Prof believes universities are ‘independent’ and ‘beacons of academic integrity and free speech’
The latest authoritarian hyperbole out of academia comes from an Arizona State University “teaching and learning innovation” professor and dean.
In The Conversation, Iveta Silova chides President Trump’s efforts to curb antisemitism and DEI on American campuses, claiming “many” universities are “widely seen globally as beacons of academic integrity and free speech.”
Silova (pictured), “a scholar of comparative and international education,” says the president’s strategy of pressuring universities has “a few historical parallels” … which just happen to include Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR.
In the former, Silova says universities “adapted” to the Nazis’ takeover of government, and once Hitler had control he “moved swiftly to purge academic institutions of Jews and political opponents” through such means as the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.”
This law required the termination of Jewish and “non-Aryan” professors.
A good number of academics were “eager to comply” with the Führer’s demands, according to Silova: “Each decision – each erased name, each revised syllabus, each closed program and department – was framed as necessary, even patriotic.”
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Similar things occurred under Russia’s Bolsheviks:
In the Soviet Union, this control was not limited to symbolic gestures – it reshaped the entire academic system.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks oscillated between wanting to abolish universities as “feudal relics” and repurposing them to serve a socialist state […] Ultimately, they chose the latter, remaking universities as instruments of ideological education and technical training, tightly aligned with Marxist-Leninist goals.
Under Josef Stalin, academic survival depended less on scholarly merit than on conformity to official doctrine. Dissenting scholars were purged or exiled, history was rewritten to glorify the Communist Party, and entire disciplines such as genetics were reshaped to fit political orthodoxy.
Silova claims Trump is “echoing” these notorious authoritarians and his actions “may mark the beginning of the end of [universities’] academic independence.”
According to her faculty page, Silova’s areas of expertise include “collective memory and meaning,” “colonial and post-colonial theory,” “decolonization,” and “postcolonial studies.” She also supervises PhD students in the areas of “post-socialist transformations,” “nature-culture interactions in the anthropocene,” and “ecofeminism.”
MORE: Duke University shrink: Trump may be worse than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao
IMAGE CAPTION & CREDIT: Iveta Silova photo for her “Planetizing Citizenship” lab; ASU Humanities Lab/X
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