Maybe Already, If Not Sooner

Photo By Steve Weir | Tiergarten - Berlin, Germany | 2023

This morning’s Consortium News ( 7/25/25) features a very long interview piece by Chris Hedges on the firing of tenured professor, Maura Finkelstein, Chair of Sociology at Muhlenberg college, for her alleged and now slanderously interpreted support of HAMAS and her contra-US anti-Zionist criticisms.

Transparently nothing more than a blatantly defamatory hit-job on a Jewish instructor openly sympathetic to Palestine, Professor Finklestein’s obviously contrived removal meshes with other items around the internet this morning testifying as well, that the forces of Israeli / AIPAC conspirators and the radical reactionary Corporate Right have concentrated their alliance and are advancing.

Originally, years ago, Hillel, a once benignly innocent campus-life organization for Jewish students, but, according to both Hedges and Finklestein,, now an energetically active AIPAC affiliate, has not only been the publicly principal instigator of the plot to rid Muhlenberg college of an obnoxiously outspoken pro-Palestine professor, but it has also openly become an official AIPAC gate-keeper whose in-house agent has been charged with explicitly warning all naively innocent prospective Hillel applicants, that any Jew harboring forbidden Palestinian sympathies is persona non grata -for sure.

Almost always initially from a predictably protectionist base anyway, it’s my guess that none of this disturbs the sleep of higher Muhlenberg college administrators nor, for that matter, their upper-tier colleagues around the country either, for increasingly drawn from the upper echelons of corporate business and industry, the men and women who today elaborate the existential protocols and procedures of American “higher” education, are much more interested in “capital accumulation” -their own as well as the institution’s -than in such banal matters as our historically rooted attention to, critical analysis, clarity of thought and -dare we say it ? our heritage of liberal skepticism.

Perhaps also in complicit synchrony, mid-level traditionally subject-matter-oriented departmental deans and, even chairpersons, are lately showing themselves to be allied with the Trump administration's proclaimed intentions to rid the nation’s universities and colleges of all essentiallysubversive -“un-American”studies- such as, randomly,

British, American and comparative World literature, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Race studies, Socio-political theory and, of course, all classes devoted to uncensored American and, Middle East History.

Donald Trump’s anxiety driven head-hunting aside, the roots of the narrowing impulses behind such administrative evisceration have been developing sub-rosa on college campuses for at least the last two decades.

Grown almost spontaneously as a matter of course, I think, from the incidental emergence of a relatively new administrative class, the academic authoritarian’s inherent need for behavioral conformity, code-of-conduct-compliance, his or her often acute discomfort with any show of faculty individuality and, their relief in now having an increasingly part-time-faculty, permanently dependent, often eagerly compliant, all seem of a piece with -institutional mirror-age-merging into our burgeoning authoritarian state.

Within this narrowing frame, it’s to be expected, I suppose, that benefitting from generous US DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grants-in-aid, more than 60 US colleges and Universities, can today boast of post & pre-doc researchers busily developing AI systems of censorship (attitude modification) and surveillance (covert oversight) for whatever ends our always self-stabilizing beacon of democracy will choose to put them to.

So no surprise that a Trump administration spokesperson recently announced that hereafter government overseers will be taking “a closer look," “showing more interest” in those issues that have heretofore been thought to be “academically independent” ..(of government meddling ? )- Academic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of association and privacy and, issues of equality of access and diversity-

“Oversight,” Trump’s spokesperson went on to say, will also be more “coercive "

Unsurprisingly, both Hedges and Finkelstein see in these nefarious processes the likely end of whatever flimsy academic freedom we perhaps foolishly believe we still have, but considering the progressive administrative distancing of functionally autonomous, upper-upper level decision-makers, at least since the Clinton era, it’s no stretch at all to see these maneuvers as further steps in the advance of the emissaries of an ultimate Corporate dictatorship.

So this may become more than merely serious, and If we don’t find the fortitude to stop it, we may all be loser’s ... but, grotesquely, shamefully, those among us, we, the people, (those always only marginally among us at best) -who will have the least to lose will be those compliant go-along-to-get-along absentees who, always politely, always permissively looking the other way, those always standing aside as it happens- those creature-comfort-beneficiaries who, too, could have done something else, something worth doing, -Netanyahu’s Americans, Exxon’s Americans, the eternally vacationing Americans, they will have their diversions.

A democratic republic, after all, is democracy for every body. -even the dilettante cowards among us.

And will any ever realize what it once took to be a good German ?

Silence, they say, is consent