Dispatch #1: Neoliberal Failures and Authoritarian Dreams

22 April 2025

Greetings from the land of broken conquistador dreams, which litter our landscape like the over-priced, unsold houses that line our streets. The swindle is our state's motto as the Marx brothers well knew when they made a movie about it in 1929 called The Cocoanuts about selling bogus land in south Florida. The con extends from property and political grift to that of public education.

Florida and Texas have been at the forefront of attacks against public higher education for at least three years. Black history, LGBTQ+ studies, climate change, and general analyses of systemic oppressions have been increasingly squeezed out of introductory college courses. Reactionary legislators claim that they want to protect a student body that they regard as nothing more than as glorified children from the indoctrination of radical professors. But, in reality, they are attempting to remove critical thinking and theoretical frameworks that could challenge their increasing authoritarian control and sanitized views of history that they use to leverage their privilege and power. They cannot conceive of the classroom as a forum for discussion and debate nor can they imagine a diverse student body that requires faculty to diversify their approaches and subject matter to better respond to and connect with a wide range of student interests.

But, as many of you already know, the assault against public higher education started roughly fifty years ago as tenure-track and tenured faculty were increasingly replaced by instructors and adjuncts, as administrative bloat took root, as state funding for public higher education withered on the vine, and as an overall corporatized outlook began to define education in general as a service for select individuals rather than as a public good for all. We are witnessing now what decades worth of restructuring of public higher education has led to: a catastrophic failure of the managerial class of university presidents, provosts, and chancellors to push back against an authoritarian attack on public education. Those attacking public higher education only have one of two goals in mind: 1) to restructure it as a glorified vocational school that can grease the wheels of industry and ideologically align itself with an ethno-nationalist, reactionary outlook; or 2) to completely destroy it altogether once and for all.

What finally led me to create this blog was a discussion I had with a group of friends who I had met for drinks last week. Earlier during that week, chairs and program heads at Swamp University, where I teach, scrambled after receiving a list of allegedly suspect terms to be identified and potentially scrubbed from their websites that were associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion. The list was exhaustive and confusing with words like "women" and "community" being considered suspect. Chairs and other administrators huddled together to discuss how to best respond. They offered a preliminary AI scrape of Swamp University's website, which flagged nearly every page as a problematic, even when there seemed to be no content to justify such an assessment. A day later, however, they belatedly realized that old university-approved language that advertised Swamp University as having one of the most diverse students bodies in the state was flagged. Such language built off of earlier state-mandated language that diversity, equity, and inclusion be highlighted in public higher education missions and practices.

But the worm has turned, as the saying goes. Aspirations to celebrate a more diverse nation that could boldly lead us into a post-racial future has crumbled under the pressures of the Global Recession of 2008 and the Black Lives Matter protests, George Floyd uprisings, and the Covid 19 pandemic of 2020. Older structures of capitalism faltered leading to a housing crisis and vast youth unemployment where only emergency bailouts of banks and government subsidized funding of families and individuals kept the system afloat. At the same time, many witnessed both online and in-person a historic reckoning with the United States' racist past and inheritances revolving around policing and poverty as protests ignited nationwide. The attacks against public education must be seen as only one thread of a reactionary populist backlash to these earlier moments. Such populism wants to reassert a muscular capitalism that can power through an ecological crisis and the end of neoliberalism as we know it. It wants to repress any histories that connect the past with the present other than in the most glorified ways. It wants to turn back time to an era that never existed and certainly was never "great" for a majority of people.

I write this blog in full anticipation that most of my relevant information will be stripped from Swamp University's website where I teach. Our presidents and provosts are ill-equipped to deal with the current crisis. They think that they can strategize their way out of it, that they can ward off future blows by self-censoring themselves and their faculty, that if they make another concession that those in power will be appeased. But they fundamentally misread the moment. Every capitulation that we make doesn't appease those in power; it emboldens them to take more.

I never had much faith of those in power. They get there often for self-serving reasons or, at best, hold an idealism that leads to very little substantive improvement except in the most rarified historical moments. I instead believe in collective power whether that be through unionizing, community organizing, or mutual aid. I study social movements for a reason. Through analysis of them, we can trace the possibilities and limitations that collective organizing holds in altering the balances of power, of advancing practices and beliefs for more equitable and just futures, of opening our imaginations towards previously unseen possibilities.

I write this blog to offer periodic dispatches from the academic trenches here at Swamp University and Florida in general where we have been holding dress rehearsals for the past several years of confronting the authoritarianism you are now feeling closing in around you. This blog is here to say that we still exist, that we are still resisting despite the onslaught. I hope that you might glean some useful information from here from time to time that might assist your struggles and resistance.

I don't write this blog for myself but in the hopes of translating what I am learning on the ground with allies and accomplices to anyone who reads this and recognizes some shared conditions and concerns. I hope you find better solutions than we have so far and that we can increasingly unite in our resistance.

I write this for all of us on the frontlines of public higher education who continue to endure and resist against this storm that confronts us.

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