U.S. Universities Are Under Attack. The World Should Seize the Opportunity

As America Criminalizes Free Speech on Campus, Global Institutions Can Attract Students and Scholars Fleeing Repression

Academic Freedom in America is Dead, Dead, Dead!

I always believe in finding opportunities in a crisis. We must be able to pause, remain calm, and remember what Bob Marley said, “When one door closes, many others will open.” I remember my university days. We learned more because we were free to be critical of everything and to design and implement solutions for all the problems we saw around us. Universities should be fortresses of free thought. It’s how we improve society. But the U.S. is silencing dissent or anything that seems not to support a white-washed, white-believing, oligarchic agenda. U.S. Universities are under attack, and as one professor pointed out to me, many are giving in and sacrificing their students and professors.

Students protesting genocide in Gaza at Columbia and Tufts face arrests, suspensions, and blacklists. Foreign students who are party to the protests are removed from school, detained, and deported. Some have even abandoned their school program and left the country to avoid detention. Many others fear the same fate. I can only imagine how stressful it must be to try to study in the U.S. now, when your every move, speech, writing, and even who you associate with, whether in real life or on social media, are under surveillance. Faculty who challenge a corrupted power and protect students (which is literally what they should be doing as faculty—their job!) are labeled “un-American.”

University administration is sacrificing defiant students to save their school and their jobs. They are providing a list of protesting students to the government. The naïve and GOP voters invested in the chaos call this politics, “cleaning house”, reform, and eliminating wokeness (aka eliminating brown people from any and all spaces except servitude). It’s not too hard to see the unmistakable truth—the erasure of intellectual freedom. You have detention, deportation, funding cuts, and political threats forcing universities to serve authoritarian agendas. They are no longer learning institutions, but many are becoming puppets of autocracy. That type of education is not worth it, even if you were being paid to attend.

Key Example:

• At Columbia University, over 120 students were arrested for peaceful protests against the Gaza invasion and bombings. Administrators cited “safety concerns,” yet deployed riot police against their own students to dismantle encampments. I would be very angry if I were in such a school now, on a student loan, indebting myself, and being treated like a criminal.
• The University of Florida eliminated all DEI programs, stripping support for marginalized students under the pretext of “neutrality” — a policy I call white supremacy in the open. I wrote my thoughts on the DEI attack here ICYMI.

DEI: The New Target of Authoritarianism

Republican-led states like Florida and North Carolina are dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, branding them as “woke indoctrination.” At the University of Florida, DEI offices were shuttered overnight, stripping support systems from Black, LGBTQIA+, and First Nations students. North Carolina’s public universities now enforce “institutional neutrality,” a euphemism for whitewashing history and censoring discussions about systemic racism.

America has never been neutral about anything. By definition, whiteness and racism are designed not to be neutral. Historically, removing Native people from their lands is not neutral. But they know this. It’s all a faux behavior designed to bolster and protect all aspects of white supremacy. These moves align with legislation like Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, which criminalizes teaching concepts that might cause “discomfort” to white people about America’s racist past.

I call bullshit! Where is the neutrality when we are making laws to make white people (not black or brown people) feel “comfortable? I deserve to feel “comfortable” too. People like me, brown and black people, deserve to feel comfortable and safe! Where is the neutrality for that? Their whiteness racism is “divisive,” but they know this already. That’s the hardly-hidden intent. The message is clear: conformity, not critical inquiry, is the new mandate.

This isn’t reform or progression, or even civil behavior. It’s censorship. It’s back to a primitive era of backward behavior. Forget facts, science, and objectivity. Roll in the fantasy and foolishness of whiteness and bring the whole system down.

America’s Brain Drain Is Your Gain

Global Opportunity:

The country is setting fire to free speech and universities or students that it deems have defied it. A nation that jails students for protesting genocide, fires professors for teaching about enslavement, and bans books about LGBTQIA+ or trans lives isn’t preparing for a stable, peaceful, or progressive future—it’s regressing into a theocratic and savage fascism. This intellectual suicide has sparked a quiet exodus. Black scholars, Palestinian American researchers, and queer educators are asking: Why stay? Countries like France are already capitalizing on this brain drain, recruiting Jewish studies experts and Middle East historians fleeing U.S. campuses. Germany, Brazil, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean could follow suit by offering visas, housing, and academic asylum to displaced talent.

Build Intellectual Asylum—Now

For decades, Global South nations struggled to retain homegrown intellectuals lured by U.S. opportunities. When America has a shortage, the country poaches the Global South for teachers, nurses, professors, and, through the universities, some of the brightest minds as students. During WWII, intellectuals escaped German Nazi regime to the safety of America and made the nation a far better place to live with their knowledge. Now we may see a reverse. A country that turns against knowledge and replaces it with ideology and people who believe in fiction tends to chase its most intelligent people.

Universities in Nigeria, Jamaica, Indonesia, and beyond can leverage this moment to build world-class programs in climate science, AI ethics, gender studies, STEM, and more. Imagine Lagos hosting a think tank led by Black and Brown feminist scholars expelled from Florida, or São Paulo fast-tracking visas for Palestinian engineers and physicists barred from U.S. labs. This isn’t poaching talent—it’s rewriting the colonial script. Development through education and providing mutually beneficial opportunities for a knowledge base that is being exiled.

Case Study: South Africa’s University of Cape Town is part of the “Scholars at Risk” network that can help place U.S.-based academics. Check their website at the link provided if you consider yourself a scholar at risk.

A Global Academic Revolution

The path forward is clear. Roll out red carpets for professors and students fleeing repression in the U.S., as well as other countries where academics are not protected. Design credit-transfer agreements with government-targeted U.S. institutions. Fund scholarships tied to local development goals. Build campuses where protest isn’t a crime and DEI isn’t a dirty word. Prepare an environment where everyone is “comforted”, not just white people, or puppet faculty and students. The U.S. may be content to torch its own future, but the rest of the world needn’t watch passively. See the American crisis as an opportunity. The time to act is now—before the next generation of thinkers is lost to fear, censorship, and despair.

Sources

1. Columbia Student Arrests – The Guardian
2. Florida’s DEI Ban – NPR
3. Scholars at Risk Network – SAR
4. South Africa’s Scholars at Risk Program – Times Higher Education