President Donald Trump’s cuts to education in the name of combating anti-Semitism are measures to implement totalitarianism in the minds of future generations. There are no questions to be asked, only myths must be enforced. The assaults on colleges and universities have nothing to do with combating antisemitism. Trump’s government has cautioned some 60 colleges that they could forfeit federal money if they refuse to make campuses secure for Jewish students and is already withholding $400 million from Columbia University.
Antisemitism is a facade, a mask for a much wider and more insidious plan. The plan, which includes methods to repeal the Department of Education and conclude all agendas of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), aims to turn the educational system, from kindergarten to graduate school, into a propaganda factory.
Totalitarian governments desire absolute authority over the institutions that produce concepts, particularly the media and education. Descriptions that challenge the tales employed to legitimize absolute power.
The purpose of education is not only to impart knowledge, it is about motivation. It is about passion. It is concerning the belief that what we accomplish in life is valuable. It is nearly, as James Baldwin notes in his piece “The Creative Process,” the ability to drive “to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.” The rightwing episodes on agendas such as critical race theory or DEI, as Stanley writes in his book.
“intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally included — like Black Americans, for instance — are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.”
Quality and integrity of public higher education in the US have been under attack for decades, as Ellen Schrecker noted in her book The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s. Almost 75 percent of the teaching at colleges and universities is performed by adjuncts, non-tenure-track full-time faculty and part-time lecturers who have no expectancy of being granted tenure.
A large number of public institutions, which function for 80 percent of the nation’s students, are chronically lacking of budget and basic aids. Higher education has developed, even at primary research institutes, into vocational training, not extended as a vehicle for learning but economic mobility. The attack notices elite schools, where fees can run upwards of $80,000 a year, cater to the rich and the privileged, shutting out the needy and the working class.
“The current academy functions primarily to replicate an increasingly inequitable status quo, it is hard to imagine how it could be restructured to serve a more democratic purpose without external pressure for something like universal free higher education,”
Schrecker notes.
Totalitarian institutions do not instruct students how to feel but what to think. They force learners who are historically and politically substandard, overwhelmed by an executed historical amnesia. They aim to produce helpers and apologists who work, not critics and revolutionaries.
