Suppression of Thinking: Governmental Silencing and Control of Higher Education

In the United States, institutions of higher education have benefited from a general history of the government supporting institutional efforts while not directing them. The thought being that those within the academy are to be thought leaders and creators of knowledge and that having too much direct governmental oversight might stifle these efforts. Yet, in more recent political climates in the US and around the world, the very idea of thinking and questioning the status quo are seen as threatening to the control of the some over the many. Everything we do in higher education is assumed to be nefarious and have direct political intent. The scrutiny facing our institutions of higher education is not simply aimed at some nebulous organization but directly at the humans who provide it life. Our institutions and our administrators, staff, and faculty are under constant surveillance and viable threats of physical and mental harm. We must support each other in our work, and we must recognize that many administrators, staff, and faculty are tired, disheartened, and frankly scared about the future. At this time, we need to not just defend the work of higher education but to champion it. We must uphold the trust between the citizenry and the academy that places higher education as a beacon of wisdom, a harbinger of thought, an usher of new ideas, and an inquisitor into the assumptions of normative and traditional cultural and sociopolitical ways of being. Higher education is not just value added in the equation of thriving democracy, it is a necessity for its very existence. In this talk I will explore the ways attacks on higher education are direct attacks on democracy and provide examples of governmental regulations being wielded at higher education as a means of silencing not just scholars but the citizenry.