The Higher Education Inquirer is conducting an extensive investigation of the reemergence of fascism in US higher education. The examination aims to: define and operationalize the concept of fascism, investigate the roots of American fascism since the 17th century, and chronicle the most important cases of fascism in US higher education today. As part of a democratic process, we ask readers to be involved in the research and writing of this project.
Reader Input
Additions and corrections will be made with input from readers of the Higher Education Inquirer. Please add your comments in the section at the bottom. For those who wish to remain anonymous, you can provide feedback by emailing me at dahnshaulis@gmail.com.
Definition(s) of Fascism(s)
The word fascism has been used by politicians and American writers on the Left and Right for generations. It may not be possible to create a consensus of what fascism is, or how it appears in US society. This space is likely to be edited as more comments are received.
*Laurence W. Britt, the author of Fascism Anyone, described 14 elements of fascism here.
*Italian historian Umberto Eco described 14 elements of fascism here.
*Yale professor Jason Stanley explains "How Fascism Works" here.
Origins of Fascism in US Higher Education
US higher education was founded on the taking of land from indigenous people, and oppressing people of color for four centuries. Enslaved Africans and their descendants were part of the origin and continuation of elite American schools for two hundred years. White, Protestant, males from elite backgrounds had most of the higher educational opportunities--and the names of robber barons and tobacco magnates (Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Duke) became part of the elite pantheon. Thorstein Veblen and Upton Sinclair provided a great deal of information on this.
While there has been more democracy at times, people of color, women, and working-class folks have been excluded or discriminated against for all of US history. The federal government (Department of Defense, CIA) and US corporations (particularly federal contractors) have also held great importance in the direction of higher education, servicing their most oppressive anti-democratic, colonial elements.
In the 21st century, historians Craig Steven Wilder and others dug up the white supremacist roots of elite universities. In a zero-sum game, historically privileged groups and individuals may also feel aggrieved and oppressed when others succeed or are placed ahead of them in line.
Propagation of Fascism in 2022 (Contemporary Examples in No Particular Order)
This section will evolve with the help of reader comments. Here are some preliminary examples of varying importance:
Role in Mass Surveillance
"Savage Inequalities" in the K-12 Pipeline
Hunger, poverty, prostitution, and drug sales among college students
Sexual assault of college students
Anti-intellectualism in America
Rise of Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA, Turning Point Action, and Students for Trump
Turning Point USA's Professor Watchlist
Police State and Strong Military Supported
Use of Propaganda and Disinformation to Oppress "Minorities" and Empower Big Corporations
Predatory Marketing and Advertising
Legalization of Hate Speech in US Higher Education
Book Burning and Censorship in US Society
Role of Corporate Power in Higher Education (e.g. Boards, Endowments, Contracts)
Role of Elite Families in Higher Education (e.g. Walton Family Foundation, Koch Brothers)
Land Theft Through Gentrification and College Expansion
Tax Avoidance by Elite Schools to Rob Public Coffers
Colleges Colluding to Limit Financial Aid
Role of Higher Education in Educating Reactionary Judges and Politicians
State-Sponsored Think Tanks to Support Elites and Oppress Others (e.g. Liberty Institute at University of Texas)
Bomb Threats Against Historically Black Colleges and Universities
End of Affirmative Action for African Americans but Continued Use of Legacies
Reduction of Needs Based Grants and Scholarships
Management Corruption, Robocolleges, and the Loss of Labor Power in US Higher Education
Expenditure of Elite Endowment Funds to Fund Anti-Democratic Organizations
Role of NCAA Football in Promoting Oppressive Values (No Wages, Poor Safety, Sports Gambling)
Role of US Universities in Supporting Human Rights Violators (e.g. Russia, People's Republic of China)
Role of US Universities in Undermining Foreign Efforts in Democratization
Use of "Credentials" as a Legal Form of Discrimination
Non-Disclosure Agreements
Anti-Union Efforts in Higher Education
Student Loan Peonage, Declining Social Mobility, and the "Educated Underclass"
Related link: US Higher Education and the Intellectualization of White Supremacy
Related link: UT Austin President Eats Cake in a Pandemic (Austin Longhorn*)
Related link: Coursera IPO Reveals Bleak Future For Global Labor
Related link: Guild Education: Enablers of Anti-Union Corporations and Subprime College Programs
Related link: Maximus, Student Loan Debt, and the Poverty Industrial Complex
Related link: Community Colleges at the Heart of College Meltdown
Related link: The Tragedy of Human Capital Theory in Higher Education (Glen McGhee*)
Related link: Higher Education Inquirer: The Growth of "RoboColleges" and "Robostudents"
Related link: SLABS: The Soylent Green of US Higher Education
Dahn Shaulis
Higher Education Inquirer
Credentialism is making an opening for Fascism because
ReplyDeleteCredentials have become the newest form of class domination.
When progressives argue "college for all" they are espousing the hegemonic superiority of one group over another.
Eventually those being dominated at the bottom will rebel. Credentialism -- aka College Mania -- is making an opening for fascism. Although the dynamic of this conflict has not been recognized by scholars, populist politicians regularly make it part of their campaign plans.
Public policy is blind to the fact that improving upward mobility only exacerbates downward mobility for the rest. This is why one highly successful populist once said, "I love the uneducated.
Repressed workers have nothing to lose by embracing "strong" leaders that recognize their plight.
Glen, so how do we put a stop to this hyper-credentialism and College Mania? It seems like it has only gotten worse as good jobs have become scarcer.
DeleteWhat you describe is important but it is not fascism. Class domination is not fascism. It is class domination.
DeleteTo understand how fascism works in the university setting one can look at Germany.
"The “Code of Academic Freedom,” published by the University of Hamburg in March this year, does not defend the freedom of the democratic exchange of ideas, but instead promotes a modern form of Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity) at Germany’s universities. While the federal government is giving COVID-19 free rein, spending billions on rearming and sending tanks to Ukraine in the war against Russia, student protest against war research and right-wing ideology is to be suppressed with police violence."
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/11/ufpq-o11.html
This is fascism in higher education.
"German government defends right-wing extremist Professor Jörg Baberowski
Johannes Stern@JSternWSWS
5 June 2019
In an official statement, the German government has backed the far-right Humboldt University Professor Jörg Baberowski and his colleague Herfried Münkler.
In a statement on the 70th anniversary of the “Basic Law” (as Germany’s post-World War II constitution is called), which was published on the official website of the federal ministry of education and research and which appeared in several newspapers, Science Minister Anja Karliczek (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) writes, “In Germany, the freedom of scholarship is a fundamental right. It goes hand in hand with freedom of expression [...] This also includes the imposition of other opinions. Opinions like those of Professor Münkler and Professor Baberowski from Berlin [...] who were attacked.”
The “opinions” of the professors, which should now be regarded as “reasonable” according to the federal government, are well known. Following the death of his role model Ernst Nolte, Baberowski, Professor of Eastern European History at Humboldt University, is the most well-known Nazi apologist among German historians.
”Hitler was not a psychopath, he was not vicious. He did not want to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table,” he declared in 2014 in Germany’s major newsweekly Der Spiegel. His “scholarly” writings are also marked by a trivialisation of Nazism and the crimes of the Third Reich.
Meanwhile, a best-seller has revealed that Baberowski's revisionist history goes hand in hand with the far-right agenda he prosecutes politically. The book by Die Zeit authors Christian Fuchs and Paul Middelhoff, “The Network of the New Right”, identifies Baberowski as the initiator of a right-wing discussion group, which includes, in addition to the social democratic racist Thilo Sarrazin, far-right journalists such as Dieter Stein (Junge Freiheit), Karlheinz Weißmann (Cato) and Frank Böckelmann (tumult)."
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/06/05/babe-j05.html
And it all takes place within the former fascist Germany.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/23/berl-j23.html
I wish to make one other small contribution to this subject.
DeleteFor those who wish to understand fascism I would recommend reading the fascists themselves.
“Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.”
Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze:Vallecchi Editore. (p.15)
Autocracy and monarchy are not fascism.
Fascism is both an economic and social concept.
George Seldes probably did the best work on fascism in his writings during the last century.
As an independent journalist he wrote Fascists and Facts, among many others.
Without a clear definition of fascism it is impossible to apply the word, though appealing nonetheless.
I would also advise people to check out:
https://politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corporate-state
One might begin with Aldous Huxley, a MI6 spy, as was Orwell.
Huxley, like his contemporaries in universities in Britian and London was a techno fascist and this is very different than ethno national fascism.
“There will be in the next generation or so a method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
– Aldous Huxley, From a speech for the Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
Lest we forget history of ethno-nationalist white settler fascism:
“In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion.
The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none.
As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among those unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated.”
― Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
Read or listen to fascists for a clear definition of both technocratic fascism, like Gates or the Rainbow fascism of Biden and ethno nationalist white settler fascism.
They are different.
They often intertwine.
But fascism is a product of capitalism.
I am so impressed with this site and find it so necessary to continue and expand the debate as to fascism, its implications, its history and the sordid forms it takes within academia and without that I thought to comment.
ReplyDeletePlease assure that colleagues in academia and even friends and family receive this important new site. Register and tell your friends to follow/subscribe.
Please submit your ideas and develop the site so that it might become a part of educational debate, both as to curriculum, testing, anti-racist education, standards as well as educational and social socio/economic policy.
The years that we will see emerging will indeed force the necessity for thinking about fascism.
Fascism is a managerial plan for failed capitalism.
Lest we forget history:
“In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among those unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated.”
― Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
Maricata, thank you for the wisdom, guidance, and encouragement. Much of this analysis comes from our conversations over the years. The Higher Education Inquirer needs more readers, writers, and contributors. Have had some very good ones so far...
DeleteAmericans erroneously believe that universities are the guardians of democracy, equality, and free inquiry. But in fact, they have always been subject to the prejudices of the day.
ReplyDeleteIn the 1980s, for example, universities refused to recognize gay student groups until the federal courts ruled against them. In the late 19th century, Harvard Law School refused to admit any student who graduated from a Catholic college.
In the late 19th and 20th centuries, American university leaders espoused eugenics, pure racism. Thomas Leanord's excellent book, Illiberal Reformers, tells the story of racial and ethnic bigotry by American intellectuals, including the president of Stanford University.
My point is this: American universities are descending into fascism because the academic community is primarily made up of moral cowards who will espouse the popular prejudices of the day.
Richard, you are right about the existence of oppression in US higher education. One of the problems for older (white, male) citizens like me is that we often had greater expectations for the higher education system. We believed higher education was a good thing and would lead to more social justice and greater social mobility. Of course, that was happening while some very questionable things were going on in classrooms, Board rooms, locker rooms, and fraternities.
DeleteExactly. The university has always, in the US, been the seat of fascism of one sort or the other. From eugenics to cybernetics from teaching the superiority of American 'ideals' (which are fascist) we can see the university as a prime mover in developing fascist ideas.
DeleteSee the Mises Institute for more.
Here is a documentary warning of fascism from 1947.
But it is controlled or was controlled opposition for the US was already fascist by 1947.
Henry Wallace tried to warn us:
“The Danger of American Fascism,” Henry Wallace (1944)
Henry Wallace was FDR’s vice president from 1941-1945; conservative party leaders defeated his re-nomination bid in 1944, replacing him on the Democratic ticket with
Harry S. Truman. Wallace would later unsuccessfully challenge Truman in the 1948 election.
According to Wallace, what is an American fascist, and what danger do they pose?
https://www.cbsd.org/cms/lib/PA01916442/Centricity/Domain/1864/Henry%20Wallace_The%20Danger%20of%20American%20Fascism.pdf
The documentary warning of fascism in 1947
ReplyDeletehttps://www.uncensored.tube/2021/08/the-current-state-of-our-reality/