The War on Higher Education

Authors

Athena Mutua
Jonathan Feingold, Boston University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

ISSN

0041-5650

Publisher

UCLA School of Law

Language

en-US

Abstract

Academic freedom is under assault in the United States.¹ Like the authoritarian populism rising across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader and multifaceted campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it.² The individuals and entities driving this antidemocratic movement have also targeted the electoral process; public education; the right to bodily autonomy; the civil rights and liberties of minoritized and marginalized communities; and freedom of speech and expression (increasingly marshaled against pro-Palestinian advocacy).³ Their openly stated goal is to delegitimize, defund, and “lay siege to”⁴ the institutions that anchor American democracy and civil society, including the institutions that comprise higher education.⁵

This backdrop shapes our analysis and speaks to the urgency of this moment. It also may explain why the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to education (SRE) conducted an official country visit to the United States in spring 2024.⁶ The SRE is an independent human rights expert that the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed in 1998 to “examine the crucial issue of the right of all persons to access quality education without discrimination, and to provide recommendations to Governments and other stakeholders.”⁷

To fulfill her mandate, the SRE produces and presents periodic reports to the UNHRC.⁸ Earlier this year, the SRE announced a forthcoming report on “academic freedom and freedom of expression in educational institutions.”⁹ The Report“[will] build[] on previous work achieved by other United Nations human rights mechanisms on the topic” and “take stock of setbacks and progress both under international human rights law and in domestic legislation and practice with respect to defining academic freedom, ensuring its enjoyment by all relevant actors and protecting it from attacks and interferences.”¹⁰

As is practice, the SRE invited input from entities ranging from nation-states and UN agencies to human rights organizations and individual academics.¹¹ The Critical (Legal) Collective (CLC)¹² answered this call with a submission that outlined the escalating assault on academic freedom, university independence and freedom of expression in the United States.

This Essay expands upon that submission and proceeds as follows. Part I outlines academic freedom’s core features and spotlights GOP-led attacks on academic freedom in North Carolina and Florida. In Part II, we situate the two preceding case studies within a nationwide right-wing assault on academic freedom and university independence. Part III links academic freedom’s present precarity to often-bipartisan neoliberal reforms that privatized and corporatized much of higher education.

Recommended Citation

Athena Mutua & Jonathan Feingold, The War on Higher Education , in 72 UCLA Law Review 2 (2024).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3910