The good years for the American academy are over. The 60-year era of relative freedom since the Red Scare, however imperfect, has ended. My generation of boomer academics never had to face such a threat to our work and identity.
Our long-term problems, like falling numbers of high school graduates and their decreasing literacy, will have no solutions that aren’t painful. But the very freedom for our countless faculties and administrations to decide for ourselves how to act is up for public debate, as if that freedom were a national political problem. The Trump state openly threatens our finances, our faculty, our tax status, our morality, our students, and our minds. The stance of negotiation adopted early on by some prominent targets, attacked by many as cowardice, has proven to be simply useless.
The “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” offered to American higher education as a whole makes the maximum demand in plainly partisan language. The word “conservative” appears once, in what I found to be the most threatening paragraph of the document:
A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines. Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.
Arguments about what it would mean to have a limit on foreign students or whether it would be immoral to accept the bribe of easier access to government grants are distractions from the crucial point for academics. The Trump regime says that the “broad spectrum” of acceptable ideas does not include opposition to “conservative ideas”, whose range is now galloping rightward.
The Compact declares that they are not trying to make one ideology dominant, but that our own disciplinary consensus is illegal. Vice President J. D. Vance called his 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference “Universities Are the Enemy”. The Compact implicitly accused our profession of purposefully “supporting violence”, echoed in Republican commentary at the highest level after Charlie Kirk’s shooting. I am especially worried, because I believe that the “institutional unit” in greatest danger of abolition is the History Department.
Nobody is safe. I have rarely heard a faculty historian describe the history they know best in a way which would be secure from attack by the most fanatical defenders of “conservative ideas”. Imagine teaching about modern European political history and the repeated rise of neo-fascist political formations. Imagine teaching about the military spread of white European civilization across America and its treatment of Native Americans. Imagine teaching about the democratic and socialist projects that opposed and then overthrew the antisemitic Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Imagine teaching the Holocaust and the varied reactions to it inside and outside Europe. Imagine teaching contemporary American history silenced from saying that the American justice system found more than 1000 pro-Trump rioters criminally guilty for their actions on January 6, 2021.
Your own classes, your own writings, your own statements in department meetings could be perused by Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and their militarized formations of ideological purists. You might have to discuss your subject and your historical methods with Stephen Miller. Or better, before a tribunal led by Stephen Miller, where you have to explain why they are wrong that your description of the unpleasant facts of slavery or of government oppression of unfavored groups or of dictatorial regimes around the world is not “belittling”.
Imagine that we would have to invite the editors at the Institute for Historical Review, led by David Irving, to explain how to teach the Holocaust. Imagine being forced to parrot David Barton’s ideas about religion and the state in an American government class.
How would we explain conventional historical methods to irate Republican political figures anxious to make their MAGA reputation? Republican politicians are loudly redefining words familiar to us, putting us in dangerous categories. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Whip Thomas Emmer from Minnesota labelled the peaceful millions of protesters on No Kings Day (October 18) “terrorists” who “hate America”. How might that seep into Republican political evaluations of how we teach the ubiquitous revolutions in modern history, including the two that ushered in modernity, in America and France? Would historians doing their jobs become supporters of “domestic terrorists”?
The sanctification of the late Charlie Kirk, seeking to make him a martyr for his proclaimed beliefs in antisemitism and women’s subordination, demonstrates the rapid redefinition of “conservative” to now include ideas we believed were beyond the pale. How could any historian speak and write without describing, and thereby belittling the antisemitism pushed by Kirk, and more venomously by Candace Owens? Or offer facts about, and thereby disparage, the Holocaust denial that Nick Fuentes was invited to bring into the White House and now brings to right-wing podcasts?
Scrubbing the hard-won history of social, racial, and gender conflict in America from our national parks was not about countering a too-liberal historical interpretation – it was intended to stop all discussion by declaring that such history should not exist. We postwar scholars created that history against the sanitized and thus misleading version that predominated until the 1960s. We are the targets of the Compact, just one of the many Republican creations for attacking us.
The Trump administration poses existential questions from a position of unlimited, at least as they see it, power. Trump himself wrote that the Compact is designed for “Those Institutions that want to quickly return to the pursuit of Truth and Achievement”. In that dystopian world, Truth is delivered by the government and Achievement depends on its acceptance. But not signing the Compact will not be sufficient to stop the Trump-MAGA war against academic work. The Education Department won’t have to abolish History Departments itself or demand that universities get rid of us. The targeted investigations, the threats to funding, and the harassment of faculty and administrators are changing our work forever.
The purging has already begun. State- and local-level Republican officials are already at work abolishing unfavorable discussion of “conservative ideas”. Jessica Adams, of the Indiana University School of Social Work, was removed from a class after she clumsily dared to consider the elements of white supremacy in the MAGA movement. Her abolition involved Republican Sen. Jim Banks, only too happy to enforce “intellectual diversity”, pressuring the IU administration, whose board of governors is entirely appointed by the Republican Governor. A University of Oklahoma psychology instructor was placed on leave for failing an inappropriate essay that called the idea of multiple genders “demonic”; the Governor involved himself in the controversy.
Experts on authoritarianism have developed revealing ideas, such as the concept of “working toward the Führer”, a bureaucratic response down the chain of power to imagine what else Hitler might want, what might please or appease him. Since working against the Führer was deadly, this natural social response led to some of the worst Holocaust atrocities, as ambitious men carried out vague instructions with extremes of violence.
I don’t think we have seen this yet in the Trump administration. Trump still seems to leave his most fanatic ministers behind. But the arrogant DOGE tech bros were the first wave of an ambitious younger generation of careerists willing to probe the limits of vague concepts like “conservative” and “belittle” by attacking us.
We faculty must not leave it to our beleaguered administrations to fight this political battle. As intellectuals, we must counter the Compact with our consensus that we know how to do research, we know how to teach and write, and we know the meaning of academic freedom. We have come to these understandings through very hard work, linking our personal professional success to abstract notions of truth, transparency, and evidence. Trump’s Compact denies our experiences, our legitimacy, our sincerity, and our professionalism.
The idea of sending the Compact with its blatant bribery, written by a hedge-fund billionaire over the signature of a wrestling billionaire, around to nine, then to all universities, may seem unserious. That would be a fatal misjudgment. We can’t wait around to see if this right-ward rush toward an authoritarian culture stops. It has already gone too far. Our freedom to pursue academic inquiry is being challenged as un-American by fanatics who are already remaking American higher education, based on their violent objection to the existence of most of us. We must fight the powers behind the Compact for the future of the American academy.
Our collective explanation of our endless fascination with the search for intellectual rigor is not likely to sway committed ideological enforcers. We must offer it anyway. We must explicitly defend our profession and its ideals. We must say loudly that conservative ideas, like all other ideas, will be examined and critiqued in our classrooms and writings to the best of our abilities.
We can use our historical understanding to analyze contemporary American political history and to consider our future. We can just do our job, to examine the Compact as a document developed over time by particular people and promulgated at a particular moment and in a particular way by this administration. We will better understand those who attack us through careful analysis of their behavior.
We must continue our disciplinary work everywhere we do it, staying late in labs and visiting archives, immersing ourselves in data and documents, amassing long bibliographies, and arguing with publishers about footnotes. We need to keep writing our specialized works. But we also must move beyond the academy.
We must make public arguments about what our work adds up to. Our profession is often criticized for being unable, even unwilling to communicate effectively to the public. I don’t think a lecture on “Working Toward Trump” would work well outside a conference panel. To gain public support for academic inquiry and for all scientific enterprises, I offer my academic colleagues a suggestion. We must become more welcoming to good scholars outside the academy, for example, historians who create fictions and fictionalized narratives for a wide readership and historians who quietly research their families and communities. I believe they overwhelmingly share our reverence for facts and logic. In my field and in all fields, we could benefit from their local contacts, marketing skills and general advice in the war that has been declared on us.
Steve Hochstadt, Professor of History Emeritus, Illinois College
Brown University ‘71 BA in mathematics, ‘83 PhD in modern European history
Bates College History Department 1979-2006
Illinois College History and Political Science Department 2006-2016
