Universities are the ideological incubators of Antifa in the US. While most US campuses do not have any policies that endorse Antifa explicitly, the group flourishes where administrators employ teaching staff that are increasingly far-left activist educators or actual members of the group, where they are allowed to recruit and host events on campus grounds and where universities offer an over-abundance of courses in the social sciences that have their roots in Marxist and postmodernist theory and which do not offer sufficient evaluation of course content to train students to think critically.

While there have been several high-profile cases of Antifa-connected lecturers in the news in recent years, we wanted to get a sense of how prevalent the issue is by creating a database to track the relationship between Antifa and University Professors on Twitter.

Up until the 1960s, Marxism was the favoured theoretical approach of the leftist intellectual class. After WWII, with the restructuring of Europe, mass migrations and the rise of the Information Age a clique of radical skeptics within academia, chiefly of French origin, gave rise to a nebulous, fragmented movement brought to public consciousness by Jean Francois Lyotard in 1979. He called it postmodernism. Lyotard’s postmodernism is a rejection of the certainty of “grand narratives” that arose out of the Enlightenment — truth, reason, science, objective reality etc. Lyotard rejects the world of grand narratives and promotes subjective and relativistic interpretations of prevailing knowledge. Allied to Lyotard’s skepticism of grand narratives, Jacque Derrida’s deconstruction provided a means to open up commonly held interpretations of language and text to critical analysis by subverting the central meaning of language and text to show how a marginalised interpretation can be just as significant. What emerges in the postmodern period is an intensely skeptical tradition that relentlessly attacks the foundations of modern Western knowledge without care to provide alternatives. Its aim is not to find solutions to societal problems or add to empirical knowledge, rather endlessly critique or interpret.

While postmodernism and Marxism are separate entities with the former rejecting the latter as a model that claimed a grand narrative, the reality is that Marxism never fell out of favour, it was just repackaged by many postmodernists or at the very least, postmodernism became a very useful tool with which Marxists could upend academia for their own ends. Derrida’s deconstruction has become an essential part of modern ethnography, literary criticism and feminist theory in university courses where traditionally privileged voices are displaced and those historically marginalised are given centre stage. This aligns ideally with Marxism, that is the analysis of conventional truths (grand narratives), principally the ongoing struggle surrounding modes of production, through the lenses of class struggle, gender and racial inequality etc.

Similarly, Lyotard’s rejection of grand narratives suited those leftist intellectuals still enamoured with Marxist ideals. While turning a blind eye to the failures of Marxism in the 20th century they were happy to see fault in those other systems that they opposed ideologically such as Capitalism. In more recent years, postmodernism is seen as a bag of tools for actual radical professors to add a glaze of intellectualism to their wholly subjective ideologies which they pass on to their students. And that is perhaps the greatest failure of postmodernism. It’s not that it is simply an obfuscating intellectual exercise that adds little to solving real world problems, it gave below-average academics the ability to pursue radical political agendas with little to no academic rigour, and little to no basis in fact or empirical research. The combination of Marxism and postmodernism has opened the door to a new breed that is damaging US universities and radicalising students — the activist professor.

The proliferation of university courses rooted in Marxist postmodernism such as feminism, critical race theory and social justice since the 90s has played an important role in the rise of both the activist student and the activist professor. In years past where universities were dominated by liberal professors — the majority of whom were still mainstream Democrats — it was acceptable to teach Marxist postmodernism in an abstract, theoretical manner. The teacher introduced her students to revolutionary and critical ideas without necessarily embodying them herself. That has changed. Whereas the traditional academic gains repute through publication, the activist professor gains repute as a frontline activist. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Animal Liberation Front etc. all provide activist professors with the opportunity to show how committed to the marginalised they are.

University administrators are increasingly hiring far-left professors in their campuses. A major and ongoing study by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA found that University professors are now overwhelmingly liberal with an increasing number identifying as far-left. In 1990, 42% of professors identified as liberal or far-left but by 2014 this had risen to 60%. With a significant rise in the number of professors with far-left political beliefs there comes a rise in the number of courses on offer that are based in Marxist postmodernism. A disturbing absence of conservative and increasingly, moderate, professors means that universities, particularly their social science departments, are now ideological echo-chambers.

Just as professors are becoming more activist-orientated, so too are their students. According to another HERI study, 50% of students wish to become community leaders upon graduation and their professors increasingly serve as role models. As teaching bodies veer further and further left, the definition of community leader becomes more and more synonymous with extremist activism. Critical thinking and dialogue in the democratic theatre are replaced by fundamentalism and guerrilla tactics on the streets of major US cities.