The Miscellany News

I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I could see Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello from my elementary school playground. My parents are professors at the University of Virginia (UVA). At the end of June, the President of UVA resigned under extreme pressure from the federal government. The town was alit with anxiety; nobody knew, and most still do not know, if jobs would be safe, if programs would remain or if anything would ever be the same. 

This, however, was not an isolated event. The forced resignation of UVA’s president was the continuation of President Trump’s broader campaign to gut higher education. From the first day of his administration, he set out to target universities, painting them as dens of antisemitism and “wokeness.” Trump turned them into battlegrounds for his ideological war. Of course, these charges of antisemitism, beginning at Columbia University and Harvard University and later expanded to others, were clearly false. The idea of universities as hotbeds of secret antisemitism is laughable, and courts have repeatedly struck down these claims. But the point was not truth; it was to vilify the institutions that foster free thought and to strip them of protection until they bowed to power.

But why should this matter? Why should universities become the battleground for democracy? To answer this, we must return to the people whom Republicans love to cite, but hate to understand: our founders, more specifically, Thomas Jefferson. Of course, Jefferson was full of contradictions. He was a prophet of liberty, yet a slaveowner who built his university using slave labor and violently raped an enslaved woman. Still, his words carry weight we cannot ignore. Jefferson founded UVA because he understood that the survival of the Republic depends on an educated citizenry. He believed that without education, freedom itself would vanish.

In his 1779 “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson declared, “It is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this [tyranny] would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.” For Jefferson, universities were entrusted with equipping citizens to recognize tyranny in its early stages—the silencing of the press, the erosion of civic life, etc.— and giving them the tools to resist it. Education, in Jefferson’s mind, was not job preparation but a training for the preservation of freedom. This education was to be available regardless of economic class, although, as is typical of an 18th century white man, it excluded African Americans and, to an extent, women. It is foundational to democracy itself. It is no mere ornament of society; it is the safeguard. A free people cannot exist without the means to understand the world they inhabit, the rights they hold and the threats that endanger them. 

Ignorance breeds submission; knowledge breeds resistance. Universities equip us with not only facts but a critical lens with which to question authority and the skills to do so. They are the living engines of liberty, built to sustain the very possibility of democracy in our world. Trump’s assault on higher education is, therefore, not only unconstitutional. It is wholly un-American. It strikes at the very system designed to keep tyranny at bay. 

Universities have always been at the forefront of resistance to tyranny, whether it be students marching against apartheid in South Africa, uprisings in the Eastern Bloc or the revolutionaries in Syria. Dictators understand this, and Trump understands this. This is why he seeks to cripple universities. His campaign of tyranny has nothing to do with reform; it is about the annihilation of the liberated mind.

It is tempting to think that we are safe here at Vassar. We are a private school in a blue state with less name recognition than Columbia University or Harvard University. However, this is a dangerous illusion. Tyranny is totalizing, and it does not stop halfway. When dictators consolidate power, their sights fall on every institution, whether famous or obscure. History offers no shortage of examples: Augusto Pinochet executed Chilean professors, Adolf Hitler purged German universities, and Joseph Stalin murdered scholars. Their message was the same as Trump’s: Education is dangerous, thus it must be destroyed. Trump is going down this path, and it is happening in plain view. 

To do nothing now is complicity. Thomas Paine warned in 1776, “Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!” Silence is not neutrality; it is surrender. To remain quiet is to, in effect, grease the gears of fascism. We know what history says about those who watched oppression rise and stayed seated. They were not spared; they were consumed. One can simply turn to the people of Germany during the Nazi regime, who stood by as Hitler rose up and suffered in turn. We are now confronted with a similar choice. Either we do something now, or we will be led like lambs to the slaughter.