Law professor’s paper details ‘assault’ on higher education

The ultra-conservative movement’s “assault” on public education and the independence of higher education, university professors and protesting students seeks to undermine multi-racial democracy, according to a national report written by a UB law professor and civil rights activist.

“Like the authoritarian populism rising across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader and multifaceted campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it,” according to the paper, “The War on Higher Education,” published Sept. 1 in the UCLA Law Review Discourse.

The lead author is Athena D. Mutua, professor of law and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar in the School of Law.

The paper notes that the “well-resourced network of right-wing officials, think tanks, foundations and media” that are “driving this antidemocratic movement” are also “targeting the electoral process; public education; the right to bodily autonomy; the civil rights and liberties of minoritized and marginalized communities; and freedom of speech and expression (which is increasingly marshaled against pro-Palestinian advocacy).”

The “openly stated goal” of these forces “is to delegitimize, defund and lay siege to the institutions that anchor American democracy and civil society, including the institutions that comprise higher education,” the paper says.

The article was written on behalf of the Critical (Legal) Collective (CLC), described as an association of critical legal scholars and activists. The CLC has also submitted a letter to the American Bar Association (ABA) opposing proposed changes to ABA Standard 206 that would eliminate language on diversity — and thus the ABA’s commitment to it — on the pretext that the Supreme Court’s SFFA decision ending the use of race in college admissions requires it, according to Mutua, who is co-founder and coordinating committee member of CLC.

Partially focused on free speech and academic freedom, the article “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,” according to the paper.

The paper highlights two reports by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) on the Republican assault on higher education in North Carolina and Florida.

 In North Carolina, the AAUP analyzes how legal and procedural changes, “which coincided with GOP leadership appointing ‘political ideologues’ to the (governing) boards, undermined academic freedom and university independence across the UNC system,” including elimination of “UNC-Chapel Hill’s privately funded Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity — an entity created to ‘examine innovative and practical ideas for moving more Americans out of poverty and into the middle class.’”

In Florida, AAUP cites Gov. Ron DeSantis’ takeover of New College, “a leading alternative liberal arts college,” as an example of practices underway in Florida and other states. DeSantis-appointed trustees replaced the New College president with a DeSantis partisan, “eliminated the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence, altered the faculty handbook, terminated the college’s gender studies program and denied tenure” to several qualified faculty members. 

According to the paper, AAUP concludes: “[A]cademic freedom, tenure, and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in [U.S.] history, which, if sustained, threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state, with the direst implications for the entire country.”

The article explains that these efforts include attacks on education more broadly and entail mostly GOP officials at the state, local and federal levels proposing “over 800 discriminatory censorship laws,” with more than 240 of these laws enacted as of November 2023. 

“Over the same period, the United States witnessed almost 6,000 instances of book-banning across 41 states and 247 public school districts,” according to the article.

Mutua points out that the purpose of higher education, and education more generally, is the pursuit of truth; to provide basic information and understanding about the world we live in, who we are, how we come to be where we are; and to research, develop and provide knowledge for the common good. As the AAUP’s 1915 Principles state, the purpose of the university “is to promote inquiry and advance the sum of human knowledge.”

The paper also identifies higher education’s present vulnerability as partially resulting from “the privatization and corporatization of universities.” In short, the paper says, the decline in public funding of universities has left them dependent on private sources, and thus vulnerable to corporate and donor interference, and dependent on student tuition, resulting in dramatically increased student debt.   

Corporatization has also helped restructure the university workforce, the paper says, noting that nationally, the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty positions plummeted from 78% in 1969 to 30% today — with the bulk of teaching left to “unprotected” contingent faculty and graduate students — while the number of full-time university executives and managers grew by 140% between 1976 and 2015.

“An autonomous and independent university functions as a democratic check against authoritarianism,” the paper concludes. “Taking a playbook from dictators across the globe, antidemocratic forces in the United States now aim to erode the safeguards that buffer universities against interference from political ideologues and corporate interests.

“Little more than the future of American democracy depends on it.”