How Authoritarians Target Universities
What happens on campus reflects and often anticipates democratic decline.
Many educators are already hard at work, but my university starts on Tuesday. I am looking forward to meeting my students in my World War Two and Coups: 1900 to the Present seminars. To mark the start of the academic year and honor educators who are working in difficult circumstances, I have updated my 2023 essay on how authoritarians target universities, which sees events here in comparative perspective.
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"Florida could start looking a lot like Hungary," noted New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg in Feb 2023., writing about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's quest to restructure higher education in line with his far-right views. Although many GOP politicians have made pilgrimages to Budapest to proclaim their alignment with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's repressive policies, DeSantis has been arguably the most aggressive adopter of Hungarian-style restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights and attacks on higher education.
The sad sight of all those books discarded by far-right New College employees in a dumpster for being politically “unacceptable” will stay with me a long time, not least because it is similar to what happened to books from public and private libraries during the right-wing Chilean military dictatorship, the Chinese Communist “Cultural Revolution,” and many other regimes.
As the Tampa Bay Times reported, 13,000 books were thrown into a dumpster as though they were trash or toxic waste.
After images of the dumpster circulated, causing a public outcry, New College went into damage control mode. They made a preliminary decision to fire the dean of the college library for not following proper procedures, including justifications for each book selected for elimination. But the New College was just fine with having hundreds of other books discarded as part of a purge of the Gender and Diversity Center!
As the GOP transforms into an autocratic entity allied with foreign far-right parties and governments, it's worth understanding how Orbán and other illiberal leaders target universities. They don't only shut down intellectual freedom and change the content of learning to reinforce their ideological agendas, but also seek to remake higher education institutions into places that reward intolerance, conformism, and other values and behaviors authoritarians require.
Authoritarian Visions of Education: Italy and Chile
The regime of Benito Mussolini (1925-1943) provided the template for right-wing authoritarian actions. Leftists, liberals, and anyone who spoke out against the Fascists were sent to prison or forced into exile. Since most universities were public, professors and researchers were civil servants and could be pressured through bureaucratic means.
First came a 1931 loyalty oath to the King and Fascism, then a 1932 requirement to join the Fascist Party to apply for jobs or promotions. Student informers monitored their peers and their teachers, recording any critical remarks or anti-regime jokes, and new university student organizations inculcated Fascist values through extra-curricular activities
In the Cold War era, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who seized power through a 1973 U.S.-backed coup, claimed that universities were hotbeds of Marxism and targeted them for "cleansing." By 1975 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed (and thousands sent to prison), and philosophy and social science departments had been disbanded.
The junta replaced civilian university rectors with military officials. The Air Force General César Ruiz Danyau announced his arrival as Rector of the University of Chile in Santiago by parachuting onto campus.
To turn Chileans against each other, faculty “prosecutors” handled denunciations of “extremist” colleagues who were imprisoned and tortured if found guilty. Foreign-born professors, now seen as untrustworthy, could be jailed and deported. Placed in a concentration camp on a remote Chilean island, sociology professor Klaus Meschkat felt he was reliving the Nazi regime that he and his parents had fled decades earlier.
Hungary, Model for the GOP and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025
Today’s right-wing autocrats mostly come to power through elections and extinguish freedom slowly. Yet universities continue to be the targets of leaders who seek to eradicate free thinking and turn campuses into sites of informing, mistrust, and fear. Orbán had already started to drive the liberal Central European University out of Hungary when his 2018 re-election accelerated his crackdown on education.
Much of this repression has centered on LGBTQ populations. A 2018 ban on gender studies preceded the 2020 end of legal recognition of transgender and intersex people. In 2021, a law outlawed any depiction or discussion of LGBTQ identities and sexual orientation, and some universities came under the authority of "public trusts" run by Orbán cronies.
Like his fellow far-right strongmen, Orbán aims to discredit and dismantle all liberal and democratic models of education to produce a new authoritarian-friendly population. As someone who grew up under Communism, Orbán knows the power of political socialization. He also knows that universities have always been sites of resistance to authoritarianism (a theme of the resistance chapter of Strongmen).
No wonder his latest measure against education has been dubbed the "vengeance" law. It punishes teachers, staff, and students who have engaged in protests for almost a year against low pay and disappearing intellectual freedoms. Over 15 towns and cities hosted protests in June.
We don’t hear enough about how Orbán has slowly defunded public education, subtracting 16% from its budget over the past decade, and Hungary already has a dire teacher shortage. Privatization and defunding schemes are also pillars of Project 2025 in America.
This new law, which Hungarian opposition politician and European Parliament member Katalin Cseh called "a brutally oppressive tool," places educational policy under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior, which is also in charge of law enforcement. It allows the state to monitor teachers' laptops and videotape their classrooms, and opens the door to working longer hours at the same pay.
No wonder a recent protest in front of Hungarian Parliament spelled out the word "future" in melting ice. Educators and their students see their possibilities vanishing, and thousands of teachers have announced their intention to resign. The goal is to induce self-censorship or, as Cseh puts it, "compliance with a police state apparatus designed to silence them."
If some of this sounds familiar to readers in America, that's not surprising. DeSantis's maneuvers to remake New College as a model of far-right pedagogy take a page from Orbán's crusades. Increasingly, it's not just "make America Florida," as the DeSantis camp advocates, but "make America Hungary" —a goal fellow Orbán fan and former Fox host Tucker Carlson also supported.
Florida House Bill 999, which Goldberg calls "a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom," is a case in point. DeSantis's law builds on American precedent in restricting study choices, curricula, and campus activities (anything that espouses "diversity equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric" is banned). It also shows a debt to Hungarian anti-LGBTQ measures in barring Florida's public colleges and universities from offering gender studies majors or minors.
Watch for higher education professionals to be increasingly attacked as agents of the destruction of family, faith, and decency as GOP politicians compete to seem more extremist and authoritarian —which will bring them even further into line with autocrats such as Orbán.
On that note, “anti-Judeo-Christian values” is now a category of offense for the authoritarian targeting site Professor Watchlist. Checking my page there to see what new outrage I have committed is one of my back-to-school rituals.
Far from being “ivory towers” closed off from society, higher education institutions are often front-line targets of those who seek to destroy democracy. What happens on campus reflects, and often anticipates, transformations of societies as authoritarianism takes hold.
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References:
Jonathan Kanter, “A Wide Anti-Marxist Purge in Chile is Shaking the Universities,” New York Times, November 14, 1973.
Klaus Meschkat in Laurence Birns, ed., The End of Chilean Democracy: an IDOC dossier on the coup and its aftermath (1974), 133-135.
What repression of dissent in the universities does is render society brittle because it becomes unable to change. There is an interesting quote from JD Vance at the end of a Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/31/jd-vance-podcast-feminism-immigration):
“There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”
The trashing of books at New College and the "banning" of "diversity equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric" is bad enough. but the training videos put out by Project 2025 talk about the "eradication" of such words. That's exterminist language, and one might well paraphrase the German poet Heinrich Heine: "Where words are eradicated, eventually they will eradicate people.."
So, we now have a Supreme Court in which the majority subscribes to an ideology that precludes societal change, and the reactionaries now want an educational system that does the same.
Ruth, you and other scholars who are actively opposing this trend are doing the most vital work imaginable.
I congratulate all those in Florida who would struggle against the authoritarian influences there.