The Serenity Prayer, Climate Collapse, and Genocide: A Deal with the Devil

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference."

The Serenity Prayer has comforted millions. In times of personal struggle, it can be a powerful call to surrender what lies beyond one’s control. But in moments of global crisis, when powerful institutions profit from destruction, the prayer can function less as a path to peace and more as a pact of passivity—a deal with the devil.

This danger becomes stark in the face of two intertwined realities: planetary climate collapse and the mass suffering of human populations through war and genocide. While glaciers melt and firestorms raze entire regions, and while families in Gaza are buried beneath rubble from precision airstrikes, too many well-meaning individuals offer only whispered prayers for acceptance. The language of “serenity” has become a spiritual sedative, numbing people to action in the face of unprecedented violence.

The horror in Gaza is not isolated. It is the latest chapter in a long history of calculated brutality. For more than nine months, Israeli forces have carried out one of the most intensive bombing campaigns of the century, reducing schools, hospitals, and apartment blocks to ash. Palestinians—already confined, stateless, and starving—are told to disappear quietly. And in the United States, many of the most powerful evangelical Christian institutions offer not protest, but prayer. They do not condemn the bombs. They bless them.

This theology of inaction extends to the climate crisis as well. Fires in Canada have darkened skies from New York to Kentucky. Rising seas threaten to erase Pacific island nations and entire Gulf communities. Extreme heat has shattered records from Delhi to Phoenix. The science is clear, and has been for decades. The cause is clear: the burning of fossil fuels for profit. And yet, rather than confront the systems responsible, many Americans—especially in religious communities—retreat into familiar verses, trusting in divine will while oil executives thank them for their silence.

This pattern is old. During the genocide of Native Americans, Christian settlers invoked scripture to justify massacres. Indigenous nations were labeled “heathens” standing in the way of Manifest Destiny. Boarding schools were built to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Entire civilizations were wiped out in the name of order, law, and even God. Churches, rather than stand with the oppressed, often operated hand-in-hand with empire. They prayed not for justice, but for tranquility—after the land had been stolen and the people erased.

In the twentieth century, many Christian leaders remained silent during the Holocaust. In the Rwandan genocide, clergy sometimes aided the killers. Again and again, the lesson is clear: serenity without resistance is complicity.

And today, we see this same quiet complicity in American Christian higher education. At Liberty University—a billion-dollar religious empire—the Serenity Prayer might just as well hang above the boardroom. The institution thrives on a mixture of fundamentalist certainty, political power, and economic ambition. Its law school has become a breeding ground for conservative legal warriors who reinterpret justice through dominionist theology. Its Jesse Helms School of Government honors a segregationist legacy while preparing students for ideological battle. Climate science is downplayed. Militarism is sanctified. And genocide—whether in the name of security or salvation—is never named.

In such an environment, prayer becomes performance. It soothes the conscience while injustice metastasizes. It gives believers a moral loophole: if change is deemed impossible, no action is required. But change is not impossible. Resistance is not futile. And silence is not neutral.

We must reclaim the Serenity Prayer from the institutions that have weaponized it. Serenity cannot be the first response to atrocity. Courage must lead, especially when the victims are silenced. Wisdom must include historical memory—of the land theft that built America, of the smoke rising from Gaza, of the forests burning in Siberia and the Sahel. And acceptance must come only after struggle, not before it.

The future will not judge us for how often we prayed, but for what we did while praying. In an age of climate catastrophe and global injustice, serenity without struggle is not peace—it is surrender.

Sources:
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer and its Contexts, Library of Congress
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “Gaza Emergency Reports” (2023–2025)
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sixth Assessment Report (2023)
Human Rights Watch, “Israel: Apparent War Crimes in Gaza” (2024)
Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt
Democracy Now!, “Witnessing the Gaza Bombardment”
Center for Environmental Justice, “Climate Apartheid” Report
Higher Education Inquirer, “Liberty University: A Billion-Dollar Edu-Religious Powerhouse Under the Lens” (2025)

“We Can’t Make It Here Anymore” Still Rings True

More than twenty years after James McMurtry released We Can’t Make It Here Anymore, the song’s haunting verses continue to echo across the American landscape. Originally written during the early 2000s under the weight of offshoring, union busting, and post-9/11 disillusionment, McMurtry’s protest ballad has aged not with irrelevance but with renewed urgency.

McMurtry wrote about Vietnam veterans pushed aside by a society eager to forget its mistakes. Today, those veterans have been replaced by men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan—some with missing limbs, some with invisible wounds, many with few job prospects. The system still tells them “thanks for your service” while it sends their factories overseas, their benefits into the shredder, and their children into debt servitude at for-profit colleges or underfunded public universities.

The song’s refrain—“And the banks run the loan game, and the dollar jumps the track”—has only deepened in meaning in the era of trillion-dollar student loan burdens and the financialization of everything from housing to higher education. Entire zip codes have been gutted by opioid overdoses, job loss, and rising suicide rates. The technology is flashier now, but the despair McMurtry chronicled feels even more entrenched. The “big boys” still “don't like to lose,” and the factories are still “boarded up,” not just in Michigan and West Virginia, but now in the shadows of elite universities, where campuses flourish while surrounding communities falter.

Higher education, the supposed equalizer, has played its own part in this disillusionment. Where once it held the promise of upward mobility, it now too often offers low-wage adjunct jobs, debt without degrees, and institutions more concerned with branding and endowments than student welfare. McMurtry sings, “The doctor can't be reached, he has moved back to LA,” and in 2025, that’s still true—except now the doctor’s been replaced by a telehealth AI, and the local hospital has been bought out by a hedge fund.

We Can’t Make It Here Anymore is not nostalgia. It is indictment. It is reportage. It is prophecy. And like Woody Guthrie before him, McMurtry tells a story corporate media would rather ignore.

The song’s last verse ends not with hope, but with observation:
“Will work for food, will die for oil, will kill for power and to us the spoils.”
Two decades later, the empire has not changed course. It has just changed spokespeople.

The names may change—NAFTA to USMCA, Halliburton to BlackRock—but the machinery grinds on. And McMurtry’s anthem remains a soundtrack for those who never made it out of the wreckage, for the veterans of war and labor still trying to make it here.

Sources

• James McMurtry, We Can’t Make It Here Anymore, 2004

• U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics

• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

• National Student Legal Defense Network

• Higher Education Inquirer archives

Netanyahu Denies Starvation as Civilians Die at Gaza Food Sites, While U.S. Campuses Suppress Dissent

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated this week that “there is no starvation in Palestine,” contradicting extensive reporting from international aid organizations documenting famine conditions and lethal attacks on civilians at food distribution sites in Gaza.

A May 2025 report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a United Nations-supported initiative, found that over 70 percent of Gaza’s population was experiencing catastrophic food insecurity. Nearly 30 percent of children under the age of five were acutely malnourished. The World Food Programme has labeled the crisis a "man-made famine."

On July 20, Doctors Without Borders reported that a drone strike hit near its food and medical site in Khan Younis, killing nine civilians, including three children.

On July 24, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported that at least 15 civilians were killed when Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution point in Gaza City. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) confirmed the death of one of its staff members in the incident. 

Despite these conditions, Netanyahu has denied the existence of starvation, and the U.S. government has continued its military and diplomatic support. The United States provides approximately $3.8 billion annually in military aid to Israel, and U.S.-manufactured weapons have been linked to attacks on aid sites. The U.S. has also vetoed or blocked three United Nations Security Council resolutions since October 2023 aimed at enforcing ceasefires or expanding humanitarian access.

Meanwhile, suppression of speech and surveillance on U.S. campuses has escalated. Across dozens of universities, students and faculty who have spoken out against the war in Gaza or criticized U.S. and Israeli policies have faced disciplinary action, police monitoring, and digital surveillance. Peaceful protests and teach-ins have been met with administrative crackdowns, restrictions on student group activities, and, in some cases, expulsions.

At several campuses, private security firms with ties to law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been contracted to monitor student activism. Surveillance tools, including facial recognition and social media tracking software, have been used to identify and target protesters. In many cases, these efforts have been carried out with little or no oversight.

Faculty members who have criticized U.S. foreign policy or supported Palestinian rights have reported threats to job security and tenure, especially in public institutions receiving defense-related research funding. Some have been the targets of smear campaigns and blacklists promoted by outside organizations.

At least 24 U.S. universities maintain partnerships or research contracts with defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics—companies whose weapons systems are deployed in Gaza. This financial entanglement has made many administrations unwilling to permit open debate, let alone challenge the broader militarization of U.S. higher education.

These repressive measures raise fundamental questions about the role of the university in a democratic society. When criticism of state violence is policed, and protest against war is surveilled, the campus ceases to function as a space of inquiry and dissent. It becomes, instead, an extension of the national security state.

As civilians are killed while waiting for food and as children die of hunger and infection, the U.S. government and its educational institutions remain enmeshed in systems of silence, denial, and complicity. The suppression of free speech on campus is not peripheral to this crisis—it is part of it.

Sources:
UNRWA Situation Reports, July 2025
World Food Programme Emergency Updates
Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), May 2025
Palestinian Red Crescent Society, July 2025
Médecins Sans Frontières Field Reports
World Health Organization, Gaza Emergency Briefings
UNICEF Gaza Nutrition Data, July 2025
U.S. State Department Foreign Military Financing Budget, 2024–2025
UN Security Council Voting Records, 2023–2025
Coalition for Civil Freedoms Campus Speech Tracker
Higher Education Inquirer archives on university-defense contractor ties

HELU's Wall-to-Wall and Coast-to-Coast Report – July 2025

July 2025 HELU Chair’s Message From Levin Kim, HELU Chair and member of UAW 4121, student workers, researchers and postdocs at the University of Washington Over the first six months in office, the Trump Administration attempted to gut funding for crucial research, attack immigrant and non-citizen workers, curtail academic freedom and freedom of speech, and more. These attacks on higher ed workers and institutions have been the centerpiece of the right wing's political agenda to expand control and power over public-serving institutions in service of the interests of the ultra-wealthy few.  Read more. Read HELU's July 2025 Chair's Message HELU's July 2025 newsletter contains items about movements in large systems. Some are national (the EWOC conference, the NEA organizing grants, May Day Strong, the DSA Convention). Others are state-level (Michigan and New York). Some are system-level (Arizona and California university systems). Some are about collaborations (the LA Federation of Labor, the SUNY/CUNY MADCs). This movement reflects the reality of where the higher ed labor movement is going.  – Helena Worthen, Co-Chair, HELU Media & Communications Committee   From the HELU Blog: EWOC and Higher Ed: First Conference at Labor@Wayne EWOC, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, held its first conference at Wayne State University with co-hosts Labor@Wayne on June 28 and 29. Read more.   The University of California System: Labor Actions Loom in 2025-2026 The longer the UC system maintains a hard line against unions at the bargaining table, the more likely it is that a majority of UC’s unionized workforce will be out of contract by the end of the 2025-26 school year. Read more.   NEA Offers Grants to Help Local Affiliates Pay HELU Solidarity Pledges The National Education Association (NEA) has offered grants to local affiliates to enable them to join HELU by paying half of their solidarity pledge for one year. Read more. Contingent Labor at the University of Arizona: One Damn Thing After Another If it weren’t so devastating, it would be comic timing. Every year, contingent faculty, specifically lecturers with academic year appointments, at the University of Arizona are laid off in May. Then, in the fall, some are hired back in even more precarious positions as adjunct instructor. Read more.   Joint Union-Senate Mutual Academic Defense Compacts in SUNY and CUNY Systems Hours before the signing of the federal budget reconciliation megabill, ten current and former leaders of SUNY’s and CUNY’s governance bodies issued a July 4 declaration. Candice Vacin, President of the SUNY Faculty Council of Community Colleges (FCCC), described it as “a solemn call to defend foundational principles of American higher education" ... Read more.   Michigan HELU Coalition: Organizing and Action HELU activists in Michigan have banded together to form a state coalition to take on several existential threats to our students, universities and colleges, and our jobs. So far, the coalition has hosted several online and in-person events, actions, and meetings, each bigger than the previous one. Read more.   What is HELU Doing at the DSA Convention in August? On August 9th, representatives from Higher Education Labor United will be attending the Democratic Socialists of American biennial convention in Chicago to take part in their first ever Cross-Organizational Political Exchange. Read more.   HELU at May Day Strong in Chicago On July 17 and 18, Levin Kim and Executive Director Ian Gavigan traveled to Chicago for the second national May Day Strong convening hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Read more.   Mass Non-Violent Resistance Trainings in Los Angeles: Labor Leads with Power and Discipline On July 10, 2025, 1,443 people gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center for the largest nonviolence training in the history of the city, and perhaps the country. Read more.   Upcoming Events:  Building Campus Solidarity Across Job Categories: Lessons from Recent Strikes & Adjunct Struggles Weds., July 30 at 6pm ET/5pm CT/4pm MT/3pm PT Join the Contingency Taskforce (CTF) of Higher Ed Labor United (HELU) for an urgent strategy discussion of how we can build campus solidarity among faculty and other higher ed workers, across job ranks, in light of the severe threats we now face. How can we organize broadly to defend the most vulnerable members of our communities? How can we help people overcome isolation and fear, discovering new courage and power by connecting with others? How can we raise up the voices and needs of historically marginalized workers and students within the broader fight to defend higher ed? Register here. International Campus Worker & Student Organizing Meeting Monday, August 4 at 2pm ET/1pm CT/12pm MT/11am PT Attacks from the Trump administration are putting international students and workers in our campuses at risk. Mass SEVIS terminations, cancellations of Visa appointments, targeted attacks against Chinese nationals, ICE detentions and threats of raids in our campuses are making our jobs, our livelihoods, and the mission of our institutions unsafe. These actions follow the same pattern: attacking those who are in the most vulnerable positions to create a chilling effect on the rest of us. We demand action from colleges and universities now! Join us on Zoom August 4th at 2pm ET/1pm CT/12pm MT/11am PT to plan next steps and organizing strategies. Register here.   HELU Open House  Thursday, August 14 at 6 pm ET/5 pm CT/4 pm MT/3 pm PT HELU has been organizing since 2021 and is growing. On Thursday, August 14, at 6pm ET/5pm CT/4pm MT/3pm PT we will be hosting another HELU Open House, designed to welcome folks into the national higher ed organizing space and help everyone find a way to plug in. Join HELU on Thursday, August 14th, at 6pm ET/5pm CT/4pm MT/3pm PT. Register here.    Library Workers Organizing Meeting & Strategy Session Weds., August 20 at 7pm ET/6pm CT/5pm MT/4pm PT On August 20, 2025, HELU is bringing together higher ed library workers across the country to strategize against threats to our livelihoods and profession. We will come together to meet and set our agenda, then we will break into small groups to discuss crises in academic freedom, disparities between library staff categorizations, labor organizing, austerity, and more. Our goal is to develop a platform for library worker protections to advocate for and implement across the country. Register here.  Higher Ed Labor in the News College students and staff at universities across Minnesota are organizing new unions – The Minnesota Star Tribune UMN union workers announce vote to authorize strike – MN Daily Duke Graduate Students Union scores historic tentative contract – Duke Chronicle Faculty Unions & New York City Electeds Say ‘Hands Off Higher Ed! Hands Off CUNY!’ – WNY Labor Today In AAUP Trial, State Dept. Official Says Criticizing Israel Could Be Grounds for Visa Revocation – Harvard Crimson Labor union says California university professor was taken during Camarillo immigration raid protest – KTLA5 News Penn Postdocs and Research Associates Win Their Union – UAW ‘Without us, there is no UMass’: Unions representing staff decry bargaining tactics by administration at campus rally – Athol Daily News The link to Scott Douglas’ presentation on the California community college load cap, included in HELU's June 2025 newsletter, has changed. You can now access it here. Want to support our work? Make a contribution. We invite you to support HELU's work by making a direct financial contribution. While HELU's main source of income is solidarity pledges from member organizations, these funds from individuals help us to grow capacity as we work to align the higher ed labor movement. Contribute to HELU

 

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters

Fighting for my students’ right to read, I lost my teacher’s license. I’d risk it all again.

Summer Boismier, Chalkbeat

Jul 24, 2025 at 2:22pm EDT

“The Hate U Give.” “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.” “Challenger Deep.” “The Poet X.” These are just some of the titles my students researched and recommended as part of a 2018 project-based learning unit I had assigned. The goal: to diversify our high school’s required reading lists. “Why don’t we have these books?” the superintendent of the district where I was teaching English at the time asked me.

The following school year, these books were integrated into the English I curriculum as choice reads for our literature circles. I find it hard to fathom such a thing happening today.

Four years later, I was teaching in another school district, this one in Norman, Oklahoma. Just days before we were set to return for the 2022-23 academic year, teachers were advised during a faculty meeting to restrict or remove student access to classroom libraries.

Such a sprint toward soft censorship was a response to the Oklahoma State Board of Education’s enforcement of House Bill 1775 of 2021, which restricts conversations around race and sex in academic spaces. Concerned about a potential accreditation downgrade for violating this law, a school site administrator suggested I cover the 500-plus books in my classroom library with butcher paper, which I did. But that was far from the end of the story.

Without the classroom library that I had spent my career curating, some of my students walked into class that first day to find stories that reflected their lives had been reclassified as contraband. So I wrote on the butcher paper covering my shelves, “Books the state doesn’t want you to read.” A protest in pixels, I also added a QR code for students to scan for information about Books Unbanned, a nationwide initiative from Brooklyn Public Library, offering students ages 13-21 free eCard access to the library’s more than 500,000 digital items.

I’ve never taught a math class, but I knew that 500,000 books > 500 books. I also knew that this act of resistance could cost me my job or even my teacher’s license. But if state leadership was going to censor classrooms, I was going to make sure my students still had ample opportunities to read, think, and decide for themselves.

Oklahoma’s HB 1775, which is facing a challenge in federal court, and similar laws from Texas to Florida to Iowa, followed the first Trump administration’s 2020 Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping. These state mandates are often referred to as “divisive concepts” laws. But really, they are censorship by another name. And they don’t just silence ideas; they silence people. They resist the inclusion of historically marginalized voices, such as BIPOC and LGBTQ+ perspectives, because those voices challenge the comfort of the dominant narrative.

“Most characters/authors are straight white guys, and that kind of reflects how we treat literature,” one of my students reflected back in 2018, as they were working on the reading list project.

That student said they wanted to see more diversity in the assigned reading. Unfortunately, the progress made to integrate inclusive, relevant texts into curriculums and libraries is now at risk.

Friday, August 19, 2022, was my first day of year nine as a certified English teacher in Oklahoma public schools and my second year in the Norman district. By day’s end, however, I was placed on leave and told to report to district offices first thing Monday morning. Although the district expressed hope I would return to the classroom, I chose instead to resign so that I could continue to speak out for intellectual freedom and against HB 1775. Soon, my story was making headlines.

And while in 2023 an assistant state attorney general recommended against revoking my teaching license, the Oklahoma State Board of Education still took it away the next year. That has put my livelihood and my life on hold for the foreseeable future and taken an irrevocable toll on my mental health.

Recently, at my eldest nibling’s kindergarten graduation, I was ambushed somewhere around the second chorus of Imagine Dragons’ “Believer” by a panic attack. To an outside observer, I was there in that small-town auditorium, listening to a stage full of big little voices as they belted out “Pain! You made me a believer, believer.”

However, at that moment, I could not have been further from row G, seat 1.

Suddenly and without consent, I was lost amid the voices in my head that for almost three years have relentlessly labeled me a loser, letdown, failure, and fraud — my entire being seized by a feeling akin to what I can only describe as white-knuckling an electric fence.

Until recently, I associated post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, with literal soldiers scarred by the hell of war. Yet I’ve spent most of the past decade not on the battlefield, but in the classroom. I’ve learned, however, that the majority of PTSD diagnoses do not in fact stem from past military service. Apparently, standing up for students’ right to read can leave its own scars.

Despite the deep personal and professional costs, it’s impossible to convey just how little remorse I have. None at all, really. Because not every battle worth fighting is winnable. Because sometimes “Paycheck or principle?” isn’t a rhetorical question.

We are living through a near-constant deluge of crises that are designed to make meaningful teaching and learning unsustainable and undesirable — from efforts to dismantle the Department of Education to the wholesale retraction of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, from book bans in PK-12 schools to ideological litmus tests imposed on American universities.

In this era of renewed threats to civil liberties coming out of the White House, the statehouse, and the courthouse, I’d challenge all teachers in the schoolhouse to ask themselves: What’s your QR code?

To teach is to take a stand. And just like teaching, taking a stand can look a lot of different ways, including:

• Recommending a story to a student that speaks to them as they are.
• Incorporating diverse voices and perspectives intentionally in lesson plans.
• Affirming students’ identities through intentional language and identity-sustaining classroom culture.
• Facilitating workshops for teachers on responding to educational gag orders and preserving access to diverse texts.
• Bringing together educators, librarians, and community members for public events defending inclusive curriculums.
• Documenting and reporting instances of censorship and/or policy overreach.

Sometimes, it can even look like resting, a radical act of resilience for the fight ahead.

As the youth scholar and artist Jasmine Lewis shared with me in a recent email exchange, “[The world today] reminds me how important it is that we continue reading, writing, and harnessing care in any/every space that we are able to.”

Against the torrent of extreme partisan interference in our public schools, it is your persistence, teachers, that forms the foundation for meaningful resistance to censorship efforts. Despite everything you’re up against, we need you for what comes next: the 2025-26 school year. There’s a lot riding on the integrity of those spines beyond books.

Summer Boismier (she/her) is an English language arts educator and doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma whose work focuses on free expression issues, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and educational equity in public schools. A nationally recognized youth free expression advocate, she is also a recipient of the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s 2019 Rising Star Award and Piedmont Public Schools’ 2018-2019 District Teacher of the Year honor. In 2024, the Oklahoma State Board of Education unanimously revoked her teaching certificate for telling her students about a public library card.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Presidents, Trustees, Donors, and the Machinery of Genocide: Higher Education’s Complicity in War and Fossil Capital

In a time of global climate catastrophe, endless war, and mounting social unrest, the American higher education system—ostensibly a sanctuary of ethics and enlightenment—has shown its allegiance not to peace or justice, but to power. The presidents of elite universities, their boards of trustees, and their wealthiest donors now stand exposed as key cogs in a machinery that profits from genocide, fossil fuel destruction, and war profiteering. They are not simply bystanders to global injustice; they are its enablers and its beneficiaries.

The Role of University Presidents

University presidents, many with backgrounds in business or law rather than academia, have become institutional CEOs rather than moral stewards. Their silence—or worse, their euphemistic statements—in the face of war crimes and environmental devastation reveals not neutrality but complicity. As students protest U.S.-backed wars and apartheid policies abroad, these leaders respond not with dialogue, but with surveillance, mass arrests, and the suppression of speech.

The university president today is less a defender of academic freedom and more a manager of reputational risk. In the face of genocide in Gaza or mass civilian deaths in Yemen, many presidents remain silent or offer carefully crafted non-statements that betray the moral bankruptcy at the heart of neoliberal academia. Their true constituents are not students or faculty—but the donors and trustees who demand institutional alignment with corporate and political interests.

Trustees as Enforcers of the Status Quo

University trustees are often drawn from the ruling class: hedge fund managers, defense contractors, fossil fuel executives, and venture capitalists. These are not individuals selected for their commitment to education or the common good. They are chosen precisely because of their wealth and their proximity to power.

Their presence on governing boards ensures that universities continue to invest in private equity, fossil fuels, and weapons manufacturers. They help enforce austerity for faculty and students while protecting multi-million-dollar endowments from divestment campaigns. When students call for cutting ties with Israeli defense contractors or fossil fuel companies, it is trustees who push back the hardest.

Donors as Puppeteers

Donors exert a quiet but overwhelming influence on policy, curriculum, and campus climate. Mega-donors like Stephen Schwarzman, Kenneth Griffin, and Leonard Lauder have given hundreds of millions to name buildings, shape public discourse, and suppress dissent. Often, these donations come with invisible strings—ideological conditions that shift the priorities of entire departments or shut down lines of critical inquiry.

In the case of fossil fuels, large gifts from oil and gas interests help sustain "energy centers" at top institutions, which in turn push pro-industry research and obstruct climate activism. In terms of war, donations from defense industry executives or foreign governments with poor human rights records ensure a steady normalization of militarism on campus.

Even genocide, once a line that no institution dared cross, is now rendered a matter of "complex geopolitics" by the same donors who pour money into think tanks and academic centers that sanitize ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

Genocide and the Academy

It is no longer possible to ignore the role of elite institutions in justifying or supporting genocidal policies. When universities accept grants and partnerships with governments or corporations involved in mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, or indiscriminate bombing, they become accomplices in atrocity.

During the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza, for example, several major U.S. universities have contracts or investments tied to Israeli defense firms or U.S. arms manufacturers whose weapons are used against civilians. Students calling for divestment face violent repression, police brutality, and academic retaliation. The pursuit of justice is punished. The preservation of power is prioritized.

Fossil Fuels and the Death Economy

Despite decades of research proving the existential threat of fossil fuels, many university endowments remain deeply invested in oil, gas, and coal. The divestment movement, led primarily by students, has scored some victories—but these are often cosmetic. Institutions may pull direct holdings while maintaining exposure through private equity or index funds.

Fossil fuel interests also shape research agendas, sponsor misleading "carbon capture" or "clean energy" projects, and silence environmental whistleblowers. Professors who speak out risk losing funding. Departments that challenge fossil capital are marginalized. The truth, as always, is inconvenient.

War as a University Business Model

Finally, the war economy permeates American higher education at every level. Defense contracts support engineering departments. ROTC programs and military recruiting are embedded in campus life. Universities run weapons labs, receive funding from DARPA, and participate in Department of Defense research initiatives. The "military-academic-industrial complex" is not an abstraction—it is the everyday reality of higher ed.

Many of these contracts directly support weapons development used in current conflicts. And as with fossil fuels, the system is built to insulate the university from moral scrutiny. War is framed as "security research." Genocide is called "a contested political issue." Exploitation is rendered invisible through language.

Toward a Reckoning

The American university must decide: Will it continue to serve as a laundering machine for violence, fossil capital, and authoritarian control? Or can it reimagine itself as a truly democratic institution—answerable not to trustees and donors, but to the communities it serves?

That transformation will not come from the top. It will come from students occupying campus lawns, adjuncts organizing for fair wages, and the public demanding transparency and divestment. The reckoning is long overdue.

Until then, university presidents, trustees, and donors will remain what they have become: polished stewards of empire, cloaked in Ivy and moral evasion.

The Higher Education Inquirer continues to investigate the political economy of higher ed, exposing how institutions prioritize power and profit over people and planet.

Rebel Diaz: Beats, Truth, and a Higher Education of the Streets

In a nation that throws trillions at war, banks, and billionaires while students drown in debt and public schools crumble, the Bronx-based hip-hop duo Rebel Diaz has carved out a necessary lane—one where education doesn’t come from a classroom but from struggle, solidarity, and sound. Formed by Chilean-American brothers Rodrigo (RodStarz) and Gonzalo (G1) Venegas, Rebel Diaz is more than a music group. They are truth-tellers, radical educators, and architects of a liberatory curriculum that centers the oppressed and calls the system by its name.

Nowhere is that more evident than in their track “A Trillion,” a searing critique of post-9/11 U.S. capitalism, war profiteering, and the impunity of Wall Street elites. It opens with an indictment so sharp it borders on satire:

“A lotta people askin’—‘Is that really nine zeroes?’
Nah, homie, it’s twelve.”

 

And then the verses drop—complex, accessible, and devastating in their precision. G1 raps:

“Lotta speculations on the moneys they made
Markets they played
Pimping the system because they run the game
They trades is inside of the old boy network
Money stays in while they build they net worth.”

This is economics with teeth—naming not just the scale of corruption but the two-tiered justice system that underwrites it. G1 continues:

“If I was to flip money that ain’t exist
Or get a loan on my home and not pay back that shit
Interest will stack up
Moving truck or backup
And the repo man will pack everything up.”

These aren’t abstract critiques. They’re visceral comparisons between the impunity of the rich and the precarity of everyday people. Wall Street collapses the economy and gets bailed out with public funds. Meanwhile, poor and working-class people are criminalized for far less—whether it’s defaulting on a loan, evading rent, or “flipping currency” in the underground economy.

A Trillion was written in the shadow of the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—wars that cost American taxpayers more than a trillion dollars, all while social services were gutted and inequality soared. Rebel Diaz doesn’t just call out that grotesque spending. They tie it directly to neoliberal austerity, to gentrification, to student debt, and to the very structure of a U.S. economy built on extraction and punishment.

Their music functions as what bell hooks called engaged pedagogy. It’s teaching that risks something—something real. And it’s rooted not in theory alone, but in a lifetime of organizing, community-building, and lived experience. The brothers’ political lineage runs deep: they are children of Chilean exiles who fled the Pinochet dictatorship, and that legacy of resistance is embedded in every syllable they spit.

Their broader body of work—songs like “Runaway Slave,” “Crush,” “I’m an Alien,” and “Which Side Are You On?”—challenges both the prison-industrial complex and the nonprofit-industrial complex, the police and the politicians, the landlords and the labor exploiters. In their hands, hip-hop becomes a weapon against what Paulo Freire called banking education—where students are seen as empty vessels to be filled, rather than agents of transformation.

Rebel Diaz refuses that model. They’ve facilitated workshops for youth around the world. They founded the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective (RDAC) in the South Bronx—a radical cultural center that functioned as studio, classroom, and sanctuary. While elite universities peddle “diversity” through PR campaigns, Rebel Diaz built power in real time.

A Trillion reminds us that debt and inequality aren’t natural—they’re designed. That a trillion dollars could be conjured for war and bailouts, while education remains underfunded and healthcare inaccessible, isn’t a fluke. It’s policy. It’s ideology. It’s class warfare.

And while most institutions of higher learning remain silent—or worse, complicit—Rebel Diaz offers a curriculum of truth. Their syllabus includes economic justice, anti-imperialism, grassroots organizing, and critical media literacy. Their lectures come through speakers, not Zoom screens. And their degrees? Measured not in credits, but in collective awakening.

In a society that leaves millions in debt for chasing knowledge, and rewards only the knowledge that maintains power, Rebel Diaz flips the script. They aren’t just part of the resistance—they are building the new university.

And in that space, “A Trillion” isn’t just a song. It’s a lesson. A warning. A call to action.

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Rebel Diaz Playlist: A Syllabus of Sound

Listen to these Rebel Diaz tracks as an alternative curriculum—one that speaks to the struggles universities often silence:

“A Trillion” — A blistering takedown of war spending, corporate bailouts, and the injustice of capitalism.
“Which Side Are You On?” — A rallying cry against complicity, rooted in a long tradition of protest music.
“Runaway Slave” — A powerful indictment of the prison-industrial complex and systemic racism.
“Crush” — A sharp narrative linking gentrification, police violence, and displacement.
“I’m an Alien” — A migrant anthem reclaiming humanity against the backdrop of dehumanizing immigration policy.
“Work Like Chávez” — A celebration of working-class resistance and Latin American liberation.
“Revolution Has Come” — An intergenerational call to remember the lessons of past uprisings.

These tracks are available via Rebel Diaz’s Bandcamp page, Spotify, YouTube, or independent archives. Better yet, invite them to speak—virtually or in person—if your institution has the courage to confront its own contradictions.

San Diego Community Joins 'Out of CECOT' Nationwide Protest Against ICE Arrest Practices in Chula Vista, Thursday July 24th 10 AM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WHAT: Protest against recent increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and targeting of non-violent, non-criminal working families

WHEN: Thursday, July 24, 10-11:30 a.m.

WHERE: Corner of Birch Road and Millenia Avenue, Chula Vista (near 1610 Millenia Ave., Chula Vista, CA 91915)

WHO: Indivisible Chula Vista and community members

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Indivisible Chula Vista will join an 'Out of CECOT' nationwide day of action Thursday, July 24th to protest what organizers call a dramatic increase in ICE arrests of individuals without criminal convictions.

According to San Diego Union-Tribune reporting, 72% of those arrested by ICE in San Diego in June had no criminal convictions or charges.¹

"The Trump administration keeps saying that they are targeting 'the worst of the worst,' that they were only targeting violent criminals, terrorists and gang members," said Janine Manchel, event organizer. "Instead, they are arresting children, parents going to work, people attending their immigration hearings. They are tearing families apart, hurting farms and businesses and instilling fear in our communities, all just to meet an arbitrary daily arrest quota of 3,000 per day."

Organizers are calling for:

• An end to ICE arrests of individuals without criminal convictions
• An end to immigration enforcement operations that organizers say instill fear and disrupt workplaces
• An end to ICE arrests of people attending scheduled immigration hearings
  

To coordinate any interviews with organizers or community members, please reach out to the media contact below.

MEDIA CONTACT: 
Janine Manchel, Indivisible Chula Vista
(858) 229-9738‬‬
pestibear@gmail.com 

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¹ San Diego Union-Tribune, "What the data say about who ICE is arresting in San Diego," July 8, 2025. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/07/06/what-the-data-say-about-who-ice-is-arresting-in-san-diego/

The Rich Life: Joy, Asceticism, Solidarity—and a Rejection of GDP Thinking

In a society obsessed with growth, speed, and accumulation, the phrase “the rich life” is most often used to describe an existence of luxury and exclusivity—curated vacations, designer goods, elite diplomas, and six-figure job offers. Elite universities in the United States, with their billion-dollar endowments and glossy marketing, have long sold students on this vision. Success is measured in metrics: earnings, endowment size, prestige rankings, and placement in the upper tiers of a system that quietly rewards exploitation.

But beneath the glittering surfaces lies a deeper poverty—a poverty of meaning, connection, and collective well-being. The GDP may rise, but so do depression, ecological collapse, burnout, and social fragmentation. In this context, the rich life must be reimagined. It cannot mean more consumption and more isolation. It must mean deeper joy, chosen simplicity, and solidarity with others. It must reject GDP as a measure of progress, and instead embrace a fuller, more humane vision of what it means to thrive.

Since World War II, Gross Domestic Product has been the dominant measure of national health and success. But GDP counts weapons manufacturing, fossil fuel extraction, and fast food sales as positives. It says nothing about equity, sustainability, or whether people have their basic needs met. It is a deeply distorted metric that treats all economic activity as inherently good—even when that activity is war, incarceration, deforestation, or cancer treatment. When universities follow this logic, they end up celebrating job placement in exploitative industries, increased student consumption, and rising tuition as signs of vitality. Entire institutions become addicted to a model of growth that quietly undermines the very conditions of human and planetary survival.

To understand what a truly rich life looks like, we might turn not to economic models but to psychological and philosophical ones. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, often misunderstood and oversimplified, offers a more nuanced framework. At the base are physiological needs: food, water, shelter, rest. Above that are safety needs—security, health, freedom from violence. Next come love and belonging, followed by esteem and the need to be respected. At the top is self-actualization: the ability to live with purpose, creativity, and integrity.

In a society driven by GDP and status competition, many people are stuck in the lower tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy—working long hours just to meet their physiological needs, or trapped in precarity with no sense of safety. Even among the affluent, the higher needs—belonging, self-worth, purpose—are often unmet. Elite universities contribute to this problem when they promise that self-actualization will follow prestige, when in fact they often deepen student anxiety and isolation through competition and debt.

The modern economy creates the illusion of abundance while delivering profound scarcity—scarcity of time, attention, care, and community. That’s where asceticism comes in, not as a form of self-denial, but as a conscious disengagement from toxic excess. True asceticism is not about suffering. It is about choosing a life that centers intention over impulse, relationships over acquisition. It allows us to reclaim our attention, our agency, and our sense of enoughness. When you no longer define your worth by your salary or possessions, space opens up—for joy, for learning, for resistance.

The joy that emerges from this way of living is not found in consumption, but in connection. It’s the joy of a shared meal, a collective project, a moment of awe in nature. It is not fleeting or hollow. It’s grounded in the rhythms of real life. In resisting the culture of more, we make room for what actually nourishes us.

Solidarity is what makes this kind of joy sustainable. Without solidarity, simplicity becomes privatized and performative. With solidarity, it becomes transformative. Solidarity means recognizing that none of us can be truly free while others are suffering. It means organizing not only for ourselves, but with and for others—workers, debtors, the unhoused, the planet itself. It is in solidarity that we find the courage to say no to extractive systems and yes to mutual care.

Maslow’s model, when viewed through a collective lens, demands that we create conditions where everyone—not just the privileged few—can ascend the ladder toward self-actualization. That means addressing structural violence, not just personal healing. It means challenging the dominance of GDP and the institutions that promote it. And it means building systems that nourish every layer of our shared humanity.

The richest life is not the most expensive or exclusive. It is the most grounded, the most connected, the most free. It is a life where basic needs are met without destroying others’ ability to meet theirs. It is a life where safety comes from community, not surveillance. Where belonging is unconditional. Where esteem is earned not through domination, but through care. Where self-actualization is not an individual escape, but a collective unfolding.

Elite universities, with their resources and visibility, have a responsibility to shift the narrative. They must abandon GDP-driven metrics and begin teaching students how to live and act for collective well-being. That means investing in degrowth, sustainability, and solidarity—not in fossil fuels, consulting firms, and Silicon Valley pipedreams. It means embracing joy, not just success. It means returning to education as a path toward wisdom, not just wealth.

The rich life is here. It is in the soil, the story circle, the union hall, the community fridge, the silent meetinghouse, the protest march, the long walk at dusk. It is in every act that centers sufficiency over supremacy, care over conquest.

Let us stop measuring the wrong things. Let us live lives that matter. Let us be rich in what counts.

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Sources and Influences:
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
Jason Hickel, Less Is More
bell hooks, All About Love
Juliet Schor, Plenitude
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

Cognitive Dissonance in Conservative Circles: Student Loans, Reproductive Control, and Elite Education

In the fractured landscape of American politics, few ideological camps require as much mental compartmentalization as the contemporary conservative movement—particularly on issues such as student loan forgiveness, reproductive control, and elite education. These contradictions are not incidental; they are foundational to a worldview that champions “freedom” and “responsibility” while selectively applying both.

Student Loan Forgiveness: Moral Hazard for the Working Class?

Conservatives have long framed student loan forgiveness as a dangerous “bailout” for the irresponsible. When the Biden administration announced broad relief for borrowers in 2022, Republican leaders rushed to block the effort, culminating in the Supreme Court’s rejection of the plan in Biden v. Nebraska (2023) [1]. Senator Mitch McConnell called the proposal “socialism,” and GOP-aligned media accused the administration of rewarding “woke” degrees in gender studies and art history.

Yet this outrage over debt relief was largely absent when it came to Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan forgiveness. According to data from ProPublica and the U.S. Small Business Administration, many Republican members of Congress, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Vern Buchanan, had hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of dollars in business loans forgiven under the program [2]. Donald Trump’s companies received over $2 million in PPP loans, much of it forgiven [3].

Meanwhile, millions of working- and middle-class borrowers remain trapped in debt from degrees that were oversold as gateways to stable careers. Many were students at for-profit institutions that have since faced lawsuits or federal scrutiny for misleading advertising and inflated job placement claims [4].

Reproductive Control: The Politics of "Limited" Government

One of the most glaring contradictions in conservative rhetoric is the demand for limited government—except when it comes to controlling women’s bodies. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), Republican-led states have rushed to enact abortion bans. As of mid-2025, 14 states have near-total bans in effect, many with no exceptions for rape or incest [5].

While conservatives argue for “parental rights” in education and protest vaccine mandates as government overreach, they have no issue allowing the state to force pregnancy and childbirth. The very people championing “freedom” from mask mandates and climate regulations are often the first to demand criminal penalties for doctors who perform abortions.

This isn’t just hypocrisy—it reflects a selective application of liberty: economic freedom for corporations, religious freedom for evangelicals, but no bodily autonomy for pregnant women, particularly those who are poor or marginalized.

Elite Education: The Ivy League as Both Enemy and Badge of Honor

Conservative disdain for elite universities is both cultural and performative. Schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are routinely criticized as leftist indoctrination centers. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for instance, has targeted public university diversity programs and pushed for “anti-woke” education reforms [6].

And yet, the conservative establishment is deeply enmeshed in elite education. Four of the six conservative Supreme Court justices were educated at Harvard or Yale. The Federalist Society, a conservative legal powerhouse, thrives at these institutions. DeSantis himself holds degrees from Yale and Harvard Law.

Wealthy conservative families still pull strings to get their children into Ivy League schools, often through donations or legacy admissions. Meanwhile, conservative media outlets mock first-generation students or those from historically marginalized communities for seeking higher education in the first place. As working-class and rural conservatives are dissuaded from attending college, elite education becomes more exclusive—while still being used to confer legitimacy on conservative power brokers.

The Real Ideological Glue

These contradictions require cognitive dissonance, but they are sustained by a shared grievance narrative: that “real Americans” are being left behind by coastal elites, cultural change, and demographic shifts. In this framework, debt relief for a truck driver is socialism, but forgiveness for a car dealership owner is economic stimulus. Academic freedom is sacred for religious conservatives, but dangerous when exercised by liberal professors. Government intrusion is tyranny—unless it enforces traditional gender roles.

What binds these inconsistencies together is not logic but power. The goal is not to apply principles consistently, but to protect a hierarchy in which wealth, whiteness, patriarchy, and Christian nationalism remain dominant.

Until conservatives confront these contradictions—or acknowledge that their ideology serves different masters depending on context—they will continue to promote a politics of resentment that undermines both higher education and democracy itself.

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Sources:

1. Supreme Court of the United States. Biden v. Nebraska, 600 U.S. ___ (2023). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-506_n6io.pdf

2. ProPublica. “Tracking PPP Loans.” https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/bailouts/

3. Forbes. “Trump Organization and PPP Loans: Over $2 Million Forgiven.” July 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2021/07/06/trump-organizations-ppp-loans-over-2-million-forgiven

4. U.S. Department of Education. “Borrower Defense to Repayment.” https://studentaid.gov/borrower-defense/

5. Guttmacher Institute. “State Bans on Abortion Throughout Pregnancy.” Updated May 2025. https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/state-policies-later-abortions

6. The Chronicle of Higher Education. “DeSantis Signs Bills Overhauling Florida Higher Ed.” May 2023. https://www.chronicle.com/article/desantis-signs-bills-overhauling-florida-higher-ed

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The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to investigate the ideological contradictions, systemic inequities, and political influence that define U.S. higher education—and its role in American life.

How Immigration Has Fueled the Rise of Trumpism—and Changed Higher Education

In the United States, immigration has long been framed as a symbol of national pride—a beacon for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But in recent decades, as demographic, economic, and cultural shifts have accelerated, immigration has also become a flashpoint for political backlash. That backlash has taken on a powerful form in Trumpism: a nationalist-populist movement steeped in nativist fear, economic resentment, and white grievance politics. What’s often missing in mainstream analysis is how higher education—both as a driver and a symbol of immigration—has become entangled in this struggle.

At the center of this complexity is a contradictory truth: while much of Trumpism is fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric and fear of demographic change, some of its most visible leaders and financial backers are themselves immigrants or children of immigrants, particularly from India. In the elite zones of tech, business, and politics, conservative Indian Americans are shaping immigration policy, university priorities, and even culture war narratives in ways that reinforce the very Trumpist ideology they supposedly should oppose.

American higher education has undergone a transformation over the past four decades—from a public good to a privatized, competitive marketplace. As state funding dried up, institutions turned to other sources of revenue: tuition, corporate partnerships, real estate development, and international students. Colleges and universities—particularly large public research institutions and elite private schools—ramped up recruitment of foreign students who could pay full price, especially from China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and increasingly, India.

Today, Indian nationals are the second-largest group of international students in the U.S., particularly in STEM fields and graduate programs. Their tuition dollars help subsidize faculty salaries, administrative bloat, and research labs. H-1B visa holders, many of them Indian engineers and tech workers, have become a cornerstone of the U.S. tech workforce—and a key component of university-sponsored visa pipelines. In many graduate programs, foreign students are the programs.

At the same time, working-class Americans—especially in rural areas and former manufacturing hubs—have watched colleges become unrecognizable. For many, the university has become a symbol not of opportunity but of exclusion: a place that speaks a foreign language (literally and culturally), employs foreign-born TAs, and caters to elite global interests while raising tuition and reducing services.

One of the most paradoxical developments in the Trumpist era is the rise of conservative Indian Americans as major players in business, politics, and education policy. Figures like Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and 2024 GOP presidential candidate, have become darlings of the MAGA movement, espousing anti-DEI rhetoric, rejecting multiculturalism, and calling for the dismantling of the administrative state—including large swaths of the Department of Education. Kash Patel, Ajit Pai, and others have served in prominent Trump administration roles, often pushing deregulation, aggressive nationalism, and the rollback of civil rights protections.

Many of these individuals are highly educated products of elite U.S. universities—Princeton, Harvard, Yale—who advocate for a vision of America rooted in "meritocracy," free markets, and Christian-coded traditional values. Their rise is no accident. They often come from upper-caste, upper-class families in India and align ideologically with India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, the BJP. That ideology—Hindutva—is increasingly aligned with global authoritarian movements, including Trumpism, Putinism, and Zionist ethnonationalism.

In higher education, this conservative cohort supports crackdowns on campus protest, restrictions on Critical Race Theory, and the dismantling of diversity programs. Some even promote a two-tier immigration system: open pathways for high-skilled workers and university graduates like themselves, and closed doors for asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants.

Trumpist Republicans—often with support from conservative immigrants—have increasingly turned higher education into a battleground in the culture wars. In red states, new legislation and executive orders have targeted DEI offices, faculty unions, and ethnic studies departments. They have moved to restrict international student programs, especially for students from China and the Middle East, while simultaneously undermining tenure protections and academic freedom. Crackdowns on campus protests, often under the guise of "free speech," have been used to suppress progressive voices and student organizing.

As faculty ranks have become more diverse—and more contingent—conservatives have fought to reassert traditional hierarchies, often by using foreign-born faculty and graduate students as a wedge. Critics of tenure and academic “liberalism” claim that universities are out of touch with American values and serve foreign interests. Meanwhile, the same institutions continue to capitalize on the global student market, building campuses in Dubai and Singapore while closing rural extension centers at home.

Trumpism is not just a reaction to immigration itself, but to who benefits from it. At the top are elite immigrants—often from privileged caste backgrounds in India or affluent families in China—who attend top-tier universities and enter high-income fields. Below them are millions of working-class Americans saddled with student loan debt, gig jobs, and eroded social status. And beneath them still are the invisible laborers of higher education: the adjuncts, food service workers, janitors, and maintenance crews—many of them immigrants without documentation or legal protections.

This stratification of labor is mirrored in the classroom. International students often receive better advising, housing, and visa support than low-income domestic students, particularly Black, Latino, and Native students. Colleges may invest in ESL services and global partnerships while cutting mental health counseling, rural outreach, and Pell-eligible student aid.

Immigration is not the cause of Trumpism—but it is the mirror in which many Americans see their own social decline. And higher education has played a central role in projecting that mirror. When universities prioritize international growth over local development, or when elite immigrants champion policies that punish the poor and undocumented, they unwittingly feed the very movement that seeks to close the gates behind them.

Trumpism, for all its contradictions, thrives on this resentment. It exploits the divisions between “model minorities” and “undeserving poor,” between elite institutions and everyday people. It turns the American university—from Berkeley to Ohio State—into a symbol of what has been lost, even as it pretends to offer a way forward.

Immigration and higher education are deeply interwoven in the American story. But as higher ed becomes increasingly globalized, privatized, and stratified, it risks alienating the very people it claims to serve. The rise of Trumpism is not just a rejection of immigrants—it is a rejection of an education system that many see as rigged, elitist, and complicit in their decline.

The challenge for those of us in higher education—and especially for immigrants who have benefitted from it—is to confront these contradictions honestly. We must rethink who higher education serves. We must recognize how caste, class, and color operate not only across borders but within them.

For the Higher Education Inquirer, this is not a call for scapegoating immigrants, but for deeper analysis. How did we arrive at a system where elite global mobility coexists with mass domestic precarity? And what would it look like to build a higher education system rooted in justice—not just for the few who arrive, but for the many who are left behind?