For more than a decade, Americans have been told that polarization, mistrust, and civic fragmentation are organic byproducts of cultural change. But the scale, speed, and persistence of the damage suggest something more deliberate: a sustained poisoning of the American mind—one that exploits structural weaknesses in education, media, technology, and governance.
This poisoning is not the work of a single actor. It is the cumulative result of foreign influence campaigns, profit-driven global technology platforms, and domestic institutions that have failed to defend democratic literacy. Higher education, once imagined as a firewall against mass manipulation, has proven porous, compromised, and in many cases complicit.
Foreign Influence as Cognitive Warfare
Chinese and Russian influence operations differ in style but converge in purpose: weakening American social cohesion, degrading trust in institutions, and normalizing cynicism.
Russian efforts have focused on chaos. Through state-linked troll farms, bot networks, and disinformation pipelines, Russian actors have amplified racial grievances, cultural resentments, and political extremism on all sides. The objective has not been persuasion so much as exhaustion—flooding the information environment until truth becomes indistinguishable from propaganda and democratic participation feels futile.
Chinese influence efforts, by contrast, have emphasized discipline and control. Through economic leverage, academic partnerships, Confucius Institutes, and pressure campaigns targeting universities and publishers, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to shape what can be discussed, researched, or criticized. While less visibly inflammatory than Russian disinformation, these efforts quietly narrow the boundaries of acceptable discourse—especially within elite institutions that prize funding and global prestige.
Both strategies treat cognition itself as a battlefield. The target is not simply voters, but students, scholars, journalists, and future professionals—anyone involved in shaping narratives or knowledge.
The Role of Global Tech Elites
Foreign influence campaigns would be far less effective without the infrastructure built and defended by global technology elites.
Social media platforms were designed to monetize attention, not to preserve truth. Algorithms reward outrage, tribalism, and repetition. Misinformation is not an accidental byproduct of these systems; it is a predictable outcome of engagement-driven design.
What is often overlooked is how insulated tech leadership has become from the social consequences of its products. Executives who speak fluently about “free expression” and “innovation” operate within gated communities, private schools, and curated information environments. The cognitive pollution affecting the public rarely touches them directly.
At the same time, these platforms have shown inconsistent willingness to confront state-sponsored manipulation. Decisions about content moderation, data access, and platform governance are routinely shaped by geopolitical calculations and market access—particularly when China is involved. The result is a global information ecosystem optimized for profit, vulnerable to manipulation, and hostile to slow, evidence-based thinking.
Higher Education’s Failure of Defense
Universities were supposed to be inoculation centers against mass manipulation. Instead, they have become transmission vectors.
Decades of underfunding public higher education, adjunctification of faculty labor, and administrative bloat have weakened academic independence. Meanwhile, elite institutions increasingly depend on foreign students, donors, and partnerships, creating subtle but powerful incentives to avoid controversy.
Critical thinking is often reduced to branding rather than practice. Students are encouraged to adopt identities and positions rather than interrogate evidence. Media literacy programs, where they exist at all, are thin, optional, and disconnected from the realities of algorithmic persuasion.
Even worse, student debt has turned higher education into a high-stakes compliance system. Indebted graduates are less likely to challenge employers, institutions, or dominant narratives. Economic precarity becomes cognitive precarity.
A Domestic Willingness to Be Deceived
Foreign adversaries and tech elites exploit vulnerabilities, but they did not create them alone. The poisoning of the American mind has been enabled by domestic actors who benefit from confusion, resentment, and distraction.
Political consultants, partisan media ecosystems, and privatized education interests profit from outrage and ignorance. Complex structural problems—healthcare, housing, inequality, climate—are reframed as cultural battles, keeping attention away from systems of power and extraction.
In this environment, truth becomes negotiable, expertise becomes suspect, and education becomes a consumer product rather than a public good.
The Long-Term Consequences
The danger is not simply misinformation. It is the erosion of shared reality.
A society that cannot agree on basic facts cannot govern itself. A population trained to react rather than reflect is easy to manipulate—by foreign states, domestic demagogues, or algorithmic systems optimized for profit.
Higher education sits at the center of this crisis. If universities cannot reclaim their role as defenders of intellectual rigor and civic responsibility, they risk becoming credential factories feeding a cognitively compromised workforce.
Toward Intellectual Self-Defense
Reversing the poisoning of the American mind will require more than fact-checking or content moderation. It demands structural change:
A recommitment to public higher education as a democratic institution, not a revenue stream.
Robust media literacy embedded across curricula, not siloed in electives.
Transparency and accountability for technology platforms that shape public cognition.
Protection of academic freedom from both foreign pressure and domestic political interference.
Relief from student debt as a prerequisite for intellectual independence.
Cognitive sovereignty is national security. Without it, no amount of military or economic power can sustain a democratic society.
The question is not whether the American mind has been poisoned. The question is whether the institutions charged with educating it are willing to admit their failure—and do the hard work of recovery.
Sources
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, reports on Russian active measures
National Intelligence Council, foreign influence assessments
Department of Justice investigations into Confucius Institutes
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Renée DiResta et al., research on computational propaganda
Higher Education Inquirer reporting on student debt, academic labor, and institutional capture
“There is a perception that diplomats lead a comfortable life throwing dinner parties in fancy homes. Let me tell you about some of my reality. It has not always been easy. I have moved 13 times and served in seven different countries, five of them hardship posts. My first tour was Mogadishu, Somalia.”
So said Marie Yovanovitch, a veteran U.S. diplomat who was the first witness in a congressional inquiry held to find out whether President Donald Trump abused his power as president by extorting a foreign president into investigating a Trump rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, in the race for the 2020 U.S. elections.
The congressional hearings, only the third in the nation’s 243-year history to target a president for impeachment, have dominated the U.S. political debate for weeks and will continue making headlines for months both in the United States and elsewhere.
It is a case that highlights, among other issues, widespread perceptions that diplomats have cushy jobs and play a lesser role in implementing foreign policy than soldiers.
Yovanovitch, who was recalled from her post as ambassador to Ukraine for reasons that are at the heart of the impeachment proceedings, went on to tell a hushed meeting chamber: “The State Department as a tool of foreign policy often doesn’t get the same attention and respect as the military might of the Pentagon does, but we are — as they say — ‘the pointy end of the spear.’”
“If we lose our edge, the U.S. will inevitably have to use other tools, even more often than it does today. And those other tools are blunter, more expensive and not universally effective.”
Exhibit A is Cuba.
Those tools include military force and economic sanctions, the latter being Trump’s favourite method to try to bend antagonistic governments to his will. The limits of military force are particularly obvious in Afghanistan and Iraq, where American troops have been waging war for 18 and 15 years, respectively.
Exhibit A for the limits of economic sanctions is Cuba, which withstood an American embargo for more than 50 years. More recently, “maximum pressure” to cripple Iran’s economy has yet to persuade the government there to drop its nuclear ambitions, curb its quest for regional supremacy or curb support for groups hostile to the United States and Israel.
The impeachment hearings have brought into focus the interplay between diplomacy and military strength.
According to a parade of witnesses, all of whom except one were professional diplomats or career civil servants, Trump made the release of $391 million in military aid to Ukraine contingent on its president, Volodymyr Zelenski, launching an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter, who worked for a Ukrainian energy company while his father was the point person for Ukraine in the administration of ex-President Barack Obama.
For the past five years, Ukraine has been fighting Russian-backed separatists in a low-intensity war in the east of the country. It needs the American aid, including anti-tank missiles, to keep control of its territory.
According to administration witnesses in the impeachment hearings, Trump had ordered a freeze on the aid — which had been allocated by Congress — as a lever, thus using public funds for personal advantage.
Big military spender
The main conduit for the request for an investigation was President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who is a private citizen, rather than the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the State Department or the National Security Council.
Giuliani saw Yovanovitch as an obstacle for the aid-for-investigations deal and he spread false rumours about her being a Trump critic. The end result: she received a middle-of-the-night call telling her to leave her post and take the next flight to Washington.
Ivanovitch’s testimony at the impeachment hearing echoed complaints, voiced mostly in private, from foreign service diplomats almost as soon as Trump assumed office. Now, she said, there is “a crisis in the State Department as the policy process is visibly unraveling, leadership vacancies go unfilled and senior and mid-level officers ponder an uncertain future and head for the doors.”
By word and by tweet, Trump has made clear his disdain for the institutions of state, from the State Department to the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Justice Department. This year, for the third year in a row, the administration is cutting the budget for the State Department while increasing the Pentagon’s.
The United States already spends as much on its military as the next eight countries combined. It tops the list of global arms sellers. U.S. armed forces outnumber the diplomatic service and its major foreign aid agency by a ratio of around 180:1, vastly higher than other Western democracies.
Beyond military solutions
Curiously, the imbalance between the size of the U.S. armed forces and the civilian agencies that make up “soft power” — chiefly the foreign service and the United States Agency for International Development — have long been a matter of concern for military leaders.
Often used in academic discourse, the term “soft power” was coined in the 1980s by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye. It embraces diplomacy and assistance to foreign countries as well as cultural and exchange programs meant to improve the image of the United States. Hard power, in contrast, includes guns, tanks, war planes and soldiers.
Last year, budget cuts for diplomacy and development so alarmed the military that 151 retired generals and admirals wrote to congressional leaders to plead for greater emphasis on civilian foreign policy and security agencies. “Today’s crises do not have military solutions alone,” the officers’ letter said.
It quoted an observation by General James Mattis, the Trump administration’s first Defense secretary: “America’s got two fundamental powers, the power of intimidation and the power of inspiration.”
Soon after taking office in January 2017, Trump promised “one of the greatest military buildups in military history” and put forward an “America First budget. It is not a soft power budget, it is a hard power budget.”
There were not then, nor are there now, provisions to boost the power of inspiration.
THREE QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
1. In what ways are economic sanctions limited?
2. What is “soft power”?
3. How might you use a form of diplomacy to bring them together two people angry at each other?
The Western Hemisphere is entering a new and dangerous phase of global rivalry—one shaped by old imperial habits, new economic pressures, and resurgent great-power maneuvering. From Washington to Beijing to Caracas, political leaders are escalating tensions over Venezuela’s future, reviving a familiar script in which Latin America becomes the proving ground for foreign powers and a pressure cooker for working-class people who have no say in the geopolitical games unfolding above them.
What looks like a confrontation over oil, governance, or regional security is better understood as a collision of neoliberal extraction, colonial legacies, and competing empires, each claiming moral authority while pursuing strategic advantage. In this moment, it is essential to remember what history shows again and again: ordinary people—soldiers, students, workers—pay the highest price for elite ambitions.
A Long Shadow: U.S. Intervention in Latin America Since the 1890s
The U.S. role in Latin America cannot be separated from its imperial foundations. Over more than a century, Washington has repeatedly intervened—militarily, covertly, and financially—to shape political outcomes in the region:
1898–1934: The “Banana Wars.” U.S. Marines were deployed throughout the Caribbean and Central America to secure plantations, protect U.S. investors, and maintain favorable governments in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Honduras.
1954: Guatemala. The CIA overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz after he challenged United Fruit Company landholdings.
1961: Bay of Pigs Invasion. A failed U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.
1973: Chile. U.S. support for the coup against Salvador Allende ushered in the Pinochet dictatorship and a laboratory for neoliberal economics.
1980s: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala. Funding death squads, supporting Contra rebels, and fueling civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands.
1989: Panama. A full-scale U.S. invasion to remove Manuel Noriega, with civilian casualties in the thousands.
2002: Venezuela. U.S. officials supported the brief coup against Hugo Chávez.
2020s: Economic warfare continues. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and support for factions opposing Nicolás Maduro all sustain a long-running pressure campaign.
This is not ancient history. It is the operating system of U.S. hemispheric influence.
China’s Expanding Soft Power and Strategic Positioning
While the U.S. escalates military signaling toward Venezuela, China is expanding soft power, economic influence, and political relationships throughout Latin America—including with Venezuela. Beijing’s strategy is centered not on direct military confrontation but on long-term infrastructure, trade, and diplomatic partnerships designed to reduce U.S. dominance.
Recent statements from Beijing underscore this shift. Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly backed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, describing China and Venezuela as “intimate friends” as the U.S. intensifies military pressure in the region. China’s role extends beyond rhetoric: loans, technology transfers, energy investments, and political support form a web of influence that counters U.S. objectives.
This is the new terrain: the U.S. leaning on sanctions and military posture, China leveraging soft power and strategic alliances.
Russia as a Third Power in the Hemisphere
Any honest assessment of the current geopolitical climate must include Russia, which has expanded its presence in Latin America as part of its broader campaign to counter U.S. power globally. Moscow has supplied Venezuela with military equipment, intelligence support, cybersecurity assistance, and diplomatic cover at the United Nations. It has strengthened ties with Nicaragua, Cuba, and other governments willing to challenge U.S. regional dominance.
Russia’s involvement is not ideological; it is strategic. It seeks to weaken Washington’s influence, create leverage in distant theaters, and embed itself in the Western Hemisphere without deploying large-scale military forces. Where China builds infrastructure and invests billions, Russia plays the spoiler: complicating U.S. policy, reinforcing embattled leaders when convenient, and offering an alternative to nations seeking to escape U.S. hegemony.
The result is a crowded geopolitical arena in which Venezuela becomes not just a domestic crisis but a theater for multipolar contention, shaped by three major powers with very different tools and interests.
Neoliberalism, Colonialism, and the Repeating Pattern
Viewed in historical context, today’s crisis is simply the newest iteration of a long-standing pattern:
Colonial logics justify intervention. The idea that Washington must “manage” or “stabilize” Latin America recycles the paternalism of earlier eras.
Neoliberal extraction drives policy. Control over energy resources, access to markets, and geopolitical leverage matter more than democracy or human well-being.
Foreign powers treat the region as a chessboard. The U.S., China, and Russia approach Latin America not as sovereign equals but as terrain for influence.
People—not governments—bear the cost. Sanctions devastate civilians. Military escalations breed proxy conflicts. Migration pressures rise. And working-class youth are recruited to fight battles that are not theirs.
This is why today’s developments must be understood as part of a wider global system that treats nations in the Global South as resources to exploit and battlegrounds to dominate.
A Warning for Those Considering Enlistment or ROTC
In moments like this, the pressure on young people—especially working-class youth—to join the military increases. Recruiters frame conflict as opportunity: tuition money, job training, patriotism, adventure, or stability. But the truth is starker and more political.
Muhammad Ali’s stance during the Vietnam War remains profoundly relevant today. He refused the draft, famously stating that the Vietnamese “never called me [a slur]” and declaring that he would not fight a war of conquest against people who had done him no harm.
The same logic applies to today’s geopolitical brinkmanship. Young Americans are asked to risk their lives in conflicts that protect corporate interests, reinforce imperial ambitions, and escalate global tensions. Venezuelan workers, Chinese workers, Russian workers, and U.S. workers are not enemies. They are casualties-in-waiting of decisions made by governments and corporations insulated from the consequences of their actions.
Before enlisting—or joining ROTC—young people deserve to understand the historical cycle they may be pulled into. Wars in Latin America, proxy or direct, have never served the interests of everyday people. They serve empires.
Sources
Firstpost. “Xi Backs Maduro, Calls China and Venezuela ‘Intimate Friends’ as Trump Steps Up Military Pressure.”
Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change
U.S. Congressional Research Service reports on U.S. policy in Venezuela and China-Latin America relations
UN Human Rights Council documentation on sanctions and civilian impact
The reaction to Alla’s interview contrasted with the pro-Ukraine demonstrations that met Russian soprano Anna Netrebko when she appeared on the opening night of Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Royal Opera House in London earlier this month.
In contrast, the appearance of Netrebko, who has said in an understated way that she is against the war, sparked a debate in the British press about whether politics and art should be mixed.
But Alla was clear. She said she felt she had to tell the truth for the sake of her children.
Repercussions of speaking out
Her interview, lasting more than three-and-a-half hours, ranged over many topics, from her musical memories to her five husbands. But it was when she grasped the nettle of politics — and how politics affected her family — that it became gripping.
Alla is married to the Russian-Israeli stand-up comedian Maxim Galkin, who at 49 is 27 years her junior (their 12-year-old twins Liza and Harry were born via a surrogate mother).
Straight-talking and irreverent, Galkin shared a stage with Ukraine’s comedian-turned-president Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s iconic New Year’s Eve show in 2013. He opposed the war with Ukraine, when it broke out in 2022.
After Galkin spoke out, Alla said she was summoned to the Kremlin for a “talk” with Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration. The conversation seemed to be friendly enough. But a few days later, Galkin was declared a “foreign agent”.
Alla said that when their children went to school after that, they were mocked as the children of spies and told that their father was a foreign agent and their parents were enemies. The family packed up and left — first to Israel and then to Cyprus. They spend their summer holidays in Latvia.
“They call me a traitor,” Alla said in the interview. “And what exactly did I betray? I have said that I could leave my homeland, which I love very much, only in one case — if my homeland betrayed me. And it has betrayed me.”
Strong words from a woman who has been a celebrity in Russia for decades.
A performer for the people
Classically trained to conduct choirs, Alla shot to stardom in 1975 when she won the grand prix at the Golden Orpheus international song contest in Bulgaria with the song “Arlekino” (Harlequin).
Banned by the Communist Party from collaborating with ABBA, she became huge in her own right — as big as Tina Turner, say, in the United States — and always sang for the people. In 1986, for example, she appeared in a special concert for the firemen who risked their lives in the aftermath of a devastating explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine, when it was part of the Soviet Union.
Because Alla never projected herself as a diva but rather as “the woman who sings”, she won the hearts of millions and was loved by everyone, from housewives to mafia bosses. In the 1990s, there was even a petition calling for her to stand as Russian president, which she modestly laughed off.
Russian journalist and writer Mikhail Zygar, who now lives in Berlin, wrote that Alla’s statements against Putin are important because she had never been a political activist.
“Millions of Russians always considered her ‘one of their own’ — because through her songs she expressed the pain and suffering of ordinary Russians,” he said. “The fact that she has stopped keeping silent and spoken out openly against the war is a very important signal. She has always been the voice of millions of mute, wordless, unhappy Russians. Now they will think the way she put it — that’s how her interview is being described on social media.”
Perhaps the biggest indication of the strength of the interview was the speed and viciousness with which the Russian authorities reacted.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called it a “bazaar of hypocrisy” while parliamentary deputy Vitaly Milonov said: “I believe that in her interview, Pugacheva said enough not only to warrant the status of ‘foreign agent’ but also to fall under several criminal articles, including the justification of terrorism.” The pro-Kremlin ruler of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, went so far as to call Alla an “enemy of the people”.
Questions to consider:
1. In what ways could it be “patriotic” to criticise your own country?
2. Should art and politics be mixed?
3. Can you think of other artists or musicians who have risked their popularity by standing out against their government’s policies?
One of the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a vast reconfiguring of Russia’s academic and intellectual life. Universities, thought of as a potential hotbed of opposition since the White Ribbon movement of 2011, came under intense control and its personnel placed under even greater scrutiny.
Many faculty fled. Connections with international partners in the West were severed. And then to top it off, the Russian government announced that it would abandon the three degree bachelor’s, master’s doctoral system introduced when the country joined the Bologna Process 20 years earlier.
All this has combined to create what some have called a slow motion collapse in Russian higher education. But to understand what’s been happening in Russian Universities since February 2022, you really need to go back to the dawn of the Putin era in January 2000, and understand how ideological control of institutions has come to rest squarely inside the Kremlin.
Joining the podcast today is Dmitry Dubrovsky. He’s a scholar at the Institute for International Studies at Charles University in Prague, where he has taught ever since being designated as a foreign agent by the Putin regime in early 2022. And he writes primarily about the politics of academic freedom and civil society in Russia.
He’s with us today to talk about this slow motion collapse, the internal governance of Russian institutions, and how the country might one day be put back on a track to integration with European academia. Over to Dmitry.
The World of Higher Education Podcast Episode 4.5 | Undoing Bologna: Russia’s Conservative Turn in Higher Education with Dmitry Dubrovsky
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Dmitry, I want to take us back to the year 2000. Vladimir Putin is the new president of the Russian Federation. What was the state of the higher education sector at the time, and how did Putin approach it? How did he view higher education as an instrument of state policy?
Dmitry Dubrovsky (DD): Well, the legacy of the 1990s left Putin with a serious challenge. The system faced underfunding and fragmentation. At the same time, scholars were eager to join the European system. There had been attempts in the 1990s, but the biggest problems were the lack of financing and the absence of international mechanisms or tools to fully integrate into the European system of higher education and science.
Putin saw higher education and science, first and foremost, as a tool to join Europe—to become part of the European family and a prominent member of the global market of ideas. That’s why Russia joined the Bologna Process in 2003 and actively pushed for internationalization.
AU: So in that sense, it’s probably not that different from most other countries in the former socialist bloc, like Poland or Romania—the idea that internationalization would bring about an improvement in higher education. Is that about right?
DD: It is right, with one very important difference. At first it might seem small, but it became a very serious issue. In higher education and science, everywhere in the world, there are always people who believe that their own system is highly advanced—at the very top.
The problem in the late Soviet Union and the Russian Federation was that a substantial number of people survived the collapse of the USSR still believing that Russian and Soviet science was the most advanced in the world. In some cases, for certain disciplines, that might have been true. But in most areas—especially the humanities and social sciences—it wasn’t.
By the late 1990s, there was a substantial group of people who were deeply disappointed in the results of democratic reforms and in what democracy had brought, both to the country overall and to higher education and science in particular.
AU: Okay, now, Putin was president until 2008, and then he switched places for four years with Prime Minister Medvedev. He returns to power as president in 2012. And as you say, it’s a different Putin—a much more authoritarian Putin. How did his approach to higher education change? If we think of “Putin 1.0” around 2000, what does “Putin 2.0” look like after 2012? How does he try to exert greater control over the system?
DD: It’s important to note that before Putin came back to power, there was a very significant period of reform in Russian higher education. Especially around 2007–2008, reforms were focused on improving quality and gaining international recognition. This was the era of what we call “managerialist modernization.”
The idea was to select flagship universities that would drive the rest of the system forward into a brighter future.
AU: And eventually that becomes the 5–100 Project.
DD: Yes, the 5–100, or “5–2020” project. The goal was that at least five Russian universities should appear in the world rankings. It was a very interesting period because it marked a serious transformation in the sociocultural landscape of Russian higher education.
For the first time, the so-called “effective managers” entered the system. From the mid-2000s onward, higher education began receiving serious investment from the state, making it appealing to a new managerial class and their approaches. Internationalization advanced, but it went hand in hand with growing managerial control over universities.
Even before Putin returned in 2012, higher education was already being used as a tool to demonstrate the effectiveness of Russian policy and as an instrument of soft power, particularly through supporting Russian universities in former Soviet countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan.
When Putin came back, however, the situation changed dramatically. What I call the “conservative shift” began—not just in politics broadly, but within higher education and science.
AU: And some of that has to do with the broader crackdown at the time. I remember there was a lot of pressure on foreign organizations, which made international cooperation more difficult. For example, the government targeted the Open Society Foundations, George Soros’ network that had been active in supporting the social sciences and humanities. There was also a crackdown on things like gender studies and spaces for LGBTQ students.
Masha Gessen wrote about this in her book The Future is History. Why did that happen at that moment? What was it about Putin that made him say, “This is an area I want to control and push in a more conservative direction”?
DD: First and foremost, we have to remember the protests of 2011–2012. That was the time of the so-called “white ribbon” movement. It came very close to a revolution, though in the end it never happened—we failed. I was a member of that movement myself.
The significant participation of scholars and students in those protests put higher education under special scrutiny from the security services and the political apparatus. They believed that control over the education system could restore their legitimacy and symbolic power in society.
And remember, these leaders were, in many ways, Soviet people. They genuinely believed, “This is how the Soviet Union ruled—through control, especially in education and ideology.” And to some extent, that was true. The Soviet Union consolidated its power in part through universities.
Putin believed the same could work for him—that restoring control over higher education would allow him to strengthen his government, which had been undermined by the events of 2011–2012.
AU: We’ve been talking about the relationship between institutions and the government, but the government also changed the way institutions were run a couple of times, right? How has the exercise of power within Russian universities changed? I’m pretty sure there’s been a change in the process of selecting university leaders. How has that affected Putin’s ability to control universities?
DD: The specificity of Russian universities in the 1990s was that there was an enormous amount of democracy. There was absolutely no money in the system, so it was extremely poor—but at the same time, it was a kind of “poor democracy.” There were numerous elections, and the whole system of university governance was very active in self-governance.
There were real political struggles. People fought for the position of dean, they competed for the position of rector. Even department chairs could be elected. Almost every administrative position within a Russian university could be filled through an election.
When Putin consolidated power, especially during the managerial reforms, there was pressure—particularly on the flagship universities in the 5–100 Project—to amend their charters and replace elections with government appointments.
The official explanation was simple: if the state was providing so much budget support, then the state should also assign the rector rather than leave it to an election.
Even now, some Russian rectors are still technically elected. But in Putin’s Russia, an “election” is not an election in the normal sense. The ministry proposes the candidate, people watch the process, and it ends up looking very much like the way Putin himself is “elected.”
AU: Dmitry, in the early days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, one thing that surprised a lot of people in the West—it seemed to come out of the blue—was a letter in support of the invasion signed by several hundred university rectors. Why did they do that? I mean, presumably they were ordered to by Putin, but why did Putin think that would be legitimizing?
DD: In post-Soviet societies there is a very high level of trust in higher education and science. The leaders of higher education were expected to officially support the so-called “hard decision” about the war.
But it’s important to remember—something some of our colleagues abroad seem to forget—that most of these rectors were never democratically chosen. They do not represent the voices of Russian scholars, lecturers, or faculty members. They mostly represent the vision of the presidential administration. Their role was to collect names for a list of support and then sign this shameful document.
And of course, this didn’t start in 2022. Under the “foreign agent” law of 2015, the government began a long anti-Western campaign—searching for “un-American” groups of influence, cutting connections with international centers, and declaring institutions like Central European University or Bard College in New York to be “undesirable organizations.”
This created a climate of fear and anxiety among the leaders of higher education. And there was direct blackmail: if you decided not to sign, that was your choice—but you had to think about your faculty, your team, your colleagues. They would probably be fired soon.
AU: What changed on university campuses after the invasion? Obviously, if I were in Putin’s position, I’d be worried about student unrest. So what happened in terms of surveillance on campus, and how did faculty react? I mean, you were a faculty member at the time, and you’re one of many who left fairly quickly after the invasion. How big a brain drain was there?
DD: Not as big as you might think, for different reasons. Academics can’t move as easily as other people—they need to be sure they’ll have a way to continue working, and for many there simply wasn’t anywhere to settle quickly.
My personal story was different. By coincidence, I had an invitation for a fellowship. Long story short, I relocated quickly from my home city of St. Petersburg to Prague. But for many others, leaving was far more difficult.
As for institutional surveillance—yes, it was there. It looks like Russia had been preparing for war for about two years beforehand. Around two years before the invasion, they started introducing special vice rectors responsible for “youth” whose actual role was to monitor and control loyalty.
At the same time, they established special departments within Russian universities with very long titles—things like “Promoting Civic Consciousness, Preventing Extremism, and Managing Interethnic Relations.” In practice, these were institutions embedded in higher education to control and discipline students and scholars.
Their real work was searching social networks, looking for so-called “betrayal” behaviors among students and faculty, and reporting them to the security services and police. Today, almost every region of the Russian Federation has one of these departments to oversee and report on improper behavior.
AU: After that rectors’ letter, Russia was suspended from the Bologna Process, and in retaliation Putin announced a return to the pre-Bologna system. So, getting rid of the bachelor’s, master’s, PhD framework and bringing back the old Russian model with the second PhD. How is this process unfolding? How easy is it to undo Bologna?
DD: That’s a good question. I don’t think Russia is really going to undo Bologna. They’re not planning a full reversal or trying to recreate the Soviet path.
From one side, there’s direct pressure on the Ministry of Higher Education and its bureaucrats to dramatically change a system that has been built over twenty years. But this system cannot simply be reversed. Legally, if students have already been admitted to a particular program, the state can’t just stop it midstream. At the very least, it would take four or five years to change. It can’t happen overnight.
Secondly, to me this feels like an exercise in mimicry or emulation from the old Soviet-style bureaucratic circles in higher education. I follow what’s happening closely—the statements from the Minister of Education—and they always try to explain what will be different, but they can’t. They have no clear idea what they’re trying to create.
Officially, they say, “This is not Bologna anymore. It has proved to be ineffective. Now we will collect the best achievements of the Russian system of education.” But what does that even mean? It’s absolutely impossible to understand. From my perspective, they are trying more to sabotage the process than to implement something substantial.
AU: Looking ahead, what do you think a post-Putin higher education system in Russia might look like? Is there a path back into the European higher education space, and what would it take to undo the damage that’s been done since 2012?
DD: That’s a good question. Currently, I would describe the situation as a “fourth deglobalization.” We’ve essentially gone back to the conditions of 2003, before joining the Bologna Process.
That doesn’t mean there’s no capacity—many faculty members still working in Russia earned their degrees in Western institutions. There is still substantial expertise within the system. But the fate of Russian higher education is very difficult to predict because it is so closely tied to the political fate of the Russian Federation itself.
If sanctions were to decrease and the war were to end, perhaps things could return to something like “normalcy.” But even that is debatable—what would “normalcy” mean in this context? At best, it might look like the Cold War era, perhaps similar to the late 1970s.
There are already serious restrictions in place: academic sanctions, boycotts, and bans on cooperation imposed by many institutions and countries. These severely limit Russia’s ability to develop visible academic exchanges with Europe. Instead, Russia is turning elsewhere—towards an “alternative globalization,” aligning more closely with countries like China, Iran, South Africa, and Brazil within the BRICS framework, [a political and economic bloc of major emerging economies that positions itself as an alternative to Western-led alliances].
AU: Dmitry, thank you so much for being with us today. It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, our listeners, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments on this week’s episode, or suggestions for future ones, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected].
Join us next week when our guest will be Joshua Travis Brown from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. He’ll be joining us to talk about his fascinating new book from Oxford University Press, Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission-Driven to Margin Obsessed. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says religion was one topic his family never mentioned at the dinner table.
That could be because he’s from the Jewish minority, or because the overwhelming Orthodox Christian majority was split into different branches.
Ukraine’s Orthodox have gradually become more Ukrainian, to the detriment of a once-powerful pro-Russian Church, and the trend has sped up now that Kyiv and Moscow are at war.
The conflict between the pro-Kyiv Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) and the pro-Moscow Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) gets lost in the international coverage of the drama on the battlefield.
But with about 80% of Ukrainians identifying as Orthodox Christians, even if probably less than half attend church regularly, this split between the two Churches seeps into politics.
Christmas in Kyiv
The religious conflict crept into the news last month when the pro-Kyiv Church authorized all Ukrainian parishes to celebrate Christmas on December 25 if they wished, rather than the traditional Orthodox date of January 7.
The symbolism of allowing Christmas to be celebrated on the date used in the West was not lost on Ukrainian believers.
The roots to this clash go back to the communist period. While Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, it was under the umbrella of the Russian Orthodox Church.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church continued to operate in the newly sovereign Ukraine, but proclaimed its loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate.
Ukrainian patriots objected and said they deserved their own Church. Their rival Orthodox Church of Ukraine was created in 1992, soon after Ukraine’s independence. It was recognized as autocephalous (independent) by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul — the highest authority in Orthodox Christianity — in 2019.
The politics of praying in Ukrainian
The two Churches have the same theology, liturgy and even architecture as the Moscow Church. But the Kyiv Church prays in Ukrainian rather than Church Slavonic and declares allegiance to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul instead of Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill.
Originally much larger, the Moscow Church saw parishes defecting to its rival, especially after the war began. Under this pressure, the Ukrainian branch declared its independence from Russia in May, condemned the invasion and refused to recognize Patriarch Kirill in its liturgies.
It’s unclear now which Church is larger. But the head of the Kyiv Patriarchate, Metropolitan Epiphinius, told Religion News Service in May: “Every day, Ukrainians are gradually coming to understand which Church is truly Ukrainian and which Church is Russian.”
The Moscow Patriarchate tried to shield off Russian-occupied Crimea by creating its own metropolitanate (archdiocese) there in June. The Kyiv Church refused to recognize this.
When Putin annexed four Ukrainian territories in September — even though he did not completely control them — he tried to justify the move in religious terms, calling it a “glorious spiritual choice.”
Sermons, spies and the Security Service
But Kyiv increasingly saw the pro-Moscow Church as a fifth column, or spies of Putin. In October, the acting head of Ukraine’s Security Service revealed it had found 33 suspected Russian agents among the Moscow Church’s clergy in Ukraine.
Some preached pro-Russian sermons, Kyiv said, some had anti-Ukrainian literature and some were army chaplains who passed on information about Ukrainian artillery batteries to Russian agents.
That’s when the Kyiv Church authorized all Ukrainian parishes to celebrate Christmas on December 25 if they wished. On December 1, Zelensky upped the ante by calling for an official ban on all activities of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Church in Ukraine. Parliament was asked to draft a suitable law, which may be difficult given the provision in the Ukrainian constitution of freedom of religion.
In late December, Ukraine refused to renew the Moscow Church’s lease on the Cathedral of the Dormition at Kyiv’s Monastery of the Caves, traditionally the center of Ukrainian Orthodoxy.
On January 7, Metropolitan Epiphanius, head of the pro-Kyiv Church, celebrated the traditional Christmas there to show he was the new man in charge now.
And in its latest turn to faith, Russia called for a 36-hour truce to mark the traditional Christmas on January 7. Kyiv and its western allies rejected this as a cynical ploy, and both sides continued shelling each other as if nothing had happened.
The battlefield struggle is still the main story, both in its ultimate importance and in the David-and-Goliath story that readers understand. The religious rivalry will always be secondary.
But these pinpricks on the faith front add up to a new phase in the growth of local nationalism, which helps buoy Ukrainian morale. In hoping to defeat a country he thought would easily give in, Putin has done more than anyone to forge a united and defiant Ukrainian nation.
Three questions to consider:
1. Why do politicians often appeal to religion during a war?
2. Do mainstream journalists make religious angles clear in a conflict?
3. When do separate small events add up to a noteworthy trend?
Universities have long been bastions of freedom, democracy, and truth. Today, they find themselves operating in a nation where these ideals are increasingly under siege—not by foreign adversaries, but by policies emanating from the highest levels of government.
The Department of War: A Symbolic Shift with Real Consequences
On September 5, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order rebranding the U.S. Department of Defense as the “Department of War,” aiming to restore the title used prior to 1949. This move, while symbolic, reflects a broader ideological shift towards an aggressive, militaristic stance. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, appointed in January 2025, has been a vocal proponent of this change, asserting that the new name conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve.
Critics argue that this rebranding prioritizes optics over substance, with concerns over potential high costs and effectiveness. Pentagon officials acknowledged the financial burden but have yet to release precise cost estimates.
Economic Instability and Global Alienation
Domestically, the administration’s economic policies have led to rising unemployment, inflation, and slowing job growth. A recent weak jobs report showing a gain of only 22,000 jobs prompted Democrats to criticize President Trump’s handling of the economy, linking these issues to his tariffs and other controversial actions.
Internationally, Trump’s policies have strained relationships with key allies. Countries like Japan, South Korea, and several European nations have expressed concerns over U.S. trade practices and foreign policy decisions, leading to a reevaluation of longstanding alliances.
Authoritarian Alliances and Human Rights Concerns
The administration’s foreign policy has also seen a shift towards aligning with authoritarian leaders. Leaked draft reports indicate plans to eliminate or downplay accounts of prisoner abuse, corruption, and LGBTQ+ discrimination in countries like El Salvador, Israel, and Russia, raising concerns about the U.S.’s commitment to human rights.
Immigration Policies and Humanitarian Impact
On the domestic front, the administration’s immigration policies have led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of individuals, including those with Temporary Protected Status. Critics argue that these actions undermine the nation’s moral authority and have a devastating impact on affected families.
The Role of Higher Education
In this turbulent landscape, higher education institutions find themselves at a crossroads. Universities are traditionally places where freedom, democracy, and truth are upheld and taught. However, as the nation drifts away from these principles, universities are increasingly tasked with defending them.
Faculty and students are stepping into roles as defenders of civic values, ethical scholarship, and truth-telling. But without robust support from government and society, universities alone cannot sustain the principles of freedom and democracy that once underpinned the nation.
The current moment is a test: Can American higher education continue to serve as a bastion of truth and civic responsibility in an era where the country’s own policies increasingly contradict those ideals? Or will universities be compelled to adapt to a world where freedom, democracy, and truth are optional, not foundational?
Speaking on August 29, two days after an attack on the Ukrainian capital in which at least 16 people were killed, the British Council’s director for the country, Colm McGivern, laid bare the impact on the organisation’s offices in Kyiv.
Standing outside the ravaged offices, which were severely damaged after Russian forces fired two missiles at it, McGivern said that the building had been “absolutely devastated – it’s been practically obliterated”.
While extending condolences to the families of those who died during the “horrific attack”, McGivern was firm in his resolve that the British Council’s work in Ukraine would continue even as the war with Russia wages on.
“I’d like to tell everyone that the British Council’s resolve is still there,” he said. “We will be here in Ukraine, we’ve been here 30 years. We’ll continue our work.”
He pointed out that the organisation did not stop its work in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in 2022, and that this will not change. “To the contrary, we’re more determined than ever to make sure that cultural and educational links between the UK and Ukraine can thrive, not just survive,” he said.
He pledged that an upcoming British Council event in Lviv, located in the west of Ukraine, would take place this week as planned, as well as promising young Ukrainians that face-to-face learning would also resume in the coming days.”We will keep those promises. We will start those classes,” he stressed.
McGivern extended best wishes to a British Council colleague who had been injured on the evening of the attack, who he said was recovering in hospital. And he said his team had been overwhelmed by the support they had received from the international education community, as well as the Ukrainian first responders and emergency services who helped in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
There has been an outpouring of support for British Council colleagues in Ukraine by the international education community.
Our work will not stop now because of this horrific attack. To the contrary, we’re more determined than ever Colm McGivern, British Council
Gwen van der Helden, a professor of education reconstruction during/post war, crisis and conflict at the University of Warwick and a visiting professor at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, expressed her shock.
“The BC is hardly of military interest, not a danger to anyone, and the people working there do nothing than trying to contribute to the future of fellow citizens. It is utter codswallop to think that the BC is in any way a reasonable target. But then, so few of the targets that have been hit in this war have been,” she wrote on LinkedIn.
“Furious is how we should all feel at this point. Our colleagues in Kyiv (and yes I do think we should regard BC colleagues as exactly that), deserve better. Sending courage, strength and a large portion of defiance to our British Council colleagues.”
The British Council’s mission in Ukraine offers English language programs and other training or educational programs. In June, Russia made accusations that it was being used as a cover for British intelligence operations in Kyiv.
After the attack, British Council chief executive Scott McDonald confirmed that bombing in the city had damaged its offices.
“Our guard was injured and is shaken but stable. At the insistence of my amazing colleagues, we will continue operations in Ukraine today wherever possible,” he said.
Meanwhile, European leaders have condemned the strike, which saw 629 missiles and drones launched at the city.
President of the European Council, António Costa, confirmed that the British Council’s Ukrainian office “was damaged in this deliberate Russian strike”, while UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer hit out at Vladimir Putin – accusing him of “sabotaging peace”.
President Donald Trump calls himself a master of deals and a builder of wealth. But a closer look at his economic record shows otherwise. What passes as Trumpenomics is not a coherent strategy but a dangerous cocktail of trickle-down economics, tariffs, authoritarian force, and outright deception. The emperor struts confidently, yet his economic clothes are invisible.
Trickle-Down Economics with Tariffs
Trump’s policies leaned heavily on Arthur Laffer’s supply-side theories, promising that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy would lift all boats. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, showering disproportionate benefits on the top 1%. The Congressional Budget Office found that by 2025, households making under $30,000 would actually see tax increases, while millionaires reaped permanent benefits.
At the same time, Trump imposed tariffs on China and other trade partners—despite claiming to be a free-market champion. Tariffs raised consumer prices at home, effectively acting as a hidden tax on working families. The Federal Reserve estimated that U.S. consumers and businesses bore nearly the full cost of Trump’s tariffs, with average households paying hundreds of dollars more each year for basic goods.
Demanding Tributes from Other Nations
Trump approached international trade less as economic policy and more as a tribute system. Nations that purchased U.S. arms, invested in Trump-friendly industries, or flattered his ego received preferential treatment. Those who did not were threatened with tariffs, sanctions, or military abandonment. His decision to reduce funding to NATO while deepening ties with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE reflected this transactional worldview.
Altering Economic Data and Scapegoating the Poor
Trump consistently attempted to alter or spin economic data. When unemployment spiked during COVID-19, his administration pressured agencies to downplay the crisis. In some cases, career economists reported being silenced or reassigned for refusing to misrepresent figures.
When numbers could not be manipulated, scapegoats were manufactured. Trump blamed immigrants, people of color, and the poor for economic stagnation, while targeting Medicaid recipients and the homeless as symbols of “decay.” Instead of addressing structural problems, his rhetoric diverted public anger downward, away from billionaires and corporations.
Lie, Cheat, Steal
Lawsuits and corruption have always been central to Trump’s business empire, and they carried over into his economic governance. From funneling taxpayer money into Trump-owned properties to bending trade policy for donors, his approach blurred the line between public service and private gain. The New York Times documented that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017, even as he claimed to be a champion of the American worker.
Fourth Generation Warfare, AI, and Taiwan
Trump’s economic worldview also bleeds into Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW)—the mixing of political, economic, and psychological operations. His chaotic handling of AI development, threats over Taiwan, and erratic China policy destabilized global markets. Uncertainty became a feature, not a bug: allies and rivals alike never knew if Trump’s economic positions were bargaining tools, retaliations, or improvisations.
Authoritarianism at Home and Abroad
At home, Trumpenomics relied on force and intimidation. He threatened to deploy the National Guard against protesters, treating dissent as an economic threat to be neutralized. Abroad, he backed Netanyahu’s expansionist policies while cutting aid to Europe, effectively reshaping U.S. alliances around authoritarian partners willing to pay for loyalty.
Hostility Toward Higher Education
Trump also targeted higher education, cutting research funding, undermining student protections, and ridiculing universities as bastions of “elitism.” The move was both political and economic: by weakening critical institutions, he expanded the space for propaganda and disinformation to thrive.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Beneath the spectacle, Trumpenomics have left the US more unequal, more indebted, and more divided. The federal deficit ballooned by nearly $7.8 trillion during his first term—before COVID-19 relief spending. Inequality widened: by 2020, the richest 1% controlled more than 30% of the nation’s wealth, while median household income gains evaporated. Tariffs have raised costs, tax cuts hollowed out revenues, and corruption flourished.
Trump’s economy was not built on strength but on illusion. Like the emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, Trump strutted in garments only his loyalists claimed to see. For everyone else, the truth was painfully visible: the emperor had no clothes.
Sources
Congressional Budget Office, “The Distributional Effects of the 2017 Tax Cuts” (2018)
Federal Reserve Board, “Effects of Tariffs on U.S. Consumers” (2019)
The New York Times, “Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance” (Sept. 27, 2020)
David Cay Johnston, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (2018)
Joseph Stiglitz, “Trump’s Economic Nonsense,” Project Syndicate (2019)
Alaska’s higher-ed story is a preview of the national “College Meltdown,” only starker. The University of Alaska (UA) system—Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Southeast—has endured a decade of enrollment erosion and austerity politics, punctuated by a 2019 budget crisis that forced regents to declare financial exigency and consider consolidations. The immediate trigger was a proposed $130+ million state cut, later converted into a three-year reduction compact; the long tail is a weakened public research engine in the very state where climate change is moving fastest.
In 2025 the vise tightened again from Washington. UA’s president told regents that more than $50 million in grants had been frozen or canceled under the Trump administration, warning of staff cuts and program impacts if funds failed to materialize. Those freezes were part of a broader chill: federal agencies stepping back from research that even references climate change, just as the Arctic’s transformation accelerates.
This is not an abstract loss. Alaska is the frontline laboratory of global warming: thawing permafrost, vanishing sea ice, collapsing coastal bluffs. UA’s scientists have documented these trends in successive “Alaska’s Changing Environment” assessments; the 2024 update underscores rapid, measurable shifts across temperature, sea ice, wildfire, hydrology, and ecosystems. When the main public research institution loses people and projects, the United States loses the data and know-how it needs to respond.
Climate denial collides with national security
The contradiction at the heart of federal policy is glaring. On one hand, the Trump administration has proposed opening vast swaths of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve to drilling and reversing environmental protections—signaling a bet on fossil expansion in a region already warming at double the global rate. On the other hand, the same administration is curtailing climate and Arctic science, even as military planners warn that the Arctic is becoming a contested theater. You can’t secure what you refuse to measure.
The security stakes are real. Russia has spent the past decade refurbishing Soviet-era bases, deploying ice-capable vessels, and leveraging energy projects along the Northern Sea Route (NSR). China has declared itself a “near-Arctic” power and partnered with Moscow on patrols and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the U.S. remains short on icebreakers and Arctic domain awareness—even as traffic through high-latitude passages grows more plausible in low-ice summers. Analysts project that a meaningful share of global shipping could shift north by mid-century, and recent reporting shows the region is already a strategic flashpoint.
That makes UA’s expertise more than a local asset; it’s a pillar of U.S. national security. The University of Alaska Fairbanks hosts the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience (CASR) and degree pathways that fuse climate, emergency management, and security studies—exactly the interdisciplinary skill set defense, Coast Guard, and civil authorities will need as sea lanes open and storms, fires, and thaw-related failures multiply. Undercut these programs, and you undercut America’s ability to see, interpret, and act in the Arctic.
The costs of disinvestment
The 2019 state-level cuts did immediate damage—hiring freezes, program reviews, and fears of accreditation changes—but their larger effect was to signal instability to students, faculty, and funders. Austerity invites a spiral: as programs and personnel disappear, grant competitiveness slips; as labs lose continuity, agencies look elsewhere; as uncertainty grows, students choose out-of-state options. UA leadership has tried to reverse course—prioritizing enrollment, retention, and workforce alignment in recent budgets—but it’s difficult to rebuild a research reputation once the pipeline of projects and people is disrupted.
The 2025 federal freezes amplify that spiral by hitting precisely the projects that matter most: those with “climate” in the title. Researchers report program cancellations and re-scoped solicitations across agencies. That kind of ideological filter doesn’t just reduce funding—it distorts the evidence base that communities, tribal governments, and emergency planners depend on for everything from permafrost-safe housing to coastal relocation plans. It also weakens U.S. credibility in Arctic diplomacy at a time when the Arctic Council is strained and cooperation with Russia is largely stalled.
Why this matters beyond Alaska
Think of UA as America’s northern early-warning system. Its glaciologists, sea-ice modelers, fire scientists, and social scientists collect the longitudinal datasets that turn anecdotes into policy-relevant knowledge. Lose continuity, and you lose the ability to detect regime shifts—abrupt ecosystem changes, cascading infrastructure failures from thaw, new navigation windows that alter shipping economics and risk. Those changes feed directly into maritime safety, domain awareness, and the rules-of-the-road that will govern the NSR and other passages.
Meanwhile, federal moves to expand Arctic drilling create additional operational burdens for emergency response and environmental monitoring—burdens that fall on the same universities being told to do more with less. Opening the door to long-lived oil projects while throttling climate and environmental research is a recipe for higher spill risk, poorer oversight, and costlier disasters.
A pragmatic way forward
Three steps could stabilize UA and, by extension, America’s Arctic posture:
Firewall climate science from political interference. Agencies should fund Arctic research on merit, not language policing. Reinstating paused grants and re-issuing climate-related solicitations would immediately restore capacity in labs and field stations.
Treat UA as critical national infrastructure. Just as the U.S. is racing to modernize radar and add icebreakers, it should invest in Arctic science and workforce pipelines at UA—scholarships tied to Coast Guard and NOAA service, ship time for sea-ice and fisheries research, and support for Indigenous knowledge partnerships that improve on-the-ground resilience.
Align energy decisions with security reality. Every new Arctic extraction project increases environmental and emergency-response exposure in a region where capacity is thin. If policymakers proceed, they owe UA and Alaska communities the monitoring, baseline studies, and response investments that only a healthy public research university can sustain.
The paradox of the College Meltdown is that it hits hardest where public knowledge is most needed. In the Lower 48, that might mean fewer nurses or teachers. In Alaska, it means flying blind in a rapidly changing theater where Russia and China are already maneuvering and where coastlines, sea ice, and permafrost are literally moving under our feet. The University of Alaska is not a nice-to-have. It is how the United States knows what is happening in the Arctic—and how it prepares for what’s next. Weakening it in the name of budget discipline or culture-war messaging is not just shortsighted. It’s a security risk.
Sources
University of Alaska Office of the President, FY2020 budget overview (state veto and reductions).
University of Alaska Public Affairs timeline (2019 exigency and consolidation actions).
Alaska Department of Administration, Dunleavy–UA three-year compact (2019).
Anchorage Daily News, “$50M in grants frozen under Trump administration” (May 28, 2025).
The Guardian, “Outcry as Trump withdraws support for research that mentions ‘climate’” (Feb. 21, 2025).
