The Taliban’s return to Kabul in the summer of 2021 sent shock waves through the university system. Students at Bamyan University, where I was chancellor at the time, fled back to their homes in rural areas. As Taliban soldiers poured into the town, a Taliban official summoned me and asked where the university kept our weapons. We were a school, I told him – we had no weapons.
In Kabul, many faculty and students, particularly those associated with Western governments, rushed to the airport and attempted to flee the country. The American University of Afghanistan pulled out completely. Western countries welcomed some scholars, like me, in countries ranging from Ireland to the United States and India. Many of those who could not leave the country went into hiding as the Taliban brought their version of moral purity to universities.
Almost four years later, however, the results of Afghanistan’s sharp swing towards authoritarianism has been uneven and far more complicated than many guessed in those early days.
While the United States federal government’s recent attacks on a range of institutions and norms in higher education may look much different from the Taliban’s, there are some potentially uncomfortable parallels and useful lessons. The Trump administration’s announcement of mass layoffs at the Department of Education just preceded Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada’s announcement that the Afghan Emirate would be laying off tens of thousands of officials from the Ministry of Education. Even the tools being used by these administrations are similar, with the official farman or command of the supreme leader being similar to the executive orders used by the Trump administration to circumvent Congress.
Similarly, as the Trump administration attacks diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and threatens to withhold funds, as in Afghanistan, those who are likely to suffer are the most vulnerable and those who have the most difficulty getting into universities in the first place. In both countries, underfunding the higher education system and attacking vulnerable groups may have the greatest impact in the long run.
In the initial months of Taliban rule, some brave protesters, mostly women, showed up in the streets to speak out against these changes. The Taliban brutally suppressed these protests, beating protesters and eventually showing up at the homes of some of those that spoke out on social media. Again, the U.S. deportation of student leaders with a history of engaging in protest raises uncomfortable similarities.
Since fleeing from my homeland in 2021, I have been working as a scholar in exile, hoping to better understand the great shifts in higher education in Afghanistan from one regime to the next. Together with an American scholar, we have collected educational biographies from a range of Afghans, who collectively have witnessed half a dozen regime changes during their lives. What stands out is the fact that not just the Taliban but the U.S.-backed government before them and the Communist government in the 1980s have taken power with grand ambitions for higher education reform. Ultimately, these regimes have succeeded in either expanding or limiting access to universities to specific groups – most notably women, but also many ethnic minorities – according to their goals. At the same time, however, each of these regimes struggled in instituting real curricular change or changing much of what is actually taught in the classroom.
The current Taliban regime has again banned women from Afghan universities and made it more difficult for men from minority groups or poorer backgrounds to attend. They also have added requirements to the curriculum, such as telling faculty that they must announce to students that their lessons are Islamic before each class. Students and faculty we have interviewed point out, however, that these pronouncements are followed by university lectures that are fairly unchanged from those delivered under the democratically elected Karzai and Ghani governments.
Similarly, the Taliban have added a two-credit religious studies requirement to most programs, but have done little more to alter the curriculum. Instead, they have focused on policing who enters the campus, punishing those who do not have beards or who wear clothes that are perceived as too Western. These authoritarian practices are very effective at determining who is able to enter the classroom, but they are far less able to control the learning that happens there.
As the new administration in the United States issues has taken aim at higher education – both by targeting specific universities and by threatening to upend programs by pulling federal funds from schools that are perceived as supportive of diversity efforts – it is worth wondering whether a similar process will play out. Pulling funding from U.S. schools is going to make it more difficult for students from less well-off backgrounds to attend college or university. It will make faculty and students more afraid to speak out. But even as universities quickly scrub the language of DEI from their websites, replacing it with the language of “fairness,” it is less clear how this will impact actual faculty-student interactions within the classroom.
Authoritarian regimes are good at instilling fear and targeting the vulnerable, but historically they have been less successful at the bureaucratic process of curricular reform. The Afghan case suggests that individuals’ desire for learning will, in many instances, win out over authoritarian pronouncements, just not in the vibrant free-speech mode of learning that most Americans have become accustomed to.
As universities in the U.S. confront an increasingly authoritarian approach from the federal government, they would do well to look to Afghans who have lived through even more difficult challenges. American faculty and students may find themselves taking similar tactics to their Afghan counterparts: publicly attempting to avoid the wrath of the government, while in classrooms, attempting to continue teaching and learning according to long-standing practice. This is certainly counter to many of the principles of liberal democracy that the United States has claimed to hold, but is not so different from what is happening in classrooms in more authoritarian countries across the globe.
While this comparison between Afghanistan and the U.S. may seem extreme, the speed at which the Taliban succeeded in reordering Afghan universities should give Americans pause. Despite the corruption and mismanagement of many programs during the international intervention in Afghanistan, higher education was one of the few bright spots of the past 20 years. International and Afghan investment in the higher education system led to a rapid expansion. New universities opened, the number of women and minorities attending these institutions increased rapidly, and the regional reputation of the system increased exponentially.
In 2001 there were a dozen universities in Afghanistan, many in shambles after the destruction of the civil war. By 2020 there were 172 institutions of higher education with nearly half a million students. Higher education was one of the few sectors where international support and Afghan desire for education fuelled genuine growth. The Taliban upended all this swiftly.
While some in the U.S. have been shocked by the speed with which the Trump administration has changed higher education policies, the playbook has been similar. Attack a few of the biggest universities, make an example of those who speak out, and cut funding to everyone else. While changes in the classroom and in the curriculum will be slower, authoritarian policies and violence can quickly alter who is at the university.
In the longer term, both systems are likely to be reduced hollow shells of themselves if there is continued underinvestment. Still, as long as faculty have the desire to teach and students have the desire to learn, education will continue. Americans may have to adapt to this new authoritarian reality.