UMich history profs warn of Trump's 'authoritarian politics'
The University of Michigan History Department plans to address Donald Trump’s presidency with a “teach-in” on fascism, calling the recent “regime change” a threat to the country’s “democratic institutions.”
According to a Facebook event page for the “Fascism Teach-in,” students and faculty will gather to discuss “concrete strategies for members of [their] communities to stay safe, informed, resilient, and effective in a fight against fascist and authoritarian policies in the world today.”
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The teach-in will apparently bring together “faculty experts whose work focuses on the historical and scientific dynamics of fascism and authoritarian politics in different forms,” including two professors from the university’s History Department, which, according to yet another event page for the teach-in, will be sponsoring the event.
Event organizers explicitly cite the country’s “recent regime change” as the primary motivation for the event, saying they were “most immediately motivated by the recent regime change in the United States and its rapid implementation of policies intended to erode democratic institutions and target immigrants, refugees, Muslims, women, LGBTQ people, people of color, workers, the unemployed, and political opponents for exclusion, discrimination, imprisonment, and other forms of oppression.”
Notably, the upcoming “Fascism Teach-in” is just one of many similar events scheduled for the current semester as part of a broader faculty-wide initiative to organize “a series of teach-ins” on the recent election and its political fallout.
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In fact, the group of professors recently hosted a teach-in on the sanctuary campus movement sweeping the country, which resulted in a faculty petition calling for decreased cooperation with immigration enforcement agencies.
Other upcoming teach-ins include one on the topic of “what is activism” for those students who are “feeling energized in light of the election” or who may be interested “in gaining skills to help advance social and environmental justice.”
Campus Reform reached out to the university for additional comment on the matter, specifically inquiring about whether students can receive academic credit for attending, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
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