Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
In a 2021 speech entitled “The Universities are the Enemy,” Vice President JD Vance declared, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Such attacks are part of the global authoritarian playbook to curtail universities’ independence and capacity to sustain democracy. In the U.S., however, the attack is perversely cloaked in civil rights discourse and tied to the persistent assault on racial justice efforts. As SFFA v. Harvard exemplifies, measures meant to address discrimination against marginalized communities are rebranded as racism against white people. Today this strategy manifests in right-wing campaigns against “critical race theory” and “DEI.”
A redefined notion of antisemitism marks the latest front. Here, conservative white elites and some Jewish communities are encouraged to band together to suppress critical thinking, progressive ideas, and supposedly “woke” faculty and students accused of antisemitism. This weaponization of “antisemitism” serves as a cloak for efforts to dismantle faculty self-governance and academic freedom. Universities are being pressured by donors and trustees as they struggle to balance student protest rights with claims of safety. Faculty governance norms are being upended as personnel are dismissed without due process. These crises collide with economic vulnerability after decades of neoliberal “corporatization.”
This panel draws on Critical Race Theory to examine how to act strategically and collaboratively within an individualist, careerist academic culture during this era of ideological conflict, with the goal of protecting and advancing higher education’s core mission: the pursuit of truth and knowledge for the common good.
•Mario L. Barnes, Chancellor’s Professor of Law, UC Irvine School of Law
•Steven W. Bender, Associate Dean for Planning and Strategic Initiatives and Professor of Law, Seattle University Law School
•Meera E. Deo, Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School
•Athena D. Mutua, Professor of Law and the Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar, University at Buffalo Law School
In a 2021 speech entitled “The Universities are the Enemy,” Vice President JD Vance declared, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Such attacks are part of the global authoritarian playbook to curtail universities’ independence and capacity to sustain democracy. In the U.S., however, the attack is perversely cloaked in civil rights discourse and tied to the persistent assault on racial justice efforts. As SFFA v. Harvard exemplifies, measures meant to address discrimination against marginalized communities are rebranded as racism against white people. Today this strategy manifests in right-wing campaigns against “critical race theory” and “DEI.”
A redefined notion of antisemitism marks the latest front. Here, conservative white elites and some Jewish communities are encouraged to band together to suppress critical thinking, progressive ideas, and supposedly “woke” faculty and students accused of antisemitism. This weaponization of “antisemitism” serves as a cloak for efforts to dismantle faculty self-governance and academic freedom. Universities are being pressured by donors and trustees as they struggle to balance student protest rights with claims of safety. Faculty governance norms are being upended as personnel are dismissed without due process. These crises collide with economic vulnerability after decades of neoliberal “corporatization.”
This panel draws on Critical Race Theory to examine how to act strategically and collaboratively within an individualist, careerist academic culture during this era of ideological conflict, with the goal of protecting and advancing higher education’s core mission: the pursuit of truth and knowledge for the common good.
•Mario L. Barnes, Chancellor’s Professor of Law, UC Irvine School of Law
•Steven W. Bender, Associate Dean for Planning and Strategic Initiatives and Professor of Law, Seattle University Law School
•Meera E. Deo, Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School
•Athena D. Mutua, Professor of Law and the Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar, University at Buffalo Law School
