Franks on Little Fascists Everywhere: The National Socialist Playbook of Trump's War on Universities

Mary Anne Franks, George Washington University Law School, is publishing Little Fascists Everywhere: The National Socialist Playbook of Trump's War on Universities in Academic Freedom in the Era of Trump (Lee Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone eds., 2026) (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

While there is no real predecessor in U.S. history for the breadth and depth of the MAGA movement to destroy higher education—even the McCarthy period pales in comparison in fervor and scope—the Nazification of German universities in the 1920s-30s provides eerie and instructive parallels. The Nazification movement, like the MAGA movement, was organized around unquestioning obedience to a single leader and, correspondingly, hostility toward democratic ideals. The frontline soldiers of Hitler’s war on universities were students resentful of progressive changes to higher education, and the tactics they used to convert German universities into right-wing propaganda factories closely resemble the ones used today to lay siege to American universities: disrupting classrooms, surveilling professors, and monitoring curricula for “undesirable” ideas; countering the “liberal indoctrination” of students with external speakers promoting far-right talking points; purging “degenerate” books from schools and libraries; and organizing watchlists, harassment campaigns, and public exposures of allegedly biased or immoral professors, with the goal of having them removed from their positions. And, in a crucial moment in their push for totalitarian control, the Nazis used the murder of a young, charismatic Party member known for his provocative debate style as a pretext to escalate their ruthless repression of dissent and violence against critics of the regime. Among the urgent and important lessons to be learned from this historical precedent is that totalitarian impulses cannot, in fact, be tamed, and that when universities succumb to them, the rest of society will follow. The preservation of democracy requires the uncompromising rejection of all efforts to interfere with academic freedom and to zealously defend the autonomy of institutions of higher education.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.