Neoliberal politics and tactics have come to be signature themes in higher education over the past 40 years, accompanied by the steady decimation of one of its pillars: shared governance. But of late something new seems to be afoot. Anyone watching the news this past spring could hardly avoid images of police in full riot gear descending on student protesters. Is this a reversal of neoliberalism or a new chapter in it?
Colleges and universities have long served as stages for societies’ culture wars and ideological battles. Over the past forty years, as neoliberal privatization has eroded institutions and practices of social and public welfare, political pressure has come to bear on higher education to focus more on job training and less on the importance of a liberal arts education. Today neoliberal politics and tactics have come to be signature themes in higher education: valuing skills for a gig economy, STEM over liberal arts, and quantitative thinking over genuinely critical thinking. Whether in a trade school or in an elite university, education is increasingly oriented toward the bottom line, including metrics for how schools rank in terms of students’ return on their investment of tuition dollars in terms of post-graduate salaries. And worse, in an increasingly volatile and uncertain job market, even the new focus on job training hardly guarantees a job. As Albena Azmanova notes in her Post-Neoliberalism Symposium piece, neoliberalism does not just create precarity for the poor; it is ubiquitous. Now even the most elite schools are producing a new precariat.
But of late something new seems to be afoot. Anyone watching the news this past spring could hardly avoid images of police in full riot gear descending on student protesters with flash grenades, chemical irritants, tasers, and rubber bullets. These scenes played out in both public and private universities, especially larger research universities. Less visibly shocking, but equally unsettling, are new mandates at largely public universities, mostly in Republican-led states, curbing what faculty may say and teach, with bans on language pertaining to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and other bans on criticism of Israel. Where neoliberalism generally doesn’t care what anybody says, this new phenomenon is laser-focused on the words people use.
This is not your old neoliberal university. To the extent that higher education is a handmaiden of larger political forces, these are signals of a new political era. As I see it, higher education is moving from being merely neoliberal to becoming outright authoritarian.
At that moment, the signs of authoritarianism that I had been witnessing on my campus for over a year suddenly clicked into place: the locked doors of the president’s office building, the closing down of means of communication between faculty and student leaders and their constituents, the vilification of certain words and phrases, the normalization of police presence.
Until recently, I thought authoritarianism happened only to countries. That changed in the Spring of 2024 when my own university’s administration called in outside police forces to violently terminate a peaceful protest with tasers, rubber bullets, and pepper spray, knocking heads to the ground, and arresting students and faculty, myself included. At that moment, the signs of authoritarianism that I had been witnessing on my campus for over a year suddenly clicked into place: the locked doors of the president’s office building, the closing down of means of communication between faculty and student leaders and their constituents, the vilification of certain words and phrases, the normalization of police presence. And all this with the backdrop of a decades-long slow but steady decimation of one of the pillars of higher education in America: shared governance.
At first I thought that the problem was rooted in my own university’s malfunction. But as I started comparing notes with faculty at other universities, hearing their stories of what happened to them on their campuses this past spring, in the midst of a wellspring of student protest around Gaza, I realized that the very same things were happening everywhere. Virtually every university that overreacted to peaceful protests seemed to react in the very same ways, all uncannily similar to tactics followed by the likes of authoritarian leaders such Orbán, Trump, and Bolsonaro.
As a critical theorist, I have to wonder, why is this happening? What material and social conditions have led to this shift? Is this a reversal of neoliberalism? Or a new chapter in it? What is underlying this move? It seems that critical theory has barely been able to keep up with the neoliberal tide and now it has to make sense of a new authoritarian one.
Several years ago I wrote a piece exploring neoliberalism as an anti- or de-political phenomenon that largely eviscerated any rich conception of democratic public life.1 In lieu of a political process that tarries with ambiguity, disagreement, and uncertainty, neoliberalism offers up economic “truths” that should settle any matters. In lieu of gathering in public to deliberate and decide together, a private market promises to quietly have the last word. Instead of public space and public power punctuated by human reality, neoliberalism reduces any suffering to employment rates and return on investment. As Wendy Brown writes, “both the zone and the objects of the private are expanded to contest the domain and power of liberty’s enemies: political power and belief in the social.”2
And now we are witnessing this bewildering right-angle turn from a politics that is laissez-faire, globalized, and individualistic to one that is chauvinistic, statist, and moralistic. This is a politics that demands obedience to the law as well as a withdrawal from the rest of the world. Where the hallmark of neoliberalism was the banishing of borders, the call of the current moment is to build a wall.
Where neoliberalism generates precarity, the new authoritarianism rushes in to offer comfort and solace against the anxieties unleashed by precarity and it still continues the anti-political project.
While it might be tempting to see this moment as radically different from neoliberalism and to say that we are in a post-neoliberal era, this would be a mistake. What we are seeing now is a vicissitude of what gave rise to neoliberalism in the first place: an attempt to completely discredit any attention to shared, collective social life, including social-welfare and social-justice politics, and to disincentivize political action. Not only does neoliberalism attempt to eviscerate the political, it has steadily colonized the public realm with private values. With the new authoritarian turn it is now introducing patriarchal ones: family, god, bible, religion, unity (no divisive words, no books that question prevailing words, no acknowledgment of race and its terrible history).
Neoliberalism emptied out the public sphere with a gig economy that left the person working three jobs too exhausted to be political. The new authoritarian politics demands obedience to the law as it is and brutally punishes those who question it. Both are in service to the same thing: a globalized, economic capitalist order free from political accountability. Where neoliberalism generates precarity, the new authoritarianism rushes in to offer comfort and solace against the anxieties unleashed by precarity and it still continues the anti-political project. Both operate by emptying the metaphorical and actual public square, but authoritarianism does this to assuage the anxiety that neoliberalism generates.
This sheds light on the playbook that authoritarian leaders of the past few decades seem to regularly invoke and follow. Uncannily, higher education leaders seem to be following the same playbook.
1. Foment fear
Where neoliberal policies generate real precarity, authoritarian leaders deflect attention from the actual sources to imagined ones. Authoritarianism operates by ginning up fear of some potential enemy that might destroy the community. On campuses, 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 are truth, for example 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, the protesters were calling for an end to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The charge of antisemitism arose from political and legal pressure on campus leaders to delegitimize protests by 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 serves to split the community between the good and peaceful people, on the one side, and the dangerous enemy on the other. This tactic not only drives a wedge between people, it consolidates support for the leader who promises to ward off all dangers. A hallmark of authoritarianism is this very thing: depicting benign adversaries as fearsome threats in order to instill anxiety that benefits the authoritarian.
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, but usually they are those who have already been marginalized and ostracized: immigrants; trans and queer people; racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. All have served as scapegoats for political troubles—even though they are often in fact the victims of authoritarian politics. Then, weirdly, the victims get blamed for failing to forgive and move on, for being disloyal and recalcitrant. At NYU, as the New York Times reported, arrested students effectively 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 in their right to protest, this requirement effectively reinforced the view that they had been criminals all along.
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 willingly consent to a brute power that might control these supposed dangers.
3. Consolidate executive power
Shortly after they get in power, authoritarian leaders will claim that exceptional circumstances warrant the suspension of normal procedures. This “state of exception” allows them to start whittling away at horizontal checks and balances. Because previous tactics in the playbook put the community into a state of anxiety and panic about imminent threats, many will go along, even taking pleasure at punishing their imagined enemies. As Theodor Adorno noted in his 1951 essay, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” authoritarian leaders manipulate these more regressed parts of the human psyche in order to get people to voluntarily submit to non-democratic rule and hence their own domination.3
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 in violently terminating protests and unilaterally enacting new rules to clamp down on student protests, all despite the university senate’s protestations, ignoring standing policies that call for faculty oversight and input.
All over the country, 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 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 with having to protest publicly the failure of the university’s administration to honor the faculty’s oversight in the educational mission. In the face of the brute vertical power of their 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 so that pressure against authoritarian measures might bear fruit.
4. Curtail democratic practices
Ah, but authoritarians have an answer for that. They seem to 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 close down democratic avenues by claiming 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 my university, 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 that most people don’t bother to read.
Very recently several CCTV cameras appeared on 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.
In addition to curtailing communication, authoritarians will limit opportunities for people to physically gather, not just by violently terminating peaceful protests, but by locking doors to buildings. At Emory, for weeks before the police crackdown, the doors of the main building for the university president and provost had been locked. Over the summer, all the 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. At Dartmouth, students, faculty and staff who were arrested at a May 1 protest were banned from the campus Green and the administration building.
In addition to these brute forms of curtailing speech, there is also the more subtle but insidious tactic surveillance. Very recently several CCTV cameras appeared on 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 across the country is the image of heavily militarized police forces on college campuses. As I noted above, this past spring, all over the country they descended on campuses wielding flash grenades, tasers, pepper spray, long guns, rubber bullets, and drones. The most brutal included Emory University and the University of Texas—which violently terminated their demonstrations shortly after they began. Across the country, not only did they round up students, they smashed to the ground professors at Dartmouth College, Emory University, and Washington University, including breaking nine ribs and the hand of SIU-Edwardsville Professor Steve Tamari.
American colleges and universities are increasingly complicit with the growth of the police state. The very same police attacking students are creating new training facilities to ramp up their use of force against the populations they are supposed to be protecting. This phenomenon is central to the protests on my campus, where the same students protesting against genocide in Gaza are protesting against the development of “Cop City,” the police training facility where the Israeli Defense Force will continue training the Atlanta Police Department in tactics for taking down menacing students.
6. Truncate thinking
Through all these tactics the authoritarian mindset fosters an inability to think, much less tolerate, any range of possibilities. It trades in fear and dichotomies. It vilifies words and thoughts that might call into question how things are. It clings 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 the people are consumed by fear and anxiety, they will turn rule over to authoritarian leaders. The authoritarian needs an enemy on which the people can deposit anxieties and focus rage, to justify calling in heavily armed police on students sitting on the grass.
In the scheme of things, the authoritarian university is a bit player. There is an entire history behind the scene, a confluence of social and political and economic forces at work, many set in motion decades ago as global capital set about undoing the social safety nets of the welfare state, making the world ripe for global flows of power, data, money, and now bitcoin and AI. Neoliberalism was an attempt to discredit social justice policies, and now the new authoritarianism is a vicissitude of that same aim. Neoliberalism led to precarity, unease, and fear. The new authoritarianism offers neoliberalism’s phobic subjects a promise of safe havens. But instead of providing safety from the real threat, namely unfettered global capitalism, which has turned the working class into the abject poor, the new authoritarianism, what Wendy Brown calls “neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” displaces danger from its actual source to its invented ones: immigrants, trans people, and any other supposed dangers to the state. Trying to call out and pin down these displacements is exhausting and unending, for the process of displacement can continue without end. There is always someone else to blame. So long as there is precarity, the promise of salvation is, for many, too tantalizing to resist.
Footnotes
1. Noëlle McAfee, “Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum,” in Reclaiming Democracy: Judgment, Responsibility, and the Right to Politics, eds. Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai, (New York: Routledge, 2015), 165-183.
2. Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” in Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky, Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 17.
3. Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Power of Fascist Propaganda” (1951). Republished in The Culture Industry, J. M. Bernstein, (London: Routledge, 1991).
Noëlle McAfee is professor and chair of the philosophy department at Emory University. On April 25, 2024, she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct at the scene of a student demonstration. As of this writing, charges are still pending. This essay is adapted from a blog post she wrote for the American Association of University Professors.