Autocracy Is Eroding Higher Education

For more than two centuries, American colleges have been wrestling earnestly, if not always successfully, with a set of questions rooted in the assumption that they were situated within a democratic society. How, and to what degree, should students be prepared for engaged citizenship? How can one create what Cornell University, my alma mater, calls “a culture of broad inquiry”? When, if ever, should higher education use its voice to speak to social and political issues? These questions all take for granted the fact that engaged citizenship, broad inquiry, and political speech are permissible.

As far as I can tell, most of American higher education is continuing to act as if we are still a functioning democracy, even as it capitulates to an autocratic government by changing curricula, closing offices, and firing employees for saying the wrong things. Mission statements still speak to intellectual growth and global citizenship even as forbidden words are being scrubbed from websites. Press releases and admissions materials are relentlessly upbeat. The pretense that little has changed, while understandable, might be worse than the acknowledgment that everything has, since it allows the comforting veneer of normalcy to persist.

As autocracy strengthens, colleges begin increasingly to lose control over their curricula and operations. This is happening most rapidly in public institutions in Republican-controlled states, but virtually no institution remains untouched. In some states, universities seem prepared to abandon all principles and control to remain in good standing with the government. In Texas, a social-media post from a state representative brought Texas A&M University — which has a $17-billion endowment — to its knees, while the Texas Tech University system has urged faculty to scrutinize their course materials and eliminate any acknowledgment that transgender people actually exist.

One can of course argue that the current descent into autocracy is temporary, destined to end once President Donald Trump exits the scene. This hope is misplaced. Nine months have been enough to demonstrate that the supposed guardrails of democracy — Congress and the Constitution, the courts of law and public opinion — were in fact shockingly easy to breach. How likely is it that future governments will take their existence seriously? And how much more damage can be done in the next three years?

Autocratic rule does more than eliminate particular courses and offices: It alters the relationship between the university and society. Educating students for “engaged citizenship” takes on a different meaning. Autocrats prefer and draw their power from a passive and disengaged citizenry, so there needs to be a recognition that education for political and social engagement is now a more subversive act than it was just a year ago. Those that continue to pursue this mission will need to accept a new level of risk for themselves and their campus communities. The experience of other autocracies suggests that some institutions will replace education for engagement with education for loyalty, perhaps lured, as The Washington Post reports, by the promise of a competitive advantage in the awarding of research grants “to schools that pledge to adhere to the values and policies of the Trump administration.” Others will follow the lead of the Universities of Florida and North Carolina and Ohio State University and establish “centers” devoted to forms of inquiry that, while not necessarily inappropriate, align with the views of those in power. Even more will shift to a more narrowly vocational, and therefore less threatening, suite of programs.

A “culture of broad inquiry” and a culture shaped by autocracy are incompatible. Exposure to diverse perspectives is the last thing autocrats desire; the voices of the disempowered are the last they wish to hear. This is why books are banned and words forbidden. It is why the liberal arts, defined as “education that equips a person for life as a free citizen,” rarely exist under autocratic rule. Dictators despise the arts and humanities not because of any aesthetic judgment, but because they fear the habits of mind they create.

The soft power of progressive orthodoxies — a reality that higher education has been too slow to acknowledge — is being replaced by the hard power of the government, which has done more in six months to restrict academic freedom than a decade of hecklers’ vetoes. Every institution will need to decide how broad its inquiries will be and how much it is willing to sacrifice to preserve the ability to explore subjects of which the government disapproves.

Evidence to date suggests that willingness even to risk sacrifice is in short supply. Emory University ended all diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and programs, its interim president claiming that the legal requirement to do so is “clear” even though that is not at all the case. Northeastern University, in deep-blue Massachusetts, dismantled almost all of its DEI “messaging and websites” back in January. The Chronicle has, to date, tracked retreats from diversity programming or language at “410 college campuses in 47 states and the District of Columbia.” Not all of these changes have been ill-advised — diversity statements were never a good idea — but the breadth and rapidity of the de-emphasizing of diversity suggests not reform but retreat.

While many institutions have tried to preserve their autonomy by adopting a strategy that might be described as “duck and cover,” vocal defense of academic freedom in courts or in public forums has been in short supply: limited to a handful of outspoken presidents and to Harvard, though even Harvard has quietly taken steps to align its programming with the priorities of the government and is apparently close to striking a deal with the administration.

Institutional neutrality, which is having a moment, also needs to be re-examined. The prevailing notion of institutional neutrality on political and social issues within American higher education — most visibly championed by Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Andrew D. Martin, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, and pretty much anyone who has come within a mile of the University of Chicago — is rooted in the assumption of a relatively functional democratic political system. Put another way, colleges in a democracy are silent on political questions because they choose to be. Colleges in an autocracy are silent on political questions because they have to be.

Viewed through this lens, neutrality looks less like a defense of academic freedom and more like capitulation to the loss of that freedom. In 1967, the authors of the Kalven Report at the University of Chicago wrote that “from time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”

In this instance, the most powerful force in society, the federal government, is not just threatening the value of “free inquiry” but actively forbidding and punishing it. A university cannot simultaneously purport to defend academic freedom and accede silently to its dissolution — though some, like Columbia University, are twisting themselves into rhetorical knots in an embarrassing attempt to do so.

Put simply, the traditional work of higher education has, under autocratic rule, gone from being an act of civic strengthening — democracies need engaged, educated, and inquisitive citizens — to an act of resistance. Autocrats know this, which is why colleges are always among their initial targets.

The question is not whether most of higher education will survive under autocratic rule — it will — but rather, how much will it sacrifice and how fully will it change in the effort to survive? While the early signs are discouraging, my hope rests less on a sudden outbreak of courage than on the tendency of autocrats, and of our home-grown autocrat in particular, to overreach: to become so convinced of their own power that they take steps that leave otherwise-disengaged or frightened people with no choice but to react. Perhaps not at Texas A&M or Emory or Vanderbilt, but, at some point, leaders at more colleges will realize, as Adam Serwer writes, that “the act of capitulation compromises the very thing those capitulating say they want to protect,” and they will fight back.