Red States' Fascist Campaign Against Colleges and Professors

https://newrepublic.com/article/206812/red-states-fascist-campaign-colleges-professors

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https://archive.li/vH2hl

Oklahoma’s governor just signed an executive order barring most of the state’s public colleges from offering tenure to professors. School administrators can secretly record classes under a new University of North Carolina policy. Nervous about violating restrictions on speaking about racial issues, officials at Florida A&M, a historically Black college, were instructing students to remove the word “Black” from Black History Month flyers. (University higher-ups later said that putting that word on those flyers was legal.) Texas A&M officials told a professor that he couldn’t assign some writings from Plato for one of his classes.

This is American higher education in red states in 2026. What’s captured the most national attention has been the Trump administration’s authoritarian attempts to dominate elite private colleges, such as Harvard, and public universities in blue states like UCLA. The policies that the administration is trying to impose on blue-state colleges and private schools, such as strict limits on diversity and inclusion efforts, were already enacted years ago by Republican legislators and governors in red states.

Meanwhile, perhaps emboldened by what Trump is doing, the red states are going much further. They are attempting to destroy higher education as we know it. This assault on higher education is another indication of the radicalism of today’s Republican Party. What’s even more alarming is that most of these education moves in red states are happening without any involvement from Trump or his aides. The fascist Republicans aren’t just the ones in the White House.

Republicans have long been wary of universities and particularly professors. Ronald Reagan rose in California politics, more than five decades ago, in part by casting the University of California at Berkeley as a hotbed for radicalism. But conservatives had mostly left universities alone. The 2020 George Floyd protests were a turning point. Young people in the streets across the country declaring that America still has a racism problem resulted in a slew of red-state restrictions on the teaching of race and LGBT issues in both K-12 and college education.

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