by Mindy Clegg
Since the start of the second Trump term, people have noticed the destructive nature of this regime, even those who at one time dismissed him as an actual threat to the country (looking at you David Brooks). Those of us who avoided the Flavor Aid understood the great harm that another Trump presidency would visit upon us. Like the deportations and tariffs, this was foreseeable. Last time I touched on the attacks on the nation-state and international institutions that have shaped our world since the end of the second world war. Universities are also under attack by Trump and other autocrats, modeling their approach to academia on Victor Orban’s authoritarian takeover on Hungarian universities.
This is less an attempt to completely take universities apart and more an attempt to redirect them back to what some see as their original mission: empowering the elite classes to shape our society for their own benefit. In other words, Trump and his cronies seek to undo the democratic work of the last century, where education started to be seen as a universal good and necessity. In doing so, they attack an important foundation of modern society which they themselves benefited. But this is not new with Trump as there have been years of attacks by the far right. If higher education does need reform, what they propose is not that. It is, in fact, an attempt to gut democratic institutions, an important social leveler of the past 70 years.
Academia is a set of institutions (universities, colleges, technical schools, publishers, journals, and so on) that deserve both criticism and praise for its role in modern society. On one hand, the expansion of universities—along with unionized blue color work—have been an effective engine of social mobility in the global north since the end of the second world war. This was true in both the first and second world, with some countries making college essentially free. In the US, college became more affordable thanks in part to programs like the GI Bill and Pell Grants. Starting in the 1940s, this helped more working and middle class young people access college in greater numbers with the biggest beneficiaries being the Baby Boomers. As more people went to college, the need for more faculty sky-rocketed and public universities grew in size. Access to a college education contributed to upward mobility and the expansion of the postwar American economy.
On the other hand, colleges, especially research university, underwrote American imperialism during the Cold War, as many Boomers discovered in the 1960s. Federal and state governments made a strategic decision to support higher ed because of the Cold War, not just to benefit the American public. More scholars were needed to further scientific fields (aerospace, computing, bio-medical research, chemistry, among other fields). Area studies scholars in the humanities helped fill in the knowledge on both our “enemies” (the communist world) and the emerging new states of the global south where much of the Cold War was actually fought. For much of the Cold War, scholars in these area studies programs focused on modernization theory, which countered the Marxist view of historical development.1 Even cultural studies were weaponized in what became known as the Cultural Cold War.2 When President Eisenhower gave his famous speech warning of the “military-industrial complex” he could have said “military-industrial-academic complex” instead. Academia, then, is a mixed bag historically speaking. But it was certainly an important institution that shaped the postwar world and contributed to the postwar era of American abundance.
With the expansion of the academy and the rise the rights revolutions, the academy became more diverse. As a result, there came an expansion in fields of studies based on student demands. By the 1960s and 1970s, universities the nation over saw demand for programs like African American studies, feminist studies, and queer studies, which intensified after the end of the Cold War. The diversification of the academy and the expansion of fields of studies (especially in the humanities) represented a further democratization of the academy. It should be noted that this democratization was imperfect at best. Even as more people were accessing college in the postwar era, the concept of meritocracy put hard limits on that democratization. The working class (especially from non-white communities) had a harder time accessing college overall. It happened, but the ideology of meritocracy made it far more difficult and laid the blame at the feet of the so-called “failures” rather than on a class system that masqueraded as some kind of “natural” order of things. Perhaps, we might better call the academy of the postwar era semi-democratic institutions. But even this imperfect expansion saw a backlash from the right, as more women and people of color became scholars across the academy, but most visibly in the humanities. Some conservatives started to argue that the humanities were less important, less worthy of funding, a luxury that was not necessary for the healthy functioning for society, and even as an existential threat to the nation. That perception slowly seeped out into the mainstream culture. The far right has especially weaponized that perception. The roots of the right wing critique of academia can be found as early as the 1940s with figures like William F. Buckley who matriculated at Yale. The perception he and others conservatives presented was that the academy was a bastion of not just social liberalism, but radical Marxism. There is very little evidence to back up this claim, at least at the institutional level. In fact, in the midst of the Red Scare of the 1950s, many colleges and universities demanded employees sign oaths that they were not communists and those persist. Some in the public bought that argument hook-line-and-sinker. By the end of the century, it was an article of faith among many conservatives. At the heart of it, though, Buckley and other conservatives really just objected to the democratization of the academy.
Attacks from the right intensified after the end of the Cold War and into the era of the War on Terror. The idea that the academy was a hive of villainous cultural marxists gained steam, especially with regards to the humanities. Federal funding started drying up, putting more pressure on states to fund these schools, and then to the students themselves. The cost of going to college rose, with fewer state-backed loans and grants being made available. More people took out loans from commercial banks. Meanwhile, business schools and STEM fields turned to the private industry for funding, meaning these programs shaped their curriculum for private industry more often. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit. A wave of colleges (especially smaller, liberal arts schools) have faced enough economic hardships that around 300 have closed (although some number of those were for-profit schools). Tenure-track jobs dried up replaced by part-time or adjunct positions. The pandemic exacerbated these trends and it reverberates across the economy still today. Students have stepped away from fields such as history in part because they’ve been told that college exists primarily as a form of job training and the humanities do not lead to jobs. Understanding the past and other similar pursuits just shouldn’t be prioritized, our society tells us now. People assume that history and our understanding of it just exists, not that someone has to do the work to produce it in the first place. But who writes history and what they highlight actually matters. Youtuber Michael Burns quoted Fredric Jameson on the postmodern attack on the humanities, especially history. The diminished role of history means we live in a kind of eternal present, unconnected to the past. What many view as history is really just nostalgia, Burns argued. That is to our detriment. Our current lack of historical imagination with regards to Trump and what he represents is just one example of that truth. I would argue that the far right (and to a lesser extent the center right, which includes some Democratic politicians) has a project to ensure that we understand history as a mere practice of nostalgia, not as a way to understand the world that we have collectively built. They want us to lack a historical imagination. By focusing on a university education as a means of only making a living, we are missing how humans are driven by curiosity and creativity as much as we are by our desire to survive in the systems in which we find ourselves. We begin to ignore the ways that fields like history enrich our lives and help us to better navigate our complicated world.
The Trump administration is in the midst of the destruction of the academy as a semi-democratic, independent set of institutions. This time, funding for STEM fields are squarely in the cross-hairs. One could have predicted this after the ongoing attacks on the humanities, but many ignored it, because they’d bought into the idea that there was some stark, irreconcilable differences between the sciences and the humanities. Many (certainly not all) in these fields shrugged their shoulders as the humanities came under attack, assuming that they were safe from similar treatment. They were just plain wrong on that count. Political science professor Corey Robins recently addressed an NYT’s article about the current round of academic defunding. A professor in the biological sciences at Columbia was quoted as worrying about the funding loss and that he and other researchers would be knocked down to mere educators. People like that professor see less intrinsic value in educating the public for its own sake, especially at the high school or community college level. But Robins argued that if we wish to save academia from this long-standing right wing attack, we must work together across disciplines and institutions rather than circle the wagons around our own fiefdoms. All of it matters in other words. Human knowledge exists for a more than just profitability. It exists as a byproduct of our own rich and creative imagination. It is always collectively produced, too. In our modern era, we settled on universal public education and universities as a means of producing that knowledge, for a variety of reasons, not just for the profits it can product. Yes, that includes making a living, but the focus should also be on improving the human condition overall. Rather than centering the market, we should center human beings in our institutions instead.
There are some who seem to believe that if we just automate research, that we will save the baby from going out with the bathwater. In a recent letter to The Guardian, a historian at the Max Planck institute Dr. Matteo Valleriani argued for publicly controlled Large Language Models (or LLMs, which are the underlying technologies that drive many AI programs). He specifically meant this to apply to carrying out research for the humanities. As a historian of science and technology, he is perhaps primed to view technology as inherently progressive. But the aims of the creators of technologies need to be taken into account. As Brian Merchant has shown, the goals of these technologies are often more about replacing workers in order to move yet more profits up the chain, and far less about freeing us from drudgery. Although we often see the emergence of capitalism as quite distant, Merchant’s work in his book Blood in the Machine links the rise of technologies like AI and the emergence of mass production of textiles in Britain, resulting in the Luddite rebellions.3 These men rejected their expertise being replaced by technology. Research, writing, theorizing, all these are human endeavors of creativity, just the same as making a shirt or building a piece of technology like a computer. Like storytelling or music-making, they begin with questions and ideas, are worked out over time, within the confines of our own heads, but also among those we spend time with every day. Our thoughts are shaped by all we’ve read and experienced over our lives. That can’t just be replaced by an algorithm or some clever code.
The far right mistakes the process of scientific, technological, and social progress as the acts of some individual genius man, freed from the confines of other responsibilities. Hence, their firm belief that only (white) men born in certain classes can move society forward. They also believe that the value of such endeavors rest primarily on the generation of wealth. But we all have the creative capacity to move the world in a positive direction when working together. This is why opening up the academy to a much wider swath of humanity has been beneficial, because curiosity and creativity are part of our natural condition. If some progress was made in the wake of the most destructive war in modern history, it was because many pushed for a path that allowed more of us the time and freedom to access institutions that helped us to improve the world. We failed, many time and often. But there were successes too. If the academy needs changing, it’s not the change being suggested by the neoreactionary movement currently in ascendancy under Trump and other autocrats. They seek to take us back to a time when children died for lack of good healthcare and vaccines, to where women could not be scholars or scientists, and racial and religious minorities were rare in the halls of the white dominated, elite institutions. We do not have to go back to a world where only a few had the privilege of an extended education. We can build on the successes of the past and make something even better. Ultimately, academia should be a set of institutions that serve all of us, not just an elite few.
Footnotes
1 For a couple of examples on the development of modernization theory, see books such as Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 and Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in the Cold War, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2003.
2 For example, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: The New Press, 2000.
3 Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, New York: Little Brown and Company, 2023.
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