The Trump Administration is an Existential Threat to Academic Freedom and Higher Education: Middle East Studies Assn.
Middle East Studies Association | 14 March 2025 | Informed Comment
The second Trump administration has ushered in an existential threat to academic freedom and higher education in the United States. The current campaign targeting universities is an extension of earlier right-wing efforts to attack and defund teaching about race, gender, and sexuality at the state level, but it is a significant escalation and one at the federal level. In the midst of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip of the last sixteen months and the fragile ceasefire in place as of this writing, Palestine solidarity protest activity on university and college campuses became a target of attacks that sought to undermine criticisms of Israel while simultaneously extending a pre-existing far-right war on higher education. The consequence has been, above all else, a censorious climate of repression to stifle voices in support of Palestinian self-determination and human rights and to secure ongoing, unconditional support to Israel. In the process, Palestine-related scholarship and advocacy have now become focal points of a frontal assault on universities as centers of critical thinking and knowledge production in a battle to destroy the autonomy of institutions of higher education in the US…