The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America; Vanity Fair, March 31, 2025

  KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair; The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America

"Jason Stanley has spent the last two decades writing about power, language, and the ways both are corruptible. He is an expert on authoritarian regimes and the author of seven books, including 2018’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and last year’s Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, and has been a member of the Yale University faculty since 2013.

Last week, in what he calls an “impulsive” decision prompted by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump administration demands, he decided to leave—not just Yale, but the country altogether. This fall he’ll decamp to the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where he was offered the position of Bissell Hyatt Chair in American Studies.

“Educational authoritarianism is frequently accompanied by more general restrictions on knowledge,” he writes in Erasing History, “and by attempts to push mythic representations in place of that knowledge.” In the book he likens conservative activist groups seeking book bans to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels keeping lists of books to be censored, and outlines attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ people by various fascist regimes throughout history (among which he counts the Trump administration). When I ask whether he sees warning signs in sectors outside of education, he responds, “Are you fucking with me?”"...

[Vanity Fair] I think an anxiety for many people is, will we only really realize how bad things are once it becomes too late to do anything about it? How would you counsel people who are wondering how you know that it’s time to try to get out?

[Jason Stanley] Not my business. My business is to describe what’s happening. And you can read what I write and decide for yourself, but I’m not going to make other people’s decisions for them. I’m not into moralizing or lecturing; that’s not my thing. I’m an intellectual. What I do is I describe reality as I see it. I would love to live in the United States, but I want to live in the United States because it’s a place that is free. A lot of Americans don’t care about freedom. If you look at the polls, they say that Americans don’t value democracy at all. I have a different set of values. Democracy comes before the price of eggs. But what I think is particularly foolish and naive and stupid is to give up democracy and raise the price of eggs."

Leading from the Middle Insight and Advice for Department Chairs; The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1, 2022

 The Chronicle of Higher Education; 

Leading from the Middle

Insight and Advice for Department Chairs

Addressing the Crisis in Academic Publishing; Inside Higher Ed, November 5, 2018

Hans De Wit and Phillip G. Altbach and Betty Leask, Inside Higher Ed; Addressing the Crisis in Academic Publishing

[Kip Currier: Important reading and a much-needed perspective to challenge the status quo!

I just recently was expressing aspects of this article to an academic colleague: For too long the dominant view of what constitutes "an academic" has been too parochial and prescriptive.

The academy should and must expand its notions of teaching, research, and service, in order to be more truly inclusive and acknowledge diverse kinds of knowledge and humans extant in our world.]

"We must find ways to ensure that equal respect, recognition and reward is given to excellence in teaching, research and service by institutional leaders, governments, publishers, university ranking and accreditation schemes."

‘Unwanted Advances’ Tackles Sexual Politics in Academia; New York Times, April 5, 2017

Jennifer Senior, New York Times; 

‘Unwanted Advances’ Tackles Sexual Politics in Academia

"Among the educators who recently found herself at the treacherous intersection of free speech and sensitivity politics is Laura Kipnis, a film professor, cultural critic and dedicated provocateur at Northwestern University. Responding to a new campus directive that prevented professors from dating undergraduates, she wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education in February of 2015 entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Within days of publication, she was brought up on Title IX complaints for creating a “hostile environment.” She spent 72 days in the public stockade for it, until the university cleared her of any wrongdoing.

Kipnis has now written a book, “Unwanted Advances,” about feminism, relationship statecraft and the shadow world of Title IX investigations. It is invigorating and irritating, astute and facile, rigorous and flippant, fair-minded and score-settling, practical and hyperbolic, and maybe a dozen other neurotically contradictory things. Above all else, though, “Unwanted Advances” is necessary. Argue with the author, by all means. But few people have taken on the excesses of university culture with the brio that Kipnis has. Her anger gives her argument the energy of a live cable."

Are MOOCs Forever?; Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/14/16

[Podcast and Transcript] Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education; Are MOOCs Forever? :

"Hello, and welcome to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning Podcast. I’m Jeff Young, and I recently had the chance to talk with Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, about those issues...

Q. What do you see for Coursera as the biggest challenge now? You’ve probably solved some, and new ones crop up. What is on your mind these days?

A. I think there’s still an awareness challenge. Even today, there was a Pew center study that shows, I think, that only 20 percent of professional Americans, so people who would be in our target demographic, only 20 percent are aware of MOOCs. I guess the other 80 percent don’t read The Chronicle of Higher Ed, or The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal. I think it’s, how do you get to those people? Even more so, how do you get to those people in countries outside of the United States, where awareness is even lower, to let them know that this opportunity exists for them?

Q. I guess that is a question, because I obviously like people to read us and to read these other esteemed publications, but there’s other things that people do. Have you done bus ads, or are you thinking of other ways to get at people who have different media habits? How do you reach people who may benefit from MOOCs but not know about them?

A. That’s a really great question, and we now, only about a year and a half ago, we finally hired a marketing person who was thinking about this full time. We didn’t have one in the early days, but we have some partnerships that I think are really exciting. For instance, the one with Times Internet of India. They do billboards, and ads in traditional newspapers, including newspapers that our typical demographic hasn’t been reading, and so this was reaching out into a whole new demographic. I think that’s one direction. We’re doing partnerships with governments on work-force development. We found the ones that we’ve had, for instance, in Singapore, to be hugely impactful, both on the learners, but also on the work-force development needs in the country. I think that those are new channels that we’re exploring to reach new populations."