The Star Chamber: A New Structure and Form of Bureaucratic Academic Repression

For approximately 130 years (1890–2020), academic repression often took the form of “McCarthyism,” which relied on aggressive elected officials or attentive university trustees to identify and harass targeted faculty, who usually only came to light if they were engaged in public facing political activities. However, during the last decade, new and more intrusive forms of academic repression have been developed in the United States by university administrators, who actively cooperate with right-wing state elites and corporate political activists. This paper focuses on a new bureaucratic form of academic repression, which relies on secretive “Star Chamber” investigations of alleged faculty misconduct. This new form of academic repression is designed to fabricate false narratives of “professional misconduct” or “inappropriate behavior,” and they do so within a new bureaucratic organizational structure that allows university administrators to evade accountability and responsibility for their decisions. This new form of bureaucratic academic repression marks a transition from earlier autocratic forms of repression to a more intrusive form of totalitarian repression that regularly generates absurd Kafkaesque scenarios for affected faculty.