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‘With Vance, American Far-Right authoritarians have succeeded in elevating a fascist’

The new president of the American Association of University Professors recently referred to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance as a “fascist.”

In an August 8 statement, Todd Wolfson, a Rutgers University anthropologist whose research “is a mixture of traditional and cyber-based ethnography,” took issue with Vance’s claim that universities are the “Enemy” and are “dedicated to ‘deceit and lies, not to the truth.’”

Vance made the accusations at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, according to Inside Higher Ed. 

In his speech, the veep candidate also called universities “very hostile institutions” that “give credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.”

“If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” Vance said.

In his statement, Wolfson said Vance’s nomination marked a “tipping point” for the “future of American higher education.”

“With Vance, American Far-Right authoritarians have succeeded in elevating a fascist who vows to ‘aggressively attack universities in this country’ to within striking distance of their goal: the annihilation of American higher education as we know it,” Wolfson said.

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More from Wolfson’s statement:

Vance’s labeling of professors as “the enemy” and his praise of Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán’s seizure of state universities as “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with leftwing domination of universities” are unambiguous. Should he and the dark-money funders backing him gain power, they aim to take control of American higher education and bend it to their will. Ironically, they would use fear and misinformation to turn colleges and universities into what the Far Right has for years falsely accused them of being: ideological indoctrination centers. …

While attacks on American higher education are nothing new, the scope of the Project 2025 blueprint for a Trump-Vance presidency offers a frightening glimpse into an authoritarian future that would transform American colleges and universities into thought-control factories by stifling ideas, silencing debate, and destroying autonomy. Project 2025 would roll back decades of progress on access to higher education, eliminate protections for LGBTQ+ students and sexual assault survivors, privatize student loans, end loan forgiveness, and, if we take its authors at their word, abolish the Department of Education entirely. We cannot afford to let this happen.

Wolfson (pictured) also chided conservative efforts to “ban” critical race theory and other “divisive concepts,” and to abolish campus DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — efforts.

Ironically, last year the AAUP in Vance’s home state of Ohio opposed efforts to establish “intellectual diversity” centers at state universities. The local AAUP representative claimed colleges “are already open marketplaces of ideas where free inquiry is ongoing.”

Even though funding for the diversity centers would, among other things, create more professor teaching positions, one Ohio State University professor said they were “not a great use of money and therefore not likely to be implemented well.”

According to his faculty page, Wolfson is co-director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center which purports to “explore the intersections between media, democracy, technology, policy, and social justice.”

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IMAGES: SweetPeaBelle/X; Rutgers U.

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