The mysterious firing was only the latest in a series of attacks on higher education in the Sunshine State pushed by its ambitious governor, Ron DeSantis. Besides the highly touted “Don’t Say Gay” law, Florida’s educators must now navigate around measures that ban teaching critical race theory and other “divisive” concepts. They also face threats to eliminate tenure and allow students to film their classes so that they can report on their professors’ political biases.
While Florida is the epicenter of the current political assault on higher education, it is not alone. Over the past two years, legislators in dozens of states introduced nearly 200 measures aimed at limiting how students are taught about racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression in U.S. history. Although primarily directed at K-12 education, colleges are experiencing the chilling effects. McCarthyism persecuted individual professors because of their politics; today’s gag rules threaten to destroy what’s left of academic freedom in public higher education, which has already been weakened by years of economic austerity and political harassment.
To understand what’s happening, you need to see how the backlash against higher education began. You need to trace its roots in the 1960s, its evolution through the culture wars of the 1980s and ‘90s, and into the current populist fray. Then you need to do something about it. Professors, administrators, students, and concerned citizens can no longer stand on the sidelines, shaking our heads and deploring the potentially devastating consequences. The simple truth is this: For decades, outside forces have — both consciously and unintentionally — undermined the integrity and quality of public higher education in America. And time and time again, a divided academic community has failed to combat them effectively. We can and must do better. Seeds of resistance are sprouting. Together, we must nurture their growth. There is no time to lose.
The golden age had its darker side, however. Women and people of color faced serious discrimination. Although the political chill of McCarthyism eventually receded, vestiges remained. In many states professors still faced loyalty oaths, while speaker bans kept Communists and other leftists off many campuses.
But the American dream of high-quality, affordable mass higher education was suddenly within reach of many more Americans. Tuitions were low, if not free. State legislators showered their colleges and universities with seemingly unlimited largesse. The federal government plowed money into scientific research, especially after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite in 1957. Universities came to be viewed as essential for national security. Professors benefited the most; research grants proliferated, while graduate enrollments grew exponentially.
Never again would higher education enjoy as much prestige.
Everything changed on October 1, 1964, when several thousand Berkeley students surrounded a university police car and for more than 30 hours refused to let the officers take a civil-rights organizer to jail for disobeying a University of California regulation that banned the recruitment of students on campus for outside political activities. For the first time, students at a major American university engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience against their own institution.
Academe has assumed a symbolic importance it hasn't since the height of the Cold War. Read more here.
With the end of McCarthyism, campuses had begun to stir. By the mid-1960s, the Civil Rights Movement that swept through historically Black colleges and universities in the South sparked political engagement on previously quiescent campuses elsewhere. In the spring of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam. Opposition arose at once. Faculty members organized teach-ins to explain to their students — and the rest of the public — what was wrong with the conflict and why they should resist it. Soon students were protesting the draft, while African American undergraduates — many among the first to integrate their previously white universities — demanded that their institutions create Black studies programs and bring more Black students and faculty members to their campuses.
The student protests of the early sixties were usually nonviolent — if not always legal. But, by the early 1970s, some demonstrators adopted more militant tactics. Rampaging students disrupted classes, took over buildings, and destroyed property. When outside police forces were called in, some students endured beatings and arrests. A few people lost their lives — mainly, it must be noted, at HBCUs.
For a complacent nation accustomed to viewing colleges as oases of elm-shaded campuses, bookish professors, and homecoming queens, the turmoil that began at Berkeley was a shock. As the evening news zeroed in on the most disorderly — and disheveled — protesters, conservative politicians and pundits demanded that the universities crack down on their unruly charges. Administrators felt pressure to take a tough stand but feared violence if they called in the police. Most waffled. Outside observers viewed the unrest as evidence that universities could not control their students, and higher education lost credibility with the public.
Faculty members, deeply divided about the students’ demands and their administrations’ response, were flummoxed as well. A group of prominent intellectuals — Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Sidney Hook among them — blamed the disorders less on the students’ disrespectful behavior than on the spineless actions of the university’s ostensibly liberal leadership. They portrayed the protestors as irrational and determined to destroy their universities, while denouncing the university’s administrators and faculty members as facilitators — “Munichmen” one furious Berkeley economist called them, terrified Neville Chamberlains desperate to appease the barbarian hordes.
Although these pundits’ prolific jeremiads were greatly exaggerated, their warnings about the public’s reaction to the campus unrest were all too prescient. For the next 50 years, their depiction of formerly respected institutions betrayed by leftist professors and weak-kneed administrators became the dominant trope employed by opportunistic politicians and right-wing ideologues who attacked higher education to further their own political agendas.
Reagan won in a landslide — and set about dismantling California’s institutions of higher learning. At his first meeting with the University of California Board of Regents, he persuaded its members to fire the university’s president, Clark Kerr. He also imposed tuition on the state’s theoretically free colleges and universities and contemplated major reductions in funding. After warning that he would put down student protestors “at the point of a bayonet, if necessary,” Reagan dispatched the National Guard.
His actions were wildly popular — and not just in California. Public opinion polls showed widespread support for punishing militant students and the institutions that housed them. Across the country, state legislators, governors, and boards of trustees raced to crack down. By the early 1970s, punitive measures dealing with higher education were on the books in more than 30 states. Though some provided for expulsions, prison terms, and fines for unruly protesters, economic sanctions were the most widespread, durable, and damaging.
Bettmann Archive, Getty Images
Beginning in 1968, Congress withdrew federal funding from anyone convicted of “inciting, promoting, or carrying on a riot.” State legislators soon followed by cancelling financial aid to misbehaving students. They also targeted professors. In 1969, California’s legislature refused to grant the previously automatic cost-of-living raise to faculty members in the University of California and California State College systems.
In some states, including California, Illinois, and Wisconsin, there were unsuccessful attempts to eliminate tenure. Even so, many professors lost their jobs for political reasons — leftists in particular. Some came under fire from politicians and other powerful outsiders. Most, however, were young instructors denied tenure or reappointment by their departments or administrations, ostensibly for academic reasons.
Egregious as these covert violations of academic freedom were, across-the-board budget cuts proved more devastating. President Richard Nixon reduced funding for academic research. He also redirected federal aid away from grants to colleges and into student loans. Elsewhere, state legislatures that had unstintingly funded their public universities began to pull back. In 1969, Indiana lawmakers cut the budget of their flagship university, Indiana University at Bloomington, by nearly 25 percent. Such reductions occurred almost everywhere — and almost always received overwhelming bipartisan support.
By the time these measures went into effect in the 1970s, most campus protests had quieted down. But higher education would never again enjoy the near-universal respect and financial support of the American people.
Higher education came to be seen primarily as a vehicle for individual economic mobility. And as the academy’s demographic make-up changed, public sentiment turned against devoting resources to help individuals who should be helping themselves — especially if those individuals were no longer white men. Instead of making a case for a more democratic system that would offer all qualified applicants access to a high-quality system of universal higher education, the academy’s leaders adopted the individualistic mantra of neoliberalism.
As a result, even as a college degree became ever more essential for entree into the middle class, it became harder to obtain. Public colleges and universities imposed or raised tuition to offset diminished state funding. A vicious cycle ensued: As tuitions rose, higher education’s reputation fell. The public increasingly viewed colleges — not unrealistically — as denying access to prospective students or forcing them to take out often unrepayable loans. The result: today’s $1.6 trillion student-debt crisis that, despite the Biden administration’s attempt to alleviate some of it, still blights the futures of millions of students, graduates, and drop-outs.
Meanwhile, higher education evolved into an increasingly stratified system that could no longer fulfill the American dream of upward mobility. The less-selective public institutions that serve 80 percent of the nation’s students were operating in what the historian Roger L. Geiger described as a “condition of chronic scarcity.”
The managerial restructuring that accompanied these new financial constraints further undermined educational quality. Cost-conscious administrators embraced the competitive, hierarchical practices of the corporate sector. They focused on marketing their institutions, while slashing costs and eliminating the faculty’s input over key educational decisions.
Enrollments increased, at least for a time, but the size of the faculty did not. When tenured professors retired, they were replaced by part-time and temporary teachers at wages that were often less than those in the fast-food industry. Now nearly 75 percent of the instruction at colleges and universities is in the hands of exploited and insecure, but highly trained and often devoted, faculty members who lack the time and resources to give students the attention they need.
That plan was laid out in a widely circulated memorandum, written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. in the summer of 1971, that called on leading businessmen to reshape America’s political culture. Believing that radical students posed an existential threat to the free-enterprise system, Powell urged corporate officials to pay particular attention to higher education. To oust the left from the main institutions of American life, the business community would have to throw vast resources into taking over the media, the legal system, and, of course, the university.
By the time Powell produced his memo, the campaign he espoused was already underway. As works like Nancy MacLean’s 2017 exposé, Democracy in Chains, reveal, a handful of conservative foundations and wealthy individuals were constructing a network of activists and intellectuals to disseminate an anti-statist ideology, while delegitimizing the liberalism that had dominated U.S. political culture since the New Deal. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into think tanks and publications designed to supply policy makers and the media with expertise that had previously been supplied by mainstream academics.
The conservative foundations also created a shadow academy. They endowed professorships, supported free-market economics departments, and developed programs that pushed the virtues of free enterprise at dozens of universities. Brand-name colleges got their share, but so too did lower-tier regional institutions like Middle Tennessee State University and Virginia’s George Mason University. Funders sought out promising conservative students, subsidizing their publications and political organizations and sponsoring their future careers. By the 1980s, these efforts had created a chorus of seemingly respectable voices delivering a devastating critique of the traditional university.
With Reagan in the White House, the right’s campaign against higher education came into its own. “There is a sense now,” Michael Joyce, former head of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, crowed, “that the work we’ve been doing all along, the studies we’ve been supporting, have reached a kind of fruition. … The ideas we’ve been supporting have filtered down into public opinion.”
Greg Gibson, AP
Conservative foundations subsidized Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990), and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991), which, along with the backlash against affirmative action and attacks on so-called political correctness, helped to set off the culture wars of the 1980s and ‘90s.
Old arguments resurfaced. As in the 1960s, when institutions sought to admit more Black and other underrepresented students and to hire more faculty members of color, opponents claimed that such measures would dilute “excellence” and undermine meritocratic values.
At the same time, a new set of charges emerged, centering on academe’s supposed intolerance for free speech. Though seriously misrepresenting the difference between the First Amendment’s protection of an individual’s right to speak out on issues of public concern and academic freedom’s support for a qualified professor’s right to teach and conduct research without external interference, those charges gained widespread credibility.
It is difficult to explain how academic freedom benefits society, especially to a public already upset about the rising costs of higher education and jealous of the economic security tenured faculty members enjoy. The task is all the more challenging when professors are demonized as over-privileged, out-of-touch, left-wing elitists. By the end of the ‘80s, conservatives’ clever depiction of a repressive academy that stifles anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxy had come to dominate the public’s perception of higher education.
Were all right-wing arguments without merit? Of course not. Some colleges had blundered by developing overly repressive speech codes and denying due process to students and outside provocateurs. Moreover, the often impenetrable and jargon-filled prose of postmodernists alienated even left-wing academics who were otherwise horrified by the campaign against political correctness. They viewed their colleagues’ theoretical turn as an apolitical diversion that gave ammunition to outside critics.
Though professors are more liberal than the rest of the country, the rest of that demonized stereotype bears little resemblance to the reality of today’s increasingly straitened university. The faculty has been hollowed out; there are now more administrators than instructional staff. Professors of all ranks face a heavy load of bureaucratic busywork while coping with heightened demands for productivity and publication. At most institutions, shared governance is a farce. Faculty members have little say about their own working conditions or the content of the education they provide.
Which is why in early 2021, when reactionary Republican politicians turned opportunistically to dictate how race, racism, gender, and other so-called divisive issues are taught, the academic community failed to resist. Professors felt powerless and demoralized. Administrators tried to keep their heads down. With few exceptions, colleges and their faculties have not demonstrated the solidarity needed to face the most serious threat to academic freedom in their history.
Yet seeds of resistance are sprouting. During the past academic year, some 50 faculty senates joined a campaign initiated last summer by the African American Policy Forum to pass resolutions opposing the wave of repressive legislation and asking their administrations to join them in defending academic freedom. At Florida International University, the faculty union’s “Freedom to Teach/Freedom to Learn Campaign” urges its members not to change their teaching in response to the state’s new laws and to support those colleagues disciplined for defying them. Other groups and faculty organizations are planning similar actions.
Solidarity matters. So does the truth. We must act collectively to combat the lies and misinformation that are destroying the university. We must speak out and explain to colleagues, students, and fellow citizens what is at stake and why higher education matters if we are to preserve our, albeit imperfect, democracy.