by FATIMA EL-TAYEB,
professor of Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with Yale University
*An earlier version of this piece appeared in the Yale Daily News*
Fascist regimes from Mussolini to Modi follow a simple playbook: they attack and destabilize the judiciary, the media and the educational system, three of the core pillars of society. They claim to be above the law, arrest judges, ignore and then abolish laws meant to protect democracy. They intimidate, censor and shut down news outlets. They demonize teachers and student activists, paint universities as hotbeds of leftist culture wars and gain control over curricula.
The result is called, in German, “Gleichschaltung,” meaning there is no space left where one could legally and safely criticize the government. But before Gleichschaltung comes anticipatory obedience. Whether the motive is opportunism or the hope to protect many by sacrificing a few, the result, invariably, is the erosion of democracy.
A good part of the world is moving rapidly in this direction, the U.S. included. It is high time to turn the tide.
As a historian of modern Europe, I know that appeasement has never stopped fascism. Fascists have no interest in meeting in the middle. Every concession made moves them closer to power.
Yet appeasement is the overwhelming response chosen by both the mainstream media and university administrations. It has not slowed down anything but the collapse of the values we are supposedly committed to.
Columbia’s decision to cave to blackmail — by agreeing, among other things, to hand over to the government information about disciplinary actions against student visa holders — did not end attacks on academic freedom. Instead, it paved the way for the University of California, Berkeley, to voluntarily hand over names of students, faculty and staff accused of Title VI violations before any inquiry has taken place. The University of Pennsylvania’s choice to exchange withheld funding for the protection of transgender students made it easier for Yale New Haven Hospital to quietly end gender-affirming care for people younger than nineteen.
There is no neutrality in this situation. Academics self-critically admitting to a lack of “viewpoint diversity” are not helping to save themselves or their institutions; they are helping to destroy them. Racism, censorship and anti-science bias are not viewpoints; they are key ingredients of fascism.
Most authoritarian regimes want their populace fearful and quiet. Fascism wants it fearful and angry. As a fundamentally modern movement, fascists use mass media to provoke mass anger that then can be turned into mass action. You could call them the original rage-baiters. The targets for this rage invariably are already marginalized groups within society — Jews, Muslims, transgender people, immigrants. They are framed as mortal threats to the very survival of the nation. They are accused of having disproportionate influence over the media, the law and education.
When DEI is considered racist identity politics but white supremacy is not, we have conceded territory to the extreme right that we should be defending with everything we have. The more fascist moves are rationalized by their opponents as “playing politics the right way,” the more the limits of what is possible are pushed towards violence.
There are small but hopeful signs of a turning tide, from Harvard to the University of California.
Yale should add its weight to this effort. Defending everyone’s right to speak truth to power without fear of persecution should be the common ground we stand on — as it was 55 years ago when Yale found itself at the center of an equally tense political moment — the New Haven Black Panther trials.
The trials stemmed from the May 1969 killing of Alex Rackley, a 19-year-old Black Panther suspected of being an informant. Nine members of the Black Panther Party, including national chairman Bobby Seale and founder of the New Haven chapter Ericka Huggins, were indicted for their alleged involvement in Rackley’s murder. The trials became a national flashpoint and brought thousands of demonstrators to New Haven in May 1970 to protest political repression and the systemic targeting of the Panthers by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.
Yale students and many faculty supported the local organizers of the May Day protest. However what sets May 1970 sharply apart from our current moment is the response of the university administration: it agreed to open Yale to thousands of rally participants, many of whom were housed in college dorms, which also organized childcare, staged teach-ins, and provided food.
Driving this rare show of solidarity with the New Haven community was Yale’s Black Student Alliance, but the administration’s stand was another decisive factor: rather than calling in police and closing its gates as Harvard had done a few weeks earlier, Yale chose the opposite approach. Then president Kingman Brewster acknowledged the concerns of the rally organizers and their supporters: “I am appalled and ashamed that things should have to come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”
A majority of students and faculty supported Brewster’s decision to engage with rather than suppress the protests, but many alumni and US vice president Spiro Agnew sharply criticized him. Nonetheless, while he was a proponent of institutional neutrality – the belief that universities should largely stay silent on political matters – in this moment of national crisis, Brewster chose to affirm Yale’s responsibility to its students, the New Haven community and society as whole. “On the fundamental matter of the fact and feeling of justice in our own community,” Brewster wrote, “Yale cannot be neutral.”
The situation we find ourselves in today poses a threat to the survival of our democracy that is as serious, if not more so. The US government kidnaps people because they are poor and brown or Black, sends the national guard to Black-led cities, criminalizes dissent, and forces the whitewashing of history – these are fundamental matters of justice and as much Yale’s concern as they were in 1970. University administrations are wrong in thinking that making “reasonable” concessions to a movement that is not reasonable will slow down its radicalization. What we see instead is the opposite: the willingness to concede to unreasonable demands lowers the bar for what is considered acceptable.
Speaking out is becoming more costly by the day and there are many reasons to remain silent. But we should not kid ourselves that this silence equals neutrality. I was born and raised in Germany. I’ve never forgotten something I read as a high school student: as soon as the Nazis gained power in January 1933, many schools started to expel Jewish students. There was no mandate yet to do so, but it was in keeping with the spirit of the times. It was being on the safe side.
This kind of anticipatory obedience was made possible by those who chose to remain silent, to let it happen while reassuring one another and the public that it surely wouldn’t get worse, that the new system would collapse by itself, that the best one could do was to keep one’s head down and stay quiet. With the luxury of hindsight, we should know that it is not the new moral order that is destroyed by this strategy; it is our own.
FATIMA EL-TAYEB is a professor of Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with Yale University. She can be reached at fatima.el-tayeb@yale.edu. An earlier version of this piece appeared in the Yale Daily News