That Same Ol’ Authoritarian Playbook

Dictators and autocrats have a love-hate relationship with higher education. Their actions show keen insight into the cultural power of colleges and universities, which they often wield to suit their own needs. In the summer of 2026, Hungary officially began the hard work of reversing over a decade of democratic backsliding incited by former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán and his political allies spent years working to complete an authoritarian takeover of the higher education system (and the country itself). Key elements of this takeover included censorship of what professors could publish, closure of majors that the government opposed and additional taxes on institutions that helped to support immigrants.

While a key focus of U.S. policymakers and wonks alike is higher education’s return on investment, the attacks on Hungarian institutions had little to do with how much money their graduates make after they leave college. An authoritarian government interested in encroaching on higher education cares more about the cultural mission of the institution than its economics. Jason Stanley, an expert on authoritarianism and fascism, notes that authoritarians focus on culture because higher education is a haven for “critique and dissent.” Authoritarian governments may use the institution’s finances, most often its funding, to force the institution to do something it wants, but the economics are the means, not the goal.

The ultimate danger remains that, when institutions comply with authoritarian wishes, the government will just ask for greater and greater concessions. After all, if you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.

Hungary is not the first country to experience this coup d’université. The conclusion to an incisive collection of essays, appropriately titled Universities Under Dictatorship (Penn State University Press), notes that gaining control of higher education was “a vitally important goal for every dictatorship” they studied. The dictatorships profiled in the essays, from Germany to Spain to Poland to Russia, used multiple pathways to exert power over universities: coercing institutions to adjust research and teaching topics to align with the government’s preferred ideology; expelling faculty, staff and students; gaining additional control over who can access higher education; replacing university leadership with people who agree with the government (thus reducing institutional autonomy); and reducing access to international colleagues and institutions.

While those essays focus on Europe and Asia, these patterns hold across the globe. The 20th century saw direct attacks on universities in Latin American countries intertwined with assaults on democratic governance. Analysts noted that a unifying theme in Latin America’s authoritarian attacks was that “the universities [were] among the first institutions brought under control through the imposition of tests of political loyalty, wholesale dismissals of teachers and research investigators, and suppression of normal student life.” In an echo of the European and Asian attacks, Latin American institutions, often led by new puppet administrators loyal to the government, purged faculty, staff and students with opposing views. The new administrations often overhauled the curriculum, reducing access to disciplines that highlighted power structures, particularly the humanities and social sciences.

If that sounds similar to the current state of U.S. higher education and the multiple attacks the second Trump administration has made to force colleges and universities—often through threats and blackmail—to hire the types of professors it prefers and teach the types of classes it favors, that’s not a coincidence. Last month, former Department of Justice attorneys-turned-whistleblowers alleged that antisemitism investigations at Harvard, Columbia and Brown Universities contained “extraordinary procedural irregularities, predetermined outcomes without factual or legal support, and disregard for Title VI’s legal requirements and the First Amendment to meet the political mission of the Task Force.”

As an example, even with no evidence of a Title VI violation at Brown, the whistleblowers said repeated attempts by career DOJ attorneys to close the cases were ignored. All the while, the federal government halted millions of dollars in research grants that the institutions had already won. Makes sense given that an official made clear that “the goal is compliance, but pulling money is the tool.”

What did the government want from universities’ compliance? The settlement they were negotiating with Harvard provides a clue. One whistleblower alleged that the proposed settlement “included [Memorandums of Understanding] with police, installing a provost to oversee curriculum, ending [diversity, equity and inclusion] programs, placing endowment money in trusts the government could seize, and investing in programs in Israel.” It appears that the federal government focused on partisan political priorities—instead of interventions to mitigate explicit Title VI violations—while it ignored standard procedures.

These revelations, coupled with insight from prior legal cases, suggests that the Title VI investigations were never about antisemitism, a real and rising issue in the United States. The federal probe was never in good faith. If it was, staffers would have been allowed to carry out a thorough investigation and then, if violations were found, the federal government would work with universities to create a better environment for Jewish members of their communities.

Elements of previous authoritarian attacks on the cultural mission of higher education weave throughout our current moment. This is one of the reasons that I do not see the Department of Education’s recent “Call to Action” as a mere set of innocuous questions. Even though I’ve been asking, sometimes begging, for certain colleges to re-examine their missions to better serve their students and the public, those questions cannot be separated from the context surrounding them (either literally in the letter itself or in our larger world). The same government that (allegedly) went on a hunt for evidence to prove predetermined wrongdoing, then pressured institutions into settlements despite failing to find evidence of wrongdoing, has now asked institutions to collaborate with them.

It can seem easy to just comply and move on (which some university systems have done, oddly, so swiftly that there was almost certainly no time to consult key university stakeholder groups). But always remember: If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk. We can look to previous authoritarian regimes to know that this will not be the last request, and each step—whether cutting certain programs, attacking Middle East studies faculty or something else—will erode the foundations of universities as sites of knowledge and learning.