Universities As Political Battlegrounds, A Call For Courage
March 4, 2025
We are witnessing a brazen frontal assault on higher education by a right-wing authoritarian regime that seeks to control what faculty write, speak, and teach, as well as who is allowed and has access to our classrooms. As teachers, students, researchers, and campus workers, we must muster the collective courage to resist.
There is a lot at stake. In 2024, approximately 19 million students attended universities, while more than 3 million people were employed by them. According to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), colleges and universities collectively held $873.7 billion in endowment assets in 2024, while controlling millions of acres of land. By 2030, the higher education industry is projected to reach a market size of USD $370.4 billion. And all the while tuition and student debt continue to rise. The university is more than a site of higher learning, it is a reservoir of power.
It’s no coincidence that, upon taking office, Trump launched an aggressive assault on higher education. From banning DEI initiatives and threatening investigations into schools that allow transgender athletes, to calling for the deportation of international students protesting the genocide in Gaza, these actions signal more than just an attack on academic freedom. They represent a deliberate, authoritarian effort to impose ideological control on campuses reshaping education, discourse, and society itself. This is a signature feature of dictatorships throughout history and around the world.
There is also an economic component to these attacks that we cannot ignore. They have arrived hand in hand with widespread and devastating cuts in funding to the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts, to name just a few. We predict that cutting federal funding will destroy publicly funded research initiatives and the institutions that depend on them. This will inevitably pave the way for the further replacement of higher education by private corporations and the further transformation of scholarly research into company-owned intellectual property.
American colleges and universities stand at a crossroads. What we do, or fail to do, say, or fail to say, at this juncture will fundamentally impact the future of higher education for generations to come. In this atmosphere, scholars, students, and faculty members must come together to fight this assault on campuses across the country, and to defend the fundamental principle of academic freedom, and to advance the right of all to an education. We must do this while not losing sight of the policies and decisions that have long contributed to injustices felt both on campuses and the surrounding communities they inhabit.
For decades universities have not adequately responded to demands emanating from those on campus as well as the communities that surround them. This has left universities vulnerable to right-wing attack. This moment demands that we fight the authoritarian threats before us while fighting for the rights and dignity of all workers on campus as well as the communities and neighborhoods we impact. The time for symbolic gestures, preemptive compliance, and maintaining neoliberal self-interest is over. Choosing to placate or obey in advance will only further accelerate threats to higher education and freedom. Now is the time to not only fight to teach about justice on campus, but make sure that our universities are places where we practice it.
Amidst the present battle over the future of the Academy, we call upon the courage and commitment of our colleagues, co-workers, students and academic workers to join us in defying the assault on, not only diversity and inclusion as principles, but on education itself. In this moment of crises we must work together to:
Serve as bulwarks against censorship and autocracy by protecting space for dissent and debate.
Defend the right of students, faculty, and staff to fully exercise their individual and collective rights to freedom of speech, association, and assembly, including protest without fear of reprisal or discipline.
Organize collectively to fight back against the neoliberalization and privatization of the university.
Fight for worker protections that take into account the needs of the most vulnerable employees and staff on campus.
Continue to center racial, economic and gender justice in our advocacy and demand that institutions of higher learning commit to academic freedom and freedom of expression.
Although we find ourselves in a moment of great peril, this is also a time of great possibility. The right-wing assault on higher education should be of grave concern to us all. However, we cannot give in to despair. This is a time for collective courage. We must fight for our independence as scholars, and for the rights and resources that our students and coworkers deserve.
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