Hannah Leffingwell is a writer and historian who teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and the New School.
The New School was founded as an institution dedicated to critical inquiry and the free exchange of ideas. The current austerity measures at the university are dismantling the radical democratic aspirations it once represented.
Right-wing authoritarianism lures people away from the promise of democracy, peace, and equality toward destructive violence by offering one key appeal: pleasure in harming other people.
The transformative experience I had in the classroom led me to dedicate my whole life to academia. But austerity and precarity have made it impossible for me to give those same experiences to my undergraduate students.