WAR ON UNIVERSITIES

It is no accident that aspiring autocrats target higher education, both to prevent such institutions from becoming sites of resistance and to ensure their own long-term influence over educational content and public culture

- Jan-Werner Mueller

We have become so accustomed to aspiring autocrats attacking universities that we hardly ever stop to ask why. But pushing back against authoritarians requires understanding their motivations and strategies. University leaders, in particular, ought to be better prepared to coordinate resistance across institutions of higher education, and to ensure internal cohesion among faculty.

Otherwise, autocrats may succeed in playing different parts of academia off against one another.

One type of attack on universities has become depressingly familiar partly because it is so easy for far-right populists to copy: a culture war targeting specific academic subjects and programs like “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” One can criticize DEI’s implementation without endorsing the far right's claim that it amounts to discrimination against white men, and without accepting the demonstrably false notion that left-wing professors comprehensively indoctrinate their innocent charges.

Such claims are the building blocks for a bridge that the far right hopes to extend to citizens who see themselves as centrist. When in power, the far right has appropriated the language of “freedom” but actually makes academic life unfree. In the United States, for example, laws devised by Republicans restrict which subjects can be taught and how; similarly, the Hungarian government has prohibited gender studies altogether.