A Toolkit for Spotting the Authoritarian University

/ September 25, 2024

BY NOËLLE MCAFEE

This post is the first in a blog series, organized by Annelise Orleck, that focuses on recent crackdowns on protests at US college and university campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza. You can read other posts in the series at the links below:

A red sign listing rules about the time, place, and manner of expressive activity appears with a metal chain and a chain-link fence surrounding an Indiana University campus meadow.

Photo by Bloomington, Indiana, photographer Jeremy Hogan taken at Indiana University’s Dunn Meadow after the administration cleared protesters’ encampment.

An Introduction to the Series

In spring 2024, the half-century tradition of college administrations letting peaceful protest flourish unobstructed on campuses across the United States came to a sudden and violent end as one college president after another called in armed riot police to physically subdue and arrest student protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. By June, more than 3,200 students, faculty, and community members had been arrested—many injured, some shot with rubber bullets. Many still face charges. Administrators justified this use of force by arguing that these campus protests were antisemitic and made Jewish students, faculty, and staff feel uncomfortable and unsafe. This blog series documents a weaponization of antisemitism that some have called a “new McCarthyism.”—Annelise Orleck

There’s nothing like a rumble of dissent to bring authoritarianism into relief. In placid times, there can easily be a semblance of liberal ease, tolerance, and openness to ideas; but when the status quo is threatened, this façade easily crumbles, triggering authoritarian reactions. Classic ones include demonizing enemies, clamping down on free expression, banning public associations, and insisting that an emergency warrants the suspension of normal procedures and democratic norms. I’ve been studying this curious phenomenon for many years now, including its psychic origins and the kinds of practices that authoritarian leaders regularly invoke. Even authoritarian leaders who are not very smart instinctively know what to do to garner public support and quell dissent. From Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to America’s Donald Trump to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, they all seem to follow the same playbook for manipulating public opinion and reinforcing their own rule.

Until recently, I thought authoritarianism happened only to countries. That changed on April 25 when I stepped out onto the quad of my university to observe a peaceful protest and watched in horror as the Georgia State Patrol marched on to campus, joining Atlanta’s and Emory’s own police departments. In a flash they descended on students and colleagues, brutally attacking them with tasers and rubber bullets. And then, because I would not step away from witnessing this horror, I was handcuffed and dragged off to a police wagon. Twenty-eight were arrested that day, including students and faculty. When economics professor Caroline Fohlin tapped on the shoulder of a police officer and screamed at officers to “get away” after she saw them smashing a student’s head, police tackled her and slammed her head against the concrete. Incredibly, she was then charged with battery against a police officer. We continue to face charges of disorderly conduct and criminal trespass.

At that moment, the signs of encroaching authoritarianism that I had been witnessing on my campus for over a year suddenly clicked into place. There were locked doors to the president’s office building. All means of communication between faculty and student leaders and their constituents were shut down. Certain words and phrases were vilified. Police presence was normalized.

Weeks later, when I met on Zoom with other AAUP members who had likewise witnessed police brutality on their own campuses, I realized that the very same things were happening everywhere. Virtually every university that overreacted to peaceful protests seemed to be following the same playbook. And it was uncannily similar to the one followed by the likes of Orbán, Trump, and Bolsonaro. I here offer anyone experiencing a crackdown at their own university a toolkit for making sense of the new authoritarian university. Below are the six key elements of its playbook.

1. Foment Fear

Authoritarianism operates by ginning up fear of some potential enemy that might destroy the community. This often involves distorting facts, such as claiming that protesters were violent when they were in fact peaceful. Alternative facts are floated as if they were truth. The most widespread rationale for crackdown has been that there is a rising scourge of antisemitism on campuses. This is a kind of gaslighting: everyone talks about the rise of antisemitism on campuses even though the facts hardly bear this out. In reality, protesters have been calling for an end to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The charge of antisemitism is fear-mongering: the product of political and legal pressure on campus leaders by elected officials and conservative donors who insist on conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

This has been happening despite the presence of a disproportionate number of Jews in these largely peaceful campus protests. Even if it bizarrely means calling many Jews antisemites, this tactic paints campus communities as split between good and peaceful people, on the one side, and a dangerous enemy on the other. This consolidates support for leaders who promise to ward off all dangers. Depicting benign adversaries as fearsome threats heightens anxiety that benefits authoritarian leaders.

2. Scapegoat Vulnerable Populations

Frantz Fanon called such moves phobogenic. The person or group deemed dangerous, becomes the target and reservoir for the group’s fears and anxieties. Manufactured phobic objects serve as scapegoats for authoritarian crackdowns on peaceful protests. Depending on the context, different groups can be posited as phobic objects. During the protests of spring 2024, the arrested have disproportionately been from groups who are already marginalized and ostracized: immigrants; trans and queer people; racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. All have served as scapegoats though they were in fact the victims of authoritarian politics and police brutality.

Then, weirdly, the victims have been blamed for failing to forgive and move on, for being disloyal and recalcitrant. At New York University, as The New York Times reported, arrested students had to apologize and confess: “In order to return to the university, some students would be required to complete a 49-page set of readings and tasks — “modules”—known as the Ethos Integrity Series, geared at helping participants ‘make gains’ in ‘moral reasoning’ and ‘ethical decision making.’” Even though the students were within their rights to protest, this requirement effectively reinforced the view that protesting made them criminals.

This need to demonize protesters may be why my university administration has yet to call for charges to be dropped against the twenty-eight of us arrested on April 25: Leadership needs to maintain the illusion that those arrested pose a mortal threat to the community.  It is also likely the reason that they have not expressed concern for or issued any condemnation of the right-wing group Campus Reform, which arrived on campus on September 9, 2024, and began distributing defamatory posters with names and photographs of those of us who were arrested on April 25.

I wrote to the university’s general counsel to make clear that this group was violating Emory’s own recently reinforced signage policies and putting students and faculty at risk. I asked him to call on the organization to stop. He replied, “It’s not clear that the flyer actually came from Campus Reform, even though someone put their logo on it.” How does one explain this unwillingness to acknowledge an actual wrong done, that those of us arrested and still facing charges are now also being doxed and depicted as security threats? The authoritarian playbook tells me why: To acknowledge that any protesters are vulnerable and now themselves in danger would effectively humanize them, undermining the authoritarian’s aim to demonize them.

Riven with anxiety, the public tends to fall for these phobogenic moves, believing that it is the students and not the police who are violent or hateful and need to be contained. Fear-mongering fuels authoritarianism by making people consent to a brute power that promises to control these supposed dangers.

3. Consolidate Executive Power

Shortly after they take power, authoritarian leaders claim that exceptional circumstances warrant the suspension of normal procedures. This “state of exception” has been enacted on campuses across the country in spring 2024 and since then, allowing campus leaders to whittle away student and faculty governance and effectively ban peaceful protest. Once campus and wider communities descended into a state of anxiety and panic about imminent threats posed by Gaza peace protesters, many were willing to go along with these crackdowns, even taking pleasure at the punishments police were meting out to the newly imagined enemies. As Theodor Adorno noted in his 1951 essay, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” authoritarian leaders manipulate regressed parts of the human psyche to get people to voluntarily submit to nondemocratic rule and hence their own domination.

When leading a country, an authoritarian might suspend parliament; when leading a university, an authoritarian might, as at the University of Kentucky, suspend the university senate. At Emory, the administration ignored its own open-expression policy, violently terminating protests and unilaterally enacting new rules, all despite the university senate’s protestations and standing policies that call for faculty oversight and input.

Since the 1980s, the neoliberal university has prepared for possible coming states of exception by denigrating and undermining norms of shared governance to the point that faculty councils and university senates now have merely ceremonial roles and no actual power to do anything. All we are left with is the power of public opinion, which requires skills of community organizing and courting the press. Instead of being able to sit down with leaders of governing boards to work together, faculty are left having to protest publicly the university administration’s refusal to honor faculty oversight of the educational mission. In the face of the brute vertical power of today’s university administrations, faculty’s most available path to restoring shared governance is to cultivate democratic, horizontal power, to become skilled in the democratic arts of collective action and speech, hoping that pressure against authoritarian measures might bear fruit.

4. Curtail People’s Democratic Power

Ah, but authoritarians have an answer for that. They instinctively understand the power that can emerge from public assembly and speech, so one of the first things they do is close spaces for assembly and communication among the people, just as the British did with the 1774 Intolerable Acts banning New England town meetings. Today’s authoritarians claim there are imminent dangers that warrant suspending normal democratic practices.

A subtle but telling sign of this is limiting ways in which people can communicate with each other. At Emory, a year before the protests, the university disabled the ability of student and faculty government leaders to communicate directly with their constituents. They were told that since everyone’s email inboxes were overburdened, announcements should be funneled through the Emory Report, the email newsletter released by the administration, an official publication that most people don’t read.

In addition to curtailing communication, authoritarians limit opportunities for people to physically gather, not just by violently terminating peaceful protests but also by locking doors. At Emory, for weeks before the police crackdown, the doors of the main building for the university president and provost were locked. Over the summer, academic buildings and libraries were either locked or closed to the public. At Columbia University, people had to use their campus IDs to get on campus or into the dining halls. At Dartmouth, students, faculty and staff who were arrested at a May 1 protest were banned from the campus green and administration buildings.

In addition to these brute forms of curtailing speech, there is also the more subtle but insidious tactic of increased surveillance. CCTV cameras appeared on Emory campus buildings surrounding the quadrangle where students pass time between classes, where some professors hold class on a nice day, where people gather to protest. A place that was once free, at least on good days without police presence, has become a space of round-the-clock surveillance.

5. Normalize Use of Force and Militarized Police

The most visible sign of the new authoritarian playbook is the deployment of heavily militarized police forces on peaceful campuses. This past spring, all over the country armed police descended on campuses wielding flash grenades, Tasers, pepper spray, long guns, rubber bullets, and drones. At Emory University and the University of Texas they violently terminated student demonstrations shortly after they began. When professors protested, they were smashed to the ground: at Emory and Dartmouth and at Washington University, where they broke nine ribs and the hand of SIU–Edwardsville Professor Steve Tamari.

American colleges and universities are now complicit with a metastasizing police state. The very same police who attacked students and faculty at Emory are creating new training facilities to ramp up their use of force against the populations they are supposed to be protecting. On my campus, the same students protesting against genocide in Gaza are also protesting the development of “Cop City,” where a Georgia international police exchange proposed using Israeli Defense Forces to train Atlanta police in tactics that might then be used to take down students deemed “threatening.” Before the spring 2024 crackdowns, Atlanta police shot a twenty-six-year-old Cop City protester dead.

6. The Final Authoritarian Play: Truncate Thinking

Colleges and universities have long and often been caught in the crosshairs of political battles, but this past season things seem to be even worse. When otherwise independent organizations become politicized by agents for a more authoritarian politics, they can become adjuncts for authoritarian aims. Agents for this can be governing boards populated by political appointees at public universities and big corporate players at private universities. They choose administrators who will follow through.

Through all these tactics the authoritarian mindset hinders the ability to think, or to tolerate any range of possibilities. Authoritarians trade in fear and dichotomies. They vilify words and thoughts that might call into question how things are. They cling to absolutes and either-or thinking, to the point that hearing a chant about freedom for one group feels like it must mean death for another. The issue is not an inability to think rationally but an inability to sit with any thought that is indeterminate or engages contingency or ranges of possibility.

Authoritarianism feeds on this. When people are consumed by fear and anxiety, they will turn rule over to authoritarian leaders. The authoritarian needs an enemy in which people can deposit anxieties and focus rage. It’s the only way to justify calling in heavily armed police on students sitting peacefully on the grass.

Noëlle McAfee is professor and chair of philosophy at Emory University with a secondary appointment as professor of psychiatry and behavioral science.

Annelise Orleck is professor of history at Dartmouth College.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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