For academics a crucial aspect of ‘Fascism’ is the way it plays out in universities. As a retired academic I’ve been shocked by some of the reports coming from America over the past month featuring censorship of free speech in colleges, not by radical Left no-platformers (although they disturb me too), but by the Federal or State authorities, and ordered by Trump. Here’s one recent example: de-funding programmes which teach ‘improper ideologies’, including portraying America’s ‘founding fathers’ in a less than heroic light:
‘Improper ideologies’! Doesn’t that have a whiff of ‘1984’ about it? Or of the old Soviet Union? For the State (in the person of the President) to be ordering professors what and – more importantly – what not to teach surely goes right against the independence and intellectual freedom that are usually associated with and valued by institutions of higher education; or were in my time, at least. Questioning the motives of the ‘founding fathers’ might undermine a certain sort of ‘patriotism’, which I imagine is what is troubling the MAGA lot; but ‘patriotism’ is emphatically not what universities are there to teach.
There are many more indications of this kind of US government hostility towards universities, and even, one suspects, towards intellectual enquiry itself. Courses have been suddenly de-funded; foreign graduate students forcibly (and illegally) flown out of the country (or in one case down to Louisiana) for demonstrating peacefully against America’s support for Israel in Gaza… and so on. Other examples are featured here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/29/trump-ice-deportation-universities. Or you can simply Google ‘Columbia’. – If you don’t think that ‘Fascism’ quite fits the bill here, then ‘dictatorship’ or ‘authoritarianism’ should cover it. In any case it’s scary.
I’d hate to be teaching at Yale again now. Clearly I’m not alone. At least three current Yale Faculty are fleeing over the northern border to find academic freedom there: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/yale-university-scholars-toronto-trump/index.html. Presumably the USA’s loss here will be Canada’s gain. Or – more likely – Trump won’t care. After all, what do ‘intellectuals’ know about the ‘Art of the Deal’?
Porter’s Pensées 