These days, I can’t seem to take two steps anywhere in the city without encountering an advertisement branded with the slogan “For the Times” — which isn’t surprising considering UMass Boston spent $1.5 million on the marketing campaign. And these days, I also can’t seem to go five minutes without learning of some new horrifying reality — cities consumed in flames, basic human rights being legislated away, undercover government agents snatching people out of their homes.
I can’t help but ask myself: what exactly does it mean to be “For the Times” when we find ourselves in these times? To say that these are scary times feels like an egregious understatement; to say that these are fascist times feels increasingly hard to deny.
Robert Paxton, arguably the preeminent scholar of fascism in contemporary academia — who has himself endorsed applying the fascist label to our current moment — includes among the defining features of fascism “goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
During the first Trump presidency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was revealed to be performing coerced sterilizations in migrant detention facilities. “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within [an ethnic or racial] group” is one of the acts proscribed by the 1948 Genocide Convention. Within the first weeks of Trump’s second term, we are already seeing ICE rampaging across the country, disproportionately targeting enforcement efforts against non-white communities.
Not stopping at seeking to annex Greenland, Trump has now moved on to advocating for an American occupation of Gaza — announcing the idea in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, contravening the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against him for crimes against humanity.
If “internal cleansing” and “external expansion” are warning signs of fascist times, it would appear we’ve more than met that litmus test. So, again, what does it really mean to be “For the Times” in times like these? I don’t intend to imply that our university leaders had some nefarious agenda to eventually endorse fascism when they debuted this slogan three years ago, but this is precisely the problem with these sorts of vacuous pronouncements — they mean nothing in particular, and can therefore be construed to mean anything at all.
Let’s take a blunt look at exactly what our university leaders are doing and how they are operating in these times. Human Resources has been stonewalling campus unions during contract negotiations for seven months now, obtusely opposing efforts to secure living wages for the workers that keep this campus running. Faculty routinely express the view that the Provost’s Office has altogether abandoned any semblance of commitment to principles of shared governance. There is a noticeably increased police presence on campus that seems to be geared more towards intimidation than protection. Dissenting voices that seek to challenge these affairs are met with silencing and surveillance tactics.
A week before the Spring semester began, the Trump administration rescinded the “sensitive locations memo,” which had previously forbid ICE agents from targeting schools — within days, ICE agents were making arrests in immigrant neighborhoods across greater Boston. We are now two weeks into the semester and our university has still yet to publicly acknowledge this state of affairs, let alone offer any cohesive guidance to the campus community on how to respond if ICE does arrive — despite a request from the Faculty Staff Union to do so, and despite other school districts across the Commonwealth taking clear public stances.
I find this silence particularly egregious given the emphasis UMass Boston places on the diversity of its student population in its promotional materials. It would seem that the most vulnerable members of our campus community are good enough to serve as smiling faces in our marketing campaigns, but not deserving of our support and protection when they need it most. To the extent that information has been shared, it has trickled down through opaque channels of communication and thus been wildly inconsistent in reaching the students, staff and faculty who could benefit from it.
I would love to believe that our campus leaders are in fact working hard to protect us, and are just doing so behind the scenes due to the sensitivity of the situation. I might have an easier time extending this benefit of the doubt if these leaders had taken even the slightest steps to cultivate any degree of good faith with the campus community in recent years, but this has not been the case.
Our situation is not hopeless. The realization that our “leaders” are not coming to save us is terrifying, but it can also be liberating. In the face of administration’s abdication of its responsibility to protect us in recent weeks, I have already begun to witness our campus community come together to give new meaning to the old refrain “we keep us safe.” Now is the time for all of us to look within ourselves to decide what we want to stand for, and who we want to stand with.
This article appeared in print on Page 12 of Vol. LIX Issue X, published Feb. 10, 2025.
