Dispatch #9: The Disinvestment and Destruction of Trust in Public Higher Education

September 22, 2025

Greetings from the Swamp!

This past week finds us confronting two related onslaughts against public education. UC Berkeley, home of the free speech movement in the 1960s, recently shared the names of 160 faculty and students involved in alleged past antisemitic incidents with the Department of Education. None of the accused have been told the charges against them. Prominent gender studies theorist Judith Butler, whose name was one of the 160, noted: “We have a right to know the charges against us, to know who has made the charges and to review them and defend ourselves. But none of that has happened, which is why we’re in Kafka-land … It is an enormous breach of trust.”

The ghost of the second Red Scare hangs heavily over this incident. During that moment, accusations against academics, politicians, screenwriters, and other cultural workers could result in being Blacklisted or, more likely, Greylisted, the denial of employment not based on being proven a political subversive but instead because one has run in too close proximity with other subversive figures.

Greylisting is a nebulous zone where one is not formally charged with a crime or explicitly told that one is unemployable. Instead, work inexplicably dries up. One is no longer invited to parties or social engagements. Your community dwindles down to those hapless others also caught on the outside looking in, wondering what they have done to lead to such circumstances.

Butler articulates a similar sensibility arising from the recent move at UC Berkeley: “We should not be naive. Will those of us named now be branded on a government list? Will our travel be restricted? Will our email communications be surveilled?” These are all valid concerns. But the ambiguity and unclarity are there to stoke fear and self-censorship among us all.

More widespread, however, have been the attacks upon teachers across the country related to their social media posts regarding recent tragic events. Education commissioner of Swampland, Anastasios Kamoutsas, recently sent out a missive to school board superintendents that warned: “Although educators have First Amendment rights, these rights do not extend without limit into their professional duties.” He later claims that “if an educator’s conduct causes a student or his or her family to feel unwelcome or unwilling to participate in the learning environment,” it may be a violation of Swampland law. His statement has led to placing multiple educators being put on leave or immediately fired within our vast Swampland.

But such doxxing of educators has not been limited to our dear swamps. It has extended across our country like a plague to include faculty from K-12 up into higher education. It has become something of a trolling bloodsport during the last few days to hunt for educators online with certain keywords and then harass spineless or ill-willed administrators into submission.

Such attacks against educators at all levels nationwide reveal a levelling-up of the authoritarian playbook that views higher education as one of the key institutions in keeping a check on such authoritarian tendencies. Hungary, Turkey, and Poland have become templates for what we see occurring within the United States:  Hold state funding hostage. Attack accreditation. Replace academics with political reactionaries who know nothing about education but everything about towing the general line on boards and oversight committees. Limit what can be taught in the classroom. Most importantly, savagely smear anyone who disagrees with you as a traitor of the state. After drawing and quartering their careers and livelihoods, the facts that run contrary to the accusations become secondary and irrelevant.

None of this would have been possible if public higher education was not sold out by multiple generations of academic managers who for decades transformed the idea of it being a public good into one of a commodity. It allowed administrative salaries to distend like a rotting corpse as faculty salaries collapsed. It chucked most faculty into non-tenure track positions. Tenure, rather than protecting the integrity of public higher education as a whole, became limited to a specialized and privileged class of academics who for the most part became completely disconnected from the day-to-day economic reality that most instructors faced.  It allowed states to drastically cut support for public education by offsetting costs upon students with higher tuition costs and newly created fees. Furthermore, as Michael Fabriccant and Stephen Brier note, “the rate of tuition increase lagged behind growth in funding for student aid,” leading to massive student debt (124).

As a result of all this, higher education has become increasingly inaccessible for the vast majority of people. Community colleges once served as vital entryways for first-generation and working-class college students. But attacks against diversity, equity, and inclusion funding have intentionally reduced federal financial support for these vital institutions. The Trump administration’s gutting of the Department of Education is not about stopping waste. It is about destroying a central institution that supplies students with public loans and grants in order to privatize them and reroute profits into his cronies’ coffers.

The Department of Education recently updated that it still has millions of unprocessed repayment options for its borrowers leaving them in financial limbo about their options and financial future. Again, this is not accidental but deliberate. Those in power want to destroy most federal institutions that thwart their plans for privatization. Higher education is an easy target since it has been stabbing itself for decades by making itself increasingly unaffordable and distant to a majority of people.

As a result, when teachers are attacked by reactionary trolls for social media posts or have their names forwarded to the government for potential subversive activity, many people don’t care. These events are simply further evidence regarding the way in which higher education has betrayed them. The neoliberal model of public higher education has completely failed by incurring incredible amount of student debt and pricing out students from an affordable education.

Despite a college degree still remaining a good investment for future success in terms of salary and career options as well as for society as a whole, it requires a faith and long-term strategy that many people lack due to confronting exorbitant tuition costs, difficulties in charting more affordable routes to higher education, and a bureaucracy of paperwork.

Free college tuition would be an immediate way to clear the path and reinstall faith in public higher education. But this would require political will and foresight that seems increasingly distant in our deeply fractured world that stares into the maw of climate catastrophe with each passing day.

This does not mean that such possibilities do not exist. As Ernst Bloch, German theorist and utopian thinker, argues: “Only thinking directed towards changing the world and informing the desire to change it does not confront the future as embarrassment and the past as spell.” Such utopian aspirations are achievable. But it forces us to pursue a form public higher education runs counter to our current model and the mindset surrounding it.

For the moment, we need to weather the current attacks against public higher education, fighting back where we can and warding off the complete collapse of higher education as we know it. But while undergoing this fight, we need to keep in mind what has in part led us to this moment: making public higher education seem more distant than ever for a vast majority of people. We have to reignite the belief in public higher education in order to make it worth something fighting over. Although we have our champions among some communities, we need to do a better job of not simply outreaching to communities that would most benefit from it, but also putting the structures in place that would make it more accessible where the future shakes free of the spell of the past.   

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