BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE

Most Americans are accustomed to authoritarianism by virtue of their daily experiences in the workplace. Managers make, interpret, and enforce the rules by which private companies operate; they say what goes, and they can use force to impose their will. Employees who resist can be disciplined or fired, often without due process or options for appeal. The right-wing forces of reaction that are now ascendant in the United States would like universities to operate similarly and are trying to eliminate the last remaining obstacles to full managerial control.

A list of these obstacles would include tenure; dependence on faculty experts to do the research and scholarship that undergird a university’s legitimacy and reputation, enabling it to attract students and grant money; norms of academic freedom and free speech; policies that mandate shared governance in curricular matters; and the presence of students who are inclined by youth and conscience to challenge the injustices built into capitalist societies. On some campuses, faculty unions are also an obstacle.

Though the exercise of power offers its own rewards, the forces of reaction, embodied paradigmatically in the Trump administration, are not seeking control for control’s sake. The ultimate goal is to ensure that universities function efficiently to aid the growth of capital by turning out compliant workers and eager consumers, by doing research that serves corporate and US military interests, and by broadcasting the message—on campus and beyond—that dissent is futile and likely to ruin one’s life. Achieving this long-term goal requires exactly what we are witnessing now: building the protest-free university.

There is nothing new about corporate profiteers wanting universities to serve their interests in every way possible. Nor are attacks on tenure and the replacement of tenure-line faculty with vulnerable contingent faculty recent developments. The so-called corporatization of the university, with an attendant increase in managerial control and weakening of faculty power, has been going on for decades. This is part of how we’ve come to be in the fix we’re in. What’s different now is the pace at which top-down control is being imposed and extended.

Looked at piecemeal, authoritarian acts undertaken by politicians, trustees, or administrators hardly seem like parts of a coherent strategy to build anything. But taken together, and in light of the larger right-wing project to bring major American institutions into ideological alignment, the attempt to remake the university—to eliminate sources of anticapitalist friction otherwise endemic to universities—becomes clear enough. Consider a few of the changes to which universities have been subjected in recent years.

New surveillance tools make it nearly impossible for dissenters to assemble, organize, and speak without detection and interference. These tools include security cameras, license plate readers, cell phone trackers, checkpoints at campus entrances, facial recognition software, undercover spying by police, and police units that follow the social media posts of students and faculty. Using these powers of the high-tech Panopticon, administrators can identify, exclude, or expel troublemakers before much trouble is made.

Surveillance is a soft strategy, a prelude to harder methods. As we saw in the spring of 2024, when students formed peaceful pro-Palestinian solidarity camps, university administrators, acting at the behest of right-wing politicians and donors, invented new rules to repress dissent; they ignored established rules about due process so as to quickly suspend or expel student protesters (and, occasionally, fire faculty); and when protesters refused to be mollified by bad-faith “negotiations” over divestment demands, administrators took off the velvet gloves and ordered police to wreck the encampments and arrest protesters.

But the protest-free university is not built solely on surveillance, repressive rules, and police violence. It is also built in less overtly fascistic ways: by eliminating social science and humanities programs in which students learn to think critically about the economy and society; by diverting resources to nonthreatening vocational programs; by adopting seemingly innocuous “institutional neutrality” policies that can be invoked, at administrative will, to quash disfavored speech by groups of faculty; and soon by replacing professors with AI teaching bots that never veer from approved scripts.

It is also built by abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which could result in excluding students who might be inclined, by virtue of their life experiences, to embrace critical analyses of capitalism, white supremacy, and US imperialism. It is built by establishing “civil discourse” programs that can be used to neutralize dissent by implying that the only acceptable response to ruling-class atrocities—crimes against humanity, genocide—is a calm discussion in a seminar room.

The impulse to dissent can also be dulled by circuses. In the protest-free university, even as most students are taught by underpaid adjuncts, millions of dollars are spent on lavish recreational facilities, celebrity sports programs, and new sports venues. The point is to deter students from being politicized by giving them other seductive activities to get excited about. It’s better that students aspire to a luxury suite at a sports arena than to a just and peaceful world.

Of course, not all of these strategies are pursued with equal vigor everywhere. It depends on how much dissent administrators fear and the anticipated costs of letting dissent occur. Local politics and culture matter, too. The University of Chicago is unlikely to go in big for football, no matter what happens on campus. Yet it seems clear that across the board—from Harvard and Columbia to UCLA and UNC–Chapel Hill—administrators are learning, in the present political climate, that if they don’t build protest-free campuses, it will cost them dearly. Just ask Claudine Gay or Liz Magill.

Knowing this, having seen who and what has been sacrificed already, administrators who bow to the forces of reaction aren’t simply surrendering to the barbarians at the gate. Chancellors and presidents might wince at the crudity of right-wing attacks on higher education, but many are perfectly willing to turn outside political pressure into an expansion of their own power. For most administrators, no matter their personal values, the prospect of a protest-free campus probably seems like a blessing. Hence many administrators’ complicity in bringing dissenters to heel.

Is there any way to preserve universities as bastions of intellectual freedom, places where dissent is not only tolerated but valued? Yes, of course; there is much we can do. Speak up. Educate the public. Organize. Act collectively. Resist irrational authority. Support colleagues who resist. Don’t obey in advance. File suit. Defend practices—tenure, academic freedom, free speech—that impede authoritarianism. All obvious stuff, without which universities might soon be protest-free and far less able to challenge the systems of domination that ail us.

Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.