The online targeting and harassment of the LPE Project’s Deputy Director, Helyeh Doutaghi, is part of a broader environment of speech repression, particularly of anti-war and pro-Palestinian views.
An increasing number of universities want to restrict their leaders from speaking about issues of public concern. This push for "neutrality" is a key piece of a broader conservative campaign to suppress speech that conservatives don’t like. It also offers a lesson about what we can expect of powerful institutions in the second Trump era.
The articles, blogs, exit polls, charts, tweets, and skeets that have been helping us make sense of the 2024 election.
Free speech at universities hangs in the balance. But defending it will require much more than just resisting the assaults coming from billionaires and right-wing influencers. It will require reconnecting with the purposes and highest aims of the academy and building a political economy of higher education that can begin to truly deliver on them.
What happens when we stop generalizing about the economy from the starting point of the grain market, as neoclassical models all seem to, and start generalizing from the post office, or the operating system? That’s the kind of question that Networks, Platforms, and Utilities puts on the table, and it is a major accomplishment. From an LPE perspective, however, one might worry that the book's current approach is insufficiently attuned to the “political” part of political economy.
Setting aside their habit of quoting Augustine, the post-neoliberal right can at times sound surprisingly like fellow travelers in their critique of the market. So how does their vision of life after neoliberalism differ from our own? And what does their arrival on the scene mean for the LPE movement?