stepped foot in — even more out of control than my own days as a Baltimore City public school student. 

The school eventually hired me as a staff member because of the teacher shortage, along with my ability to connect with students and mentor them in the way I needed guidance back when I was their age. The school also promised to promote me to a leadership position after I got the necessary certifications. I enrolled in Johns Hopkins University to study education at the graduate level with the hopes of earning a Master’s and then a Ph.D. I dreamed of opening my own school one day to provide a different experience than the ones my students and I had. And while studying at Hopkins, I became addicted to creative writing in a memoir class and switched plans again.

I do want my child to have the same kinds of educational experiences and revelations. I want her to have the opportunity to try things and abandon them, then revisit them and excel beyond her wildest dreams. I never would have found my passion for storytelling and my writing career if I hadn’t stumbled into that criminal justice class I hated or gotten lost in the history class I loved. That history class sparked my interest in teaching, which led me into the school system and then to Hopkins to study education, where my love for memoir sent me back to the University of Baltimore to get my MFA. That’s where I met my first real mentor in the writing world, Marion Winik, who made me feel like I could have a career with words. Without Singer and Winik, I would not be a professor at the University of Baltimore today.

I needed college for exposure and camaraderie. But more importantly, I needed it for connections. Poor people normally aren’t able to excel inside mainstream systems because they don’t have the right connections. They can’t call an uncle or a friend of their dad’s who owns a company and is willing to look past their inexperience and offer a competitive starting salary. College has been the gateway to connections for many people like me. But do my wife and I need to spend a quarter of a million dollars to buy our daughter those kinds of connections? After all, we already made them.  

My child is my child, so my network will be her network. She won’t need a crafty teacher to trick her into loving books, because at two years old she already demands to be read to every day. She attends an elite early learning center and will probably spend her formative years in a sheltered private school — nothing like the schools I attended. She already has a schedule, a tight curriculum and parents who challenge her consistently. So if she doesn’t want to be a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse, or any profession that actually requires a degree, should we assume she will automatically go?

Should we push her to visit campuses and design her adolescence around being a competitive applicant, then spend what will likely be hundreds of thousands of dollars for her to sit in on lectures she can also watch on YouTube, read books she can check out for free from the public library, and gain access to professional networks and connections my wife and I have already established?

Maybe she will have her own reasons to want to go to college besides feeling like she has to in order to succeed. Or maybe the thing that will make her feel the way I did in history class will be sharing with her followers how good it feels to dip a gourmet grilled cheese in locally-grown tomato soup. She’s good at that already, and I hear it pays well. 

The post College was necessary for me. Will my own child need it like I did? appeared first on Salon.com.

You’ve compared tuition. Reviewed on-campus housing costs. Even digested student meal plan prices.

But have you thought about how much your son’s or daughter’s dream school will charge for health coverage?

You might be in for a shock.

Hawley Montgomery-Downs was thrilled when daughter Bryn Tronco earned a scholarship that pays half the $63,000 annual tuition at the University of Southern California. But just as school was starting in August, she was stunned to receive a bill from USC for $3,000 to cover both a student health insurance premium and a fee that allows students to access on-campus clinics and other services. At home in West Virginia, she had paid nothing for her daughter’s health insurance, through the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, which serves lower- and middle-class families.

Montgomery-Downs, who lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, was especially upset that USC not only billed her for health insurance but a $1,050 annual health fee. “It would be nice for her to go to the student health center, but with buying insurance to go to a primary care provider, it feels like I am paying twice,” she said.

Mandatory medical insurance and health service fees are common at colleges as a condition of enrollment, said Stephen Beckley, a Fort Collins, Colorado, health and benefits consultant to colleges. While the health fee can help reduce students’ insurance premiums, parents may feel as though they are paying double. “That’s a big conundrum for our field,” he said.

For parents, these big payments might come as a surprise, making a barely affordable education feel even less so. After all, students can economize by choosing a skimpy meal plan and cooking their own dinners or buying used textbooks, but there is no way around the mandatory health fees.

The costs vary by school but often can amount to several thousand dollars a year — costs that health care advocates say should be carefully reviewed by parents and students to ensure they understand their options while also meeting university requirements.

Students can seek a waiver to university health insurance by showing they have their own insurance or are covered by their parent’s insurance that meets specific university criteria. Schools typically want to see that a student’s own insurance covers local doctors and hospitals for little out-of-pocket cost. Student health fees, however, generally can’t be waived.

USC, a private college, charges $2,273 a year for its Aetna student health insurance plan. The average for public colleges is $2,712 and $3,540 at private universities, according to a 2022 survey by Beckley’s firm, Hodgkins Beckley & Lyon.

Other prominent colleges charge much more, such as $6,768 at Stanford and $4,163 at Dartmouth College.

The University of Montana charges $4,700, and most services at its school health clinic are fully covered by its health plan. The University of Colorado charges $3,976.

At Harvard, students buying the school’s insurance pay $4,080 annually and $1,304 for the student health fee.

The easiest solution to avoid these charges would be for students to stay on a parent’s health policy — which the Affordable Care Act allows until they turn 26. But that works only if the student’s parent has a policy that meets the school’s comprehensive requirements and offers in-network coverage where the college is located.

Otherwise, parents may want to shop among ACA marketplace plans to see if they can find a bargain. If their incomes are low enough, students can sometimes enroll in Medicaid or a CHIP plan in states where they go to school. But this strategy has limitations as well. Students must meet state residency requirements where they go to school, and parents cannot claim them as a dependent on tax returns. CHIP coverage also expires once a student turns 19.

Schools that charge a student health fee and require insurance coverage say the funding helps cover services at campus health clinics, which otherwise would cost students hundreds of dollars a year or more.

The USC student health fee — which covers primary and preventive health services — also helps the school pay for services not typically covered by insurance, such as monitoring disease outbreaks on campus.

Dr. Sarah Van Orman, chief health officer of USC Student Health, noted that the student health fee provides funding for additional mental health providers on campus and a team focused on sexual assault prevention and education — services available to students without any copayments. She said these additions are vital because, even with insurance, students could face challenges finding private counselors to provide timely help and, if they do, students would have cost-sharing expenses.

“The student health fee supports our public health infrastructure on campus,” Van Orman said.

Because students can get primary health services on campus at the student health center, fewer of them seek care paid for by the insurance, she said, and that helps keep the monthly premium on the Aetna student health insurance plan lower. “These things are working together and are not at all duplicative,” Van Orman said.

USC’s student health insurance has an in-network annual deductible of $450 and a $20 copay for physician office visits. It also provides comprehensive services nationwide, so students are covered when at school and back at home — even if that’s across the country. About half the USC students buy the Aetna student insurance, according to Van Orman.

Other colleges have a different strategy. For instance, George Washington University‘s mandatory health insurance covers health center services on campus. Unless they get a waiver, undergraduates must enroll in the student health insurance plan — costing $2,700 a year — unless they prove they have another insurance plan that meets the school’s criteria. The health plan premium allows students to get many free services at the student health center, including medical office visits, some prescriptions, and routine screenings for sexually transmitted infections.

Beckley said college rules vary on whether they allow students to choose insurance plans other than what the school offers.

USC allows students to buy an alternative insurance policy through their parents’ plan or on the ACA marketplace as long as it meets the school’s requirements that include comprehensive health coverage in the Los Angeles area and covering preventive care with zero cost sharing. Out-of-state Medicaid or CHIP plans don’t meet the university’s criteria because they don’t have provider networks for routine care in California.

That was unwelcome news to Montgomery-Downs.

“This is not something we budgeted for,” she said of USC’s health costs.

Montgomery-Downs, a former associate professor at West Virginia University who now works as a freelance editor, said she wasn’t sure what to do when she got the USC health bill. She had thought Bryn, who turned 19 last week, would be covered initially because her CHIP plan provided coverage for treatment at emergency rooms and urgent care centers out of state. And Montgomery-Downs wanted to make sure her daughter had health coverage on summer and holiday breaks when home.

Unsure of which marketplace coverage options would meet the school’s rules and deadlines, she decided to go with the Aetna student plan USC offered.

A look at marketplace options on Covered California shows the $2,200 for the USC Aetna student plan is a competitive rate. The lowest-priced comparable PPO plan offered by California Blue Cross that would provide Bryn a national network of providers costs about $2,400 a year factoring in a government subsidy based on their family income. PPOs provide some coverage for out-of-network doctors and hospitals.

Montgomery-Downs gets her coverage on the marketplace and said she will shop for a marketplace plan for Bryn for the next school year. She said she wishes they had been aware of all the health costs at the time of admission rather than just before classes began.

“It’s all nightmarish, even for someone with the privilege of time and some understanding of these bureaucracies — higher education and medical insurance,” Montgomery-Downs said.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

The post After tuition, books, and room and board, colleges’ rising health fees hit a nerve appeared first on Salon.com.

After the news broke, Sanders tweeted, “Change makes people get uncomfortable. Change is inevitable in every age & stage of life but it somehow someway brings Love but Hate, Joy but Sorrow & Life & Death. There’s a time & season for every activity under the sun the bible declares. CHANGE is INEVITABLE. #CoachPrime” 

I know what you might be thinking: Who cares about a college coach switching jobs? Coaches move schools all the time, right? Especially for a better offer. His new deal, according to The Denver Post, includes $5.5 million for his first season alone. Jackson State was paying Sanders $300,000 per year. Colorado will be more than quadrupling his annual pay, on top of other incentives. This is America, right? And we know the rule is to be paid. To save your space, time, energy and — most importantly — your talents for the highest bidder. I honestly don’t think anyone has a problem admitting that. However, Deion’s situation is different. 

Now certain Republican politicians and other deniers of racism will never admit that America was built on the backs of Black people who slaved all day — literally — and weren’t legally allowed to share space with our white counterparts, even after emancipation. That meant we couldn’t live in the same neighborhoods, shop at white stores or eat at white restaurants. We couldn’t even drink out of the same water fountains, let alone be educated at white colleges. As a result, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were established. And you don’t have to be a history expert to know that colleges for Black people, like Jackson where Sanders coached, have been historically underfunded. 

In 2022, Forbes did a deep dive into the history of America cheating its Black colleges, even though these intuitions were responsible for educating “80% of Black judges, 50% of Black lawyers and doctors and 25% of Black science, technology, engineering and math graduates.” Here’s how poorly North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NC A&T), the country’s largest HBCU, is funded compared to predominately white public institutions: 

“The single worst instance of annual underfunding for any school was in 2020, when the North Carolina legislature appropriated A&T $95 million, $8,200 less per student than the $16,400 per student it gave to NC State. Instructional expenses per student at NC State: $15,681, versus $7,631 for the HBCU. Even Student Services, which includes admissions and the registrar’s office, are better funded at the predominantly white school. At NC State it amounts to $1,342 per Wolfpacker versus $726 per Aggie.” 

So imagine if you are one of the top Black athletes in America with dreams of playing professional sports. Do you enroll at the mega-white college with the pro-athlete-sized stadium, located on the campus with the pro-athlete-equipped fitness center, and the necessary contracts needed to put you on television every week just like a pro, or do you commit to the historically underfunded Black school that produces a small fraction of professional athletes compared to big white schools? Deion Sanders was on the road to changing the predictable outcome of that question. 

I want to be extremely clear that Jackson State was lit before Coach Prime was blessed with the coaching job. They were known for their magnetic energy, beautiful history and having some of the most passionate students in America. However, Prime’s use of social media is so good that my wife who doesn’t even watch football knew that he lost two toes, because like millions of other people, she tunes into his Instagram like a TV show. Add that to his larger-than-life NFL persona, crazy dance moves, Tony Roberts meets Diddy pre- and post-game speeches and coaching ability gloriously amplified the magic experience that was Jackson State. He coached the school to two consecutive Celebration Bowl appearances and the only undefeated season in the school’s history. For the first time since colleges were desegregated, Black fans across the board were raving about HBCU sports and Black players were considering, getting excited about, and actually attending HBCUs — including Prime’s own son Shedeur Sanders, the star quarterback at Jackson State. 

Since the announcement, Prime has hinted at Shedeur leaving. Also, star wide receiver Robert Lockhart, Jordan Hall, Twan Wilson, and other top recruits have already de-committed from Jackson State, which is the worst news resulting from the departure. Losing top recruits means diminished hope for the potential to make tens of millions of dollars or more in revenue from ticket and memorabilia sales, donations from excited alumni and TV deals that could go toward Jackson hiring more top academics, building a bigger and better stadium, expanding the campus, introducing new disciplines, and overall elevating the school, not to mention closing some of those gaps found in the Forbes study. 

HBCU advocates, Jackson fans and spectators following Coach Prime’s viral motivational speeches have been ripping him apart on Instagram and Twitter all week. The basic narrative is that he used Jackson to propel himself to a godly status and then abandoned it as soon as the white school came knocking. 

“In coaching, you either get elevated or get terminated. Ain’t no other way,” Sanders told his team.

Joining the white school is elevating? I don’t think he meant the people. I think he was referring to the same money and resources that have been leading Black athletes away from HBCUs historically. Jackson did bless Sanders with his first head coaching gig. But we must acknowledge that he was already one of the most celebrated athletes in sports history and a successful commentator on “NFL Today.” Sanders also has a history of preaching, motivating and sharing the word of God everywhere he goes — that energy he became known for over the last two years at Jackson is him all of the time. Dude has been like a running, jumping and rapping one-man mega-church­­, even back in the 1990s when he visited my high school. 

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I attended Paul Laurence Dunbar, a citywide school surrounded by five housing projects. And while the school has been known for producing celebrated world-class athletes like Reginald Lewis, Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues, Sam Cassell and Tavon Austin, professionals never visited our school in an effort to motivate us. No doctors, no lawyers, no journalists, no politicians, no reverends. Nobody except Prime. 

“Line up, straighten up, clean it up,” Mr. Brown, our sharpest history teacher — and a heavy HBCU advocate — said to us as we entered the auditorium, “Chin up, doctors, keep those heads up.” 

Even though Dunbar’s student population was predominantly female — not on purpose, it just worked out that way — the assembly was for boys. The mid-’90s was one of the most dangerous segments of the crack era. Baltimore had an extremely high murder rate, and many of the boys who weren’t going to make it in sports like Sanders needed some kind of hope, some other inspiration, even just an example of the kind of success that could exist outside our neighborhoods. Enter Prime. 

It is important for people to know that Deion wasn’t at the end of his career when he decided to visit us. He was actually at the top — an icon, a mega star, a guy with his own Nike sneaker. Prime was in his prime. He didn’t need to go speak to a bunch of poor kids, but he did. The power of his stardom kind of drowned out the bouncing around on stage, the “you can do it” rants, and his message in general, but he came. He came to inspire us when no one else did. Over 20 years have passed, and the impact of that visit still holds meaning for so many of us. It is not strange for one of my friends from high school to say, “Yo, remember that time Prime came?” 

Coach Prime had no connection to Dunbar. I’m sure he visited schools like mine all over the country, which is an honorable gesture. That does not mean he is not capable of hurting people. Both things can be true. Prime can have a big heart with good intentions, while simultaneously breaking the hearts of others. And that’s what happened. Adults who get to pick and choose where they decide to work, live, and play are using social media to attack Coach Prime for doing the same. So let’s say this all together: Coach Prime was great for Jackson State, but he is not a savior. He is not and will never be. He is a person. After two magnificent years as head coach at Jackson, poverty is still poverty, earning a livable wage is still a luxury, Ted Cruz is still employed, and Black people are still dying at alarming rates. The Savior Industrial Complex (I think I just made that up) is hurting us as much as Sanders hurt the fans of Jackson, if not more.

It bothers me that we are not using this moment to properly capitalize on the positive energy that surrounded Jackson State over the last two years. HBCU graduate (Texas Southern University) and former NFL player turned “GMA” host Michael Strahan acknowledged the star power high-profile coaches like Sanders bring to these institutions in an interview here at Salon last year. “These kids want to see someone that they’ve admired or someone that they’ve seen on TV, who’s had success,” he said.

We should be using this moment to encourage more successful black coaches, former professional athletes with an interest in coaching, and other powerful Black people in sports, to flood the HBCUs and continue to carry the torch so star coaches don’t have to leave in search of more money, media and resources. And while we’re at it, Strahan gave this advice in that interview, too: “[I]f you have an opportunity to support an HBCU, do your best to support them.” Donating to Jackson State and other HBCUs is extremely easy. That will go a lot further than bashing Prime or refusing to critique the white power structure that is collegiate sports. 

The post Coach Prime is not the HBCU savior: On Deion Sanders and the money-making machine of college sports appeared first on Salon.com.

Yet the fundamental rot in the American university system goes far deeper than any system of rankings. As author, John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and Harvard Law alumnus Evan Mandery explores in his new book “Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us,” it’s our Ivy League and elite “Ivy plus” schools that perpetuate a disingenuous narrative of merit and achievement — and the illusion of opportunity.

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Drawing on individual stories and fascinating data, Mandery shows that while our so-called top schools are indeed a path to mobility and security for most students, that mobility and security are accessible almost exclusively to the already well-off. And it’s a self-perpetuating cycle that bends firmly toward greed — as Mandery chillingly notes, “Over 70 percent of Harvard seniors apply to investment banks or consulting firms. Once upon a time, the Ivies produced doctors and lawyers. Not anymore.”

If you feel like maybe as a nation we’re getting crueler, dumber and far less equitable, can you even imagine what we could be if we had a higher education system that wasn’t perpetually glorifying its own self-defined “best and brightest”? 

Salon talked to Mandery recently about the myth of the “great school,” the crisis of inequity and why he says elite schools are actively “harmful” to society.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Let’s start with what we mean when we talk about the U.S. News and World Report rankings, which you demolish in this in this book. When we are looking at schools and ranking them and assessing them, what makes them “elite”? 

There’s what we are defining as “elite” and “great,” and what we should be. I think people mean different things when they talk about “good schools.” Certainly, when it comes to primary and secondary education, they often mean “white.” They sometimes mean “affluent.” And they never mean “adding significant value educationally.”

All of the data is about economic value added by attending particular colleges. I presume it would look the same for high schools, there’s nothing about educational value added. I’ve spent three years looking at data on this stuff, and there’s really no effort to measure whether one school is teaching any better than another.

That’s not the basis upon which people get hired and promoted. U.S. News certainly makes no effort whatsoever to look at educational value. But as a teacher, that’s what education means. A great school is one that takes somebody wherever they start and elevates them as much as they possibly can.

There is a smaller and smaller pool of people who can get into these schools. But the idea is, that’s your ticket. Especially for those of us who did not have parents who went to Ivy Leagues or who went to college at all, there is this desperate sense that this is going to be your way into another life. You start out by saying these elite schools don’t let lots of poor people in, though they say they’re doing it. Who is actually getting into these schools?

The data is overwhelming.

The stories they tell are about promoting access — and they do let into a handful of socioeconomically disadvantaged students. 

One of the stories I tell that hasn’t heretofore been told is that elite colleges are a massive insurance policy against downward mobility. Very, very few people end up with poor economic outcomes after attending one of these colleges. They’re an exclusive promoter of opportunity to a particular type of super elite job, like in management, consulting, investment banking. These jobs have a really outsized influence on American policy.

I’m sure many of your readers will be sympathetic to my fears about the future of American democracy. I think what’s changed most dramatically is mistrust of elites. It’s a pathway that Trump very skillfully exploited, and it’s a page he took from Adolf Hitler’s playbook. There is a fairness to it, in that the elite is effectively inaccessible to most poor people, and most poor people of color. I don’t know why if you grow up in rural Appalachia or wherever, you should have any confidence that the New York Times is factual and accurate.

And when a paper like the New York Times covers higher education, the vast majority of those stories are about Ivy League and specifically Harvard. That is its view of higher education in this country. It’s Harvard.

They definitely cover Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Princeton more than they deserve to be covered on the basis of the percentage of students that are actually enrolled there. But it’s not just the quantity of coverage; it is the quality of the coverage. I think this is where who belongs to the elite really shapes opinion. Have they been adequately critical of elite colleges? In some regards, yes. I got a piece in criticizing legacy admissions. The Times Editorial Board has now taken an official position against legacy admissions. I think the best piece I’ve written in connection with the release of my book was an op-ed in CNN, that Harvard can’t simultaneously defend doing race based affirmative action while doing affirmative action for affluent whites. They do for about a third of their class. 

Even though we are talking about the Ivies, we are also talking about different kinds of educational elitism, whether it’s an MIT or a Vassar. 

You know, meritocracy is a double-edged sword. If you say that a certain group of people are the smartest and most hardworking and most deserving, by implication you say that everyone who’s not part of that group is less intelligent, less hardworking and less deserving. The elite defines itself. Harvard, Stanford, said to the world, “Look, we’re not profit maximizers. But we’re status aggrandiziers.” They’re in a race with one another to be the first to get to a trillion-dollar endowment, which they will, sometime in the 22nd century, depending how the stock market does and if the planet doesn’t end. If you said that they’re like Shell Oil, then they’re just a corporation. But that’s not the story they tell. They tell the story that they’re admitting the best and the brightest. And that word “best” says “more good than you are.” That’s a very, very tough message to send. If you’re born into the bottom income quintile of the United States, you have less than a .5% chance of ending up in a “plus” college.

And the that population who does is, as you point out, very unique. It’s not even remotely a meritocracy. It’s not like everybody can do that, just because they’re smart. And then they get there and they face a lot of obstacles based on socioeconomic status and culture. 

Even for the handful of socioeconomically disadvantaged students who manage to get their way to these places, it’s just the beginning of the battle for them. I tell the story in the book of this woman Brianne, who’s at Northeastern law school now and obviously a success story. I told her, “Now you’re going to meet rich people for the first time in your life, and you’re not going to like it.” She called me and was telling me how she had related some of her life experiences, which involved a lot of hardship, and how dismissive her classmates were.

And you can’t say to your kids that it doesn’t matter, because it does. When people say to me, “Where you went to school doesn’t matter,” I’m like, “You’re kidding. You’re lying. Of course it does.” How do we change that conversation? Is it possible?

In the book I take on [Columbia University alumnus] Frank Bruni’s book. I certainly agree with Bruni that I don’t think where you go to school has anything to do with your actual value as a human being. I can sign on to that. But in terms of economic prospects, it makes a big difference. It’s not deterministic, but it makes a big difference in terms of status. You understand how much credibility your degree buys you. Access makes a huge difference.

You ask, how do we change it? I think there are three things, at least, that have to happen. One is we have to start changing the narrative about meritocracy and what these schools actually are. I hope my book is the beginning of that. I really think it’s important that people understand that the concept of merit doesn’t exist; it doesn’t come from God. It doesn’t exist in the ether. People construct it, and the elite have constructed it to serve their interests. Who says that SAT scores are really a measure of whether you deserve to be in college? They don’t predict anything. They’re actually a terrible predictor of college performance. High school rank is a better predictor, but then it would legitimize the candidacy of every valedictorian in the United States. And they don’t want to do that.

Then I think tax policy has to be used to demand that we both raise the floor and lower the ceiling. We’re under investing in public education. We’re over investing in privates. They collectively have more assets than Fort Knox. I think they could do a little bit more to help socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

And you point out the apartheid of the charter school system. 

New York City schools are basically the most segregated in the United States.

To me, a lot of this really does seem like Dunning Kruger in action. I look at some very high-profile people who went to fancy schools, let’s say a Donald Trump or an Elon Musk. [Both are products of the University of Pennsylvania.] People who think that they are truly the smartest guys in the room. And some of that worldview was fostered in the schools that they went to.

I’m fascinated with elites. And that arrogance that you’re talking about, always, always repulsed me. When I would come home to my parents and when I would tell them about college, I would refer to it as “the Harvard thing.” It wasn’t just that they would disagree with you. It was that they would make you feel like you were stupid for ever having said that in first place. It’s a type of gaslighting.

I remember reading this piece by Dwight Garner in the New York Times. It was a defense of critics as gatekeepers. There’s such hubris in it. The idea that somebody can believe that they know what quality is? Oh, my goodness, I just can’t connect to it. I think I have no sense of entitlement whatsoever. And by the way, no middle class or poor kid does. They’ve all experienced impostor syndrome. Everybody else just sort of shirks because they think they own the room. 

We are looking literally right now on Twitter at someone who will not countenance any sort of challenge to authority, or the rightness of his positions, or the idea that he could learn something. You see that worldview fostered in these kinds of schools.

To counteract all of the psychological heuristic biases there are in favor of beliefs in the justice of the system, you would have to work very hard to teach people humility, and the relevance of moral luck and listening. They don’t do any of those things that just make people existentially more secure in their position. And that leads to the type of dismissiveness and arrogance that you’re talking about. 

You point out in the book that if we don’t understand that this is what is happening in this the schools right now, we are missing a big part of the story. As you say, these are not where the next great physicians are coming from or the next great humanitarians are coming from. If we think that these schools are fostering a philosophy of service in the world, we’re wrong. It’s about competitiveness, it’s about class and it’s about how to get out and get your quote, unquote, return on your investment, which means one thing. And that’s your salary.

I’m very interested in the interrelationship between elite colleges and suburbs. I think what we’ve created in America is a likelihood for a certain type of affluent kid, that they never encounter any disadvantage or cognitive dissonance in their life, they just feel completely confident about their status in the world. And their value systems are skewed. American taxpayers give elite colleges about $20 billion a year in tax breaks. I’d feel a little differently about it if they made a bunch of rich white kids into teachers and do-gooders. They don’t do any of that. About 2% of Harvard graduates go into education, most of those Teach for America, which is a two-year commitment. By contrast, where I teach about three-quarters of our students go into public service. And Harvard outspends John Jay, by about ten to one per student.

For someone who is thinking about picking up this book, maybe somebody like me, a parent who has college-aged kids, what is the most important thing that you want them to take away?

It’s in some sense an argument to elites, which is why I have some optimism about this. I do think people who go to college are receptive to data. Let’s say maybe you’ll disagree with my conclusion that elite colleges are on balance harmful to society, but I think my case is irrefutable. I can’t imagine anybody reading my book and not thinking that these colleges have to do substantially more than they’re doing to create opportunity, and stop giving them money until they start doing their bit.

I always say to people, I’m just playing a different game that you’re playing. I’m not trying to maximize my child’s status. I’m trying to turn her into a good human being who has some commitment to making the world a better place. I just want her to be happy. 

The post “Poison Ivy” author Evan Mandery: “Elite colleges are harmful to society” appeared first on Salon.com.

The lady at thrift store erupted in laughter. “You need a seamstress, buddy.” 

I grabbed the available jackets, gladly paid the clerk about $20 for all three, and smiled my way out of the store. I was beyond happy — I was going to start my first university teaching job, as an English and creative writer professor. Being Black and in academia has always been tricky, if not impossible. It’s like publishing and Hollywood in that respect — yet another industry that does not allow many Black people to play. I have three degrees, all from schools located in a city that is 64% Black, and can still count the number of Black professors I’ve had on one hand.

Over the last month, the outrageous treatment of Nikole Hannah-Jones by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has dominated headlines after UNC buckled to conservative political pressure to deny the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The 1619 Project for the New York Times the tenure that traditionally accompanies her appointment as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. Hannah-Jones, who graduated from Chapel Hill in 2003, was scheduled to start her position this year, and retained lawyers to handle her challenge to the university over its decision to offer her a five-year contract position instead.

“I had no desire to bring turmoil or a political firestorm to the university that I love,” she said in a statement. “But I am obligated to fight back against a wave of anti-democratic suppression that seeks to prohibit the free exchange of ideas, silence Black voices and chill free speech.”

The job I was shopping to outfit myself for wasn’t a tenured chair position like Hannah-Jones’, or even an assistant professor job. My role was adjunct faculty, which explains the thrift store. But I was still beyond proud to be teaching at a university. I hadn’t applied for this gig; an MFA classmate and Toni Morrison expert who became my mentor worked at this HBCU already, and she slid my CV to the department chair, who gave me an interview and then the job. The pay was $1,700 per class, per semester. And no, the year was not 1972; it was actually 2014. I was assigned to teach two classes with about 30 students in each, and semesters run about 15 weeks, which means I made about $226 a week — before taxes. 

But the low pay didn’t bother me much. I was used to being poor at the time and relying on anywhere from three to 50 odd jobs to survive — building websites for artists, shooting videos, taking pictures, substitute teaching, anything to pay the bills while I wrote. The university gig would look prestigious on my frail, almost empty resume, I thought, and be a first step toward getting a real adult job — if they actually hired me full-time, which I knew they would do. I figured I could get to know the staff, build a reputation with the student body, work extra-hard at introducing students to cool, relatable literature infused with hip hop lyrics, revamp the English department, make a name for myself around campus, and become a staple — a guy they would be crazy not to hire. That was my plan. 

“And who are you?”

A short, preppie-looking dude approached me on my first day as I ran off copies of my syllabus.

“I’m guessing the new guy, right?” he said. 

I turned around and extended my long arm in its too-short blazer sleeve for a hand shake.

“My name is D, Watkins,” I said to my new colleague. “I’ll be here this semester. Nice to meet you.” 

“So, what are you teaching?” he asked. 

“English 101 and 102,” I replied, working the copier. 

Dude let out a loud and disturbing chuckle.

“Oh my goodness,” he laughed. “Those students are always horrible — terrible! They want nothing out of life. You will have a bad day every day you see them. I have been on staff here for years, and it’s always the same. Do you know what you are getting into? Nothing but bad days.” 

I turned around and looked him in the eye. 

“Working with young students isn’t a bad day,” I said. “It’s a job, a blessing. A bad day in my world is a gun in your mouth.”

He paused. “I was just saying…”

“Don’t say anything,” I said. “There’s no need for you to address me.” I gathered my papers and stormed off toward my adjunct office. 

I wasn’t mad enough to slam the door, but I was upset­­. An idea bounced around in my head: How can a guy who is not Black hold up space teaching at a historically Black university and have the confidence to tell a young Black professor that the Black students who attend this Black school are terrible? And then I was hurt, too, by how this clownish guy spoke about his work like this job was something he settled for, when I knew so many hard-working Black academics, myself included, who would kill for a full-time job with benefits at an HBCU.

My adjunct office became the spot — the hub for my plans, the place where I would go on to cut, sketch and configure my strategy for school domination. Normally, adjuncts don’t get offices; however, the department was so small at this school the building had a whole floor of empty offices. Mine had a huge window overlooking the city. Inside was a good strong wooden desk, probably dating back to the Civil Rights era; a cozy chair that I pulled in from next door, and Wi-Fi –– all I really needed to publish my first essays and eventually complete my first book, with the cocktail of both giving me the status I would need to snatch up a full-time position. When I’d see that preppy professor in the hallway I’d walk right pass him, because he was wrong­­ about my students — they were amazing and I was really getting through to them.

During my first semester I felt things were going well, but I also noticed something kind of strange as I made my rounds on campus. I first explained it to one of my best friends from graduate school, Therman, who also had dreams of being a professor. 

“You gonna have that job at your university ready for me after I get this degree, right?” Therman asked me on one of my off days as we posted up at a campus bar, him clicking away on his laptop while nursing a vodka. “I’m gonna finish with a 3.9 bro — I’m killin’ this program.” 

I looked at Therman, who is as Black as me and from my neighborhood, and said, “You know what, I probably won’t.”

“Because even though the school is an HBCU, most of the people in my department with tenure are white,” I told him. “I might not even have a full-time job for myself.”

Historically Black Colleges and Universities are institutions established before Lyndon B. Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964. Prior to the Act, Black students were not allowed to attend many white institutions, and even in those institutions that admitted Black students, their numbers were very limited. HBCUs were a place where Black students could dream, learn and graduate with the skills needed to obtain gainful employment. These institutions evolved into hubs of Black beauty, Black art and Black culture. These schools were also places where Black scholars could grow, research and teach. And now there I was, 100 years after this particular HBCU had been created, as a Black guy with my Black friend, trying to explain to him and to myself that we may never get hired at one of our HBCUs because white men at the time had flooded the department.

“Damn, bro? For real?” Therman said.

“Maybe they don’t value Black English professors or something,” I laughed. “Maybe they want English teachers to look like they are from England.”  

“Well, if anybody can flip them and make them value us, it’s you, Watkins, so have my job ready,” he replied, taking a slow sip of his drink. “I’ll be finished in two semesters.”

I kept a list in my office of things I the things I would need to do to make them value me enough to offer me a full-time position, aside from teaching and mandatory campus meetings and events: Publish a book, publish articles, and document all of the community work I was quickly becoming known for. I did all of those things during my first year at as an adjunct. I published over a dozen stories, secured two book deals, did a bunch of media around my stories, and headlined about 50 well-promoted events dealing with police brutality, systemic racism and the plight of many Black people living in the so-called post-racial America. I won multiple Best of Baltimore Awards and was named to the Baltimore Business Journal’s 40 under 40 list. I was on a roll.

I was so proud of my accomplishments I didn’t realize how sick my mentality was.

The white professors I worked with went to grad school, published in some obscure academic journals, and then received jobs at Black schools as full-time professors. My road to full employment depended on me not just being good, but being a superstar. Most of the Black professors I know today fit into that category, too. Our white counterparts can live private scholarly lives­­­. But Google Black professors and watch how many hits you get on a name: Our faces are plastered across the internet due to the number of public and community events we host and perform for, an unspoken requirement that allows the respective colleges we work for to justify our presence. 

Many of the white professors at that HBCU — who I actually did build pretty good relationships with — constantly reminded me that I was a star and told me that I would be a shoo-in for a job as soon as a position opened up. I even had a meeting with the provost who was so impressed by my writing and reputation, telling me, “You are what this school needs.” 

I didn’t let my head get big from the praise or see it as a cue to slack on my work. I published more articles, did more events, coordinated more student activities, all in preparation for my big moment, my shot at the tenure track, a chance to have the stability needed to become the writer I always wanted to be. And then it all worked out — or so I thought. I had an email from the university president. I imagined this was going to be it: He was going to promote me to a full-time tenure-track position, ask me to run the department, make my books required reading, cite my articles in campus literature, allow me to visit all of the high schools in the region to promote the university and up our enrollment, convince them this was the place where learning, connecting and celebrating Blackness was essential. It was my moment, I knew it.

But it wasn’t. The email said he had been hearing a lot of great things about me, so he looked me up, and he read an essay I published (here at Salon) called “Screw the National Anthem,” about the racist history of our national anthem and why I’ve never stood for it. (My original title was “F*** the National Anthem,” but I wasn’t allowed to use that word in the headline — to this day, I’ve never actually said the word “screw.”) The president told me in this email that he was impressed by my writing, but if I wanted to continue my adjunct career at the university, I would need to tone my rhetoric all the way down.

I laughed so hard I snorted. The fact that he called a $226-a-week, no benefits, no guaranteed future, not even a parking spot gig “a career” was hilarious. 

I didn’t tone down my rhetoric. I don’t regret publishing that essay about how toxic and racist the anthem is, two years before Kaepernick began kneeling at games. And my time at that university came to an end after that semester. I knew there was nothing there for me. The provost who saw me as the future sent her own email a few months later — not about a job, but about an unpaid parking ticket, which struck me as a task way below her pay grade. The next semester, I was offered a position at the University of Baltimore, the institution where I had earned my MFA, as a lecturer. That gig came with benefits and more pay, but neither tenure track nor parking spot. I love UB, the place where I fell in love with education as an adult. And I’m extremely proud of what I accomplished at both schools during my six-year teaching career. But would be lying if I acted like Hannah-Jones’ story isn’t scary to me. If a writer as accomplished as her can be denied tenure, then what can I expect?

I don’t know much about Hannah-Jones’ personal journey through academia­­­­ — the number of Black professors she has had, her own hunger to teach. But I’ve read her amazing work, and I imagine that teaching journalism must be very important to her. Journalists with her status — winner of three National Magazine awards, a Peabody award, two Polk awards, a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant — are offered the best positions at the best schools. I guarantee other institutions are making her offers in case UNC doesn’t fix its error. Which is also unfair; the 1619 Project was groundbreaking and she deserves to excel because of her work, not in spite of a controversy.

One beautiful thing to emerge out of this mess, however, is the solidarity shown by other journalists and academics is support of Hannah-Jones. More than 200 top scholars, filmmakers and public figures, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Angela Rye, Ava DuVernay, Imani Perry and Roxane Gay, signed a statement of solidarity challenging the university’s decision to deny Hannah-Jones tenure, published in The Root. UNC’s chemistry department revealed that Lisa Jones, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Pharmacy, canceled her plans to continue her career at Chapel Hill, based on the institution’s treatment of Hannah-Jones.

“Hearing of the delay of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure decision led me to reconsider whether the environment at the University of North Carolina would be conducive to the achievement of my academic aspirations, which include promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion,”  Lisa Jones said in a statement. “While I have never met Ms. Hannah-Jones, as a faculty member of color, I stand in solidarity with her and could not in good conscience accept a position at UNC.”

She might not be the last. William Sturkey, a Black tenured professor of history at UNC, says he thinks “probably 90 percent of Black and non-white faculty right now, they are probably looking at their other options,” calling that number “a conservative estimate.”

Universities should pay attention to this moment. They need us. More Black professors might start deciding they have better career options outside of institutions that don’t value us. 

The post The dream of thriving in academia is still a nightmare for many Black professors appeared first on Salon.com.

But Cruz Vital says the students also aired a grievance about a department policy that, on its face, appeared to have little if anything to do with race.

Berkeley’s economics department has long required most students to achieve at least a 3.0 grade point average in a set of prerequisite courses — currently statistics, calculus 1 and 2, and introductory and intermediate economics — to gain admission into the major. (The threshold is slightly lower for transfer students.) Similar GPA-based restrictions have been deployed elsewhere at Berkeley, and beyond, typically to limit the number of students pursuing majors strained by high enrollment. They are especially common in science, technology, engineering, and math — known as the STEM disciplines — but they have also proliferated in fields like finance and economics. In 2019, no fewer than 20 of the top 25 public universities in the U.S. News and World Report rankings imposed a GPA restriction on at least one major.

Cruz Vital had a gut feeling, but no hard data to show that her department’s restriction was disproportionately impacting nontraditional and socioeconomically disadvantaged students, who are more likely to come from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. As cofounder of a student group for underrepresented minorities in economics, she personally knew many of the people who’d fallen victim to the cutoff. What Cruz Vital did not know at the time was that two economists — one at Berkeley, another down the coast in Santa Barbara — were gathering exactly the kind of statistical evidence that could, and soon would, confirm her instincts.

Those economists, Zach Bleemer and Aashish Mehta, analyzed detailed records for 900,000 students who’d enrolled at four University of California campuses between 1975 and 2018, and they found evidence that GPA restrictions do, in fact, disproportionately push Black and Hispanic students out of restricted majors. An apparent effect of the restrictions is to shunt those students from more lucrative majors to less lucrative ones, limiting their career earning prospects well after graduation and contributing to persistent racial wage gaps.

Bleemer and Mehta’s preliminary findings, released last December, have yet to be formally vetted by experts. If they hold up to scrutiny, they’ll add to a growing body of evidence that a culture of competition in many introductory college courses, known as weed-out courses, is exacting an outsized toll on students from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. For university administrators and department chairs who are struggling to balance scarce teaching resources with shifting student preferences, the findings pose a question with few, if any, simple answers: If it is true that GPA restrictions are disproportionately penalizing Black and Hispanic college students, what can be done about that?

Aa best as Shachar Kariv can remember, there were only 600 students majoring in economics at Berkeley when he first began teaching there 19 years ago. Since then, the major’s popularity has surged nationwide, and the tally at Berkeley has nearly tripled to 1,700, says Kariv, who’s now the department chair. The growth spurt has stretched the department thin. “I don’t have enough classrooms,” he says. “I don’t have enough teaching assistants.”

“We are so large that only half of our teaching assistants are economics students,” Kariv adds. He says he’s had to poach the workers from other parts of campus — the business school, the school of public policy — and has even resorted to hiring undergraduates.

Still, Kariv says that his department’s GPA restriction is not intended as a tool for managing enrollment levels. And the policy has been on the books for decades, since well before the major’s recent surge in popularity. Rather, Kariv sees the GPA threshold as a way to identify students who are unlikely to succeed in the major and steer them to a major where they can be more successful — essentially, a mechanism to save underperforming students from themselves. The view of the department, he says, is that “if you don’t get a B in the basic courses, maybe economics is not for you. You’re actually going to fail, you’re going to struggle.”

When Kariv talks about students who, judged on the strength of their GPA, will struggle and fail, he is talking about people like Emmanuel Prunty.

Prunty left his hometown of Altadena, California for Berkeley in the fall of 2015 on a whim, he says, without ever having visited the campus. He says he’d been dealing with personal things at home, and he knew he wanted to get away: “I just wanted to start off something new.”

In his first semester at Berkeley, Prunty found himself adrift and isolated. He was often, if not always, the only Black person in his classes. He was short on money, and he couldn’t depend on his family for financial support. And he says he didn’t handle the workload well. “By the time of finals, I was just completely exhausted, depressed,” he recalls.

“The combination of all that, it just crushed me at the end,” he adds. He says he bombed three of his finals and ended his first semester with a 0.67 GPA — one B minus and three Fs, including an F in calculus.

For the next two years, Prunty would try to dig himself out of the hole. He continued to struggle with anxiety during and leading up to big exams, but his grades improved. He fell in love with economics, which he says felt intuitive and made sense to him. He even became an economics tutor, one of several jobs he juggled throughout school to help support himself.

By 2017, he’d nearly clawed his way to the 3.0 GPA he needed to declare the economics major. But the B plus he earned in intermediate microeconomics — the last of his prerequisite courses — was not enough to get him over the bar, and he says he ended up with a 2.93. “I applied to the major and, of course, I got denied because I didn’t have the GPA requirements.”

Prunty remembers it as a painful defeat: “I was the econ tutor who wasn’t even going to be able to be an econ major.”

Prior to coauthoring the new study on GPA restrictions, Aashish Mehta had seen a number of Emmanuel Pruntys pass his way. An economist by training, Mehta teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Global Studies, an interdisciplinary department that draws from fields as varied as social science, history, and religion in order to understand globalization and its impacts. Mehta says the major has become a popular second choice for students who get pushed out of economics. “Some of them were students who I thought were quite promising, who told me they were interested in economics,” he says. That so many students were being cut off from their major of choice seemed to him like a missed opportunity. “It seemed inefficient,” he says.

Mehta teamed up with a Berkeley graduate student, Bleemer, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and will become an assistant professor at Yale in July, to try to understand how GPA restrictions were impacting students more broadly. The pair looked at more than 40 years of data on student enrollment at four UC campuses — Berkeley, Davis, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz — dating back to the 1970s. They used statistical techniques to try to identify the effects of 29 GPA restrictions that were imposed by various departments on those campuses during that time span, and they found that in the years immediately after a restriction was adopted, the share of underrepresented students in the restricted major fell, on average, by 20 percent. Black and Hispanic students, they found, were more than twice as likely as their White and Asian peers to be pushed out of the major as a result of the restriction.

Bleemer and Mehta suspect this disparity can be traced to inequities in pre-college education. “It looks like the students who are able to achieve access to these restricted majors may have had differential access to, say, AP courses in those fields,” says Bleemer.

“They probably came from somewhat higher income families, and so had greater access to academic opportunity before they showed up on campus,” he adds. “These are all things that are correlated with race.”

The results seem to corroborate, with statistical rigor, the view held by many higher education experts that intensely competitive introductory and prerequisite courses are key drivers of attrition for students of color in STEM and other highly technical fields. Studies suggest that these students, in addition to often having limited access to pre-college academic opportunities, may also be more frequently subjected to negative social and psychological cues, such as racial stereotyping or exclusion from study groups. One recent analysis, yet to be formally vetted by experts, suggests that when Black, Hispanic, or Indigenous students do perform poorly in these weed-out courses, the consequences are more severe than for their peers: A student’s odds of completing a STEM major fall considerably if they score a D or worse in even a single introductory course, but the decline seems to be far steeper for women and underrepresented minorities than it is for White and Asian men, even after controlling for academic preparedness.

The study by Bleemer and Mehta also suggests another, very tangible cost of weed-out culture — one that may linger long after graduation and extend far beyond any college campus. The economists found that a cumulative effect of the University of California campuses’ GPA restrictions was to steer Black and Hispanic students into fields that would pay them less, after graduation, than the fields they would have gone into had no restriction been in place. That finding dovetails with a recent study by The Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization, that showed that Black undergraduates tend to be overrepresented in lower-paying majors like public administration and social services, and underrepresented in lucrative majors like engineering, mathematics, and statistics. Hispanic undergraduates, also underrepresented in STEM, tended to be overrepresented in majors like language studies and linguistics.

According to a 2020 report from the Washington, D.C.-based think tank The Economic Policy Institute, Hispanic college-educated workers earn 84.5 cents, and Black college educated workers just 77.5 cents, for every dollar earned by their White peers. Bleemer and Mehta found evidence that those disparities may be partly attributable to the inequitable distribution of racial and ethnic groups between high-paying and low-paying majors — an effect the researchers call the major premium gap. After narrowing in the 1970s and 1980s and nearly closing in the 1990s, the major premium gap has been widening ever since and now stands at about 3 cents on the dollar, equivalent to around $2,000 in lost annual income for the average Black and Hispanic college educated worker, based on average salary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bleemer and Mehta’s modeling suggests that the gap’s recent widening is largely a biproduct of the rising popularity of GPA restrictions.

Mehta sees a cruel irony at play: The students snared by GPA restrictions are, in many cases, precisely the ones who would benefit the most from being allowed to stay in the major. “Our estimate is that potential earning gain is bigger for the students who got denied than the students who were just let in,” he says.

“If we could allow these students in,” he adds, “we will deliver not just more learning, but also more upward mobility.”

When Prunty, sitting at a 2.93 GPA in his prerequisite courses, was denied admission to Berkeley’s economics major, he still had some recourse. In the economics department, a student who does not meet the major’s GPA requirement can file an appeal. So Prunty did exactly that. He explained the personal trials he’d weathered during his time on campus. He touted his work as an economics tutor, and got his boss to write a letter of recommendation. His macroeconomics professor, with whom he’d built a good relationship, also vouched for him.

When Prunty’s appeal was accepted and he was admitted into the major, it was “like I got this weight lifted off my shoulders,” he remembers. He went on to earn a double major in economics and ethnic studies, finishing with a 3.4 GPA. He now works as a research associate with the Public Policy Institute of California.

But for every Emmanuel Prunty, there are others who are turned away. In the 2014-15 academic year, the economics department rejected 236 applicants to the economics major — around one fourth of the students who applied — according to a study by UC Berkeley’s faculty governance body, the Academic Senate. Cruz Vital, who says she’s helped many peers write appeal letters over the years, has seen some students win admittance, complete the major, and go on to land prestigious economics positions. But she’s also seen the department reject students who’ve attested to suffering hardships and extenuating circumstances. And some students, she says, may be unaware that there is an option to appeal at all: “It’s not something that they actively advertise on the website.”

Both Prunty and Cruz Vital say they would like the economics department to adopt a holistic admissions process for all of its applicants, not just those who are in the position of having to appeal. They’d like to see the department consider not just a student’s GPA but their experiences, their campus involvement, the arc of their academic growth, and other intangibles.

Other departments, including some on the Berkeley campus, already use holistic selection criteria. Bleemer and Mehta find preliminary evidence that, unlike GPA requirements, these holistic admission processes don’t adversely impact racial and ethnic representation.

Kariv, Berkeley’s economics chair, agrees that a more holistic process would be more ideal than what his department currently has in place, but he indicated the department doesn’t have the resources it would need to implement such a system. “I need more undergraduate advisers,” he says, adding that the ratio of students to undergraduate advisers in his department is among the highest on campus. “Because they know the students. They know how to do it holistically.”

The dilemma plaguing Berkeley’s economics department is one that Stephen Schmidt, an economics professor at Union College in upstate New York, has also grappled with in recent years. Schmidt has taught at the small liberal arts school long enough to remember when the economics major first began to boom in popularity there, after the Great Recession of the late aughts. In the span of just a few years, the number of undergraduates in his department swelled by about 50 percent. Eventually, one in five graduates of Union College was an economics major. In response to the rising demand, the department began requiring students to earn a C or better in each of three intermediate economics courses before continuing to the major’s higher-level courses.

Schmidt is one of the few scholars — aside from Bleemer and Mehta — who have published on the impacts of GPA restrictions. In 2021, he published a statistical analysis showing that his department’s policy dissuaded about six students per year, or roughly one in 17 prospective economics majors, from pursuing the degree. He says he doesn’t have enough data to discern the policy’s impact on racial and ethnic representation, but, on balance, it seems to have slightly boosted representation of women in the major.

Still, Schmidt recognizes that a GPA requirement — for that matter, any system that rations access to education — is imperfect. He’s considered the idea of admitting applicants on a first-come, first-served basis, but he thinks that would favor students who come to campus already knowing they want to major in economics, a demographic he says is likely to skew White and male. Hiring a wave of new faculty to meet the surge in student demand would be impractical, he says — a costly, long-term fix to what might be a short-term problem. A new tenure track professor might stay with a school for decades, but a major that’s trendy today could fade in popularity after a few years.

“There are no silver bullets for this other than to have a whole bunch more economics professors show up. That’s the silver bullet,” he says. “But that’s costly. Very, very costly.”

In the spring of 2020, the Berkeley economics department was subjected to what Kariv, in true economist form, refers to as a natural experiment. In a move aimed at alleviating the stress and anxiety caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the College of Letters and Sciences, which houses the economics department, defaulted to grading courses as pass-no pass, and the economics department relaxed its prerequisite restrictions. Kariv says the policy led the ranks of economics majors to surge even faster than usual — growth that he suggests would not be sustainable in the long run.

In the spring of 2023, the department will undergo an academic program review, a formal assessment performed once every 10 years in which the department takes stock of itself and sets teaching and research priorities for the decade ahead. Kariv said he expects that the GPA restriction policy will be an important part of that review.

Asked if Bleemer and Mehta’s study has changed the calculus on the issue, Kariv answers that it has, but that a sea of other factors and constraints have moved the needle as well. “We always need to think outside of the box,” he says.

“I’m open to any innovative ways to do it better. Absolutely,” he adds. “Do I have a magic wand to do it better? I don’t.”

Ashley Smart is the associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, and a senior editor at Undark.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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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.

The academic novel has been a mainstay in bookstores for generations, from Willa Cather’s “The Professor’s House” to “Blue Angel” by Francine Prose. Many campus novels, like Richard Russo’s “Straight Man” are comedic. Some detective novels substitute the college campus for the quaint English country home as a setting for suspicious death — and some books, like “Academy Gothic” by James Tate Hill, do both: murder and comedy on campus.

Educational settings have always provided a good home for horror in film too, particularly slashers. Though many of these films are set in high schools or boarding schools, sororities seem to get terrorized often, from “Black Christmas” to “Sorority House Massacre.” 2014’s “Kristy” used a mostly deserted university campus over Thanksgiving break as the site of its scares.

It’s not simply a college campus, but a small liberal arts campus in New England that provides the setting for Mariama Diallo’s directional debut feature film, “Master,” which Diallo also wrote. Isolated, insular and rooted in oppressive structures, this is a very specific academic setting perfect for fear.

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Set at the fictional campus of Ancaster, which sounds like every small liberal arts college you’ve ever heard of, “Master” centers on two women: Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) a tenured professor who has just become the first-ever Black woman Master, a position of authority at the college which comes with its own, musty living quarters; and Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), a first-year Black student assigned to a dorm room that is allegedly haunted. 

Jasmine’s room, which she shares with a wealthy, disaffected white girl, was once the room of Ancaster’s first Black undergraduate, who died by suicide in the room in the 1960s. 

Add into this mixture the story of a New England witch — or, a woman accused of and hanged for witchcraft — who allegedly haunts the campus, and a sect of strict, Amish-like folk who dress in colonial garb and live on its outskirts. There’s also a third woman at the film’s center, professor Liv Beckman (Amber Gray) who clashes with Jasmine to the point of a grade dispute, is going up for tenure and may be hiding a secret of her own.

It’s a lot, and some reviewers have criticized the film for “too many plot beats,” as The Washington Post wrote, or that it is “so full of ideas,” according to Vox. But I keep coming back to that setting, a college a lot like my own undergraduate institution. What is it about a small, liberal arts campus that makes it so ripe for horror?

As a kid from a farming family on scholarship, liberal arts college was a new, isolating world for me. I had never seen so many tennis courts, never heard of rugby or polo. And I had never met anyone who went to a private high school, let alone boarding school, as some of my new classmates had. Many were also legacies. I was a second-generation student, and certainly the first at a private college. 

RELATED: Through “The Chair,” Sandra Oh and Amanda Peet take an academic view of cancel culture

A Black student in an overwhelmingly white and wealthy private school, Jasmine tries to fit in with her roommate and the rich girl’s friends, who all knew each other before from boarding schools. It’s an uncomfortable, tense friendship tinged with microaggressions (and just plain aggression: Jasmine roommate eventually tells her straight out that she hates her). There are only a few other Black students on campus, and they don’t really each out to her until late in the film, something that has been criticized as unrealistic.   

Jasmine’s friendship with her roommate and her friends is also tinged with classism. In a painful moment, Jasmine brings pizza to the group and tries to ask them to pay their share. They don’t, of course. 

It’s painful because it’s real. The scariest parts of this film are not the witch Jasmine may or may not be seeing, and the infestation of pests Gail may be finding in her living quarters — but moments like when Gail discovers a racist figurine under the sink in her assigned faculty house. This is masterfully shot, focusing on Gail’s face. 

Both Gail’s and Jasmine’s living quarters are haunted. Who knows if it’s ghosts, but something terrible is lingering: the specter of the past that never really went away. The campus of Ancaster is old, and so is the world of academia the women try to walk in. Scenes of tenure review meetings are as difficult to sit through as the pizza scene, because again, they’re real beyond real. It’s a world that doesn’t really want to make room for Jasmine. Or for Gail.

Near the end of the film, Gail endures a faculty party where, having learned potentially terrible news, she seems to be seeing the ghosts of white men who taught at the college generations ago. Then again, the ghosts look exactly like the white men currently teaching at the college. Ancient portraits blur with present faces, laughing at her. 

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Some of the appeal of the small liberal arts college for a student was always its intimacy, small class sizes and the close relationship between professors and students. But what if your professors don’t really help or believe you, as Gail and Liv do not with Jasmine? What if there’s nowhere you can turn?

We weren’t allowed to have cars on campus until we were upperclassmen and in a pastoral, small town, there wasn’t any public transport. We were, in a real sense, trapped on campus. In the film, the Amish community represents isolation, but the students and faculty of the college are just as sequestered, most of their so-called liberal ideas just as “backward” in practice. Or, not practiced at all, simply academic. 

Jasmine’s roommate ends up leaving the school, possibly because of sexual violence. We don’t really know. But that’s real too. How a college closes ranks. How the ranks don’t include you. It protects its own, and Gail gets the message, no matter how hard she works, she will never be one of them. 

Maybe “Master” is not straight horror, or maybe it’s the most horrific of all. The witch isn’t scary. But academia is. 

“Master” is now streaming on Prime Video. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

More stories like this

• Deck the halls with films of horror
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In 2020, colleges and universities throughout the United States awarded more than 42,000 Ph.D. diplomas for scientists and engineers. In many respects, that’s fantastic news; it represents a giant leap from the fewer than 6,000 degrees awarded in 1958. We have more scientists and engineers than ever before. In a society that thrives on highly skilled workers and that celebrates and respects those workers, many young people are heeding the call to enter the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines.

And then what happens?

Many universities and colleges do not publish data on the long-term career outcomes of graduate students the way they do for undergraduate students. Why are they ignoring their advanced students? Perhaps it is because if they were to print the realities on their brochures, fewer graduate students would enroll in their programs.

Nevertheless, we can track the progress of the nation’s Ph.D. holders via independent surveys. Around 30 percent of new science Ph.D. graduates who responded to the 2019 Survey of Earned Doctorates, administered by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, did not immediately have a job or postdoctoral study lined up. Depending on the field, between 20 and 40 percent of respondents reported that they were continuing on the academic path — the vast majority in postdocs, short-term research positions typically lasting one to three years. Tracking the path from postdoc to professorship is difficult, but one 2015 paper noted that “less than 17 percent of new Ph.D.s in science, engineering, and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within three years” of graduating. Many of the rest will land outside of practicing science altogether: The NCSES survey indicated that nearly a third of doctoral scientists and engineers in the U.S. are not employed as scientists or engineers. If the goal of graduate programs is to create highly trained scientists, then these programs are oversupplying the workforce by the hundreds of thousands.

Keep in mind that a graduate student’s life isn’t easy. In a 2019 survey of more than 6,000 graduate students, three-quarters of graduate students reported working more than 40 hours a week, one-third say they sought help for anxiety and depression due to their school experience, and nearly 40 percent reported dissatisfaction with their work-life balance. Still, more than half expressed interest in pursuing a long-term academic career. That’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears devoted to a career that may not come to fruition.

All this raises the question: What exactly are science and engineering graduate programs for? Are they training grounds for future research scientists? Are they a fun way for students to develop highly valuable skills that they then translate to non-academic and non-science careers? Or are they research-generating factories where senior scientists can exploit cheap labor?

As an astrophysicist who has spent years communicating science and watching scores of young students get excited by the prospects of a career in science, I think we need to critically examine the way we approach science graduate education. Presumably, the goal of Ph.D. programs is to train independent scientists, but many of those students will not actually become scientists — either in academia or in industry.

First, we need to get those fresh Ph.D.s some jobs. Some departments and universities are beginning to build bridges into nonscience career paths by way of firms like the Erdos Institute, which partners with universities and corporations to help prepare Ph.D.s for private sector work and place them in jobs. These programs are a great start, but we need many more of them, and they should be woven into the very fabric of every doctoral program. Every faculty member and department head must recognize that many of their graduate students will not become academic researchers — and it serves no one to pretend they will.

Graduate student advisers must stop looking at their mentees as future professors and start preparing them for a life outside academia. These advisers should engage with industry themselves, to build the connections and networks that can give their students the best chance at success. And department administrators should support faculty in these endeavors. Academic departments obsess over metrics like publication rate and grant awards as barometers of success. Here’s a new one: successful placement of students in jobs, whether in academia, in industry, or just … in a job.

Second, we need to address the imbalance of supply and demand in academic hiring. One option is to dramatically increase the number of tenured professorships and long-term research associate positions, to ensure that postdocs can find a secure home in academia. But another, seemingly harsher approach could be the tough medicine we need: Severely cut the number of available postdocs. Placing junior scientists in temporary positions that have poor odds of leading to a long-term career is unfair to them, especially when departments aren’t transparent about the fruits those labors will bear. If there’s going to be intense competition, it’s better to have it earlier, when people are better able to pivot into new directions. It’s one thing to produce scores of Ph.D.s for every one open position; it’s quite another to delay that cliff until scientists are in their mid-30s.

Lastly, we need honesty. Academic departments need to be frank with incoming students about their career prospects. Departments should be clear about the fact that many of their graduates won’t go on to pursue a lifelong career in academic research, or end up in science at all. Yes, this may impact graduate enrollment numbers, and, yes, that might force universities to find creative ways to continue producing research and teaching undergraduates. But maybe — I’m just putting this out there — the universities can create permanent research affiliate positions instead.

And students may well decide that non-academic careers are a worthy pursuit in their own right. Holders of science Ph.D.s who leave academia generally earn higher salaries, experience less workplace discrimination, and report greater job satisfaction than those who stay. Careers outside of academia — and even outside of science — can be rewarding, challenging, and fun. And that should be printed, in big, bold, glossy font, on the front of every graduate department’s brochure.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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That was the genesis moment, more or less, for what has become known as the “intellectual dark web.” Now, after three years of spreading their contrarian gospel, several members of the IDW (along with ideological fellow travelers) have announced an ambitious effort to begin sewing the fabric of society back together. This week, Weiss formally unveiled the University of Austin (UATX), a proposed but largely still hypothetical private liberal arts college in Austin, Texas. Not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, one of the premier land-grant institutions in the country, UATX sets out to provide an alternative locus of learning for students seeking “the unfettered pursuit of truth.”

“We are alarmed by the illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s most prestigious universities and what it augurs for the country,” the school’s website reads. “But we know that there are enough of us who still believe in the core purpose of higher education, the pursuit of truth. That’s why we are building UATX.”

RELATED: Rising GOP star Ron DeSantis goes after campus thoughtcrime with vague, threatening new law

The not-quite-existent university’s board of advisers includes 31 high-profile public figures, ranging from school administrators, journalists, and artists to scientists, historians, and business leaders. Founding trustees include Weiss, historian Niall Ferguson, evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale and the former president of St. John’s College, Pano Kanelos. 

There are several points of commonality among the school’s emergent leadership, but the primary through-line is that just about all of them are persona non grata in left or progressive circles, largely because of disputes over things they have said or done.

In 2018, for instance, Ferguson, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, resigned from his leadership role on a university speaker series after it was revealed that he had asked conservative students to conduct opposition research on a left-wing student activist. Five years earlier, Ferguson suggested at a conference that 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes lacked concern for the future because he was gay and had no children. (In fact, Keynes can better be described as bisexual, and had a long and apparently happy marriage with former ballerina Lydia Lopokova — the sort of historical fact Ferguson ought to know.)

Lonsdale, a technology entrepreneur and investor who founded the Peter Thiel-backed data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, has also sparked considerable controversy. Over the past decade, Palantir has been hit with accusations of fraud, conspiracy, copyright infringement and racial discrimination. In 2017, The Intercept found that Palantir was “mission critical” to the Trump administration agenda of arresting and deporting the parents of undocumented migrant children. 

At least two members of the school’s board had direct ties to the now-deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, including economist and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers and the best-selling author and psychologist Steven Pinker. Another board member, Princeton classics scholar Joshua Katz, has been accused of engaging in inappropriate conduct with three of his past female students.

RELATED: Steven Pinker, Sam Harris and the epidemic of annoying white male intellectuals

None of this has gone unnoticed by commentators on the left, who over the course of the past week have launched a stream of satire, vitriol and more serious accusations at the newly-born institution. 

What may be of greater concern, though, is the considerable ambiguity surrounding the school’s legal, financial and administrative status, which has led some of its most strident critics to wonder whether UATX is more than another Trump University.  

As the school’s website admits, UATX is unaccredited and is currently not authorized to operate as a private post-secondary institution in the state of Texas. Accreditation can take several years, depending on the entities involved, but the UATX site suggests, without explanation, that “conversations with our accredited partners lead us to believe that we’ll have a much shorter time frame than that.” 

Specifically, UATX is seeking accreditation from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), a regional accreditor that has been criticized twice by the Department of Education over its accreditation of for-profit colleges, including American InterContinental University and the now-defunct Art Institute of Colorado. In 2010, the department considered sanctioning the HLC, but ultimately chose not to.

Though UATX outlines no clear path toward accreditation, it has promised to offer classes in “entrepreneurship” and “leadership” to graduate students next year, with a specific program dedicated to “forbidden courses” that will promote “spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.” UATX says it intends to roll out an undergraduate program in 2024, with the first two years focused on helping students learn “self-mastery” and the second two “mastery in their fields.”

Some experts in education, law and leadership ethics are dubious that the school’s ambitious academic plans can possibly jibe with its ill-defined path toward accreditation. 

Joanne B. Ciulla, director of the Institute for Ethical Leadership, told Salon that UATX has offered “a very odd model.”

“Anybody can teach classes — you just can’t get university credit for it,” Ciulla said in an interview. “So what [UATX] will have to do is say, ‘You’ll start taking classes, and then when we get accredited, you’ll get your credits for them.’ But who would want to do that? Because it’s not just when we get accredited, but if we get credited.”

Tristan Snell, a managing partner of MainStreet.Law, which prosecuted the case against Trump University, posted a series of tweets casting doubt on the university’s legal and organizational integrity. “Is the University of Austin licensed as a school in the State of Texas? Is it allowed to call itself a university?” Snell asked. “Parallels to Trump University could be closer than you think.”

Others expressed concern about UATX’s apparent lack of faculty and administrative staff, aside from the school’s three founding faculty fellows. 

“While not accredited yet, UATX will seek accreditation and try to enroll its first master’s students next fall,” Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, wrote in The Washington Post. “And might I just say good luck to the nonexistent admissions staff that will have to gin up that process this late in the game!”

UATX has also revealed nearly nothing about its finances. According to the school’s website, UATX is seeking nonprofit status, which prevents it from directly taking non-taxable donations from benefactors. Instead, the university has partnered with Cicero Research, a nonprofit incorporated last December that it’s using as a fiscal sponsor. 

“Cicero Research is not a funder of UATX; it is the fiscal sponsor of UATX while UATX waits for its applied tax-exempt determination from the IRS,” Hillel Ofek, the school’s vice president of communications, told Salon by email. “Sponsorship is a frequently used practice of a previously-approved non-profit organization offering access to its legal and tax-exempt status to another group. Joe Lonsdale is one of our leading benefactors and we are honored to have his support. We have several seven-figure donors committed and have already received over 600 donations.”

In a brief email to Salon, Lonsdale attempted to assuage concerns about UATX’s financing, saying that “there are several hundred funders at this point and a lot of major donors have stepped up alongside me both before this announcement and more after already.” He declined to comment further.

But according to a Cicero filing from December, the nonprofit reported zero financial assets and no full-time employees. It appears to operated from a residential address in Austin owned by Jen Dirmeyer, who told Salon through a message on LinkedIn that she “left [her] position as Head of Operations for Cicero in May of 2021 and [has] not had anything to do with the legal or financial structuring of the university.”

For that matter, the physical address for UATX listed on its website appears to be a small office building near the University of Texas campus that is home to the law firm RashChapman, which specializes in oil and gas litigation, according to journalist Eoin Higgins. The website says that the school is “in the process of securing land,” and intends to have a physical campus at some point.

Though Cicero’s filings reveal virtually nothing about its finances, the entity’s reported leadership includes Lonsdale and his wife Tayler, along with Clay Spence, who is described as “Philosopher-in-Residence” at 8VC, Lonsdale’s current venture capital firm. Spence is also a board director at Cicero Institute, a political organization (also run by Lonsdale) that published a white paper last year advocating for a “performance-based funding formula that allocates state public higher education funding based on the post-graduation earnings of an institution’s students.” Spence did not return Salon’s request for comment. 

Cicero’s description of its mission and services includes a pledge to “create and distribute non-partisan documents recommending free-market based solutions to public policy issues.”

UATX, however, says it is “committed” to “freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse” and intends to remain “fiercely independent — financially, intellectually, and politically.” Asked whether that mission conflicts with the apparent free-market or libertarian orientation of Cicero, neither Lonsdale nor Ofek responded.

While the apparent birth of UATX may appear sudden, it’s just one of the many conservative attempts in recent history to break free from the perceived constraints of liberal academia.

“For a full century, conservative activists of different stripes — religious, free enterprise, anti-cancel culture — have dreamed big, hoping to build dramatically different institutions to salvage what they perceive as ‘truth’ and proper teaching,” wrote historian Adam Laats in Slate.

In the 1920s, evangelical Christians like T.T. Shields and Bob Jones Sr. attempted to build a new system of “conservative scholarship” at schools like Bob Jones College and Des Moines University. More recently, Republican operatives, religious leaders and wealthy conservative donors have bankrolled such schools as George Mason University and Liberty University.  

RELATED: Scandal at Liberty University: How a Christian college dismisses students’ reports of sexual assault

Of course it’s conceivable that UATX will break new ground and revolutionize the academic space. But running a successful college, as Laats writes, takes more than impressive names and grand ambitions: “Big dreams of school founders have been punctured by not-so-big details … Without accreditation, classes, or degree options, all of which the founders say are forthcoming, the answer may be no. It takes more than accusing mainstream colleges of being ‘broken’ to create something that will actually work.”

The post Bari Weiss’ field of right-wing dreams: Will the “University of Austin” ever actually exist? appeared first on Salon.com.

It will be decided by the increasing collapse of conscience, the undermining of truth and a mass consciousness that supports violence as a central weapon for social change. To the degree that the public can be convinced, as Judith Butler argues, that the “call for democracy is interpreted as sedition [and] the call for freedom is taken to be a call to violence,” democracy will suffer from a legitimation crisis and will disintegrate. Under such circumstances, it will be easier for the abyss of fascist politics to gain more legitimacy and prevail in the United States.

Violence in the United States has gone into overdrive. Building on a history of disposability, genocide and militarism, it increasingly has gained support, particularly among the Republican Party, as a potentially justifiable path to power. How else to explain the shocking defense by most Republicans of the insurrection against the Capitol on Jan. 6 as “a patriotic attempt to protect the nation against its enemies”? How do reason and justice prevail in a society when the legal justification given to macho-infused vigilantes in the aftermath of the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal provides them with a pass to shoot, if not kill, peaceful protesters? How else to clarify the rise of deadly misogynist violence, operating under the discourse of surveillance and vigilantism, that has moved from Texas to the law of the land, subjecting women to an incriminating reality that dictates that they are second-class citizens who can no longer have control over their reproductive rights? How else to address the rise of a gun culture that trades on fear to immunize people to the tsunami of mass shootings, suffering and death that appears as an everyday experience in the United States?

RELATED: White terror: Millions of Americans say they’d support violence to restore Trump to power

How does one explain crazed images of guns being celebrated in the social media by Republicans, as if the spectacle of violence does not present a danger to a larger public? In one telling instance, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky “posted a Christmas picture of himself and what appears to be his family, smiling and posing with an assortment of guns, just days after four teenagers were killed in a shooting at a high school in Michigan.” Accompanying the image was the tweet “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.”

The image is more than insensitive, it endorses a hyped-up version of gun culture while maximizing the pleasure potentially produced by an obsession with guns and the threat of violence (after all, it was intended as a virtual Christmas card). What Massie mimics in this Christmas family photo is an echo of the cruelty and pornographic fascination and celebration of the spectacle of violence central to a fascist politics. This merging of pleasure, moral irresponsibility and cruelty offers legitimation for the horror of violent acts, including the threat of violence as a political weapon. The image is symptomatic of a moral and political depravity that defines the Republican Party and its obsession with violence, fear and death.

With the rise in hate speech, right-wing extremist violence, gerrymandering, voter suppression, police violence and staggering economic, health and educational disparities, UN special rapporteur Fernand de Varennes stated that “the United States is becoming a darker, nastier, and more divided society.” It should come as no surprise that a number of organizations, from Freedom House to the European think tank International IDEA. report that democracy, at least what is left of it, is eroding in the United States.

Right-wing extremists have redefined the notion of freedom by detaching it from any sense of the common good and ethical considerations while reducing any vestige of liberty to an individual and utterly privatized right. Mimicking neoliberal values, freedom now flees inward, reduced to almost pathological self-centeredness that is increasingly hostile to the common good, matters of mutual support and social responsibility. Concerns for the public good, if not the social bonds that hold societies together, are undermined by an all-encompassing retreat into personal responsibility, which places the burden of change entirely on the individual. In this instance, freedom is privatized, hollowed out and emptied of any considerations for social costs. Evidence of this retreat from social responsibility is evident in the refusal on the part of many Trump supporters to get vaccinated against a deadly virus regardless of the suffering and death it causes to others. This position is now largely justified by extremists in the name of individual freedom and self-determination.

The language of violence has become normalized among a Republican Party that is indifferent to its fringe elements, who increasingly threaten the lives of politicians they disagree with. Moreover, it has become ensconced in the collective consciousness for a large segment of the public as a routine way to address social problems, drive political rhetoric and annihilate dissent and resistance. Violence now defines the very essence of politics and increasingly has become a routine element of everyday life. School shootings have become an everyday occurrence, further accelerated by Republican legislators who argue that anyone should be able to buy as many guns as they want, regardless of the danger gun violence poses to the public. As blood flows in the corridors of malls, schools, synagogues and houses of worship, right-wing Republicans talk more openly in violent terms, threatening their opponents with the use of force and mobilizing their followers with a call for armed confrontation.

Unsurprisingly, one revealing and increasingly symptomatic incident took place in October at a conservative rally in western Idaho. A young man stepped up to a microphone and asked, “When do we get to use the guns” to start killing Democrats? The audience applauded. He then asked, “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”  Lisa Lerer and Astead Herndon of the New York Times reported that “the local state representative, a Republican, later called it a ‘fair’ question.” The racist spirit of the Ku Klux Klan and a politics of racial cleansing have merged with the unchecked greed and systemic violence of a Second Gilded Age to create an updated fascist politics that now drives the Republican Party.

As white supremacy moves from the fringes of politics to the centers of economic, political and social power, the boundaries of those considered disposable and unknowable widens through escalating police violence, voter suppression laws and the ever-increasing poison spread by right-wing social media. Views critical of racism, the attack on academic freedom or the lies of those who thrive on denouncing reason and science are dismissed as fake news, while those journalists, school board members, politicians and educators who oppose a rising fascist politics are subject to insults, threats and violence. In addition, the Republican Party’s drive to ensure minority rule is working overtime to gut labour rights, destroy the environment, subvert majority rule, roll back the protections for LGBTQ people, women, people of color, young people and others who have benefited from civil rights gains that have been won through generations of struggle.

RELATED: Can American democracy escape the doom loop? So far, the signs are not promising

The Republican war against reason, critical education and thinking itself is working. Violence is increasingly accepted by many people in the United States as a solution to addressing political problems. The language of militarism and violence dominates much of right-wing social media and its pedagogical reach keeps growing. For instance, the rising threat of extremism is evident in the growing culture of racism nurtured by the Republican Party and its acolytes. Anthony DiMaggio’s analysis of the Republican Party’s alignment with white supremacist views is eye-opening and worth quoting at length: 

[E]ight in ten Republicans feel that “America is in danger of losing its culture and identity,” and nearly as many Republicans (79 percent) agreeing that “the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence.” Conceptions of American identity clearly overlap strongly with white supremacy, with 51 percent of Republicans agreeing that “America must protect and preserve its white European heritage,” and an equal number saying “a culture established by the country’s early European immigrants” is “important” “to the United States identity as a nation.” … Nearly two-thirds of Republicans base their commitment to protecting American identity on reactionary religious values, with 63 percent saying that one must be Christian to be “truly American.”

The Jan. 6 insurrection was one stage in the evolution of a politics that now enshrines violence as a potential path to power. Racial terror and a clarion call to violence dominate American politics, amplified by a mainstream press that refuses to name it as a form of fascist politics, and a right-wing media that revels in a spectacularized culture of threats and violence. Aaron Blake, writing in the Washington Post, states that “not only do 31 percent of American adults … believe the election was stolen [they] also sympathize with the statement that ‘because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.'” 

Citing an American Enterprise Institute poll, DiMaggio states that more than 39 percent of Republicans agree that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.”

The landscape of violence no longer hides in the dark or on the fringes of politics, as was obvious with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In addition, there are the many instances of violence emerging in the last few years from the politicians loyal to Trump along with many of his followers. Some of the more visible and threatened acts of violence include Rep. Paul Gosar’s cartoon depiction of “killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and swinging swords at Biden.” There is also Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that the only way to get freedom back is “with the price of blood.” 

RELATED: Paul Gosar’s death-threat video is no joke — it’s part of the Republican terror strategy

Greene’s call to violence became more specific in a video in which she endorsed “calls to execute FBI agents deemed disloyal to President Donald Trump and to target top Democrats, including ‘a bullet to the head’ for Speaker Nancy Pelosi.” More recently, former Trump adviser Michael Flynn, who now sees himself as a spokesperson for a fundamentalist religious army, advocates a right-wing Christian takeover of America with his call for “one nation under God and one religion under God.” Flynn is simply symptomatic of the theocratic war being waged by right-wing radical Christian extremists against both democracy and Christianity. This unholy alliance between Christian extremists and fascism is now a fundamental force in the Republican Party and its theocratic wing is as dangerous as its motley group of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and militia movements.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the Republican Party, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have refused to censure these calls to violence, giving credence to Greene’s claim that “We Conservatives [in the House of Representatives] aren’t the fringe. We actually represent the base of Republican voters, which is approximately 70%. And when the party learns to represent Conservative Americans, we will never lose again.”

Jonathan Freedland is right in stating that Greene and “Gosar are in lockstep with a Republican Party whose face can be seen in the death threats now routinely meted out … to nationally famous politicians such as AOC” and others. The threats of violence on the part of the Republican Party and a large majority of its supporters are only one register of its drift toward authoritarianism. A more significant concern is how such violence works in tandem with a range of cultural apparatuses to legitimize the use of such violence as part of the drive to destroy democracy and instill an authoritarian government.

The threat of murderous violence is not restricted to Trump’s unhinged political flunkies. Such threats also inhabit the daily world of micro-aggressions aimed at destroying the day-to-day social relations that enable people to gain some control over their lives. We live in the age of Trump-inspired raging mobs. Heather Cox Richardson makes some of these micro-assaults visible in her claim that violent gangs are becoming a central political force in America. She is worth quoting at length.

Since January 6, angry mobs have driven election officials out of office in fear for their safety. In increasingly angry protests, they have threatened school board members over transgender rights and over teaching Critical Race Theory, a legal theory from the 1970s that is not, in fact, in the general K–12 curriculum. Now, as the coronavirus rages again, they are showing exactly how this process works as they threaten local officials who are following the guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to require masks. Although a Morning Consult poll shows that 69% of Americans want a return to mask mandates, vocal mobs who oppose masking are dominating public spaces and forcing officials to give in to their demands. In Franklin, Tennessee … anti-mask mobs threatened doctors and nurses asking the local school board to reinstate a mask mandate in the schools. “We will find you,” they shouted at a man leaving the meeting. “We know who you are.”

As Brad Evans, one of our most astute theoreticians of violence, has made clear, the long legacy of violence espoused by Trump and his acolytes constitute not simply the development of slow violence at work in emptying politics of its democratic values, but the degree to which violence has become routinized and politics turned into a machinery of fear, terror and death. War, militarism and violence now dominate the public imagination in the United States. Underlying the diverse attempts of right-wing Republicans to destroy public education, overturn election results, subvert abortion rights and produce malign forms of lawlessness in different forms of disenfranchisement is a long-term goal of destroying any vestige of democracy and the public institutions that support it. There is more at work here than the debasement of politics, there is also a systemic struggle to undermine the public imagination and create the conditions for the wider public to internalize the need for violence as a form of habitual domination.

What ties all these incidents of violence together — whether it be an attack on dissent, women’s abortion rights, voting rights or social justice — is both a limited understanding of the theories and practice of freedom and the growing repressive educational forces that serve to depoliticize people. In this case, the forces of authoritarianism are deepened and extended throughout American society through an image-based culture of manufactured ignorance and an overcharged cult of lies produced both in right-wing cultural apparatuses, toxic social media spheres and current attacks on public and higher education. At the heart of this emerging rebranded fascism is a politics deeply at work in the struggle over consciousness, identity, subjectivity, values and agency. As Paul Street observes, “Public knowledge is a matter of life and death,” particularly when it is conditioned to offer little resistance to “the political hurricane of white nationalist authoritarianism — fascism, American-style — [that] is bearing down on the United States today.”

RELATED: Republicans’ war on education is the most crucial part of their push for fascism

The merging of historical amnesia, manufactured ignorance and a culture of fear and violence have become a major pedagogical force in American politics and culture. Yet this ongoing struggle over consciousness waged by proto-fascists through diverse forms of political and popular education in a variety of cultural sites is largely underplayed or ignored as a dangerous force in American society. This misunderstanding and theoretical failure is particularly true among liberal and left-oriented critics, except for a few public intellectuals such as Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelley, Noam Chomsky, Paul Street, Tony DiMaggio, Jeffrey St. Clair and some other journalists and public intellectuals. There is little sense among too many educators, cultural workers, protesters and anti-capitalist and anti-racist groups that politics is educative.

What I am suggesting is that there is little hope for social change unless people can be persuaded to invest in a politics in which they can recognize themselves and their problems, and can develop a moment of recognition and broader understanding of resistance, politics and collective struggle. Of course the Black Lives Matter movement and other anti-racist and social justice advocates are trying to change our understanding of the crucial relationship between education and politics, but their voices are under-emphasized, and they are largely muted by the dominant right-wing media from reaching large segments of the American public.

It is not enough for those of us struggling for a radical democracy to be horrified over the workings of the Trump Supreme Court, the fascist politics being implemented by right-wing state legislators, the normalization of white supremacist ideology, the expanding forms of domestic terrorism and the ever-present culture of cruelty and violence that has enveloped in the United States. If people cannot escape from the ideological terror machinery of culture that convinces them that all their problems are a matter of individual responsibility, that matters of class, racism, misogyny and other forms of oppression are not systemic, and that the privatization of everything should not be viewed as a powerful form of depoliticization, the United States will soon move to a full-fledged, rebranded fascist social order. There is no genuine democracy, collective move for resistance and expanding defense of public goods without genuine opposing critical power, and that power at its core is educational.

The failure of progressives to recognize this is evident in too many short-sighted treatments of the Republican Party’s attack on “critical race theory.” This is not simply an attack on history as dangerous memory, dissent, academic freedom and racial injustice. This is a much broader attack on the very institutions that produce engaged citizens, critical agency and critical thought itself. It is a full-fledged attack on both the democratizing purpose of education and the institutions that support its democratic possibilities. Under the narrow rubric of an attack on critical race theory, what we are witnessing is a wider attack on the ability to link moral authority with intellectual competencies that extend from learning history and learning civic virtue to critically engaging the most malign threats to democracy and social and economic justice. This is even more reason to take seriously the attack on education in the specific and broader sense as one of the main sites of struggle over consciousness, power, identity, agency, politics and the ability to define and struggle for a socialist future.

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The war against the culture of critique, accountability, dissent, reason, justice and critical agency has moved into full throttle with the current attacks on language and meaning. In the current era of authoritarianism, meaning as a form of truth-telling is stripped out of language. Truth is no longer discernible from lies, and terrorism takes the form of eliminating the thinking subject, the common good and all forms of meaningful solidarity. In other words, among the casualties of authoritarianism are the minds that oppose it. Under such circumstances, the current attacks on critical race theory become codes for attacking all institutions where students and others might realize themselves as critical citizens. Judd Legum provides a telling instance of the latter in his critical analyses of how right-wing extremists are waging war against public education in Tennessee.

The attacks on issues dealing with racism and social justice are being conducted through both repressive pedagogical practices and threats to ban instructional material that includes concepts such as “privilege,” “discomfort” and other terms that reinsure that the language of erasure works to miseducate students while imposing a form of historical amnesia. This is a form of violence that cripples language, elevates stupidity over informed reason and disregards the truth to promote lies and conspiracy theories. It is a form of violence, a machinery of annihilation, that connects the power of corporate wealth and religious fanaticism to a politics of racial cleansing and the degradation of civic literacy, civic courage and civic culture.

Legum makes this clear in his report that the dark money-funded group Moms for Liberty is waging a war of censorship against any book that includes social justice issues and has gone so far as to object to such books as “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the March on Washington.” One criticism of the book made by Moms for Liberty was that it displayed “photographs of white firemen blasting black children to the point of ‘bruising their bodies and ripping off their clothes.'” Legum also points out that the group “objected to the teacher’s manual accompanying the book because it had a negative depiction of Bull Connor, the notorious racist who used hoses and attack dogs to enforce segregation.”

It is worth noting that Robin Steenman, head of the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty once stated on her Twitter account that she would never send her kids to a public school and referred to public school teachers as “brainwashing assholes.” It gets worse. The Moms for Liberty movement not only engages in a whitewashing of history for public school children, it also attempts to impose its own white supremacist version of history. For example, their website recommends that students learn about American history through the lens of “The Making of America,” a book published in 1985 by W. Cleon Skousen. According to Legum:

Skousen was a supporter of The John Birch Society, a far-right organization that opposed the civil rights movement…. Skousen’s book characterizes “black children as ‘pickaninnies’ and American slave owners as the ‘worst victims’ of slavery.” The book claims that the Founders wished to free the slaves but “[m]ost of [the slaves] were woefully unprepared for a life of competitive independence.” Skousen asserts that abolitionists “did much to perpetuate slavery” by taking a “too militant” approach.

This reactionary white-supremacist pedagogy must be challenged through forms of schooling and popular education that do more than promote an anti-racist consciousness; it must also be addressed by first recognizing that underlying this fascist politics is a crisis of consciousness. That, as Angela Davis points out, must be challenged through educational practices that adopt a critical stance in which people can “perceive their relationship to reality.” At the heart of such a struggle is the question, what is the purpose of education? Put differently, what does it mean to address education in a time of tyranny? How might education become central to politics and take on the goal of educating students and the public to think critically and learn how to challenge the perpetrators of white supremacy and social violence?

I think it is best to begin with the question of what the role of education might be in the midst of a historical moment in which there is a growing alliance between corporate and political power and an updated fascist politics. One response is that education at its best should be defined as a public good — one that takes seriously the need to create critical, informed and engaged citizens. As such, it not only should provide the pedagogical conditions for students to be knowledgeable and critically appropriate the best of the Enlightenment and other traditions, but should also infuse the liberal arts, if not all elements of education, with a sense of social, ethical and public responsibility.

A radical politics cannot survive if it ignores the fact that public and higher education are one of the few spheres left in democratic societies where students and others can learn the knowledge and skills of democratic citizenship. Nor can it survive if it ignores that education takes place outside of schools in a massive ecosystem of cultural apparatuses. At the same time, it is not the job of education to confuse education with training, nor is its job only to educate students for the workforce or to impose a regime of repressive conformity on teachers and students and the wider public. Moreover, the job of education is not to build “human capital” and reduce the obligations of citizenship to the demands of consumerism, but to educate young people and others to address the most crucial problems of the day, extending from climate change and systemic racism to the threat of nuclear war.

In what follows, I want to focus on higher education, because it is one of the few places still left to offer a more protective space for critical pedagogy and learning, even though it has been under siege by right-wing conservatives since the end of the 1960s. Moreover, any talk of reforming higher education has relevance for how people learn and what they learn in a variety of sites and political and social contexts. The purpose of the university should be on the side of democracy, not increasing the bottom line, which is what drives higher education today under the regime of neoliberalism.

Higher education needs to build a bridge between faculty, citizens, students, administrators and the larger world. The broader public needs to understand the relevance of the university as an institution for the public good, rather than simply an adjunct of corporations, finance capital and military interests. In a time of incipient authoritarianism and an insurgency of white supremacy, it is especially important to raise the question of what public and higher education stand for or, as Paul Allen Miller argues, “where does the university stand [and] what does the university owe the truth?” In the current moment marked by the proliferation of conspiracy theories, a culture of lying and the assault on critical thought itself, Miller’s question has enormous relevance for the entirety of institutions that shape American society.

RELATED: How higher education can win the war against neoliberalism and white supremacy

What Miller is suggesting is that the university should take on the noble task of aligning with truth, a task which must be matched by the practice of freedom and the infusing of learning with the spirit of civic culture, social justice and economic equity. The university should not only be a place to refuse and resist the forces of neoliberalism by revealing its anti-democratic ethos and toxic austerity politics; it should also make an appeal to truth in refusing to compromise with oppressive forms of power while at the same time exposing the financial and corporate interests at work in the larger society.

This suggests addressing the legacy and configuration of authoritarian and anti-democratic forces responsible for privatizing public services, eliminating public sector jobs, shipping jobs abroad, refusing to provide decent meaningful wages, curbing the power of trade unions, slashing retirement benefits, polluting rivers, poisoning drinking water with lead and promoting tax cuts for the ultra-rich. These issues are not limited to promoting the survival of higher education as a democratic sphere, but also address issues relevant for creating a more just, equitable and meaningful life for everyone. Unfortunately, these goals have been under attack as the university has succumbed to the dictates of neoliberalism, and more recently to attacks on faculty, dissent, control over curricula and attempts to turn higher education institutions into factories of bigotry, conformity and moral indifference.

As higher education has become more corporatized, it has been perceived less as a public good. Several significant changes have taken place that undermine the democratic role of higher education. All of these must be reversed. First, higher education has been radically defunded because its potential role in providing free or cheap access to wider populations is seen as a threat to far right foundations, conservative groups and reactionary think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. As a promising engine of democracy, higher education poses a threat to conservatives who have attacked it since the ’60s. This is evident in massive increases in tuition, in tandem with the public defunding of the university, contributing to the ballooning of student debt while making education less accessible to working-class students, especially Black and brown students. In addition, faculty have been removed from any control of the nature of their labor and had their job security eliminated. In the U.S., two-thirds of faculty are now on short-term contracts, living in fear and in some cases poverty. This attack on the power of faculty to control the conditions of their labor is part of a much broader assault on unions that went into high gear with the rise of neoliberalism, especially under the reign of Ronald Reagan, who as governor of California campaigned against the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez, and when elected president fired 13,000 air traffic controllers in the summer of 1981, effectively destroying their union.

What must also be noted is that the governing structure of the university is not just top-heavy with administrators but is largely shaped by a form of managerialism modeled after business culture. The university has become more than a model of corporate governance; it has become a high-powered factory run by a clueless managerial class more interested in grants and bottom-line profits than in high-quality education for everyone. Neoliberal governing structures have turned destructive in their disregard for tenure, the rush for departmental mergers and their ongoing disregard for academic freedom — a longstanding inheritance of the Reagan and Thatcher period, when universities were increasingly defined through the lens of a business ideology and culture. 

Another attack on higher education takes place as corporate values replace academic values, knowledge is reduced to a commodity and any academic field or subject that does not translate into profit-making and instrumental rationality is viewed as unnecessary. In this logic, what is lost is educating young people for the social good or encouraging faculty to assume the role of public intellectuals. This would mean providing the financial and intellectual resources necessary, along with the encouragement, to enable faculty to relate their academic work to alleviating human suffering, reducing the wastefulness of corporate barbarism, directing crucial resources back to communities in need, and using their research to address the dangerous threat of climate changes. Those things does not appear to warrant any consideration. In fact, faculty tend increasingly to be punished for engaging in this type of work. Under the rule of neoliberal capitalism, students are now considered clients, the curricula are dumbed down and faculty have been deskilled, overburdened and stripped of their power.

All these issues must be challenged both by educators and those groups and social movements outside the university who recognize that education is a crucial force for a democracy to survive. But such resistance must not only take place among students, faculty and progressive administrators, it must also involve all those social movements who recognize that the same forces at work in destroying higher education are also undermining the viability of the welfare state, the environment, civil rights, struggles for economic equality and any institution that furthers equality and social justice.  

It is also crucial to acknowledge that education cannot be reduced to schooling in an image-based culture. It must be broadly understood as taking place in various locations and defined, in part, through its interrogation on the claims of democracy. As Ariel Dorfman has argued, it is time to produce cultural institutions and empowering pedagogical conditions in multiple places extending from the mainstream press to the online digital world in order “to unleash the courage, energy, joy and, yes, compassion with which rebellious millions [can] defy fear and keep hope alive in these traumatic times.”

Such sites are important in the efforts to engage education as a political force. Pierre Bourdieu rightly observed that “important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical and lie on the side of belief and persuasion [making it even more] important to recognize that intellectuals bear an enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination.” This is an especially crucial demand at a time when the educational and pedagogical force of the culture works through and across multiple places. Schooling is only one site of education, while screen culture, television, books, podcasts, magazines, the internet, social media platforms and music venues are incredibly significant forces in shaping worldviews, modes of agency and diverse forms of identification.

At a time when truth has become malleable, and people are being told that the only obligation of citizenship is to consume, language has become thinner and more individualistic, detached from history and more self-oriented, all the while undermining viable democratic social spheres as spaces where politics brings people together as collective agents willing to push at the frontiers of the political and moral imagination. Too many people across the globe have forgotten their civic lessons, and in doing so, ceded the ground of history to the purveyors of lies, militarism and white supremacy. 

Terror comes in many forms, and one of its most powerful expressions is when people no longer have the words to either understand or challenge the world in which they live. Not only does such linguistic deprivation fail to ward off the plague of propaganda, but it also contributes “to an annihilation of the self and the destruction of the capacity to recognize the real world.” 

If the university no longer engages in the search for truth, and matters of justice become irrelevant, the university can become what it was under the Nazis, an institution that placed “learning in service to a nationalist and militant culture, a mechanism for producing political legitimacy, ideological conformity, and economic value to be used and deployed by others.” Such a lesson extends far beyond the boundaries of the university. As educators and intellectuals, it is crucial to remember that there is no genuine democracy without the presence of knowledgeable citizens willing to recognize and search for the truth, hold power accountable, engage in forms of moral witnessing, break the continuity of common sense and challenge the emergence of anti-democratic institutions, policies, ideas and social relations.

Making education fundamental to politics suggests that as academics, researchers and artists we ask uncomfortable questions about what Arundhati Roy called “our values and traditions, our vision for the future, our responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy of our ‘democratic institutions’, the role of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, and the intellectual community.”

Once again, there is no democracy without an educated public, and there is no educated public without the support and existence of institutions that define education as a public good and a crucial public sphere. Educators, artists, intellectuals and other cultural workers have a moral and political responsibility to put into place those pedagogical sites and practices that enable the critical agents and social movements willing to refuse to equate capitalism and democracy and uphold the conviction that the problems of ecological destruction, mass poverty, militarism, systemic racism, staggering economic inequality and a host of other social problems cannot be solved by leaving capitalism in place. Both higher education and other spheres of education must do justice to democracy and the conditions that make it possible by writing the future in the language of struggle, hope, equality, compassion and the fundamental narratives of freedom and equality.

To be on the side of justice, educators must take seriously the notion that history is open and that it is necessary for people to think otherwise to act otherwise, especially if they take seriously that the role of higher education is to enable young people and others to be able to imagine and bring into being alternative democratic futures and horizons of possibility. This is a vision infused with a mix of justice, hope and struggle has never been more important than it is today. Moreover, in the face of the rise of right-wing movements across the globe, it is time to address the role of higher education in a time of tyranny. This suggests that it is time to heed the call to merge a sense of moral outrage with a sense of civic courage and collective action. It is crucial to take on the challenge of initiating a period of mass awakening while articulating and connecting moments of political recognition, critical consciousness and social awareness to mass struggles.

Progressives need an education revival based on the recognition, as Stanley Aronowitz insisted, that without radical political and social movements standing behind educational change, school reform is unlikely except in the cosmetic sense. At the same time, if education does not become central to mass struggles, there will be no radical change in society. What should unite this movement for radical democracy is not only a broad-based defense of public goods, but tactics and strategies that involve direct action, political education and cultural politics. What is at stake here are not just mass movements aimed at overthrowing the economic structures of finance capital, but also forms of collective resistance whose aim is to combat the repressive formative cultures that enable state and corporate violence to be internalized and legitimized. There will be no successful movement for insurrectional change unless mass movements come together and provide the pedagogical and cultural preconditions for creating the modes of agency identification, visions, values and social relations necessary for ushering in a democratic socialist society.

One of the challenges that educators, youth, artists, cultural workers and others fighting for social change must address is how to make the political more pedagogical. This would necessitate connecting social problems, political and economic structures and everyday experiences with the construction of an educated political consciousness marked by a disciplined attention to meaning that enlarges “critical awareness of and of moral judgment in relation to [such experiences], an exercise of intelligence,” which seems in short supply today. 

The great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci provided a valuable lesson for educators in his insistence that it is crucial to separate neither culture from systemic relations of power and state violence nor politics from the production of knowledge and identities shaped by such violence. This suggests that educators and other cultural workers begin to address how politics bears down on everyday life and becomes habitual through the force of its pedagogical practices, relations, and discourses. 

At the very least, it is crucial to acknowledge that education as an emancipatory force is central to politics because it provides the foundation for those willing to engage democracy as a site of struggle, which can only be waged through a consciousness of both its fragility and necessity. What educators and other cultural workers cannot do is look away, because the fascist danger that confronts democracy is no longer in the shadows. Yet far too many critics refuse to acknowledge how the ghost of a fascism that prevailed in the past is still with us in different forms and is becoming triumphant in the present. Education, cultural politics and mass consciousness face an enemy in the current historical moment that is about to engulf us all. The necessity to take up the fight against a rebranded fascism is no longer a matter of imagining a different and more emancipatory politics; it is an urgency that demands a revival of both an insurgent historical consciousness and the will to act collectively to usher in a future filled with socialist dreams of equality, freedom and justice rather than the nightmare politics of an authoritarian present.

The post Right-wing authoritarianism is winning — but higher education is where we can fight back appeared first on Salon.com.

Amidst the subsequent sentimental gestures honoring a young man who had died “doing what he loved” — while teammates and coaches issued tributes to Agu’s intelligence, compassion and dedication; while Cal paused other campus activities to stage a memorial service; while a plaque with his likeness was installed at Memorial Stadium — what is arguably the world’s most famous public university proceeded, on a different track, to do something quite different. It engineered what could only be termed a cover-up of the cause of Agu’s death. Moreover, the cover-up succeeded.

We’ll get to the elements of the cover-up in a moment. First, it’s important to note that offseason conditioning drill deaths of non-professional football players — who are often minors and thus, by definition, not legally consenting — tell their own collective and gruesome story. This is a vastly underreported aspect of football’s overall vastly underreported public health crisis.

Thanks to a vogue angle of medical research — which most people don’t realize has been around since at least the 1920s — many football participants and fans now have some appreciation of the problem of traumatic brain injury, which can have both immediate and lifelong consequences, as a byproduct of systematic violent contact. However, few know or understand the implications of a phenomenon that causes two or more youth football players to die almost every year — at high schools and obscure junior colleges, as well as at NCAA Division I programs like Cal’s — with no traumatic contact whatsoever, and without helmets or shoulder pads. 

These boys or young men are dying of bronchial asthma or genetic heart conditions or exertional heatstroke. And, like Ted Agu, at least some of them, probably far more than we know, are dying of what the medical literature has called “exertional sickling,” or ES. Sickling attacks are overwhelmingly associated with Black athletes, since approximately one in 12 African-Americans carry the sickle cell trait.

You most likely have heard of sickle cell anemia, an inherited red blood cell disorder. But sickle cell trait is different; it is not a disease. Carriers can lead normal lives. But they need to be extra-vigilant, with medical protocols in place to protect them in the event of distress during extreme exertion. The trait makes carriers urgently susceptible to rhabdomyolysis, the poisonous entry of dead muscle tissue into the bloodstream, which can cause sudden death.

I argue that all youth football conditioning deaths add up to more than the sum of their individual etiologies. They are a pandemic, albeit a socially induced one, of deaths from football itself — from the sheer size and scope and power of something our society would be wise to confine to a gladiator class certified to provide late-empire mass divertissement. Football belongs out of our public schools. It belongs off our public fields.

“A teen football player dies suddenly in America, for reason unrelated to collision on the field, and the postmortem investigation produces more questions than answers — particularly whether the stressful sport contributed mortally,” writes Matt Chaney, a Missouri author who has investigated the history of football harm. He cites as one of the key reasons “the reputedly ‘deficient’ state of autopsy in America, especially for children, as part of the death-investigations system that a National Academy of Sciences report characterizes as ‘fragmented’ and ‘hodgepodge.'” 

And if you analogize the global, multibillion-dollar football industry’s manufacturing of doubt about its dangers to the “captive research” funded or supported by the Tobacco Institute during an earlier era, then the unappreciated scale and causes of youth football conditioning deaths can be seen as something like the sport’s “second-hand smoke” problem.

Speaking of smoke, there was plenty of that spread by Cal authorities from the moment Ted Agu fell down dead, when everyone inside the football program immediately feared and suspected the worst.

Scott Anderson, the head athletic trainer for the University of Oklahoma football team — one of the sport’s most famous collegiate programs — heard all about it. He is an outspoken critic and monitor of some football coaches’ maniacal conditioning regimes. Often these are performative masculinity “toughness” rituals with zero fitness rationale, offering zero genuine competitive advantage. Anderson has a network of sources across the country. On the day Agu died, Anderson spoke with a former Cal football staffer who in turn was on the phone with an assistant coach at the Berkeley football complex. “The coach told my source, ‘It’s a sickle cell death,'” Anderson reported. A report including this revelation briefly made the front page at CBSsports.com, before mysteriously vanishing. Anderson later told the story directly to me. (CBS did not respond to Salon’s request for comment.)

At a same-day press conference, university officials, including team physician Dr. Casey Batten, deflected questions about whether Agu had any pre-existing medical condition. Working from a script drafted by the sports information office, Batten and others said they could not comment on details that might impinge on the privacy of the deceased student-athlete.

Behind the scenes, Batten was singing a different tune — an outright obstructive one. As Dr. Thomas Beaver, the Alameda County medical examiner, was preparing to perform an autopsy on Agu, he received a highly irregular phone call from Batten. The team doctor said the case looked like open-and-shut “HCM”: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or generic heart failure. He did not mention ES, and the university never got around to telling Beaver — or the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, under which the medical examiner operates — that Agu had been tested for sickle cell trait and found to be a carrier. Beaver never asked.

Indeed, it’s unclear how much the coroner knew in the first place about sickle cell trait or exertional sickling. “I was fully aware of exertional sickling when I did the autopsy, but I had no history of sickle cell disease or trait,” Beaver told Salon. He recalled that in examining Agu’s body, he found “mild to moderate cardiomegaly” (i.e., an enlarged heart) but no evidence of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (the disease by which the heart muscle grows excessively thick) or hypertensive cardiovascular disease.

“I was given the history that he was perfectly healthy and had participated in this specific drill many times without the slightest issue,” Beaver added. “It was not until I looked at the cardiac biopsy material that I found sickle cell in the microvasculature and could raise the issue.” From that point forward, he said, the investigation was conducted by the sheriff’s office and he was no longer involved. “I was never given the history of documented sickle cell trait, or shown any documentation that I recall,” he said.

The autopsy report was released two months after Agu’s death. To the great relief of university officials, the cause of death was listed as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

The truth didn’t begin to emerge until discovery and depositions for the Agu family’s wrongful death lawsuit against the University of California’s Board of Regents. In his own deposition, Beaver recounted the phone conversation in which Batten had put his thumb on the scales of the autopsy investigation. A sheriff’s lieutenant confirmed that the university had faxed over 112 pages documenting its own investigation, while appearing to omit up to 29 other pages.

Asked about his call to the coroner, Batten said under oath, according to the transcript of his deposition: “Um, I don’t recall that I had a conversation where we — I think we did say something along the lines of it appeared to be, but it was — I think it was — it might have been after — I really don’t recall when I spoke with him….”

Batten is now lead primary care physician for the Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League, and is also on staff at the highly prestigious Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He did not respond to Salon’s request for comment, and a spokesperson for Cedars-Sinai said the hospital could not respond to questions about events in Batten’s career that predated his employment there.  

After the depositions, Beaver — who by then had taken another coroner post in Florida, and is now a faculty member at the Medical University of South Carolina — took the extraordinary step of having Alameda County revise the autopsy report to reflect the new conclusion that ES was a contributing cause of Ted Agu’s death. Not long after that, the University of California’s lawyers reached agreement with the Agu family on a $4.75 million settlement of their wrongful death suit.

But to call ES a contributing factor in this case seems a major understatement. Testimony by Agu’s teammates made clear that he collapsed multiple times and deteriorated in stages, rather than dying suddenly. That sequence is completely consistent with ES-rhabdomyolysis, and not at all consistent with a coronary event.

ES awareness can be funny that way. For football, as we’ll see, it’s a political football. In other walks of life, it’s an excuse. Surveying the overall cluster of litigation over deaths of African-American males, there seems to be only one category of defendants who jump to acknowledging ES. In fact, in that one category, defendants aggressively deploy this explanation. That category is police officers, in fatalities involving criminals or suspects. There, apologists for the brutality that caused the individual in custody to die suddenly are quick to suggest that the culprit might have been ES, rather than the proverbial or actual knee on the neck, as in the infamous case of George Floyd.

Yet even today, if you do a standard Google search for Ted Agu’s cause of death, the result still comes up as “hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.” Adhering to the maxim often attributed to Mark Twain, the lie got halfway around the world before the truth put its shoes on. Which was exactly the way Cal and FootballWorld — my term for the organized football establishment — wanted it.

As a grim illustration of this, my California Public Records Act lawsuit against the University of California is now in its fifth year. As a result of the corresponding public information law requests, some of them enforced or catalyzed by my court petition and court orders, 700 pages of internal university documents have been produced, many of them intensely focused on the university’s PR management of Agu’s death.

The only reason this litigation remains ongoing is that UC apparently is not content with its victory in seeing none of these details, which have only been published at my personal website, picked up by any mainstream news outlet. The university is now asking California’s First District Court of Appeal to reverse a lower court’s ruling ordering reimbursement of my attorney’s fees and costs. (Earlier this year, the parties had settled on a discounted payment of $125,000.)

Demonstrating that Cal football at least knows how to fight the last war, emergency medical services were summoned in a timely fashion during a subsequent conditioning episode in 2018 that involved another Black player on the first day of team conditioning. He had been pulled out of a practice three months earlier, and this time required hospitalization for two nights with what was diagnosed as “non-traumatic rhabdomyolysis.” Again, news of the incident was efficiently hushed up.

For FootballWorld, multimillion-dollar settlements of lawsuits by family survivors are baked in as a cost of doing business. In case you’re wondering how key individual actors in the Agu death and the subsequent cover-up made out, beyond the illustrious Dr. Batten, the answer is that they’re doing fine — and without exception have moved on to bigger paychecks and more prestigious programs.

Damon Harrington, the strength and conditioning coach who designed and supervised the bizarre drill that killed Agu — which is certainly not found in any kinesiology or cardiovascular health textbook — had his contract renewed twice at Cal before moving on to become strength and conditioning coach for the football team at Grambling State in Louisiana, one of the best-known historically Black universities in the nation. Today, he holds the same position at Texas Tech.

Sonny Dykes, who was head football coach at Cal when Ted Agu died — and for whom Harrington was executing a mandate of “culture change” for a football program seen as having grown soft — is now head coach at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In 2019, he was among the finalists for the Football Writers Association of America’s Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year Award.

Sandy Barbour, the former athletic director at Cal, now holds that position at Penn State, a school whose legendary football program has been tainted by an entirely different kind of scandal.

*  *  *

There’s a broader question here about the persistence of a largely-unaccounted subset of youth football deaths among Black players. Anderson, the Oklahoma athletic trainer, maintains a spreadsheet updating cases of known sickling fatalities in football conditioning. There have been at least 31 since 1963. By his calculation, nearly half of all college football conditioning deaths are from exertional sickling.

There is “a ratio of 4.5 nontraumatic deaths for every traumatic death,” Anderson wrote in the Journal of Athletic Training, meaning that far more players die as a result of training or practice than because they got hit in the head on the field. “On average, 2 NCAA football players die per season.”

On the college football ES list, Ted Agu was No. 29. Because of cover-ups similar to Cal’s but across a longer period, and because of generally poor awareness of sickle cell trait and ES, there may have been many additional deaths that were inaccurately ascribed to “random” heart attacks and the like. Anderson has documented scores of conditioning deaths in college football this century. There could be scores more at lower levels of the sport, all the way down to Pop Warner and pee-wee leagues. Anderson’s colleague, now-retired football team physician Dr. E. Randy Eichner, writes extensively about safety lapses in conditioning drills.

No. 27 on the ES list was Ereck Plancher, who died at the University of South Florida in 2008. That happened on the watch of an athletic trainer named Robbie Jackson, who moved on to California and was head athletic trainer on the scene when Agu died six years later. After being intimately involved with two such similar tragedies, Jackson seems to be the only main figure in the story who suffered noticeable career consequences: He left football and was last reported to be working in medical supply sales.

Anderson wrote that the four most common causes of “on-field (non-trauma) collapse of a football player who takes the field healthy are, by and large, different enough in setting and clinical features that, even judging only from early, sparse, media accounts we can sometimes make an educated guess that proves right.” Those four are ES, cardiac disease, exertional heatstroke (EHS) and asthma.

With more than 150 fatalities at all levels of football since 1955, EHS is the most frequent cause, and it is the one that has captured most of the headlines in recent years. There was 16-year Zachary Martin (who was not Black), at Riverdale High School in Fort Myers, Florida, in 2017. There was 19-year-old Jordan McNair, at the University of Maryland in June 2018.

And just two months after McNair, there was 19-year-old Braeden Bradforth, at Garden City Community College in Kansas. Bradforth had been rush-recruited from New Jersey less than a week earlier. He expired on his first full day in Kansas, at altitude. After the head coach, Jeff Sims, lashed out at him for supposedly not making enough effort in first-day conditioning drills, during which basic hydration was withheld, an assistant coach dismissed Bradforth from the inaugural team meeting — and, seemingly, the team — and he wandered off. Shortly thereafter, teammates found the 300-pound lineman lying unconscious outside the dormitory building where he had just moved in. Team staff directed that his body be crudely hosed down before 911 was belatedly called.

Garden City is one of the “Last Chance U” bottom-feeder football programs in the junior college system; it was where Tyreek Hill, now a star wide receiver for the Kansas City Chiefs, got a leg up before transferring to Oklahoma State and being drafted by the NFL. Sims, a peripatetic coach who was in the middle of taking Garden City to two straight junior college national championship games, blatantly lied in his early spin to the media — which was dutifully amplified on a national scale by Sports Illustrated and others — saying that Bradforth’s death was a random, context-free act of God. Only after the dogged investigations of Braeden’s mother, Joanne Atkins-Ingram, and her lawyer, Jill Greene, did the college begin seriously accounting for its gross negligence. Sims left Garden City for Missouri Southern State, then was let go there around the time Garden City settled the Bradforth family’s lawsuit for $500,000, the maximum amount allowable under the Kansas legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” for state public agencies.

One thing Sims could well have faced, but didn’t, was criminal prosecution for reckless endangerment or manslaughter. There is only one known case of such prosecution in a football conditioning death: the EHS death of 15-year-old Max Gilpin at Louisville’s Pleasure Ridge Park High School in 2008. The Pleasure Ridge Park head coach, Jason Stinson, was acquitted at trial, but Jefferson County Public Schools forked over $1.75 million to the Gilpin family to settle the civil case.

(Two Georgia high school girls’ basketball coaches currently face charges for the 2019 EHS death of one of their players.)

Dr. Eichner has published voluminously on avoidable football conditioning deaths in general and ES in particular. He has consulted in dozens of wrongful death lawsuits involving sports or the military, including the Agu family’s. (A 1987 Army study found that Black recruits with sickle cell trait were 30 times likelier to die during basic combat training than those without the trait.) Commenting on the recent football heatstroke deaths in the newest issue of Current Sports Medicine Reports, Eichner writes: “Global warming and a demanding coach can be a lethal combination [especially] for a huge lineman. This is especially true when the coach lacks common sense. In football, training is often by tradition; athletes become coaches and train young athletes as they were trained. Too often, the focus is on ‘creating’ toughness and discipline more than developing football fitness and skills.”

*  *  *

Black people are around 13 percent of the U.S. population, but Black athletes comprise 46 percent of Division I football players, according to NCAA data. In the NFL, that figure is close to 60 percent.

A basic and understandable explanation for this is what has been called the “Dr. J. Syndrome,” after basketball legend Julius Erving: Lacking a multitude of models for advancement, Black youth cling to the visible and compelling dream of fame, glory and riches in sports and entertainment.

David Karen, a specialist in the sociology of sports at Bryn Mawr College, also sees fundamentally rational economic choices playing out. “There is serious tracking happening with sports, by race and class,” Karen said. “What do parents and kids perceive the sports opportunity structure to look like? People are going to gravitate toward opportunities that appear plentiful and well-used. Additionally, what kids choose to do in college is structured by what they’d had access to before — from very young ages onward.”

Hamilton College sociologist Alex Manning specifically studies the dynamics of racism, inequality, families, youth, sports and culture. He told me: “It comes down to how we treat sports institutionally. A lot of sports require substantial private resources in order to get to elite levels, but football is something supported and invested in by public schools. That’s where the funneling happens.”

In Manning’s analysis, football’s touted benefits to the commonweal, such as forging teamwork and wider community-building, as well as time management and other disciplines said to be individual life skills, stem from the same structural determinism: “Especially in the South — rural, urban and suburban — football has become that rare open space and institution for Black youth-centered activity. It is where young African-American men can build recognition and attain some agency in their lives.”

Passivity regarding the lethal risk of ES is a challenging extra piece of the puzzle around football, racialization and death. The University of California and other higher-education football factories, major and minor, couldn’t so easily get away with burying the complications of providing for both athletic opportunity and safety if the most conspicuous constituency didn’t largely remain silent. Many Black people in or around football who I have spoken with about this have expressed sentiments that could be summarized this way: “Why do we have to take the lead in raising sickle cell trait consciousness? That will just be one more thing used to stigmatize us and retard Black progress.”

Activists for sickle cell anemia research and treatment don’t necessarily want to hear evidence about exertional sickling and football deaths, fearing it could draw oxygen away from their fundraising efforts. This statement appears on the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America website: “Given the lack of scientific evidence that substantiates a significant correlation between sickle cell trait in athletes and training related sudden death, SCDAA does not support screening of athletes for sickle cell trait as a means to reduce heat related illness or death in athletes who are carriers.”

That disclaimer relies on a restricted definition of what constitutes a “significant correlation.” The families of Ereck Plancher and Ted Agu might consider the link not insignificant. So might the loved ones of Aaron O’Neal (University of Missouri, 2005), whose death was not nailed down as ES until long afterward. The larger public health point is that greater awareness would almost certainly establish greater correlation.

Here’s the language from the Centers for Disease Control: “Some people with SCT have been shown to be more likely than those without SCT to experience heat stroke and muscle breakdown when doing intense exercise, such as competitive sports or military training under unfavorable temperatures (very high or low) or conditions.” 

The CDC recommends sickle cell trait screening for athletes, and the NCAA mandates that football programs offer optional screening. Ted Agu was among those who opted in, but it’s not known what percentage of Black student-athletes opt out. Anyway, screening itself is meaningless if, as in Agu’s case, a school knows about a player’s sickle cell trait vulnerability but does nothing about it when a life-saving intervention is needed — and then proceeds to skew and cover up the record after the worst happens.

And what ES awareness safety measures could give to young Black men, they could also take away. Football “scholarships” are not the bootstrapping grants-in-aid portrayed in sports mythology; they are semester-to-semester contracts at the almost sole discretion of the coaches. Players who are perceived as not able to cut it are dropped, just as ruthlessly as NFL players under the imperfect protections of their union. There is good reason for Black athletes to be concerned that greater caution around ES could mean a reduction of scholarship opportunities.

So it goes in the stormy cultural marriage between young Black men and organized football. Until death do they part.

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The Washington Post reports that the University of Florida backed down on Friday and “should not be barred from testifying in a voting rights lawsuit against” DeSantis’s administration.

The initial decision to block the three political science professors from testifying drew an uproar from both faculty and alumni, who accused the university of bowing to political pressure and of suppressing their professors’ freedom of speech.

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Kenneth Nunn, a law professor at the university, welcomed the school’s reversal and said that “it’s great that the president saw the university’s reputation was being damaged by their unfortunate decision to restrict those three faculty members from testifying in their case.”

The professors will now be testifying in a lawsuit against a Florida law passed earlier this year that places new restrictions on mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes.

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