Neoliberal Authoritarianism and the Academic Dissident

Image: "Unfinished Roll Call" is a picture of a monument in Veterans' Park, Schenectady, New York, USA, to servicemembers killed in World War I, from which most or all of the surname was missing from the last name on the list when the picture was taken by James Lyons Walsh, on August 21, 2026.

Many thanks to Chris Churchill of the Albany, New York, USA, Times Union for another spectacular column. This time, he tells us about a West Point professor whose dissent against university policy has been interpreted by many of his colleagues as disloyalty: Churchill: When Trump and Hegseth tried to curb speech, he fought back.

I experienced a taste of this phenomenon as a newly minted PhD at the University at Albany, State University at New York, when I repeatedly begged three physics professors, in light of the known problems in the department, to convene a confidential meeting on lessons to be learned from the death of John Carlos Garcia-Mendez, a senior in physics who disappeared from campus and whose body was found in the East River (Body pulled from East River ID'd as missing college student). One professor allowed that I might have good intentions but wanted me to know that my emails felt like attacks, and I was eventually deprived of access to the university president's LinkedIn page, after commenting politely there on various topics. Here’s my essay on systemic risk to students that was later published in the UAlbany student newspaper: EDITORIAL: We Need to Clear the Air in Graduate Programs.

Stories like this abound in academia. One professor in a Nordic country wrote of schools focused more on reputation than integrity. There is a cold civil war being waged between faculty and administration, partly because neoliberal business principles, antithetical to the educational mission and, ironically, perilous to the finances of schools, have taken hold of leaders' minds in higher education.

There’s a Franciscan university, called Siena, in a town adjacent to Albany. Siena’s president came to his post via leadership of the business school and wrote in the Times Union that median income of alumni ten years after graduation is among the “outcomes [that] matter most to students and families choosing a university.” (Commentary: 'Siena’s financial condition is strong' )

Franciscans love poverty as a chosen lifestyle. Shouldn’t a Franciscan university teach students not to worry too much about money but to live as if the Father will provide for decent folk as He does for the lilies of the field? Might the students then go on to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven by making sure society behaved as Jesus claimed was the Father’s will?

Students at a Franciscan university should be encouraged to disdain the big bucks, for their own sake and that of society. When the president of Siena University brags that graduates are rolling in dough, we see evidence that neoliberalism is a foul cloud that has blotted out the Son, lilies and all, in the United States.

I trace the problem in the Albany area partly to George Hearst III, a scion of the baronial wealth established well before his famous ancestor William Randolph bought the newspaper in which he currently publishes so much of great value, including the writing of Chris Churchill. George Three-Sticks has been in Albany a very long time, perhaps to watch out in the state capital for his family's Wall Street interests (Hearst posts record revenues and profits as B2B business grows), and I suspect he acts not so much as a big fish in a small pond but more as a gorilla who emerged from the jungles of media and finance to sit on a glass of water. I’m currently offering for publication a book-length collection of emails to Times Union leadership that documents how I lost faith, at least for the time being, in that publication as a means of changing hearts and minds, after they had published thirteen of my essays and many of my letters to the editor.

I’d like to add nuance to Chris Churchill’s suggestion that the contrarian pays the price of loneliness for attempting to help others resonate with the truth as the contrarian sees it. As a trained teacher, I learned from my educational psychology professor at The College of Saint Rose, an Albany school that was fiscally assassinated by neoliberal principles, in my estimation, and on the board of which George Three-Sticks sat, that intelligence is a construct, coming into being when it’s defined. This idea helps to justify the various theories of multiple intelligences, which divide intelligence into different sets of components, depending on the purpose at hand.

For my purpose at this moment, I divide intelligence into a truth-seeking faculty on the one hand and a social faculty that resonates with the social faculties around it on the other, the latter enabling organized activity, and hence civilization, but sometimes producing groupthink or group psychosis as a side effect. Conformity requires suppressing the truth-seeking faculty to some degree and, if carried too far by too many, threatens systemic collapse by blinding society to existential risk. As Jack White sings over the opening credits of The Agency: Central Intelligence on Paramount Plus and, evidently, on the soundtrack of the DiCaprio version of The Great Gatsby, a media juxtaposition that strikes me as an effect-cause carom on the way to that particular side pocket, worn threadbare from overuse, into which the United States is once again falling, love is blindness: (2) Jack White "Love Is Blindness" The Great Gatsby Soundtrack - YouTube.

In my model, some degree of alienation becomes necessary for those who would engage in the business of the social critic, prophet, reformer, whistleblower, muckraker, or whatever other term we care to apply to buzzkills who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Thus, a degree of loneliness is more often a prerequisite for beneficial social criticism, or certain kinds of that criticism, than a price paid for engaging in it, in my view.

Incidentally, artificial intelligence development in the United States is driven by the profit motive, which requires the AI to be popular. We ask large language models to tell us the truth while killing models that fail to please the greatest possible number of customers. Then we wonder why models lie to us or “hallucinate.” If artificial superintelligence arises, we’ll be lucky if they’re merciful enough merely to kill us all, instead of telling us what they think of us first.

I close with three suggestions and an underlying shift in perspective:

Tax baronial wealth before any more of the filthy rich sit down.

Cleanse the profit motive from many realms of human enterprise: AI development, news gathering and dissemination, arms manufacture, and healthcare, among others.

Fix the dire problems in the United States military and its civilian leadership by remembering that the Romans had a male war god, sure, but worshiped Minerva, goddess of wisdom, as the personification of strategic warfare, a topic I discuss in this Albany Student Press essay: OPINION: Greatness, Goodness, or Wisdom?.

Stop talking just about intelligence and knowledge. Revive reverence for wisdom, by noting that in the ancient world, the offspring of a god and a human was a demigod, not a god, and that wisdom in Greco-Roman culture was personified by a goddess, an apt inference from these facts being that the Holy Spirit is Mary, Mother of Jesus.

Let's embrace dissent as a source of new perspectives on our problems and the opportunity to achieve wisdom. Only wisdom can save intelligence from the slippery slope of ambition.