‘Money talks, and fear is a great motivator’ — Christopher Rufo, 2025
This quote from Christipher Rufo, one of the most influential architects of Donald Trump’s current assault on ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ in education, succinctly distils the key techniques in what has become a global war on higher education.
This war takes on different forms in different jurisdictions, but it finds expression, to a greater or lesser extent, right across the globe.
For Trump, it is now quite clear that the goal of this war is to eliminate academic freedom, and open enquiry – the bedrock of higher education. If this goal is not fully expressed outside of authoritarian regimes, it is nonetheless a lens through which to view how higher education, and higher education workers, are increasingly being regulated.
Like all workplaces, universities are sites of power and contestation, where managers have an imperative to exercise control over the labour process. It might sound odd to describe universities as workplaces, but that’s exactly what they are. It is workers – academic and non-academic – who teach the students, conduct the research that make universities what they are.
Yet, as higher education managers are impelled to control their workforces, there are constituent elements of universities this potentially conflicts with, especially academic freedom and collegial decision making.
This tension, between managerial control, on the one hand, and academic and intellectual freedom and collegial decision making on the other, was heightened with the spread of neoliberalism. In many countries, neoliberalism in practice meant the development of more corporate forms of university governance. Particularly when combined with fiscal austerity and corporate financing of research and teaching, this created a powerful check on academic freedom.
Education was increasingly commodified, especially teaching. Precarity spread throughout the university workforce. New tools were developed to quantify and measure teaching and research ‘outputs’ – with career ending consequences for those who could not meet the often arbitrary standards that were imposed. Restructuring of the workforce became the norm.
One can readily appreciate how, whether intentional or not, fear was deeply embedded within these new neoliberal technologies of university management. Fear of being disciplined, fear of not meeting expectations, fear of not being promoted, fear of not being offered a contract, fear of losing one’s job.
And for many, fear leads to regulation and management of the self: to avoiding the research or teaching of certain topics; to crafting one’s work within accepted discourses and modes of expression; of not challenging the power structures of the neoliberal university.
But universities are not only a sphere of contested freedom. They are also institutions crucial to the production of workers. In advanced capitalist economies, universities are increasingly one of the most important sites where workers are, literally, made. The polite term for this is ‘human capital formation’, but a political economist might call it the production of labour power. So much of the knowledge and skills demanded by capital is produced in universities. This is so with respect to research as well as teaching.
The dual nature of the university, as a sphere of freedom, and a sphere of production for capital, makes its regulation inherently problematic. Academic freedom and collegial determination of research and teaching are constituent elements of higher education. They also lie beyond the control of capital, but capital needs what universities produce. Therein lies a potential conflict at the heart of the corporatisation of universities.
That academic and intellectual freedom will sometimes cause university workers to offend is beyond reasonable doubt. The mere act of challenging the boundaries of accepted knowledge often causes offence to those whose world view is premised on dominant paradigms. Those offended by the exercise of academic freedom might be within the university or outside of it.
Well before the election of Trump, universities were always in the sights of authoritarian governments. As spheres of autonomy, where free thinking and the pursuit of knowledge is foundational, even if sometimes muted, institutions of higher education pose an inherent threat to regimes that require uniformity of expression and a toothless opposition to survive.
And university staff have been the target of the conservative movement and think tanks for decades. While modern right wing activists rail against so called ‘woke’ culture, this is just the latest imprecise term of derision cooked up by right wing activists to demonise and delegitimate ‘things they don’t like’.
We’ve seen this before: the neo-conservative argument, beginning in the 1970s, that universities were dominated by a ‘new class’ of intellectuals, often benefiting from public funding, and using their privileged position to mask radical left-wing ideology as truth.
So, in many ways Trump’s brutal assault on academic freedom is the apogee of attacks on higher education over the last few decades in which funding and fear have been central elements of a corporatised approach that has reshaped universities – how they operate, and how they are experienced.
Fear was already inscribed into the corporate management of universities. It was already a technology of corporatised university governance. But it has been refined by MAGA. It has been stripped of liberal conventions. As Rufo says “The political Right has figured out how to use political leverage effectively”. And they are doing so, ruthlessly, brutally and relentlessly.
In Rufo’s words, courses and departments must be “oriented towards truth rather than ideology”. By which is presumably meant that universities must confine teaching and research within a particular ideological view of the world.
Since coming to office Trump has signed a raft of Executive orders attacking the foundations of a free education, including: to dismantle the federal Department of Education; terminating any federal government programs, including funding for universities and research grant bodies, that promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Environmental justice; and against ‘gender ideology extremism’, which essentially prohibits critical analysis of gender and is an attack on transgender rights and transgender identity.
Trump has already cut billions in funds to universities who refuse to implement draconian restrictions on academic freedom, while others have acquiesced to Trump’s demands for restrictions. Furthermore, international students involved in the Palestine solidarity movement have been arrested and deported by federal agencies. And we should assume that the Palestinian activists who have been arrested and deported are likely only the first group to be targeted.
This is chilling stuff. Trump is not tinkering around the edges. The goal, clearly, is to eliminate academic freedom, intellectual freedom, free and open enquiry – the bedrock of universities. Broader political freedoms and the right to protest on campus are also under threat. Institutional and individual obeisance is the ultimate end.
The USA is far from an isolated example. Turkey, Hungary, Russia, and the Philippines, are some of the most obvious recent instances where authoritarian regimes have targeted university workers for censure, sacking or arrest. As support for far-right parties grows around the world, so will the assault on academic freedom become more central. Even where the far right fails to gain a foot-hold, neoliberal modes of corporatised university governance remain in many places, which makes them susceptible to calls from Trump’s willing allies in the conservative media globally for limiting the right to protest, curbing the ability to speak freely on matters that challenge the powerful and narrowing the legitimate sphere of what it is acceptable to teach and research.
Fear may be a powerful motivator, but solidarity is just as strong. And solidarity is, ultimately, the best hope of contesting and resisting this. University workers are most powerful when they stand together and speak with one voice. When they defend the values of freedom that define a university, and when they use their freedom both to contest the repression of thought and to articulate the foundations of a free society that are the necessary antipode of the current authoritarian moment. Solidarity requires courage, which becomes especially difficult as the consequences of resistance become more serious. But generations of our predecessors have shown us the way. Even in the face of the most intense and rational fears for their own security and well-being, their courage to resist authoritarian regimes has kept the ideal of academic freedom alive today.
This article was originally commissioned to appear in dialogue with the art exhibition Grounds by Marta Riniker-Radich, shown in Basel 3/5/25-21/6/25. It was published in the Free Market Solidarity Fear edition of the magazine For.
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