“I’m sorry for you,” my Ukrainian colleague said to me on a recent Google Meet call, which felt shockingly ironic given that she had been under bombardment from Russian missiles and Iranian Shahed drones for over three years.
She was expressing her sympathy in response to news about the Trump administration’s “invitation” to Dartmouth and eight other colleges, which had been reported in the Ukrainian media. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine pays close attention to domestic U.S. politics, and as a former part of the Soviet Union and neighbor of Russia, it has had intimate experience with authoritarian power grabs.
Yet, not only Ukraine, but the entire world is watching as the institutions of American civil society come under lawless pressure from the Trump administration. This is for good reason. Several aspects of Trump’s proposed compact, as well as his conduct towards universities generally, are eerily reminiscent of actions taken by authoritarian regimes.
Authoritarian regimes are keen on bringing higher education under control because they view independent thought as an existential threat. Vladimir Putin, who came to power in 2000, proceeded stealthily in restricting academic freedom. In the 2000s, the Putin administration established the “Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science” and identified “efficiency pockets” — universities that were granted disproportionate federal resources. Following widespread protests against the falsification of parliamentary elections in 2011-12, critically-minded students and professors were expelled or dismissed, and Vice Rectors for Security, who were frequently FSB agents, oversaw ideological conformance.
After the annexation of Crimea, prominent scholars, such as the renowned economist Sergei Guriev and directors of world-class institutes were forced to emigrate or even arrested. Programs that were considered at odds with “traditional Russian values,” especially “western influenced” women and gender and queer studies programs, were shut down. The brain drain and deglobalization of Russian universities that ensued after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 will hobble the Russian economy for years to come.
The Trump administration has been arguably far more aggressive in its attempt to bring American higher education to heel than Putin was in Russia. The latest effort, the so-called “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education,” represents the type of interference in higher education that no free society can tolerate. Its conditions effectively appropriate the universities’ authority to make their own financial, curricular, hiring and admissions decisions, trampling on the constitutionally enshrined rights of their communities while purporting to defend them. In short, the compact seeks to remake our community in the administration’s ideological image.
In fact, the first premise of the compact betrays its authoritarian intentions. Dartmouth was selected along with eight other universities as ostensible “good actors,” invited to join by means of dubious carrots dangled amidst the sticks. The sorting of “good” and “bad” “loyal” and “disloyal” “supporter” and “internal enemy” is essential to autocratic regimes. It creates and codifies divisions in an already intentionally polarized and divided society. It affixes labels that introduce a distorted, through-the-looking-glass reality. The “good” are the ideologically docile, craven or cowardly; the “bad” are those who refuse to be brought to heel or to kneel, to betray their professional ethics, personal values and sense of integrity. Trump’s recent extension of the compact’s “offer” to all universities represents his attempt to divide higher education into the “good” and the “bad” in one fell swoop.
What is worse is that these provisional labels harden into categories such as “foreign agent,” “undesirable organization,” “member of a terrorist and extremist organization” that are subject to legal penalties, often severe ones. New and all-encompassing laws are then passed to criminalize independent or critical speech and action, such as the law against “discrediting the Russian Army,” “offending religious sensibilities” or “distributing fake news.” In Russia, these laws have been wielded against oppositionists and regime loyalists alike — no label is durable.
President Donald Trump himself has also demonstrated his desire to prosecute those, like the comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who “offend” and “discredit” him, and it’s not far-fetched that a Congress in thrall to him would legislate according to his wishes.
Based on historical and international experience, it would be foolish and shortsighted to assume that the attacks on higher education, or the media, or NGOs, will cease anytime soon. If anything, they will intensify. So what is to be done?
Nobody can dodge, thread the needle or stay in a defensive crouch for three years, and that’s not how we want to live and learn. The most important thing to remember is that it’s not some abstraction “the universities,” “academia,” “higher education” or even the “higher-ups” — the president and College administration — that is being targeted. It’s all of us, down to our granular lived experience in our classrooms, dormitories and shared spaces — down to our class discussion, casual conversations and social media posts. Most of us have not experienced living in an authoritarian country. By clarifying and consistently acting upon the civic values of a country that has been a beacon of liberty to the world, we can do our part to ensure that we never will.
Lynn Patyk is a professor of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
