Respected colleagues I worked with for years before I retired from the university were talking in a cluster in the hallway about the surveillance and censoring of academics now underway in the land. Alarming, frightening, everyone agreed. Not much of an idea about what to do next. Keep your heads down? Look for quiet strategies? Change the words you use to avoid being turned in by emboldened fanatics?
Plenty of sophistication on hand, but not much political imagination or experience. it's a regional public university being slowly stripped down by state authorities to job-training only, not there yet but that seems to be the goal, and certainly no commitment to arts and humanities. The people with the greatest stake in the campus, the regional taxpayers who probably still hope to have a solid institution of higher education for their children and grandchildren.
Does it ever occur to faculty to reach out to these neighbors who have the most to lose if the public university is hollowed out? To seek a dialogue with them? To see them as potential political allies? Generally speaking, I don't see faculty having that kind of political imagination.
So it was a grim conversation in that circle of colleagues in the hallway. Keenly aware of what is happening, nothing much to suggest about how to resist. It's a great shame, since a regional public university has a beautiful mission of service to the people of the area, especially those who are not wealthy enough to go away to posh colleges or maybe even to stop for four years of full-time course work right after high school.
It's a class-divided society, and certain things are too good for a swath of our fellow citizens. That's how it seems, anyway.