Let me evoke some of what I’ve learn from the press reports. According to a dispatch from Agence France Presse:

Thousands of women chanted “No means no!” during a march in Santiago Wednesday called by students to protest sexual abuse and harassment, part of a new feminist wave sweeping Chile.

Banners called for the introduction of “non-sexist education” and the end of “sexual violence” following a number of cases of abuse against women and deep-rooted practices in universities and schools.

To the rhythm of drums, dancing and the chants of “No means no”, the students, mostly women, filled a large section of the Alameda Avenue, in a largely peaceful protest, with only isolated incidents reported towards the end of the march.

“Today we are condemning what my aunt ignored and my mother experienced and kept quiet about,” said one of thousands of placards.

A longer piece from 48hills reports on street marches and on a visit to an occupied campus. Among the street chants of the movement is said to be this:

Y como y como (And how and how)
Como es la wea ? (How is this thing?)
Nos matan y nos violan (They kill us and they rape us)
Y nadie hace nada (And no one does anything)

The movement seems to be constructing some powerful street iconography as well, as some groups of women protesters march in red masks or dressed as nuns. You can get a sense of the march from this protest music video which I saw via a TV5Monde story. Many women wrote slogans on their backs; I liked soy la mujer de mi vida (I am the woman of my life). A striking Reuters photo in the TeleSur story also has Fuego al patriarcado la moral & el estado (Fire to the patriarchy, morality and the state), as the water cannons bombard the empty street.

It’s interesting to see the political motivation for the movement. One of the spokeswomen for the movement, Emilia Schneider, tells 48hills:

“She asserted that the meeting was not about any case specifically, but instead a general sense that things needed to change when it came to the way gender-based violence was dealt with on campus. (Since then, demands have expanded to include gender parity in curriculums. “Feminist public education is not a secondary issue, not an accessory issue, but an essential issue of how we approach radical educational transformation,” said Schneider.)

As a scholar of campus politics, I’m looking forward to hearing where this movement goes, and what sorts of curricular or legal changes it may bring into being. And if anyone knows of further sources on this, let me know.

These issues brought to mind the work of my late, lamented friend and colleague, the Israeli sociologist and therapist Dan Bar-On.  The author of many interesting books, Dan was a refugee who family fled Germany to Israel.  In his therapeutic practice, he found many children of Holocaust survivors who were deeply troubled by the silence of their parents or families about what had happened. He concluded that the silence itself prevented them from working through these issues and traumatized many.  After a time, he became curious about the children of the Nazi perpetrators and eventually went to Germany to meet some of them. He found they were suffering similar traumas brought on both by silence and shame.  His book about this is called The Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich.  Eventually he brought a group of the survivor’s children and the perpetrator’s children together to share their experiences on the basis that “working through” these issues was their only way forward. Later Dan found that the legacy of silence affected even the grandchildren’s generation.

This raises both an ethnographic and pedagogical issue for me. Are we “working through” these issues  or are we reproducing the trauma of slavery and genocide by silencing them.  What has anthropology to say about silence, taboo, and social healing?  When is silence and taboo socially valuable and when is it destructive? How can we be relevant to the current scene based on lessons we have learned from our fieldwork and ethnographic analyses?

The intense instability of the U.S. political situation in the days since Trump’s inauguration makes it hard for any of us to know the future or even the present. Nevertheless, the ascension of the Trump administration — a possible misnomer, admittedly, since “administering” is a plainly inadequate label for their praxis — forces us to think reflexively about our situation as academics and as denizens of the U.S. academy. What, then, is the impact of Trump on higher education? What has it been already? What will it continue to be?

Some initial elements of the situation are already becoming clear. Trump’s election sparked a wave of racist incidents across U.S. campuses, particularly by (invariably male) white nationalists, with swastikas painted on campus buildings, Muslim women choked or grabbed by the hijab, and threats of “tarring and feathering.” Scholarly research is being affected across the disciplines, as the EPA freezes and then unfreezes grants for environmental research, while humanities and the arts are targeted by threats to abolish the NEA and NEH. The currently-contested immigration ban on Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen affects more than 17,000 international students, and has led visiting speakers to avoid visiting the country: “I simply do not have the stomach to deal with being held and interrogated for hours after a transatlantic flight only to be refused entry based on directives imposed by a government where neo-Nazis are pulling the strings,” one wrote. Other scholars are proposing boycotts of U.S. academic conferences.

All this is of course prior to any specific higher education policies that Trump’s administration might enact. Trump’s administration is more focused on right-wing shock therapy than policy development, and has not advanced any clear policy proposals in higher education, in spite of conflicting statements that Trump made on the campaign trail. His Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, appears ignorant of basic civil rights legislation. A possible candidate for science advisor, David Gelernter, has predicted that “over 90% of U.S colleges will be gone within the next generation.” One must therefore expect a general demolition of the federal regulatory apparatus, per standard right-wing ideology, and in spite of what this may mean for civil rights, anti-discrimination and anti-harassment requirements. It bears noting that Trump’s own relationship to higher education has been fraught, as he has sought to extract the maximum amount of reputational and economic profits from a social field where his own status is decidedly uncertain. Thus he has long boasted of his elite Wharton School credentials, and encouraged false rumors that he had graduated first in his class, while in reality he was a mediocre and diffident student. He went on to found a fraudulent for-profit “university,” Trump University, which peddled business advice that former students called a “total scam.”

In this unfolding zone of reactionary opportunism, institutional crisis and unprecedented contestation, the exact ratio between tragedy and farce is still hard to calculate. A previous moment’s neoliberal consensus — which has long administered structural violence along racial, sexual, national, religious, political and linguistic lines, on campus and off — is clearly breaking down, as the previous crowd of happy policy elites find themselves sidelined. And yet Trump’s “disruptive” project is far from a total break, since radical privatizers like DeVos have long had resonances with mainstream neoliberals like her predecessors Arne Duncan or, before him, Margaret Spellings. The alt-right coalition that currently commands the American state apparatus is in part only a political transmogrification of the usual capitalist dreams of “disrupting” every sector of society and polity. As such, it looks newer than it is. While it masquerades as a radical break, the cliche of intense rupture can blind us to what’s really a magnification of pre-existing political tendencies. “America was all cool till Trump came & started treating everyone else like Black People,” as one current meme has it.

In that sense, Trump is a symptom as well as an event, a stimulus (to collective action) as well as a reaction (to the slow contradictions of bureaucratized neoliberalism). He calls our attention to social fractures we have long been living with. His presidency is already reopening questions about the relationship between global capital and the (American) state — a complex relationship which the academy has long been caught up in, and helped to mediate for good and ill. Trump’s declared supporters remain a minority of the American population — for now. And colleges and universities are likely to be among the forefront of Trump opposition, even as they harbor substantial populations of white nationalists and more moderate Trump supporters. What, then, is the event of Trump and what does Trump signify? And where does this leave us as critics of an existing academy who may now have to defend it?

— Eli Thorkelson