When Was Higher Education Truly a Public Good? (Glen McGhee)

Like staring at the Sun too long, that brief window in time, when higher ed was a public good, has left a permanent hole for nostalgia to leak in, becoming a massive black hole for trillions of dollars, and a blind-spot for misguided national policies and scholars alike. 

The notion that American higher education was ever a true public good is largely a myth. From the colonial colleges to the neoliberal university of today, higher education has functioned primarily as a mechanism of class reproduction and elite consolidation—with one brief, historically anomalous exception during the Cold War.

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Colonial Roots: Elite Reproduction in the New World (1636–1787)

The first American colleges—Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and a handful of others—were founded not for the benefit of the public, but to serve narrow elite interests. Their stated missions were to train Protestant clergy and prepare the sons of wealthy white families for leadership. They operated under monopoly charters and drew funding from landowners, merchants, and slave traders.

Elihu Yale, namesake of Yale University, derived wealth from his commercial ties to the East India Company and the slave trade. Harvard’s early trustees owned enslaved people. These institutions functioned as “old boys’ clubs,” perpetuating privilege rather than promoting equality. Their educational mission was to cultivate “gentlemen fit to govern,” not citizens of a democracy.

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Private Enterprise in the Republic (1790–1860)

After independence, the number of colleges exploded—from 19 in 1790 to more than 800 by 1880—but not because of any commitment to the public good. Colleges became tools for two private interests: religious denominations seeking influence, and land speculators eager to raise property values.

Ministers often doubled as land dealers, founding small, parochial colleges to anchor towns and boost prices. State governments played a minimal role, providing funding only in times of crisis. The Supreme Court’s 1819 Dartmouth College decision enshrined institutional autonomy, shielding private colleges from state interference. Even state universities were created mainly out of interstate competition—every state needed its own to “keep up with its neighbors.”

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Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Credential Capitalism (1880–1940)

By the late 19th century, industrial capitalism had transformed higher education into a private good—something purchased for individual advancement. As family farms and small businesses disappeared, college credentials became the ticket to white-collar respectability.

Sociologist Burton Bledstein called this the “culture of professionalism.” Families invested in degrees to secure middle-class futures for their children. By the 1920s, most students attended college not to seek enlightenment, but “to get ready for a particular job.”

Elite universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton solidified their dominance through exclusive networks. C. Wright Mills later observed that America’s “power elite” circulated through these same institutions and their associated clubs. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital helps explain this continuity: elite universities convert inherited privilege into certified merit, preserving hierarchy under the guise of meritocracy.

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The Morrill Acts: Public Promise, Private Gains (1862–1890)

The Morrill Act of 1862 established land-grant colleges to promote “practical education” in agriculture and engineering. While often cited as a triumph of public-minded policy, the act’s legacy is ambivalent.

Land-grant universities were built on land expropriated from Indigenous peoples—often without compensation—and the 1890 Morrill Act entrenched segregation by mandating separate institutions for Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. Even as these colleges expanded access for white working-class men, they simultaneously reinforced racial and economic hierarchies.

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Cold War Universities: The Brief Public Good (1940–1970)

For roughly thirty years, during World War II and the Cold War, American universities functioned as genuine public goods—but only because national survival seemed to depend on them.

The GI Bill opened college to millions of veterans, stabilizing the economy and expanding the middle class. Massive federal investments in research transformed universities into engines of technological and scientific innovation. The university, for a moment, was understood as a public instrument for national progress.

Yet this golden age was marred by exclusion. Black veterans were often denied GI Bill benefits, particularly in the South, where discriminatory admissions and housing policies blocked their participation. The “military-industrial-academic complex” that emerged from wartime funding created a new elite network centered on research universities like MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley.

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Neoliberal Regression: Education as a Private Commodity (1980–Present)

After 1970, the system reverted to its long-standing norm: higher education as a private good. The Cold War’s end, the tax revolt, and the rise of neoliberal ideology dismantled the postwar consensus.

Ronald Reagan led the charge—first as California governor, cutting higher education funding by 20%, then as president, slashing federal support. He argued that tuition should replace public subsidies, casting education as an individual investment rather than a social right.

Since 1980, state funding per student has fallen sharply while tuition at public universities has tripled. Students are now treated as “customers,” and universities as corporations—complete with branding departments, executive pay packages, and relentless tuition hikes.

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The Circuit of Elite Network Capital

Today, the benefits of higher education flow through a closed circuit of power that links elite universities, corporations, government agencies, and wealthy families.

1. Elite Universities consolidate wealth and prestige through research funding, patents, and endowments.

2. Corporations recruit talent and license discoveries, feeding the same institutions that produce their executives.

3. Government and Military Agencies are staffed by alumni of elite universities, reinforcing a revolving door of privilege.

4. Elite Professions—law, medicine, finance, consulting—use degrees as gatekeeping mechanisms, driving credential inflation.

5. Wealthy Families invest in elite education as a means of preserving status across generations.

What the public receives are only residual benefits—technologies and medical innovations that remain inaccessible without money or insurance.

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Elite Network Capital, Not Public Good

The idea of higher education as a public good has always been more myth than reality. For most of American history, colleges and universities have functioned as institutions of elite reproduction, not engines of democratic uplift.

Only during the extraordinary conditions of the mid-20th century—when global war and ideological conflict made mass education a national imperative—did higher education briefly align with the public interest.

Today’s universities continue to speak the language of “public good,” but their actions reveal a different truth. They serve as factories of credentialism and as nodes in an elite network that translates privilege into prestige. What masquerades as a public good is, in practice, elite network capital—a system designed not to democratize opportunity, but to manage and legitimize inequality.

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Sources:
Labaree (2017), Bledstein (1976), Bourdieu (1984, 1986), Mills (1956), Geiger (2015), Thelin (2019), and McGhee (2025).

Pedagogies of Repression: Ford, Trump and the War on Education (Henry A. Giroux and William Paul)

Analyses of fascism too often fixate on its most spectacular expressions: staggering inequality, systemic racism, the militarization of daily life, unbridled corruption, monopolistic control of the media, and the concentration of power in financial and political elites. Fascism thrives on a culture of fear and racial cleansing and the normalization of cruelty, lies, and state violence. Yet what is often overlooked is how culture and education now function as decisive forces in legitimating these authoritarian passions and in eroding democratic commitments. As Hannah Arendt, Jason Stanley, Richard Evans, Chris Hedges, and others remind us, the protean origins of fascism are never fully buried; they return in altered and often disguised forms, seeping into everyday life and reshaping the common sense of a society.

Under US President Donald Trump, we face a terrifying new horizon of authoritarian politics: the erosion of due process, mass abductions, vicious attacks on higher education, and the steady construction of a police state. Canada has not yet descended into such full-fledged authoritarianism, but troubling echoes are undeniable. Public spaces and public goods are under assault, book bans have appeared in Alberta, languages of hate increasingly target those deemed disposable, the mass media bends to corporate interests, labour is suppressed, and democratic values are met with disdain. These may not replicate the worst horrors of the past, but they reveal how culture and education become the terrain upon which democracy is dismantled and authoritarianism gains legitimacy. These are warning signs of a gathering darkness that must be confronted before they harden into something far more sinister.

Culture and Pedagogy

Fascism thrives not only on brute police power, prisons, or economic violence but also on culture and pedagogy. Culture has increasingly become a site in the service of pedagogical tyranny. It works through erasure and repression, through memory stripped of its critical force, and through dissent silenced in the name of order. Fascism is never solely a political or economic system; it is a pedagogical project, a machinery of teaching and unlearning that narrows the horizon of what can be said, imagined, or remembered.

Today authoritarianism seeps insidiously into everyday life, embedded in seemingly obvious maneuvers that consolidate power under the guise of technical or bureaucratic necessity. Its mobilizing passions often emerge unobtrusively in maneuvers that hide in the shadows of the mundane, often at the level of everyday experience.

This creeping logic is starkly visible in Ontario, where Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative (PC) government has moved to seize control of local school boards. What may look like routine administrative measures should be read as a warning: authoritarianism does not arrive only with grandiose spectacles or open attacks on democracy’s foundations; it gains ground quietly, through the erosion of the ordinary, the capture of the local, and above all, through the weaponization of education as a tool to dismantle democracy itself.

The Ford government’s seizure of the Toronto, Toronto Catholic, Ottawa-Carleton, and Dufferin-Peel Catholic district school boards is extraordinary, even for this democracy-averse regime. Education Minister Paul Calandra has even mused about eliminating trustees altogether before the 2026 local elections, declaring “Everything is on the table.” His justification that Ontario’s Ministry of Education (MOE) has allowed them to make too many decisions on their own is both unsupported and revealing. It exposes a deeper authoritarian project: the desire to centralize power and strip away democratic oversight from institutions closest to local communities. It curbs liberal instincts of trustees who see first-hand the vast diversity of lives and needs of the families who rely on their schools.

This is precisely how authoritarian control operates: by eroding intermediary structures that connect people to power. Just as Donald Trump sought to bend national cultural institutions like the Smithsonian Museum to his will, Ford dismantles the modest democratic functions of trusteeship. Both cases illustrate how authoritarianism works through the fine print of governance as much as through grandiose pronouncements.

Manufactured Deficits and Structural Starvation

The pretext for takeover was financial mismanagement. Yet none of the investigators found evidence of serious fiscal incompetence. The truth is that boards submitted balanced budgets year after year but only after slashing programs and services, closing outdoor education centres, selling property, cutting staff, and raising fees. What really drives their fiscal crises is a decades-old funding model – first imposed by the Mike Harris PC government in 1997 – that shifted resources from local taxes to provincial grants. This was not a move toward equitable funding; these were neoliberals of the first order who believed in central control of funding so they could squeeze school boards and education workers to contain costs.

This model, based on enrolment rather than actual need, starved boards of resources for special education, transportation, salaries, and infrastructure.1 For instance, school boards don’t get funding for actual children who need special education support but rather on the basis of a predictive model MOE devised. Boards pay for the kids MOE doesn’t fund. The Ford government hasn’t funded the full increase for statutory teacher benefits for years, leaving boards short by millions. The result is a structural deficit: chronic underfunding that leaves even well-managed boards teetering on insolvency. The Ford government, while claiming to increase spending, has in fact cut funding per student by $1,500 in real terms since 2018. This is the problem faced by with 40 percent of Ontario school boards.

It is this manufactured insolvency that led Minister Calandra to get the most out of a useful crisis and put the four school boards under supervision and maybe next eliminate all school boards in the province. Here we see neoliberal austerity converging with authoritarian ambition. Underfunding is not a policy mistake; it is a deliberate strategy to weaken public education, undermine trust in democratic institutions, and prepare the ground for privatization schemes such as vouchers and charter schools. In this instance, the policy of underfunding is a way of weakening public education and then blaming whatever problems occur on education itself. This is gangster capitalism at work, cloaked in the language of fiscal responsibility but fueled by a pedagogy of dispossession.

Eliminating Trustees, Silencing Communities

If board takeovers were simply about money, supervisors would have been told to just find savings. Instead, elected trustees were suspended, their offices shuttered, their tiny stipends cut off, and their ability to communicate with constituents forbidden. Calandra’s power grab has all the elements of Elon Musk’s DOGE assaults in the US: move fast, offer absurd excuses, and blame the victims. The supervisors replacing trustees – accountants, lawyers, and former politicians with no background in education – now wield greater power than the elected community representatives they displaced.

This substitution of technocrats for democratically accountable representatives is part of fascism’s pedagogy. It teaches the public to accept disenfranchisement as efficiency, to see obedience as order. Parents who ask why a program disappeared or why their child’s special education class has grown larger are now met with silence. In this vacuum, the lesson learned is that participation is futile and resistance meaningless – precisely the kind of civic numbing oligarchic fascism requires.

Command, Control, and the Policing of Education

Ford’s government frames these takeovers as a “broader rethink” of governance, but the real project is clear: the imposition of command and control over education. This move sends a strong message that it’s time to duck our heads and get back to basics: teaching “reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic and the whole shebang…” as Doug Ford complained last fall after teachers and students attended a rally in support of the Grassy Narrows First Nation and its efforts to deal with generations of mercury contamination in their area. He proclaimed, with no evidence, that the field trip was “indoctrination” by teachers because activists protesting Israeli genocide were present. Community members who supported an Indigenous curriculum, modern sexual education, or even school-name changes honoring anti-colonial figures are dismissed or painted as obstacles. The message from Ford and Calandra is blunt: stick to the basics – reading, writing, arithmetic – and leave politics at the door.

Yet politics hangs over classrooms like a shroud. Despite his Captain Canada complaints about the Trump tariffs, Ford admires the President quick-marching America toward fascism. In an off-mic moment he commented recently: “Election day, was I happy this guy won? One hundred per cent I was.” It’s not the racism, the authoritarianism, the compulsive lying, the fraud, the sexual assaults that bothers the Premier; it’s that he got stiffed by his friend.

Usurping trustees according to University of Ottawa professor Sachin Maharaj is just another step toward the Progressive Conservatives’ goal to “squelch the pipeline of more progressive leaders”2 like those gaining notice and experience attending to the needs of local schools.

The banning of the Toronto Muslim Student Alliance’s screening of the film No Other Land, which documents Israeli settler violence, shows how censorship now masquerades as neutrality. This is the pedagogy of repression in action: narrowing what can be taught, remembered, or discussed until education is reduced to obedience training. What parades as a “broader rethink” is part of the authoritarian language of censorship and control. Like Trump’s attacks on “critical race theory” or his censorship of the Smithsonian, Ford’s moves are not about protecting students from politics but about protecting power from critique. The real issue here is constructing authoritarian policies that narrow critical thinking, teacher autonomy, essential funding, and knowledge that enable schools to both defend and facilitate democracy.

For Ford and his adherents, the real issue is not that schools are failing but that they are public and have a vital role to play in a democracy. The real threat to Ford is that a democracy can only exist with informed citizens. Yet that is precisely the role education should assume.

Bill 33: Codifying Authoritarianism

The perversely named Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act extends this authoritarian logic. It allows the Minister to investigate boards or trustees on the mere suspicion they might act “inappropriately” or against the “public interest” – an elastic phrase that grants unchecked power. It checks much-maligned Diversity Equity and Inclusion efforts by refusing boards the right to name schools, forcing them to abandon diversity-affirming figures in favor of colonial or sanitized names. It mandates the reintroduction of police officers into schools, despite community opposition to surveillance and “unaccountable access to youth by cops.”3

At work here is the legacy of colonialism, a legacy that is terrified of diversity, of those deemed other, being able to narrate themselves. Viewed as threat, this anti-democratic language ultimately falls back on issues of control and security. This is one instance of how authoritarianism consolidates itself, not through tanks in the streets but through legislation that transforms education into an arm of the security state. Pedagogical spaces are militarized, memory is policed, and students are taught that surveillance is normal and dissent dangerous.

Trumpasitic Authoritarianism

Ford’s methods echo those of his southern counterpart. Just as Trump’s politics thrive on dispossession, erasure, and the weaponization of culture, Ford borrows from the same authoritarian playbook. The takeover of school boards not only tightens political control but also grants easy access to billions of dollars in public land, enriching developers tied to his government.4 Here, neoliberal profiteering fuses seamlessly with authoritarian centralization, an example of the merging of gangster capitalism with the pedagogy of repression.

What do you expect from a government that makes decisions reflecting the arrogance of power? The Ford government cut Toronto city council in half soon after took office in 2018 and threatened to use a constitutional override, the Notwithstanding Clause, Section 33 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to overturn a Superior Court justice’s decision that the move was unconstitutional. Ford actually used the clause to push through a bill restricting election advertising in 2021 and again, pre-emptively, in 2022, buttressing back-to-work legislation against striking public workers, among the lowest paid in the province. He’s considering using it again after his decision to remove bike lanes from Toronto streets was overturned in court; power makes you petty.

Democracy in the Smallest Details

The takeover of Ontario school boards may appear less dramatic than Trump’s assaults on national institutions, but its implications are just as dire. Authoritarianism advances not only through spectacle but through the slow erosion of local democratic practices that once seemed secure.

If fascism is a pedagogy of fear, amnesia, and conformity, then resistance must be a pedagogy of memory, solidarity, and imagination. To defend education is to defend democracy itself, for schools are not simply sites of instruction but laboratories of citizenship, places where young people learn what it means to speak, to question, to remember, and to act. When trustees are silenced, when curricula are censored, when communities are stripped of their voice, what is lost is not only oversight but the very possibility of democratic life.

What is at stake, then, is far larger than budget shortfalls or bureaucratic reshuffling. It is whether the future will be governed by communities or dictated from above by those who mistake obedience for learning and silence for peace. Fascism thrives in these small erasures, in the details that seem technical until they harden into structures of domination.

The lesson could not be clearer: democracy dies in increments, but it can also be rebuilt in increments – through collective memory, through civic courage, through the refusal to allow education to become a weapon of obedience. To resist the Ford government’s authoritarian incursions is not only to protect local school boards; it is to reclaim the very ground on which democratic hope stands. •

Endnotes

1. Dan Crow, The Consequences Of A Neoliberal Funding Formula, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Fall/Winter 2018.
2. Sachin Maharaj, Interview August 26, 2025
3. Andrea Vásquez Jiménez, Interview June 7, 2025.
4. William Paul, “Riding the Gravy Train” in Against the People: How Ford Nation is Dismantling Ontario, eds: Brian Evans, Carlo Fanelli, Fernwood Publishing, 2024.

Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015), and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2016). His website is henryagiroux.com.

William Paul is editor of School Magazine website.

This article first appeared at the Social Project Bullet

The Veritas Evasion: How Elite University Presidents Dodge Structural Critique

Across American higher education, labor rights have been under sustained pressure for decades. Adjunct faculty and contingent academic workers face precarious employment conditions, stagnant pay, and eroding protections. Yet when systemic critiques are raised, elite university presidents often reframe the discussion, narrowing structural problems into manageable, apolitical talking points.

Technocratic Deflection

Presidents frequently recast labor issues in neutral managerial terms:

• Union suppression = “workforce modernization”

• Adjunct exploitation = “budgetary flexibility”

• Student debt peonage = “innovative financing”

By reducing structural injustices to administrative concerns, they strip these issues of political and historical significance, making them easier to manage and harder to challenge.

The “Hands Tied” Defense

When confronted with inequities, presidents often insist:

• “Declining appropriations leave us no choice.”

• “Our boards demand fiscal responsibility.”

• “Market forces shape our decisions.”

This logic frames systemic oppression as inevitable, technical, and apolitical — a narrative that protects institutional power while masking the long-term consequences for faculty and students.

Vocabulary Capture

Elite leaders control the conversation through language:

• Critics say “union suppression”; presidents say “workforce modernization.”

• Activists say “racial exclusion”; presidents invoke “mission fit.”

• Students call it “robocolleges” or corporatization; presidents speak of “scaling access.”

By changing the words, they change the battlefield, making systemic critique appear radical, ill-informed, or irrelevant.

Evasion of History

Historical context is often sidelined:

• Universities rarely acknowledge their role in breaking faculty strikes or adopting corporate governance models.

• They deflect from the impact of elite endowments and funding structures in deepening inequality.

• Decisions that shape labor, access, and academic priorities are rarely recognized as part of a decades-long neoliberal project.

Case Studies

1. Columbia University's $221 Million Settlement

In a notable instance, Columbia University agreed to a $221 million settlement with the Trump administration, restoring previously cut federal research funding. While the university emphasized its continued autonomy in admissions and hiring decisions, the settlement included oversight on issues such as merit-based hiring and campus free speech. This move sparked backlash from faculty who viewed it as political interference in academic governance .

2. Harvard University's Response to Federal Pressure

Harvard University faced scrutiny from the Trump administration over alleged failure to combat antisemitism. In response, Harvard President Alan Garber pledged cooperation with federal demands but faced criticism for lacking a strong defense of academic independence. Administrative actions, including suspensions of pro-Palestinian programs, heightened faculty unease and raised concerns about potential political interference in academic institutions .

3. The 2023 Rutgers University Strike

At Rutgers University, faculty and graduate student workers participated in a strike demanding increased salaries, job security, and equal pay for equal work. The strike, involving over 9,000 staff members and 67,000 students, was suspended after a tentative agreement for across-the-board salary increases was reached. This action highlighted the growing mobilization of contingent faculty and the challenges they face in advocating for better working conditions .

The Veritas Problem

Elite institutions claim Veritas — truth — but their leaders practice selective blindness. They respond to criticism in managerial jargon, policing language, and rendering systemic injustices invisible within the institution.

Across campuses nationwide, the strategy is consistent: narrow the conversation, maintain the appearance of neutrality, and protect the interests of trustees, donors, and corporate partners — all while structural crises of labor, debt, and inequality continue unchecked.

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Sources:

• "Columbia agrees $221mn settlement with Trump administration" – Financial Times, August 2025

• "Harvard faculty organize amid anxiety university will capitulate to Trump" – The Guardian, April 2025

• "2023 Rutgers University strike" – Wikipedia, June 2023

Judge Rules on Harvard Case: When We Fight, WE WIN! (Todd Wolfson, AAUP)

Last night, we got great news: We WON our lawsuit challenging the Trump’s administration’s attempt to dismantle research and critical thought at Harvard University.  

Please join us in our fight for higher education and research.

A federal judge agreed with us and with the Harvard administration that the Trump administration violated the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act by demanding that Harvard restrict speech and restructure core operations or else face the cancellation of billions in federal funding for the university and its affiliated hospital.

In her ruling, US District Judge Allison Burroughs found that the administration’s actions, which included freezing and canceling more than $2 billion in research grants, violated the First Amendment rights of Harvard and of Harvard’s faculty and amounted to “retaliation, unconstitutional conditions, and unconstitutional coercion.” Her ruling vacates the government’s funding freeze and permanently blocks it from using similar reasoning to deny grants to Harvard in the future.

In April, the national AAUP and our Harvard chapter, alongside the United Auto Workers, filed the lawsuit seeking to stop the Trump administration’s attack on Harvard. Pressured by our filing, the Harvard administration subsequently filed suit and the cases were linked.

Many of Judge Burroughs’s findings responded primarily to the claims of AAUP members, particularly about harms to research, First Amendment violations, and attacks on academic freedom.

This is a huge win not just for AAUP members at Harvard but for all of American higher education, for science, and for free and critical thought in this country. The Trump administration’s attempts to restrict speech and cripple lifesaving research are widespread, affecting every state and type of institution in the nation. As this victory shows, Trump’s war on higher education is unconstitutional. We will continue to stand up and fight back against these attempts to dismantle our universities, terrify students and faculty, and punish hospitals and scientific research for not bowing to authoritarianism. And we will win.

We could not have done it without the leadership, hard work, and testimony of AAUP members. We need you in this fight with us too. Please join now.

In solidarity,

Todd Wolfson, AAUP President

The University of California Meltdown: Trump’s Extortion Meets Years of Student Suppression

University of California (UC) President James Milliken has sounded an alarm over what he calls one of the “gravest threats” in the institution’s 157-year history. In testimony before state lawmakers, Milliken outlined a looming financial crisis sparked by sweeping federal funding cuts and unprecedented political demands from the Trump administration.

The UC system — spanning 10 campuses, five medical centers, and serving hundreds of thousands of students and patients — receives more than $17 billion in federal funds annually. That includes $9.9 billion in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, $5.7 billion in research dollars, and $1.9 billion in student financial aid. According to Milliken, much of this funding is now at risk.

Already, UCLA alone has seen more than $500 million in research grants cut. On top of that, the administration has levied a $1.2 billion penalty against the system, alleging that UCLA and other campuses failed to adequately address antisemitism.

“These shortfalls, combined with the administration’s punitive demands, could devastate our university and cause enormous harm to our students, our patients, and all Californians,” Milliken warned. He has requested at least $4 to $5 billion annually in state aid to blunt the impact of federal cuts.

More Than a Budget Fight

The Trump administration has tied federal funding to sweeping political conditions, including:

• Release of detailed admissions data.

• Restrictions on protests.

• Elimination of race-related scholarships and diversity hiring.

• A ban on gender-affirming care for minors at UCLA health centers.

Critics argue that these conditions amount to political blackmail, undermining both academic freedom and healthcare access.

California Governor Gavin Newsom denounced the federal measures as “extortion” and “a page out of the authoritarian playbook.” Thirty-three state legislators urged UC leaders “not to back down in the face of this political shakedown.”

Protesters in the Crossfire

Yet while UC leaders frame themselves as defenders of free inquiry, many students and faculty who have protested war, racism, and inequality have found themselves silenced by the very system that now claims victimhood.

• 2011 UC Davis Occupy Protest: Images of police casually pepper-spraying seated students went viral, symbolizing the university’s harsh response to peaceful dissent.

• 2019 UC Santa Cruz Graduate Worker Strike: Graduate students demanding a cost-of-living adjustment were fired, evicted, or disciplined rather than heard.

• 2022 UC Irvine Labor Strikes: Workers organizing for fair pay and job security faced heavy-handed tactics from administrators.

• 2023–24 Gaza Encampments: UC campuses, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, called in police to dismantle student encampments protesting U.S. and UC complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza. Dozens of students were arrested, suspended, or disciplined for their participation.

These incidents show a pattern: UC celebrates academic freedom in official statements, but clamps down when protests threaten its ties to corporate donors, political interests, or foreign governments.

As one Berkeley student put it during the Gaza protests: “The university claims it’s under attack from Trump’s censorship — but it censors us every single day.”

UC’s Own Accountability Problem

Beyond silencing dissent, UC has been unresponsive to many Californians on broader issues: rising tuition, limited in-state enrollment, reliance on low-paid adjuncts, and partnerships with corporations that profit from student debt and labor precarity. For many working families, UC feels less like a public institution and more like an elite research enterprise serving industry and politics.

This contradiction makes the current crisis double-edged. UC is indeed being targeted by the Trump administration, but it also faces a legitimacy crisis at home.

Looking Ahead

Milliken, who took office as UC President on August 1, is lobbying state lawmakers to commit billions annually to offset federal cuts. But UC’s survival may hinge not only on political deals in Sacramento, but also on whether it can rebuild trust with the Californians it has too often sidelined — including the protesters and whistleblowers who have been warning for years about its drift away from public accountability.

The larger struggle, then, is not just UC versus Washington. It is about whether a public university system can still live up to its mission of serving the people — not corporations, not politicians, and not the wealthy few who hold the purse strings.

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Sources:

• University of California Office of the President

• California State Legislature records

• Statements from Gov. Gavin Newsom

• U.S. Department of Justice communications

• Higher Education Inquirer archives on UC protest suppression and public accountability

• Coverage of UC Davis pepper-spray incident (2011), UC Santa Cruz COLA strike (2019), UC Irvine labor strikes (2022), Gaza encampment crackdowns (2023–24)

Scientific Authority: A Century of Bias in the Name of Progress

For more than a century, the authority of “science” has been used not only to cure disease or explain the universe but also to justify bigotry, exploitation, and exclusion. From eugenics to IQ testing, from biological determinism to race science, various pseudoscientific movements have cloaked prejudice in the language of objectivity and legitimacy. This history—still echoing in higher education, medicine, and public policy—demands deeper public understanding.

Eugenics and the Birth of Scientific Racism

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as evolutionary theory gained public attention, a darker interpretation emerged: eugenics, the idea that human populations could be improved through selective breeding. Championed by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, eugenics quickly became a popular movement in the United States and Europe. Its adherents—often university-educated scientists and physicians—used statistical arguments and anatomical studies to promote forced sterilizations, anti-immigration laws, and the institutionalization of people deemed “unfit.”

Elite universities like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford were central to the eugenics movement. Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, supported restrictions on Jewish enrollment, while professors like Charles Davenport led major eugenics research projects, funded by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. These efforts culminated in U.S. policies such as the Immigration Act of 1924 and Supreme Court rulings like Buck v. Bell (1927), which legitimized the sterilization of “feeble-minded” individuals. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The Globalization of Bigoted Science

Eugenics was not limited to the United States. In Germany, American eugenic ideas influenced Nazi racial laws and programs. German doctors and scientists adopted race hygiene as state policy under Hitler, leading to sterilizations, medical experiments, and mass murder—what began as “science” ultimately culminated in the Holocaust.

Yet after World War II, even as Nazi atrocities were exposed, many in the West continued promoting soft forms of scientific bigotry under different names. Race-based intelligence theories were repackaged for Cold War audiences. Psychological studies, for instance, used IQ testing—originally developed by Alfred Binet for individualized education—as tools to argue for the innate intellectual inferiority of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant populations. American psychologists like Arthur Jensen and later Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve, 1994) insisted on a genetic basis for racial disparities in intelligence and income. Their ideas were roundly criticized but widely circulated in elite circles and conservative think tanks.

Medical Racism and Human Experimentation

Bigotry under the banner of science was not limited to intelligence testing. In medicine, scientific racism was used to justify brutal experimentation on marginalized populations. The most infamous case is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932–1972), in which Black men in Alabama were denied treatment for syphilis by the U.S. Public Health Service so researchers could observe the disease’s natural progression. These men were never told they had syphilis, even after penicillin became widely available in the 1940s.

In Puerto Rico and other U.S. colonies, women were used in early birth control trials without informed consent. Poor people, incarcerated people, and mentally ill individuals were also subjected to invasive procedures under the guise of scientific advancement.

Even today, racial biases continue to shape medical education and practice. Myths such as Black people having “thicker skin” or feeling less pain still influence clinical decision-making, leading to disparities in treatment and outcomes.

The Rhetoric of “Objectivity” and the Persistence of Bias

What makes science-based bigotry particularly dangerous is the claim to objectivity. Unlike openly ideological or religious justifications for inequality, scientific arguments seem neutral, rational, and data-driven. This gave them an air of credibility that allowed policymakers, judges, and educators to embed discriminatory practices into laws, institutions, and curricula.

Throughout the 20th century, bigoted science influenced criminal justice (through phrenology and “criminal anthropology”), education (through tracking and segregated schooling), and labor markets (through biased aptitude testing and “merit-based” hiring). University researchers were frequently at the forefront of these movements, aided by philanthropic funding and government contracts.

Resistance from Within Science

It is important to note that many scientists, doctors, and educators resisted these abuses. Activists like W.E.B. Du Bois, a sociologist and the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, used empirical research to debunk racist theories. In the mid-20th century, geneticists like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould challenged biological determinism, showing that racial categories have no firm biological basis and that environmental factors play a dominant role in shaping intelligence and behavior.

Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) exposed the flawed data and assumptions behind IQ science and craniometry. Lewontin, meanwhile, demonstrated that genetic variation within racial groups far exceeded variation between them, undercutting race as a meaningful biological concept.

Legacy and Modern Manifestations

Despite these corrections, echoes of science-based bigotry persist. Racial disparities in standardized testing, policing algorithms, facial recognition software, and genetic research reflect uncritical assumptions about “objectivity” and “merit.” Tech companies and university researchers now traffic in new forms of algorithmic bias that often reproduce the old hierarchies under new names.

Moreover, white supremacist groups and alt-right ideologues continue to misuse evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and social psychology to justify racial segregation and misogyny. The internet has made this misinformation harder to regulate and easier to disseminate.

Scientific Authority

The history of science-based bigotry reveals a troubling pattern: when scientific authority is wielded without ethical oversight or historical awareness, it can become a weapon of oppression. Higher education institutions—many of which played central roles in promoting pseudoscientific racism—must reckon with this legacy. That means more than issuing apologies or renaming buildings; it requires a critical reassessment of how knowledge is produced, validated, and applied.

Understanding the misuse of science in the past is essential to ensuring that the knowledge of the future uplifts rather than excludes. A truly democratic science must be self-critical, historically informed, and deeply engaged with questions of power and justice.

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Sources:

• Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton, 1981.

• Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Harvard University Press, 1985.

• Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Doubleday, 2006.

• Lombardo, Paul A. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

• Lewontin, Richard C. “The Apportionment of Human Diversity.” Evolutionary Biology, vol. 6, 1972, pp. 381–398.

• Allen, Garland E. "The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940: An Essay in Institutional History." Osiris, vol. 2, 1986, pp. 225–264.

• Duster, Troy. Backdoor to Eugenics. Routledge, 2003.

• Reverby, Susan M. Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.You said:

Climate Denial and Conservative Amnesia: A Letter to Charlie Kirk and TPUSA

Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA have built an empire of outrage—rallying young conservatives on college campuses, feeding them culture war talking points, and mocking science in the name of “free thinking.” At the top of their hit list? Climate change. According to TPUSA, man-made global warming is a hoax, a leftist ploy to expand government, or simply not worth worrying about. But this isn’t rebellion—it’s willful ignorance. And worse, it’s a betrayal of the conservative legacy of environmental stewardship.

Let’s be clear: man-made climate change is real. It is measurable, observable, and already having devastating consequences across the planet. The science is not debatable. According to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth’s average surface temperature has risen more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century—largely driven by carbon emissions from human activities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which aggregates peer-reviewed science from around the world, states unequivocally that “human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”

If Charlie Kirk and TPUSA were interested in truth, they wouldn’t be spreading climate denial. They’d be listening to the 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists who confirm that this warming is caused by humans. They’d look to the Department of Defense, which recognizes climate change as a national security threat. They’d pay attention to farmers losing crops to drought, families displaced by floods and wildfires, and millions of people suffering through record-breaking heat.

In 2023, Phoenix experienced 31 straight days above 110°F. In 2024, ocean temperatures reached the highest levels ever recorded, accelerating coral bleaching and threatening global fisheries. Canadian wildfires covered U.S. cities in toxic smoke. Coastal towns face rising seas. These are not “natural cycles.” They are the direct result of burning coal, oil, and gas at unsustainable levels—driven by short-term greed and fossil fuel lobbyists.

And that brings us to a painful irony. TPUSA claims to speak for the working class, for rural Americans, and for future generations. But these are exactly the people being hit first and hardest by climate change. Farmers in Texas and Kansas are watching their yields collapse. Gulf Coast communities are being battered by stronger hurricanes. Urban neighborhoods with little tree cover and poor infrastructure are turning into deadly heat islands. Denying climate change doesn’t protect these people—it abandons them.

But perhaps the worst betrayal is ideological. TPUSA calls itself conservative. Yet real conservatism means conserving what matters—our land, our water, our air, and our future. And in this regard, the Republican Party once led the way.

It was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt who pioneered American conservation. He created national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. He didn’t call environmental protection socialism—he called it patriotism.

It was Republican Richard Nixon who signed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He founded the Environmental Protection Agency, understanding that pollution was not just bad for nature—it was bad for people and for capitalism itself.

Even Ronald Reagan, whose presidency is often associated with deregulation, signed the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. The result? The ozone layer began to heal—one of the greatest environmental successes in human history.

More recently, conservative leaders like Bob Inglis, Carlos Curbelo, Larry Hogan, and Susan Collins have advocated for carbon pricing, clean energy investments, and bipartisan climate action. Groups like RepublicEn, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, and the American Conservation Coalition are working to reintroduce common-sense environmentalism to the Republican movement. These are not radicals. They are conservatives who understand that freedom means nothing without a livable planet.

Young Republicans increasingly agree. Polls show that Gen Z conservatives are far more likely than older Republicans to support climate action. They’ve grown up in a world of extreme weather, mass extinction, and economic uncertainty. They know the cost of inaction. They see through the oil-funded lies.

So what exactly is TPUSA conserving? Not the environment. Not scientific integrity. Not the truth. They are conserving ignorance—and protecting the profits of ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the very fossil fuel billionaires who knew the risks of climate change in the 1970s and chose to deceive the public anyway. (See: Harvard University’s 2023 study on Exxon’s internal climate models.)

If TPUSA is serious about freedom, they must realize that freedom cannot exist without responsibility. There is no free market on a burning planet. There is no liberty when wildfires choke your air, when hurricanes destroy your home, or when heatwaves kill your grandparents.

We challenge Charlie Kirk and TPUSA not to “own the libs,” but to own the truth. Talk to climate scientists. Visit frontline communities. Debate conservatives like Bob Inglis who actually care about the world they’re leaving behind. Break the echo chamber. Lead with courage instead of trolling for clicks.

The earth does not care about your ideology. It cares about physics. And physics is winning.

Sources:

NASA – Climate Change Evidence and Causes: https://climate.nasa.gov
NOAA – Global Climate Reports: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, 2023: https://www.ipcc.ch
Harvard – Exxon’s Early Climate Models, Science, Jan 2023
U.S. Department of Defense – Climate Risk Analysis, 2022: https://www.defense.gov
Pew Research – Gen Z Republicans and Climate Change, 2023
RepublicEn – https://www.republicEn.org
American Conservation Coalition – https://www.acc.eco
Montreal Protocol overview – United Nations Environment Programme

The truth is not left or right. It is grounded in science, history, and conscience. Conservatives once led on environmental protection. They still can—if they’re brave enough to face the facts.