Photo by Nathan Dumlao

Introduction

The horrors of fascism have returned have returned, not as ghosts, but as a plague, fueled by racial hatred and historical amnesia, infiltrating schools, universities, and the public sphere through state violence, fear, censorship, and manufactured ignorance. Across the globe, fascist forces—emboldened by resurgent colonial logics, neoliberal cruelty, and virulent white nationalism—have transformed universities into battlegrounds for democracy’s future. Dissent against a genocidal war in Gaza is not merely discouraged but criminalized, while political intimidation and extortion directed at major institutions, especially higher education, are recast as the new language of governance. In this critical moment, the urgency of defending higher education has never been clearer. As both a site of knowledge production and democratic possibility, higher education must resist becoming a tool of fascist and neoliberal control. Its role in nurturing critical thought, social responsibility, and civic courage is central to the survival of democratic values in the face of rising authoritarianism

It is no longer enough to rehearse the familiar language of education’s democratic mission or nostalgically invoke its emancipatory promise. Those ideals must be rethought and radicalized; they must be expanded, sharpened, and reclaimed as ethical and political imperatives equal to the darkness of our times, especially the threat posed by neoliberal fascism. In this instance, what is needed is an argument for understanding higher education not as a refuge from politics but as one of its most decisive battlegrounds, a place where public consciousness is shaped, where the struggle over truth and power unfolds, and where the pedagogical conditions for resisting emerging fascism must be forged anew. Such recognition forces us to confront the deeper forces shaping this crisis, to ask what forms of power are waging war on education and what is truly at stake in this escalating assault.

What is at stake, however, is far more than a rejection of gangster capitalism and the global misery it produces. The deeper danger lies in recognizing that education has become the primary battlefield in the cultural and ideological wars waged by authoritarianism. Neoliberal capitalism, in its fascist mutation, does not simply impoverish; it seeks to colonize consciousness, to erode the capacity for critical thought, and to replace democratic imagination with the deadening certainties of hierarchy and fear. Universities now sit at a dangerous crossroad where truth is contested, civic memory is either erased or preserved, and the formative conditions for democratic life are nourished, or systematically destroyed. To defend higher education, then, is to reclaim its power to cultivate the forms of agency, solidarity, and critical awareness necessary to challenge the lies, brutalities, racism, corruption, and manufactured ignorance that sustain authoritarian rule. It is to insist that education remain a crucial site of critique and possibility—one capable of expanding the horizon of the future at a moment when fascism seeks to close it down.

Such a task demands thinking the unthinkable: not merely reforming neoliberal capitalism but abolishing it, and cultivating pedagogical spaces where new modes of agency, solidarity, value, and identity can be forged. Only through such radical reimagining can education become the ground from which democratic life is rebuilt and the struggle for a liberated future renewed.

The threat to American society is not merely external, evident in the lawlessness and militarization that now permeate almost every aspect of public life. It resides in the pedagogical terrain itself, in the ways authoritarian movements mobilize cultural institutions, digital ecosystems, and state power to produce a public consciousness increasingly habituated to cruelty, disposability, white nationalism, and historical amnesia. Trump’s educational politics, steeped in racial hatred, ultra-nationalism, and authoritarian contempt for reason, exemplify a broader global project: the transformation of education into a tool for consolidating hierarchy, manufacturing consent, and converting higher education into laboratories of indoctrination. To confront this project, it is not enough to criticize his corruption or his embrace of economic exploitation, staggering inequality, unadulterated cruelty, and racial hierarchies. We must expose the cultural fantasies and pedagogical practices that animate these policies, the false promises of belonging they extend, and the forms of political and ethical illiteracy they cultivate.

What is required, then, is the radical reimagining of pedagogy. Higher education must reclaim academic freedom, dissent, critical thought, and democratic governance not as abstract principles but as urgent practices of resistance. This means creating pedagogical conditions that nurture individual and collective agency, reconnect critique with social change, and transform private suffering into shared political consciousness. It means building classrooms and campuses where justice can be named, where inequality can be confronted, and where democratic forms of life can be rehearsed and renewed. It also means forging solidarities among faculty, students, unions, workers, and social movements, nationally and internationally, as part of a broader struggle for equality, justice, and freedom.

The task before us is clear: for higher education to endure as a democratic public good, it must take decisive action. It must recognize that democracy cannot exist without an informed public, that justice requires a language capable of confronting and narrating injustice, and that freedom depends on a pedagogy dedicated to nurturing the fragile yet vital work of civic courage—and the refusal of complicity with the mobilizing passions of fascist politics. Stephen Rohde, focusing on Northwestern University, warns that universities must resist succumbing to “Trump’s ongoing campaign, steeped in hypocrisy, self-delusion, bribery, and cowardice…to dismantle the independence of American colleges and universities,” for doing so would make them complicit in cementing the bigoted regime of MAGA. In the following, I will explore what this struggle demands and why the fight over higher education is, at its essence, a battle for the very meaning of radical democracy.

Higher Education Under Siege: The Rise of Neoliberal Fascism

Across the world, universities are under siege and democracy itself is approaching a terrifying threshold. From Hungary to India to Turkey, governments are hollowing out the university’s democratic mission, attacking intellectual freedom, weaponizing history, policing critical pedagogy, and stripping away the civic imagination that sustains democratic life. What’s at stake is not just the pursuit of truth but the moral and pedagogical fundamentals of democracy, a delicate balance between knowledge and responsibility, learning and the courage to bear witness. In these darkening times, it is not only knowledge that is being policed but agency itself, as the lifeblood of an informed, critical, and resistant citizenry.

When education is severed from its moral and civic grounding, democracy erodes. Truth becomes suspect, knowledge becomes dangerous, and educators are seen as enemies by those who fear the power of enlightened judgment and the task of holding power accountable. Once the classroom loses its capacity for moral witnessing, critical thinking, and civic courage, the conditions for domination are set. Ignorance becomes virtue, conscience is silenced, and democracy’s fragile bonds begin to fray from civil and legal rights to the institutions meant to protect them. In such a climate, the struggle for education is inseparable from the collective solidarities that make democratic life possible.

Theorists as diverse as Pierre Bourdieu and Thomas Pikety have noted in a number of books and essays how neoliberalism, a predatory form of capitalism, has waged war on the welfare state, dismantled the public sphere, and hollowed out the very notion of the common good. Masked by the rhetoric of freedom and efficiency, it elevates market logic into a totalizing ideology, demanding that every domain of life bend to economic imperatives. In doing so, it separates economic practices from social costs, and in doing so disparages any viable notion of social responsibility. In practice, it concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite, celebrates ruthless individualism, and commodifies the most sacred dimensions of human existence. The social wreckage it leaves behind, systemic racism, militarism, mass precarity, and staggering inequality, is not an aberration but a defining feature of a politics built on dispossession, domination, and terminal exclusion. Paramjit Singh, wring in the Socialist Project, insightfully sums up neoliberalism bad-faith premises and the wreckage it produces. He is worth quoting at length:

Across the world, neoliberalism has exhausted the moral and material foundations of the liberal order that once began as a promise of equality, justice, prosperity, efficiency, and freedom. In practice, it has produced deep inequality, widespread dispossession, ecological devastation, and the disintegration of collective life. However, neoliberalism’s most enduring damage lies not only in its economic consequences but also in its epistemic effects. It has weakened the categories through which societies understand justice, equality, community, and reason…. In the neoliberal era, both dissent and reason have been profoundly degraded. Decades of globalization, financialization, and privatization have depoliticized everyday life, replacing collective struggle with individualized anxiety. The rhetoric of choice, empowerment, and personal fulfilment has displaced the language of class. Under such conditions, dissent risks becoming spectacle, and reason risks degenerating into strategy, emptying both of their transformative political content. We inhabit a world that protests incessantly, yet rarely challenges the structural roots of crisis.

As neoliberalism decays into an upgraded fascism, its machinery of repression intensifies. No longer able to legitimate itself, it blames its failures on immigrants, Black people, and all those deemed “other.” Dissent is criminalized, social life militarized, immigrants are abducted, and hate is normalized. Under Trump, this assault has crystallized into open warfare, rooted in the belief that critical education poses a direct threat to the authoritarian project.

The Role of Higher Education in Defending Intellectual Freedom

This hostility is echoed at the highest levels of the regime. J.D. Vance, the U.S. Vice President, has called higher education a “hostile institution.” Donald Trump rails against colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” stating that student protesters as “radicals,” “savages” and “jihadists” have been brainwashed by faculty “communists and terrorists.” These poisonous declarations shape policies that transform education into a site of repression, censorship, and laboratories of........

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