Part of a Longer Article in Change Magazine (link here)

The Narratives about Charlie Kirk’s Assassination are an Example for Higher Education to Learn From

A single gunshot pierced through the sun-stroked academic quad at Utah State University. Within moments, the crowd knew that the founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, had been assassinated.

Kirk’s assassination was many academic leaders’ nightmare.

Collectively, campus leaders lose sleep over the possibility of active shooters on campuses.

And Kirk was a significant figure in challenging the legitimacy of higher education in American democracy.

His assassination, tragic on many levels, is also a complicating factor in how the public sees higher education in a politically-charged decade.

The Battlefield for Citizenship is the National Imagination

The Nostalgia Spectrum (figure below) allows us to witness how history is being organized in the present by omissions and repressions from mediated stories of current events in order to assert racialized power rather than democratic values. Benedict Anderson defines nations as “imagined communities” that work by establishing who is culturally understood as a cultural citizen and who is not. Turning Point USA and the general anti-DEI movement has operated with similar understanding, and sought to draw firm borders between who they see as included in the curriculum and so nation, and who is not. History and its record, is part of how the present imagined citizenry is defined, and so the future hierarchies of identity that the public imagines is also being organized by our present understanding of the past. The Nostalgia Spectrum illustrates this dynamic and its inner workings. The left side (not in terms of political persuasion) of the Nostalgia Spectrum generally seeks to establish cultural definitions of who belongs in the imagined borders of America a very narrow and mythological way by erasing realities of oppression from the record. The right side, in contrast, seeks to insist on those facts being part of official records and subsequently establish citizenship and the imagined nation, as inclusive of those people harmed in those moments.

In the end, The Nostalgia Spectrum illustrates that higher education is a locus of debates because the battlefield for how we imagine is in what we learn, read, and experience.

Narratives following Kirk’s assassination immediately put his memory in a nostalgic mythology. He was positioned by many as an advocate of free speech. Glossed over were his overt sexism, racism, homophobia, and anti-Asian rhetoric (Stein). Narratives around Kirk’s assassination follow a familiar pattern regarding higher education, race, and the way in which the public’s imagination of both often repress memories of the marginalized through physical and rhetorical violence that the Nostalgia Spectrum reveals: Those who are focused on marginalizing cultural citizenship of the already-marginalized have a tendency to repress from memory the atrocities of the past: In Kirk’s case this erasure occurred through repressing the hateful rhetoric he engaged in.

The tensions that exist regarding race, higher education, and cultural citizenship today originate from this reality that a side of the Nostalgia Spectrum seeks to repress memory of atrocities from the past and subsequently mythologize America’s current realities; which there is a side directly opposing this tendency.

For instance, after planning to carry out a shooting at the College of Charleston (but finding too much security there), a shooter entered South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and killed nine African Americans. The legitimacy of Confederate monuments in public spaces and higher education institutions took center stage in the national discourse in the months following. The focus on symbols of our racist past overshadowed the burgeoning white supremacy that we needed to shine a light on.

Just one year later, attacks on academic subjects that focused on race and power led to them being outlawed in over eighteen states because the meaning of Critical Race Theory was perverted to the general public.

Two years later Unite the Right marched at University of Virginia and made clear a hatred for Jews. In his press conference regarding this event, Donald Trump asserted some of those white power members were ‘good people.’ (Phelps, 2019) And now, eight years later, the same administration is attacking higher education for being anti-Semitic .

Erased from memory are the actions of the white supremacy in each of these instance. For the past decade, college campuses and how we remember particular flashpoints has led to a repression of white supremacy and a lifting up of a problematic hierarchy of races, genders, sexualities, and nationalities aligned with that construct.

Higher Education Leadership and Leaning into Our Roles

There is a role higher education leaders play in cultural flashpoints.

In moments of cultural significance, truth and knowledge become foundationally important for how the future is being organized and imagined. Our sector is poised to play a much more significant role in our democracy if we resituate our posture to lean into the controversies surrounding these flashpoints rather than default to policies and procedures. On campuses, this leaning in would take the form of providing time and space for students to debate issues rather than creating policies to repress their grappling with them. For institutions, this would mean taking relatively benign stances that all students matter, but that some view points can be hateful.

For instance, October 14^th has been deemed a National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk. Many students for years to come will gather to pay respect to a figure they heroize. Other students will most likely protest such memorial gatherings. And there are faculty and staff across the country who have been victims of his WatchLists, literally receiving death threats for over a decade as a result of their being named as ‘too woke.’

Throughout the hallways of our institutions, leaders are reciting policies for students’ ability to hold vigils and start new Turning Point factions.

Many are concerned about the controversy that such vigils may bring. Others incorrectly rely on the notion of academic freedom to justify such vigils. Free speech, not academic freedom, is what protects vigils and the factually incorrect thinking Kirk and his followers espouse. Neither is an example of academic freedom. However, lost in such posture is explicit statement that Kirk caused pain, suffering, and fear among students, faculty, and staff because of their gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. Moreover, whitewashing Kirk and Turning Point’s belief systems is educational malpractice and supporting a movement that is anti-educational and anti-black, brown, and LGBTQ+. While we should indeed allow free speech on campus, our role as educators is to present the whole truth: Kirk was a free speech advocate. The other part of the story that should be discussed on campuses is his role in hate. The complexity of such an individual’s legacy is part of unpacking meaning that higher education is supposed to support.

Yet, policies and protocols regarding free expression seem to be the default justifications leaders continue to use in order to situate the Kirk phenomena as a singular event to ‘get through’ rather than a milestone of a grander movement to decimate the very values of higher education.

Leaders in higher education would do much better to seize these moments as rife opportunities to center the academic, democratic, and national responsibilities of our institutions and organizations. There are many different ways to address Kirk’s assassination as a sector and on campus.

Those who desire to hold vigils and lift up his memory will and should do so.

There is also opportunity to hold campus discussions about the phenomena of cultural memory and how the imagination is a site of current contests about citizenship. There are respectful ways of using the day to underscore the general repressions of his movements’ racism, sexism, and heteronormativity in favor of an American mythology that voids the horrors of the present and past. There is opportunity to explore distinctions between the First Amendment and academic freedom as well as the how the Second Amendment impacts higher education.

Indeed, such respectful discussion is the responsibility of educators—both in terms of unpacking the stories of power and history and also of modeling civil but difficult discourse. Unfortunately, many educators and leaders back away from using rigorous, academic approaches to engage with these cultural flashpoints, instead using policy and protocol as a justification for their positions, ignoring the deeper work of academics and equity. In the meantime, we not only miss an opportunity to make higher education stronger, but we also allow one set of narratives to dominate our campus cultures and media in general.

By mistaking momentary comfort with deep civic work, we place our higher education sector in peril.

These new proposed rules are an unprecedented intrusion by the federal government into the autonomy of higher education institutions and will allow the government, regardless of the administration, to interfere with the academic freedom of our nation’s faculty, students, and college leaders.

See the Alliance’s toolkit on how to submit public comment and join us Friday, August 29, at 12pm ET for a briefing on the proposed rules hosted in partnership with Wesley Whistle, Project Director of Student Success & Affordability at New America. Register here.

Sports is Next for Authoritarians

President Trump’s influence in sports and sporting events is anything but apolitical. As he and FIFA president Gianni Infantino laughed in a spectator suite during the World Cup final yesterday, the two men’s relationship reminded us all of how Florian Balogun’s red card suspension was when Trump became the first time an American president intervened to potentially change the outcome of athletic event. (His interference, matching the values he takes toward elections, derived from a desire to win even if unfairly.)

So much for the ‘shut up and dribble’ posture Trump has taken in the past.^[i]

But Trump and his movement’s focus on sport of late seems to match the attacks on higher education, legal, media, voting, and other sectors than they do cultural debates.

For example, just a month ago, in a nearly cartoonish spectacle, the Trump administration brought professional sports to the White House for competition for the first time in American history. The UFC event being held at the White House inverted the tradition of a politician attending sporting event. And the meaning behind this inversion should not be lost on us. Presidents often attend sporting events to unite the country in moments of crisis (Bush at Game 3 of the 2001 World Series; Kennedy at the Army-Navy games of early 1960s in context of the Cold War).

However, UFC Freedom 250 placed people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people outside of what we define as ‘American.’ After his match, UFC fighter Josh Hokit proclaimed, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” Noah Betlatsky has already written that Hokit revealed the MAGA movement’s racism and sexism.

But the Trump administration’s use of sports as a tactic to further divide did not stop there. On June 19, the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched an investigation against Major League Baseball for civil rights violations. The ‘victims’ identified by the DOJ were those who wrote Bible verses on their team’s Pride hats to show their general distaste for LGBTQ+ people. Ironically, these players were in no way injured: nobody prohibited them from asserting their beliefs and they experienced no employment harm. This move by the DOJ happens in a context where zero agreements regarding civil rights and sexual harassment violations have been reached by the Department of Education despite 2,700 pending cases.

Whereas athletes have often been catalysts for progressive social movements, and a sector of Americans have often sought to discipline them through rhetoric or controversy, now the administration is using sports to further the assault on black, brown, LGBTQ+ people.

Clearly, the American people see the contestation being played out, and there is a feeling that sports is the next sphere of attack. That was clear when the President appeared at Madison Square Garden during game three of the Knicks championship run. The overwhelmingly negative reception of Trump in his hometown, was grounded in a distaste for the administration’s stripping away of civil rights and general discourse that dehumanizes the people.

It was no surprise, therefore, that the Knicks denied the White House’s invitation to be received and celebrated as the NBA champions.

The general deterioration of civil rights through policy, rhetoric, and law is creeping into nearly all spheres of American culture. What we are quickly learning is that there are no cultural or social spheres separate from another. While this can be seen as reason to despair, it is also reason to recalibrate our thinking about the isolation of cultural spheres from one another. Sports, politics, education, law, comedy, media, and all the identities that comprise these sectors impact and are impacted by one another. Our work cannot be to protect our small, siloed sector, but the democracy itself by coming together and uplifting social progress for all.

And our call to action is to have hope and build coalitions outside of your realm, while recognizing that the authoritarianism of today did not rise out of nowhere.

^[i] The irony that Trump supported Balugon, who was born American when his Nigerian mother’s advanced pregnancy prohibited her from returning home speaks for itself. But on the dawn of Trump’s visit to the World Cup championship on July 19, sports and its use by the MAGA movement belies the traditional ‘stick to sports’ mantra we see coming from that movement.

President Trump’s influence in sports and sporting events is anything but apolitical. As he and FIFA president Gianni Infantino laughed in a spectator suite during the World Cup final yesterday, the two men’s relationship reminded us all of how Florian Balogun’s red card suspension was when Trump became the first time an American president intervened to potentially change the outcome of athletic event. (His interference, matching the values he takes toward elections, derived from a desire to win even if unfairly.)

So much for the ‘shut up and dribble’ posture Trump has taken in the past.^[i]

But Trump and his movement’s focus on sport of late seems to match the attacks on higher education, legal, media, voting, and other sectors than they do cultural debates.

For example, just a month ago, in a nearly cartoonish spectacle, the Trump administration brought professional sports to the White House for competition for the first time in American history. The UFC event being held at the White House inverted the tradition of a politician attending sporting event. And the meaning behind this inversion should not be lost on us. Presidents often attend sporting events to unite the country in moments of crisis (Bush at Game 3 of the 2001 World Series; Kennedy at the Army-Navy games of early 1960s in context of the Cold War).

However, UFC Freedom 250 placed people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people outside of what we define as ‘American.’ After his match, UFC fighter Josh Hokit proclaimed, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” Noah Betlatsky has already written that Hokit revealed the MAGA movement’s racism and sexism.

But the Trump administration’s use of sports as a tactic to further divide did not stop there. On June 19, the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched an investigation against Major League Baseball for civil rights violations. The ‘victims’ identified by the DOJ were those who wrote Bible verses on their team’s Pride hats to show their general distaste for LGBTQ+ people. Ironically, these players were in no way injured: nobody prohibited them from asserting their beliefs and they experienced no employment harm. This move by the DOJ happens in a context where zero agreements regarding civil rights and sexual harassment violations have been reached by the Department of Education despite 2,700 pending cases.

Whereas athletes have often been catalysts for progressive social movements, and a sector of Americans have often sought to discipline them through rhetoric or controversy, now the administration is using sports to further the assault on black, brown, LGBTQ+ people.

Clearly, the American people see the contestation being played out, and there is a feeling that sports is the next sphere of attack. That was clear when the President appeared at Madison Square Garden during game three of the Knicks championship run. The overwhelmingly negative reception of Trump in his hometown, was grounded in a distaste for the administration’s stripping away of civil rights and general discourse that dehumanizes the people.

It was no surprise, therefore, that the Knicks denied the White House’s invitation to be received and celebrated as the NBA champions.

The general deterioration of civil rights through policy, rhetoric, and law is creeping into nearly all spheres of American culture. What we are quickly learning is that there are no cultural or social spheres separate from another. While this can be seen as reason to despair, it is also reason to recalibrate our thinking about the isolation of cultural spheres from one another. Sports, politics, education, law, comedy, media, and all the identities that comprise these sectors impact and are impacted by one another. Our work cannot be to protect our small, siloed sector, but the democracy itself by coming together and uplifting social progress for all.

And our call to action is to have hope and build coalitions outside of your realm, while recognizing that the authoritarianism of today did not rise out of nowhere.

^[i] The irony that Trump supported Balugon, who was born American when his Nigerian mother’s advanced pregnancy prohibited her from returning home speaks for itself. But on the dawn of Trump’s visit to the World Cup championship on July 19, sports and its use by the MAGA movement belies the traditional ‘stick to sports’ mantra we see coming from that movement.

In the past week, the federal budget process signaled that the supports that make college affordable for students who most need assistance are in jeopardy. While there is reason to celebrate the Republican legislation that addresses the Pell shortfall, it does so by threatening subsidized loans, TRIO, work-study, and other necessary funding streams that support first-generation students and provide need-based aid.

At the state levels, we are seeing boards and governments reaching way into the operations of colleges to dictate curriculum. Auburn’s board is reaching into curriculum to void it of race and gender, although no law requires it. In some states like Iowa, through a process potentially opaque to the public, newly-required ‘Civic Centers’ will be overseeing the general education curriculum—the site where students learn about the world beyond themselves and develop core knowledge for any major or career they ultimately choose.

There is data to show why political and governing board interference into curriculum is harmful to students, the states it is happening in, and the economy in general.

Patience is also not a virtue

An uncomfortable truth we must reckon with is that we have miscalculated the threat of political and partisan infiltration into the higher education sphere. Many higher education leaders are used to external pressures coming in the form of new accreditation standards, financial aid regulations, accountability requirements, or developments in access. None of these pressures, until the past three years, have come in the form of taking funding away from our students; claims that work was ‘illegal;’ or a use of grant funding to create a hostage-like scenario for institutions. Beliefs that there are workarounds and/or that a change in political seats will ‘solve’ our concerns have actually been quite harmful to us in the past five years.

There are no workarounds against the multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar movement to dismantle higher education.

The harm is indeed to democracy and our students. For example, the state-level assaults on higher education began prior to the current Trump administration’s attacks. In Texas, Senate Bill 17 banned DEI in public higher education institutions in 2023. Since that time, 52 percent of students in Texas have considered leaving their colleges and 78 percent have considered leaving Texas entirely, according to an ACLU Campus Climate report on the bill’s impact. LGBTQ+ students felt more unsafe at Texas institutions than their peers in other states, according to a USC Race and Equity Center Report.

That same year, Florida passed its ‘anti-woke’ bill regarding higher education institutions. Since then, one in eight high school seniors say they won’t attend an in-state public college because of DeSantis-era education policies, reported economist Lucie Lapovsky in Forbes.

As leaders stand still, hoping the moment passes us by, it is not just the students suffering. Hiring practices and outcomes are also being impacted. Research done by Higher Education, Race, and the Economy (HERE) Lab) found that in states where anti-DEI bills have been introduced and not passed, found a 10% decrease of faculty of color being hired in such states. This indicates that our institutional cultures are shifting even if legislation does not require it. There are some concrete solutions to such phenomena that the Alliance for Higher Education has suggested and are summarized in Times Higher Education. In sum, they amount to higher education leaders needing to understand the legislative landscape deeply; not rely only on lawyers but also race scholars to provide risk-analysis; and communicate clearly when the institution will make changes well in advance. Otherwise, faculty and staff make fear-based changes, and their imaginations are being atrophied.

Emotion and Rationality

Because we are in the business of teaching, we have a deep belief that rational thought can convince our detractors. This has become a central weakness as we have not previously faced a political movement that so outwardly despised higher education.

We have to change our posture.

We can no longer attempt to teach our way out of an attack on our souls. Instead, emotions have to be a part of our work, and there is every reason to be comfortable in emotional work.

Rather than finding the ‘right message’ for the entire country, we have to lean into our values and communicate them in different ways, but always with a singular construct: Love.

Love can be more impactful and theoretical than it may seem on the surface. Audre Lorde told us that, in the systems and structures designed in theof the past, “our feelings were not meant to survive.” (Lorde, 1984). Our feelings have not survived, but we need to revive them in this moment.

The progenitors of race, gender, and sexuality studies told us that lLove was a construct capable of moving the nation out from oppression, if we concentrated on the correct audiences. James Weldon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Sherman Alexie, Judith Butler, and more have long provided arguments that white complacency is the weapon of oppression. Moving that audience is foundationally important. Our audience is not our detractors. Our audience is of those in the middle of The Nostalgia Spectrum, (image below) and Llove is how we move them.

Nostalgia Spectrum: The left side (not in terms of political persuasion) of the Nostalgia Spectrum generally seeks to establish cultural definitions of who belongs in the imagined borders of America a very narrow and mythological way by erasing realities of oppression from the record. The right side, in contrast, seeks to insist on those facts being part of official records and subsequently establish citizenship and the imagined nation, as inclusive of those people harmed in those moments.

To move people, as well, wWe need to stand for something rather than standing against the anti-educational movement. At the Alliance for Higher Education, we have developed a coalition that is working to develop a report that will assert and explore:

• Higher education’s unwavering alignment with the American ideals of developing a more perfect union that provides access and achievement for all;

• An unapologetic, visionary commitment to ensuring people from all walks of life are represented, belong, and thrive in our institutions;

• An education system where the curriculum reflects the diversity of our nation;

• The power of each higher education institution type in delivery on democratic ideals;

• Primacy on ensuring institutional autonomy;

• Accessible, affordable education as a fundamental right of all people; and those residing within American borders; and

• Sector-wide accountability for how higher education is advancing a democratic and equitable society and improving achievement of holistic student outcomes.

What is the Value of a Center if the Center Keeps Moving Right?

Lastly, we need to understand that the extremism of 2025 is quickly becoming the normal of today. There is not a single moment in time when we arrive at authoritarianism or the complete project of The New White Nationalism. There is a process that snowballs, and our inertia in stopping that process is carrying institutions and norms to unrecognizable ends. The process did not begin in 2025; it began more than a decade ago. The inertia has become so great, however, that by 2025, the country was ready for the fast-paced destruction of our institutions and norms, because a strong foundation had been set.

The current extremes, when considered through the lens of The Nostalgia Spectrum, illustrate a ‘middle’ that accepts censorship; marginalization of identities based on race, gender, and sexuality; and incentivizes leaders standing down in exchange for monies.

The middle, in short, is not of value to those who see democracy and higher education linked. Our frames need to be reset at all levels in our sector, but most especially beginning with our leaders of institutions and associations.

To be sure there is work to do. The work, however, is in coalition and cross-collaboration, understanding democracy is at stake, and the complacent population is the most important entity in the work to save it. Join us at the Alliance for Higher Education.

The focus on French as an individual rather than the cultural and social conditions that undergird his self-admitted “naivety” and subsequent shift in perspective are much more revealing and important for a path forward for our democracy. Of course, French holds a particular sway in American culture as a columnist for major news outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic and The National Review. But he, like nearly all Americans outside of academia, believe that lived experience in society made him an expert in race relations despite that there are entire fields of study focused on race, class, gender, sexuality, and more. The reason a lion-share of Americans believe that they are authorities on identity is that there is a foundational truth experts and non-experts agree on: skin color, gender, sexuality, economic status, religion, and more should not matter. In fact, they would not matter if the political, legal, social, cultural, and economic realities and sphere did not intersect in ways that make these parts of identity matter. The experts in fields like African American Studies or Women’s Studies study how these spheres intersect to make identity matter and argue how to better undo that matrix of power so that, in the long run, they do not matter in ways that cause unequal conditions.

As a result, there is a wealth of expertise necessary to speak or have well-developed arguments and opinions about identity that extends beyond lived experience. The phenomena that our society has not yet grappled with is that expertise is necessary to inform deep conversations and policy about race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion, in the same way that deep expertise is necessary to prescribe the correct medication for illness. In fact, if we consider oppression as a symptom of a sick body politic, the studies that are currently under fire—from Women’s to African American to American Studies—are part of the core research arm meant to find the policy, law, narratives, cultural, and social mechanisms to heal those illnesses.

French’s words regarding his revelation indicate a significant obstacle in the collective American journey toward a truly multiracial democracy. French noted that only when he adopted a child from Ethiopia who was called the ‘n’ word in his neighborhood did he realize that racism existed in what he called the ‘bubble’ he created for himself. He describes his bubble and experience as an adult as living in “white, educated, upper middle-class bubble in the south had really intentionally screened out racism.”

French’s description of his bubble and how it bursts is more important to analyze than the naivety necessary for one to believe that racism does not exist while living in a racially monolithic existence. The bursting of his bubble only occurred as a result of a personal experience, and even after that bursting. Concerningly, the change in his mindset did not also come with a change in the idea that he is not an expert in race—just that he changed his mind about it. Interestingly, there is a wealth of research on race that explain the experience children in multiracial families; similarly, research explains how children who are minorities in the schools they attend experience such a social world. Seminal texts like Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria explain both why French’s daughter is friends with one of the only other people of color in the school, and how/why the social structures and individual experiences for her and others can lead to either supportive or restrictive environments. Ironically, this book and many others like it are now banned in classrooms across America. The classrooms, then, are themselves becoming bubbles resembling French’s neighborhood, boding ill for future generations’ abilities to solve the problems French himself identified.

Our country is facing a democratic assault. It is one that needs deep thinkers and experts. But expertise is being continuously vilified and ignored, when there is reason to consider the experts are the ones that may salve the wounds to the democracy—the wounds that even some of the most vehement antagonists toward higher education and identity studies naively ignore until their realities hit them where they live.

The Alliance for Higher Education and our partners refuse to accept the segregationist logic currently being weaponized to attack the higher education and drive society backwards. Coalitions are the most effective tactic against authoritarianism, and when we join together, the opposition crumbles under the weight of the law.

By way of background, institutions gain eligibility for federal financial aid by meeting accreditation standards. Across the sector, this amounts to more than $120 billion each year in grants, work-study funds and loans that help about 13 million students pay for their education. It is one of the most effective sets of programs in the country for individual economic opportunity and collective economic prosperity.

The strategy to wrest control from higher education seeks to limit or eliminate the freedom of institutions to self-govern and of students and faculty to think, learn and research without fear of retribution. It seeks to deny students the fair opportunity to pursue a better life through access to higher education. The playbook has been on display at the federal and state levels with the freezing of research funding, board takeovers, the closure and consolidation of several academic departments and programs in Texas, and attempts to dismantle tenure in Oklahoma.

Accreditation is the next tool to be used to place institutions, students and democracy in a hostage-like posture. One of those is well under way through the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization Committee.

Moreover, while Zimmerman is right to highlight a tendency of academia to focus on correct language rather than systems, the overall focus on his essay neglects to make the point that in the history of higher education, focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has only just begun, when an entire culture is seeking to eliminate it. And the culture, including higher education, stood by as this happened.

Some Hard Truths about our Sector and Culture

Our sector has not fully embraced the truth that higher education is at the locus of a battle regarding American democracy.

As public institutions in Florida and Texas were assaulted, other major institutions stood by quietly, not realizing that both states were proving grounds for a national strategy. The posture that such assaults were not necessarily forthcoming for other states only left the sector vulnerable to similar attacks. Consistently, in my travels, I learned that many leaders have waited for some person or some group to save us. But in waiting for that person or group, the assaults on higher education have amplified, and the counter-narratives and thought leadership regarding value and false claims about higher education have been few and minimally helpful.

The truth is: We are the ones who need to save ourselves.

And we cannot rely on the past ways of thinking and old systems to do so. There are many reasons why this is true. Chief among them is that our old systems and ways of asserting our worth were predicated on a public that believed in the efficacy, morality, and value of higher education. Higher education does not have the benefit of this positioning any longer.

Deep, intentional work that is the mirror to the deep, intentional work of Turning Point and Heritage Foundation is necessary to change the public’s imagination regarding what higher education is and does. That work must celebrate the different kinds of higher education institutions in America while also reorganizing the implicit hierarchy within that diverse set of institutions.

For instance, a majority of the conversations about equity and value are relatively easily solved if regionals and community colleges are centered in the public’s imaginations. The work done at regional and community colleges is generally celebrated by the public. These institutions commit to affordable education with support for students based on needs, so that all reach the same outcome—which is equity.

The solution to value and equity—both in terms of delivering on promises and being embraced by the public—already exist in America. The work is shifting posture and mindset of how we explain our work, to whom we explain it to, and why.

Equity is an Educational, not a Partisan, Concept that we Must Reclaim

But there is also a harder truth for us to acknowledge, accept, and act upon.

Our sector has not embraced rigorous and true equity work, and this is one reason some of the public is opposed to equity.

We have leaders and employees who espouse the importance of equity, but their understanding of equity is limited to language changes and not the systems underneath that create oppression.

Rather than embracing this reality, and doubling down on the need for more rigorous approaches to equity, our sector has been quick to proclaim, ‘we need improvement,’ ‘we have made mistakes,’ or ‘we have gone too far.’ The fact is, however, we have made mistakes in not training leaders well in equity. And we have not gone far enough in systems change. In fact, we have hardly begun.

Some of the mistakes we must own are not those of true equity work, but rather leadership. Many institutions have placed employees in equity-centric positions who have done little to no reading on structural change, race, gender, sexuality, or nationality. The focus on ‘gotcha’ moments or language needing to be changed is hardly the deep work necessary for our sector to improve equitable outcomes. Yet for many institutions, this has been the focus on their equity work.

Still, missteps are part of innovating. Our sector would be wise to ask why, in other areas of our institutions, we place mistakes and innovation in the continuous improvement lens, but with equity, we have been quite willing to let it be thrown out.

Further, we have to position our work in academic freedom and equity in the context of educational issues, not partisan fights. That is, we have to reclaim these topics from the political sphere.

Focusing on equity is the role of higher education in a democratic society.

Our passive posture in reclaiming these topics for the sector has permitted one political party to co-opt what should be the domains of higher education.

We are, as a result, at a crisis point that can be characterized as one of educational morality. There is nothing about education, race, gender, sexuality, curriculum, books, and people, including our students, that would make their identities legitimate topics for political debate. Higher education has to become comfortable with reclaiming these subjects as our domain, even if it is seen as political in the doing.

And we must reckon with the reality that some of our unwillingness to engage in this reclamation is more about comfortability than leading with conviction.

This is a story about civil rights violations, politicians’ lies, the media that projects those lies, and the general deterioration of public trust institutions that results. It is a story that shows higher education’s ability to address equity and social justice is hamstrung by compliance efforts, many of which are mandated to ensure public trust in education.

The Unravelling of Trust in Politics in the Late 20^th Century

In late 1978, Bill and Hillary Clinton and their friends, Jim and Susan McDougal, purchased 230 acres of undeveloped, tree-filled land on the Lake of the Ozarks. The foursome, power-brokers in Arkansas politics and legal circles, intended to divide the land into four plots and build and sell a vacation home on each. They named the land and incorporated their partnership under the name Whitewater Development Corporation.

Once the plots of land were ready for sale, the interest rate on borrowing to purchase property had escalated to twenty percent, beyond what potential vacation-home purchasers were willing to pay. The land remained, as a result, undeveloped.

The foursome, however, continued to rise in the Arkansas power structure. A year after purchasing the Whitewater land, Bill Clinton ascended from State Attorney General to Governor of Arkansas. The Clintons and McDougals remained friends and gained in political power, relying on each other for information and favors in their professional worlds. Ultimately, the Whitewater land was a net loss for both the Clintons and McDougals. But the McDougals suffered significantly more financial injury than the Clintons. The discrepancy in net losses between the two families despite similar investment cultivated questions about the nature of the McDougal and Clinton relationship. Investigations into the irregularity of the business deal also led to unproven allegations that Bill Clinton pressured David Hale (a former banker and judge ultimately found guilty of bank fraud) to approve an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal in purchasing the Whitewater land. Although Hale did not originally implicate Clinton in his detailed testimony, when questioned by Federal authorities, his narrative changed to include Bill Clinton in the fraud. Many of Clinton’s political adversaries saw Hale’s testimony as indicative of a quid pro quo relationship between the Clintons and McDougals. Fourteen years after purchasing the land, and while still governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton announced his candidacy to be the forty-second President of the United States.

Running against a popular and first-term President, George H.W. Bush, Clinton at first seemed to lack any chance of at winning at all. However, at the beginning of 1992, the economy began to sour sharply, and Bush made a series of unforced, political errors. On March 8, 1992, The New York Times published an expose on Clinton’s Whitewater venture. The expose, written by Jeff Gerth, outlined what claimed to illustrate an elaborate financial and political fraud carried out by the Clintons during their tenure in Arkansas politics.

Although the race for presidency took place under the cloud of a Whitewater scandal, Clinton ultimately won the White House. Once Clinton became president, the Whitewater scandal permeated the political and legal spheres of Washington, D.C. The Republican-dominated Congress established a series of committees to investigate any potential wrong-doing that the Clintons may have engaged while in Arkansas. In order to quell any concerns, Clinton established an Independent Council to review his involvement in the Whitewater Scandal. The Independent Council, led by staunch Republican Ken Starr, extended its investigation into a variety of tangential events involving both Clintons. Starr’s report culminated in the drafting of two articles of impeachment, stemming from President Clinton lying under oath about a sexual encounter in which he engaged with an intern at the White House. There was no mention of the Whitewater scandal in the Articles of Impeachment. And Gerth, who wrote the original article on Whitewater, was ultimately found to have lacked credibility and valid sources in a number of stories with national reach, the Whitewater scandal included.[i] On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Clinton and he was later acquitted in the Senate. In the end, the Whitewater scandal illustrated the power of media to push politicians into action, and how that action may align more with a partisan divide than national ideals of democracy, equality, or justice.

In that same month, the nation was just beginning the machinations to sort out the candidates to represent the democratic and republican parties in the race for the 42^nd presidency of the United States.[ii] As the nation went to the polls on November 7, 2000, electoral and popular votes poured in and it was clear that Gore would win the national vote. However, at 8 p.m. eastern time, the major television networks projected Florida, which was the pivotal state in the election, to be Gore’s. By 10 p.m., the networks retracted their projection. A few hours later Florida was called to be Bush’s. Gore then concede to Bush. Again, however, more votes poured in, mainly in favor of Gore, and the state was too close to call. As a result, Gore retracted his concession.

That twelve hour period marked another national example where politics and media intersected in setting a false narratives.

Americans woke up the next morning, still uncertain of who the next president would be. It would be another full month until Florida, which held the deciding electoral votes, would sway toward George W. Bush. That single month and the decisions within it were among the first of the new century that can be directly linked to a significant destabilization and erosion of civilian faith in American media, political, legal, and judicial systems.

This destabilization has everything to do with The New White Nationalism: The battle for Florida’s electoral votes comprised of a to include or exclude votes cast by American citizens. Images of election officials holding up ballots with hanging chads to gymnasium panel lighting yet endure. And in those images are concrete examples of the political, legal, and media complexes converging on Florida citizens’ ballots wherein voting was transformed, not for the first time, from a Constitutional right into a grab for political power. Days past. Then a full week. Ire increased.

And then Katherine Harris, Florida’s Secretary of State, certified the recount vote based on a state-mandated deadline. This certification occurred despite that not all Floridian votes were yet counted. Of concern for many Americans and the Gore team was that Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties had not yet finalized their vote counts when Harris certified the state’s electorate. Importantly, all three of these counties comprised of high percentages of black and brown citizens, a majority of them leaning democratic. Miami-Dade County was a majority Hispanic and African American, with only an 11% white population. Broward County was 42% Hispanic and African American. Palm Beach was overwhelmingly white, but heavily democratic.[iii] When the Gore team sought legal intervention to ensure that these three counties’ ballots be fully counted, the Supreme Court found 5-4 that Florida’s electorate was legally sealed when Harris declared it so. One has to wonder if the Supreme Court’s findings would have been the same if the counties where votes had not yet been fully counted were those the likes of Silver Springs or Chevy Chases, Maryland—where the white and powerful live. The 2020 presidential election was another in a long history of federalized and/or state-mandated repression of minority voting rights.

Studies since then show that the certified vote count of Florida may not have reflected the actual will of citizens. And certainly, the election of Bush did not reflect the popular vote. Underpinning the process of closing the 2000 presidential vote, then, was a political and judicial finding that many felt took away from American citizens’ ability to elect a president. The manner in which that right was seemingly taken from the American voting public was by repressing many minority votes. A National Gallup poll in December of 2000 revealed that:

Over a third of black Americans say they are ‘angry’ and ‘bitter’ about the election--the most of any subgroup to express those feelings--while two-thirds say that they feel ‘cheated’ by the election outcome, that black voters were less likely to be counted fairly than white votes and that the vote count in Florida entailed fraud, not just errors.[iv]

The Nostalgia Spectrum illustrates that the 2000 election was not an anomaly, however. The 2000 election marked only a new strategy used to repress black and brown votes. That strategy included invocation of the Supreme Court to conclude that not all votes need to be counted in order to seal a state’s electoral votes—a strategy that seemed to run counter to the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. Highlights on that list of restricting minority voting rights prior to the 2000 election are:

· Prohibiting African Americans and women from voting at all;

· Counting slaves as three-fifths a man in calculating state populations for sake of allocating the number of Congressional representatives in the late 1700s;

· Poll taxes; and

· Poll tests.

It is hardly a coincidence, moreover, that the candidate who won the 2000 election was one who, in no uncertain terms, adopted the Southern Strategy to garner votes from his base. Only one year earlier Bush supporters aligned against Senator John McCain by sending flyers out to South Carolina voters claiming that “McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was really ‘a Negro child’ he fathered out of wedlock. The end result? Record high turnout, an 11-point Bush primary victory, and the stifling of McCain’s momentum that effectively ended his chances at securing the nomination.”[v]

In the Clinton impeachment and Bush election, the matrix of media, politics, power, and the legal system caused destabilizations of trust and seeming muted the voices of the voiceless. This destabilization of trust and work to silence minority voices became even more extreme by the time the 2016 election for the United States President came along.

The New White Nationalism of the Twenty-first Century Electorate and Congress

After inserting himself into the 2012 Presidential campaign through birtherism already discussed, Donald Trump launched his own presidential campaign to become the forty-fifth President of the United States in 2016. That campaign was characterized by extravagant manipulations of the voting public through injections of wild mistruths. Early in the Republican primary, Trump outlandishly claimed that opponent Ted Cruz’s father assassinated John F. Kennedy. Later, after winning the nomination, presidential candidate Donald Trump publically solicited Russian assistance in muddying the name of his political opponent, Hillary Clinton. Gazing into a live camera he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” Trump then went on to win the American presidency, just as Bush had, while losing the popular vote. It is hardly a small thing that in the 2000s, two of the three presidents to have sat behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office have done so after minimizing the power of the American electorate. Two of the three presidents of the 2000s were not elected by a majority of the American voting public, and both of these presidents benefitted from interventions outside the typical voting process to gain their seats.

As a result of a variety questionable decisions as candidate and president, the FBI launched an investigation into Trump and his inner circle to explore any ties he had with Russia. Like Clinton, Trump initiated a Special Council. However, that Special Council officially reported to the Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who supported the Trump campaign for president. When Sessions recused himself from oversight of the Special Council as a result of potential conflicts of interest, Trump said: “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.”[vi] Trump ultimately demanded that Sessions resign. Session’s public resignation stated to President Trump, “at your request, I am submitting my resignation.”[vii] Trump then replaced Sessions with William Barr, who had previously defended Trump’s firing of then FBI Director, James Comey. This firing was the precipitating event leading to official investigations into Trump’s ties with Russia. Over a year passed as the Special Council investigated Trump’s campaign and its ties to Russia. Throughout the process of the investigation, twenty-one people associated with Trump’s campaign were indicted for working with Russian operatives to manipulate the election of 2016. As the Special Council was nearing its end, Trump met with Rod Rosenstein, Assistant Attorney General to Barr. Rosenstein said to an anxious Trump, “’I give the investigation credibility…I can land the plane.’” Much of the public, already weary of the potential for the Special Council’s report to be given a fair and serious reading by the legal and political spheres of the day, saw this comment as evidence of a conspiracy happening in broad daylight. That feeling was solidified in spring of 2019 when the Special Council submitted its report to Barr, along with an executive summary. Within two days of receiving the report, Barr released his own executive summary. In it, Barr wrote, “I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”[viii] However, when the Special Council’s report was released days later, it became painfully clear that the Special Council’s writing was not in alignment with what Barr claimed in his summary. The report stated:

[T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and…the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts…a statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts [of outright collusion] does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.[ix]

It was clear that Trump’s Attorney General’s Office worked to obfuscate the truth in order to ensure the Trump administration, already having been shown to be the epitome of The New White Nationalism, would remain in power. The general shoulder shrug of Congress was telling of the power and the inertia of The New White Nationalism: Not only does it slowly erode the ability to see racial discrimination that equates to white supremacy as a result of it chipping away at what is right over the years in the aggregate, but it does the same with truth.

In Bush and Trump’s elections, then, there were potential violations of civil liberties. One of the main tenants of white supremacy, remember, is to ensure “white domination is complete and un-complicated by civil rights laws and voting rights for people of color.” While the laws regarding voting rights are certainly on the books, if those laws are ignored in broad daylight, one has to wonder if The New White Nationalism functions simply by ignoring them to the point that they become simply words on paper. It is possible to see that The New White Nationalism has been mainstreamed into politics, then. Indeed, Jim Rutenberg, Nick Corasaniti and Alan Feuer write that “Republicans have used [the Southern Strategy] to roll back voting rights for the better part of the young century… Republicans have pushed to justify laws that in many cases made voting disproportionately harder for Blacks and Hispanics, who largely support Democrats.”[x]

[i] The story as well, upon further analysis, omitted significant information that would have contextualized financial decisions the Clintons made in a way that may have lessened the concerns about wrongdoing from the jump. Later, a similar pattern of using unchecked resources to send national politics into a tailspin was wintnessed in Gerth’s story on Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese national studying nuclear warheads. In that story, Gerth suggested Ho Lee was a Chinese operative using his scholar status to spy on America. Ho Lee’s career was put in jeopardy and his name sullied. Years later, of the fifty one counts brought against him as a result of Gerth’s reporting, only one stuck—and that one was related to how data was transmitted, not in how it was used. Gerth now claims that the articles of both Clinton’s Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee’s nuclear research were problematically re-written by editors, and this is why they contained erroneous maetrial.

[ii] By late fall of 2000, Clinton was not viewed as such a pariah as the Gore team assumed at the beginning of the race. Clinton emerged from impeachment looking more like a victim of political gamesmanship than a perpetrator of crimes.

[iii] U.S. Census, 2010.

[iv] Gallup News Service, “The Florida Recount Controversy From the Public’s Perspective: 25 Insights,” Accessed December 10, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/2176/florida-recount-controversy-from-publics-perspective-insights.aspx.

[v] Theodore Johnson and Leah Wright Rigueur, “Race-Baiting for the Presidency,” The Atlantic. November 15, 2015.

[vi]Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, “Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions,” New York Times, July 17, 2017.

[vii] Sessions, Jeff. Resignation Letter, accessed December 20, 2019 https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=FmsL%2flei&id=ACEBFD23D3714552D5953C9D7EB7218D9D5E7B07&thid=OIP.FmsL_leiMOOctw0vQ9QWxwHaJl&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2flegalinsurrection.com%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2018%2f11%2fJeff-Sessions-Resignation-Letter.jpg&exph=2200&expw=1700&q=jeff+sessions+resignation+letter&simid=607986490343686408&selectedIndex=0&ajaxhist=0.

[viii] William Barr, “Executive Summary of the Mueller Report,” March 24, 2019.

[ix] Robert Mueller, “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election,” (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, March, 2019).

[x] Jim Rutenberg, Nick Corasaniti and Alan Feuer. “Trump’s Fraud Claims Died in Court, but the Myth of Stolen Elections Lives On.” New York Times, December 26, 2020.

In addition to the SPLC, the administration fired the entire National Science Board, the body responsible for recommending priorities for science for science funding and policy. The new board, guaranteed to be aligned with a segregationist agenda seen in Divisive Concepts legislation in over 20 states and in Executive Orders aimed at eradicating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, will have deleterious effects on American scientist’s abilities to find and pursue truth. On a much more concrete level scientific inability to consider all populations will have catastrophic impact on health outcomes, which are already stratified by race and sexuality.

In states like Florida, Texas, and Indiana where academic programs and courses that even hint are race, gender, and sexuality have been altogether cut or required to change content, the fundamental value of college is not being debated, but rather demolished completely. Also in this past week, Dylan Ruediger, Chelsea McCraken, and Jonathan Barfield published a report showing that when partisan Divisive Concepts legislation has been introduced, faculty and staff are seeking to leave their institutions.

Likewise, the Accreditation, Innovation and Modernization committee began its work to weaponize Title IV funding and ideologically control knowledge while dismantling the institutional systems and structures that support all students. In all of these efforts, there is a common thread: Attack any entity that seeks to ensure democracy is for all and replace it with a white nationalist agenda.

In this context, also this week, a broad coalition filed suit to stop the Trump administration from weaponizing contract disbursement based on their segregationist definition of DEI. In the lag between the case being filed and the ultimate finding, our institutions and organizations need to hold fast to the legal approaches to pro-democracy efforts imbued in DEI. Doing so is imperative so that these cases—which are continuously won by plaintiffs supporting DEI—have the impact of maintaining momentum to a more democratic nation and sector.

No doubt, the next arguments made by those the states and federal governments will be that the disparate impact (which they are claiming is not a legal term any longer) illustrates that DEI practices were harming whites in the past—not that the systems and structures were being corrected by DEI and removing them proves that case. Our leaders need to be ready to explain the data that is forthcoming and that we have examples of from Florida and Texas in that new vein.

The Narratives about Charlie Kirk’s Assassination are an Example for Higher Education to Learn From

A single gunshot pierced through the sun-stroked academic quad at Utah State University. Within moments, the crowd knew that the founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, had been assassinated.

Kirk’s assassination was many academic leaders’ nightmare.

Collectively, campus leaders lose sleep over the possibility of active shooters on campuses.

And Kirk was a significant figure in challenging the legitimacy of higher education in American democracy.

His assassination, tragic on many levels, is also a complicating factor in how the public sees higher education in a politically-charged decade.

The Battlefield for Citizenship is the National Imagination

The Nostalgia Spectrum (figure below) allows us to witness how history is being organized in the present by omissions and repressions from mediated stories of current events in order to assert racialized power rather than democratic values. Benedict Anderson defines nations as “imagined communities” that work by establishing who is culturally understood as a cultural citizen and who is not. Turning Point USA and the general anti-DEI movement has operated with similar understanding, and sought to draw firm borders between who they see as included in the curriculum and so nation, and who is not. History and its record, is part of how the present imagined citizenry is defined, and so the future hierarchies of identity that the public imagines is also being organized by our present understanding of the past. The Nostalgia Spectrum illustrates this dynamic and its inner workings. The left side (not in terms of political persuasion) of the Nostalgia Spectrum generally seeks to establish cultural definitions of who belongs in the imagined borders of America a very narrow and mythological way by erasing realities of oppression from the record. The right side, in contrast, seeks to insist on those facts being part of official records and subsequently establish citizenship and the imagined nation, as inclusive of those people harmed in those moments.

In the end, The Nostalgia Spectrum illustrates that higher education is a locus of debates because the battlefield for how we imagine is in what we learn, read, and experience.

Narratives following Kirk’s assassination immediately put his memory in a nostalgic mythology. He was positioned by many as an advocate of free speech. Glossed over were his overt sexism, racism, homophobia, and anti-Asian rhetoric (Stein). Narratives around Kirk’s assassination follow a familiar pattern regarding higher education, race, and the way in which the public’s imagination of both often repress memories of the marginalized through physical and rhetorical violence that the Nostalgia Spectrum reveals: Those who are focused on marginalizing cultural citizenship of the already-marginalized have a tendency to repress from memory the atrocities of the past: In Kirk’s case this erasure occurred through repressing the hateful rhetoric he engaged in.

The tensions that exist regarding race, higher education, and cultural citizenship today originate from this reality that a side of the Nostalgia Spectrum seeks to repress memory of atrocities from the past and subsequently mythologize America’s current realities; which there is a side directly opposing this tendency.

For instance, after planning to carry out a shooting at the College of Charleston (but finding too much security there), a shooter entered South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and killed nine African Americans. The legitimacy of Confederate monuments in public spaces and higher education institutions took center stage in the national discourse in the months following. The focus on symbols of our racist past overshadowed the burgeoning white supremacy that we needed to shine a light on.

Just one year later, attacks on academic subjects that focused on race and power led to them being outlawed in over eighteen states because the meaning of Critical Race Theory was perverted to the general public.

Two years later Unite the Right marched at University of Virginia and made clear a hatred for Jews. In his press conference regarding this event, Donald Trump asserted some of those white power members were ‘good people.’ (Phelps, 2019) And now, eight years later, the same administration is attacking higher education for being anti-Semitic .

Erased from memory are the actions of the white supremacy in each of these instance. For the past decade, college campuses and how we remember particular flashpoints has led to a repression of white supremacy and a lifting up of a problematic hierarchy of races, genders, sexualities, and nationalities aligned with that construct.

Higher Education Leadership and Leaning into Our Roles

There is a role higher education leaders play in cultural flashpoints.

In moments of cultural significance, truth and knowledge become foundationally important for how the future is being organized and imagined. Our sector is poised to play a much more significant role in our democracy if we resituate our posture to lean into the controversies surrounding these flashpoints rather than default to policies and procedures. On campuses, this leaning in would take the form of providing time and space for students to debate issues rather than creating policies to repress their grappling with them. For institutions, this would mean taking relatively benign stances that all students matter, but that some view points can be hateful.

For instance, October 14^th has been deemed a National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk. Many students for years to come will gather to pay respect to a figure they heroize. Other students will most likely protest such memorial gatherings. And there are faculty and staff across the country who have been victims of his WatchLists, literally receiving death threats for over a decade as a result of their being named as ‘too woke.’

Throughout the hallways of our institutions, leaders are reciting policies for students’ ability to hold vigils and start new Turning Point factions.

Many are concerned about the controversy that such vigils may bring. Others incorrectly rely on the notion of academic freedom to justify such vigils. Free speech, not academic freedom, is what protects vigils and the factually incorrect thinking Kirk and his followers espouse. Neither is an example of academic freedom. However, lost in such posture is explicit statement that Kirk caused pain, suffering, and fear among students, faculty, and staff because of their gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. Moreover, whitewashing Kirk and Turning Point’s belief systems is educational malpractice and supporting a movement that is anti-educational and anti-black, brown, and LGBTQ+. While we should indeed allow free speech on campus, our role as educators is to present the whole truth: Kirk was a free speech advocate. The other part of the story that should be discussed on campuses is his role in hate. The complexity of such an individual’s legacy is part of unpacking meaning that higher education is supposed to support.

Yet, policies and protocols regarding free expression seem to be the default justifications leaders continue to use in order to situate the Kirk phenomena as a singular event to ‘get through’ rather than a milestone of a grander movement to decimate the very values of higher education.

Leaders in higher education would do much better to seize these moments as rife opportunities to center the academic, democratic, and national responsibilities of our institutions and organizations. There are many different ways to address Kirk’s assassination as a sector and on campus.

Those who desire to hold vigils and lift up his memory will and should do so.

There is also opportunity to hold campus discussions about the phenomena of cultural memory and how the imagination is a site of current contests about citizenship. There are respectful ways of using the day to underscore the general repressions of his movements’ racism, sexism, and heteronormativity in favor of an American mythology that voids the horrors of the present and past. There is opportunity to explore distinctions between the First Amendment and academic freedom as well as the how the Second Amendment impacts higher education.

Indeed, such respectful discussion is the responsibility of educators—both in terms of unpacking the stories of power and history and also of modeling civil but difficult discourse. Unfortunately, many educators and leaders back away from using rigorous, academic approaches to engage with these cultural flashpoints, instead using policy and protocol as a justification for their positions, ignoring the deeper work of academics and equity. In the meantime, we not only miss an opportunity to make higher education stronger, but we also allow one set of narratives to dominate our campus cultures and media in general.

By mistaking momentary comfort with deep civic work, we place our higher education sector in peril.

Part 2 of this piece will be published later this week.

Cyanosis is a medical condition indicating lack of oxygen in the blood and can warn of lethal heart or lung problems. On white skin it presents as a blue discoloration in areas with less pigmentation, like nail beds or the tongue; but on darker skin it is much more difficult to identify as it presents as gr

ey and can be mistaken for dry skin rather than a signal of significant health problems.

In health care, training for racial difference is a matter of life or death. The best medical schools, health care providers, and hospitals ensure their curricula, knowledge base and research, and institutions are keenly aware of social, cultural, racial, and religious differences that help to identify medical conditions. This is merit developed as a result of rigorous training that includes race.

Let me digress for just a moment. When I was president of Delta College and defined excellence as inclusive of all students—and explained that rigor would not be sacrificed in our commitment to look at gaps in outcomes and curricula, our already-excellent nursing department bought its first mannequin of color. For fifty years, the best nursing program in the area had not yet trained its students to find Cyanosis. When the department presented their use of the mannequin to the faculty at large and that singular example as transformative for the rigor of their curriculum, other changes permeated the institution:

Our admissions office realized it was built off of arcane approaches to outreach—only visiting K-12 schools, when our Hispanic, African American, and poor, white, rural populations were at quinceaneras, churches, and local community centers, respectively. So, we shifted practices to include those areas, without changing our K-12 practices. All people were welcome at each of these activities. Our enrollment increased 26% in four years; our graduation rates and numbers increased by 10% for all students; for African Americans and Hispanics, who started 15% below white students, their graduation rates and numbers increased by 15% and 16% respectively.

Merit requires attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, and more, and it lifts all boats.

Of concern, however, is the recent Executive Orders by the administration suggest merit is in opposition to rather than require attention to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The orders, and the approach this administration is taking toward System Award Management, Accreditation, and funding, all are meant to alter institutional and individual behavior in ways that are both antithetical to our collective mission and using vague terminology and misleading language to present their ideology and legally sound when it is not.

The most recent Executive Order proclaims that “racially discriminatory DEI activities means disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity in the recruitment, employment (e.g., hiring, promotions), contracting (e.g., vendor agreements), program participation, or allocation or deployment of an entity’s resources.”

This Executive Order holds the same logic and rhetoric found in the Unlawful Discrimination Memo from the Department of Justice in 7/29/25, that the Alliance for Higher Education picked apart to assert most campuses and institutions were not violating Civil Rights law previous to this administration, nor are they now. Using funds and resources to include groups—and ensuring they do not exclude any from program participation—is not illegal as the example from Delta shows.

The Executive Order also defines “Program participation” as “membership or participation in, or access or admission to: training, mentoring, or leadership development programs; educational opportunities; clubs; associations; or similar opportunities that are sponsored or established by the contractor or subcontractor.” In the example of Delta College, all were welcome to all activities, even if some groups were targeted. This approach is both best practice and in line with the Executive Order.

So, just like the Alliance recommended on the Dear Colleague Letter from 2/14/25 and the Executive Orders on Race, Gender and Citizenship, the Alliance recommends that institutions change no behavior and make clear to their faculty, staff, students, and stakeholders that stance so there is not self-repression of research, teaching, or robust conversations. Similarly, it is important to remember that humans when we work on racial disparities, there are sub-groups within them, such as gender, academic interest, religion—there is not a monolithic approach to race in our work, and this is a necessary nuance to considering the approach institutions use in considering their focus on merit and legal defense.

For help on thinking through how Executive Orders and/or state-level restrictions can be navigated contact The Alliance for Higher Education.

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions…The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

A fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Rufo exploited higher education’s vulnerabilities in two ways. First, Rufo understood that in a social media communication ecosystem that narrative, not rationality or research, provided meaning-making and truth for the broad swath of Americans. Second, and as a result, disciplined narrative and strategic alignments between political, financial, and educational spheres provided a pathway for destabilizing the public’s trust in higher education while planting the seeds for a future based on ideological, not educational, bases.

To align political, financial, and educational spheres, Rufo brought his study at the Heritage Foundation to Turning Point USA, Students for Fair Admission, and a variety of mediated outlets, all to elevate a singular, common purpose among them: To rid all post-secondary education of its democratic and public good missions of expanding opportunity for more people, especially those who have traditionally been marginalized from the sector in the past, or what many term, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

In relatively short order, Rufo developed a cultural, social, and political movement based on narrative, not truth, which would chip away, if not demolished norms of allowing the higher education sector to govern itself for the good of knowledge, students, and democracy. The proof of that assertion is found in the recent study showing that most conservative students feel like they belong on campuses.

Already, that movement has changed higher education’s role in 26 states, and informed the federal government’s approach to the sector in ways that are detrimental to democracy, future and current students, and the ability of research to better the lives of all Americans as it has for generations. The narrative movement inserts ideology into curricula and campus operations by perversely branding DEI as anti-Civil Rights and higher education as out-of-touch. However, the ideology being implemented has been found, over and again to violate Civil Rights both legally and in principle.

A Playbook of Boards, Money, and Power: A Tale of Two States

The playbook developed and refined by this movement begs illuminating so the American public can better understand its implications and just how well-honed it is. Upon his election in 2022, Governor Ronald DeSantis began to implement what he called an anti-woke agenda in schools. The anti-woke agenda developed a narrative that it would re-establish common sense principles, adhere to ‘American values,’ and ensure that racism would not be permitted in Florida schools. However, much like Rufo’s narrative surrounding CRT, Anti-Woke presented a narrative that was counter to the substance of the agenda. Indeed, courts found over and again that the DeSantis Administration threatened the civil rights of teachers, professors, and students. Specifically, courts found that the agenda violated citizens’ freedoms of speech and the protections of all citizens guaranteed in the fourteenth amendment. The official finding of the court found:

The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian (emphasis mine). It should go without saying that ‘[i]f liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Still, the Stop Woke agenda had broad support not because of what it did, but because of the narratives the DeSantis administration surrounded it with. Support for DeSantis was so strong that he was launched into a leading role during the Republican primary for president.

Florida became a template for governors and legislators who saw higher education as a means to assert ideological power to follow. Very quickly after the New College hostile takeover, Governor Gregg Abbott in Texas implemented Senate bill 37, which learned from the Constitutional failures of the DeSantis administration and subsequently legislated based on where there would be a convergence of political power and ideological control through board authority and the powers granted to the Governor. Senate Bill 37 was geared at the very same goals of the STOP Woke Act. In fact, Abbott referred to wokeness in his narrative of the bill, stating that “woke college professors have too much influence over who is hired to educate our kids.”

Decades ago Lauren Berlant and Marita Sturken illuminated that how we organize learning and thinking in the present is a manner in which to control the future. This insight reveals the motives underlying the ideological movement to dismantle higher education through politics and money.

Bluntly, as money and politics converge to control higher education, the minds and imaginations of our nation’s future leaders are being shaped, and in ways that are antithetical to the values of democracy—the court’s findings illustrate this.

In 2023, Katherine Banks was president of Texas A&M. She was at the helm for two years there prior to addressing the first major controversy at the institution arising from the political climate in Texas. She, like presidents around the country found herself trying to thread an eyeless needle.

In the spring of that year, Kathleen McElroy, renowned journalist and scholar whose work on the 1619 project was nationally celebrated was in contract negotiations to be the leader of a revived journalism program at the institution. She was promised a tenured position as a result of her intellectual prowess and nuanced lens on how truth is framed in media based on race.

However, once word of her intended hire made its way to the board of trustees, her offer of a tenured position, a decision that has traditionally been made by faculty and approved by the Board, was all but revoked. The board was open about their reluctance to offer tenure to “someone like her,” who studies race and its impact on history and the present. Her hire, a board member noted in another perversion of narrative and truth regarding what the liberal arts are, would not make the “liberal arts less liberal.” Another trustee noted that the fiscal support of the journalism program from the board was predicated on finding conservative faculty who would create conservative journalists to communicate conservative values to the public.

And now, Texas and Florida institutions are facing existential crisis.

Most Americans would view this alignment in partisanship into the classrooms as antithetical not only to educational but also personal freedoms and American values. Indeed, the outcome of the DeSantis administration was performed here under Abbott, but in a way that avoided the Constitutional crises, for it was not through legislation, but rather loopholes of authority granted the Governor, board, and financial authorities of the Texas Congress.

After the New College seated its board, all programs about race, class, and sexuality were eliminated. Students protested and the nation watched as what was once a shining beacon of a public honors college shuddered.

In that time, the feeling of belongingness among young people had deteriorated: Kara F. said of her state’s educational culture:

People feel empowered to attack queer students because if the legislators can do it, they think they can do it too… I’ve heard slurs being said constantly and no teacher bats an eye and it’s like, whoa, why aren’t you doing anything about it? We need more protections for queer students. We need schools that are an inclusive space.

Teachers reported having students show up for history classes unaware that black people did not have the right to vote for hundreds of years.

In that time, New College was found to spend nearly 400% over all other public 4-year colleges in the state (other than University of Florida) but has dropped from 60 spots on US News & World Reports rankings. Moreover, it is seeking $400 million of tax-payer dollars for the partisan transformation. The institution itself is failing.

The scenarios here beg for elucidation. These are not culture wars, nor are the differences of opinion about how to educate. These are tactics to change the entire sector and democracy through power and moment.

In the early 1950s, former president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, travelled state to state by train, advocating for a new kind of college. He proclaimed that for the country to deliver on the promises of equality and democracy, more colleges with fewer restrictions on admissions had to be funded and proliferate. This new kind of college would respond to national cries for educating African Americans and poor whites who fought in wars only to return home to the same racism, poverty, oppression, and educational limitations they were liberating people from in other countries.

But in the smoke-filled train cars after speeches, Conant sipped whiskey. He told his colleagues that community colleges were necessary to ensure that the national pressures to enhance educational access would not result in integration of elite colleges.

Conant’s voice carried weight. Funding for community colleges increased to such an extent that in the next decade, there were nearly 1,000 community colleges nation-wide. Hundreds of thousands of Americans received training in skilled trades and became union workers when those pathways were, prior to that moment, passed down through families. While the learning provided and the subsequent pathways offered new livelihood to many families, the sorting of lower-middle class and middle-class jobs was racialized as it always had been, this time through a hierarchy of kinds of colleges existent in America.

Still, over six million black and brown Americans enrolled in community colleges in the next two decades. Community colleges necessarily and gladly welcomed all races, genders, sexualities, and nationalities.

In the country and the world, they became the most democratic of higher education institutions. To this day, American community colleges are among the only institutions of higher education globally that welcome everyone in.

With advances in Civil Rights, the elite colleges, over time, acknowledged a need to diversify. However, it remains a sad truth that zip codes often predict individuals’ success in high schools. The most elite colleges continued to adhere to their rigid admissions practices, except for one tweak: they began to practice as race-based admissions. Race-based admissions did not necessarily increase the number of students coming from impoverished and racially oppressive zip codes. Rather, they permitted a mechanism to admit black and brown students and these students often came from relatively affluent zip codes. In short, this single policy did not have transformative effects on the democracy. As a result, the racial sorting of American economies, housing zones, and social mobility predicated on a similar sorting through higher education sectors remains.

In this context, the lightening rod of admissions practices at elite institutions should give many Americans pause. A few white and Asian students—a minuscule amount—were not gaining access to a very few elite institutions when they may have prior as result of race-based admissions. In addition, the race-based admissions practice became the ‘excuse’ many white students and their families used to explain why they did not get into colleges. These individual and small examples were exploited by think tanks with a desire to stay the progress of racial and economic equality. And these admissions practices became the catalyst for angst, especially white angst, regarding higher education as a whole, despite that only a few colleges and seats at them were actually being debated about.

Simultaneously, public colleges continued to serve the remainder of college-going students. But these institutions’ funding has been cut nearly by 25% in the past decade, especially in rural and red states with very high white populations. In an irony that is all-too-familiar, the exploitation of poor whites occurred through narratives about race-based admissions. These narratives intentionally misinformed the population of the realities they were experiencing all the while making those same realities worse. That is to say, mediated narratives about the cost of Ivy League colleges and their race-based admissions overlooked the relatively affordable community and state colleges. In the process, a skewed understanding of the higher education sector developed in the national consciousness, and many communities are suffering more than they were a decade ago because states cut support for higher education even more, resulting in increased tuition even at ‘cheaper’ colleges. And a miniscule amount of attention has been paid on the way such funding cuts have decimated opportunity for a significant swath of citizens kept out of the mainstream view of Americans.

Just as importantly, the foundational philosophies underpinning the higher education sector and maintaining a race- and class-based sorting of American citizens remained reinforced by the higher education sector.

A robust shift in higher education, one linked to the aspirations of American democracy and equality, would not seek to sort institutions by demographics, but rather use the diversity of institutional kinds for the project of democracy. The country would benefit from extricating itself from a gatekeeping and elitist paradigm as if it was reflective of the whole of opportunity available to those living in the country as it pertains to higher education. A more democratic and revolutionary concept would embrace the notion that all people can be Katherines if we can love them to better lives—what I call Rigorous Love. Rigorous Love requires deep change and hard work. It requires a reimagination of the sector and dismantling the apparatus that defines ‘elite’ institutions in problematic ways. It can be done. We just have to believe it can be.

The role the imagination plays should not be minimized. Edward Said’s major point in Orientalism is that the Western world imagined the East in a way that was totally divorced from reality, but that dictated policy for over two centuries. Likewise, from “The Declaration of Independence’s” first line that America is ‘dedicated to a proposition,’ to “The Gettysburg Address’” proclamation that the nation was conceived in liberty to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream,” those at the forefront of political movements have inspired cultural imagination to manifest new realities. But even more so, King believed in America as a concept—a vision that had not yet manifest in reality. “When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” His consternation, like many of ours, was that the disconnect between what was promised and the urgency on delivering on that promise was too great to reconcile with rhetoric of the current moment.

King was right to illustrate that struggles for justice are struggles for the imagination. For the imagination and justice permeate the nation’s approach to democracy requires activation of those whose complacency is a form of power—the moderate who is not inclined to act because they are comfortable. When Dr. King Jr. wrote that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he was stating the need for those who are complacent to become activated. Rapper Chuck D observed that for such activation to occur requires the imagination to be jump-started: “minds are the real estate of the 21st century.” Both understood that the battle for belonging involves both policy and imagination—how we understand our past, present, and future.

The intersection of nationhood and imagination has been theorized by some of the foremost scholars on national identity. Two of the most helpful thinkers about how a collective imagination creates perceived groups out of individuals and subsequently imagined nations are Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. In “Imagined Communities,” Anderson claims that the increase in intensity of print culture from the mid- to late 1800s, allowed “people to think about themselves, and to relate to others in profoundly new ways” through the imagination.[1] This leads him to define nations not as lands with borders and policies and politicians, but as ‘imagined communities.’ Herein, Anderson illustrates the importance of media culture in how people consider themselves as part of a nation. He also underscores the importance of human imagination in establishing nations.

Similarly, Gellner believes that a division of labor allows print and media to be owned by an elite, who then create that same material in their own image and from their own perspective; they thereby manifest a national identity in limited and power-based fashion. The division of labor, that is, establishes a specific people, usually in racially homogenous terms, as the elite representatives of the nation-state.

In sum, there is no political sphere that is separate from the educational sphere—there are actors attempting to shape meaning and using their different powers of thought, finance, and media to do so; and in so doing they construct an imagined nation, one that will reflect contemporary versions of what an elite identity is. Often this reflection of an elite identity is not sinister in motive, but does have sinister outcomes. Hence, this elite identity plays a role in creating and being created by past, present, and future contestations for what can be considered ‘a’ national identity. For “[t]he basic deception and self-deception practiced by nationalism is this: nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society.”[2]

Today, in 2026, there is not such an inspirational call so much as a cultural malaise and assumed futility when the future of social justice in America is considered. However, that malaise does not have to remain. There are visions for a more socially just future. Those visions need only a toolbox with which to unpack how politics, funding, cultural mindset, and higher education work to maintain the status quo or disrupt it. We can create that anew.

[1] Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Communities.” In Nationalism, edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, 90-91. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

[2] Ernest Gellner. “Nationalism and Modernization.” In Nationalism, edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, 90-91. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.