The Last Graduate Students?

In the first months of 2025, I hit a writing block. A PhD student, I was drafting my dissertation and trying to finish my program. And I was doing both in the shadow of higher education’s disorienting centrality in a year’s worth of upheaval in the United States: crackdown on dissent, deepened assault on fundamental principles of academic freedom and critical thought of a kind with decades of austerity and culture war, though on a sweeping scale with catastrophic ramifications for the sector and beyond it. Planning a life was coming to feel impossible, or silly; writing a dissertation more impossible, and much, much sillier. I wanted to make my work responsible to the present but didn’t know how.

Some version of this question has followed me since I moved to Durham, North Carolina, in the summer of 2020 to begin graduate school under conditions no matriculating student could have imagined just months prior. I’d made the decision to enroll in early March; by August, it was months into the lockdowns that defined the early COVID-19 pandemic, at whose peak in the US thousands of people were dying each day. Seminars would be held virtually, on a platform called Zoom, and the only campus spaces open for gathering were a smattering of rooms tucked up and away in otherwise empty buildings that the university required students to march into weekly—to unmask, swab nostrils, test for virus, remask, and leave. Those first months utterly clashed with any dream of community on campus. And with the exception of the genuinely buoying efforts of a handful of elder graduate students, this first period of graduate school was overwhelmed by the sense of going through the motions: wondering how the other faces in the Zoom panels were grappling with the scale of what was happening; questioning how they found the energy for complex, informed thinking, let alone giving voice to it when they unmuted their microphones.

That was my first experience of three developments that have marked the last five years and been registered within the US as crises of higher education: COVID; the genocide in Gaza and upswell of domestic opposition to it; and the consolidation of an authoritarian regime openly hostile to academics, their expertise, and education in general. At these junctures, ambient frustrations stemming from the actual, ongoing polycrisis of the US university system have been stoked and funneled into a phantasmatic panic over “the campus,” as Samuel Catlin put it during 2024’s Palestine solidarity demonstrations.¹ COVID shock doctrine, and not long after, cuts and restructuring at institutions like West Virginia University, were symptoms of an illness, in this case, already chronic for decades.² Public universities had already been brought to their knees by decades of neoliberal social policy, their capacity to function as once avowed essentially decimated. The very idea of university education as a keystone of egalitarian opportunity, or multiracial pluralism, was being shed to a chorus of privatization and tech parasitism, funding cuts, tuition spikes, and life-hobbling student debt.³

It was 15 years ago in “The End of Educated Democracy” that Wendy Brown wrote: “At no previous time in history … has capitalism so bluntly revealed its vulnerabilities, coarseness, inability to steer itself, and, above all, capacity to damage widely valued institutions.”⁴ Hindsight shows even that canary call was made from a collapsing coal mine.

By 2025, familiar architects of the public university’s dismantling, together with a rash of newer, somehow more odious faces, exploit the symbol of “the campus” to excite pervasive anti-intellectualism to a frenzy and manufacture consent for autocracy. Anyone with an internet connection knows these campus crises have been fodder for years of headlines.

Still, it can be easy to overlook how those headlines relate to a real set of conditions on the ground. I began writing this as a record of what it felt like to be a student then, as collective attachments to values—long recognized as fraying, with the knell of the next scapegoat, or horrifying spectacle—face the final chopping block: public good, responsibility to others, democracy itself.

The portrait being painted is a bewildering one, as if the very promises universities have been less able to keep, owing to decades of strangling austerity and corporate parasitism, must be brought to the stake and made an example of: the promises of collective gathering, creativity, human flourishing—let them burn! That the possibility of such a switch being flipped has been looming in decades of deteriorating working conditions for educators, and attacks on intellectuals and “theory,” still doesn’t prepare one to feel like one of the last graduate students.

Spring 2024

A sniper on the roof of the campus union at Indiana University, with his rifle trained on teenagers. An Atlanta officer tackling an Emory University economics professor onto concrete, when she tried to intervene on behalf of a student, on whose back three other officers were kneeling while a fourth handcuffed her. Hooded right-wing counter-protesters rushing peaceful students at UCLA on a Tuesday evening, shooting fireworks into them; and then, before dawn the next day, LAPD officers descending upon those same students, handcuffing them, and removing them via a prison bus. Such images are burned into the brains of anyone who cares about education, the values of protest and academic freedom, or simply the lives and futures of students.

The genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza—and eruption of the Palestine solidarity movement on college campuses in spring 2024—exposed the gulf between the typical US university’s educational core, on the one side, and corporate management structure, on the other. Suppression was swift and forceful, as Andy Hines captured when he wrote that the ruling coalition in the US had become aligned “on the idea that prestige within the university system ought to incorporate” a willingness to discipline students into compliance to secure future investment and prestige.⁵

When Columbia University brought the hammer down on its own students on April 18, it became clear that the attempt to quash them would fail. Encampment tents cropped up on campus greens across the country, and then the globe. An eruption of state-sanctioned violence followed as leaders at countless institutions opened their gates for unaccountable police officers.

The pace had accelerated by March 2025, when the federal government withheld $400 million in grants from Columbia, singling it out for its alleged failure to combat antisemitism, a dog whistle for stamping out opposition to Israeli atrocities. Columbia’s administration did not stand its ground and instead, again, acquiesced, pledging to support investigations of students involved in Palestine solidarity work. On March 9, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student and organizer, was disappeared by ICE acting on State Department orders to deport him, though he is a green-card-holding permanent resident. On March 10, the gutted Department of Education announced further investigations at 60 more universities under the same pretenses and threat to withhold funding, and on March 13, Columbia expelled Grant Miner, the president of its graduate student union. Acting President Claire Shipman was drowned out with boos and chants of “Free Mahmoud” at the college graduation ceremony in May. Columbia quickly became an emblem for shameful capitulation. Other universities followed suit by signing agreements with the Trump administration that, in essence, sold off intramural oversight.

Familiar architects of the public university’s dismantling exploit the symbol of “the campus” to excite pervasive anti-intellectualism to a frenzy and manufacture consent for autocracy.

The third crisis has congealed around this rising tide of authoritarianism. By the end of June 2025, the assault appeared total. Funds earmarked for higher education were being weaponized as a cudgel for the ruling faction to implement its political program and establish its mandate, unfurling into outposts once thought impenetrable. Abductions of international students and interference with visas emerged as companion tactics to bring universities to heel and obstruct their functions.

The siege is ubiquitous, the barrage is endless, and writing that attempts to capture what’s happening tends to traffic in series of lists, deeper analysis deferred to some longed-for future moment of reprieve. My own sampling of headlines from the last year will be a reminder of everything else that has transpired by the time this essay is published: sweeping restrictions on National Institutes of Health research funding, which will decimate scientific communities for generations to come; an executive order that attempts to define transgender people out of existence and $100 million withdrawn from the University of Maine system immediately after Maine’s governor rebukes it; the NEH and NEA unceremoniously gutted with a sadism from the Reagan coalition’s most twisted dreams.

As I began typing this list, I received an email from my own institution informing me that withheld federal dollars will “slow the rate of university expenditures,” and I wondered if support for the final year of my program could be pulled at a moment’s notice. The sense that it is somewhat silly to try to address myself to the present crept back in, given how rapidly the situation is developing and what looms on the horizon for everyone.

---

“The full-scale war on the institutions of American higher education has kicked into its blitzkrieg phase … ” insists Peter Coviello. “Meanwhile, we in the battered and bruised humanities suddenly find ourselves shoulder to shoulder with a lot of new-convert comrades. Friends one and all: welcome.”⁶

The pretense of private universities as bastions insulated from political vicissitudes no longer holds, as they become ideal names for stirring fascist passions and confront threats that public universities have for the last half century. But the publics, too, remain in the line of fire, and their capacity to survive on the other side of the siege is far less certain. Regional universities, working-class colleges, and minority-serving institutions that are already resource starved will be forced to bear ever greater, more impossible burdens. Though it has been feeling like the end times for a long time, the end is nowhere in sight.

Mahmoud Khalil was freed on June 21, 2025, after 104 days of detention, and while other abducted students have been released, many remain with threatened, uncertain status. Some of the most egregious executive actions were temporarily stalled in the courts, but the Trump v. CASA decision dramatically curtailed judiciary guardrails. The budget reconciliation bill signed into law on July 4, 2025, curbed student loan programs and repayment relief, which will also reap untold damage and further limit quality education access to the ultra-rich. All this is still shocking, even when you’ve been warned about the “crisis in the humanities,” itself a product of entrenched disdain for the existence of values that have nothing to do with the market.

In Dark Academia (2021), the labor sociologist Peter Fleming describes scholars’ internalization of campus crisis as an infernal conversion: “the academic calling is dismantled brick by brick. Slowly the miasma gets under the skin. And because scholars are trained to study … phenomenon closely, they begin to study that too … with dark intensity.”⁷ For a kind of person accustomed to finding sustenance in thinking, or the fantasy of its volitional force, the idea that identifying and deeply understanding the causes of one’s vocational frustrations might not help one in the long run, personally or vocationally, can be a hard pill to swallow.

For that precise reason, however, critics don’t stop trying to understand what is happening to their lives; they don’t stop trying to rescue themselves and their most foundational attachments. And they certainly don’t stop writing about it. The writers I’ve been referencing throughout this essay, speaking about the crises of higher education and the conditions its students and workers are facing every day, are among the evidence. Unable to secure stability by simply understanding the reasons for their vocational frustrations, critics strive for better conditions—see the ongoing upswell of organized labor among academics and journalists—and they write about what is unfolding around them, powerfully, creatively, and in ways that affirm the value of their work as humanists and educators. That writing may not be able to meet the political anger or optimism that first motivated it, but that could be mobilizing, and simply sustaining, in its own way.

My own block gave way as I wrote this essay, because part of making one’s work responsible to the present entails recognizing its value as work. Scholars will continue writing about what is happening, they will defend humanistic values and critical thought, and their persistence despite all the forces that continue to be mobilized against them is evidence enough that those are not things that can be killed. The work scholars are doing now will nevertheless be a record of how they lived with an explosion of crisis narratives or simply with the feeling this time could really mark the end of something.