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WHY FASCISTS HATE UNIVERSITIES  
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Jason Stanley
September 5, 2024
Guardian
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_ Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians are only too aware that
universities are primary sites of critique and dissent. Attacks on
universities are the canary in the coalmine of fascism. _

"Victor Orban in Moscow (3)", by Press service of the president of
Russia (CC BY 4.0)

 

In Bangladesh [[link removed]],
something remarkable has happened. Initially in response to a quota
system that reserved the majority of government jobs for specific
groups, university students initiated large-scale non-violent
protests. Bangladesh’s increasingly autocratic prime minister,
Sheikh Hasina, responded essentially with “let them eat cake.”
Instead of calming the protests down, Hasina’s response made the
protests grow nationwide.

In mid-July, the government responded with extreme violence, with
police gunning down hundreds of students and shutting down the
internet across the country. Scenes of extreme police brutality
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social media. By the end of July, the protests had grown into a
nationwide pro-democracy movement. Eventually, the military joined the
students, and Hasina fled the country. A nationwide student-led
democracy movement successfully challenged a violent autocratic
leader, and, at least for now, appears to have won

Bangladesh’s non-violent student movement has not gone unnoticed in
neighboring countries. In Pakistan, the popular former prime minister
and leader of the opposition party, Imran Khan, was jailed a year ago,
an act dictated by Pakistan’s military. Media companies were
instructed [[link removed]] not to
mention his name, quote his words, or show his picture. Members of his
opposition party were imprisoned. But something astonishing has begun
there. Motivated by the success of the student-led pro-democracy
movement in Bangladesh, the Pakistan Students Federation declared an
ultimatum [[link removed]] for
the government: free Khan by 30 August or face nationwide student
protests.

What has happened in Bangladesh and now could happen in Pakistan
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every autocratic regime. Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians
are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and
dissent. Attacks on universities are the canary in the coalmine of
fascism.

Narendra Modi, India’s autocratic Hindu nationalist prime minister
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has ruled the country since 2014. Attacking
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elite universities as “anti-India” is a hallmark of his
government. Similarly, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor
Orbán, started a political campaign with an attack on Central
European University in Budapest, with demagogic rhetoric directed
against its supposed spreading of “gender ideology”. With the use
of legislation, Orbán’s government went so far as to drive the
university out of the country.

The situation is structurally the same in the United States –
would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target
universities with the aim of restricting dissent. Florida’s
Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and
Harvard Law School, is an aspiring autocrat who has used the myth of
widespread voter fraud to severely restrict
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voting. (Voter fraud practically never happens in the United
States; rigorous investigation
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it as between 0.0003 and 0.0025%.) DeSantis also created an office of
election crimes and security, to pursue supposed cases of voter fraud.

Besides minority voting populations, DeSantis has focused on public
and higher education as central targets. According to an AAUP report
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special committee on political interference and academic freedom in
Florida’s public education system in May 2023, “academic freedom,
tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and
universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven
assault unparalleled in US history.” The committee’s final report
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an atmosphere of intimidation and indeed terror, as the administrative
threat to public university professors has been shown to be very real.

Even more so than Florida, Tennessee is a one-party state, with a
Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature.
The Tennessee house and senate passed a resolution
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Danube Institute; on the floor of the Tennessee house, the state
representative Justin Jones questioned
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state was honoring the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s thinktank.
Tennessee has a state ban
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teaching of “divisive concepts”, one that includes public
universities. To report a professor for teaching such a concept (such
as intersectionality), Tennessee provides an online form
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Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably
center on universities, and vice versa. The Yale Law School graduate
and current Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has
claimed
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the 2020 election should not have been certified because of suspicion
of voter fraud. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference,
Vance also proclaimed, echoing Richard Nixon: “The professors are
the enemy.”

In the fall of 2023, in response to Israel’s brutal retaliation in
Gaza for Hamas’s terrorist attack, anti-genocide protests erupted in
American universities, with the active participation of a significant
number of Jewish students. These anti-genocide protests were labeled
as pro-Hamas and used as a basis to attack elite universities, their
students, their professors and their administrations, verbally,
politically and physically. It is not implausible to take the goal to
have been, at least largely, a preliminary show of police power to
university students.

In the United States, the Republican party has long been aware of the
democratic potential of student movements. As it lurches closer and
closer to authoritarianism, it will, like all rightwing authoritarian
movements worldwide, seek to crush dissent, starting with university
students and faculty. With great courage and determination, the
students in Bangladesh have shown that this strategy can be made to
backfire.

_Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale
University, and author of Erasing History: How Fascists rewrite the
Past to Control the Future
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_The Guardian is globally renowned for its coverage of politics, the
environment, science, social justice, sport and culture. Scroll less
and understand more about the subjects you care about with the
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free to your inbox._

* Fascism
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* Anti-Fascism
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* Bangladesh
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* Narendra Modi
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* Ron DeSantis
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* Victor Orban
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* Pakistan
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