By Susan Stokes for PS of July 11, 2025
When politicians try to muzzle universities by ousting their leaders, interfering with their research and teaching, and cutting off their funds, the writing is on the wall. As the US careens toward autocracy, President Donald Trump has set his sights on other independent institutions as well.
The resignation of University of Virginia President James E. Ryan under political pressure from US President Donald Trump’s minions and the Virginia state government is the latest shocking turn in the administration’s all-out attack on American higher education. Officials from Trump’s Justice Department and members of the University’s Board of Visitors – several of whom were appointed by Republican Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin – accused Ryan of moving too slowly to dismantle the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. By the end of June, Ryan had announced his departure.
It is highly unusual for politicians to call the shots at major universities in the United States. But such interference is common in failing democracies. Power-hungry presidents and prime ministers replace university leaders with partisan loyalists. They defund or dismantle universities – often the most elite ones. Trump’s assault on the University of Virginia – as well as on Harvard, Columbia, and many others – is following this playbook and should be understood as a measure of America’s slide into autocracy.
Trump’s rationale for the crackdown is that many of the top US universities are bastions of “woke” culture and have become dominated, as he put it in 2023, by “Marxist maniacs and lunatics.” The universities can’t be trusted, the argument goes, to protect students from biased treatment and harassment. The administration’s ostensible aim is to make these institutions more “viewpoint-neutral.”
Other right-wing autocrats around the world have made the same argument – that universities are too progressive – when attacking higher education. But that is far from the only justification. Leftist autocrats have complained that universities are too conservative. Some politicians might deem universities too secular or too religious. Universities’ real threat to autocrats, though, lies in their independence as sites of critical inquiry, which implies an institutional check on these regimes’ authority.
Consider Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who, despite initially coming to power through fair and free elections, has censored the press, crushed legitimate protests, and overseen the country’s slide toward autocracy. Most recently, Erdoğan ordered the imprisonment of his top political rival, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu.
As part of his efforts to solidify his rule, Erdoğan has engaged in a years-long attack on Boğaziçi University, a prestigious public institution known for its academic rigor and diverse and engaged student body. After a failed coup attempt in 2016, Erdoğan issued a decree that gave the president the authority to appoint university rectors – a task that normally fell to professors. Soon after, he installed Mehmed Özkan, a biomedical engineering professor at Boğaziçi, as the university’s head, instead of the faculty’s choice.
In 2021, Erdoğan further restricted Boğaziçi’s academic autonomy by appointing as rector Melih Bulu, an outsider and a loyalist to the president’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). This set off student demonstrations and a series of silent protests by faculty members. Erdoğan accused protesters of being “communists, terrorists, and traitors,” and his government prosecuted many of them, while also imposing other controls that have triggered an exodus of top talent.
While Erdoğan’s AKP represents a nationalist-conservative alliance, autocratic-minded leaders from the political left have framed their attacks on universities in their own terms. During his tenure as Mexico’s president between 2018 and 2024, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (widely known as AMLO), a populist who raised the minimum wage and increased pension payments as he consolidated his power, disparaged top Mexican universities’ “neoliberalism.” The hostility went beyond rhetoric: Mexico’s attorney general made repeated attempts to arrest a group of 31 top scientists on corruption charges, spawning enormous controversy.
AMLO’s attacks roiled Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, one of Mexico’s top public-research centers and universities. CIDE students protested the government’s appointment of a new director, who demoted several administrators. Over the course of its conflict with López Obrador, many CIDE faculty members departed for other schools.
Some autocrats are not satisfied with merely changing the leadership of annoyingly independent universities. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán forced the Central European University out of Budapest; it moved to Vienna, where its faculty continues to engage in excellent research and teaching. At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega assumed control of the Jesuit-run Central American University, fired the university’s leadership and staff, hired party loyalists, and changed its name. Only the buildings remain the same.
When politicians try to muzzle universities by ousting their leaders, interfering with their research and teaching, and cutting off their funds, the writing is on the wall – and not only for once-great academic institutions. As the US careens toward autocracy, Trump has set his sights on other independent institutions as well. From media outlets to law firms and judges, the president is trying to demolish the pillars of democracy.
Many are resisting, but many are capitulating, normalizing Trump’s anti-democratic behavior in the process. In the case of the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of America’s Declaration of Independence, the submission to despotism is particularly poignant.
Susan Stokes, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Faculty Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy, is the author, most recently, of The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2025).
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