From Substack September 5, 2025
September 5, 2025
My senior year at Emory, I added a second major. I had taken more than the required sociology classes, so I decided to double major in political science. I wanted to better understand the history of fascism, but also the geopolitical events of the day. So I signed up for Professor Juan del Aguila’s Latin American Politics class and Professor Thomas Remington’s Soviet Foreign Policy class (where President Carter was a regular guest lecturer). I also enrolled in a semester-long course called The Philosophy of Marxism, taught by a wonderful Catholic priest named Professor Thomas Flynn. I tried to integrate all this with my sociology background into my senior honors thesis, a Marxist analysis of the Irish conflict.
Emory in the 1980s was a vibrant place. Between classes, frequent protests over apartheid, CIA recruitment, and whatever Ronald Reagan was doing that week, and keeping up with the abundance of live music, there was a small fracture on campus. As a kid from a Georgia Klan town, Emory opened me up to a multiplicity of progressive approaches to politics, culture, and sexuality. But there was dissent in the liberal utopia. A conservative group called Students for America, founded by Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, began showing up in classrooms. Their goal was to out “liberal” college professors. They weren’t very effective. As it turns out, the truth is liberal.
But forty years ago, I already knew what this was. Having studied the rise of Hitler, I knew that college campuses were the first targets of the Third Reich. In April 1933, the Nazis passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It effectively forced universities to fire faculty who were leftist, Jewish, and/or anti-fascist. Among those let go was Albert Einstein. After that, students in the Hitler Youth and the National Socialist German Students’ League would report professors who made “un-German” statements or who were critical of the Reich. The students forced the firing of more faculty, often threatening them with violence. A climate of fear overtook German universities as Nazis purged them of any hint of “leftist indoctrination.” Many professors fled Germany, and others ended up in concentration camps.
At Emory in 1985, we joked that the Students for America were the Reagan Youth, following history’s fascist playbook. Little did we know what was to come.
The far right has long waged a war on higher education funding. Fascists need a docile, uneducated populace, not cohorts of college grads who have read Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon. Professors were in the crosshairs of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare in the 1950s. More recently, laws and executive orders have been passed to restrict university funding and curriculum around LGBTQ and race issues. In 2021, when I was teaching my Race and Ethnicity class at the University of Oregon, I announced on the first day, “This class is based on Critical Race Theory. Tell me if you have a problem with that.” Fortunately, Oregon still protects academic freedom, but I was told I would be watched by conservative students. It was clear that universities were nervous about pressure from the right. (That same year, Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, was denied tenure at UNC–Chapel Hill because of pressure from conservative donors.)
Things began to shift after the election of Trump last November. Right-wing social media influencers began to encourage conservative students to out liberal professors and try to get them fired, as the Hitler Youth had done 90 years earlier. Far-right group Turning Point USA published their online “Professor Watchlist” (which includes some of my favorite academics, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Robin Kelley). It should be noted that the front-page of their website features a “professor” who appears to be Jewish. Right-wing pundits and online influencers attacked history professor Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, and tried to have him removed from his position at Boston University. Hopefully academic unions are tracking complaints from conservative students. I’m guessing they have spiked.
When I was a tenured full professor at Portland State University, I felt ten feet tall and bulletproof. But this is a new era, and I am in a new position. As I focus on my consulting work, I’ve had the great privilege to adjunct at our local community college, and I’ve had a front-row seat for the shift. I have great respect for all my students, no matter their political leanings. Sociology classes are kind of group therapy. We’re all working it out in real time. But some of the young white men—the demographic that broke for Trump—have been given permission by our anti-education president to disrupt that sacred space. They are more likely to push back against discussions of patriarchy and white supremacy. It pops up in class, in course evaluations, and in online reviews, often as snide comments. Since I was in their exact shoes all those years ago (as a conservative white teenager), I desperately want to reach them. But I’m also deathly afraid of them. I’ve studied the history and know what they can do.
Fortunately, I’ve got a union and an administration that defends faculty freedom. But it feels like a dark cloud is coming to campuses across the country. And we have been here before. Buckle up.
Watching the Wheels 