As college leaders paintings to make offers with the Trump management, many school presidents are at a moral crossroads. At the one hand, they will have to do all they may be able to to revive investment for important analysis. At the different, they possibility ceding to the calls for of a president with perspectives that don’t align with their missions.
As the autumn semester starts, instructional directors may glance to literature for steerage. Latin The us’s wealthy archive of fiction over the last century options this predicament in a large number of tales about dwelling below dictatorships.
Amongst many others, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, Colombian author and journalist Gabriel García Márquez and Argentine creator Luisa Valenzuela have mined the area’s turbulent political historical past to discover how authoritarian rulers bend institutional leaders to their will by way of cultivating worry.
Courses from the bookshelves
In those works, some threats are extra openly coercive than others.
Vargas Llosa’s “The Feast of the Goat” main points how Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo reportedly fed insubordinate underlings to voracious crocodiles, a picture that, for me, has echoes in Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz. In García Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” an illiterate strongman takes over all establishments to such an excessive that “él solo era el gobierno” – he by myself used to be the federal government.
But to me, the best threat that Latin American literature foretells for upper schooling is the insidious method capitulation to authoritarians adjustments each people and establishments.
That is the topic of “The Censors,” a 1976 quick tale by way of Valenzuela. Again then, all however 4 Latin American nations have been ruled by way of authoritarian regimes.
The principle persona in Valenzuela’s tale is a mean Joe – aptly named Juan – who writes a letter to his liked Mariana, now dwelling in Paris. Quickly after he mails the letter, Juan is beset by way of worry that regardless of its harmless sentiments, his message might be construed by way of government as subversive. He worries that secret army forces will fly to Paris and kidnap Mariana from her rental. (Masked males forcing other people into unmarked cars is a commonplace sight in dictatorships, then and now.)
Juan comes to a decision he will have to “sabotage the machinery, throw sand in its gears.” So he turns into a censor for the regime in hopes of intercepting his personal letter as it really works its method during the painfully sluggish Put up Place of work Censorship Department.
College leaders, just like Juan, start with the most efficient of intentions. They to start with collaborate with the federal government’s calls for as a result of they would like to offer protection to the college’s project.
Journalist Silvia Lemus, left, gifts an award to Argentine author Luisa Valenzuela on the Guadalajara World E-book Truthful on Dec. 1, 2019.
Leonardo Alvarez Hernandez/Getty Pictures
However as soon as the concessions are made, issues start to trade.
In “The Censors,” Juan discovers he has a knack for redacting questionable letters. Assigned to a department that tests correspondence for explosives, he watches as a co-worker’s proper hand will get blown off. But when a colleague tries to prepare an indication advocating for more secure running prerequisites, Juan experiences him to the government and is rewarded with a swift promotion.
Juan justifies his opportunism as a one-off slightly than a non-public transformation: “Una vez no crea hábito” – “One time doesn’t create a habit” – he reassures himself as he leaves his boss’s place of job.
As he reaches the absolute best echelons of the censorship authority, Juan’s sense of objective blurs past popularity. He now considers flagging subversive letters and condemning their authors to be “a truly patriotic task, both self-sacrificing and uplifting.”
At this actual second, Juan encounters his personal letter to Mariana. “Naturally,” the narrator proclaims acidly, “he censored it without regret.” Within the closing traces of the tale, the narrator finds that Juan used to be performed tomorrow.
Juan, Valenzuela concludes with devastating irony, is “one more victim of devotion to his work.”
Universities within the crosshairs
In his zeal to capitulate, Juan offers himself a demise blow, and I will’t assist however wonder whether universities are heading down the similar perilous trail.
In an professional remark, Brown College famous on July 30, 2025, that it’s going to “comply with the Trump administration’s vision” on admissions practices. Likewise, Columbia College has agreed to direct governmental oversight of its Heart East research division, whilst the College of Pennsylvania will not permit trans girls on feminine sports activities groups.
On the College of Virginia, the place I’m an affiliate professor of Spanish, President James E. Ryan resigned below intense drive from the Division of Justice in June 2025.
For many of his seven years in management, Ryan got down to make the college extra various and open doorways for first-generation and low- to middle-income scholars.
College of Virginia President James E. Ryan resigned in June 2025.
Win McNamee/Getty Pictures
By the point of his resignation, alternatively, the college had already yielded to calls for from a conservative alumni workforce to de-emphasize the historical past of enslavement all over campus excursions. And it had followed “institutional neutrality,” which means it might not take a place on, say, mass hunger in Gaza.
In March 2025, the college’s governing board voted to dismantle the college’s variety, fairness and inclusion place of job on the behest of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
3 months later, Ryan used to be long gone.
Extra to come back?
Because the White Space continues its drive marketing campaign, instructional directors would possibly face extra investment threats at some point. I fear that if humanities techniques are minimize – the College of Chicago simply paused admissions to doctoral techniques in literature, philosophy, the humanities and languages, mentioning “this moment of uncertainty” – scholars will lose the chance to be offered to works like “The Censors.”
Columbia maintains it has safeguarded instructional freedom by way of creating a deal. However as Wesleyan College President Michael Roth advised PBS, the instructional neighborhood stays skeptical concerning the sturdiness of those agreements.
In all probability some directors imagine, as Juan did, that “one time doesn’t create a habit.”
However upper schooling, I worry, is being swallowed by way of its leaders’ “devotion to their work.”
