Description
The Trump administration’s extraordinary attack on colleges and universities have led to severe anxiety and insecurity across American campuses. At the same time, it has galvanized academic leaders, faculty and students in defense of institutional autonomy and academic freedom that is unfettered by national and ideological boundaries. Scholars have compared the Trump administration’s actions—arbitrary cuts in federal funding, unprecedented interference in curricular content and governance, and the deliberate targeting of international students and scholars—to those of rightwing nationalist regimes in Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, and India, which have systematically attacked and undermined institutions of higher education, particularly those with a global orientation. This paper compares three examples of autocratic governments targeting globally renowned institutions, namely, the Central European University in Hungary, the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Ashoka University in India and Harvard and Columbia Universities in the U.S., as part of a populist, anti-intellectual project that is in direct tension with the values of a liberal international education. We examine the motivations and impact of state policies on academic freedom, strategies of resistance, and the implications of these examples for democratic societies and international education and knowledge production, more broadly.
