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UNIVERSITIES DIDN’T FAIL, THEY SUCCEEDED—THAT’S WHY THEY’RE
UNDER ATTACK  
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Emese Ilyés
October 14, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ Universities need to recognize that they are being targeted because
of what they represent, not because of what they’ve failed to do,
and resist accordingly. _

A protester holds a sign reading, “Educate, Don’t Capitulate!!”
featuring Harvard University shields during a rally at Cambridge
Common., Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

 

I grew up watching my mother teach histories she was forbidden to
teach, in a language that was illegal to speak. I know what
authoritarianism looks like. And I’m watching American universities
respond to this moment with the same dangerous pattern I witnessed
then: accepting the narrative of their accusers, capitulating to
illegal demands, destroying themselves from within.

At a time when blue cities become military zones
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when citizens are arrested and abused on camera
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when journalists are forced to transform from truth tellers to White
House publicists
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president accepts planes as gifts from foreign governments and then
offers them military bases on US soil
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it is not a moment for universities to ask, “What did we do
wrong?” This is a moment to recognize: We are living through an
authoritarian takeover, and universities are being targeted because of
what they represent, not because of what they’ve failed to do.

The Trap of the “Universities Failed” Narrative

Across the country, university leaders are grappling with attacks on
their institutions by asking: “How did we get here?” But without
proper historical analysis, these questions lead directly into a trap
set deliberately by those who seek to dismantle higher education as we
know it.

The narrative is seductive: Universities became too focused on
diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). They pushed “woke
ideology.” They marginalized conservative voices. They failed to
serve their students properly. And now, this narrative suggests,
they’re reaping what they’ve sown.

This is all a lie. More precisely, it’s what political theorist
Isaac Kamola [[link removed]]calls a
decade-long psychological operation, a well-funded
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well-organized campaign of disinformation designed to make Americans
believe that what’s happening in universities is not what’s
actually happening.

The reality? American higher education has more women enrolled
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than ever before. More people of color
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than ever before. An educated populace is a civically engaged
populace, a populace capable of critical thinking and democratic
participation. Universities haven’t failed. Universities have been
succeeding. And that success threatens the wealth and power of those
orchestrating these attacks.

Understanding the Authoritarian Playbook

We’ve seen this script before. Universities are always the first
targets of authoritarian regimes. Look at Hungary, where Viktor Orbán
seized control of higher education through a national system, banned
gender studies programs, and forced the Open University to leave the
country
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Look at Turkey. After 2016, more than 6,000 academics were expelled
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in Turkey, hundreds prosecuted, and entire universities were closed.
Many dismissed scholars were banned from public sector employment and
from seeking academic work abroad due to travel bans, creating
widespread precarity and self-censorship among remaining faculty. The
pattern is unmistakable and deliberate.

When universities face these attacks, they have a choice: Resist in
solidarity with the broader democratic struggle, or accept the framing
of their accusers and try to appease them. History shows us that
appeasement doesn’t work. It only accelerates the destruction.

Look at Brown and Columbia. In both cases, Brown and Columbia accepted
Trump administration demands largely to avoid funding cuts, yet both
remain under sustained attack from the administration. Rather than
fighting to preserve institutional independence and democratic
principles in higher education they have accelerated the authoritarian
takeover by capitulating.

We are watching universities and their leaders across America choose
the second path. They’re eliminating DEI programs, not because they
believe these programs are wrong, but because they’re afraid of
losing funding. They’re censoring faculty, not because academic
freedom suddenly matters less, but because trustees are buckling under
financial threats. They’re accepting the premise that they somehow
deserve what’s happening to them.

They are playing into the tiny hands of authoritarians.

What’s Really at Stake: Race, Rights, and Democracy

If we take a historical view, we can see more clearly what’s
actually driving these attacks: race. The legislative assault on
curriculum, the attacks on critical race theory, the dismantling of
DEI programs, all of this escalated in inverse proportion to the
access that Black and brown people were gaining to higher education.

The bookeyman of DEI is a strategic tool for turning civil rights laws
on their heads, for weaponizing the very protections meant to ensure
equity. When White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller tells
law enforcement they’re “unleashed,”
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Chicago’s South Side
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are raided and destroyed in the middle of the night and families,
including citizens, are separated and detained for hours, when the
National Guard is deployed to terrorize Democratic cities with large
populations of Black and brown
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we’re watching the same white supremacist project that universities
are being punished for challenging.

Chris Rufo has been explicit about his counterrevolutionary agenda. He
accuses universities of ideological capture and promotes a fiction
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that radical leftists completed a “long march through the
institutions” from the 1960s to today, turning universities into
engines of woke ideology. His strategy has been devastatingly
effective, tying federal funding to demands that colleges eliminate
“race-based” programs and DEI initiatives, end political activism
on campus, and enforce what he falsely calls “ideological
neutrality.” The bitter irony, of course, is that this neutrality
means alignment with conservative values. Authoritarian regimes always
claim neutrality while enforcing ideology.

The actual transformative change that generations of civil rights
leaders have fought to achieve in higher education has been painfully,
frustratingly slow. As Dr. King reminded us, the arc of the moral
universe is long. Diversity, equity, and inclusion work had just begun
when the backlash hit. As Isaac Kamola reminds us, we haven’t gone
too far, we’ve barely started. And that’s precisely why the
backlash is so fierce. Progress, however incremental, is intolerable
to those who benefit from the status quo.

The Rapid Response Trap

Rapid response to individual attacks, while sometimes necessary, keeps
universities perpetually defensive and reactive. Each response accepts
the terms of the debate as set by those seeking to destroy higher
education. Today, it’s a demand to eliminate a DEI office
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Tomorrow it’s a threat to revoke accreditation
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Next week, it’s federal agents on campus or trustees forcing out
presidents
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who won’t comply. The exhausting onslaught of breaking news pushes
institutions into pure survival mode, where they can only see the
immediate threat in front of them. Meanwhile, the bigger picture, the
systematic dismantling of democratic institutions, disappears from
view.

This is how authoritarianism works. It overwhelms. It exhausts. It
forces you to fight a hundred small battles so you cannot see the war.

And when universities respond by looking inward, by searching for
their own failures, by implementing “reforms” that mirror the
demands
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of their attackers—cutting DEI programs, restricting faculty speech,
purging curricula of “controversial” content—they believe
they’re defending themselves. They’re not. They’re participating
in their own destruction. Worse, they’re legitimizing the
authoritarian narrative: that universities deserved what’s happening
to them, that the attacks are a reasonable response to institutional
failure rather than a calculated assault on democratic education
itself.

This is precisely what authoritarians count on: that institutions will
police themselves, that fear will accomplish what force alone cannot.

What Universities Must Do Instead

First, universities must stop accepting the false premise that
they’ve failed. Higher education remains one of the most important
engines of democratic participation, social mobility, and civic
engagement in American society. The Truman Commission
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understood this in 1947: Higher education’s core mission includes
preparing citizens who can respond to social needs with intelligence
and creativity.

That mission hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that powerful
interests have recognized how threatening an educated, diverse,
critically thinking populace is to their accumulation of wealth and
power.

Second, universities must understand themselves not as isolated
institutions defending their own interests, but as part of a broader
democratic movement under siege. The attacks on higher education are
interconnected with attacks on blue cities, on journalism, on voting
rights, on the rule of law itself. Universities cannot win this fight
alone, and they cannot win it by trying to appease authoritarians.

Third, universities must reclaim the narrative. Higher education is
not a commodity that consumers buy and sell. Universities are not
corporations. They are communities, students, faculty, staff,
administrators, and the broader public, engaged in the vital work of
knowledge production, teaching, and the preparation of democratic
citizens. That means the university belongs to all of us, and all of
us have a stake in its defense.

Finally, universities, that is all those who create the university
community, must act with courage. We’ve seen examples of this
courage—boards (like that of MIT’s
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standing behind presidents who refuse to capitulate, faculty senates
(like that of the University of Texas at Austin
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adopting new academic freedom principles, and institutions using the
rule of law to protect their faculty and students. Courage, in this
moment, is the super multiplier
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It gives others permission to resist
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The Choice Before Us

Universities stand at a crossroads. They can continue to react
defensively to each attack, to implement “reforms” demanded by
those who seek their destruction, to accept the narrative that
they’ve somehow failed and deserve what’s happening. Or they can
recognize this moment for what it is: an authoritarian assault on one
of democracy’s essential institutions.

I know from experience that once authoritarianism takes hold, it moves
swiftly. The window for resistance narrows quickly. My mother made her
choice, to keep teaching the truths she was forbidden to teach. Now
universities must make theirs.

The question isn’t “What did we do wrong?” The question is:
“Will we defend democracy, or will we aid its destruction?”

The answer to that question will determine not only the future of
higher education, but the future of American democracy itself.

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Emese Ilyés is a critical social psychologist and participatory
action researcher whose work examines community resistance and
collective survival in the face of authoritarianism. Her research
focuses on grassroots movements and mutual aid networks.

* Universities; United State Democracy; Education; Resistance to
Trumpism;
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