Illiberal Reactions to Higher Education

Abstract

Higher education has expanded at astonishing rates around the world. We seek to understand the oppositions that periodically arise, which may produce enrollment declines and/or imposition of political controls. The post-1945 growth of higher education was – to a greater extent than is often recognized – propelled by the liberal, and later neoliberal, international order. Oppositions arise from illiberal alternatives, which also may organize globally. The recent weakening of the global liberal order, associated with growing populism and nationalism, creates conditions for a new wave of oppositions. We hypothesize that attacks on higher education emerge in countries less integrated into world society and in countries linked to international structures that support illiberal alternatives. We examine cross-national data on higher education over the period 1960–2017. Enrollments and funding are higher in societies more tightly linked to world society and lower in countries tied to illiberal international organizations. Analyses of enrollments in various fields, constraints on academic freedom, and terrorist attacks on education institutions show similar pattern. Finally, we observe heterogeneity in the forms of illiberal opposition: countries that suppress academic freedom generally are less likely to restrict enrollments.

Individual Empowerment, Institutional Confidence, and Vaccination Rates in Cross-National Perspective, 1995 to 2018

“…At the same time, neoliberal doctrines that emerged in the 1970s and assumed global hegemony in the 1990s severely compromised the legitimacy of the state and liberal institutions. Even science falls prey to growing attacks (Frank and Meyer 2020; Schofer et al 2022).…”

“…As a cultural ideology, neoliberalism comprises two related elements: anti-elitism and individual empowerment (Jepperson and Meyer 2021). Neoliberalism engenders declining trust in elites and institutions—government elites and state institutions, to be sure, but also science and scientists (Gauchat 2012; Kozlowski 2022; Mooney 2005; Schofer et al 2022), journalists and the media (Kenny 2020; Moffitt 2016; Mounk 2018), and multilateral institutions (see Lake et al 2021 and the accompanying papers). For Giddens (1990), declining trust in expert systems is a constituent feature of late modernity.…”

“…In other cases, liberal institutions may be co-opted to serve illiberal ends. For instance, while illiberal attacks on universities have increased markedly in recent years (Schofer et al 2022), other groups have adapted the university model to their own political or cultural purposes (e.g., Liberty University). Likewise, many illiberal interest groups participate actively in the United Nations, a bastion of the liberal international order, in their bid to challenge the system internally (Bob 2012;Buss and Herman 2003;Cupać and Ebetürk 2021).…”

“…We argue that deeper social and cultural transformations, global in scope, help explain the sudden and widespread decline in vaccination rates worldwide. Contemporary resistance to vaccination forms part of a much larger backlash against the postwar liberal order, one that includes restrictions on civil society organizations (Bromley, Schofer, and Longhofer 2020;Glasius, Schalk, and De Lange 2020), legal and popular reactions against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people (Hadler and Symons 2018;Roberts 2019;Velasco 2018), declines in women's status (Lerch, Schofer, et al 2022), and attacks on science and universities (Frank and Meyer 2020;Schofer, Lerch, and Meyer 2022). These trends reflect an even broader set of illiberal developments: the retrenchment of democracy worldwide (Diamond 2015), the global resurgence of populism (Norris and Inglehart 2019), and mounting distrust of liberal institutions (Kavanagh et al 2020;Lake, Martin, and Risse 2021).…”

Global Determinants of Education Reform, 1960 to 2017

“…Challenges have arisen on multiple other fronts (for a discussion of nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism reactions, see, e.g., Bonikowski 2017). A growing wave of empirical studies document falling levels of democracy worldwide (Fukuyama 2012;Kurlantzick 2013), increased restrictions on civil society around the world (Bromley et al 2020;Dupuy et al 2016), growing attacks on higher education (Schofer, Lerch, and Meyer 2019), and the rise of repressive laws against sexual minorities (Hadler and Symons 2018).…”