The Far Right Wants You Stupid: The Attack on the University as a Project of Extreme Capital

There is a question I want to put on the table before anything else, because everything that follows depends on how we answer it. Why does the far right hate the university? Not the polite version of the question, the one that treats campus culture wars as a clash of values or a debate about free speech. The structural version. Why has the dismantling of tertiary education, the discrediting of academics, the slashing of public university budgets, and the manufactured panic about woke indoctrination become a core, repeating, well-funded feature of far-right politics across the world, from Florida to West Bengal to here in Aotearoa?

The answer I want to defend is simple to state and uncomfortable to sit with. The far right hates the university because the university is one of the last places where a person from a subaltern community can learn to name the structure that subordinates them. Critical thought is the threat. An unthinking, uncritical, atomized mass is the goal. And the project is funded, deliberately and at industrial scale, by the donor class whose extractive capacities depend on keeping that mass exactly where it is.

This is not a metaphor and it is not a feeling. It is documented. Let me walk through the record.

The architecture has a name

We tend to talk about the far right as if it were a mood, a wave of resentment that bubbles up from below. Some of it does move through resentment. But the resentment is cultivated, and the cultivation is structured. Isaac Kamola and Ralph Wilson have laid out the architecture with a clarity that makes the whole thing legible. Libertarian megadonors, Charles Koch foremost among them, have pushed market-fundamentalist ideas and policies into the center of political life, and they have succeeded not through scattered grievance but through a clear, deliberate strategy designed to produce policy at an industrial scale through a fully integrated political infrastructure (Kamola & Wilson, 2025, New Political Science 47(1), 74-99).

The strategy has a name. It is called the Structure of Social Change model, and it was formalized by the Koch strategist Richard Fink and pushed out through the entire Koch-funded operation. Here is the part that should stop you cold. Inside this model, the university is not a target of opportunity. It is the first stage of a supply chain. Universities produce the raw materials. Think tanks refine those raw materials into model legislation and elite consensus. Implementation groups push the finished product out to legislators and to the public. The pipeline runs from the seminar room to the statute book, and capital owns every link in it.

Fink did not hide the language. He spoke of the investment in intellectual raw materials, the exploration and production stage of the pipeline. The Vice President of the Charles Koch Foundation boasted that the network's academic work was of significant competitive advantage and a great investment over many years, with the product visible across 400 colleges and universities (DeSmog, 2019). Read those words as what they are. This is the vocabulary of extraction. Capital does not see knowledge as a commons that belongs to the people. It sees it as a feedstock to be mined, refined, and sold back to us as common sense.

And once you understand the university as a refinery, the dual movement of the far-right project comes into focus. Where the university can be captured, capital captures it, planting endowed chairs and centers and institutes that manufacture the ideology of the market and dress it in the authority of scholarship. Where the university resists, where it stubbornly remains a place of critical thought, capital moves to defund it, discredit it, and discipline the people inside it. The same actors who fund the friendly centers run the campaigns against the unfriendly faculty. It is one operation with two faces.

They told us what they were doing

The self-consciousness of this project is its most chilling feature, and it is the thread that the historian Ellen Schrecker follows back to its roots. The conservative movement against the university emerged precisely to reverse the openings of the 1960s, when campuses admitted new constituencies and new ideas. That campaign has been so effective that most people in the United States now see the nation's faculties as radical, elitist, and somehow alien to ordinary citizens (Schrecker, 2010, Thought & Action 26, 71-82).

Sit with that achievement for a moment. The faculty, the people whose job is to think carefully in public, have been reframed as enemies of the ordinary person. That reframing is not an accident of bad public relations. It is the product. Schrecker points to a former Reagan official who, in a 1989 speech at the Heritage Foundation, openly described the work as a counteroffensive on the last leftist redoubt, the college campus. They named the campus as a battlefield. They named themselves as the attacking force. We do not have to infer the intent. The intent is in the archive.

This is the communicative work I keep coming back to in my own scholarship, because it is communicative work above all. The slurs do the heavy lifting. Cultural Marxism. Woke indoctrination. The tenured radical. The indoctrination factory. Each of these is a device for severing the bond between the working person and the institution that might teach them to read their own conditions. The far right does not need the worker to hate the university for any particular reason. It needs the worker to distrust the very faculty of critical thought, so that when the analysis of structural violence arrives, it arrives already discredited, already marked as the language of a hostile elite.

Why capital needs you uncritical

Here is where I want to be most direct, because this is the heart of it. The attack on critical thinking is not anti-intellectualism for its own sake. It is the precondition for a particular kind of labour force. Capital needs an unthinking, ununionized, compliant mass that will toil under worsening conditions without demanding collective rights, while the institutions of collective organizing, the unions, the worker associations, the solidarities, are dismantled around them.

Henry Giroux names this formation with the precision it deserves. Since the 1980s, he argues, the discourses of neoliberalism and authoritarianism have merged, producing the echoes of a fascist past that has moved from the margins to the center of global politics. And in this conjuncture, what he calls neoliberal fascism has aggressively targeted higher education, attempting to eliminate every vestige of critical thinking, faculty power, historical consciousness, and critical knowledge (Giroux, 2023, Studia Krytyczne/Critical Studies 12, 65-74).

Read that list of targets again, slowly. Critical thinking. Faculty power. Historical consciousness. Critical knowledge. These are exactly the four capacities a person needs in order to recognize that their subordination is structural rather than personal, and to organize with others against it. Critical thinking lets you see the structure. Historical consciousness lets you see that it was made and can be unmade. Faculty power and critical knowledge are the institutional conditions under which those capacities get transmitted from one generation to the next. Strip all four, and you produce a population that experiences its own immiseration as individual failure, that turns its anger sideways onto migrants and minorities rather than upward onto capital, and that has lost the very tools it would need to do otherwise.

That is the mass extreme capital requires. The destruction of the union and the destruction of critical pedagogy are the same project, because both remove the infrastructure through which people learn to act collectively. When the far right comes for the curriculum that names settler-colonialism, or the seminar that names Hindutva, or the course that teaches the political economy of structural violence, it is not protecting children from bias. It is protecting capital from a workforce that can think.

The structure travels

None of this is a North American curiosity, and this is where the newest work in the field is most useful. Ichamati Mousamputri argues that the global resurgence of far-right politics has had a significant impact on higher education, and develops a research agenda for thinking about contemporary far-right attacks on the university through a geographical lens (Mousamputri, 2026, Human Geography 19(1), 187-200). This matters to my own location in a way I cannot leave unsaid. Mousamputri is a political geographer from Kolkata, my own city, whose doctoral work studies how Hindutva comes to the Indian campus, bringing nationalism, militarism, and violence to students who hold space for dissent.

The structure I have been describing travels, and it adapts to terrain. The Atlas Network seeds market-fundamentalist think tanks across the Global South, including the bureaucracy indices and free-market institutes that launder extreme capital as policy expertise. The Hindutva machine attacks Jawaharlal Nehru University and every campus where students gather to organize. And here in Aotearoa, the Free Speech Union-adjacent actors and the Hindutva-aligned networks run the same play against those of us who teach decolonial and anti-racist scholarship, down to the verified accounts that circulate the location of an anti-racism seminar so that the harassment can find its target. Different soil, same seed. The funding logic is continuous across all of it, because the donor class is, in the end, defending the same thing everywhere: its power to extract.

This is why I refuse the framing of these as local incidents. The harassment campaign that comes for a scholar in Palmerston North is structurally continuous with the campaign that comes for a student in New Delhi and the legislation that comes for a professor in Tallahassee. To treat each as a separate misfortune is to miss the architecture. The architecture is the point.

Follow the money, and hold the line

So what is to be done, and where does responsibility sit? Kamola gave the most useful practical instruction to university administrators years ago, and it has not aged a day. Follow the money (Kamola, 2019, AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom). When the outrage machine descends on a faculty member, when the coordinated pile-on arrives, when the verified accounts begin circulating the seminar location, the institution's first instinct is to treat the matter as a reputational problem and to quietly manage the academic out of the line of fire. That instinct is capitulation. It completes the donor class's work for free, and it does so while telling itself a story about neutrality and de-escalation.

The administrator who actually protects the faculty member has to begin from a different premise. The harassment is not organic public concern. It is funded infrastructure. Naming the funding, tracing the network, refusing the premise that this is a spontaneous expression of community feeling, is the first act of defence. An institution that will not do this is not neutral. It has chosen a side, and the side it has chosen is the one with the money.

I want to end where I began, with the university itself. The university, for all its compromises, its corporatization, its complicity with the very capital that now turns on it, remains one of the last institutions in which a voice infrastructure for the subaltern can be built and held. A place where a young person from a working family, a Dalit student, a Māori student, a migrant's child, can encounter the analytic tools to read the structure of their own world and find others to act with. That possibility is precisely what the far right is funded to foreclose.

So the defence of critical thought is not a guild interest. It is not academics protecting their privileges. It is a frontline in the struggle against the extractive capacities of capital, and the line runs through every classroom where students still gather to learn how the structure works. We hold that line in Kharagpur and in Kolkata, in New Delhi and in Tallahassee, and here, in Palmerston North. We hold it together or it falls.