From the Guest Editor: Higher Education in Wartime

We live in a world at war. According to the United Nations, the current century can be characterized as “a new era of conflict and violence.” The 2024 Global Peace Index lists fifty-six distinct military conflicts, the most since World War II, with ninety-two countries involved in wars outside their borders, the most since the index’s inception. In 2023, the index recorded 162,000 conflict-related deaths, the second-highest annual toll in the past thirty years. It is estimated that 110 million people have either become refugees or been internally displaced because of violent conflict, with sixteen countries hosting more than half a million refugees.

Civil wars have been wreaking death and destruction in Myanmar, Sudan, and Syria, with political instability and criminal violence plaguing Haiti, Central America, and parts of Mexico. The Yemenite Houthis repeatedly attack shipping routes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The most devastating and dangerous conflicts, however, are the major wars sparked by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine—a massive escalation of its 2014 seizures of Crimea and the Donbas—and the punishing Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza and Lebanon provoked by the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, which killed over a thousand Israelis and foreign nationals, mostly civilians. Together, these two wars accounted for nearly three-fourths of all conflict-related deaths in 2023–24. By the fall of last year, the number of dead and wounded in the Ukraine war had reached one million. As of late 2024, the number of deaths in the Gaza campaign exceeded forty-four thousand, including some thirteen thousand Palestinian children.

The impact of war on society and culture is both extensive and unpredictable, and it is rarely determined solely by the intentions and plans of combatants. As Roderick A. Ferguson argues in an article for this special theme issue of Academe, “making civilians shoulder the burdens of war’s atrocities” has been “a deliberate and new military strategy” at least since World War II. Higher education is thus by no means immune from the direct and indirect effects of war.

This is certainly true in today’s major conflicts. As Israeli scholar Arieh Saposnik relates in his anguished contribution to this issue, 115 of his university’s faculty, staff, and students perished in the October 7 attack and ten others were taken hostage. But those numbers pale before the massive destruction of higher education institutions in Gaza, which some have labeled a “scholasticide”—the systematic and intentional destruction of educational institutions and the infrastructure of learning. According to the United Nations, as of April 2024, 80 percent of schools in Gaza, including many UN-sponsored ones, had been destroyed or damaged since October 7. In the first hundred days of the war, all twelve universities in Gaza were bombed and wholly or partly destroyed. The Palestinian Ministry of Education was also bombed, and numerous libraries, archives, publishing houses, museums, and bookstores were ruined. The ministry reported that in just the first three months of fighting, ninety-four Gazan professors were killed, targeted in what it described as “deliberate and specific air raids on their homes without prior notice.”

Shocking and devastating as this level of brutality is, it is critical also to take note of the war’s indirect impact on Israeli institutions of higher education, which have historically served both Jewish and Arab Israelis, albeit not equally. Saposnik despairs that an “antihumanistic and antidemocratic worldview” has “become increasingly pervasive in Israeli society” alongside a growing “indifference to death and destruction.” In response, he says, many Israeli academics have “adopted a refugee mindset.” From a different perspective, Sonia Boulos describes the “clampdowns” on even mildly pro-Palestinian sentiment in Israeli institutions, amounting to a wholesale assault on academic freedom. But, she argues, “an exclusive focus on academic freedom” fails to capture the full extent of “academic complicity in the oppression of Palestinians.”

The impact of the Russian invasion was felt immediately by Ukrainian scholars. According to Tymofii Brik’s online-only contribution to this issue, by fall 2022 direct damages to educational institutions already amounted to $8.94 billion. Nearly a fifth of Ukrainian scientists have left the country, and about 15 percent of scientists remaining in Ukraine have stopped conducting research. “Many of those who have stayed cannot physically reach their institutions or have lost access to crucial data for their studies,” Brik writes. Yet his account of how the small Kyiv School of Economics responded by expanding its offerings in the service of national defense and regeneration should inspire us.

Similarly inspiring is historian Oksana Dovgopolova’s compelling account of how faculty and students in Odesa have learned to cope with wartime conditions, illustrating how “multilayered and multidirectional the development of universities has become during the Russian invasion.” Despite “colossal problems,” she concludes, “new research and educational programs are launched, opening new horizons for Ukrainian universities.”

If war induced Ukrainian scholars to move in new directions, for many Russian academics the invasion inspired a crisis of conscience. More than a few have chosen exile, including Ilya Matveev and Evgeny Roshchin, who examine how repressive mechanisms have eviscerated academic freedom. While many Russian academics could be characterized as conformist, acceding to the demands of the wartime state, Matveev and Roshchin see “as much hidden resistance as there is compromise, accommodation, and opportunism.”

Displacement, whether out of conscience or necessity, has been a salient feature of the Ukraine war’s impact on academics in both states. In 2022, faculty at Princeton University worked to provide refuge to Russian and Ukrainian scholars. In a connected series of articles, a Princeton professor, historian Ekaterina Pravilova, and displaced scholars Roshchin and Ukrainian historian Yana Prymachenko reflect on their experiences.

These accounts can serve as cautionary tales for us in the United States, especially given that our government is deeply, if indirectly, implicated in both conflicts. Of course, the United States is no stranger to the impact of war, even if since the Civil War we have been largely spared domestic devastation and civilian casualties. This issue of Academe is not primarily focused on the historical impact of war on US higher education, but that impact has been immense. Think, for just two examples, of the massive growth of government-funded research beginning with the Manhattan Project, or of the extraordinary impact of the GI Bill. The First World War and the Cold War also produced massive assaults on academic freedom, which sorely tested both the AAUP and academia itself.

Roderick A. Ferguson’s article addresses the continuing impact on US higher education of the Vietnam War and campus opposition to it, suggesting links between that era and what we might term “the war on campus” that erupted last spring when too many university administrations responded to protests against the Gaza incursion by calling in police. Dartmouth historian Annelise Orleck begins her essay with a chillingly vivid description of her own arrest. She situates last spring’s events in the context of “a seventy-year war by conservative politicians and intellectuals to ‘retake’ higher education from ‘tenured radicals’ who allegedly poison students’ minds by radicalizing them.”

Robert Cohen, biographer of Mario Savio, finds parallels between the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement and recent campus unrest. “There is nothing outdated about Savio’s critique of the undemocratic nature of university governance and the overweening influence of a rich and powerful elite in that governing structure,” Cohen writes. “His insight that the university is managed like a hierarchical corporation rather than a city of free citizens is as relevant in the present academic year as it was in 1964.”

I would like to thank Professor Vitaly Chernetsky of the University of Kansas and Professor Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania for their assistance in identifying contributors to this issue.

Henry Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay, a former AAUP vice president, and a former chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is the author, most recently, of Understanding Academic Freedom, which will appear in a second edition in spring 2025.