A dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities: ICE agents are snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight; student visas are being revoked en masse overnight; funding cuts and freezes are upending countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure; students are being expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An all-out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by law enforcement, internet vigilantes, and even university administrators. Today’s climate of repression recalls that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist Red Scare in the 1950s, but leading scholars of McCarthyism and political repression say that the attacks on higher education, free speech, and political repression we’re seeing today are “worse” and “much broader.”
In this installment of The Real News Network podcast, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of scholars about the Trump administration’s authoritarian war on higher education in America, the historical roots of the attacks we’re seeing play out today, and what lessons we can draw from history about how to fight them. Panelists include:
- Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American higher education, and a member of the American Association of University Professors national committee on academic freedom and tenure. Schrecker is the author and co-editor of numerous books, including: The Right To Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom; The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s; No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; and Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
- David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, host of the podcast Speaking Out of Place, and author of several books, including: Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back; The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age; and Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier
- Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Wald is an editor of Against the Current and Science & Society, he serves as a member of the academic council of Jewish Voice for Peace, and he is the author of a trilogy of books from the University of North Carolina Press: Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left; Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade; and American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News and it’s so great to have you all with us. Higher education looks very different today than it did when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and then an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education during the first Trump administration just a few short years ago. As you have heard from the harrowing interviews that we’ve published at the Real News interviews with faculty members, graduate students and union representatives, a dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities under the second Trump administration fear of ice agents snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight student visas revoked on mass overnight funding cuts that have upended countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure, self-censorship online and in the classroom, students expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, an all out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by police, internet vigilantes and even university administrators.
Now, when you go digging into the darker parts of American history to find comparisons to the bleak situation we find ourselves in now, one of the obvious periods that stands out is that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist red scare in the 1950s. In her canonical book, no Ivory Tower McCarthyism and the universities historian Ellen Schreker writes the following, the academy’s enforcement of McCarthyism had silenced an entire generation of radical intellectuals and snuffed out all meaningful opposition to the official version of the Cold War. When by the late fifties the hearings and dismissals tapered off. It was not because they encountered resistance, but because they were no longer necessary, all was quiet on the academic front. In another era, perhaps Schreker also writes, the academy might not have cooperated so readily, but the 1950s was the period when the nation’s, colleges and universities were becoming increasingly dependent upon and responsive toward the federal government, the academic communities collaboration with McCarthyism was part of that process.
My friends, we now find ourselves in another era and we are going to find out if colleges and universities will take the path they didn’t travel in the 1950s or if we’re going to continue down the horrifying path that we are currently on. Today we’re going to talk about the Trump administration’s authoritarian war on an effort to remake higher education in America, the historical roots of the attacks that we’re seeing play out today and what lessons we can draw from history about how to fight it to help us navigate this hairy terrain. I am truly honored to be joined by three esteemed guests. First, we are joined by Ellen Schreker herself. Professor Schreker is a historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American Higher Education, and she’s a member of the American Association of University Professors National Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
She’s the author of numerous irreplaceable books including her most recent work, which she co-edited called The Right to Learn, resisting the Right Wing Attack on Academic Freedom and other Titles Like The Lost Promise American Universities in the 1960s, no Ivory Tower McCarthyism and the Universities, and many are the Crimes McCarthyism in America. We are also joined by Professor David Plumal Liu Louise Hewlett Nixon professor in comparative literature at Stanford University. David is the author of several books including his most recent one, speaking out of Place, getting Our Political Voices Back. He is also the host of the podcast speaking out of place which everyone should listen to. And lastly, we are joined by Professor Alan Walt. Alan is an editor of Against the Current and Science and Society. He’s the h Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan.
Wald is the author of a vital trilogy of books from the University of North Carolina press about writers and communism in the United States, and he serves as a member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and full disclosure here, I myself am a former student of Allen’s, but he really kicked my butt in grad school, so trust me when I say I don’t think you guys have to worry about any special treatment here. David Ellen Allen, thank you all so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. I truly appreciate it and I wanted to just kind of dive right in and ask if we could go around the table and start where we are here and now from your vantage points, how would you describe and assess what’s happening to higher education in America right now? Would you describe this as fascism, McCarthyism, an authoritarian takeover or something else? And does it even matter what we call it at this point?
Ellen Schrecker:
We can call it all of the above and then some or as my favorite sign at the first really big demonstration I was at I guess about two weeks ago, make dystopia fiction again. That’s where we are, and I used to get all sort of into, was it McCarthyism? Of course, it’s not just one man, it’s not even just Trump, although he seems to have a sort of lock on authoritarianism of a certain what shall we say, manic type. But it’s the difference between what I’ve been studying for the past 40 years, I guess if not longer, is that now everything is at play during the McCarthy period, and I do use the term McCarthyism just because it’s sort of specifically located in the anti-communist red scare of the Early Cold War. We could call it the home front of the Cold War if you wanted, just focused on individual communists, their past, their refusal to collaborate with that iteration of political oppression. And today it’s much broader. What the Trump administration is doing is focusing completely on everything that has to do with higher education as well as pretty much everything that has to do with everything else. I mean, this administration is worse than anything I’ve ever seen as a historian or studied. The closest that it comes to really is the rollback of the Civil War, the rollback against reconstruction when people were being shot by the dozens, and we haven’t gotten that blood thirsty, but I’m scared to death.
Alan Wald:
There are two points that I want to make. First of all, as Ellen very effectively pointed out, we’re now in this kind of broad spectrum crisis every single day, everything’s happening all at once. It’s hard to get a fix on what the most important thing to me from my perspective and my experience, you can’t lose sight of what precipitated the current situation. Would it begin, and I referred to it as the antisemitism scare. It’s an obvious comparison to the red skin, but there’s a pretext for what’s going on today, and that started several a while back like October, 2023. That’s when the real assault on student rights and academic freedom began and was started under the Biden Harris administration that is Democrats as well as Republicans. They targeted pro-Palestinian speech in action with this exaggerated claim. They were claiming that there was an epidemic of antisemitism rampant on the campuses.
You hear those two terms over and over epidemic rampant, and they said it was an epidemic that was endangering the safety of Jewish students. Of course, Jewish students were in the vanguard. Now we’re not talking about a small number of real anti-Semitic acts. Those could have occurred if there were real anti-Semitic acts I’m against. I want to oppose ’em if we can accurately identify them. But what was happening was this kind of bonkers exaggeration, a conflation of militant anti-Israel and anti-Zionist critique, which it can be vulgar or sometimes simplistic and sometimes not very helpful, but it’s not antisemitism. And it became a kind of smokescreen anti antisemitism now that Trump administration is using to attack all these other things because it worked. I mean, for a while they were trying to use critical race theory and so on, but this antisemitism and for various reasons we can discuss that was a better smear.
Now the other question you raised that I’ll try to tackle briefly is just this, is it fascism? I’ve been in study groups where we go back and forth about this. Are we talking about fascism as a rigorous theoretical economic concept or is this fascism thing and a rhetorical advice because we want to sound the alarm or is it just an epithet? Everybody’s a fascist. Reagan was a fascist, Johnson was a Goldwater, everybody. And what does it mean if you call somebody a fascist? What does that imply in terms of your action? Joe Biden did not do any great favors when he called Trump a fascist. Then he smiles and hands the guy, the keys to the White House. Is that what you do when there’s real fascism? Some people would say that that kind of obscures the situation. So we have to be careful about these terms.
I don’t think rhetorical overkill will help things. But on the other hand, there is the resemblance to classical fascism and what’s going on in terms of a mass movement right wing, the usurp of political powers and so on. At the same time as I understand that there is a fascist aspect, this, and maybe it’s a kind of new fascism post fascism on the edge of fascism, probably it’s more like or band’s dictatorship over Hungary where he used economic coercion to undermine the universities, undermine the press, undermine everything. But one thing about this fascism cry, if we go back to McCarthyism, and Ellen knows this better than I do, they left and especially the communist movement said that was fascism. They said it was one minute to midnight and the communists, they did what you do when you think it’s fascism. They sent a layer of people underground.
They sent a whole leadership underground because that’s what you do when you’re facing fascism. And it looked bad. 1954, they had executed the Rosenbergs, they had the leadership of the party and a lot of the secondary leadership were in prison. Lots of people were being fired, terrible things were going on. And yet in 1955 in December, in the deep South, which is where things were much worse, the Montgomery bus boycott occurred under fascism supposedly September 19, I mean December, 1955. And in September 57, the Little Rock nine stood up and went to a school and faced down a mob and so on. And in 1960, the sit-in movement began. This is just shortly after we supposedly had fascism, and then of course 1961 of Freedom Rides 1964, the Berkeley free spoof free speech. We know this because some of us, we lived through all that. So if that had really been fascism as people were saying, then why did it disappear in this matter? And it was just a small number of people at first who fought against it. So we have to be careful about using that term fascism. I think it’s good to look at the comparison and gird ourselves, but we shouldn’t get too hysterical and think all us lost start leaving the country like certain professors at Yale have done. We have to gird ourselves through a tough fight. And there are a lot of ways we could wage this fight, which I’m sure we’ll get into in a future discussion.
David Palumbo-Liu:
Yeah, I mean, I would just say in terms of fascism, we think we can all agree to bracket it and refer to it because there are certainly fascistic elements in it. And the classic definition, or one classic definition, I suppose there are lots, a fascism is the collusion of the business in political classes. And you can see that precisely in Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, the intense privatization of everything in education, not just education, but any kind of public good. That’s the primary aim that Musk is driving for. And for Bannon, its immigrants. I mean, it’s a very racialized attack, feeding off America’s pretty natural racism and the attacks on brown and black people. And I’m thinking, I’m here for the list of, I’m here as a substitute, a last minute substitute for Cherise Bird and Stelli, and I urge everybody to read her book Black Scare Red Scare because she puts these two facets together historically beautifully.
But I think that’s this powerful conversions of these two things. And when it comes to universities, the fact that they’re attacking the funding, which is public funding, is emblematic of what we’re up against. And so that’s where I think I would like to respond to the fashion what we’re up against. It is massive. The other thing I would add simply because I’m here in Silicon Valley is techno fascism. We are dealing with an entirely different mediascape. So thank God for the Real News Network. It is all US alternative media. It is an incredibly important instrument in the fight against the mainstream media and Trump’s absolute mastery of playing that. So I think we have to understand the technological changes that have occurred to make the battle both more challenging, but also offer us different kinds of instruments.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, there’s so much to think about in just these opening responses from you all, and I want to dig deeper into the historical roots of this moment. But before I do, I just wanted to go back around the table really quick and ask if you guys could just tell us a little bit about what this looks like from your vantage point. What are you and your colleagues, your students, your former students feeling right now? I mean, David, we had you on during the student encampment movement last year, Alan, I was organizing in Ann Arbor during the last Trump administration. Things have, the vibe has shifted as my generation says. So can you tell us a little bit of just what this all looks like from your sides of the academy right now?
Ellen Schrecker:
I’ve been retired now for, I think it’s 12 years. And so my normal was a campus that is very different from all other campuses in the United States. It’s an orthodox Jewish institution whose sort of cultural, what shall we say, politics is that of the Zionist, right? So I could not do any organizing on my campus, not because I was afraid of being fired or anything like that, but I just never would’ve had any students in my classes. So that was that. But what I’m seeing now is absolutely amazing. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, they are really out for blood, but on the same time, the pushback is amazing. During McCarthyism, there was no student activity whatsoever, or if there was, it was secret. And I think there was some, and it was secret. And then all of a sudden the civil rights movement sort of burst into full flower.
And there was a realization, I mean I do agree with Alan on this, that the civil rights movement ended McCarthyism, no question about it. All of a sudden the political establishment had to deal with real problems, not fake communist subversion. So hopefully the moment will shift and people will begin to think about civil liberties and constitutional freedom and free speech just like the good old days of the 1950s. But it’s still very, very scary and it shows you that we are living and have been living longer than we knew with a very powerful state. And I think I’ll leave it there
Alan Wald:
In regard to anti-Zionist activity, it’s kind of an amazing development. I came to University of Michigan in 1975. I was involved then in the Palestine Human Rights Committee, all three of us. And it was a terrible struggle. We couldn’t even get Noam Chomsky permission to speak on the campus when sponsored by departments. We had to use other means and so on. So to see a massive, relatively large anti-Zionist movement is inspiring and it is fed by a new generation of Jews that is unlike my generation. There was a generation of young people who were thoroughly indoctrinated in Zionism after the 67 war throughout the late last century whose eyes were opened mostly by operation cast led and the events in Gaza in the early 20th century. And now they’re angry that they were lied to and they’re kind of the backbone. I mean, of course there are Palestinians and other students involved, but an important element are Jewish students who realized that they were deceived about what’s going on in the Middle East.
So that’s good. There’s also a big upsurge of faculty activism in areas not seen before. As Ellen has documented, the a UP was not very nice during the 1950s. It kind of disappeared. A UP is terrific today. I mean, I dunno might have something to do with the departure of Kerry Nelson, but the new president is wonderful and the chapter here is vital and vibrant. And also the faculty senate at University of Michigan, which was pretty dormant during my time of activist politics, is now playing a terrific role, has a terrific leadership, but it’s not much around Palestine, I have to say. That’s why I’m worried about that issue getting pushed aside. They’re very upset about what happened with DEI, diversity and equity and inclusion here at University of Michigan because just overnight without any real threat from the government, they just dropped it and pretty much forced out the director who’s now moving on to another position.
And so people are upset about that issue and the procedure used and they’re upset about the other threats, although we haven’t actually had the removal of faculty from programs like they did at Harvard’s one. But the Palestine issue is not that central. And some of the things related to it, like the new excessive surveillance, which I guess Maximilian didn’t experience, but there are cameras everywhere now on campus. I mean, you can’t do a thing without being photographed. People are upset about that. Those kinds of issues are mobilizing people, but I am worried about somebody being put under the bus and a compromise being made around Palestine rights and Palestine speech.
David Palumbo-Liu:
I’m going to take the liberty of answering the question in rather a fuller form because I might have to leave. So I want to get some of these points and sort of picks up on what Alan said. But to answer your question directly, max, how is it like at Stanford? Well, the Harvard statement gave everybody a shot of courage and it was great. I fully support it. However, I find it very deficient in all sorts of ways, even while admiring it. I’ll tell you a short anecdote to illustrate what I’m talking about. We had a focus group in the faculty senate and I was sitting next to this person from the med school and she said, well, yes, it’s horrible. Everybody’s talking about their grants being taken away. That’s the real surgeons of a lot of faculty activities. My grants have been taken away, so she said five of my grants were taken away, but two got replaced after I went through this application process.
So maybe that’s the new norm. And I said, well, only in baseball is batting 400 a good thing. And she said, well, I’m in ear, nose, throat, whatever. Thank God I’m not in gynecology or obstetrics. Then I’d really be in my grants. And I said, well, I teach race and ethnicity. What are you going to say about me not even be able to give a class much less? So I said to her, think of this as structural, not particular. It’s a structural attempt to take over, not just the university, but everything public. And that’s something I think we really need to drive home to folks, is that unless we see all these struggles interconnected, and that’s one of the big problems with the university is it’s not that we’re woke, it’s that we’re removed. We are not connected to human beings anymore. We’re connected to our, too much of us and our ones are connected to research.
And Ellen mentioned Jennifer Ruth, who’s a strong ally of mine. The day of action was amazing. This was a national day of action that was put on by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education. And it combined not only labor unions, but K through 12. And it had a vision of what we could do that far exceeded the, I will say it, selfishness of some of our elite colleagues in our elite schools who are just there to keep the money rolling. All they want is to reset the clock before Trump sort of mythical time that things were fine, but it was fine for them. And if they don’t understand exactly what Alan said and what we all think, if we can’t protect the most vulnerable of us, then we are leaving a gaping hole in the structure so that protect all of us. And so we can’t throw Palestinians, immigrants, undocumented folks, queer throat folks to the machine saying, well, we will appease you with these things and this is what happens under fascism. So I really want to encourage people to look, check out khi, check out the new reinvigorated a UP, thank God that it has partnered with a FT. These are the kinds of things that I think, if not save us, at least give us a sense of comradeship that we are doing something together that can be productive at whatever scale.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to go back around the table and hopefully we can get back to you, David, before you have to hop off for your next class. But we already started getting into this in the first round of questions, but I wanted to go a bit deeper and ask, when it comes to the state and non-state actors converging to attack the institutions and the very foundations of higher education, what historical precedents would you compare our current moment to, right? I mean, it doesn’t have to just be McCarthyism, but even if it is, what aspects of McCarthyism or what other periods do you want to point listeners to? And also what historical antecedents have laid the groundwork for the current assault on higher ed? So Ellen, let’s start again with you and go back around the table.
Ellen Schrecker:
Okay, well, the main thing about McCarthyism, which is sort of a classic case of collaboration of mainstream institutions with official red baiters at the time, now it’s official, what is it? Defenders of the Jews, thank you very much. It’s that collaboration. McCarthyism did it very cleverly. I don’t think they intended it, but they had sort of McCarthy as their straw man. He was up there, he was a drunk, he was out of control. He was making charges against innocent people. And so they would say, oh, McCarthyism is dreadful. And then fire three tenured professors, and we are seeing that, or we were up until, if you can believe it, Harvard, I have three Harvard degrees. I want you to know, and I thought I loved every minute of it and thought I got such a lousy education. You can’t believe it. But that’s beside the point. That’s not what you go to school for anyhow. You go to school to stay out of the job market as long as you possibly can. But anyhow, what we saw throughout McCarthyism throughout the 1960s, throughout going way back to the beginning of the 20th century, is that your private institutions are collaborating with the forces of what will be called political repression.
Political repression would not succeed in the United States without the collaboration of mainstream establishment institutions, the corporations. I’ve been starting to have bad dreams about Jamie Diamond Dimon the head of Citi Corp that he’s coming after me next and they’re going to close out my credit cards and there I’ll be standing in line in the homeless areas. But what we’re seeing is and have been seeing and is the American form of political repression, is that collaboration between mainstream institutions, including the mainstream media, Hollywood certainly going along with depriving the American population of access to information they need. I mean, that’s one of our functions as a force for resistance is to give people the intellectual ammunition to fight back. And I think everybody else here would probably agree.
Alan Wald:
My view is that in the 20th century there’s always been this collaboration, but it had a lot to do with foreign policy. As I remember the World War I period when they fired professors from Columbia and other colleges is because they were anti-war against the first World war. And during the Little Red Scare, 1939 or 41, it was because of the hit Hitler Stalin pack to the beginning of World War I and so on, which the communists were opposed to US intervention and the allies and so on. Then during the McCarthy period, again, it was reinforcing US foreign policy in the Cold War and during the Vietnam period when professors were fired, Bruce Franklin and other people were persecuted. Again, it was US foreign policy and now today around the assault on Gaza and support of the Israeli state, and again, it’s US foreign policy. So I see that as a very consistent factor and at every stage, community groups, businesses, and eventually the universities found some way to collaborate in a process even in the red skier, which I think is the most obvious comparison.
The government didn’t do the well, government fired it. It had its own subversive investigation in the government, and they fired a lot of people and forced a lot of people to quietly resign. That’s very similar to the situation today. But in terms of the faculty and other places, they counted on the universities to do the firing. They didn’t send many people to jail. They sent Chandler Davis to jail because of the contempt of Congress, but the others were fired by the university and the public schools and businesses blacklisted them and so on. So there was this kind of collaboration that went all the way. And of course they counted on the private sector to jump in certain areas and do their dirty work. All those are red channels. Those were private investigators. That wasn’t the government. The government may have fed them names, but today of course, we have Canary mission and we have other organizations that blacklist people and publicize their names and so on. And of course we have these massive email campaigns against universities having speakers like Maura Stein, if she goes to speak somewhere about being fired, thousands of emails will suddenly appear and they’ll try to cancel or some way change the venue of her speaking and so on. So this kind of pattern of interventions is pretty much consistent and it pretty consistently involves the state working with universities and businesses.
David Palumbo-Liu:
Yeah. Well, I think that you asked be at the beginning where you asked us all what’s going on campuses and what’s really striking a lot of fear of course is ice. And I think back to the Palmer raids, the Palmer raids, which were sort of the beginning of the justice Department acting as criminals and the whole idea of during the red summer, for example, and Max, this whole stop cop city, the Rico case being pressed against the protestors, right? This imaginary notion that they were all conniving together like mafia when the actual mafia is in the White House itself. So I think the whole capture of the Justice Department by the fascist state is what’s going to be one of the most formidable things because, and we’re pressing our universities, there are laws about where ice can go and where not, but they’re turning. They’re not making any public statements.
Some universities are giving sort of surreptitious, covert good legal advice to people who are getting their measles roped. But this is what’s appalling to me. No university leaders are really coming out and saying, no, dad, God damnit, this is illegal. I mean, they’re not speaking truth, and that’s what makes the whole enterprise shaky and vulnerable to assault. The more you push back, the Japanese called it, well with the trade wars, it’s extortion. You don’t pay an extortionist. Columbia tried it and failed miserably, and yet other are lining up saying, well, maybe in our case it’ll be different. And that’s sort of the definition of crazy when you keep on doing the same thing expecting a different result.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and that takes my mind to the antecedent question, right? Because we’ve mentioned the new leadership of the American Association of University professors. I myself just interviewed President Todd Wolfson on our podcast working people, and he talked about this, how the decades long process of corporatization and neoliberal about which you have all written, and Ellen’s written an entire book about this subject, multiple books in fact. But Todd pointed to how that process over the past four decades has contributed to making universities uniquely vulnerable to the kinds of attacks that they’re facing now, which is a bit different from the situation described in Ellen’s book about McCarthyism and higher education that I quoted in the introduction where Ellen, you mentioned that in the fifties this was a period where colleges and universities were becoming more dependent on the federal government, and so they were more vulnerable to the top down like power moves of the federal government at that time. So I just wanted to ask what that looks like now in the year of our Lord 2025 when I ask about antecedents. What are the sort of changes to the very structure of higher education that have led to universities capitulating to the Trump administration, like David was just saying, or not defending their students, not defending academic freedom as vigorously as we would expect them to?
Ellen Schrecker:
Well, we could start with the backlash against the student movement of the sixties, which was orchestrated in large part by certain right wing groups, within groups of billionaires and right-wing think tanks and groups of libertarian, sort of pundit types that are now becoming fairly well known within the academic community before they were operating secretly. Now, they can’t quite keep everything secret because a lot of smart people have been writing about this, and especially the key work here that I always push is Nancy McLean’s book Democracy and Chains, which really sort of chronicles the rise of these right wings, think tanks that are creating scenarios for how you take over a university and destroy it. And also of course, how you take over a legal system and destroy it and how you take over a political system and destroy it often through the use of hundreds of millions of dollars.
I mean, we are talking about very big rich people, many of them, shall we say in the oil industry. I mean, they’re protecting their interests and they’re doing a very good job of that. I have the feeling that Elon Musk just sort of sticks a intravenous needle into the federal Treasury and withdraws however much money he wants. That is always the image I have of how he’s operating. And so the federal government is incredibly important here in a way that it wasn’t in the 1950s, in the 1950s, they were just throwing money at higher education. This is a period that’s been called by many historians, the golden age of American higher education. Well, it was in a certain sense, but they sold their soul at the same time to McCarthyism. So we’re always looking at these amazing contradictions and trying to figure out, okay, what’s their next step?
Rather than thinking about what should be their next step? How do we fight back? How do we can’t go back to a golden age? There was no golden age. Let’s start there and say, how can we get something that is going to support a democratic system of higher education for everybody in America and then go on. We’re not. But unfortunately for the past 40 or 50 years, they’ve just been backpedaling. These higher education establishment has been seeding ground to the forces of ignorance, and now we’re stuck with having to fight back. And luckily we are fighting back, even if not necessarily in a way that we love, because seeding an awful lot of ground.
Maximillian Alvarez:
With the few minutes I have left with y’all, I want to talk about the fight back, and I want to ask y’all like what lessons we can draw from our own history, both the victories and the losses about what we’re really facing and how we can effectively fight it, and also what will happen, what will our universities and society look like if we don’t fight now?
David Palumbo-Liu:
Okay, so I’ll say add my two minutes and pick up actually from what Ellen said, because yes, it was the reaction to the student protest movements in the sixties that for one thing made student loans unforgivable. That was Congress’s little knife in the gut. But remember the trilateral commission that Samuel Huntington headed, and he actually published this scree called There’s Too much Democracy. And to answer Max’s point, my recommendation is to restore a sense of what democracy should look like. And that’s the only way to do that is not to stay in our ivory towers, but to draw the resources for democracy and instill the capacity for action in everybody and make it possible for everybody to see that nobody is immune from this. This is tearing down the common trust that we have with each other and substituting this oligarchy that is beyond scale. Thank you so much for having me on. I’ll let you continue your conversations, but it’s been such an honor and a pleasure to be with Ellen. And Ellen and Max, I’ll see you a bit.
Alan Wald:
Okay. Look, first of all, I think that Ellen’s making a good point about the no golden age. It’s not if the universities were terrific defenders of student rights during the 1960s. I was at Berkeley. I mean, when I arrived at Berkeley, the National Guard was occupying the city. It was not a very nice atmosphere. And even here at University of Michigan, I was involved in a 15 year struggle to stop divestment in South Africa and get a degree for Nelson Mandela, 15 years. It took us of constant protests and trying to get to the regents meeting which they would ban us from, or they’d move to secret locations and have a million excuses. Oh, we can’t give a degree to Mandela in prison. We don’t give it to prisoners. Of course, eventually they gave in and they did give it to him, but it took 15 years.
And I mentioned already the problem with Palestine rights on the campus arguing for that was hell. So it’s not been perfect. I mean, now they’re invoking all kinds of new rules and regulations about time and place and bullhorn use of a bullhorn that they didn’t have before, or at least they weren’t punishing people before. So it wasn’t so great. And in terms of university repression, yes, it’s much worse for the Palestine protestors for some other groups, eil their protestors, they seem to get away with all kinds of things. But in terms of responses, first of all, everybody is saying, we need unity. We can’t give in. If we give in, it’s like putting blood in the water. The sharks come after you even more. And I apologize to these sharks who are offended by comparison with the Trump administration. But yeah, so we all agree on that, but I am concerned about them giving in on this IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Everybody’s praising Harvard, wonderful, wonderful, but Harvard already agreed to that horrible definition and they set a precedent, and that’s going to happen at a lot of places. And that is the wedge that’s going to cut out free speech and free discussion. If you don’t know this definition, the International Holocaust Nce Association that’s being promoted by Congress and supported by the Trump administration and I think will become the law of the land for Adeem. You should look at it carefully because of the 11 definitions of antisemitism. Seven, refer to Israel. Now, anybody who does research on antisemitism and the US knows that most antisemitism is young men who get it from social media. They get these conspiracy theories and so on. There is very little antisemitism on the left. The left is involved in criticizing Israeli state racism. But in addition, these 11 no-nos for defining antisemitism say that if you call the Israeli state racist, you’re an antisemite and antisemitism is not on the campus.
So instead of refuting that claim that Israel is a racist state, which it seems that way, especially with their law saying that only Jews have self-determination and not Palestinians, and they have 60 or so laws on the books against Palestinians and Apartheid and so on, instead of trying to refute that argument, they’re just trying to suppress it. And they’re also trying to suppress any comparisons with Nazi Germany. Now, that’s not something that I myself do a lot, but you can’t have scholarship without serious comparisons. And there’s certainly good arguments that there are comparisons to be made. So they’re trying to silence these things instead of refuting them in intellectual debate. And once they do that and get that institutionalized, that’ll lead to a lot of other things. So we have to draw a line, and I think that’s one of the things we got to draw a line on the IHRA definition.
Ellen Schrecker:
I couldn’t agree with you more, but it’s really hard when I get up to talk to sort of stick it in there and make sure that I say, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, this has to stop. But at the same time, I know there are people who maybe aren’t aware of Gaza. It’s too horrible. You can’t look at it or something. I don’t know. It’s a very hard issue to deal with because I know that people will stop listening to you. How do you talk to, you make alliances with people who don’t want to hear what you say when you have to make alliances with those people. I don’t know how to do it yet. I’m learning, but I’m curious. I would like to discuss that issue and probably argue with you about it a bit.
Alan Wald:
Well, I’m not sure where the argument is. I think that the pro-Palestinian rights movement has to be more disciplined. I much support what Jewish Voice for Peace does. That’s why I join them. I think that they’re focusing on Stop the genocide. Jews don’t do it in our name. That’s great. Some of the other groups that march around waving flags that people don’t understand the difference between a Palestinian flag and a Hamas flag. So they’re told it’s Hamas flag and they believe it, or they use slogans that are incomprehensible or mean different things. Or
Ellen Schrecker:
If
Alan Wald:
You put a bus sticker on somebody’s house because you want to show that that administrator’s a Nazi, people know that the Nazi sign is something that’s used to intimidate Jews. So it’s confusing. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that needs to be cleaned up. I think it’s just a minority that’s not acting in a way that says, what will convince people before you do something, what is going to win people over? So there are debates about where to draw the line. For example, Peter Byard, he came here to speak recently and he said, I believe it’s genocide, but if I use the word genocide, people, they’ll shut up. They won’t listen to me. They’ll put their hands over their ears. So I describe all the things that amount to genocide, but I don’t use the term maybe in some audiences you have to do that. Solidarity is not just showing your anger and showing your support, it’s also figuring out how to help people. In this case, we have to build a mass movement to get the Zionist state and the United States off the backs of the Palestinians so that they’re free to determine their own future and their own kind of leadership, which I hope will be a democratic and secular one, not a conservative right wing religious one like Hamas. But we have to get the US and the Israeli state off their backs first. And that means building a mass movement.
Ellen Schrecker:
I have been waking up in the morning reading the New York Times much too closely and feeling incredibly depressed, and recently I am somewhat less depressed. I can go right to my computer and start writing something. I can feel that maybe it’s going to make a difference because I’m seeing much more fight back against political repression that I, as a historian, and I’m speaking as a historian, never saw in the past in a similar situation. And I think that I used to sort of say, well, we must fight. We must have solidarity. But I’d never said, I have hope, and now I do have hope. I think we are on the upswing, that the forces of ignorance are now shooting at each other and shooting themselves in the foot and are beginning to really understand that they’re not going to win because nobody what they want. And that’s as simple as that. Thank you.
Alan Wald:
I don’t think I can add much, but one mistake Trump is making is he is attacking so many different sections of the society that we have the basis for a majority against him. I mean, he is firing all these people. He is screwing up the economy. He’s taking away healthcare. I mean, it’s not just the universities. So there’s an objective basis for a majority toe against him. We just have to find a way to do that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to thank all of our brilliant guests today, professor Ellen Schreker, professor Allen Wald, and Professor David Pumba Liu for this vital conversation. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. Before you go, I want to remind y’all that the Real News is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never ever put our reporting behind paywalls, but we cannot continue to do this work without your support. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this from the front lines of struggle, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News. Now, we’re in the middle of our spring fundraiser right now, and with these wildly uncertain times politically and economically, we are falling short of our goal and we need your help. So please go to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. If you want to hear more conversations and coverage just like this for our whole crew at the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.