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'More Perfect University': A Progressive Alternative to Turning Point USA on College Campuses
"Only by coming together and flexing our collective power as students, workers, tenants, and community members will we build a world for the 99%."
Apr 15, 2026
Gen Z's rightward shift in the 2024 election and the influence of Turning Point USA, the right-wing college organization co-founded by assassinated activist Charlie Kirk, have garnered considerable attention in the press—but a new project launched Wednesday by the labor-focused media group More Perfect Union makes the case that young voters across the country want an opportunity to strengthen "our collective power as the 99%."
While Turning Point USA has cast itself as an antidote to liberal viewpoints and "wokeness" on college campuses, Elise Joshi, who is leading the More Perfect University initiative, emphasized in The New York Times that Turning Point has demonstrated a steadfast “refusal to champion working-class issues.”
More Perfect University aims to mobilize young people in a movement centered on economic populism—turning their attention to the outsized power of corporations and ultrarich political donors while Turning Point USA is holding conventions where CEO Erika Kirk implores 20-something women to focus on finding a husband and condemns pro-immigration protesters as "demonic."
“The same corporations that are rigging the economy against young people are bankrolling the right’s campus operation,” Joshi told the Times.
In More Perfect University's launch video, released on Wednesday, Joshi said today's college students are "being robbed by Big... Everything."
From oil companies to private equity firms buying up housing, said Joshi, "elites have rigged the entire game. While they get billions in handouts, they squeeze us for profit, track our every move, and keep us too divided and exhausted to fight back."
NEW: More Perfect Union is opening up our newsroom, connecting with students everywhere, and equipping them with the tools needed to unrig our broken economic system. pic.twitter.com/oQT6sRqKC8
— MPUniversity (@MPUniversityUS) April 15, 2026
According to the group's website, More Perfect University will hold campus events that bring "all corners of campus life together" to build community and organize around efforts to fight for working people, offer virtual trainings where students can "connect with organizers already building power and winning," and open up More Perfect Union's newsroom to students, training them "to tell local stories that take on unchecked power."
"Mainstream media and establishment politicians are captured by corporate interests," said Joshi. "It's up to us to cover the issues our communities are facing and how everyday people are coming together to combat them.
The "student storytellers" with whom More Perfect University works, Joshi told the Times, will “understand our economy is not broken by accident.”
On April 20, US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is set to co-host a virtual launch party for More Perfect University with journalist John Russell. The group is also planning an online event with former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, an outspoken critic of corporate monopolies and corruption.
The initiative comes as young voters express growing dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump's administration, less than a year and a half after voters ages 18-29 voted for former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris by only four percentage points, signifying a major shift to the right following the 2020 election. Former President Joe Biden won the demographic by a 25-point margin in 2020.
The Yale Youth Poll, released on Wednesday, found that the views of voters ages 18-34 are heavily impacting Trump's overall sinking approval ratings. Sixty-eight percent of voters ages 18-22 disapprove of the president, according to the poll, as well as 72% of 23- to 29-year-olds.
More Perfect University is also launching as the Trump administration wages attacks on academic freedom on college campuses. Last month the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging the school has "allowed antisemitism to flourish on campus."
Universities including Columbia and Northwestern have been criticized by students and faculty for capitulating to Trump, striking deals and agreeing to policy changes in order to restore federal funding that was cut.
"Mainstream media, politicians, and universities are capitulating to the 1%," reads More Perfect University's website. "The responsibility to tackle authoritarianism and corporate greed falls on us. We cannot do that scattered and isolated. Only by coming together and flexing our collective power as students, workers, tenants, and community members will we build a world for the 99%."
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Iran Confirms at Least 60 University Students and 10 Professors Killed by US-Israel Bombings
"The enemy does not want us to succeed or have development and progress, but all our universities are united now by these attacks," said the president of Tehran's prestigious Sharif University of Technology.
Apr 15, 2026
At least 60 students and 10 professors have been killed in US-Israeli attacks on universities, according to an Iranian government official, while other university officials report even higher death tolls.
Standing outside the bombed-out ruins of Iran's Aerospace Research Institute, which was targeted twice earlier this month, Minister of Science, Research, and Technology, Hossein Simaei, said on Wednesday that attacks on the facility and other universities were “scientific crimes."
“This was a center where researchers worked on civilian sectors, including biology, agriculture, and surveying,” Simaei said. “Unfortunately, it has fallen victim to the enemy’s brutal attacks.”
The institute was one of at least 32 universities and 857 schools that have been attacked by US and Israeli forces since the US and Israel launched the war at the end of February, according to a report by the Iranian Red Crescent on April 10.
Bijan Ranjbar, the president of the Islamic Azad University system—one of the largest in the world—has confirmed that at least 110 students at his institution have been killed and 21 university branches have been damaged.
On April 6, the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, which has been described as the "MIT of Iran," was also bombed, severely damaging its High-Performance Computing Center, which serves more than 3,000 artificial intelligence and computer science researchers.
The Pasteur Institute, one of the oldest research and health institutes in Iran, was also hit earlier this month, rendering it "unable to continue delivering health services," according to the World Health Organization.
"The enemy does not want us to succeed or have development and progress, but all our universities are united now by these attacks," said Sharif University president Masoud Tajrishi.
Israel has justified attacking these institutions on the grounds that they are closely linked to the Iranian military, similar to its claim that universities in Gaza are used by Hamas.
But following promises by US President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to bomb Iran "back to the Stone Ages," attacks on civilian infrastructure have gone far beyond those with any discernible military purpose.
The WHO reported on April 8 that since the beginning of the war, at least 23 healthcare institutions were attacked by US and Israeli forces. Attacks have also been reported on several oil and energy facilities.
Though the US and Israel often frame these attacks as inseparable from their objective of weakening Iran militarily, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, an assistant professor of the international relations of the Middle East at the University of St. Andrews, argues that they function as attacks on the whole of Iranian society.
"Whatever role the state played in constructing refineries, pharmaceutical plants, and research institutions, it is Iranian workers, engineers, scientists, and patients who depend on them, who built their careers inside them, and who will suffer most from their destruction," he wrote in Jacobin earlier this week. "Bombing a country’s industrial and scientific base is an act of violence against its people, regardless of what one thinks of its government."
He said: “The systematic killing of scientists and engineers, the destruction of centrifuges and computer networks, the bombing of research universities and pharmaceutical facilities: All of it reflects a coherent strategic objective, which is to erase the embodied knowledge, the accumulated expertise, and the institutional memory that make Iranian technological development possible.”
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Standing Witness to University Complicity in Criminal Wars of Aggression
Military-related research at universities like NC State helps the imperialist state find ways to more effectively kill people around the world who resist US domination.
Apr 05, 2026
On February 28, 2026, the Trump administration ordered US military forces to launch a criminal war of aggression against Iran. In the first wave of bombing, a US Tomahawk missile struck a girls elementary school in Minab, collapsing the roof and killing over 100 children. Since the attacks began, over 1,900 people have been killed and 24,800 wounded, according to media reports. The casualty numbers are preliminary, but otherwise these are uncontroversial facts.
Here are a few more observations that should be uncontroversial.
Many, perhaps most, US research universities, public and private, function in part to abet the imperialist state. Military-related research at these universities helps the imperialist state find ways to more effectively kill people around the world who resist US domination. Today, plain talk about these activities is rare, as is protest against them. For the most part, university aid to the capitalist class' projects of imperial domination either goes unmentioned, is normalized as morally unproblematic, or is celebrated under the aspect of nationalism.
Finally, here's a report from the non-Ivy province of academia: On March 12, 2026, the vice chancellor of research and innovation at North Carolina State University (where I am professor emeritus), Krista Walton, sent a campus-wide email titled "Investing in Our Research Infrastructure's Future." NC State, the email said, ranked "steady at 6th place among our peers (public universities without a medical school) in research expenditures." This sounds innocuous enough. The usual sort of institutional cheerleading.
I am thus appalled when universities are suborned into service of an imperial state. To use universities in this way is a betrayal of the enlightenment values that make universities humane institutions.
But where did the money come from? And what will building the university's research infrastructure entail? Walton goes on to explain.
Among the major funding sources noted in the email are the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy, and NASA. In DOD funding, Walton boasts, "NC State ranked second only to Duke University." As for building infrastructure, the email calls for "positioning the university to align with national priorities," and "build[in] on the great work our investigators are already doing in the defense and security sector." More specifically, building on this work will involve creation of a new "defense and security institute," for which faculty are invited to "help develop an aligned vision, mission, and goals."
Again, this email and the invitation to get on board—to help make the university more responsive to the needs of the imperial state—was sent less than two weeks after the criminal attack on Iran began, less than two weeks after the killing of more than 100 school children in Minab and the deaths of many more civilians in subsequent weeks. Though the email of course makes no mention of killing, it implicitly invites faculty, students, and staff to support the kind of reach-across-the-globe military violence that inevitably destroys innocent lives. To put it any other way amounts to moral self-deception.
Analysis is needed to explain how we've gotten to this point. I've done that sort of thing before. I've written about NC State's addiction to tobacco money, its multi-million-dollar deal with the National Security Administration, and its ties with criminal corporations. Administrators and their political backers putting the university's snout into the trough of military funding could be analyzed in the same ways: as the result of cuts in funding from general state revenues, of the nationalist ideologies in which Americans are steeped, of amoral careerism, of bureaucratic structures that let people separate intentions from consequences and thus join in causing great harms—holocausts, genocides, wars. A thorough analysis would consider all of these causes, and more.
But do we need more analysis right now, or are the results in? The facts are as I have stated them. No one should begrudge further good-faith interpretation of these facts and what they imply. Analysis, in this sense, has no end; it is the perpetual motion machine of academia. For now, however, I have reached a point where all I can do is stand as an appalled witness. I speak simply to profess—not to untangle any sociological mysteries but to make a public statement of conscience.
I believe universities should exist to freely create and transmit knowledge useful to all peoples; to promote peace based on rational discourse; and to develop understandings of our common humanity across the divisions created to foster elite domination. I am thus appalled when universities are suborned into service of an imperial state. To use universities in this way is a betrayal of the enlightenment values that make universities humane institutions. It is a revolting reduction of universities to instruments of nationalism and resource control, for the benefit of those who have captured the reins of the state.
I am further appalled at the violence this entails, and at how this violence is obscured or normalized. The NC State email from which I quoted earlier cheerfully asks us to align the university with "national priorities"—set by whom?—by building our research infrastructure in the areas of defense and security. And for what? To make the venal and powerful—the capitalist class or, as some have taken to calling it, the Epstein class—more powerful, if necessary by destroying the lives and infrastructure of others. To this, I object.
I object, too, to the hypocrisy of conducting this violence-abetting work behind the veil of liberal values, while the violence is perpetrated at a distance, so far away that it is hard to see the links between research done for the Department of Defense or military contractors, illegal wars of aggression, and dead schoolchildren. To refuse to see these links is not merely head-in-the-sand hypocrisy; it is rank dishonesty hidden inside an institutional shell that claims the pursuit of truth to be its distinctly virtuous mission.
North Carolina State University is just an example, and no special villain. The big leaguers at the military trough are MIT, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Maryland. To the extent that these institutions claim greater prestige—based on touting humane values and scientific achievements—their hypocrisy is all the more rank. To the extent that these institutions help to legitimate war-making research at less prestigious institutions like NC State—pretending it is compatible with freedom, equality, and democracy—the damage they do is all the worse.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich argues that the psychic force driving fascism is repressed sexuality. As a social psychologist trained in sociology, I never put much stock in this argument. Most of what conduces to participation in collective acts of destruction can be traced to culture and social organization. Yet I think Reich was right when he said, looking back at the 1930s, "While we presented the masses with superb historical analyses and economic treatises on the contradictions of imperialism, Hitler stirred the deepest roots of their emotional being." Critical intellectuals offer similar analyses today. But if at the end of analysis we can't connect to our own emotional being—the part of us that stands appalled and says, No, enough!—those analyses will wither without effect, as they too often have in the past.
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