U.S. higher ed isn’t ready for authoritarianism (opinion)

2 months ago
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Like many authoritarian leaders, Donald Trump has nothing but disdain for this country’s colleges and universities, especially so-called elite institutions. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have made clear that universities are included in the group of “enemies from within” because they house the “radical left lunatics” that Trump and Vance will target if they win the November election.

In 2021, Vance said he wanted to “destroy the universities,” claiming four-year college degrees make people “derange[d]” and leave those who receive them “worse people.” In a speech he gave titled “The Universities Are the Enemy,” he lamented that “the only way to live a good life in this country, the only way for our children to succeed, is to go to a four-year university where people will learn to hate their country and acquire a lot of debt in the process.”

In their vehement criticism of universities Trump and Vance share company with other autocrats around the globe. Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, explains that autocrats “cannot abide independent universities.” Independent universities, Daniels argues, “unnerve authoritarians because everything that these institutions strive to achieve is inimical to the autocrat’s devotion to the accumulation and arbitrary exercise of coercive public power.”

American higher education seems unprepared for the trouble that will befall it if Trump and Vance get control of the levers of government. They are also unprepared to cope with the growing authoritarianism of large segments of the American population, which will endure no matter who leads the next administration in Washington.

To survive and thrive in this new environment, they will have to rethink their usual ways of doing business and learn from the experiences of higher education institutions in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. There is no time to waste.

During his first term, Trump made clear his hostility to higher education institutions, and nothing has changed since. As Inside Higher Ed’s Katherine Knott has reported, “The four years of Donald Trump’s first term as president were fraught, defined by threats to international students, allegations of ‘radical left indoctrination,’ free speech controversies and far-reaching attacks on fundamental institutional values such as diversity.”

Knott notes that, “Higher education wasn’t high on Trump’s priority list the first time around, but an increasing anti–higher education sentiment among Republicans and sectors of the public has shifted the political winds. That could open the door to more radical policy options.”

Trump has used the post–Oct. 7 campus protests to preview some of those policy options in his current campaign. In September of this year, he promised Jewish donors to the Republican Party that colleges “will lose their accreditation and federal support” over what he described as “antisemitic propaganda.” In Vance, Trump has a partner to help him carry out such threats.

And the Ohio senator has his own agenda for bringing independent universities to heel.

If he is elected vice president, Vance will want to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs at colleges and universities. And he will be in a position to push his positively Orwellian proposal to establish a special inspector general in the Department of Education to investigate racial discrimination in college admissions.

Instead of abolishing the Department of Education, as Trump has proposed, Vance will try to turn it into a weapon to bring universities into line or punish those who don’t go along.

Vance and Trump also could go after the endowments of rich colleges. Max Eden, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, applauds Vance’s proposal to raise the tax on endowment investment income from 1.4 percent to 35 percent for universities with endowments of at least $10 billion.

Not to be outdone, Eden writes, Trump “proposed an even more aggressive measure. In his Agenda47, Trump proposed a law that would monitor universities for civil rights violations and issue penalties of up to the entire endowment.”

As the 2024 campaign comes to a close, Trump is doubling down on his increasingly dark and authoritarian pitch to MAGA voters. For the moment, he has stopped beating up on higher education.

But the lessons of history suggest that this pause will be short-lived if Trump becomes president. Once in the Oval Office, he is likely to follow the playbook of his favorite strongman, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

As Daniels observes, soon after he came to power, Orbán launched “a vicious smear campaign” against his country’s prestigious Central European University. He also made it illegal for the university to offer its U.S.-accredited degrees. His efforts forced CEU to leave Hungary and move to Vienna.

But Michael Ignatieff, past president of CEU, reminds us that Orbán didn’t stop there. He “decapitated Hungary’s preeminent scientific institution, the Academy of Science, stripping it of its independent research institutes. Then he forced the privatization of a large part of Hungary’s own university system, packing its governing boards with party loyalists and pouring resources into … a new elite institution with the explicit task of providing a traditional and patriotic education for the Hungarian elite of tomorrow.”

Those actions would have to be adapted to the American context, but they suggest what life under an authoritarian might be like for colleges and universities in this country.

But even people like Daniels, who are warning about the coming storm, have offered little more than well-worn pieties by way of advice.

“Universities,” he argues, “must rededicate themselves to educating democratic citizens.” They must bring “expertise and rigorous facts to bear on contemporary social and scientific phenomena,” “renew their commitment to the idea of equal opportunity in admissions and financial aid,” and “model for students how to engage with one another across a diversity of backgrounds, experiences and beliefs.”

This business-as-usual approach is unlikely to be sufficient. There are other things that colleges and universities should prepare now to do if Trump’s brand of authoritarianism comes to our shores.

Here are a few of them.

First, colleges and universities must have serious conversations with their students, faculty and staff about the choice they will face between knuckling under to governmental pressure and threats, financial and otherwise, and resisting. These conversations must be informed by real information about what life in the resistance would mean.

What would happen if endowment revenues abruptly declined under a federal government assault? What would happen if the Trump administration finds a pretext to cut off federal funding for financial aid or scientific research?

A resilient response requires the kind of sustainable buy-in and sacrifice that can only be obtained if the entire community becomes well informed about its future under authoritarianism.

Second, colleges and universities must be prepared to move beyond a general endorsement of expressive freedom and lend their support and resources to advocacy organizations with experience and expertise in actually defending it. This doesn’t have to be partisan activity: Expressive freedom is not a partisan cause.

Third, when students, faculty and staff are targeted, as they will be, for speaking or writing in ways that are unpopular with or offensive to the authoritarian regime, higher education institutions must not leave them on their own to fend off attacks. They must use their institutional power and resources to aid people in their community who are in jeopardy. And they must make clear that they will do so in order to minimize the chilling effect of life under authoritarianism.

Finally, if they are to resist the temptation to become illiberal institutions, they must study what happened to universities under National Socialism in Germany and what is happening today not only in Hungary, but also in India, Russia, Turkey and other increasingly authoritarian countries. American colleges and universities may have to reinvent themselves from top to bottom if they are to hold on to their missions.

Responding to the authoritarian threat will not be easy, and it will play out differently across the variegated landscape of higher education. Public universities will surely have to respond differently than private ones; poor ones will have to respond differently than rich ones. But all of them must respond.

We should have learned from what happened to colleges and universities in the wake of Oct. 7 that they are sitting ducks. If they are to avoid being picked off easily, they will have to be prepared to go to the barricades.…Read more by Austin Sarat

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