Higher Ed Can’t Be Neutral in an Age of Brutality. It Must Choose Democracy.

Across the United States, and increasingly in other democracies under siege, higher education faces a coordinated assault unlike anything witnessed in generations. State governments are prohibiting the teaching of histories that confront slavery, colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, structural racism, and widening inequality. Books are disappearing from classrooms and libraries. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are being dismantled. Faculty are encountering political intimidation, ideological surveillance, and threats to their employment. Students who have protested Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza have been suspended, arrested, disciplined, and treated less as citizens exercising democratic rights than as enemies of public order. Universities themselves are facing threats of financial retaliation if they refuse to conform to the demands of increasingly authoritarian governments.

These developments should not be mistaken for good faith disagreements over curricula or academic priorities. They represent an effort to reorganize the conditions under which knowledge itself is produced, circulated, and legitimized. They determine which histories deserve remembrance, which injustices may be named, which questions remain permissible, and which forms of citizenship become imaginable. This is not an expansion of intellectual diversity — it is an authoritarian restructuring of higher education. Its deeper purpose is pedagogical. It seeks to transform the university from a democratic institution into an instrument for manufacturing conformity, organized forgetting, and political obedience.

Much of the current discussion in public forums nevertheless continues to frame the university’s crisis exclusively in terms of internal ideological imbalance. Universities are criticized for becoming too political, insufficiently open to conservative perspectives, or excessively influenced by progressive scholarship. Such criticisms may contain elements worthy of discussion. Universities should always remain open to self-criticism and should resist every form of intellectual orthodoxy, regardless of its political source. But these concerns become profoundly misleading when detached from the larger political forces transforming higher education from the outside. The greatest danger confronting universities today is not simply that certain viewpoints may receive greater attention than others; it is that political authorities increasingly seek to determine which viewpoints may legitimately exist at all.

For this reason, intellectual diversity cannot be reduced to an equal number of competing opinions. It is not achieved by balancing syllabi according to ideological categories or by treating every perspective as equally grounded in evidence and democratic values. Genuine intellectual diversity rests upon a far deeper democratic foundation. It depends upon academic freedom, institutional autonomy, secure public funding, shared governance, independent research, historical honesty, and the right of faculty and students to pursue controversial questions without fear of political retaliation. Once these conditions begin to disappear, diversity itself becomes an increasingly empty abstraction. One cannot claim to value the marketplace of ideas while dismantling the institutions that make such exchange possible.

This distinction matters because authoritarian movements have always understood something that many defenders of liberal democracy continue to underestimate: Education is never peripheral to politics. Schools and universities shape public memory, moral imagination, civic literacy, and the capacity to distinguish truth from propaganda. Every educational institution teaches far more than disciplinary knowledge. It teaches what kinds of citizens matter, whose histories deserve remembrance, what forms of agency are possible, and which futures remain imaginable.

History repeatedly demonstrates this lesson. Fascist movements have consistently regarded universities as strategic sites in the struggle for political power. They have sought not merely to censor dissent but also to reconstruct public consciousness itself. Nazi Germany did not simply eliminate political opponents; it transformed universities into laboratories of ideological conformity. Jewish scholars were expelled, critical intellectuals silenced, historical inquiry subordinated to racial mythology, and scientific research enlisted in the service of eugenics and genocide. Education became a machinery for manufacturing obedience rather than cultivating judgment.

Historical analogies must always be employed with care. The contemporary United States is not Germany in 1933. Yet historical differences do not erase recurring patterns. They enable us to recognize, in new forms and under different conditions, the mobilizing passions and pedagogical mechanisms of authoritarianism. When democratic remembrance is attacked and the lessons of the past are erased, society cultivates what Robert Jay Lifton calls “psychic numbing,” a diminished capacity to respond to human suffering, accompanied by moral indifference and the erosion of ethical judgment.

Authoritarian politics continues to recognize a truth too often neglected by liberal defenders of higher education: Democratic institutions cannot survive once citizens lose the historical consciousness, ethical imagination, and critical capacities necessary to challenge organized lies and manufactured ignorance. The struggle over education is therefore never secondary to politics. It is one of politics’ decisive terrains. Authoritarians attack universities precisely because education is one of the few institutions capable of producing citizens who can recognize and resist authoritarian power. Recognizing education’s political significance also exposes one of the most influential myths shaping contemporary higher education: the claim that universities can remain institutionally neutral.

The Myth of Institutional Neutrality

This understanding exposes the limitations of the currently legitimating language of neutrality. The claim of institutional neutrality is a myth. It has become a defining rhetoric of contemporary university administrations. Harvard’s 2024 report on its institutional voice argued that the university should refrain from taking positions on public controversies unrelated to its “core function,” while Yale’s 2024 policy on its institutional voice similarly declared that the university would generally avoid public statements on political and social issues in the name of neutrality. Such appeals to neutrality present themselves as safeguards for open inquiry, but they often function as ideological cover for institutional silence in the face of assaults on democracy, academic freedom, and human rights.

Universities have always been political institutions shaping and being shaped by the conflicts, values, and power relations of the societies they inhabit. Every curriculum privileges certain traditions of knowledge over others. Every institution reflects historical struggles over whose experiences matter, whose voices deserve recognition, and what forms of citizenship should be cultivated. The relevant question has never been whether education is political but which politics it advances.

As Stuart Hall argued, “It is not possible … to study human societies … in a ‘value-neutral’ framework. Knowledge is always from a certain point of view.” He therefore warned that intellectuals “must never confuse commitment to the truth with value-neutrality, with standing outside of history.” Hall’s insight makes clear that the issue is not whether universities are political, but whether they acknowledge the politics that already shape the production of knowledge or disguise them behind the rhetoric of institutional neutrality.

What remains of institutional neutrality when Texas A&M requires presidential approval for courses on race and gender while imposing restrictions on student research? The language of institutional neutrality evaporates the moment university administrations substitute militarized policing for democratic dialogue. What remains of neutrality when Columbia University summons the New York City Police Department to dismantle student encampments protesting in solidarity with Palestinians? Or when universities such as Ohio State and Indiana University respond to peaceful demonstrations with heavily militarized policing, including the deployment of police snipers on surrounding rooftops? Or when the University of Pennsylvania capitulates to the punitive demands of the Trump administration and vindictive donors by dismantling DEI initiatives, curbing academic freedom and free speech, and targeting trans students? These are not politically neutral administrative decisions. They are acts of institutional alignment with repressive power that transform universities from spaces of critical inquiry into instruments of censorship, surveillance, and ideological conformity.

Yet contemporary appeals to neutrality increasingly expose themselves as mere ideological performances. They identify as political only those forms of knowledge that challenge existing relations of domination while treating market values, corporate influence, billionaire philanthropy, militarized research, nationalism, and racial hierarchy as ideologically innocent. In these appeals, politics becomes visible only when it questions established power; the operation of power itself disappears beneath the reassuring language of balance, civility, and objectivity. Far from standing above politics, neutrality often functions as a form of public pedagogy. It teaches students that silence in the face of injustice is professionalism, that accommodation is wisdom, and that democracy can survive without moral courage. When the very pedagogical, cultural, and economic conditions that make democracy possible are under assault, neutrality becomes complicity.

The claim that universities can remain politically neutral during moments of democratic crisis is not merely mistaken — it is profoundly dangerous. Under such conditions, neutrality ceases to be prudence and becomes complicity. Universities educate not only through what they teach but through what they refuse to defend. Every act of institutional silence communicates a lesson about the meaning of citizenship, courage, and public responsibility. As Hall observed in defending radical intellectual Walter Rodney against state repression, governments fear critical ideas because they possess the power “to move people into action.” Universities have become targets not because they are excessively political but because they remain among the few institutions capable of cultivating critical consciousness, democratic agency, and the collective capacities necessary to resist domination and imagine otherwise. When universities retreat into managerial caution as democratic institutions are dismantled, they teach students that conformity is safer than dissent, that moral responsibility yields to bureaucratic calculation, and that the defense of democracy lies outside the university’s mission.

The irony is striking. Those who insist that universities must avoid politics often remain conspicuously silent about the most sweeping political interventions currently reshaping higher education. Increasingly, these interventions no longer appear simply as overt censorship or legislative coercion. They also arrive in the reasonable language of institutional reform, scholarly rigor, viewpoint diversity, and political neutrality. As recent reporting on Republican efforts to “save the humanities” suggests, the struggle is no longer simply over what universities teach but over who possesses the authority to define legitimate knowledge, civic education, and the purposes of higher learning. The vocabulary of reform increasingly masks an effort to institutionalize a new ideological orthodoxy under the banner of restoring neutrality.

The fiction of institutional neutrality becomes even harder to sustain when universities themselves are subjected to political extortion. As the American Association of University Professors argues in a recent report, “U.S. higher education has, in effect, become a target of a massive extortion racket.” The report documents how the Trump administration has pressured universities by withholding or threatening federal research funds already legally owed to them unless institutions comply with sweeping political demands. Under such conditions, appeals to neutrality become profoundly disingenuous. What remains of institutional neutrality when universities must purchase their independence by submitting to political blackmail?

This logic increasingly shapes a broader body of commentary that attributes the crisis of higher education primarily to the political left. Across a range of essays, books, policy reports, and institutional commentaries by figures such as Jonathan Haidt, Heather Mac Donald, and organizations such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the National Association of Scholars, the humanities are portrayed as having been weakened by progressive scholarship, identity politics, and social justice concerns, while rigorous inquiry is said to have given way to ideological commitment. Such arguments rest on a fiction of ideological innocence. They imagine a university that once stood above struggles over class, race, colonialism, gender, empire, and inequality rather than recognizing that these forces have always shaped what counts as legitimate knowledge. Even more significant, they direct public attention toward an alleged excess of critical scholarship while diverting it from the far more consequential forces hollowing out higher education: decades of neoliberal austerity, corporate governance, public disinvestment, political intimidation, and the increasingly direct intervention of authoritarian governments into what may be taught, researched, and remembered. Rather than confronting these structural transformations, they redirect attention toward an imagined ideological crisis within the university while leaving the deeper assault on higher education largely untouched.

These commentators rarely object when legislatures dictate curricular content, when governors threaten universities with financial punishment, when faculty are dismissed for engaging controversial public questions, when books are removed from libraries, or when students are disciplined for exercising democratic rights. Politics appears objectionable only when it challenges dominant relations of power. When it protects existing hierarchies, legitimates state violence, accommodates corporate influence, or normalizes organized injustice, it suddenly becomes invisible.

Institutional neutrality, under such conditions, becomes less a democratic principle than a rhetorical device disguising the politics already embedded in institutional priorities, financial investments, governing structures, and public silence. Universities are never outside politics; the question is whether they will acknowledge their political responsibilities openly or conceal them behind the language of neutrality.

The debate over intellectual diversity therefore remains fundamentally incomplete because it asks the wrong question. The issue is not simply whether universities represent a broad enough range of viewpoints. The deeper question concerns the democratic conditions under which intellectual life itself becomes possible. Universities belong to a broader democratic culture composed of public schools, libraries, independent journalism, social movements, museums, artists, writers, and public intellectuals. Collectively, these institutions preserve historical consciousness, cultivate ethical judgment, encourage informed dissent, and expand the public imagination. They enable citizens to distinguish truth from propaganda, justice from domination, and democratic responsibility from political conformity. When universities abandon these responsibilities in the name of neutrality, efficiency, or market relevance, they cease to function as democratic public goods and become little more than credentialing institutions adapted to existing relations of power. And when this wider public culture is weakened through censorship, privatization, political intimidation, organized forgetting, and the corrosion of public values, universities cannot flourish in isolation. Their crisis is inseparable from the crisis of democracy itself, which is inseparable from the political economy reshaping higher education.

Neoliberalism and the Assault on the Democratic University

Yet the debate over neutrality remains incomplete for another reason: Even when it acknowledges the political struggle over ideas, it often ignores the economic structures that increasingly govern higher education itself. It treats universities primarily as communities of ideas while remaining remarkably silent about the corporate institutional order that increasingly governs higher education itself. As Rashid Khalidi has observed, many universities now function less as educational institutions than as “money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation[s], with a minor sideline in education.” Khalidi’s observation points to the managerial and financial transformation of higher education that discussions of intellectual diversity too often ignore. Discussions of knowledge proceed as though ideas exist independently of the material conditions under which they are produced. Universities are imagined as autonomous intellectual communities whose principal challenge lies in balancing competing viewpoints.

The crisis of the humanities offers one of the clearest expressions of this transformation. Humanities bachelor’s degrees in the United States fell to 165,489 in 2024, the lowest number since 1991 and roughly 30 percent below their 2012 peak. Yet this decline tells us less about an alleged domination of universities by the political left than about decades of public disinvestment, market-driven restructuring, managerial governance, vocational reductionism, and the increasing subordination of higher education to corporate priorities. The crisis of the humanities is fundamentally political and economic before it is ideological. To reduce the crisis to ideology is to overlook the structural transformations that have fundamentally altered the mission, governance, and civic purpose of higher education over the last four decades.

Every university teaches through its curriculum, its institutional priorities, the values it rewards, the histories it preserves, and the forms of citizenship it encourages. It is embedded within relations of power that shape not only what is taught but what becomes thinkable in the first place. Every institution of higher education operates within a political economy that influences whose knowledge is funded, whose research receives institutional support, whose histories are remembered, and which forms of inquiry acquire legitimacy. To speak about intellectual diversity while ignoring these institutional realities is to separate ideas from the social conditions that make them possible.

This transformation is hardly incidental: Neoliberal capitalism has transformed universities as profoundly as it has changed virtually every other democratic public institution. Public funding has steadily declined. Corporate partnerships have expanded. Billionaire philanthropy increasingly shapes research agendas. Military contracts influence institutional priorities. Administrators have adopted the language of branding, metrics, efficiency, entrepreneurial innovation, and measurable outcomes. Students have become consumers investing in future earnings. Faculty have become increasingly contingent labor subjected to audits, managerial oversight, and demands for immediate economic utility. Education itself has been reorganized according to the logic of investment rather than the requirements of democratic life.

This transformation has consequences extending far beyond budgets or administrative organization. It reshapes the meaning of knowledge itself. Under neoliberal capitalism, education increasingly loses its status as a site of democratic learning and becomes a private investment. Knowledge becomes valuable to the extent that it generates economic growth, technological innovation, workforce flexibility, or commercial advantage. Questions concerning justice, historical memory, ethical responsibility, democratic citizenship, ecological survival, inequality, and the cultivation of the imagination are increasingly subordinated to questions of the market or ignored altogether.

Education as Democratic Public Pedagogy

This narrowing of education’s purpose helps explain why contemporary debates over intellectual diversity often remain trapped within procedural questions while avoiding more fundamental issues of power. Missing entirely is any sustained discussion of how concentrated wealth, corporate influence, donor pressure, privatization, and austerity shape the production of knowledge itself. The deeper question isn’t whether universities include sufficient ideological diversity; it is the role of economic and political power in determining what counts as legitimate knowledge, what research receives support, which disciplines flourish, and what forms of inquiry are quietly marginalized.

Capitalism today functions not only as an economic system but also as one of the most powerful pedagogical forces shaping contemporary consciousness. Neoliberalism is itself a vast system of public pedagogy, educating people to believe that markets are the template for shaping all social relations, competition is the highest civic virtue, the individual is the sole and most important site of agency, and private success is the measure of public value. It teaches values long before students enter a classroom. Through corporate media, digital platforms, advertising, financial institutions, and the culture industries, it normalizes competition over cooperation, privatization over public responsibility, consumerism over citizenship, disposability over solidarity, and individual success over the common good. It cultivates a moral vocabulary in which efficiency replaces justice, profitability replaces public responsibility, and market value becomes the measure of human worth.

Universities increasingly reproduce this pedagogical order. Rather than serving as democratic spaces capable of questioning dominant assumptions, they are encouraged to become extensions of the market itself. Programs are evaluated according to profitability. Research is assessed according to commercial application. Students are taught to view education primarily as vocational credentialing rather than preparation for democratic citizenship. Entire fields of inquiry devoted to ethics, history, philosophy, literature, cultural criticism, and the arts are pressured to justify themselves through economic metrics fundamentally alien to their democratic purpose.

Such developments are often presented as inevitable and prudent adaptations to economic reality. They are nothing of the sort. They represent political choices that redefine education according to the imperatives of capital rather than the needs of democracy. In doing so, they precisely undermine those forms of inquiry that make intellectual diversity meaningful. Genuine intellectual diversity requires time for reflection, institutional independence, historical depth, ethical questioning, and the freedom to pursue research unconstrained by immediate market demands. These conditions cannot flourish where knowledge itself has become increasingly commodified.

Democracy depends not merely upon constitutions, elections, or political institutions but upon the educational practices through which people learn to think historically, judge critically, act courageously, and imagine otherwise. Education, in this sense, is the formative practice of democracy itself. The crisis confronting higher education is therefore not simply an intellectual crisis; it is a crisis of democratic culture itself. The struggle over universities is inseparable from the struggle over the kinds of human beings that democratic societies hope to cultivate. The decisive question is whether students will acquire the historical consciousness, ethical imagination, civic courage, and critical capacities necessary to recognize domination, resist injustice, and imagine more democratic futures.