Assault on public universities threatens to undermine democracy.

The conservative movement in the U.S. has long been wary of higher education. This is understandable given the fact that survey after survey demonstrates a positive correlation between education and progressive values. Conservatives tend to attribute this phenomenon to mass brainwashing by elite liberal professors coupled with a conspiracy to blacklist anyone who tells what they consider to be the truth.

Right-wing foundations and funders have enjoyed considerable dividends from the program of long-term investments they made in private universities beginning in the 1970s, when a bunch of them decided that the entire edifice of public knowledge was tilted against their worldview. More recently, however, the far right has turned its attention away from elite universities to public ones. Instead of seeking to change the minds – and hiring practices – of the Harvards and Stanfords of the world, they are now seeking to undermine the intellectual standards of state universities. They are doing this by persuading Republican-controlled state legislatures and governorships to pass massive cuts in funding while attacking the very foundations of higher education. The new demand is that public universities should be treated as any corporate entity, to be judged not as a social good but exclusively on its bottom line.

The documentary Starving the Beast: The Battle to Disrupt and Reform America’s Public Universities, which opens in limited release throughout the month of September, seeks to tell this story. It focuses on fights taking place at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, Louisiana State University, the University of Texas and Texas A&M.

One example: In February 2015, after demanding brutal budget cuts to the University of Wisconsin system and reducing tenure protections, the Koch brothers’ plaything Gov. Scott Walker attempted to remove the inspirational words “search for truth” and “improve the human condition” from the university’s mission statement in exchange for “meet the state’s workforce needs.”

The right-wing attack on the university dates back to a 1994 article by Bradley Foundation President Michael Joyce titled “The Legacy of the Wisconsin Idea: Hastening the Demise of an Exhausted Progressivism.” Joyce argued the school’s philosophy promoted “nothing less than the transfer of moral and spiritual authority away from civil society into the hands of the modern, centralized state.”

Starving the Beast opens at the same time Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan is exploiting the recent failed coup to wipe out political and intellectual opposition, especially writers, thinkers, and teachers who support pluralism. More than 5,000 academics have been arrested or detained. More than 4,000 have been fired from their jobs. Others have been warned not to participate in international conferences.

The U.S. is not Turkey and the threats our democracy faces are not really comparable. But the anti-democratic impulse at work in both places knows no boundaries. If the right’s war on public higher education is allowed to succeed, America may confront its own version of this future. We can’t say we weren’t warned.

ERIC ALTERMAN has been writing for The Nation since 1983.