Helena Worthen with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, HELU individual member, historian of American colleges and universities, author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Inventing the Liberal University (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of Degrees of Liberation (SUNY Press, forthcoming). Listen to Lauren and others on americancampuspodcast.com.
HELU asks: Were the 2024 encampments a turning point in higher ed?
LLS: I wouldn’t say the encampments themselves were the turning point, but the response of college administrators was certainly revelatory. The crackdown against students was a bi-partisan effort, if you will, of political representatives and college leadership. University presidents who would never describe themselves as MAGA supporters ultimately agreed with Donald Trump that campus protests were unacceptable and that the students and faculty involved needed to be punished. Joe Biden held the same view. Both Trump and Biden condemned the encampments as anti-Israel and defined protestors as antisemitic. From this logic, dissenting students and faculty were doxed, arrested, expelled, fired, and in many cases, beaten by police and counterprotesters.
The last time we witnessed campus disruptions of that scale was in the 1960s, which were even more violent than 2024. An example is the May 5, 1970 massacre at Kent State University when the Ohio National Guard shot thirteen campus protestors, killing four. But after Kent State there was a tacit agreement that student protests were protected by the First Amendment. Since the then we’ve seen waves of student dissent in the 1980s to divest from South Africa and throughout the aughts against the invasion of Iraq. Through each of these waves, there was a national understanding that administrators were not going to call the cops on their students. You could see this in the way administrators built up entire infrastructures to manage dissent without resorting to violence. Colleges set up counseling services, created new ombudsmen offices, and professionalized student affairs.
But in the spring of 2024, the consensus around managing dissent, which had become standard since the 1960s, cracked. Instead, we witnessed a new coalition of MAGA conservatives and presumably liberal college administrators aligning against free expression, both on and off campus. Student and faculty social media posts were even being monitored. The reactionary consensus to punish dissent was the turning point—not the encampments.
The logic of this reactionary consensus has developed through the work of Zionist organizations which have portrayed any anti-war or anti-colonial critique of Israel as antisemitic. We’ve seen this most clearly through these organizations’ sponsorship of civil discourse initiatives. If you look at the donors behind these programs, you’ll find far right and Christian nationalist organizations. Their goal is not actually to promote understanding, but to quash criticism of Israel and, more broadly, US imperialism.
The encampments exposed this MAGA-liberal alliance to the public. But anyone who has been paying attention to the neoliberalization of higher ed for the last forty years has also been able to see it. Budgets reveal a university’s priorities. Since the 1970s, the national trend has been to defund critical studies, decolonial studies, fine arts, and the humanities more broadly. Today, 75% of the faculty who teach in those fields are contingent. While Trump’s war on woke has caused many colleges to shutter DEI offices, gender studies programs, and entire disfavored departments, these are only a more visible, crude acceleration of what has happened under ostensibly liberal college administrations for decades.
We’re now seeing it in the sciences. When DOGE took an axe to federal grants in 2025, one of the first things it did was cut science funding. The sciences have been considered safe from neoliberalism because they haven’t had the reputation of being critical. Scientific methods have been viewed as purportedly “neutral” to humanities and fine arts criticism. The sciences are apparently better for jobs and the economy, as the argument goes. More importantly, the federal government has favored scientific research for its key role in US imperialism and our foreign policy since the First World War. But that long partnership is now in question. University scientists were in the streets and on the airwaves defending public health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our new tech oligarchy—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Karp, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and others—want to eliminate the competition of university-produced science, and they have the ear of the MAGA government. The sciences may be going the way of the humanities.
The encampments made this bi-partisan consensus public. They were a snag in veil that obscured the shared priorities of MAGA and college administrators. As the shroud unravels it reveals an ugly, naked truth: the federal government and university administrators expect acquiescence from faculty and students. The expectation has been brutally enforced.
This may be a kind of turning point, but I don’t know if it is going to lead directly to some better future. It’s telling how effectively the protests were squashed. If there’s any silver lining, we should be hopeful that the public has lost its appetite for endless wars. And while the crackdowns were effective for ending encampments, they certainly did nothing to change students’ minds. If anything, they probably have intensified Gen-Z’s antiwar and anti-Zionist convictions.
Students can’t carry this antiwar movement, of course. People born in this millennia take their economic precarity for granted, and unfortunately there is little benefit for them to be outspoken if it risks a police record. If we are going to see some sort of change, it will have to come from the least precarious of us—tenured faculty and upper administration—standing up for students and each other. All of higher ed needs to be in solidarity.
The interview was suggested by the film, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Encampments, which reports the various campus protests across the country, starting with Columbia.