Fascism Winning War On Universities
Attacking intellectuals and education, always an early stop on a dictator's choo-choo!
Let’s not put lipstick on this one. Trump is targeting universities by holding them financially hostage, pressuring them to self-confess non-existent THOUGHTCRIMES, and disappearing their students. And instead of schools speaking out against the brazen FASCIST war on FREE SPEECH and ACADEMIC FREEDOM that is already making intellectuals flee the country, it’s crickets and capitulation, from the very Ivy League schools that are in the best position to speak out the loudest.
“There was a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago, the professors are the enemy,” Yale Law grad Vice President Butthair opined back in 2021.
Now the strategy is to target and pick off students and schools one by one: They’ve snatched $800 million from Johns Hopkins University, $400 million from Columbia, and $250 million in NIH grants plus $175 million from Trump’s alma mater the University of Pennsylvania, for allegedly doing TRANS SPORTS. They also withheld USDA funds from the University of Maine until they agreed to not let trans athletes participate in sports.
Pammy Jo Bondi has now opened DEI witch hunt investigations into University of California schools and Stanford, on top of the 50 other universities she’s investigating under suspicion of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they free-associated with the Ph.D. Project, a group that “encourages and supports historically underrepresented candidates on their journey” to getting doctorates in business, so of course PROBABLY SOMEBODY IS DOING RACISM to white people.
NYU cancelled a talk from the ex-head of Doctors Without Borders, after telling her that one of her slides in a presentation about USAID cuts might be perceived as anti-governmental, and heaven forbid you should be allowed to criticize the government.
Authoritarian-historian Timothy Snyder, his wife Marci Shore, and their Yale colleague philosophy professor specializing in political propaganda and fascism Jason Stanley, whose most recent book is titled Erasing History, have seen this plot already. They’ve left the country for the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, Stanley out of fears for his children who are both Jewish and Black. Jewish intellectuals fleeing a country, when have we seen that before? And Stanley doesn’t see much hope for American universities, because they are not speaking out:
When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted — that whole way of thinking presupposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy.
Columbia, the most fervent focus of Trump’s ire, has now given in to even more bullet items on the list of the li’l dictator’s demands. They’ve agreed to self-confess that they failed to protect students from “antisemitic violence and harassment,” and agreed to external oversight on the school’s Middle Eastern studies department. They’ve also agreed to hire an internal security force with 36 new security officers who will have the power to arrest students and faculty. And the school’s latest president, Katrina Armstrong, has stepped down; she’d been serving since August when the previous Trump-targeted president, Minouche Shafik, also stepped down, after being accused by donors and Mike Johnson of being too easy on protestors, even though Shafik let the police come on the campus of the PRIVATE university and arrest them.
The school has now literally locked down its campus, closing it off from the city, and students say they won’t be protesting any more. One pointed out to NBC, “Not every family of the people that will go out to protest have the financial capabilities to be able to afford a lawyer.” Not with it costing about $98k a year, nope!
The antisemitism thing is a canard, of course. There were protests, and an encampment, but about pressuring the school to divest from Israel, just like it did from South Africa in response to student protests in the ‘80s.
And, if there were an antisemitic harassment problem at Columbia, we’ve got a whole Department of Education with an entire office of civil rights and procedures already in place to investigate discrimination against students. If we were very cynical, we’d say this sure smells like a way of setting Jewish students and academics up to get blamed for the fascist destruction of higher education that Project 2025 is doing.
And Trump takes pleasure in extortion, delighting in his new boundless powers, the element of surprise, the spectacle of university elites and biglaw firm managing partners begging him to be allowed to live, with tears in their eyes.
Bringing universities to heel is always a first stop on the choo-choo of every dictator’s train from Adolph to Zedong. Gotta silence the professors who will call out fascism for what it is!
Schools are fascist one-stop shopping for the Gleichschaltung — what the Nazis called the “synchronization” of all elements of intellectual and cultural life. Scholars who engage in WRONGTHINK can be made an example of. And controlling education is controlling the future! From now on protesting Apartheid will be known as doing racism to white South Africans who just wanted to have a fun time in Sun City.
(Did you hear that, as we’re throwing all our other refugees into Salvadoran supermax, we’re about to have refugee centers to welcome white South Africans? No you didn’t, because we haven’t posted Gary’s story about it yet.)
Student movements all over the world have used protest to make change for as long as there have been universities, and authoritarians fear them. And properly obedient schools can shut down dangerous free thinking that contradicts Dear Leader right at the source! Universities are a font of trusted authorities, and authoritarians trust only one expert, and that is the man at the top of the personality cult. Everyone must think twice before they contradict him in public.
Going after universities, and foreign students, also functions as selective-retribution against blue areas. There’s about 1.1 million foreign students in the US, and most don’t get any school financial aid. They contribute about $43.8 billion to the economy and support around 378,000 jobs in little blue patches all around the country. No more foreign students could destroy colleges and university towns, and they’re already good as gone. What student would ever apply for a study-abroad program in the US, now that getting your F-1 visa surprise-revoked and finding yourself stuffed in the back of a van to a detention center is a real possibility? Why not just go to sunny Australia, cozy Canada, or a cheaper school in the EU instead?
My, all of this has happened so fast.
No state is likely more fucked per capita than Maryland, where Trump has cut $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, also the state’s largest employer, and all Maryland’s schools will lose $418 million in funds the government had already committed to spending. Screw you and your distractingly handsome Black governor! Johns Hopkins already has its own university police force, and so far no ransom note tied to a brick of demands to obey to restore funding has been thrown through a window.
And since we’re already totally Debbie Downer, how about that brain drain? France is already talking about starting a fund to support American researchers fleeing the «catastrophique» regime.
Who will stand up to these bullies?
Once upon a time this Wonkette was giving a talk at Hefei University in China (long story), and the translator had some cultural advice: Don’t ask anyone to raise their hands for questions. Better to have them write any questions down anonymously on cards, because no one wants to be the first Indian out of the woods, was the saying. Native Americans, Indians in India, she did not know to whom the saying referred, but the gist was clear. In a place where rules are vague and enforcement is subjective, nothing good can ever come from standing out.
Such it shall be in American schools now. The Socratic method? Better not risk it.
Afterwards, informally, attendees did ask lot of questions, the number one being what the American opinion was on how to raise children to do well in school. Because everybody wants their children to be educated and smart! Except now, in our fascist state.
Well, sorry that was all a big old bummer.
Better luck next article!
[Guardian / CBC / Yale Daily News / NPR]
What pisses me off is that they buckled over nothing. Trump couldn't actually do shit, if they fought.
Pathetic. Don't do this in my name. As a Jew I find it reprehensible that they are using antisemitism to implement their fascist agenda. We know where academic repression leads.