Photo: Harvard Yard of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., in February 2022 (Left-to right) Widener Library, Weld, University, Thayer, Memorial Church, Sever, Emerson, Widener Library, by Sdkb, Wikimedia
Closed-door committees are forming to investigate whether public universities in North Carolina have fully eliminated diversity practices. Campuses in Utah are being held to neutrality pledges. Accreditation is changing across the Southeast as university systems join a new state-run scheme spearheaded by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. A major political struggle is being waged on university campuses, and faculty are struggling to keep up.
Higher education has been in the news regularly since the emergence of mass pro-Palestine protests on campuses after October 7, 2023, but much of the coverage has been dominated by the likes of elite private schools such as Harvard and Columbia. Right-wing attacks, however, have rocked campuses across the country, escalating with the Trump administration’s executive orders banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. These orders have been followed by Department of Justice or Department of Education investigations into whether there are any lingering practices of inclusivity. The playbook has been used at institution after institution as a form of pressure to withhold funds and secure concessions.
Attacks from the Trump administration are an acceleration of a situation that many campuses were already facing: Under pressure from state legislatures, campus leadership, or both, university faculty have been confronting a crisis created by deepening austerity regimes for decades. Now these crises are being supercharged by the federal government’s anti-intellectualism and hunger for authoritarian control.
Faculty are scrambling to meet these challenges head-on, planning teach-ins, recruiting members for unionization drives, and organizing lobbying days at the state legislature, all as new threats seemingly crop up by the day. Universities are not just a bastion of highly educated professionals; at their best, they’re a public good, offering opportunities for intellectual growth to the community, making scientific breakthroughs, and sharing technical expertise in local problems.
“Everybody in the state has a stake in how our universities fare, because it’s such a big part of who we are as farmers and researchers and biomedical researchers and people who work in the humanities and writers,” says Belle Boggs, professor of English at North Carolina State University and president of the North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
