Consolidating Control: Recent Republican Anti-Democratic Strategies in Higher Education

Higher education in America has always fallen short of its democratic ideal, but there is a new force standing between the real and the ideal in the 2020s: intentional, internal interference from the modern-day Republican Party. The greatest challenge of our day—the GOP's all-out campaign to engineer election results, occupy the White House, hold the legislature, and control the courts—now has copious manifestations in higher education. This thesis examines just three sites of either past or potential Republican-fueled anti-democratic activity on college campuses: (1) college student voter suppression at Spelman College, (2) academic freedom issues at UChicago being dragged into the culture wars, and (3) a model of non-profit civic education at Occidental College that could be easily hijacked for partisan ends. Alongside each case study, this thesis offers solution-oriented strategies to guard against further anti-democratic activity in higher education.