Far-right politicians from Trump to Orban to UK ministers are following the same authoritarian script: attack universities, control curricula, ban ideas that challenge power. As a political economist and ex-university professor, I explain why education is at the heart of democracy — and why ignorance is tyranny's greatest ally.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Far-right politicians, including Donald Trump, are staging attacks on education all over the world.
We're seeing this in the USA. Donald Trump has most particularly picked on Harvard University, but plenty of others are also subject to his attack, and it's ongoing.
We may not be hearing about it in the UK, but time after time I am, because I'm monitoring this, partly because I'm an ex-university professor, a retired university professor, but also because where the US goes, the UK often follows both culturally and politically. And what we are seeing from far-right politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are direct attacks on higher education that are an absolute assault on democracy.
This matters. As a political economist, I see dangerous patterns emerging. In particular, I see those with power trying to remove the right to a rounded education from ordinary people. Why are they doing that? For one, very simple and very straightforward reason, and that is that they feel threatened.
Ordinary people who can question what they're doing, who can question their assault on democracy, who can question their use of force, and who can question the fact that they're even promoting things like genocide, are a threat to the power base of the right-wing and their agenda.
The authoritarian playbook is literally being seen in use here. We've seen it with Viktor Orban in Hungary. He subdued the military. Then he subdued the courts. Then he came for the media. And after that, he tried to oppress education.
Trump is doing the same, literally following the same steps, and higher education is now in his firing line. Universities nurture critical, questioning citizens, and that's the last thing that authoritarians like Victor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the USA want, but the threat is here in the UK too.
We are seeing growing narratives about overseas students, with the implication being made that they are to blame for 'Broken Britain', even though there's absolutely no substance to that. We're seeing ministers attacking so-called lefty academics, and who are demanding that right-wing ideas be taught in universities as if they never were, because to create balance, of course, a range of ideas are taught at universities.
In particular, we are seeing UK ministers talking about slashing funding for the arts and humanities, and universities are closing courses as a consequence because those types of course do, in particular, encourage critical thinking, and critical thinking threatens power.
And we are seeing very clear guidance being issued to try to restrict the right to campus protest, which is something that has always been a part of the student experience.
Students are angry. If you're not angry at 20, when will you be?
If you are not an idealist at 20, have you got any chance of understanding what idealism might ever be?
And they're doing this because they're claiming that students are showing political bias, as they should. Whether that be left or right, doesn't matter. They have the right to show bias.
And this is dangerous because right across the spectrum, politicians are demanding that conservative ideas be put on university curricula. These aren't normal ideas. These are extreme ideas.
Ideas about white supremacy, for example, because critical race theory is now being criticized.
Ideas that suggest slavery wasn't so bad after all, and ideas about Empire, as if it was justified.
Ideas about evangelical Christian thinking as if it is a norm, when it clearly isn't.
And demands are made for things like 'patriotic' history to be taught, which supports this idea that we have the right to dictate to the rest of the world.
There's nothing in this that is about fairness.
There's nothing in this that is actually about critical thinking.
This is about the claim to superiority, and it's about a right to shape knowledge to pursue the claim to power.
And this isn't just happening in universities. We're seeing it creeping down. Universities are being underfunded in the UK, but so too are schools, and so too is the demand being made of schools that they will teach in accordance with these curricula as well.
The attempt is to close minds to possibilities from the earliest possible age.
In the USA, that's being seen by the closure of the federal education department. And it's being seen by changes to individual state curricula as well.
Here we see the same sort of thing happening with regard to changes being demanded of the history curriculum.
The desire in all this is to create ignorance, and ignorance is the bedrock of tyranny.
That's why I'm speaking out. Knowledge as power is precisely what the right-wing fear. They fear the power that knowledge brings. As a political economist, I know that informed people challenge rigged systems. That's what I taught people to do, and I will continue to write and speak to defend education as the cornerstone of not just democracy, but the well-being of people who need to understand and challenge the society in which they live, so that well-being is improved.
In the past, slaveholders banned reading. Fascists burned books. Autocrats have closed universities. Totalitarian states have dictated precisely what may be taught.
I believe in democracy.
I believe in free, open, secure societies, and to get them, we must defend education because wherever democracy dies, ignorance marched first.
Taking further action
If you want to write a letter to your MP on the issues raised in this blog post, there is a ChatGPT prompt to assist you in doing so, with full instructions, here.
This video was inspired by the work of Robert Reich on this issue in the USA, where the onslaught is further down the line - but we are following.
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You have quite rightly been critical of the academic world in particular the teaching of economics
Has it to some extent been hoist by its own petard?
Yes
The fatal consequences of having the anti critical thinking and ill educated hijacking political power structures can be seen in the tragic deaths of so many in the recent floods in the US. They were not properly forecast in media directly due to Musk’s Boyz DOGE cuts. Also in the UK the predictable awful health consequences of the harebrained tech scheme by Wes Streeting to give all of us a health app aka A Doctor in Your Pocket.
As you write, in this historical era where the US goes, the UK so often follows. Placing this moment of rising reactionary darkness into a wider philosophical and historical framework helps create perspective. There is a brilliant article over on Substack’s Dispatches from a Collapsing State by Jared Yates Sexton: The Revolution Failed.
Well worth the time.
It was predicted that the DOGE cuts at the likes of the NOAA (responsible for weather forecasting and warnings) and FEMA (responsible for disaster relief) would mean poorer ability to predict and warm about extreme weather and then deal with the consequences. Here we are.
Cuts to the National Parks Service and US Forest Service create significant risks of forest fires. Just wait.
When you take away the safety net, you increase the risk that people will get hurt or killed.
Making America Ghastly Again.
I couldn’t agree more with your arguments on education, Richard. I never managed to secure an academic post after completing my PhD (not for the want of trying!). But I have lectured at conferences all over the world and remain in a Google group mainly of academics in nuclear issues, now I am retired.
But I remain an active LSE alumnus in my late 60s.
I should add another so-called Ivy League elite East Coast US educational institution,Columbia University in New York City, is currently under direct threat from Trump’s Department of Education( which he plans to close down), claiming it has not met the standards for minorities at the university. The real reason is the huge pro-Palestinian movement at the campus, that has led Zionist-led groups at Columbus to complain about discrimination and intimidation against Jewish students. Meanwhile the Trump Administration’s immigration police kidnapped and illegally incarcerated the leader of the Columbia pro-Palestine movement, Mahmoud Khalil, for nearly five months. I think I know towards whom the real intimidation at Columbia is being directed.
Following on from my earlier point, and of course your reply Richard, I wonder if we need a new ‘model’ for Universities and academic freedom within them.
Wasnt one of their original roles to test ideas?
With regard to “ideas about evangelical Christian thinking as if it is a norm – when it clearly isn’t”…
I agree with you on that, and speaking from within that community (in the UK), not only is sort of so-called “Christian” thinking you are referring to not reflected in society at large, it isn’t the majority view within UK Christian believers, nor is it the majority view within Uk evangelicalism, which in recent years is much less susceptible to being “told” what “the bible says”, and much more comfortable with study, debate and the role of reason.
But the same forces are at work as in politics and academia, to try and control, exclude and bully. And they aren’t very tolerant of discussion – the prejudices go very deep in regard to key issues including Israel, and people often feel that a challenge to their opinion is a basic challenge to their faith, so they panic then things get toxic (that’s live for me at the moment).
Thanks
Critical thinking – the right to be educated not indoctrinated!
University of California has also lost a lot of US government support. I’ve been supporting University of California, Berkeley, for some years now. Thanks for the reminder of US Unis losing government money, Richard. I will make a donation to Berkeley as soon as I get my mind and energy back after a few fraught days. I know that the small amount I can send won’t make much/any difference, but my hope is that lots of people who feel close in some way or other to Berkeley will do the same – together we are stronger.
One of the educational reforms of Curriculum 2000 that did survive the Blair cave-in over A Levels, was the introduction of AS Levels to broaden the extremely narrow, by European standards , 3 A Level sixth-form curriculum to which the older universities were addicted. Many larger providers of sixth-form education, like Sixth Form Colleges, created programmes of study that involved the teaching of AS subjects in the first year of the A Level course. Having looked at the range of subjects being offered by the examining boards, the college where I worked chose the OCR AS in Critical Thinking as one option. It proved a popular choice for those students intending to go on to university. My daughter regarded the thinking skills she picked up from the course as the most useful element of her A Level studies, particularly during her first year at university.
Sadly the curriculum reforms led by the arch-reactionaries (they liked to refer to themselves as “radicals”) Gove and Cummings scuppered the attempt to widen the 16-19 curriculum and OCR ceased to offer AS Critical Thinking in September 2016. Since then the A level element of post-16 education has become predicated on the acquisition of knowledge, rather than the development of thinking skills. The next step for
the Far Right (is there any other form of Right, these days?) is to control the impartation of knowledge. They long ago refused to accept any evidence which offends their beliefs. Critical Thinking = woke.
Thanks
can I have the oxymoron prize please for spotting the oxymoron?
“evangelical Christian thinking”
– busts out laughing at the very thought
I think Robert may disagree.
I was brought up in an evangelical household. I admit I could never work out what my parents’ faith did for them, or what difference it made. That was why I questioned their faith.
I’m thinking about that one…
At least, I THINK I’m thinking about it, but maybe I’m deluding myself?
(As for oxymorons, I definitely prefer oxen to morons)
😉
I think this paper is very important and timely. The several authors, all academics, tell us how to assess our risks, and what actions we can take based on those risks.
https://zenodo.org/records/15696097
That looks very interesting. Downloaded to read.
“Youth is insolent; it is its right – its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence.” (Conrad – Lord Jim)
I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said, “Let there be a wall between religion and government.” Setting and maintaining such boundaries as keeping government and politics out of education is vital. Britain and the Allies post 1945 made sure that there was no top down, centralised, government dominated education system in Germany, for example, but rather diverse provision with schools of different pedagogical approaches to ensure educational freedom. Finland, with its world renowned all through comprehensives shows how high levels of learning and student well being can be achieved when government respects educational autonomy. Britain’s schools, however have been undermined by neoliberal capture and political interference, and our universities have been largely turned into businesses.
UK’s education has indeed been hijacked by neo liberal fanaticism which teaches individuals to believe that they can only do well in life by their singular efforts and that all state government regulation gets in the way of their success. Neo liberal ideology rules their minds and wills them to destroy big government. So we are faced with several generations of individuals who live their lives within a worldview whose motive is to make the lives of their defined ‘losers’, those who do not ‘work hard’, ‘do well’ or are not ‘productive’, entirely worthless. This category includes Nature and the 99%. This neoliberal ruling class have taken Thomas Hobbes warning in Leviathan about a society without ethical governance, that all lives would become ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, not as a warning but as a battle cry.
Is this an example of mass insanity ?
Probably.