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White Supremacy Is the Point of the Trump Presidency
With both iron fist of police brutality and blunt leveraging of federal agencies and the Supreme Court, Trump has assured that for the foreseeable future, white folks will maintain a disproportionate share of front-row seats to orchestrate the future of this country.
May 16, 2026
Donald Trump can now claim a trifecta of restoring white privilege in a siege smoldering with all the grievance of George Wallace’s segregation now, tomorrow, and forever. While Trump has not brought us all the way back to “Whites Only” water fountains and packing Black folks in the back of buses, the ghost of Bull Connor floats above Trump’s vicious federal police crackdowns on Latino immigrants and the military occupations of racially diverse cities under lies that crime was out of control.
With both iron fist of police brutality and blunt leveraging of federal agencies and the Supreme Court, Trump has assured that for the foreseeable future, white folks will maintain a disproportionate share of front-row seats to orchestrate the future of this country.
The trifecta began with the 2023 Supreme Court ban on race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. The court, packed into a conservative supermajority by Trump in his first term, said colleges must now be colorblind. That means willfully blind to the fact, as stated by dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that the United States remains largely “an endemically segregated society.”
The effect of the ruling was immediate. A Hechinger Report analysis in February found that the nation’s 71 highly selective private universities and 14 public flagships had an overall 18% drop in Black first-year students in 2023, from about 10,000 down to 8,200. That jibes with a January study by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, which found that high-achieving students from underrepresented groups of color “cascaded” downward “into less selective colleges with lower graduation rates and earnings outcomes.”
At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else.
Any patronizing notions that African Americans squeezed out of elite private colleges can still get a fine education at top state schools are not borne out by data. In analyses for Brookings and the Hechinger Report, University of Maryland education professor Julie Park said more than half of state flagships gained fewer than 10 Black students after the Supreme Court decision.To add salt to this wound, Park said many so-called “gains” of Black and Latino enrollment in public flagships were “illusory.” That is because many of the flagships claiming the most gains are the same ones that suffered massive drops in such enrollment years ago when their states banned affirmative action. Worse, Park noted that enrollment at for-profit colleges, notorious for low graduation rates and leaving students hanging high and dry in debt, were up by 15,000 Black students in 2024. That is nothing less than educational sharecropping.
Next in the trifecta is Trump’s bleaching the government of any concern about racial disparities. He has transformed divisions of government created to enforce civil rights into agencies to destroy Black advancement. It is no secret that in the richest nation in the world, Black people still suffer from grievous gaps in healthcare, housing discrimination, and proximity to pollution, just to name a few. A central accompaniment to the Trump administration’s termination of disparity data collection across agencies is his slew of executive orders, beginning on the first day back in office, that ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government.
He unleashed the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to be on the witch hunt for companies and contractors that practice DEI and allegedly discriminate against white people. That, on top of the ban on collegiate affirmative action, triggered a national cowering on diversity that rendered to rubble any remaining reckoning about racial disparities in the wake of the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.
According to the global law firm A&O Shearman, the percent of the top 100 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange that used the term “diversity” in their human capital management disclosures plummeted from 96% in 2024 to 36% last year. Similarly, the percentage of companies in the S&P 500 that used the term “diversity” crashed from 93% to 37%. Institutional investing giants such as BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, State Street, Vanguard, and Morgan Stanley all removed language directing boards to consider race, ethnicity, or gender in board makeups, surrendering to Trump.
Whether by coincidence or direct effect, the disappearance of diversity is paralleled by the evaporation of jobs for Black people. Start with the federal government. It has long been an employment refuge from discrimination. In fiscal year 2021, Black women accounted for 12% of the federal workforce (compared with 6.6% of the civilian labor force). But Trump’s massive contraction of the federal government resulted in Black women accounting for 95,000—35%—of the 271,000 job losses, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Put another way, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimated that Black women lost more than 30% of their employment in the federal government last year, nearly three times more than women overall. In the overall workforce, that institute found that Black women, 14% of the nation’s workforce, accounted for nearly 55% of female job losses.
Inside and outside government, Black women suffered one of the highest shocks of unemployment in a quarter-century, with Black women with bachelor’s degrees suffering the greatest job losses. Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, said in a February policy brief that the losses among educated Black women “were a direct consequence” of Trump’s federal layoffs and buyouts.
While not as dramatic, Black men are also experiencing lower employment. In February of 2025, Trump’s first full month back in office, Black unemployment was 6%, compared with 3.8% for white workers. Last month, Black unemployment was 7.3%, while white unemployment—despite all the economic chaos induced by Trump’s wars and tariffs—has remained relatively stable at 3.7%.
At one point in the Biden administration, which launched efforts at DEI as well as major jobs programs, the Black and white unemployment rates were, respectively, 4.8% and 3.1%. That was the only time the Black unemployment rate was under 5% since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking in the last 20 years, and represented the closest parity to white workers in that time.
Under Trump 2.0, Black unemployment has rocketed back to double that of white people.
The Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais finishes the trifecta. The high court has declared that it needs proof of “intentional” racism in allowing race to be considered in maps of legislative districts. That is ridiculously cynical since everyone knows that “Republican” in most states translates to lily-white. Southern states are tripping over themselves to redraw maps with a straight face that carve up Black urban districts to add Republican congressional seats, accelerating a process that has already happened in states like Texas. On Monday, the high court issued a subsequent decision that allows Alabama to use a new congressional map that will likely eliminate a majority-Black district.
The romantic notion by many Democrats that they can easily return the favor in blue states took a hit this week when the Virginia Supreme Court threw out a map that would have added four Democratic seats to Congress. Moreover, the Supreme Court has opened the door for white racial gerrymandering at all levels of local, county, and state governments, down to school boards.
The voting rights groups Black Voters Matter Fund and Fair Fight Action say the Supreme Court’s decision could result in 19 more safe Republican members of Congress and 191 seats in Southern state legislatures flipping to Republicans. The Brennan Center for Justice warns that representation for communities of color at the very local level “may be at even greater risk,” as they are more likely to “escape media attention.”
This is precisely the point of the Trump presidency. It is not about the issue Trump supporters claim was their top concern. In the 2024 election, 93% of Trump voters told a Pew survey that the economy was their top issue. Similarly, in a YouGov poll, 91% and 85% of Trump supporters said the economy and inflation were their respective first and second concerns.
That is betrayed by all the current major polls showing Trump tanking with the general populace on the economy, keeping inflation in check, and his war on Iran, which aggravated both of the former with soaring gasoline prices and shortages of industrial and agricultural commodities.
In RealClearPolling’s May 8 averaging of the latest major surveys, Trump 2.0 was down to an approval rating of 37% on his handling of the economy, 39% for his attack on Iran, and an atrocious 29% on inflation. In a Reuters-Ipsos poll, Trump was down to 22% approval for his handling of the cost of living.
Yet Trump’s overall job approval rating among his voters and Republicans remains in the sycophant stratosphere. He still holds an 80% job approval rating among his voters and 94% of those who identify as Make America Great Again voters in an Economist-You Gov poll. He still has an 86% job approval rating from Republicans in a Morning Consult survey and an 85% stamp of approval in a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
One reason has to be that Trump, when it comes to race, has already gotten the job done, fulfilling the actual wishes of his voters, even with more than two and a half years to go in his term. In a May 5 Economist-YouGov poll conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, respondents were asked about the importance of proportional Black congressional representation. While 83% of African Americans said representation was very important or somewhat important, only 25% of Republicans thought the same.
Closing the case even further is the fact that the issues most boosting his high overall approval ratings are not the economy or inflation, but immigration and crime, which have long been proxies for controlling people of color. Trump continues to get rave reviews from his base for his goon squads from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even though more than 6,200 children have been detained, according to the Marshall Project, and even though ICE bullets have killed white people (Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis).
Republicans gave Trump an 88% approval rating for his handling of immigration and 89% for his handling of the border in the Washington Post-ABC News poll. The highest Republican ratings for Trump on the issues in a Reuters-Ipsos poll were for immigration (80%) and crime (77%). Ditto for a Forbes-Harris poll (78% for both immigration and crime).
While only 38% of all Americans approved of Trump’s National Guard occupations of cities such as majority-Black Memphis and 43% Black Washington, D.C., 78% of Republicans cheered on this show of lethal force in an Ipsos-National Public Radio poll. That was despite the fact that crime was falling in most American cities, including Memphis and the nation’s capital.
Despite Trump’s economic chaos, his dismantling of public-health and environmental protections, his embrace of oligarchs and putting soldiers of all colors in harm’s way in an unprovoked war, white Republicans have made it a priority of maniacal proportions to cut off opportunity at every pass for Black and Latino people. Even though the richest universities and most powerful of corporations have capitulated to Trump on getting rid of DEI, the reverse discrimination lawsuits from conservative think tanks continue to fly and the Trump administration is still in overdrive in its witch hunt on “DEI discrimination.”
The witch hunt is so insane, the Trump administration has even canceled an effort by the Biden administration to provide septic tanks to residents in the poverty-stricken Black Belt of Alabama. The president who has used fecal references for African countries somehow finds a septic tank to be “illegal DEI,” consigning communities to literally wallow in feces.
Trump has succeeded like no other modern president in seducing his supporters to wallow in the illusion of superiority once expressed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1960. The future president told aide Bill Moyers: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Republicans would rather flee down the same historical rabbit hole that led up to the Civil War and the murderous decades of enforced segregation. They willfully ignore history and the warning of Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster.” At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else.
The only result can be social disaster.
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Stop Trump and His Supreme Court From Tightening the Circle of Personhood
The right-wing Supreme Court, in rulings on Trump administration policies, has done its best to murder what's left of civil rights in the United States.
Sep 26, 2025
Warning: dangers in the mirror are often closer than they may appear. In other words, the next few paragraphs may seem to be hyperbole but are, in fact, expressions of reality (animated by a cold fury).
On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court did its best to murder what’s left of civil rights in this country. As Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported, in an unsigned 6-3 ruling, it overturned a lower court’s order forbidding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol in Los Angeles from stopping, interrogating, and detaining people based on any of four factors: “apparent race or ethnicity; the fact that they speak English with an accent or speak Spanish; their presence at particular locations like farms or pickup sites for day laborers; and the type of work they do.”
Those six conservative justices might as well have stood in front of the court and set fire to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation and discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin in a wide variety of venues and actions, including public accommodations, education, the provision of government services, housing, transportation, and voting. The Civil Rights Act outlawed exactly the kind of racial profiling now being practiced—and permitted by our highest court—in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants.
While they were at it, those six robed arsonists might as well have burnt the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which outlaws unreasonable searches and seizures and requires a court-issued warrant for arrests. They could have added the 14th Amendment to their bonfire, which was one of three passed and ratified during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Those three amendments established full citizenship rights for emancipated Blacks and future generations of US denizens, regardless of race. The 13th Amendment, of course, outlawed slavery, and the 15th secured voting rights for all (male) citizens regardless of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. The 14th Amendment, while establishing birthright citizenship, also guarantees “all persons” (regardless of citizenship status) due process under the law—including those suspected of being in the country illegally.
Centuries of Struggle Undone
No one gave us those rights. Successive generations of Americans fought for them, starting in the late 1780s and in the 1791 passage of the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to our Constitution. That’s when the Fourth Amendment established the rights that centuries later would be invoked to prevent people from being stopped for “driving while Black” or seeking work while looking Latino. (It’s also when, thanks to the First Amendment, we secured freedom of speech and the press, which gives me the right to state publicly, even in the wake of his despicable assassination, that the founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, built his organization on explicit contempt for women, especially women of color, and LGBTQ people.)
It took a civil war and the deaths of almost 700,000 soldiers on both sides to end legal slavery in this country and give us those three Reconstruction amendments, passed between 1865 and 1870.
As we’ve seen repeatedly, the hard-won legal remedies for racism are now being turned against both the historic and present-day targets of racism.
And it took decades of mostly nonviolent struggle and sacrifice (and more deaths) to win passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Those two laws essentially reiterated the same rights that had been secured back in the 1860s but had been denied in practice in the Southern states of the former Confederacy. “Denial” is a weak word for the life-destroying discrimination and segregation that was then systematically enforced by state-sponsored terrorism (all too often in the form of lynching) against those accused of violating the Jim Crow regime of that era.
The Supreme Court had already torn the guts out of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, deciding in Shelby County v. Holder that states with a history of race-based voter suppression would no longer have to seek “preclearance” from the Department of Justice for changes to their voting procedures. The court’s argument was essentially that voting discrimination no longer exists in the states named in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, observing that ending preclearance was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
The fact that a storm of suppression was indeed still raging became clear almost immediately, as affected states began passing laws making it more difficult for people of color to vote. Ironically, US President Donald Trump’s crew hasn’t yet completely purged the Department of Justice’s website of support for voting rights. You can, for instance, still find there a 2023 blog post by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke lamenting the depredations of Shelby and praising the Biden administration’s support for the—never passed—John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act as a remedy.
Now, in a one-paragraph decision, the six right-wing justices, appointed by a series of Republican presidents including Trump, have made another contribution to his administration’s all-out attack on race and gender equality. Justice Brett Kavanaugh found it necessary to amplify the court’s decision in a lengthy concurrence. In words untethered from the real world, he wrote:
The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”
Let me repeat that: “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.” Tell that to Kilmar Abrego García.
Oh, California
In the last few decades, some very bad ideas have come out of my own state, California. This may surprise readers who think of Californians as living in a great blue expanse on the country’s “Left Coast.” They may think our governor, Gavin Newsom, is an avatar of liberalism. (Despite my criticisms of the man, I will admit that his recent trolling of Donald Trump’s ALL-CAPS MEDIA STYLE is pretty funny.)
Nevertheless, some seriously bad ideas have triumphed as ballot propositions here. In 1978, there was Proposition 13, which made it all but impossible to raise taxes in the state—especially property taxes, which provide almost half the funding for our public schools. That “taxpayer revolt” (as it came to be known) spread rapidly to other states. Then, in 1994, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson transformed his flagging reelection campaign by inflaming white anxiety about immigration in California. He launched a series of TV ads with the tag line “they keep coming,” a reference to people crossing the Mexican border looking for work in my state. Weaponizing white anxiety was something Donald Trump would borrow when he ran for president in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
To ramp up his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, Wilson endorsed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, or “Save Our State” initiative. And Californians then indeed did reelect him, while passing the proposition, which outlawed the provision of any government services—including healthcare and education—to any undocumented immigrant. Government employees at any level were required to report anyone (including schoolchildren) they suspected of being in the country illegally. In language forebodingly similar to the rhetoric of both of Trump’s presidential campaigns and his two administrations, Proposition 187 began:
The People of California find and declare as follows:
That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.
What happens in California doesn’t always stay in California. As the Washington Post reported 25 years later, “Since 1994, 65 initiatives and referendums to change state immigration laws were attempted via direct democracy mechanisms.”
Almost immediately, federal courts prevented the implementation of most parts of Proposition 187. Three decades later, however, the Supreme Court has effectively validated Proposition 187’s premise, permitting the use of racial profiling to identify possible “illegal aliens.”
The right wing wasn’t done with legislating racism in my state. In 1996, Proposition 209, also known by the (completely unironic) ironic title its proponents gave it, the “California Civil Rights Initiative,” outlawed affirmative action at any level of government in the state, including access to public colleges and universities.
Though it faced legal challenges, Proposition 209 remains in force today. There’s no doubt that earlier Supreme Court decisions, including the 1978 finding in University of California v. Bakke, had indeed laid the groundwork for it. In it, a 30-year-old white man had challenged his rejection by the medical school at the University of California, Davis. He sued and was eventually admitted. In his case, the court upheld the principle of affirmative action to address racial or other discrimination against protected classes of persons, but outlawed specific numerical quotas.
By 2023, however, an ever more right-leaning Supreme Court had ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that affirmative action violates the equal protections guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. As we’ve seen repeatedly, the hard-won legal remedies for racism are now being turned against both the historic and present-day targets of racism.
Then, in 1998, another ballot initiative outlawed most bilingual education in California public schools (though it was finally repealed at the ballot box in 2016).
Disparate Impact
By 2003, however, in part because of changes to the demographic makeup of the electorate, California voters had had enough of legally weaponizing white anxiety. They roundly rejected Proposition 54, known as the “Racial Privacy Initiative,” which, as the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California put it, “would have banned most agencies from collecting data on race, ethnicity, and national origin, with disastrous consequences for health, education, public safety, and civil rights.”
But in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the right-wing strategists for a second Trump presidency made it very clear that their plans included implementing a national version of the Racial Privacy Initiative. The author of the section on labor advocated prohibiting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere existence of such data, he wrote, “can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?
I used to suggest to my philosophy students that you could view the last 2,000 years of “Western” history as a gradual widening of the circle of beings who count as full persons.
It seems that Donald Trump agrees. In April 2025, he issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” In it, he noted that “disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.” Trump and his handlers don’t see taking systemic racism and contemporary bias into consideration as a solution to a problem. Such consideration is the problem. “It not only undermines our national values,” says the order, “but also runs contrary to equal protection under the law and, therefore, violates our Constitution.”
Whatever Trump may decree, current employment law (as implied in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, affirmed in 1970 by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., and codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act passed under the presidency of George H.W. Bush) supports the use of disparate impact. As of now, plaintiffs can still seek to prove discrimination by demonstrating the disparate impact of a company’s “facially neutral” hiring, firing, or promotion policies. How long will it be, however, before this Supreme Court reverses decades of progress in equal employment?
We’ve already seen the “disparate impact” of Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency’s destruction of the federal workforce, which has disproportionately affected Blacks, and especially Black women. It’s a major factor explaining why 300,000 Black women have lost jobs since Trump took office.
If you have any doubt whether race (and sex) bias continues to exist at the highest levels in this administration, consider the words of a man Trump thought of as “sort of like a son,” the recently assassinated right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk:
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
And about a list of prominent Black women, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Kirk said: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Circling Backwards?
I used to suggest to my philosophy students that you could view the last 2,000 years of “Western” history as a gradual widening of the circle of beings who count as full persons. At first, that circle contained only high-born men. Centuries of struggle saw the inclusion of men without noble birth, and later without property. Racial concepts, themselves a human invention, long excluded men who were not deemed white. Eventually, fitfully, they, too, were admitted to the circle of personhood. Most recently, women seem to have become persons, and with that addition, people of a variety of genders and sexual orientations have also joined the circle.
But right now, six people on the Supreme Court, along with the Trump administration, are doing all they can to tighten that previously ever-widening circle of personhood and Donald Trump is on board in a big-time way. Let us hope that we can stop them from turning that circle into a noose.
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What Must Universities Become Today in Face of Trump?
In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
Jun 08, 2025
Universities face vitriolic attacks today from the Trump regime. Several could even go under. When you keep in mind that he also targets other institutions of civil society—such as law firms, labor unions, the media, assorted churches, and the like—it becomes woefully clear what is going on.
The Trump regime seeks to force all independent sources of news, truth, and judgment to their knees, doing so to rapidly impose a fascist oligopoly that limits and demeans every orientation and viewpoint except his own. His is a recipe most autocratic regimes introduce early in the day. As M. Gessen has reminded us in a superb piece in the New York Times, the silencing of diverse centers of judgment and opinion marks the early stages of an authoritarian movement. I quote from her experience in Russia during the middle stages of the Putin takeover:
"I was shaken when Russian invaded Georgia in 2008. My world change when three young women were sentenced to jail for a protest in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn't breathe when Russian annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was posoned in 2020, arrested in 2021, and almost killed in prison in 2024. And when Russian invaded Ukraine in 2022." (NYT, June 1, 2025, p B4).
The Gessen message is that it is unwise and dangerous to first feel shocked by such events and then allow them to become absorbed into the new background of life. If Trump has not yet made the same moves as Putin, his Big Lies, pardons of hundreds of convicted insurrectionists, attacks on independent centers of civil society, and extra-legal exportation of people to concentration camps in other countries are well on the way. We are shocked at each new round and then tend to forget how shocking such events were.
It is unwise and dangerous to first feel shocked by such events and then allow them to become absorbed into the new background of life.
So, the first thing universities and colleges must do today is to join hands with other institutions of civil society which are—or are about to—face the same sort of massive pressures, pressures often backed by militia threats to the livelihoods and safety of people in those same institutions. That is exactly why Trump, very early, pardoned the militias who joined him in drives to deny and violently overturn the results of the 2020 election. He may well need them in the future. "Stand back and stand by." It is also why Inspector Generals were immediately removed from key institutions in the government and why Elon Musk was given free rein to wreak havoc on government institutions focused on health for the poor, medical studies, and new scientific research.
The 'Viewpoint Diversity' Fraud
It must be emphasized from the start, too, how fraudulent new movements are within several universities—led, I fear, by the one in which I have worked—to "pluralize" intellectual perspectives within their schools. It is now called "Viewpoint Diversity." Those are attempts to move universities toward the right of the current distribution of power and opinion while the right itself holds bankrupt views about future dangers and possibilities. The fraudulence of this movement is easy to expose: If you campaign to move university faculty to the right in the name of institutional pluralism, why not—with the same vociferousness—call for greater economic and ideological diversity among university trustees, university presidents, corporate boardrooms, right wing think tanks, silicon valley entrepreneurs, the Claremont Institute, and Fox News reporting? For surely, these institutions on the right could use more diversity. The reason is that the so carefully selected calls for diversity within universities alone are designed to draw university culture—as one of the precarious holdouts against an autocratic regime—more securely into the orbit of that regime. Greater faculty "diversity," neoliberal university administrations, and external pressure will do the job.
Neoliberal university presidents and trustees may not love aspects of the Trump agenda, but too many show by their deeds that they prefer it to a university in which faculty control the curriculum, bloated administrative staffs are reduced, students express political opinions freely, and peaceful protests are treated as welcome aspects of university life that can educate wider publics about things many had failed heretofore to grasp. There have been valuable university challenges to public opinion to reconsider the Vietnam War, to resist the Iraq War, to ignite civil rights, to challenge Israeli genocide in Gaza, and to come to terms with an emerging period of climate wreckage that corporate/state institutions now try to ignore, downplay, or cover up.
The University As New Beacon
So, what should universities and colleges be doing today, then? Well, first, we must relieve our decades long great dependence on the state by curtailing military research. Faculties, students, and parents must also band together to demand a pluralization of boards of trustees, as we pull back the autocratic powers too many university and college presidents have assumed in recent years. More than that, faculties, students, and ecologists must demand that more teaching and research resources be devoted to studying the dangers radical climate wreckage poses to life in so many regimes today. (I note that this has never been one of the "signature" initiatives pursued by the president of my university, though he loves AI research).
As it becomes clear how current hurricane and tornado surges, wildfires, faster glacier melts, ocean rises, and a slowing ocean conveyor are harbingers of worst to come unless radical transformations are undertaken, university humanists, earth scientists, and social scientists must find new ways to work together. While some schools lead the way in this regard, many others are populated by faculties and students who would also give climate wreckage their highest teaching and research priority if only their trustees, provosts, and presidents would stop discouraging and marginalizing these activities. Too many of the latter are too close for comfort to Trump in this regard
The Risks and the Stakes
These are all big and risky moves. They will incite further Trump attacks as they focus on an accelerating condition he calls "climate crap." And yet, much more is needed, too. Universities must make themselves into living eco-egalitarian beacons today, doing so to encourage other institutions of civil society to follow suit. Most faculty know that today university presidents, deans, and college coaches too often pull down extravagant salaries and benefits. Those perks often draw their lifestyles and thinking closer to big neoliberal donors who increasingly see themselves inhabiting a different world from people in everyday life. This encourages college presidents to mimic the lifestyles of the donor class and to downplay the educational needs of the poor, racial minorities, and future high school teachers. The current structure of the university is exquisitely designed to foment working-class resentments among those who know their kids need to go to college but can't afford the exorbitant bill to do so.
Let the university not only practice affirmative action in admissions—an affirmative action that must now encompass class as well as race and gender—but itself become a living beacon of a more egalitarian way of being.
So, let's work to usher into being student/faculty/parent/movements to demand that the highest paid members of a university make, say, no more than eight times as much as the lowest paid members—the food staff, the janitors, the support staff, the groundskeepers, etc. Let the university not only practice affirmative action in admissions—an affirmative action that must now encompass class as well as race and gender—but itself become a living beacon of a more egalitarian way of being. One immediate effect will be to lower the cost of admission for working-class students.
These egalitarian practices must be joined to a variety of ecological practices, practices which enact in college organization what ecologists know are urgently needed in the wider society too. The university will now become a center in which fossil fuels are a thing of the past, replaced by solar and wind power. Its new buildings—hopefully now emphasizing the classroom buildings that are sorely needed—will also be constructed to conform to the most advanced ecological designs. Such redesigns can draw upon faculty and students from multiple fields to participate in their perfection.
A Utopian Agenda and Expose
Of course, it will be announced immediately that these are all utopian proposals. They are sooo unrealistic. They are indeed. In being utopian they not only expose how right-wing, anti-egalitarian, and anti-ecological the Trump regime is today. They also show how too many university presidents and trustees have lost their way as well, adopting modes of realism woefully inadequate to the risks faced today by universities and the larger society. University leaders often assume they can float above the inequalities and climate wreckage of today, and they too often support a university matrix that is desperately unattuned to the most urgent needs of the larger society in which they are nested. In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
Under a new, or revivified, university regime, presidents, provosts and deans--albeit a much smaller cohort than the number which currently bloats these schools—will propose agendas to the faculty rather than imposing them from above and waiting for laggards to buy into their problematic neoliberal image of the world. They will enact democratic processes rather than putting the squeeze on faculty, students, and parents from every side.
When it comes to Harvard against Trump and Musk, the faculty must always side with Harvard. When it comes to the current authoritarianism of too many university presidents, provosts, deans, and trustees, more faculty members must call upon a new generation of students, faculty and parents to repair the damage collaborating university regimes have wrought both in their internal organization and in the public face they present to society. We must speak more vociferously to a wider public about the real situation the United States faces, as its autocratic leaders attack democracy, affirm racism, accelerate inequality, flirt with economic disaster, ignore climate wreckage, and refuse to acknowledge how their own climate policies help to promote the escalating migrations from south to north they so cruelly use to foment fascist energies at home. The odds, of course, are against those who seek to make the university a new center of egalitarian creativity and ecological awareness. But since the most likely alternative to that is disaster, those are the odds we must face and strive to overcome.
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