A 'No Kings' protest organizer says training around nonviolence and de-escalation is key (CNN)

 

The War on Education: Reclaiming Critical Thought in an Age of Fascism (Henry Giroux)

As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note in How Democracies Die, authoritarianism no longer announces itself with marching boots or military coups. It now emerges through culture, through the seductive rhythms of social media, viral spectacles, and the normalization of cruelty. Today, culture is not just a backdrop to politics and historical amnesia; it is politics embedded in the erasure of historical memory. It teaches us how to see, what to remember, whom to fear, and what to forget. In this age of resurgent authoritarianism, culture functions as a powerful pedagogy of domination.

We are living through a dismal age, one where anti-intellectualism is no longer masked, but paraded as a form of virtue. A fascist monoculture thrives, dull and mechanized, overrun by wooden stuntmen, empathy-hating billionaires, and artists like Kanye West who unashamedly praise Hitler. Meanwhile, podcast ventriloquists spew algorithmic bile into the void. In the ruins of the university, too many so-called leaders and their bureaucratic accountants now lend legitimacy to what Herbert Marcuse once called “scholarshit,” a travesty of thought, dressed in the empty rituals of managerial reason, budget-cutting cruelty, and unapologetic brutality. “Scholarshit'” masquerades as intellectual discourse while stripping it of genuine engagement with critical inquiry. It thrives on jargon and pretension, prioritizing form over substance, and favoring self-congratulatory cleverness over meaningful argument. In its hollow rhetoric, the complexities of society are reduced to buzzwords and superficial analyses, its practitioners more concerned with appearing intellectually sophisticated than engaging in any real critique. This approach to scholarship fosters intellectual laziness, encouraging an atmosphere where complexity is simplified, nuance is erased, and true critical thought is marginalized in favor of what passes for cleverness but lacks depth or insight. Never has the need for critical education and a shift in mass consciousness been more urgent. Never has it been more crucial to recognize education as both a force for empowerment and a powerful mode of colonization.

In an age when instrumentalism and techno-fascism dominates the culture, reducing education to mere training and suffocating pedagogy under the weight of indoctrination, it becomes more urgent than ever to reclaim the university as a space for reflection, critique, and ethical imagination. Instrumentalism erases social responsibility, dismisses matters of justice, and detaches learning from the deeper relations of power. It exchanges depth for compliance and, in the process, robs education of its emancipatory promise.

We have witnessed this logic unfold in so-called liberal movements like "teaching to the test" and in the ongoing proliferation of Teaching and Learning Centers, which often reduce education to a toolbox of technical skills. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay warns, these practices resemble the workings of "imperial technologies", systems designed to manage learning without nurturing an awareness of injustice, to flatten thought, and to detach education from the struggle for democratic agency and pedagogical citizenship.

Consider Elon Musk, hailed by some as a visionary for creating Tesla and fueling fantasies of colonizing Mars. Beneath this gleaming myth, however, lies a far more disturbing reality. Musk has made Nazi salutes, trafficked in dangerous conspiracy theories, and, as Michelle Goldberg noted in The New York Times, exhibits a chilling disdain for empathy, paired with "breathless cruelty." This cruelty is not abstract; it manifests in the real world, where the policies Musk champions have contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Africa. His power is not merely technological; it is ideological, shaping a culture that confuses megalomania with genius and elevates indifference to suffering as a mark of strength. This is more than a collapse of civic literacy, it is a toxic poison, destroying any vestige of civic consciousness, solidarity, and social responsibility.

Cruelty has become the currency of power, the measure by which dominance is asserted and human worth discarded. Bill Gates, in a moment of moral clarity, acknowledged the gravity of shuttering USAID, conceding that he “bore the responsibility of risking a resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV, and polio.” But his warning grew even more damning when, in The Financial Times, he described Elon Musk—once heralded as a symbol of techno-utopian promise—as “the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children.” Yet even Gates understates the larger architecture of violence at work. Trump’s so-called “beautiful budget bill” is not merely a policy document—it is a blueprint for social abandonment, a death sentence rendered in the language of austerity. It slashes funding for child nutrition programs, strips health care from millions, and eviscerates what remains of the social state. In its wake rises a machinery of disposability—a punishing state that targets the poor, the vulnerable, and people of color, turning the politics of governance into a war zone where compassion is silenced and suffering normalized. This is gangster capitalism on steroids--unleashed, utterly devoid of any social responsibility and drunk on its own greed, power, corruption, and fascist principles.

This silence speaks to a deeper void in higher education, one that raises crucial questions about the burden of conscience in education. It is no longer enough to champion STEM disciplines while starving the liberal arts and humanities. It is not enough for humanities students to dwell only in critique, disconnected from the technological world around them. What we need is a fusion of literacies, a pedagogy that teaches technical competence without sacrificing moral imagination; a pedagogy that nurtures civic literacy, historical awareness, the capacity to think beyond disciplines, and the courage to cross borders of culture, identity, and thought.

The attacks facing higher education today are more than a political or economic crisis, they also speak to a cultural catastrophe, a struggle over civic consciousness, critical literacy, and the promise of higher education as a democratic public good. Higher education has become prime target because it offers the promise to students of pedagogical citizenship—a pedagogy that enables young people to attentive, critical, knowledgeable, and able to hold power accountable. That is why higher education is viewed as dangerous to the authoritarian neanderthals attacking higher education. At the core of the crackdown on higher education is a project that successfully enables society to forget how to think, to feel, and to remember, practices that provide a fertile ground for creating fascist subjects.  Under such conditions, grotesque acts become normalized,  children are starved in Gaza, immigrant families are torn apart, and the horror of state terrorism fades into the background noise of spectacle and distraction.

And yet, culture remains a vital site of possibility. José Mujica, former president of Uruguay, reminded us that real change does not begin with laws or institutions, but with the values that shape how people see the world. You cannot build a society rooted in justice with individuals trained to prize greed, selfishness, and domination. As he put it, “You can’t construct a new kind of future with people whose hearts still belong to the old one.” The struggle for radical democracy must begin in the realm of culture, where imagination is nurtured, public conscience awakened, and the seeds of transformation take root.

Language itself has been hijacked, bent to the will of a colonizing legacy steeped in hatred, disposability, genocide, and a culture of unapologetic cruelty. Neo-Nazis march without shame, white supremacists shape the conservative cultural machinery, and racist policies are no longer whispered but codified. Nazi salutes are back in fashion. Universities are increasingly transformed into sites of indoctrination and surveillance, more attuned to the logic of police precincts than places of critical learning. Students who dare to protest the genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza are abducted, vilified, and silenced. The most powerful white nationalist on the planet parades corruption as a political virtue and deploys state terror as a primary tool of governance. Solidarity is reconfigured into communities of hate, while resistance to fascism is rebranded as terrorism. Beneath these crimes against humanity lies a culture hollowed out by the absence of reason, moral clarity, and the capacity to hold power accountable. The ghost of fascism has not merely returned; it has taken up residence and been made ordinary.

The age of lofty visions has been cast aside, discarded like ideological refuse. Yet without such visions, rooted in the hard labor and hopeful promise of democracy and the critical function of education, we are left adrift. In their place stand administrators who act as high-powered accountants, students shaped by a culture of commodification and conformity, and a precarious academic labor force paid less than Wall-Mart greeters and clerks. Meanwhile, racism, white nationalism, and Christian fundamentalism gather momentum, extinguishing the flickering lights that once illuminated the path toward a radical democracy. When higher education no longer serves as a vessel for ethical imagination and collective hope, it becomes complicit in its own undoing, and with it, democracy itself teeters on the edge.

As educators, we must fight for a vision of higher education as both sanctuary and catalyst, a place where democracy is not only studied but enacted, where students are not trained to be efficient machines, but cultivated into thinking, feeling, and acting human beings. We need an education in which a culture of questioning is not punished but nurtured, where talking back is a civic virtue, and where the pursuit of equity and justice is central to the very purpose of teaching and learning. Such an education must be grounded in the principles of civic literacy, historical consciousness, and a systemic understanding of power—one that connects private troubles to public issues and expands the possibilities for individual and collective agency.

This is the foundation upon which a radical democracy must be built, and it is the defining pedagogical task of our time. If we fail in this responsibility, higher education will surrender its role as a vital civic sphere—one essential to producing the narratives, knowledge, and capacities that sustain the promise of equality, justice, freedom, and compassion. In abandoning that mission, it will not merely falter; it will aid in its own unraveling. And with it, democracy will edge ever closer to collapse.

Donald Trump understands this. That is why he fears critical education. That is why he wages war on it.

Trump deploys National Guard amid Los Angeles immigration protests (CNN)

In a stunning escalation that has drawn comparisons to authoritarian crackdowns, former President Donald Trump has ordered 2,000 California National Guard troops into Los Angeles to quell protests sparked by ICE raids across the region. Despite opposition from California Governor Gavin Newsom and local officials, Trump bypassed state authority by invoking federal powers under Title 10 of the U.S. Code—stopping short of the more drastic Insurrection Act but still raising serious constitutional questions.

The protests began after ICE agents detained dozens of individuals in workplace raids across South L.A. County. The response from the public was immediate and fierce, with large demonstrations erupting near ICE facilities and federal buildings. As tensions grew, federal officers deployed tear gas and non-lethal weapons against demonstrators, while arrests mounted and reports of detainee mistreatment surfaced.

What makes this moment particularly alarming is the way Trump has redefined protest as “rebellion,” authorizing military support for federal law enforcement without a state request. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has even threatened to deploy active-duty Marines from Camp Pendleton—a move unseen since the 1992 Rodney King unrest. Legal experts and civil rights advocates have sounded the alarm, calling the federal takeover of California's National Guard unprecedented and chilling.

The implications for higher education, especially for undocumented and mixed-status students, are profound. Campuses in Southern California are already on edge, with many students fearing ICE presence and military escalation. Faculty and staff in sanctuary campuses and immigrant advocacy networks warn that the militarization of civil immigration enforcement could further chill free speech, academic freedom, and student organizing.

Law professors like Erwin Chemerinsky have warned that Trump’s actions bypass both precedent and constitutional norms: “It is using the military domestically to stop dissent.” Georgetown’s Steve Vladeck noted that the National Guard’s role may technically be limited to support functions, but the symbolism and real-world consequences of armed troops on city streets are undeniable.

Trump’s invocation of rebellion in response to protest mirrors earlier moments of U.S. history where power was used to silence dissent. But this time, it is playing out amid a polarized political landscape, weakened democratic institutions, and a rising authoritarian movement—with the academy, once again, caught in the crossfire.

As protests continue, California’s colleges and universities—long sites of political activism—face renewed pressure. The presence of federal troops, surveillance, and threats of repression may signal a dangerous new phase in the government’s approach to dissent. What was once unthinkable is becoming reality: a nation where protesting immigration raids can be construed as rebellion, and soldiers patrol streets not in a time of war, but in a time of political theater.

No Kings Day of Protest June 14, 2025 (NoKings.org)

On June 14—Flag Day—President Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday. A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else.

No Kings is a nationwide day of defiance. From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianism—and show the world what democracy really looks like.

We’re not gathering to feed his ego. We’re building a movement that leaves him behind.

The flag doesn’t belong to President Trump. It belongs to us. We’re not watching history happen. We’re making it.

On June 14th, we’re showing up everywhere he isn’t—to say no thrones, no crowns, no kings.

A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. Weapons of any kind, including those legally permitted, should not be brought to events.
Contact

For general inquiries, please email us at info@nokings.org. Members of the media, please email us at media@nokings.org with inquires.

Cambridge Chancellor Candidate Urges UK Universities to Welcome US Academic Exiles

Gina Miller, the high-profile British activist and candidate for Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, is calling on UK universities to seize a rare moment of global academic realignment by welcoming American scholars fleeing political repression and institutional decay in the United States. Miller, who rose to prominence for her legal battles against Brexit, told The Telegraph that Britain’s top institutions—particularly Cambridge—should become havens for academics and students seeking intellectual freedom and safety as Donald Trump’s political resurgence escalates.

“This last year we’ve seen the biggest uptick in U.S. students and academics looking for opportunities outside the country,” said Miller. “Why is Cambridge not making the most of that?”

Her comments arrive as the U.S. faces what many describe as an academic crisis. Donald Trump’s war on higher education has included freezing billions in research funds, shutting off international student visas, dismantling diversity and equity programs, and threatening tenure protections. Scholars have increasingly found themselves under attack—not only from politicians but from coordinated campaigns of harassment, surveillance, and intimidation. The chilling atmosphere has led some to flee, while others are actively exploring exit strategies.

Canada has emerged as the leading destination for these academic exiles. Among them is Dr. Cornel West, the noted philosopher and public intellectual, who accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Massey College in 2024. West cited political censorship and corporate interference at elite U.S. universities as the primary reasons for his departure. Similarly, sociologist Dr. Saida Grundy left Boston University for McGill University in Montreal after sustained threats and harassment tied to her anti-racist scholarship. Grundy has spoken openly about feeling physically and intellectually safer in Canada.

The University of British Columbia welcomed Dr. Michael Sauder, a tenured sociologist from the University of Iowa, after he resigned in protest of proposed state legislation targeting faculty speech and tenure. In another example, Dr. Janelle Wong, a scholar of American politics and Asian American studies, relocated to York University after a combination of political threats and defunding of federal grants for her research on democracy and racial equity.

These are not isolated moves, but part of a growing wave of flight from U.S. institutions—especially public colleges in Republican-controlled states—where academic freedom is rapidly eroding. What had once seemed like hypothetical fears are now becoming lived realities for faculty, staff, and students.

Miller argues that UK institutions, particularly those with Cambridge’s global stature, should respond to this moment by offering refuge and opportunity. While Canada and Germany have already implemented formal “exile campus” initiatives, British universities have largely stayed silent—perhaps out of concern about being seen as anti-American.

But for Miller, who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer and was persuaded to run by a group of Cambridge faculty, this silence represents a missed moral and strategic opportunity. In her view, Cambridge could not only safeguard endangered scholars but also reinvigorate its intellectual community and global relevance.

She has also pledged to bring her long-standing campaign for transparency and ethical accountability to the university, including a commitment to divest Cambridge’s £4 billion endowment from arms companies. She praised King’s College’s recent decision to cut financial ties with weapons firms and argued that the university must act as a beacon of values as well as knowledge.

Miller has been critical of past chancellors who, she claims, have failed to use their positions to speak on important global issues or promote UK higher education on the world stage. “Why is Cambridge not at Davos, for example?” she asked. “Cambridge has the opportunity to be an ambassador not just for itself, but for the entire sector.”

Her campaign intersects with rising concerns about authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and the hollowing out of liberal institutions worldwide. She warned that the line between anti-elitism and anti-scholarship is eroding, as exemplified by Trump’s alignment with populist tech leaders while undermining academic expertise.

Miller’s own life story, from her childhood in Guyana to legal triumphs against the British government, reflects the kind of global connectivity she envisions for Cambridge. She also shared a personal connection to the university: the rare cancer she is now battling was genetically profiled by a research team at Cambridge, deepening her admiration for its life-saving scientific work.

“If Cambridge is going to lead, it has to get off the page and into the world,” she said. “It must act now to uphold the values of open inquiry and human progress. If we wait until universities fall to authoritarian control, it will be too late.”

As Trump’s influence reshapes the American university landscape, the choice for UK higher education is stark: retreat inward, or rise to the challenge of global academic leadership. Gina Miller is betting that Cambridge still has the courage—and conscience—to do the latter.

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For more on academic freedom, global education policy, and higher education in crisis, follow The Higher Education Inquirer.

Higher Education in Retreat (Gary Roth)

 [Editor's note: This article first appeared in the Brooklyn Rail.  We thank the Brooklyn Rail for allowing us to repost this.]

For decades, the top-tier colleges and universities—often represented by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but including a few dozen other private and public institutions as well—have reshaped themselves to accommodate the rapidly-changing demographic profile of the United States.1 From all appearances, the universities were also in harmony with the sensibilities and preferences of the country’s leading citizens. Key moments, like the sanctioning of gay marriage that found support from wide-spread sectors of the upper class, seemed to solidify the drift towards a diverse and tolerant social order, one that resonated not only domestically but internationally as well.

The future evolution of civil society was, in this way of thinking, firmly and finally in hand. Bitter acrimony might characterize the political world or single-issue items like abortion, but actual developments outweighed the leftover pockets of resistance, which in any case were thought to be localized in less significant parts of the country and the world and could at best only slow the inevitable. How hard people pushed for change would ultimately determine the future.

This somnambulistic mode of thought pervaded the university world and also wide swaths of the liberal public. It helps explain the ease with which parts of the university community, after an initial round of caution, joined hands with its political opposition to suppress the campus protests that developed in response to Israel’s brutality towards Palestinian civilians.

Appeasement and accommodation, while regrettable within the academic community because of the retreat from sacrosanct ideas such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, nonetheless set the stage for developments that followed the national elections at the end of last year. Martin Niemöller’s self-confession about his support—as a Lutheran pastor—for the German fascists during the 1930s captures nicely the corner into which the higher education community had boxed itself:

When the Nazis came for the Communists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they jailed the Social Democrats, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they jailed the Jews, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest.2

Without a vibrant protest movement already in place to push against harsh and arbitrary actions, the universities seemed to have little choice but to acquiesce to a regime that seems interested in flattening the population into an undifferentiated mass.3

Because appeasement and accommodation have been embraced as proactive survival tactics, resistance has centered on a judicial system thought to be less conservative than the groups that have come to dominate the executive and legislative branches of government, a judiciary conceptualized as a mediator rather than an initiator and enforcer of social conflict. Given the legal system’s history, this too becomes another moment of sleep walking. It is a huge distance from the dynamism that characterized the world of higher education not long ago.

Among the most dynamic institutions have been the privately-governed universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Not just their social vision, but their great wealth allowed them to embrace initiatives that stand at the forefront of attempts to remold institutional behavior. Front and center have been efforts to diversify the upper ranks of corporate, governmental, and non-profit establishments such that they too reflect the diversity of the population at large.

Previous attempts to diversify the collegiate student body by means of affirmative action programs that focused on underrepresented groups, especially African Americans and Latines, were struck down by the judiciary. Anti-affirmative action backlash took aim at the admissions policies at highly-competitive graduate programs, such as elite law and medical schools, and on prestigious scholarship programs. The backlash, in other words, concentrated on the byways that provided access into the upper levels of society.

Schools and programs that served the remainder of the population were not of particular concern. Graduate programs in public administration, for instance, where the training of mid-level administrators is the aim, rarely came under attack, whether located at medium-sized liberal arts colleges or regional state universities. These types of institutions also suspended their affirmative action initiatives, but mostly as preemptive moves to avoid future litigation. By strategically targeting the institutions at the top, the entire system was enticed to reorient itself.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives were one of the responses to both past and recent judicial rollbacks. These were initiatives directed toward the recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups rather than their admission and funding. DEI initiatives, though, did not deal with the cost of attendance, which at the elite private institutions is beyond everyone’s means except for the wealthy. For tuition, room, and board to attend as an undergraduate, the current cost for the 2025–26 school year at Princeton, for example, is $82,650. Fees are extra.4

Financial incentives based on socioeconomic status, however, were a strategy that seemingly silenced all critics. The most generous programs encompass virtually all applicants from either a working or middle class background; that is, everyone except the elite is covered as long as household or parental income is below $200,000 annually. At Princeton, the limit is $100,000, pegged considerably above the level of median household income in the United States.5

This allows the institutions to be “needs-blind” and recruit students no matter their financial situation. A tuition-free college education—once a hallmark of publicly-funded institutions—has been revived at the upper end of the spectrum, a profound assertion by these institutions of their intent to further the socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic integration of the upper class.

One consequence of these cost-free programs is that it is often cheaper to attend an elite college like Princeton than to attend the nearby publicly-funded state university, the flagship institution—in this case, Rutgers University-New Brunswick. These figures are drawn from government calculations that show actual expenses for families at different tiers of the socioeconomic spectrum:6

CHART 1 – ANNUAL UNDERGRADUATE NET COST OF ATTENDANCE

Family income	PRINCETON	RUTGERS-NEW BRUNSWICK
Less than $ 30,000	$  2,518	$15,885
$30,001 - $ 48,000	$  4,682	$15,532
$48,001 - $ 75,000	$  7,652	$17,578
$75,001 - $110,000	$13,849	$24,020
Over $110,001	$39,943	$33,460

 

A significant reversal has taken place. The elite privates have become the exemplars for the entire system of higher education, not just academically but economically as well. It makes economic sense for the poor to attend elite private institutions (assuming they are offered one of the few open slots) and for the rich to attend publicly-funded ones. Because student loans are not part of these aid packages, students at elite colleges graduate with less debt than students at nearby public flagships.7

We find, then, that the more selective the college—Princeton admits five percent of applicants, Rutgers-New Brunswick sixty-five percent—the cheaper it is to attend, and the more likely you are to graduate—at Princeton ninety-eight percent, at Rutgers-New Brunswick eighty-four percent—the less that debt encumbers you afterwards. And what’s true about the comparison of Princeton and its nearby publicly-funded flagship is true in other states also: Harvard and University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Yale and the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and so on.

Just as important, student socioeconomic profiles parallel those at nearby public flagships. At Princeton, one in five (twenty percent) of its students receives a Pell Grant. These are the federally-funded grants awarded when family income is below, roughly, $50,000. Pell Grants thus serve as a reasonable measure of the density of students from working class and poor backgrounds at a particular institution. At Rutgers-New Brunswick, it is one in four students (28 percent).

Socioeconomic programs like the one at Princeton exist at more than a hundred public and privately-governed college institutions. Taken altogether, there has been a quiet undermining of commonly-accepted assumptions regarding elite institutions and their public counterparts. That the private elite institutions often outperform the public sector ones in matters traditionally considered the latter’s prerogative shows how deeply intertwined the private and public sectors have become.

Yet for all their efforts, the elite institutions still do not reflect the demographics of the population at large. This is true for the elite privates and also for public flagships. Nationally, thirty percent of students receive Pell Grants, a measure of the degree to which the working class has become a substantial part of the university community. At top-tier schools, however, fewer of their students receive Pell Grants. At Harvard, it is seventeen percent; at Yale, nineteen percent; at the Texas flagship, UT Austin, twenty-five percent; at the Florida flagship, UF Gainesville, twenty-three percent.8

That socioeconomic diversity is lower at elite privates and public flagships than is the national norm is not surprising, given the amply-documented correlation between parental finances and scholastic performance.9 Students from wealthier backgrounds, as a rule, perform better academically and are more likely to attend prestigious institutions. Still, the top-tier institutions have come a long way from the times in which they represented, with few exceptions: only the elite.

At places like Princeton, the student body is nearly as diverse racially and ethnically as at the nearby state flagship. According to the broad demographic categories used in government publications and legislation, we find that at both Princeton and Rutgers-New Brunswick, there are no majorities, only minorities:10

CHART 2 – RACE AND ETHNICITY AT TOP-TIER INSTITUTIONS

(in percents)	PRINCETON	RUTGERS-NEW BRUNSWICK
Asian	24	33
Black (African American)	9	7
Hispanic (Latine)	10	16
White	36	31
Non-Resident Alien (International Students)	12	7
Two or More Races (Multiracial)	7	4

 

Immigration and migration initially produced majority-less campuses at urban public institutions; in other words, at institutions located in major metropolitan areas—places where jobs are numerous and resistance to newcomers often diffuse and undirected. At Princeton and other elite institutions, however, it is not demographics, but merit—in combination with these economically-based financial aid packages—that drive the dynamic.

Forty-five years ago, individuals self-identified as white represented eighty-four percent of all undergraduates but only seventy-seven percent of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds (Chart 3). Higher education was a significant cultural dynamic for this group. A major reversal has since taken place, in which the white population now accounts for fifty-two percent of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds and the same percentage of college students. Their lead has been lost.

Every other group has moved in the opposite direction, increasing its presence within the collegiate system faster than their increase in either population or the prime college-attending age cohort (eighteen to twenty-four year-olds). The latter group has been relatively stable within the Black population, for instance, only increasing one percentage point from thirteen to fourteen percent during those decades. But the presence of Black students among undergraduate college students has increased from nine to thirteen percent. Among the Latine (Hispanic) population, the increase has been dramatic. While their share of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds tripled from eight to twenty-four percent, their share among undergraduates increased more than five-fold.

Affirmative action and DEI initiatives fostered the importance of a college education as a means to circumvent obstacles within the economy:11

CHART 3 – RACIAL & ETHNIC DIVERSITY

	18-24 YEAR-OLDS		HIGHER EDUCATION
(in percents)	1980	2022	1980	2022
Asian	2	6	2	8
Black	13	14	9	13
Hispanic	8	24	4	22
White	77	52	84	52
Two or More Races	—	4	—	4

 

Over the past half century, a leveling of the population has taken place, with the Black, Latine, and white communities all participating in post-secondary education at rates equivalent to their respective shares of the prime college-attending age group (eighteen to twenty-four year-olds).

This equalization is an aspect of reality that has been neglected by the academic community, which has generally focused on the advantages members of the white community have both educationally and occupationally due to kinship and parental networks, friendship circles, neighborhood contacts, and a lack of discrimination based on skin color. Implicit in this view is that whites need not rely on the educational system as heavily as other groups, since alternative avenues of advancement are available.

In many of the top institutions, the fall-off of white students is quite pronounced:

CHART 4 - DIVERSITY AT PRIVATE ELITES AND PUBLIC FLAGSHIPS

(in percents)	Higher Education	Harvard	Yale	Columbia	UPenn	UT Austin	UF Gainesville
Asian	8	22	23	18	28	25	12
Black	13	9	9	8	9	5	5
Hispanic	22	12	16	16	11	28	24
White	52	33	32	30	30	32	50
Non-Resident	—	14	11	18	12	4	2
Two/+ Races	4	7	7	6	5	4	5

 

During the decades in which affirmative action and DEI programs have attempted to bring some measure of equal access and equal achievement to educational endeavors, parts of the white community were drifting away. This blind-spot within the academic community’s understanding of social dynamics meant that concepts of relative disadvantage might have fit the situation just as well as ones of privilege and advantage.12

Increased funding in order to include whites in DEI initiatives is a possible solution, although a fundamental rethinking of inclusivity is also called for. Instead, the elimination of services and programs has become a mandate to ensure that no group will be helped to rise out of an undifferentiated mass. If government and higher education are taken out of the picture, social advancement, which always requires additional resources, then hinges solely on the wherewithal of individual families.

The university community, with its emphasis on inclusion and diversity, has represented a last outpost of a kind of thinking—of governmental spending and educational activism—that was once heralded under the label of Keynesianism and dates back to the immediate post-World War II period when everything seemed possible. Like the fate of the white population, society itself has gone through a long-winded period of evolution and transformation despite the tenacity of modes of thought initially generated in previous times.

Because colleges and universities depend so heavily on external funding for research grants and student loans, the political world has laid claim to its governance in ever-aggressive ways. The opening thrust has concentrated on the elite privates—Columbia, UPenn, Harvard, and Princeton among them. The integration of the two worlds of politics and education, in this sense, signals the remaking of higher education into a sphere of government in which the political world functions as its own type of board of directors. While the federal Department of Education is in the process of dissolution, the entire system of higher education is being reduced to the level of a federal department. This is part of an overall effort to curtail civil society and reign in its independence, in which scientists—initially those whose work concentrates on the environment or on global public health issues—have been a major focus.

Perhaps it is in this sense that we can understand the reluctance of university executives to confront directly what at first seemed to be scattershot criticisms aimed at various parts of their enterprises and why they did not push back harder at the assertion that criticism of Israeli policies is a form of antisemitism. It is not just that the higher education community was unprepared for the level and intensity of the criticisms, but that it was so highly vulnerable.

The top-tier institutions are the gonfaloniers of modern times, targets whose capture on the battlefield disorients the troops that follow their lead. To intimidate and diminish the top-tier institutions sends a message to the wider educational community about the punitive actions that non-compliance may bring. It effectively shifts the center of gravity throughout a major portion of society. In the conflict between the government and the educational community that depends on it, the latter can only lose, even if the degree to which it loses is still to be determined. The universities are a highly strategic and, as it turns out, easy target, ideologically and in terms of government expenses.

That the university community has also served as a base and breeding ground for liberal politics is still another reason for its subjugation.13 The overall result gestures in the direction of a shrunken and harshly repressed and repressive educational system that cowers to executive mandates because of the certainty that if not, legislative enactments will follow.14 Highly successful white males are the driving force behind all this. Their goal: a system that encourages no exceptions except for people who mimic themselves.

The world we have known is disappearing, an unraveling that would take considerable time to now reassemble. It is unclear whether and to what degree colleges and universities will remain as sanctuaries for the expression of ideas inconsonant with the political establishment. Perhaps some solace is to be found in this quip by Mother Jones, herself a fierce labor movement advocate at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. She was heard to say: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

1. Between 1980 and 2022, the major changes were in the white population, which fell from 80 to 59 percent, while the Latine population increased dramatically from 7 to 19 percent. The Black population barely changed—from 12 to 13 percent, and the Asian population increased from 2 to 6 percent. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics–Most Current Digest Tables, 2023, Tables 101.20.
2. Many versions of this poem exist. The version here is unabridged, translated from the original.
3. Alan Blinder, “Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation.” The New York Times, March 20, 2025.
4. Cost & Aid | Princeton Admission.
5. Median annual income is just over $80,000 per year. These programs also take into account a family's wealth in property, business assets, etc., in complicated formulas that can mitigate qualifying on income alone. Stephanie Saul, “Harvard Will Make Tuition Free for More Students.” The New York Times, 17 March 2025; Peyton Beverford, Free Tuition for Low-Income Students | Appily. 21 March 2025; US Census Bureau, Income in the United States: 2023, 10 September 2024.
6. Unless indicated otherwise, all data is from the US Department of Education, College Scorecard, 23 April 2025. For each institution, see the various listings under: Costs, By Family Income; Financial Aid & Debt; Test Scores and Acceptance; Graduation & Retention; Typical Earnings; Campus Diversity.
7. At Princeton, the median debt for undergraduates when they finish their degrees is $10,320; at Rutgers-New Brunswick, it is $21,500.
8. Share of Federal Pell Grants recipients U.S. 2024 | Statista.
9. The situation a decade ago: “among ‘Ivy-Plus’ colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges, University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke), more students come from families in the top 1% of the income distribution (14.5%) than the bottom half of the income distribution (13.5%).” Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w23618, July 2017, p. 1.
10. Not listed are: American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and Unknown. Numbers do not always equal 100 due to rounding or these absent categories.
11. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics-Most Current Digest Tables, 2023, Tables 101.20, 306.10 (scroll down for the relevant data—based on 2022 totals, rounded up).
12. In the academic trilogy of race, class, and gender, many scholars sought a means to move the discussion of class from the theoretical, where it received extensive attention, to the concrete so that it could function similarly to the analyses of race and gender. Intersectionality has been one of the results, which nonetheless still leaves class undertheorized on a concrete level.
13. On voting patterns, see: Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, Polarized Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Cambridge University Press: 2024.
14. Isabelle Taft, “How Colleges Are Surveilling Students Now.” The New York Times, March 29, 2025.

Thanks to Jules David Bartkowski, Anne Lopes, and Paul Mattick for comments.

Gary Roth is the author of The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility (Pluto Press, 2019).