Backlash against higher education is a “global phenomenon”
You might’ve heard: There’s a presidential election coming up.
For The Chronicle’s U.S. election-issue cover story, I took a look at the increasingly contentious and polarized debate around higher education. As one source told me, whether it’s tuition costs or the culture wars, “everyone can find a reason to be pissed off” at colleges.
But the politicalization of higher ed is far from uniquely American. In fact, the United States is late to the party, said Eve Darian-Smith, chair of global and international studies at the University of California at Irvine.
Darian-Smith studies the backlash against higher education by conservative governments and groups around the world. “We’re playing catch-up on a global attack,” she told me. “The U.S. is sort of the last to wake up to what is a global phenomenon.”
Bradford Vivian, a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University, said a “conscious campaign” against higher education started earlier in countries like Brazil, China, Hungary, and Russia.
Criticism of college is a global contagion, and detractors from around the world are linked, said Vivian, author of Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has praised Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, who has cracked down on civil society and tried to shut down a prominent liberal-arts institution, Central European University. When it comes to dealing with campus dissent, Vance has said, Orbán has made “some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.” Christopher Rufo, the right-wing campus provocateur, has been a visiting fellow at the Orbán-affiliated Danube Institute, which advocates “conservative and national values and thinking.”
What is it about higher education? Darian-Smith and others make the point that colleges play multiple roles in society: They educate the next generation. They are sources of expertise. The ideas they generate often frame how the public sees the world.
Vivian argues that the pluralism and dissent on college campuses can seem unsettling to authoritarian, or authoritarian-lite, leaders.
“Universities aren’t perfectly democratic but they are more so” than many institutions, Vivian said, noting that, in the United States and many countries, the share of women and students who are underrepresented minorities has increased. “Higher education represents multicultural democracy, and there’s pushback to multicultural democracy.”
Of course, in the United States, outright antagonism from the right can eclipse the fact that Democrats too increasingly find fault with college. Read more about the two parties’ different diagnoses of what ails higher ed and, if elected, how they might remedy it.
As always, nonsubscribers who register for a free Chronicle account can read two articles a month. Your readership supports our journalism.
