The Trump administration is using all the levers of executive power to intervene in universities, including multimillion-dollar cuts, investigations into federal regulation violations, visa withdrawals for international students, and ideological pressures. The outcome of this fight over the purpose of higher education could shape the sector for decades. This reflection essay argues that these attacks have been facilitated by a decade-long loss of public trust in higher education. It addresses two main questions: Why have colleges and universities lost the support of society, and what should they do to restore public trust? The essay argues that this loss of support is driven primarily by rising costs, perceived ideological bias, and questions about degree value. By situating these discussions within scholarship on polarization, populist backlash, and the “diploma divide,” this essay moves beyond causes to explore sector-specific solutions. These include improving educational access, redefining political messaging, demonstrating nonpartisanship, supporting their communities, redefining diversity to include social class, and bridging the cultural divide to protect the university as a democratic institution.
Amid rising concern over a crisis of democracy in the United States, one point of political alignment across the political spectrum stands out: valorization of the family. This is especially striking because it would seem to conflict with the core ethos of the dominant neoliberal political rationality. We propose that both convergence and crisis are fueled by a logic of possessive familialism. Taking up recent feminist, Marxist, and critical analyses of neoliberalism to situate our claim and tracing the genealogy of this thinking to John Locke, we argue that possessive familialism more aptly describes foundational commitments and assumptions of liberal, and now neoliberal, politics. At the core of the governing rationality of our time, the solo, self-sufficient family obscures the realities of human interdependence and fuels capitalist extraction and accumulation. Feeding the fantasy that individuals, families, and polities survive—and even thrive—absent cross-cutting, overlapping nests of social supports, possessive familialism is the linchpin of neoliberal political rationality that starves democratic imagination, culture, and structures, and fuels the current crisis. We identify five elements of possessive familialism; illustrate its operations through several contemporary examples, including the case for marriage equality and the COVID-19 pandemic; and show how it threatens the very conditions of democratic politics in the US.
While the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampments and campus occupations before them have been the objects of significant debate among academics and broader public audiences, the spatialized and radical democratic dimensions of these protests remain undertheorized. This article argues that turning to Henri Lefebvre provides valuable tools for better understanding campus occupations and answering the questions that universities face today. Grounded in Lefebvre's comments about students, knowledge production, and campus life following May 1968, I argue that the university is a key site for demanding, clarifying, and expanding the "right to the city." Extending Lefebvre's analysis through a discussion of the spatial production activities of contemporary elite North American universities, I propose a novel "right to the campus" defined by radical democratization of university governance and use-driven spatial design. Finally, I draw lessons from the 1968 Columbia University occupations before applying the right to the campus to analyze the successes and disappointments of the more recent wave of encampments. Viewed through this framework, campus occupations posit control over university "property" as a mechanism for challenging the undemocratic management and market logic characterizing both campus spaces and university activities off campus.
Israel's war on Gaza has prompted a wave of protests against human rights violations that has spread across most European countries. As universities have become arenas of contestation, there has been an increase in forms of repression of academic freedom and of political rights within academia. Our systematic, case-oriented analysis of an original database enables us to identify specific repertoires of repression employed by different institutions, as well as the characteristics of the targeted academics. By comparing Germany and the United States as case studies of high and increasing levels of repression-albeit characterized by differing systems of higher education and conceptions of academic freedom-we analyze the strategies used by these actors and how they interact. In this article, we focus on the mechanisms through which repression has been promoted, anchored in a resignification of antisemitism that treats it as distinct from racism and accords it a special status in the defense of Western civilization. We use the concept of moral panic to analyze the construction of a narrative that portrays a specific challenge to society's fundamental values, which has resulted in the scapegoating of the Left and migrants. We also identify the main moral panic entrepreneurs responsible for the creation of this environment both within and outside universities.
We use economic experiments to study a fundamental question in political economy: Do voters understand the benefits of taxes? Participants play an economic game as members of a virtual society composed of computer players. In each round, the players earn low or high income, see the distribution of income, and then vote for low or high taxes. We test whether participants vote rationally for high taxes when poor and low taxes when rich, following a classic model in political economy, or whether they focus on the burden of taxes more than the benefits. Across three experiments, poor players voted against high taxes 30% to 50% of the time, and they were more opposed when the same policy was labeled "taxes" than when it was labeled "sharing." In Experiment 2, Singaporean participants opposed taxes at about the same rate as those of Americans in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, participants' opposition to taxes persisted when they received low income every round. These results support the burden hypothesis: voters focus more on the burden of paying taxes than on the benefits they provide. We reflect on what the results imply for the politics of taxes.
