SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
academic freedom
Now Is the Time to Show Our Collective Power
Let’s stand together and go on the offensive to create a social democratic vision for higher education and other universal public goods now under assault by Trump and his right-wing allies.
Nov 03, 2025
There is no question that the contemporary system of higher education in the United States was facing several crises (commodification of education, access and affordability, faculty precarity, violations of academic freedom, the “rationality crisis”, administrative bloat, etc.—what we generally refer to as the neoliberalization and corporatization of education) before the Trump administration began its assault on colleges and universities in 2025. Trump’s Executive Orders (EOs) related to education have magnified these crises. At the very least, he has forced those of us working in higher education to seriously reflect on what needs fixing. I point to these EOs as an illustration of intent to destroy colleges and universities as public goods by his administration, supporters, and surrogates, including Chris Rufo and Marc Rowan, two of the most notable agents who are not shy about using the authoritarian playbook. They are deliberately pushing the limits of legal and constitutional mores and precedents to achieve their goals. This should not be a controversial interpretation of intent, considering how transparent the expression of the authoritarian turn has been and continues to be when it comes to higher education and, well, everything else.
Their goal, and the goal of at least some elements of the capitalist class, is to dismantle the administrative state as part of the long-running backlash against FDRs New Deal programs that were rooted in the progressive ethos that government should directly serve the needs of the people. The construction of an enemy is crucial in executing the backlash. Today, the targets are, though not exclusively, teachers and what they do in the classroom, college and university professors, immigrants, transgender people, and the working class writ-large. Collectively, it’s time for faculty to show their power, moving beyond the lines of defense they have already established, creating networks of solidarity across industrial sectors, all while conducting political education about how the system works and who benefits under capitalism. It’s time we start to engage in discussing different tactics and overall strategies that include, but are not limited to, building the capacity for strike actions in collaboration with unions nationwide.
The good news, and perhaps to this end, is that Trump’s attacks have galvanized organized opposition from within higher education institutions. A bevy of coalitions led by faculty have taken the lead in pushing back against not only the Trump administration’s Education Department, but also against internal, administrative pressure to comply. The City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban university system in the United States, led by faculty, has evolved to become one of the leaders in the national call for mutual academic defense compacts across the US. Galvanized by recent attacks on academic freedom and the weaponization of antisemitism by political and administrative actors, the CUNY Alliance to Defend Higher Education is one of the many initiatives that have popped up across the country.
These coalitions have developed under the strain of what feels like daily attacks against the mission of higher education and all its community members, particularly the most vulnerable. This opposition is grounded in the idea that faculty governance should dictate how colleges and universities operate as institutions of higher education focused on the pursuit of truth in the interest of the public good.
Mobilizing the working class means promoting a long-term, positive vision for public higher education.
At the core of this idea is the material reality that faculty, or faculty labor power, as Clyde W. Barrow has explained, is the sole "producer of value": without faculty, there are no students, no knowledge being produced and taught, therefore no colleges and universities. Historically, administrators—from Board of Trustees, Presidents, Vice Presidents, Provosts, and Deans, what I call the Administrative Elite—are called upon to play a supportive role in the governance of colleges and universities. The employment relation between administrators and faculty is fundamentally a managerial one, where administrative dictates carry the implicit and at times explicit weight of exerting discipline against the perceived violators of college rules, regardless of governance structures and safeguards. To be sure, there are more guardrails against administrative overreach if faculty and staff are protected by a contractual bargaining agreement (CBA) backed by a strong union presence in the workplace. But as we have seen at CUNY and elsewhere, even a CBA cannot stop administrators from acting with McCarthyite impunity.
Colleges and universities, whether public or private, are creatures of the state. Either through regulatory means executed by the state or federal governments or both, through accreditation, or through fiscal dependency, institutions of higher education are subject to the political-economic imperatives of elected politicians and wealthy donors. In turn, they communicate their interests through formal and informal channels directly to boards of trustees, chancelleries, and college and university presidents with the goal of influencing how faculty do our jobs, placing limits on the range of what they deem to be acceptable actions and behavior. To be sure, given the diverse nature of higher education institutions across the country, the Administrative Elite will impose limits to the extent that they are called upon to do so by their respective institutional decision-making hierarchy. While there are well-meaning administrators in positions of power, some who intentionally rise through the ranks of faculty, they are nevertheless subject to the demands placed on them within this hierarchy, oftentimes placing them at odds with competing interests between the state government, politically motivated dictates, and students and faculty, particularly during moments of crisis. We cannot assume that this Administrative Elite will side with faculty and student interests if threats against their institutions are framed as existential. And we cannot convince them to do the “right thing” if their overall material interests are aligned with the dominant political and managerial hierarchy that rules over them.
This brings us to the question of faculty governance. The modern system of faculty self-governance, which dates back to the rise of the modern university in the early 20th century, rests on the assumption that faculty occupy a distinct and “professional” status in American society as intellectuals. The rise of the modern university also coincides with the rise of “corporate liberalism”, within the capitalist state, and the emergence of the corporate university. Historically, the corporate university evolved to adopt the logic and methods of the market as guiding principles which, as Larry G. Gerber has explained, deprofessionalizes and undermines faculty governance.
Since the 1970s, one manifestation of the “market model” that Gerber identifies is the increasing number of precarious employment in the form of “contingent” faculty and the simultaneous decrease in the number of tenure-track faculty lines at colleges and universities. Contingency in employment is one step towards deprofessionalization. The advantages of having a deprofessionalized workforce, as far as managers are concerned, is that workers become vulnerable and more easily subject to employer disciplinary actions. In this case, it also leads to weak faculty governance structures because faculty are already bursting under the full weight of teaching loads, pressure to research and publish, and serve in various committees, leaving no time to participate extensively in governance structures. Some faculty may continue to adjust to the constant juggling of work demands placed on them, while others tune out, keep their heads down, and carry on.
From a broader, social, political, and economic perspective, some faculty may carry on their work under the belief that they are professionals, distinct and separate from other workers who contribute their labor to maintain our workplaces in order. Here, for example, I am thinking of janitorial staff, clerical workers, and safety and security staff. One of the most successful accomplishments of the neoliberalization of the university system is getting us to believe that we are all individuals, working for our own benefit, separate and apart from other workers in a system that commodifies our experience. In other words, the logic of the market obliterates the social relations necessary to produce knowledge. It also produces the belief that as professionals, faculty, in whatever rank, are part of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), defined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 as “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”
Christopher Newfield recently captured the consequences of this neoliberalization process. Referring to the current political climate, he says:
Academics are not well prepared for this moment. This was unfortunately foretold by the Ehrenreich prophecy: the PMC was too subservient to capital and its representatives to build an independent power base, in the teeth of disapproval. Not a class but a contradictory class position, academics have a diverse membership that lacked a class interest in aligning with the noncollege working class, in spite of such an interest held by many individual members. They also failed to build organizational power for themselves; instead, they bonded with senior managers and their superiors through academic senates and status-based private bargains, in a stable PMC-capital overlap of interests.
Newfield suggest that,
[W]e must work step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities. If we do, we’ll be of real use to our knowledge allies—government scientists,public health advocates, local news journalists, community researchers, theater company directors, et al.—in building the self-governing knowledge systems we need to block authoritarian implosion and get a future we want.
As uncomfortable as it may make some individuals who identify and occupy the class position of the PMC, one conclusion that I suggest we draw from Newfield’s observation and analysis is that we must engage in anticapitalist politics within the university and, by extension, at the state level. There’s a reason why Trump deemed this word to be a threat to national security, conflating it with the word anti-fascist.
As the Trump administration continues to exert pressure using the full weight of the federal government, the Justice Department, and compliant Administrative Elites, we must move forward with a clear agenda for improving the system of higher education we have inherited. And I would argue that we must do so in collaboration with labor across different sectors and with the full acknowledgement that education in general and higher education in particular are public goods worth preserving and expanding. We must create the conditions so that the cost of attacking our communities is so high that they’ll at least think twice before doing so. It’s time for New York City labor unions, for example, to exercise their power and work strategically to overcome the legal and ideological limitations that have held them back for decades. For nearly 60 years, as New York State employees, we are prohibited from striking. It’s time we challenge the Taylor Law, which has been hindering our ability to mobilize New York’s working class, and reflect on any lessons to be learned from the 2005 TWU strike.
Mobilizing the working class means promoting a long-term, positive vision for public higher education. At CUNY, that positive vision should include the democratization of the governance structures and decision-making processes, allowing for community, faculty, and student representation and voting power within the Board of Trustees (BoT). As the institution’s policy-making body, CUNY’s BoT is made up of 17 members, with the vast majority being political appointees (ten appointed by the Governor and five by the Mayor), and only two representing the direct interests of faculty and students (the Chairperson of the University Faculty Senate and the Chairperson of the University Student Senate). Maybe it is time to reflect on and rethink what faculty governance means, in practice, under the existing neoliberal regime where administrators have so much power over university governance.
As part of a democratic and representative discussion, a key question to be addressed is what would a decommodified version of education look like? How can we decouple a college credential from the process of teaching and learning that can inspire students to view a diploma as more than a ticket into the labor market? A crucial component of this positive vision would also include providing full, government-funded free tuition for students and the infrastructure necessary to support their education. The Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union representing faculty and staff at CUNY, has already taken steps towards achieving this vision.
In the short term, we are bracing ourselves for the Trump show of force to come down on the city, as he has promised, if Zoran Mamdani is elected as our new Mayor in New York City. We need a strong coalition of groups to not only resist but to put forward a positive vision of the city we want. One of these coalitions is already taking shape aiming to “protect and prepare” for the onslaught that is sure to come.
Statements and resolutions are important, at the very least, to set the record straight about which side we are on and where we stand in a time of crisis. But they cannot replace organized, strategic actions that will have a positive impact on our workplaces and our communities. Moments of struggle can bring out the best, and worst, in people. We saw that during the Covid-19 pandemic. Let us not wait but be proactive in this fight. Let’s stand together and go on the offensive to create a social democratic vision for higher education that affirms the value of knowledge and truth-seeking for the benefit of the public good.Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's Billionaire Ballroom Is a Perfect Symbol of the Second Gilded Age
The new robber barons are having their names etched into the pediments of the giant new ostentatious ballroom President Donald Trump is adding to the White House.
Oct 23, 2025
In the first Gilded Age, which ran from the 1890s through the 1920s, captains of American industry were dubbed “robber barons” for using their baronial wealth to bribe lawmakers, monopolize industry, and rob average Americans of the productivity of their labors.
Now, in a second Gilded Age, a new generation of robber barons is using their wealth to do the same—and to entrench their power.
The first Gilded Age was an era of conspicuous consumption. The second is an era of conspicuous influence.
The new robber barons are having their names etched into the pediments of the giant new ostentatious ballroom President Donald Trump is adding to the White House.
Trump is now literally taking a wrecking ball to the White House—sending parts of the East Wing’s roof, the building’s exterior, and portions of its interior crumbling to the ground.
They already own—and influence—much of the news Americans receive. And they are eager to promote their views.
Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce, told the New York Times that Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco. (After his remarks drew condemnation from many of the city’s civic leaders, he apologized. He seems about to get his wish nonetheless.)
Marc Rowan, the billionaire chief executive of Apollo Global Management, is the force behind Trump’s recent “compact” calling on universities to limit international students, protect conservative speech, require standardized testing for admissions, and adopt policies recognizing “that academic freedom is not absolute,” among other conditions. The Trump regime dangled “substantial and meaningful federal grants” for universities that agree.
(It didn’t work. Seven of the nine universities approached rejected the deal.)
Billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of Blackstone, is also shaping the Trump regime’s campaign to upend American higher education. Schwarzman has emerged as a key intermediary between Trump and Harvard University.
Other of America’s new robber barons are rapidly consolidating their control over what Americans read, hear, and learn about what’s occurring in our country and the world. They include Jeff Bezos; Larry Ellison and his son, David; Mark Andreessen; Rupert Murdoch; Charles Koch; Tim Cook; Mark Zuckerberg; and, of course, Elon Musk.
Perhaps the new robber baron’s most lasting impression on the US government will be the lavish White House ballroom Trump is constructing—a 90,000-square-foot, gold-leafed, glass-walled banquet room that will literally overshadow the so-called People’s House.
It will not be an assembly hall, dance hall, music hall, dining hall, village hall, or town hall. It will be a giant banquet and ballroom designed to accommodate 650 wealthy VIPs.
Trump claims that the East Room, the largest room in the White House, is too small. Its capacity is 200 people. He doesn’t like the idea of hosting kings, queens, and prime ministers in pavilions on the South Lawn.
Trump’s real intention is to have the White House resemble Versailles.
Potential billionaire donors have already received pledge agreements for “The Donald J. Trump Ballroom at the White House.” In return for donations, contributors are eligible for “recognition associated with the White House Ballroom.”
Their names will be etched in the ballroom’s brick or stone edifice.
Trump last week hosted a dinner at the White House for the project’s donors, which included representatives from Microsoft, Google, Palantir, and other companies, as well as Schwarzman, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and other billionaires.
Meredith O’Rourke, a top political fundraiser for Trump, is leading the effort, paired with the Trust for the National Mall, an organization that supports the National Park Service.
The trust’s nonprofit status means donations come with a federal tax write-off.
Construction began Monday. Trump is now literally taking a wrecking ball to the White House—sending parts of the East Wing’s roof, the building’s exterior, and portions of its interior crumbling to the ground.
It seems fitting that in this second Gilded Age—an age of conspicuous influence and affluent access—the People’s House will be replaced by the Billionaire’s House.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Universities Didn't Fail, They Succeeded—That's Why They're Under Attack
Universities need to recognize that they are being targeted because of what they represent, not because of what they've failed to do, and resist accordingly.
Oct 14, 2025
I grew up watching my mother teach histories she was forbidden to teach, in a language that was illegal to speak. I know what authoritarianism looks like. And I'm watching American universities respond to this moment with the same dangerous pattern I witnessed then: accepting the narrative of their accusers, capitulating to illegal demands, destroying themselves from within.
At a time when blue cities become military zones, when citizens are arrested and abused on camera, when journalists are forced to transform from truth tellers to White House publicists, when the president accepts planes as gifts from foreign governments and then offers them military bases on US soil, it is not a moment for universities to ask, "What did we do wrong?" This is a moment to recognize: We are living through an authoritarian takeover, and universities are being targeted because of what they represent, not because of what they've failed to do.
The Trap of the "Universities Failed" Narrative
Across the country, university leaders are grappling with attacks on their institutions by asking: "How did we get here?" But without proper historical analysis, these questions lead directly into a trap set deliberately by those who seek to dismantle higher education as we know it.
The narrative is seductive: Universities became too focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). They pushed "woke ideology." They marginalized conservative voices. They failed to serve their students properly. And now, this narrative suggests, they're reaping what they've sown.
When universities face these attacks, they have a choice: Resist in solidarity with the broader democratic struggle, or accept the framing of their accusers and try to appease them.
This is all a lie. More precisely, it's what political theorist Isaac Kamola calls a decade-long psychological operation, a well-funded, well-organized campaign of disinformation designed to make Americans believe that what's happening in universities is not what's actually happening.
The reality? American higher education has more women enrolled than ever before. More people of color than ever before. An educated populace is a civically engaged populace, a populace capable of critical thinking and democratic participation. Universities haven't failed. Universities have been succeeding. And that success threatens the wealth and power of those orchestrating these attacks.
Understanding the Authoritarian Playbook
We’ve seen this script before. Universities are always the first targets of authoritarian regimes. Look at Hungary, where Viktor Orbán seized control of higher education through a national system, banned gender studies programs, and forced the Open University to leave the country. Look at Turkey. After 2016, more than 6,000 academics were expelled in Turkey, hundreds prosecuted, and entire universities were closed. Many dismissed scholars were banned from public sector employment and from seeking academic work abroad due to travel bans, creating widespread precarity and self-censorship among remaining faculty. The pattern is unmistakable and deliberate.
When universities face these attacks, they have a choice: Resist in solidarity with the broader democratic struggle, or accept the framing of their accusers and try to appease them. History shows us that appeasement doesn't work. It only accelerates the destruction.
Look at Brown and Columbia. In both cases, Brown and Columbia accepted Trump administration demands largely to avoid funding cuts, yet both remain under sustained attack from the administration. Rather than fighting to preserve institutional independence and democratic principles in higher education they have accelerated the authoritarian takeover by capitulating.
We are watching universities and their leaders across America choose the second path. They're eliminating DEI programs, not because they believe these programs are wrong, but because they're afraid of losing funding. They're censoring faculty, not because academic freedom suddenly matters less, but because trustees are buckling under financial threats. They're accepting the premise that they somehow deserve what's happening to them.
They are playing into the tiny hands of authoritarians.
What's Really at Stake: Race, Rights, and Democracy
If we take a historical view, we can see more clearly what's actually driving these attacks: race. The legislative assault on curriculum, the attacks on critical race theory, the dismantling of DEI programs, all of this escalated in inverse proportion to the access that Black and brown people were gaining to higher education.
The bookeyman of DEI is a strategic tool for turning civil rights laws on their heads, for weaponizing the very protections meant to ensure equity. When White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller tells law enforcement they're "unleashed," when apartments on Chicago's South Side are raided and destroyed in the middle of the night and families, including citizens, are separated and detained for hours, when the National Guard is deployed to terrorize Democratic cities with large populations of Black and brown people, we're watching the same white supremacist project that universities are being punished for challenging.
Powerful interests have recognized how threatening an educated, diverse, critically thinking populace is to their accumulation of wealth and power.
Chris Rufo has been explicit about his counterrevolutionary agenda. He accuses universities of ideological capture and promotes a fiction: that radical leftists completed a "long march through the institutions" from the 1960s to today, turning universities into engines of woke ideology. His strategy has been devastatingly effective, tying federal funding to demands that colleges eliminate "race-based" programs and DEI initiatives, end political activism on campus, and enforce what he falsely calls "ideological neutrality." The bitter irony, of course, is that this neutrality means alignment with conservative values. Authoritarian regimes always claim neutrality while enforcing ideology.
The actual transformative change that generations of civil rights leaders have fought to achieve in higher education has been painfully, frustratingly slow. As Dr. King reminded us, the arc of the moral universe is long. Diversity, equity, and inclusion work had just begun when the backlash hit. As Isaac Kamola reminds us, we haven't gone too far, we've barely started. And that's precisely why the backlash is so fierce. Progress, however incremental, is intolerable to those who benefit from the status quo.
The Rapid Response Trap
Rapid response to individual attacks, while sometimes necessary, keeps universities perpetually defensive and reactive. Each response accepts the terms of the debate as set by those seeking to destroy higher education. Today, it's a demand to eliminate a DEI office. Tomorrow it's a threat to revoke accreditation. Next week, it's federal agents on campus or trustees forcing out presidents who won't comply. The exhausting onslaught of breaking news pushes institutions into pure survival mode, where they can only see the immediate threat in front of them. Meanwhile, the bigger picture, the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions, disappears from view.
This is how authoritarianism works. It overwhelms. It exhausts. It forces you to fight a hundred small battles so you cannot see the war.
And when universities respond by looking inward, by searching for their own failures, by implementing "reforms" that mirror the demands of their attackers—cutting DEI programs, restricting faculty speech, purging curricula of "controversial" content—they believe they're defending themselves. They're not. They're participating in their own destruction. Worse, they're legitimizing the authoritarian narrative: that universities deserved what's happening to them, that the attacks are a reasonable response to institutional failure rather than a calculated assault on democratic education itself.
This is precisely what authoritarians count on: that institutions will police themselves, that fear will accomplish what force alone cannot.
What Universities Must Do Instead
First, universities must stop accepting the false premise that they've failed. Higher education remains one of the most important engines of democratic participation, social mobility, and civic engagement in American society. The Truman Commission understood this in 1947: Higher education's core mission includes preparing citizens who can respond to social needs with intelligence and creativity.
That mission hasn't changed. What's changed is that powerful interests have recognized how threatening an educated, diverse, critically thinking populace is to their accumulation of wealth and power.
The question isn't "What did we do wrong?" The question is: "Will we defend democracy, or will we aid its destruction?"
Second, universities must understand themselves not as isolated institutions defending their own interests, but as part of a broader democratic movement under siege. The attacks on higher education are interconnected with attacks on blue cities, on journalism, on voting rights, on the rule of law itself. Universities cannot win this fight alone, and they cannot win it by trying to appease authoritarians.
Third, universities must reclaim the narrative. Higher education is not a commodity that consumers buy and sell. Universities are not corporations. They are communities, students, faculty, staff, administrators, and the broader public, engaged in the vital work of knowledge production, teaching, and the preparation of democratic citizens. That means the university belongs to all of us, and all of us have a stake in its defense.
Finally, universities, that is all those who create the university community, must act with courage. We’ve seen examples of this courage—boards (like that of MIT’s) standing behind presidents who refuse to capitulate, faculty senates (like that of the University of Texas at Austin) adopting new academic freedom principles, and institutions using the rule of law to protect their faculty and students. Courage, in this moment, is the super multiplier. It gives others permission to resist.
The Choice Before Us
Universities stand at a crossroads. They can continue to react defensively to each attack, to implement “reforms” demanded by those who seek their destruction, to accept the narrative that they've somehow failed and deserve what's happening. Or they can recognize this moment for what it is: an authoritarian assault on one of democracy's essential institutions.
I know from experience that once authoritarianism takes hold, it moves swiftly. The window for resistance narrows quickly. My mother made her choice, to keep teaching the truths she was forbidden to teach. Now universities must make theirs.
The question isn't "What did we do wrong?" The question is: "Will we defend democracy, or will we aid its destruction?"
The answer to that question will determine not only the future of higher education, but the future of American democracy itself.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular