Trump, White House Witch-Hunters Besiege Academia

The Gleichschaltung of American Universities

It began on March 8 with the seizure of Mahmoud Khalil, a politically moderate Palestinian graduate of Columbia University, by federal agents as he was entering the door of his apartment building with his wife, who was eight months pregnant. Khalil was spirited away almost 1,500 miles to a remote Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) detention center in Louisiana. After first saying that his student visa was canceled (he didn’t have one), the feds announced that his permanent residency was revoked. The very next day President Donald Trump announced that $400 million in federal grants to the school would be cancelled. Showing its obeisance to the new regime, Columbia that same day suspended, expelled and revoked the degrees of 22 students for pro-Palestinian activism.

The Trump administration’s drive for mass deportations, reprisals against pro-Palestinian demonstrators and assault on U.S. universities was coming together. As the City University of New York (CUNY) Internationalist Clubs put it in a sign at an April 17 demonstration in defense of higher education: “First They Came for the Palestinians… Free Mahmoud Khalil!” In the following weeks, while pushing to deport international students, the federal government launched an assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus that is intended to be much more deep-going than even the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s. Washington is seeking control over hiring, enrollment, governance and course content, while demanding the expulsion of liberal “activist” faculty and students. They started out with spectacular demands on top universities, in order to intimidate the rest, a typical Trump ploy.

This was truly a purge foretold. A year ago, as the U.S./Israel war on Gaza raged on and a wave of student protest swept universities across the country, college administrators and capitalist politicians of both major parties cynically framed opposition to the Zionist genocide as antisemitism, in order to justify police repression and censorship. In April 2024, Democratic president Joe Biden “condemn[ed] the antisemitic protests,” declaring that the demonstrations “must stop” and “order must prevail.” After visiting Columbia, where the first Gaza solidarity encampment was taking place, New York Democratic governor Kathy Hochul tweeted the vile “antisemitism” smear against anti-Zionist protesters. Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson chimed in, calling for the deployment of National Guard troops to quash protest.

On the campaign trail in May 2024, Trump vowed in a closed-door meeting with donors that with “any student that protests,” he would “throw them out of the country.” The Republican National Convention in July included in its platform a call to “Deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.” Then in January 2025, during his second week in office, Trump signed Executive Order 14188, ordering investigations of universities on fallacious charges of antisemitism, and for the Department of Homeland Security and State Department to collaborate in deporting pro-Palestinian international students. So when protests erupted anew at Columbia in March, federal cops began Gestapo-style abductions and federal funds were pulled from elite private universities where demonstrations took place.

Since Columbia buckled under the pressure of the federal government, the administration has turned its attention to Harvard. It started with an April 11 letter demanding a change in campus governance “reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty” and of any faculty involved in “activism”; a ban on students “hostile to American values” and an ongoing audit of the political ideology of students and faculty to ensure “viewpoint diversity”; shuttering “all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs” and policies; and more. When Harvard refused to comply, three days later the administration announced it was withholding $2 billion in federal funding. This was followed by freezing $1 billion in National Institutes of Health research funds and $450 million in multi-agency grants, and disqualification from all future federal grants.

The administration followed up with a letter from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Kristi Noem accusing Harvard of having “created a hostile learning environment for Jewish students due to Harvard's failure to condemn antisemitism” – which Harvard, of course, had condemned long ago. The letter demanded individual reports on students, including on their “participating in protests.” Then on May 22, Noem informed Harvard that it would no longer be allowed to enroll international students. That evening, the administration formally accused Columbia of violating Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act through “deliberate indifference” toward harassment of Jewish students. But the whole construct is a lie: the supposed harassment of Jewish students was non-existent.

Similar threats of funding cuts have been made or are in the works for other universities on administration lists of suspect campuses. One list is of 60 universities being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education on suspicion of “antisemitism.” Another 131 colleges with endowments of over $1 billion are potential targets of an ED investigation over DEI programs, under a January 21 Trump executive order.  Of those schools facing fund freezes, Cornell, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University and Princeton stand to lose at least $2.5 billion between them. In short, blacklists are back, with a vengeance. When Senator Joe McCarthy (R, Wisconsin) was witch-hunting “reds” on campuses in the 1950s, hundreds of professors lost their jobs. Now it’s whole universities that are losing billions in funding.

The escalation of McCarthyism today, in conjunction with the U.S.-armed Zionist war of extermination against Gaza, is not only bipartisan – as were the “red hunts” of the late 1940s and early ’50s – it is emanating straight from the White House, with the full force of the federal government behind it. We wouldn’t be surprised to see students or faculty members hauled before inquisitorial investigative panels tomorrow to answer, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a pro-Palestinian protester?” And this time, the aim goes beyond punishing or purging hundreds or thousands of academics. As the U.S. lurches toward authoritarian rule, we are facing a drive to control all education, whipping educators into line to march in lockstep with the MAGA agenda, imitating the German Nazis’ Gleichschaltung¹ of the schools.

U.S. universities are under attack like never before. This assault cannot be diverted with passive resistance, nor can it be defeated by academia alone. It is being driven forward by the forces of xenophobia, bent on driving out millions of immigrants and ripping up the social fabric of the country, as well as by the misogynists who would force women back into the home, obligated to produce the next generation of wage slaves. It is led by virulent racists hell-bent on eliminating any measures to address social oppression, by (genuinely antisemitic) Christian nationalist fanatics who would impose a messianic theocracy, by ultra-rightists seek to decimate the left, and by labor-haters who yearn to use the repressive powers of a Bonapartist “strong state” to crush the unions. Combined with the push for “patriotic education,” it is a drive to regiment society for war.

The onslaught against American academia can only be defeated by a powerful class struggle by the workers movement in the lead of all the oppressed.

Behind the Trump Game Plan to Attack Elite Universities

Today some academics, including the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), look to the leadership of deep-pocketed elite universities like Harvard to shield higher education from state reprisals. This is illusory. All universities collaborated with local, state and federal authorities to clamp down on student protest and pro-Palestinian activism. Harvard president Alan Gabard was appointed after the resignation of his predecessor Claudine Gay, crucified at a Congressional hearing over the handling of Palestinian protests. Today he postures as a proponent of free speech, yet it was only last year he had the Palestine Solidarity Committee suspended, Harvard Yard closed and the diplomas of students who participated in encampments withheld – not to mention trying to quash graduate student unionization as provost in 2016.

On April 21, Harvard went to court, accusing the federal government of violating the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Yet Harvard has repeatedly tried to cave in. On April 29, it published a report on supposed antisemitism and “anti-Israel bias,” which among other things accused Jewish Israeli professor Atalia Omer over her course on Palestinian and Israeli history.² On May 8, reports surfaced that top Harvard administrators were considering seeking a deal with the federal government. And on May 12, Harvard’s president Gabard published a letter saying the university has “common ground” with the Trump administration. But it was never enough, so Noem, the sociopath head of DHS, issued her decree that Harvard could no longer enroll international students, whose tuition provides about a quarter of the university’s overall funds.

In filing its suit against the administration, both lead lawyers representing Harvard have prior links to Trump, reflecting divisions in the upper levels of the ruling class. Robert Hur, a senior Justice Department official in Trump’s first term, was the Special Counsel investigating President Biden’s handling of classified documents; William Burck represented several Trump officials during the Robert Mueller “Russiagate” investigation. But the attacks on free speech began under the previous Democratic administration. Along with supplying the weapons for the U.S./Israel genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza, in November 2023 Biden initiated the Education Department probe into schools on bogus charges of antisemitism. A month before that, NY governor Hochul launched an investigation into pro-Palestinian activism at CUNY.

Those witch hunts led to the December 2023 Congressional star-chamber hearings of university presidents, orchestrated by “ultra-MAGA” Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik. And it was largely Democratic governors and mayors who, in tandem with the Biden White House, brought police onto campuses to smash student protests last year, resulting in over 3,000 arrests nationwide. More recently, in February 2025, Democrat Hochul intervened directly to demand Hunter College withdraw a posting for a Palestinian studies job. This unholy alliance also includes ultra-rightists and hardline Zionists driving around “doxxing trucks” to smear defenders of the Palestinians as “antisemitic,” while the fascistic Zionists of Betar announced that they had turned over to the Trump administration a list of pro-Palestinian activists to deport.

The Trump administration’s attacks on pro-Palestinian dissent are part of an insidious long game plan to purge the universities, strategized in advance by the president’s billionaire cabal and think-tank courtiers. In July 2023, Trump posted a video statement on his Agenda 47 campaign website on the topic of “Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions.” The video laid out plans to use the college accreditation system as a “secret weapon,” purging the accreditation agencies in order to clean out “Marxists” from universities, setting “standards that will include defending the American tradition and Western civilization,” while using the Department of Justice to litigate against schools with diversity programs.

Similarly, in April 2023, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 published a playbook for Trump to follow in anticipation of his victory in the 2024 elections calling to “defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.” The basic outlook of the administration can be summed up by the title of the keynote speech delivered by current vice president JD Vance at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” Vance and the right-wing Silicon Valley clique of tech billionaires and venture capitalists to which he belongs cynically seek to exploit popular resentment of the privileges of the elite universities in order to wage ideological war against the liberal wing of the U.S. bourgeoisie, and ultimately replace it with right-thinking reactionaries.

In an interview with the New York Times (13 June 2024), the fascistic ideologue Vance cited the unrepentant Nazi jurist “Carl Schmitt – there’s no law, there’s just power.” While Vance tried to pin this on liberals, it is clearly the operating protocol of the Trump crew. Schmitt opposed the Weimar Republic, advocating the program of General Kurt von Schleicher, the last German chancellor before Hitler, for an authoritarian (Bonapartist) presidential regime with unlimited powers.³ In a 1921 treatise, The Dictatorship, Schmitt put forward a judicial principle of a “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand) in which the sovereign could transcend the “rule of law.” After joining the Nazi party in 1933, he justified the 1934 SS murder of leading generals (including von Schleicher) on the principle of the “leader order” (Führer-Ordnung).⁴

Schmitt’s program for Bonapartist rule is the underpinning of the more ideological elements of the Trump regime – and of the “theory of the unitary executive” which has long been pushed by the right-wing jurists of the Federalist Society, and which in June 2024 was embraced by the Supreme Court. A 2005 post on the blog of Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin, titled “The Return of Carl Schmitt,” noted that the arguments of John Yoo, a legal official in the George Bush II administration, justifying the use of torture in Iraq despite prohibition by the Geneva Conventions, were derived from Schmitt. In his torture memos, Yoo grounds his legal reasoning in the power “which the Framers [of the U.S. Constitution] vested in a unitary executive.” An article in Rolling Stone (11 July 2024) notes that “Trumpworld sees him [Yoo] as a guiding light.”

McCarthyism,Then and Now

The reactionary efforts to stifle dissent and root out leftist activists today, as in the 1940s and ’50s, are motivated by the drive of the ruling class toward war. As U.S. imperialism revved up the Cold War against the Soviet Union, it pursued members of the Communist Party, left-liberals and “progressives” as the “enemy within.” Today, the immediate targets are the pro-Palestinian protestors. But the genocidal war the U.S. and Israel are jointly waging on Gaza is a way station on their war drive aiming at capitalist counterrevolution in China, threatening a nuclear World War III in the process. (In fact, a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in December calls to develop anti-communist and anti-China propaganda materials to be disseminated and taught in the classroom.)

The post-World War II red hunt got its name from the infamous Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, whose demagogic antics were emblematic of Cold War hysteria. In reality, today as during the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the interrogations, inquisitions and purges are being driven by both Democrats and Republicans. McCarthy, in fact, was a close friend of the Kennedy family, and helped future president John F. Kennedy and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy get their start in politics as aggressive Cold Warriors, hiring Robert as assistant counsel on his Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. RFK would go on to serve as chief counsel in the McClellan hearings to go after the power of the Teamsters union and wiretap Martin Luther King.

McCarthy was neither the first nor the last cynical politician to use the legislature as an inquisitorial body. There was the 1918-19 Senate subcommittee led by North Carolina Democrat Lee Slater Overman to root out “Bolshevik elements” in the U.S. in the first years after the Russian Revolution. A Special Committee on Communist Activities led by New York Republican Hamilton Fish III was formed in 1930, seeking to bolster immigration and deportation laws to target radical labor activists. And, of course, the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC, established in 1938 by Texan Democrat Martin Dies Jr., for decades thereafter held high-profile public hearings to smear suspected radicals and leftist political activists as “subversive” and “disloyal.”

The precedent for anti-communist witch-hunting at the universities was set in 1940, when the New York State legislature moved on the eve of World War II to investigate leftist activities at City College and other NYC public colleges, and to purge students, faculty and staff over their political views. The Rapp-Coudert Committee subpoenaed and interrogated more than 500 people from Brooklyn College, City College of New York (CCNY), Hunter College, and Queens College. Around 50 teachers and staff members from City College were fired in what was “by far the largest purge of politically undesirable professors ever” in American history.⁵ Those who lost their jobs included CCNY’s first black faculty member Max Yergan, Philip and Jack Foner, trade unionist Moe Foner, and English tutor Morris Schappes, who was sentenced to 14 months in state prison.⁶

After the war, in 1947, Democratic president Harry Truman established a loyalty program of oaths and screenings for federal employees. Across the country, states created their own witch-hunting committees modeled on Truman’s program, and required public employees to swear their allegiance to the state and that they had no current nor prior affiliation to the Communist Party. By the early 1950s, 32 states required loyalty oaths from their teachers. New York would continue to see some of the largest purges in the country following the 1949 passage of the Feinberg Law barring suspected communist teachers from the classroom. Over 1,150 teachers were subject to questioning, and 378 lost their jobs.⁷

At the University of California in 1949, when its Board of Regents imposed its own anti-communist loyalty oath on faculty and staff, 157 employees refused to sign. The Board voted to dismiss them. All but 31 faculty members capitulated to the hysteria. The university had to settle with the fired teachers in 1951, but only because the state legislature had passed its own more harshly-worded loyalty oath, and faculty overwhelmingly toed the line. At the federal level, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee questioned faculty at NYC colleges in 1953, resulting in the dismissal of several CCNY faculty members for invoking their Fifth Amendment right to refrain from responding. At the University of Michigan, some professors cited their First Amendment right of free speech or refused to answer at all, and were jailed for contempt of Congress.

As historian Ellen Schrecker explains in her classic work, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986), opposition to the witch-hunters from within the universities was weak. Overall, administrations dutifully cooperated with government inquisitors. The AAUP, although it formally opposed loyalty oaths and censorship, and defended faculty members’ right to invoke the Fifth Amendment, failed to censure any specific violations of free speech rights or academic freedom until 1956, when the tide had already begun to turn. Schrecker concludes:

“Professors and administrators ignored the stated ideals of their calling and overrode the civil liberties of their colleagues and employees in the service of such supposedly higher values as institutional loyalty and national security…. The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.”

McCarthy fell out of favor and was censured by the Senate when he launched accusations against the military brass, boiling over in the heated (and televised) Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. By the mid-1950s the fortunes of the red-baiters were beginning to change. The rigid Cold War McCarthyite control of social life in the U.S. was ultimately defeated by the rise of black struggle, first to integrate the schools after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, notably in the 1956 battle over school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott that same year, followed by civil rights struggles all over the South. The ideological monolith of anti-communist cultural regimentation fractured.

A key moment was when students and labor joined forces against the witch-hunters. As we wrote in 2017, during Trump’s first term, about rightist provocations on university campuses in California: “What’s going on, not only in California but nationwide, is a push for a new McCarthyism on campus.” Noting how Joe McCarthy’s chief inquisitor, Roy Cohn, was Donald Trump’s mentor, we wrote: “The threat of a new McCarthyism is real. The danger is that, as in the 1950s, the intended victims fail to mobilize and vigorously fight back.” But, we added:

“What finally broke the grip of fear instilled by McCarthyism was a militant mobilization of students and workers against the House Un-American Activities Committee when it came to San Francisco in 1960. One of the main targets was the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which defied the 1947 Taft-Hartley law banning Communists from union leadership positions. HUAC also subpoenaed teachers and a student. Instead of intimidation, the committee’s hearing galvanized opposition. Professors and students from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State College joined with ILWU Local 10 members and effectively broke up the hearing.”

–“Milo Yiannopoulos,‘Free Speech’ and the Assault on Universities,” The Internationalist No. 47, March-April 2017⁸

 Gleichschaltung of Academia, Then and Now

Philosopher Martin Heidegger carried out the purge of leftists and Jews at Freiburg University.

During the World War II and Cold War witch-hunting in academia, the most avid inquisitors were waging their anti-communist crusade from Congress and state legislatures. Today, the assault on universities is coming straight from the Trump White House, with the full force of the federal government behind it. There is another important difference: the aim in the 1950s was to purge leftists from schools and colleges. Today, while leftists – and anyone that is pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist or against genocide in Gaza – are in the crosshairs, there is a broader aim: to drive out liberals and remake higher education according to MAGA dictates. The Trump regime seeks to “replace the existing ruling class with another ruling class,” as JD Vance put it in a July 2024 interview with The Federalist, by taking over and forcing the universities into line.

April 1933 Nazi decree ordering Gleichschaltung of German education.

We have explained why it is not correct to classify Trump as a fascist,⁹ but the parallels to what is now being demanded of American higher education and what took place in German universities in the 1930s are such that the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel (15 April) headlined: “‘Gleichschaltung’ Feared: What the Trump Regime is Demanding of Harvard.” Even before taking power, the Nazis used intimidation to force leftists out of academia. In 1930 after the University of Heidelberg hired Emil Gumbel, a Jewish mathematician and outspoken opponent of fascism, as an instructor, Nazi youth spearheaded a smear campaign against him, issued death threats, led physical attacks and organized mass provocations and disruptions of his lectures. Ultimately, most of his colleagues capitulated and he was removed from his post in 1932.¹⁰

The Gumbel affair set the tone for what was soon to come. Hitler became chancellor (prime minister) in January 1933, and promptly passed an Enabling Act allowing him to rule by decree. The Nazis moved swiftly to remove Jews and leftists from public employment and require an oath of allegiance to the German state (and its Führer). The purge of higher education that began that spring culminated in the dismissal of 1,000 professors, or nearly one-fifth of university academic staff. The Nazi regime carried out a reorganization of the university, eliminating faculty governance bodies (as the Trump administration is now demanding)¹¹ and concentrating administrative authority in the office of the rector. The propagation of fascist propaganda was demanded, while today a Trump executive order mandates “patriotic education.”

Most administrators and professors complied willingly with these orders. Infamous among these opportunists was the philosopher Martin Heiddegger, who became rector of the University of Freiburg just as the Nazis began to establish their control over the academy. Heidegger wasted no time in joining the Nazi Party. He dutifully carried out the reorganization of the university in accord with the dictatorial Führerprinzip (leader principle) and applied Nazi racial “cleansing” laws that targeted “Jewish or Marxist” or otherwise “non-Aryan” students. Today the targets are Palestinian or pro-Palestinian faculty and students. The eminent philosopher was one of the prominent signatories of the “Vow of Allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High Schools to Adolf Hitler.” In his inaugural address as rector, Heidegger proclaimed that “[t]he much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the German university.”

So deep was Heidegger’s complicity in Nazi crimes that he was banned from teaching for several years after World War II. But his former lover and longtime friend, the German Jewish academic Hannah Arendt, became a court philosopher of the anti-Soviet Cold War. Her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which made a false and cynical equivalence between the Soviet Union and arch-racist genocidal Nazism, was heavily promoted by the U.S. government via the notorious CIA conduit, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Meanwhile, the doctrines of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt are being taught in law schools in the United States as a foundation of the doctrine of “legal realism.”

For Labor Action to Defend Free Speech and Defeat the New McCarthyism

Today in Trumpland USA universities are under siege, as academic freedom and the rights to free speech and protest are menaced by the federal government as never before. The Trump administration is going after top private universities first of all because of their role in the intellectual formation of the ruling class, and is using financial blackmail to compel adherence. What’s called for is a struggle at universities throughout the country, in common action with labor and all those threatened by the Trump attacks. As the administration criminalizes anti-Zionism, it is urgently necessary to join in common action with those fighting to defend Palestinians and to oppose the joint U.S./Israeli genocidal war on Gaza. Likewise, a successful struggle requires linking the struggle with the fight against mass deportations, against attacks on trans people and all those victimized in the repressive onslaught.

Today, many have hailed Harvard University as a counterpoint to the abject surrender of Columbia and as an example as they look to university administrations to stand up to Trump. As already noted, the administrators of this, one of the wealthiest universities in the world (endowment, $53 billion), are hardly champions of academic freedom and free speech. Even more explicitly than other private universities, Harvard is literally a corporation, a business entity, not a “community of scholars.” And the masters of this corporation have repeatedly sought to bow down to Trump, including by forcing the resignation of Harvard’s previous president when she was pilloried by the witch-hunters in Washington. To look to this mainstay of American capitalism to lead the “resistance” to Trump is a lesson in futility and a recipe for defeat.

The same goes for university administrations in general, whether of private or public schools, small liberal arts colleges or large research universities. An open letter signed by over 600 college and university presidents and other “educational leaders” is circulating denouncing “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” But while espousing “the defining freedoms of American higher education,” it calls for “constructive engagement” with the Trump administration, which must be one of the all-time most illusory of pious hopes. This regime is not one to be “constructively engaged” – just ask the U.S.’ Ukrainian puppet president Zelensky. And while university execs have a certain vested interest in “academic freedom,” they surely aren’t going to defend pro-Palestinian protesters, students or faculty.

The origins of academic freedom go back to the libertas scholastica of the Middle Ages in Europe, when the few universities sought autonomy from papal or imperial control, as laid out in the 1158 charter of the University of Bologna (Italy). Later, during the Enlightenment, university autonomy served to protect the development of science and other disciplines linked to the rising bourgeoisie against the dead hand of the semi-feudal absolutist state. In the United States it is associated with the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure of the AAUP. But in this period of capitalism’s decline, as science itself is under attack, the Trump regime’s attacks on academic freedom are a facet of its broader assault on bourgeois democracy in the drive toward an authoritarian “strong state.” 

The threat facing American universities today goes well beyond McCarthyism. It is a full-on drive to control higher education by a would-be Bonapartist government, such as Leon Trotsky analyzed in the 1930s, which seeks dictate to all of society. The Trump regime, using the “power of the purse,” arrogates to itself the power to determine what is taught (no courses on Palestinian or black history), who teaches it (no Marxist radicals), who are the students (no international students who support Palestinians), how the university is governed (all power to the admin, no diversity programs), who plays on varsity sports teams (no trans athletes) while replacing liberal faculty and students with right-thinking conservatives. Meanwhile, in K-12 schools their demand for “patriotic education” aims to indoctrinate students in “American values.”

Despite the pantomime of defiance by the Harvard administration – which is dependent on the courts, and ultimately the Trump enablers of the Supreme Court – the experience of the last three months underlines that, as during the witch hunts of the 1940s and ’50s, college officials will capitulate before the reactionary onslaught. This is no accident, for they administer academia as the agents of capital, both in private and public universities, not on behalf of an imagined campus “community.” The Internationalist Group along with the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and the fraternally allied Class Struggle Education Workers call to abolish college administrations and boards of trustees or regents, and to institute democratic student/faculty/worker control of the university through elected assemblies.

The Trump administration's campaign to intimidate one and all, ruling by decree and tightening the grip of the state over society, augurs worse to come. While many who work and teach at universities are shocked and outraged by the blatant violation of democratic rights, the struggle cannot be waged in isolation within the ivory tower. Instead, it must reach far beyond the walls of the university and link up with the multiracial working class. This is especially so as the attack on universities is accompanied by mass deportations of immigrants, mass firings of government workers, war on transgender people, an economic program that will impoverish all working people due to tariff-induced inflation, and continued support for, and even escalation of, the U.S./Israel genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Ultimately, the offensive against the universities as the “enemy within” and the stripping away of the democratic façade of capitalist class rule are part of preparations for imperialist world war aiming at counterrevolution in the remaining, bureaucratically deformed, workers states, China first and foremost. To defeat this full-bore offensive, it’s necessary to bring out the power of the working class. The banner of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 for the May 2025 march in Oakland, California pointed the way, calling: “For Workers Action to Stop Mass Deportations and Mass Firings! No Military Cargo for Israel’s Genocidal War Against Palestinians! Defend the Rights of ALL of Us!”

At the City University of New York (CUNY), the faculty/staff union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), has denounced attempts to censor Palestinian solidarity actions, formed an Immigrant Solidarity Working Group and circulated a petition demanding that the university:

“1. Refuse to capitulate to authoritarian demands that threaten academic freedom, free speech, faculty governance, free association, and our right to protest on campus; refuse to curtail CUNY’s commitment to racial, gender and other forms of diversity.

“2. Provide emergency legal representation for any CUNY student or worker facing the threat of deportation or cancellation of visa.

“3. Ensure that no CUNY college will allow ICE and Homeland Security to enter or recruit on CUNY campuses.”

On May 27, the PSC delivered to the University administration this petition that was signed by over 7,300 people at CUNY, including 3,000 faculty and staff and 3,900 students. The CUNY Internationalist Clubs and Hunter Committee to Defend Immigrants played a major role in this effort. Now defenders of academic freedom, freedom of speech and immigrants’ rights face the arduous task of turning these demands into reality through resolute organizing. A successful fight here would have reverberations around the country.

Waging this struggle requires above all a political break with the Democratic Party, which armed the genocidal Zionist war machine, and on the home front set in motion the witch hunts, censorship and police repression on campuses – which the Republicans are now capitalizing on – while posing as “tougher than Trump” on the border. The Internationalist Group insists that, now more than ever, what’s needed is to forge a class-struggle workers party to lead all those exploited and oppressed by this rotting capitalist system in a fight for socialist revolution. How to accomplish this is the central issue of our time. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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