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Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia’s president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down on Friday, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job.
The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA had sufficiently complied with Donald Trump’s orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion.
UVA dissolved its DEI office in March, though Trump’s lackeys claim the university didn’t go far enough in rooting out DEI.
This is the first time the Trump regime has pushed for the resignation of a university official. It’s unlikely to be the last.
On Monday, the Trump regime said Harvard University had violated federal civil rights law over the treatment of Jewish students on campus.
On Tuesday, the regime released $175m in previously frozen federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, after the school agreed to bar transgender athletes from women’s teams and delete the swimmer Lia Thomas’s records.
Let’s be clear: DEI, antisemitism, and transgender athletes are not the real reasons for these attacks on higher education. They’re excuses to give the Trump regime power over America’s colleges and universities.
Why do Trump and his lackeys want this power?
They’re following Hungarian president Viktor Orbán’s playbook for creating an “illiberal democracy” – an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. The playbook goes like this:
First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you. Check.
Next, intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.) Check.
Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with. Check in process.
Then focus on independent sources of information. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews. Check.
Then go after the universities.
Crapping on higher education is also good politics, as demonstrated by the congresswoman Elise Stefanik (Harvard 2006) who browbeat the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several of them being fired.
It’s good politics, because many of the 60% of adult Americans who lack college degrees are stuck in lousy jobs. Many resent the college-educated, who lord it over them economically and culturally.
But behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism.
JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has called university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Orbán’s method for ending “leftwing domination” of universities. Vance laid it all out on CBS’s Face the Nation on 19 May 2024:
Universities are controlled by leftwing foundations. They’re not controlled by the American taxpayer and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.
I’m not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orbán has ever done [but] I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.
His way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”
Yet what, exactly, constitutes a “conservative idea?” That dictatorship is preferable to democracy? That white Christian nationalism is better than tolerance and openness? That social Darwinism is superior to human decency?
The claim that higher education must be more open to such “conservative ideas” is dangerous drivel.
So what’s the real, underlying reason for the Trump regime’s attack on education?
Not incidentally, that attack extends to grade school. Trump’s education department announced on Tuesday it’s withholding $6.8bn in funding for schools, and Trump has promised to dismantle the department.
Why? Because the greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
That’s why enslavers prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. Fascists burn books. Tyrants close universities.
In their quest to destroy democracy, Trump, Vance and their cronies are intent on shutting the American mind.
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Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
