Introduction
The horrors of fascism 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 indoctrination. Moreover, these comments play a powerful role in crushing the critical functions of higher education, which is central to consolidating authoritarian power.
Against this backdrop, as fascist politics surges across the globe, it is crucial for educators to confront a set of urgent and unsettling questions. What does the rise of illiberal regimes mean for higher education in an age of manufactured fear, state terrorism, and state-sponsored lies? What responsibilities fall to universities when the very idea of democracy is under siege? What happens to a society when education is disparaged for its claims on democracy, civic culture withers, and academics are told to look away? What happens when educators are pressured into refusing to speak the unspeakable? In Trump’s America, and in countries around the world drifting toward fascism, silence becomes a form of complicity and inaction, a profound moral failure. The university cannot retreat into neutrality when the stakes are this high; its task is to defend the public imagination, nurture democratic agency, and refuse the tyranny that seeks to extinguish both.
Domestic Terrorism and Authoritarian Rule
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 marks not only a political crisis but a profound tragedy for democracy. Under Trump, we face a terrifying new era of state terrorism evident by the erosion of due process, mass abductions, vicious attacks on higher education, and the increasing presence of a police state. America is at war with itself at the same time as it threatens war in Venezuela. Racism and hatred have moved from the shadows to the seat of power, reshaping the political landscape with brutal clarity. ICE operates as a modern Gestapo, patrolling American cities with the explicit aim of terrorizing immigrants and people of color. State violence has become a public spectacle, disinformation has supplanted truth, and the democratic bonds of shared responsibility have withered into a corrosive politics of shared fear.
Trump is unhinged in his gleeful embrace of white supremacy, a malignant worldview that saturates every policy he advances and every cruelty he authorizes. His white nationalist rhetoric has grown so extreme that he publicly indulges in a fascist delirium of racial cleansing, declaring Somali immigrants “garbage,” insisting they “contribute nothing,” and claiming they come “from a country that stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” Such racist invective not only legitimizes cruelty and a politics of disposability as governance; it also fuels his broader assault on higher education. Institutions committed to critical inquiry, dangerous memories, academic freedom, equality, justice, and pluralist imaginaries are now treated as intolerable because they pose a direct threat to the racist hierarchies and exclusionary nationalism that anchor an authoritarian state. As The Guardian recently noted, Trump’s driving ideological conviction is that there is not enough racism in either the United States or Europe, a worldview that both fuels and legitimizes his most extreme authoritarian policies.
Trump represents the endpoint of gangster capitalism, the culmination of its violence, disposability, and moral rot. He is the twenty-first-century, hyper-charged incarnation of Patrick Bateman from the film, American Psycho, a figure fashioned through cruelty, unchecked violence, narcissism, and the celebration of domination. Every policy Trump advances radiates this criminogenic logic, from the killing of more than 80 people in small boats in the Caribbean to cutting off life-saving aid through USAID, condemning millions to misery and death. He is the living embodiment of a death-machine, a leader for whom state-sanctioned violence and ruthless governance become not just a tool of control but a source of perverse pleasure.
The Assault on History: Erasing Memory and Shaping Power
Such hostility inevitably turns toward history, the most dangerous teacher of all. The subversive power of historical understanding, its capacity to illuminate suffering, expose injustice, and nurture democratic hope, is precisely why it has become a target for right-wing forces intent on erasing or sanitizing uncomfortable truths. This is not abstract: it shapes policy. Efforts to censor critical ideas, erase episodes like slavery, and eliminate depictions of systemic racism exemplify this dangerous turn. Donald Trump has openly stated that “he would punish schools that teach students accurate U.S. history, including about slavery and racism in the country.”
Across the United States, an aggressive campaign is underway by right-wing groups to erase history and transform schools and universities into instruments of ideological control. Books are being banned, professors targeted, gender and ethnic studies eliminated, trans identity vilified, student protests criminalized, and honest historical narratives suppressed. This is not symbolic; it is the blueprint of fascist politics and governance, a state-sanctioned strategy to extinguish the democratic imagination.
If the emerging fascism in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere is to be confronted, critical education must again become a vital force in democratic life. Higher education has to be understood not as a problem to be tamed but as an indispensable resource for rebuilding democracies in crisis. This begins with reclaiming a language capable of exposing lies, dismantling systems of oppression, and illuminating the corrupt relations of power that shape everyday life. Hannah Arendt understood that language reveals the hidden “crystallized elements” that make authoritarianism possible. The language of critical pedagogy, rooted in historical memory, justice, and ethical imagination, offers a powerful arsenal for truth-telling, resistance, and the refusal of untruths.
Under such circumstances, one crucial goal of critical pedagogy is to cultivate historical awareness, equipping students to use history as a vital lens for understanding the present. Through the critical act of remembrance, the history of fascism can be illuminated not as a relic of the past but as a persistent threat, its dormant traces capable of reawakening even in the most robust democracies. In this sense, history has to retain its subversive function, drawing on archives, historical sources, and suppressed narratives to challenge conventional wisdom and dominant ideologies.
Higher Education Complicity: Universities as Enablers of Authoritarianism
From Florida to Texas, far-right governors are transforming education into a vehicle for repression. Teachers are threatened with criminal charges for acknowledging gender diversity or reproductive rights. At the national level, student activists, particularly those protesting U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, are being surveilled, detained, and, in some cases, forcibly abducted and held in detention centers without transparency or due process. These actions mark a dangerous escalation in the use of state terrorism to crush dissent and stifle free speech.
Under Trump, the assault on higher education has taken on the character of political extortion. Universities are threatened with funding cuts, targeted investigations, and public humiliation unless they align with the regime’s ideological demands. Faced with this mafia-like pressure, many institutions, such as Columbia University, Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard, capitulate: some pay large financial ransoms to keep research programs afloat, submit to monitored or pre-approved syllabuses, push faculty into self-censorship, and watch as entire fields from gender studies to critical race scholarship are eliminated.
Once considered bastions of critical thought and academic freedom, these institutions have now aligned with the very political and ideological forces they should resist, transforming into silent collaborators in the rise of fascist politics. In capitulating, they have not only abandoned the integrity of higher education but become complicit in the creeping authoritarianism that seeks to control not only knowledge but the very language of dissent. These once-revered institutions are now incubators of conformity, breeding grounds for a new authoritarian oligarchy and class of billionaires that serves power rather than truth, injustice rather than justice, racial and class hierarchies rather than equality. In the face of this onslaught, they have traded their moral compass for the illusion of survival, surrendering their role as guardians of democracy to become facilitators of its destruction.
Academic freedom becomes a privilege dispensed by administrators rather than a right grounded in democratic life, and universities shrink into obedient service providers, enablers of authoritarianism rather than spaces of critique and possibility. The result is a culture of fear in which marginalized students and critical scholars endure the deepest betrayals, their histories and identities recast as political liabilities. This is the university remade by coercion, subject to racial cleansing, drained of its civic responsibility, and stripped of its public purpose. In this punitive vision, neo-fascism on steroids, education is no longer a democratic necessity; it becomes an instrument for policing memory, enforcing obedience, and erasing those who fall outside the boundaries of white nationalist belonging.
Higher Education and the Militarization of Race: Confronting White Nationalism”
The assault on education, then, cannot be separated from the broader pedagogical struggle unfolding across the globe. The current fight against a growing fascist politics is not simply a struggle over state power, it is a fight over the production of historical memory, over who gets to speak, who gets erased, and who is allowed to imagine a future. The horrors of the past, from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa, make clear that the rewriting of history is always tied to the whitening of the nation, to the violent sorting of populations into those who belong and those who do not. Universities are central to this battle because they are the institutional guardians of historical memory and critical knowledge. When they are attacked, censored, or hollowed out, the very capacity of a society to learn from its past is imperiled.
These intertwined assaults on education and democracy become even more visible in the racialized militarization of public life. The deployment of troops into cities with large Black and brown populations is not merely a spectacle of state power; it is another expression of white nationalism and racial cleansing, a violent pedagogy that teaches citizens who counts and who is disposable. This narrowing of citizenship is not unique to the United States. Across the globe, from India to Hungary, the question of who belongs is being reshaped by religious zealotry and fantasies of racial purity. Viktor Orbán makes this logic unmistakable in his declaration that the aim of his illiberal democracy is to eliminate what he calls “mixed races.” As Nicola Bertoldi observes, any struggle for a radical democratic society requires that “the lessons from our dark past (be) learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” for building a post-capitalist future. That task is impossible without institutions, especially schools and universities, that nurture critical memory, cultivate democratic agency, and resist the machinery of erasure.
Confronting the Challenges of Authoritarianism in Education
One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, and others is the need to address the question of what education should accomplish in a society at a historical moment when it is slipping into the dark night of an emerging fascism. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy?
What language must higher education reclaim to redefine its mission, to help faculty and students imagine futures beyond the present, see themselves as agents rather than victims or clients, and take responsibility for shaping democratic public life? In an age marked by the abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people, and the broader public, to challenge repressive forms of authority and hold power accountable?
In part, this suggests developing educational policies and practices that not only inspire and motivate people but are also capable of challenging the growing number of anti-democratic tendencies under a global tyranny of gangster capitalism. Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment, and elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. In this view, education becomes something other than an obsession with accountability schemes, market values, imagination-crushing methodologies, or the crude empiricism of a data-driven society. Rather than function as an instrument of pedagogical terrorism and deadening conformity, it should open a space for thinking, translating, acting, and imagining otherwise.
In light of the current assaults on education, what might it mean for educators to take seriously the notion that democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence and learning to modes of agency that embrace the demands of social and economic justice and the virtues of the common good. Any meaningful vision of critical pedagogy should have the power to provoke a radical shift in consciousness, a shift that helps us see the world through a lens that confronts the savage realities of geopolitical issues including genocidal violence, mass poverty, the destruction of the planet, and the threat of nuclear war, among other issues . Global capitalism thrives on staggering inequalities, settler colonialism, and the twisted anti-democratic ideologies that uphold it. A true shift in consciousness is not possible without pedagogical interventions that speak directly to people in ways that resonate with their lives, their struggles, and their experiences.
Education has to help individuals recognize themselves in the issues at hand, understand how their personal suffering is not an isolated event, but part of a broad, systemic crisis. In addition, activism, debate, and critical engagement should be central to a student’s education. Activism is a form of education, a way of guiding students to become both knowledgeable and engaged citizens. In this sense, critical pedagogy must cultivate conditions that empower students not only to think critically, but to act with purpose and conviction.”
There can be no authentic politics without a pedagogy of identification, an education that connects people to the broader forces shaping their lives, an education that not only helps them understand the roots of their oppression but also empowers them to imagine and fight for a world where they are no longer victims but active agents of change. Wi
