This book, prefaced by Miguel Urbán, has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, to analyze the far right, its constitutive elements and the reasons for its siege of education, and on the other, to propose for debate a set of concrete political-pedagogical practices (curricular, organizational, and educational policy) aimed at countering the new wave of reactionaryism in education worldwide, which is contesting the ideological hegemony among young people to impose its political agenda. And all of this with a final objective: to call for the construction of an International Anti-Fascist Education (IAdE).
Zenda previews an excerpt from No pasarán, a book by Enrique Javier Díez Gutiérrez and Mauro Rafael Jarquín Ramírez (Plaza y Valdés).
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The rise of far-right parties and movements worldwide is generating increasing interest and concern in the academic world.
In March 2025, in a context of widespread debate in the United States over policies advanced by Donald Trump, focused on deepening social austerity and promoting private accumulation, his administration announced the cancellation of four hundred million dollars in subsidies and contracts to Columbia University and eight hundred million to Johns Hopkins University, both institutions recognized in the American and global university circuits; this added to a policy of harassing universities accused of antisemitism due to various expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people who were being massacred in Gaza and the West Bank. In connection with this decision, two Harvard academics, Ryan D. Enos and Steven Levitsky, published an article titled “First They Came for Columbia” (2025), alluding to the well-known poem by Martin Niemöller, wrongly attributed to the playwright Bertolt Brecht. In their article, Enos and Levitsky argued that in the face of the passivity of the leading private universities to the “authoritarian assault on higher education institutions,” Harvard University should rise up and lead a public defense of academic freedom, instead of remaining silent or yielding, as Columbia University did to Trump’s pressures; Harvard has done so by suing Trump in May 2025. But, in any case, this remains a manifestation of a “reactive policy” for defending the university space. That is, when the reactionary threat is already a fact in the educational sector, it is then proposed to fight and restore the pre-existing state; in the United States that really means inequality, exclusion, and indebtedness. Which obscures that the universities’ political response does not amount to progress in improving or transforming academic and social conditions, but rather reactive policies, at best, aimed at preserving the statu quo. A trend that takes us back to the very era of McCarthyism, in which, in general terms, academia stayed on the sidelines, did not fight against the conservative reaction, or even contributed to it, as explained by Ellen Schrecker’s classic 1986 study.
We share concern for the conditions of universities; nevertheless, we consider that addressing the issue when the “monster” is already at the door can be a folly. It is not that the harassment of educational institutions arises from nothing. Like any war, the far-right campaign against public education is always preceded by the creation of a propitious discursive environment. And that, in the American context, has been happening for a long time, as shown by the Libertarian Party’s speeches, which have systematically sought to abolish the Department of Education (as Trump is implementing), and to generate changes in a university circuit oriented toward identity policies, encompassed within what the far right calls wokism.
The reactionary move to strike at universities is not a problem exclusive to the United States; harassment of public education is also a global issue. In February 2024, Santiago Abascal, president of VOX in Spain, declared that the University of Salamanca was a “machine of censorship, coercion, indoctrination and antisemitism” (Camazón, 2024). The leader of the Spanish far right frequently alludes to the trope that universities have declared war on common sense, following the anti-woke rhetoric supported by global Trumpism (Urbán, 2024). In Mexico, systematic criticism of the public university has come from a libertarian magnate, promoter of Atlas Network activities, for whom the public university is useless, and whose television network, one of the two national networks, maintains a campaign harassing the university and public education as a whole. The same scenario can be found in many other places around the world, such as the cases of the Koch brothers, Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel in the United States.
In the face of the advance of the far right against education in general, we consider that a reactive strategy is not enough. We must not wait for the aggression to occur to react. It is necessary, from universities and educational communities, within the field of what is possible, to prevent these forces from growing, from taking space in the media, and even from using the academy and schools as spaces to legitimize their programs. Under this approach, it is necessary to advocate for the construction of a new habitus academic, one that goes beyond the mainstream logic, still in force, of an academy and an education detached from the everyday problems of ordinary people, relegated to an “ivory tower,” as the university sphere is often accused of.
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Authors: Enrique Javier Díez Gutiérrez and Mauro Rafael Jarquín Ramírez. Title: No pasarán. Publisher: Plaza y Valdés. Sales: Todos tus libros.