Higher education is under attack in a way few saw coming.

Maybe they should have, and maybe that's part of the problem.

Institutions of higher education have been a laser target of the Trump administration's authoritarian project in its first two months. And while authoritarians have long prioritized going after and dismantling academic institutes, this strategy also includes the cynical use of major wedge issues (namely Israel/Palestine) and the manipulation of emotionally-charged, religiously-oriented terminology like "antisemitism"

There is, as they say, a lot going on here, and we can't get to it all in one episode, but we thought it was important to take a broad look at what is going on in higher education, where we have gone wrong in our approach to that's made it so vulnerable to attack, and some of the surprising ways religious interests are shaping the outcomes.