‘Worse’ than McCarthyism: Trump’s war on higher education, free speech, and political dissent

A dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities: ICE agents are snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight; student visas are being revoked en masse overnight; funding cuts and freezes are upending countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure; students are being expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An all-out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by law enforcement, internet vigilantes, and even university administrators. Today’s climate of repression recalls that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist Red Scare in the 1950s, but leading scholars of McCarthyism and political repression say that the attacks on higher education, free speech, and political repression we’re seeing today are “worse” and “much broader.” In this installment of The Real News Network podcast, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of scholars about the Trump administration’s authoritarian war on higher education in America, the historical roots of the attacks we’re seeing play out today, and what lessons we can draw from history about how to fight it. Panelists include: Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American higher education, and a member of the American Association of University Professors national committee on academic freedom and tenure. Schrecker is the author and co-editor of numerous books, including: The Right To Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom; The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s; No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; and Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in AmericaDavid Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, host of the podcast Speaking Out of Place, and author of several books, including: Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back; The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age; and Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial FrontierAlan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Wald is an editor of Against the Current and Science & Society, he serves as a member of the academic council of