With regime change come attacks on universities. History is filled with precedents—Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, Chile in 1973, Cambodia in the late 1970s, and Viktor Urban’s Hungary in recent years. Leaders who seize power when democracy is in crisis often set their sights on academia. Purges and extermination may follow, while academics willing to comply with the new regime take up vacant positions or passively indicate their fealty. An infamous example: an Italian state university at which only 1 percent of the faculty (twelve professors) refused to swear an oath to Mussolini in 1931.
At the moment, it’s not like that in the United States. Many American universities are private, not public, and so not as vulnerable to the whims of an administration. The U.S. is not under the kind of authoritarian regime that Italy, Germany, and Chile were. And academic freedom in the U.S. is influenced less by state control than by the market forces of higher education. But market pressures can be just as effective as government orders. And Donald Trump’s various executive actions pose additional challenges: Colleges and universities are facing a loss in federal funding; some schools are pausing or cutting back on admissions, freezing hiring, and eliminating programs and departments. This could accelerate efforts already underway to marginalize or cut disciplines seen by technocrats and some politicians as superfluous luxuries or politically suspect.
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