Abstract
Higher education is under assault in the United States. Tracking authoritarian movements across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it. Reflecting on the past academic year, this essay charts the increasingly brazen right-wing efforts in the U.S. Congress and the States to erode academic freedom and university independence— two pillars of our democratic republic. We also identify a bi-partisan source of higher education’s present precarity: the neoliberal policies that precipitated the privatization and corporatization of universities across the country.
About the Author
Athena Mutua, Professor of Law and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar, University at Buffalo, School of Law.
Jonathan Feingold, Associate Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law.
Angela Harris, Distinguished Professor, Seattle University School of Law; Professor Emerita, UC Davis School of Law.
Emily M.S. Houh, Gustavus Henry Wald Professor of the Law and Contracts, University of Cincinnati College of Law.
Matthew Patrick Shaw, Assistant Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School; Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education, Vanderbilt Peabody College; Affiliated Scholar, American Bar Foundation.
Francisco Valdes, Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, University of Miami School of Law.
