Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization. Trump’s administration has fueled this campaign, not only targeting academic freedom but also pushing policies that criminalize dissent, especially when it comes to movements like those advocating for Palestinian liberation. The erosion of civil liberties extends to international students protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with threats of deportation looming over them. The chilling message is clear: higher education is no longer a sanctuary for free thought; it is a field of repression where the rule of authoritarianism dominates.

– Henry Giroux, CounterPunch

The quote from Henry Giroux points to the corporatization of the university, where in the last 50 years, a professionalized administration has been growing while faculties have been shrinking or remaining stagnant. At the same time, tenured positions have been declining so that as of 2023 only 23% of all faculty jobs are tenured with 9% tenure-track. Unsurprisingly, this decline has resulted in a sharp decline of faculty governance (virtually an erasure) with the tenure-track number pointing toward the eventual demise of a tenured and thus protected faculty, unless unions are legalized at private universities, and at both private and public universities, where unions are legal, collective bargaining replaces the tenure void. Without effective collective bargaining, however, teaching will become a kind of piece work, which it is today for the large majority who do not have tenure or the chance of tenure on tenure-track.

While the national tenure statistics are dismal, a brief survey on ChatGPT suggests that first-tier research institutions still have a majority or significant minority of tenured faculty. This points to a two-tiered higher educational system, the upper tier of which (The Ivy League and its peers, such as Stanford, Duke, and UC Berkeley) produces the professional elites who ascend to political, social, and economic positions that form the nexus of national power. In spite of the significant numbers of tenured faculty at these institutions, their top-down corporate structure, their allegiance to donors and trustees, that is to money, rather than to faculty, students, and staff is dominant. Lacking ethical cores, corporate universities are chameleons: they take the color of the system in........

© CounterPunch