The Voracious Maws attacking Education
A Simple Comparison Tells the Story
Education is under attack on all fronts. This is a short post to outline what is happening. But, my dear fellow intellectuals, friends, colleagues, students (former, present, and future), writers - they are coming for ALL of us, and it seems to me the better part of discretion to prepare accordingly.
Consider the whole sweep of education - public education generally, K-12 schooling, universities, graduate studies, professional schools (e.g. law schools), public intellectuals, archives and repositories, museums. This includes education, knowledge production, preservation of memory, and dissemination of ideas.
Every one of these strands is under attack. This is an important point to establish philosophically. The Republican Administration and their enablers, including their base voters, are executing a total war on the life of the Mind.
(They are also simultaneously executing a total war on the working class, on immigrants, on diversity, and so on. I am just focusing on this one arm of their diabolical work at the moment)
The attacks on the universities include direct involvement in matters of academic freedom, as most trenchantly obvious in the Government-ordered insistence that Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies be placed under receivership. The attacks have endangered both direct funding for universities in terms of grant money and in discouraging foreign students. In other words, the financial viability of the universities is being undercut.
When the attack broadens out, we see a similar pattern - where will graduating Ph.D.s in, say, art history, get a job if the Smithsonian is being made to toe the Republican Administration’s latest agita-inspired bout of “owning the libs”? Small museums and archives are directly in the line of fire when the Republican administration closes the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The National Archives has been targeted on the Republican President’s revenge tour for daring to suggest that he had illegally taken classified documents that belonged to the National Archives (and now the Signal Chat scandal has demonstrated this Republican Administration’s contempt for record-keeping in general). There can’t be any field trips to museums for school children if there are no museums.
Once we grasp the scope of what they are trying to accomplish here - essentially dismantle all levels of education, and all presuppositions of education (things like “critical thinking,” “diversity of viewpoints,” critical debate over politics, scientific research, humanities analysis, etc. etc.) - then we can see that what they are attempting is both retrogressive and revolutionary. The social movements closest in their goals (and sometimes achievements) to what the Republican Administration is doing would include Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Taliban in Afghanistan. Obviously these four instances of totalitarianism came from “different sides” of the fictive political aisle, and gave different reasons for destroying all cultural institutions related to learning. But their overriding similarity was simple: They sought total control of the human mind. The only thing that can defeat this totalitarian goal of total control of the human mind is THE HUMAN MIND, in its always wayward uncontrollable dialectic.
They aim to control us - we have to make ourselves UNCONTROLLABLE. I know my anger cannot be controlled by them, nor my sadness at all that is being destroyed - but I also am confident that creative uncontrollable human minds across this country are already finding unforeseen (and unforeseeable) ways out of this morass.
A SIMPLE COMPARISON
Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested by masked ICE agents, right off the street. She is a graduate student, here on a valid student visa, a graduate student. She was going to a friend’s house to break the Ramadan fast when a strange bunch of people descended upon her, put their hands all over her and arrested her, before whisking her away to another location. The whole thing is so patently illegal, and even more patently intended to send a chilling effect (so appropriate for an agency called ICE), that the only commentary it can bear is to scream “NO!”
What was her alleged crime. Near as anyone can figure out, it is being a co-signer to an opinion editorial in the Tufts University student newspaper. I reproduce the second half of this letter below
OK, so as a retired professor, let me have a go at this co-written work. First, like any co-written piece, especially one intended for publication, it demonstrates compromise and discipline on matters of wording, while simultaneously staying firm in its its overall raison d’être: the groups’ demands.
Second, the benefits of education are evident throughout these concluding paragraphs. They “affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people” - which suggests a universal perspective that does not eschew particularities (such as ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, religion, etc.). While such declarations can be made without thought, in an otherwise thought-full statement like this, they are substantive. The next paragraph demonstrates this with a very intelligent (and intellectual) use of a quote from James Baldwin, concerning the nature of education itself. It underlines the point in the glowing rhetorical flourish of "affirming “the equal dignity and humanity” while simultaneously introducing the complexities that exist within any social discourse. The growing intricacy of their argument culminates in the understanding that the work of education, and of students, centers on evaluating “diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas and opinions” - the dialectic of history at work.
The officially measured letter to university officials has never been my favorite medium, but I’ve got to say that this committee of graduate students did a great job within the confines of this genre, and illustrated their point in a way that demonstrates both self-reflection and an ongoing challenge to the administration to hear them.
And for this (near as I know now - I am quite sure that they’ll “trump” something more up against her), Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested in broad daylight off the street.
Let’s compare this to the DOGE of Venom, Elon Musk, slasher of jobs and agencies.
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said, borrowing the term from Gad Saad, a Canadian scholar who is also a frequent Rogan host.
While Musk said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Well, I have to be a bit tougher on this student than on the previous group editorial. Musk is in a different medium here, an interview with Joe Rogan (February 28, 2025), so he is assuming friendly territory, and takes some shortcuts. But the rhetorical direction is still clear. An underspecified “Western civilization” is hurting itself by practicing too much empathy. He reverts to a metaphor from the computer world, that this is a “bug” in western civilization.
Let me take, for a moment, two undisputed bedrocks of Western civilization - Plato and Jesus. Plato is unimaginable without dialogue - the dialectic is the raison d’être of all of his works (until Laws, which is when he’s become autocratic and frankly a grumpy old man). Jesus is so empathetic that he willingly accepts death, heals the sick, and calls out injustice. I’m neither a Christian nor an old-fashioned Platonist, but I am quite certain that there isn’t any Western Civilization to discuss without grappling with those guys.
So who’s doing the “weaponizing” here? Seriously, EVERYTHING they accuse their enemies of doing, is a projection of what they are doing. He is the one weaponizing. Ozturk is being forcibly silenced, Musk gets to ramble on incoherently (a favorite occupation of many in this Republican Administration) about the problem with empathy. And this is what it looks like:
I know what side I’m on here. This isn’t a “hard” test to pass, people! Think EMPATHETICALLY.