Radical Curiosity Versus the State

Wherever we turn today, the drumbeats of a foreboding crisis in the country grow louder. It’s telling us that an authoritarian drift is pushing hard against the gates of once-inviolable institutions of democracy, like press freedom, due process, and independent higher education. They are institutions that have long fronted the American brand in the global imagination and have served as invitations to replicate a coveted liberal order whose hinges are now ready to blow.

If the din of apocalyptic warnings is overwhelming, then disengage from all media, store canned foods, and wait for the collapse to pass. But for those unwilling to abdicate critical judgment, there are more generative responses. As worn out as it may sound, it’s useful to seek out story and metaphor again, not as escapism, but as epistemological tools to help us divine the bearing of a crisis whose logic is as erratic as its logic-masters. Dystopian fiction quietly endures as one of the few genres honest enough to envisage the coming shape of our contemporary decline and also show us subversive ways out.

George Orwell is overdone. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is not. The sci-fi novel imagines a future in which books are banned, and the “firemen” of society are tasked not with putting out fires but with starting them. They hunt for and incinerate books because they threaten the nation’s purity project, which requires an erasure of key archetypal effects of education: unfiltered understanding of the past; the influence of pastness on the present; how to gaze at possible futures; and how to learn, question authority, and change.

A university that survives only by avoiding discomfort and confrontation is no longer a university; it is a finishing school churning out bureaucrats for the group-think industry.

But at the thematic crux of the novel, there’s a “fireman” who turns against the power structure he loyally served; he becomes an exemplar of radical thinking that rouses an inner rebellion and then outward resistance. At first, the fireman (the knowledge arsonist), Guy Montag, develops a strange curiosity about the contents of books he torches and, soon thereafter, is unable to ignore the uprising festering within.

Montag’s rebellion in Fahrenheit 451 begins not with ideology, but with something more audacious, the reclamation of curiosity as a seditious start of transformation. In the story, there are like-minded underground groups of “book people” who commit to memory outlawed texts and carry them in their minds like sacred relics. The book people become insurgent archivists, radical bearers of culture and literature, who refuse to let fire and epistemic erasure win. Montag’s epiphany was not about resistance in the grand sense. It was smaller, personal, and ultimately more combustible.

Back to real life, we are witnessing a concerted effort to distill national heterogeneity to a single-story perspective that requires, among other things, torching the core purposes of the university. It has come in the form of curricular restrictions, federal scrutiny of university departments in the social sciences and humanities, the surveillance of dissent on campuses, punishing legal public opprobrium, and the unannounced disappearing of student visas. All of these are pursued with threats of financial sanctions.

It extends into language itself. Words, such as diversity, gender, Palestine, genocide, trans, race, intersectionality, settler colonialism, slavery, and regrettably many more are treated as incendiary or soon about to be. So too are symbols—like the black-and-white checkered keffiya, the Muslim hijab, and watermelon pins. These are not random interventions but are part of a supremacy logic designed to narrow what may be safely taught, learned, spoken, or even worn in public.

Like the book people in fiction, the stewards of higher education in the United States are at the frontlines of struggle and resistance. The academic response has been slow but is now accelerating. The campaign to pull government funding from departments, to demand compliance in curriculum, intimidate foreign students, or to criminalize critical language is not a sideshow—it is the main point of authoritarianism.

At a granular level, options exist for faculty who have administrators genuflecting before the bullies. In the sanctity of the classroom, faculty need to double down on teaching students how to be radicals—not in the caricatured sense of rage or rejection, but in the deeper, older meaning: those who fearlessly go to the root. To be radical is to trace the origins of a threat. Not to prune, not to decorate, but to ask: Where is this coming from? What malignant ideology or state covetousness is feeding this descent?

In line with what bell hooks insisted, the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility when it links education to freedom and refuses the myth of neutral knowledge. The warnings are clear: Knowledge stripped of emancipatory intent risks becoming the passive wing of oppression—a handmaiden to the very structures it claims to critique. A university that survives only by avoiding discomfort and confrontation is no longer a university; it is a finishing school churning out bureaucrats for the group-think industry.

The university is under state pressure because, in part, it is an archive of an imperfect past, a seeker of repair, and crucible of dissent. It remains one of the few systems capable of producing decolonized knowers of society.

In this moment of disruption, to teach, to write, and to read critically are no longer normative acts expected of rigor and scholarship; they have become, in face of federal bullying, acts of defiance that refuse to accept that language and curiosity are the property of political power structures.