【by Hitomi Koyama, Dec. 2025】
The year 2025 sent shockwaves through those who had long considered US higher education one of the best places in the world to pursue an advanced degree. Funding and fellowships were often generous—though unevenly distributed between public and private institutions. Leading scholars taught many of the courses in the top programs, stellar guest speakers traveled across the country, and the intellectual stimulation and critical rigor defined both undergraduate and graduate experiences.
I completed my doctorate in 2015, when the United States was still under the Obama administration. The contrast between 2015 and 2025 is stark. This year has been marked by one disruption after another, many of them seemingly strategic in nature. Under the second Trump administration, a barrage of new executive orders and initiatives—deployed in such sheer volume as to “flood the zone”—left Democrats and much of the world in disarray and paralysis.
Uncertainty became the norm as legal protections were disregarded, and the deployment of police and military forces within US cities became a reality in several blue states. Masked ICE agents began waiting for non-citizens to appear at courthouses, placing them in an impossible situation: failing to appear would violate the law, yet appearing could result in detention. This practice reflects a shift in tactics. Locating undocumented immigrants is, by definition, difficult—especially as many are keenly aware of the changing political climate and the risks associated with leaving their homes. To increase arrest rates, ICE agents have increasingly targeted non-citizens who are legally present in the United States and who dutifully report their whereabouts. This group includes international students and, potentially, international academics.
Anxieties about visa status have been compounded by simultaneous attacks on academic freedom and free speech on campus. Non-citizen campus protesters have been targeted, and when even a green card holder was arrested and detained, it cast a chilling effect over free speech and academic inquiry. US-based academics who specialize on the Middle East have felt the need to self-censor especially after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, Lynch and Telhami write that “international students and faculty went quiet for fear of losing their visas or worse,” thereby resulting in 83% of Middle East scholars who responded to the survey self-censoring.[1] Restrictions and repression became the new norm. These developments—along with the administration’s questioning of US higher education’s commitment to diversity and equity, scrutiny of educational content, and changes to H-1B visa requirements—have altered the global standing of US higher education. A cursory examination of Reddit pages reveals a flood of anxious questions about whether students should postpone or abandon plans to study in the United States. All of this is unfolding atop the slow and steady erosion of US higher education under neoliberalism.
One might ask what any of this has to do with Critical Asia Archives. Isn’t this something that affects the United States alone? As someone who benefited from the space for critical thinking carved out within this ecosystem, I argue otherwise. The overarching premise that runs through this curated December 2025 special topic is that what happens in US higher education will reverberate across the rest of the world because of the global interconnections among US hegemony, Cold War–era complicities between sites of knowledge production and state power, and their attendant dissents—dissents which were possible because of academic freedom.
To be sure, these connections are not self-evident. They are not self-evident in part because the predominant framework for understanding the stakes of cultivating critical theories in “Asia” too often fixes and reifies the image of US higher education as wholly complicit in US state power projection.[2] This is not to deny that Area Studies emerged out of Cold War politics. Funding for Area Studies programs was motivated by the need to train experts who could inform the CIA. The substantial funding provided by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation cannot be understood apart from the Cold War mobilization of Area Studies scholars. In response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 established the National Resource Centers (NRCs), which have funded qualifying universities to support Area Studies projects. The post–World War II flourishing of Area Studies thus resulted from the convergence of state interests and the expansion of funding and resources for US higher education.[3] Nonetheless, some of the most influential critics of Area Studies—including Naoki Sakai, whom I interviewed for this special topic—were trained at these very US universities supported by NRC funding.
Historically, the relation between knowledge production and reason of state have never been entirely detached.[4] Nonetheless, the combination of the tradition of aspiring towards academic freedom and state support for Area Studies have also fostered spaces for critical inquiry and dissent. While the conservative claim that US higher education is a bastion of liberal wokeness is overstated, almost half of faculty in US higher education identify themselves as liberal.[5] Because the lingua franca of academic knowledge production remains in English, and because of the high prestige completing doctoral programs in Euro-America entails, many critical scholars currently in Asia teaching at their top institutions are either trained or are influenced and in conversations with critical scholarship produced in the United States.[6] What this curated special topic is concerned with is to sketch out how this attack on Area Studies and critical scholarship and “war on wokeness,” along with the debilitating effect the ever-changing rules for international students and scholars are doing to the future of critical Asia studies and how to understand the contemporary condition.[7]
Understandably, because a big portion of university income depends on the enrollment of international students who often pay higher tuition than domestic students, most of the media attention on US higher education focuses on the impact of Trump 2.0 on international students or on the erosion of US higher education and academic freedom. Less attention is trained on the impact on international academics and graduate students involved in area studies in US higher education, that is, the global interconnection which I am concerned with.[8] While it is impossible to offer a complete picture of an on-going change—after all, this is only the first year of Trump 2.0 and there are three more years to go—what I sought to do for this special topic is to offer snapshots of what is happening in US higher education today.
To this end, I have interviewed Naoki Sakai, asking him to reflect on his academic trajectory from University of Tokyo in Japan to University of Chicago and how he came to critique the West-Rest dichotomy in knowledge production; Chiara Pavone shared with us her experience of being an international academic working in US higher education under Trump 2.0; I have also interviewed another academic currently working in US higher education who shared how Trump 2.0 is impacting campus activism and academic freedom. Given the sensitivity of this topic in US political climate today, this interviewee’s name and location has been anonymized.
Here I would like to thank those who have been willing to share with me various stories about the quietly pulled down syllabus, warnings they have received from well-meaning colleagues about the content of teaching, fear of traveling outside of US to see families once the Biden administration was ending, and what it is like to remain faithful to one’s vocation in the age of polarization and neoliberalization. As Pavone lucidly puts it, there is a human dimension to this. Without citizenship, an international academic is at the mercy of the host state and institution. While worrying about these political developments’ impact on the students, we also cannot say with certainty what the future holds, if one can ever settle or make a plan. The populist disdain for the academic establishment is visible not just in the United States, but also in Europe. Because of neoliberalization of higher education, many institutions have succumbed to becoming diploma factories that focus on recruitment and graduation rates numbers, focusing on the output but not the process. In doing so, the popular disdain for higher education becomes hard to rebut.
In the rest of this introduction, I sketch out a picture of US higher education’s historical commitment to academic freedom, area studies knowledge production and its evolution and the emergence of transgressive dissents.
On the Rise of Area Studies in the West: Reason, Reason of State, the Three Wars, and Dissent
To better understand the contemporary problem where opinion, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom are conflated and put on steroid via new media platforms, it would be important to draw the distinction between free speech and academic freedom. As Joan Scott elucidates, academic freedom is not the same as the freedom of speech: “it is at once a negative concept that calls for truth seeking by credentialed scholars free of interference from external powers (states, administrators, trustees, philanthropists, business interests, lobbyists, politicians, political activists)” and the coining of this aspiration dates back to the Progressive Era.[9] In America, academic freedom became part of the “Declaration of Principles” of the American Association of University Professors in 1915. The protection of academic freedom is premised on two assumptions. First, the provision of higher education is a public good, and second, the provision of this public good can occur where the autonomy of faculty is shielded from external intervention.[10] What is fundamental here is the distinction between opinion and truth. Stating an opinion is not the same as subjecting one’s thought to procedure of pursuing truth. When one claims that one is entitled to express one’s viewpoint and opinion, this is about free speech. Yet, being opinionated is not the same as exercising one’s academic freedom. This is because originally, the university was to be a refuge from the tyranny of public opinion.[11] And this academic freedom was particularly important for the social sciences and humanities because these disciplines engage with the critique of social issues afflicting humanity. True to its Enlightenment origin, the social sciences began with the aspiration to change the society for the better through social reform. And social reform and discussion of social issues often touches one’s strongly held worldview. Discussing carbon dating methodology is not going to arouse the same kind of passionate reaction as discussing what counts as genocide and whose lives matter.
Yet this presumed separability of knowledge production and power do not always hold. As Masao Miyoshi succinctly puts it, “[t]he three wars in the twentieth century—World War I, World War II, and the Cold War (which included the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam)—intensified the proclivity of the university to serve the interests of the state.”[12] This is not surprising. After all, the concept such as GDP was coined to render visible national resource for waging war.[13] Social engineering and total mobilization historically have gone hand in hand. The seemingly apolitical realm of humanities is also not free of this complicity. Miyoshi reminds us that abstract expressionism was projected as a counter to Soviet realism, and modernization theory, theorized by Rostow, was explicitly titled as a counter-communist manifesto.[14] Area Studies was in the service of the state, and because it was in the service of the state, the state was willing to project massive amount of state funding. The 1958 National Defense Education Act created the National Resource Centers to fund scholarship that would aid in the Cold War.
According to Bourdaghs, with the complicity all too explicit, in the late 1960s some academics began dissenting, coinciding with the US War in Vietnam and the rise of the New Left. These dissidents involved in Area Studies broke away from Association for Asian Studies in 1968 and announced their Manifesto:
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their research and the political posture of their profession. We are concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak out against the implications of an asian policy committed to ensuring American domination of much of Asia.[15]
This dissident group established the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars which today is called Critical Asian Studies. Reacting to modernization theory’s complicity with US hegemony, scholars began to criticize their respective disciplines in the 1980s and 1990s, thereby setting the foundation for East Asian Studies in North America.[16] Much of the foundational studies on the complicity of area studies with the Cold War have been written by this generation of scholars such as Bruce Cumings, Harry Harootunian, and Masao Miyoshi.[17] As the interview with Naoki Sakai makes clear, this development of critical approach to East Asian studies has never been uniform. Those at the University of Chicago who were critical of area studies complicity with Cold War politics were dubbed the “Chicago Mafia” by academics at Harvard. An additional factor that matters here is demographics. States like California with a large population of Asian Americans with the best public university system in the world have historically, despite neoliberalization of higher education and defunding, been active in fostering critical scholars of Asian Studies.[18]
The Politicization of Campus and the Activation of the Conservative Propaganda Machine
The sudden politicization of campus culture has resulted in other developments in US higher education. The US War in Vietnam and the mobilization of protests resulted in the AAUP adding “academic responsibility” to “academic freedom” in 1970, insisting that there be a separation of the self as a scholar and the self as a citizen.[19] With freedom now comes responsibility. Yet in reality it is hard to separate the two, especially for academics who are driven by idealism and aspiration to change the world for the better.
Historically, progressive campus activism has always evoked a counter reaction. As Shephard documents, coalition building among conservative groups have historically been a reaction to the student movement in the 60s.[20] Well before Black Lives Matter, there were the civil rights protests. While not as visible as the anti-war protests, the coalition building among conservative students has been supported and funded by Heritage Foundation, Koch Foundation, Bradley, Goldway, and Amway. Today these foundations are providing millions of dollars to Turning Point USA, what late Charlie Kirk led until his assassination in 2025.[21]
Project 2025 specifically targets Area Studies and calls for cutting federal funding support because “[t]hese types of programs generally focus on specific geographic areas and foster global awareness.”[22] Reflecting this Project, in 2025, the Trump administration gutted the National Resource Centers that have been funding higher education’s pursuit of language studies and area studies for sixty-seven years.[23] This happened on top of the steady erosion of state support for funding of higher education under neoliberalism which has resulted in the ballooning of student debts—which both democrats and republicans are responsible for.[24] Combined with the administration’s altering of immigration and visa policies, the impact was immediate. This year, all admissions to humanities Ph.D. programs were halted at the University of Chicago.[25] Existing graduate students who have been counting on foreign language and area studies fellowships are thrown into disarray. Not only area studies, but other sectors of state funding for higher education have also been frozen. Columbia capitulated.[26] Harvard negotiated.[27] ICE went after Pro-Palestine activist and Cornell Ph.D. candidate Momodou Taal and he left the United States.[28] On top of this, universities facing litigation by the administration are bleeding money like hemorrhage for their legal costs. Cornell University recently announced a hiring freeze and restructuring of the university.[29] The landscape of higher education in the United States is changing.
The Decline of Area Studies in the West, the Rise of Area Studies and the Chinese Reason of State
While the West (US, UK, Europe, Australia) has been actively decimating and defunding higher education, China has been quietly concocting its own version of area studies that is tethered to its respective reason of state since the 2010s.[30] China is launching its third wave of area studies development under Xi Jinping, pouring funding into university area studies to enlist higher education in support of the Belt and Road Initiative. While the US is defunding NRCs, China’s National Social Science Foundation is funding 30,000 scholarships for states which are part of China’s regionalism, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Hoffstaedter calls this as tantamount to Western intellectual disarmament.[31]
Academics are now thinking twice before going for a job in the United States if one is not a US citizen, while international academics currently in the United States are under duress. Graduate students are facing the dire prospect of lack of funding and uncertain prospects for visa. It was already difficult to find employment in higher education. As an international, now there is the additional concern about visa fee costs. International students are looking elsewhere, and this also impacts US higher education’s ability to sustain its edge. According to NAFSA’s Fall 2025 International Student Enrollment Outlook and Economic Impact, there is “$7 billion in lost revenue, more than 60,000 fewer jobs. Potential 30-40 percent decline in new international student enrollment in United States this fall . . . [would] result in 15 percent drop in overall enrollment.”[32]
In a sense, this rise of Area Studies in China feels like a deja vu of the Cold War complicity of higher education to state support for area studies. But it is not the same. It is not the same because of the different histories of academic freedom. In this sense, this curated special topic is also in conversation with the previous special topic on Hong Kong’s public humanities.[33] Given the trajectory of the West, it is worth underscoring that the plight of Hong Kong is a matter which speaks beyond Hong Kong.
AUTHOR
Hitomi Koyama is a university lecturer at the Institute of Area Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands. Hitomi Koyama is an international relations theorist working at the intersection of comparative political theory, global intellectual history, and discourses Asianism in Japanese international political thought. Her first book, On the Persistence of the Japanese History Problem: Historicism and the International Politics of History (Routledge, 2018) asks why postwar Japanese society remains caught in an impasse over atonement for its imperialist past. Her second book, tentatively titled Pacific Dementia: Japanese International Political Thought Under Pax Americana, investigates the epithet “peace dementia” [heiwa boke]—which suggests the Japanese people have become demented because of peace brought under the aegis of American protection—to what it reveals about the history of realist thought of a semi-sovereign Japan.
NOTES
[1] Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, “Academic Self-Censorship Under Trump: The Latest Middle East Scholar Barometer Findings,” University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, Accessed December 2, 2025, https://criticalissues.umd.edu/feature/academic-self-censorship-under-trump-latest-middle-east-scholar-barometer-findings.
[2] On this point see Liam Kelley’s critique of Kuan-Hsing Chen in Liam Kelley, “The decline of Asian Studies in the West and the rise of knowledge production in Asia: An autoethnographic reflection on mobility, knowledge production, and academic discourses,” Research in Comparative & International Education, Volume 15 Number 3, (2020): 273-290.
[3] On Cold War Area Studies and the university, see Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War & The University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: The New Press, 1997); Bruce Cumings, “Boundary displacement: Area studies and international studies during and after the cold war,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Volume 29 Issue 1, (1997): 6-26.
[4] Joan Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
[5] To be more precise, in 2010-2011, 50.3% identified as liberal, in 2016-2017, 48.3% of faculty identified as liberal, in 2013-2014, 48.8% identified as liberal, and when the survey was first conducted in 1989-1990, 36.8% identified as liberal. See Stolzenberg, E.B., Eagan, M.K., Zimmerman, H.B., Burden Lozano, J., Cesar-Davis, N.M., Aragon, M.C., & Rios-Aguilar, C., “Undergraduate Teaching Faculty: the HERI Faculty Survey 2016-2017,” Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA: home of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, Accessed https://heri.ucla.edu/monographs/HERI-FAC2017-monograph.pdf, p. 17-18.
[6] Although this tendency is stronger in South Korea and China than in Japan.
[7] On the war on “wokeness” see David Goldberg, The War on Critical Race Theory (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2023). On the concerted attacks on US higher education through legislation, see Isaac Kamola, “Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021-2023,” American Association of University Professors, May 2024, https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Manufacturing_Backlash_final_0.pdf.
[8] Leonard Cassuto, “Doctoral Advising in the Apocalypse,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2025.
[9] Scott, p. 5.
[10] Scott, p. 7
[11] Scott, 41.
[12] Miyoshi Masao, “Ivory Tower in Escrow,” Boundary 2, spring 2000, p.13-14.
[13] John Barry, “A Genealogy of Economic Growth as Ideology and Cold War Core State Imperative,” New Political Economy, Volume 25, Issue 1, 2020, p. 18-29.
[14] Miyoshi, 14. On Rostow and modernization theory see Mark T. Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization (London: Routledge, 2003).
[15] Michael K. Bourdaghs, “The Ghosts of Anticommunism,” p. 445-6, in John D. Kelly ed., Reconsidering American Power: Pax Americana and the Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2020).
[16] Bourdaghs, p. 446.
[17] To be sure, Masao Miyoshi was educated in University of Tokyo and he arrived to the United States so he is not a product of this system, he told his students in his lecture that he arrived to the United States on a war bride visa because it was unimaginable back in those days that a Japanese male could be married to an American female, but he has left a deep mark on the ecosystem through his teachings and writings. See Masao Miyoshi, Harry Harootunian ed., Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham, Duke University Press, 2002).
[18] On the productive interaction between Asian Studies and Asian American Studies, see Lisa Yoneyama, “Asian American Studies in Travel,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 13, Issue 2 (2012): 294-299.
[19] Scott, 65-66.
[20] Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
[21] Isaac Kamola, “Dear Administrators: To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money,” AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 10, (2019): 1-24.
[22] Mary Ellen Flannery, “Project 2025 and Higher Education,” neaToday,October 4, 2024, https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/project-2025-and-higher-education.
[23] Alonso, “Grant Delays Threaten Cultural and Language Studies Programs,” Inside Higher Ed., August 25, 2025.
[24] Ellen Schrecker, “The 50-Year War on Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 2022.
[25] Alonso, ibid.
[26] Michael C. Bender, Alan Blinder and Jonathan Swan, “Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Universities,” New York Times, April 14, 2025.
[27] “As Trump Attacks Universities, Some are Agreeing to Negotiate,” New York Times, Sept 5, 2025.
[28] “Pro-Palestinian British Cornell student says he will leave US citing fear of detention,” Guardian, April 1, 2025.
[29] “2025 Hiring Pause,” Working at Cornell, Accessed December 5, 2025, https://hr.cornell.edu/2025-hiring-pause.
[30] Els van Donen, “Area Studies Gain Ground in China’s Education Institutions,” East Asia Forum, August 2025, https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/08/16/area-studies-gain-ground-in-chinas-educational-institutions/.
[31] Gerhard Hoffstaedter, “The Great Rebalancing of Area Studies,” East Asia Forum, October 11, 2025, https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/10/11/the-great-rebalancing-of-area-studies/.
[32] NAFSA, “Fall 2025 International Student Enrollment Outlook and Economic Impact,” NAFSA,August 8, 2025, https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact.
[33] https://caarchives.org/topic/hong-kong-2025/.