Republicans’ ideological attack on higher education seemed limited to elite Ivy League institutions at first, briefly dressing up an authoritarian crackdown on left-wing ideas like Palestinian solidarity and racial equality in the drag of anti-elitism. That’s changing. Now they’re coming for public universities all over the country.
On Wednesday, the US Department of Education announced “civil rights” investigations into the University of Nebraska Omaha, the University of Michigan, and others. They’ve also been investigating George Mason University and, last month, forced the University of Virginia’s president to resign. Faculty, students, higher-education unions, and the communities that depend on such institutions should be ready to fight the tsunami of repression that’s coming.
The City University of New York (CUNY), one of the greatest working-class higher-education institutions in America, is one of the latest institutions to be targeted, recently facing the harassment of a congressional hearing on “antisemitism” (a term that has become a depraved kind of code for the defense of Palestinians, a people currently enduring slow starvation with their children as part of a broader campaign of genocide). CUNY leadership is coping with the attack in the worst possible way: by repressing and punishing pro-Palestinian activism.
On paper, CUNY protects academic freedom in its bylaws, which specify that the university should be a “forum for the advocacy of all ideas protected by the First Amendment,” and emphasizes a commitment to the “principles of academic freedom.” Similar language appears in CUNY’s contract with its faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). But there have been times in CUNY’s history when this value has been breached. In the 1950s, a rabidly anti-Communist Brooklyn College president shut down the school newspaper and encouraged state and federal investigations of…
Auteur: Liza Featherstone
