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Abstract: Higher education is under assault in the United States. Tracking authoritarian movements across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it. Reflecting on the past academic year, this essay charts the increasingly brazen right-wing efforts in the U.S. Congress and the States to erode academic freedom and university independence–two pillars of our democratic republic. We also identify a bi-partisan source of higher education’s present precarity: the neoliberal policies that precipitated the privatization and corporatization of universities across the country.