A sign depicts President Donald Trump as Adolf Hitler during a rally to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil in New York. Photo by Getty Images

Adolf Hitler had it figured out — if you’re going to rule as a despot, you have to crack down on higher education to prevent the spread of dissident ideas. So he issued a decree banning political opponents and Jews from faculty positions, and encouraged Nazi students to rat on fellow students and professors who weren’t toeing the line.

Donald Trump has also figured it out, or at least thinks he has. But to impose his personal control over higher learning, he’s using a different approach, one that entails shaking down universities that don’t bend to his will, and rounding up foreign students for deportation to put a chill on campus protests.

America’s universities and colleges are facing threats to their autonomy that are unlike any that have occurred over the nation’s nearly 250-year history.

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Video of a Tufts University doctoral student being apprehended by plainclothes federal immigration agents on a Massachusetts street has shocked people across the nation, and around the world.

In the video, a male agent stops Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national with a valid student visa, and handcuffs her. Visibly distressed, she screams “What’s going on?” as she’s encircled by more agents. Ozturk was spirited away to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Louisiana. Federal officials claim she had been “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Öztürk’s offense was an opinion essay in the Tufts student newspaper calling on the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.” Ozturk’s friends, colleagues and supporters say she has no connection with Hamas and is completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

While the Trump administration tries to dress up the ongoing roundup of foreign students as a noble effort against antisemitism, there’s something more nefarious and dangerous that’s really going on. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he has revoked the visas of more than 300 foreign students so far, and called them “lunatics.” As the roundups continue, there’s deep concern that the crackdown is intended to silence views that don’t align with Trump’s.

Trump and Hitler have this in common: Like the Nazi leader, America’s 47th president is obsessed with exercising authoritarian control, and crushing those who stand in the way. Their methods are, of course, very different, because conditions in America are very different from those of the 12 years of the Third Reich.

One of Hitler’s top priorities after coming to power in 1933 was the total Nazification of education — from first grade through the universities. Authority over public schools and universities was transferred from local and state officials to the Reich Minister of Education, who appointed university deans and the heads of student and faculty unions. Faculty members rushed to profess their loyalty to Hitler.

Under a Nazi civil service law, “political opponents” and academicians “not of Aryan descent” — in other words, Jews — were banned from holding faculty jobs at German universities, resulting in the dismissal of more than 1,100 by 1935. Professors and students who were even suspected of harboring anti-regime ideas were intimidated and terrorized by Nazi student organizations.

While Hitler was able to command total obeisance from German universities, Donald Trump can’t, but it’s not for a lack of trying. His threat to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from universities that don’t meet his demands — combined with Elon Musk’s chainsaw — is starting to make some academicians, researchers and scientists think about leaving their homeland and taking positions in foreign countries.

Trump’s Department of Education warned universities in February about what was coming, with “Dear Colleague” letters stating that federal funds would be withheld if they didn’t drop programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

Later on, Trump said he’d block funds to universities and colleges that allow “illegal protests.” Then his administration announced it had canceled $400 million in federal money for Columbia University. Columbia capitulated, saying it would impose new restrictions on protests, hire “special officers” authorized to remove people from campus or make arrests, make changes in admission policies, and implement close scrutiny of programs that focus on the Middle East.

The University of Pennsylvania was told it was losing $175 million in federal funding because of a transgender woman who had been on a women’s swim team. Harvard could lose almost $9 billion in federal grants and contracts because of alleged antisemitism on campus. And dozens of federal research grants have been suspended at Princeton.

For many Americans, this is feeling too much like authoritarianism.

A lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors alleges that Trump’s actions are “terrorizing students and faculty for their exercise of First Amendment rights in the past, intimidating them from exercising those rights now, and silencing political viewpoints that the government disfavors.”

Trump’s assaults on higher education have triggered worry about a brain drain, as faculty members and others contemplate leaving their professions or moving to a country where they don’t feel threatened.

An exodus of America’s best and brightest may have already begun.

In a poll of scientists by the scientific journal Nature, a shocking 75.3% of the respondents said they are contemplating leaving the country for jobs in Europe or Canada.

Timothy Snyder has announced he’s leaving Yale for a position at the University of Toronto, as are fellow historian Marci Shore and philosopher Jason Stanley.

“This crackdown, Columbia’s capitulation to this, is a grave sign about the future of academic freedom,” Stanley told MSNBC. “In addition to, say, hauling people off the street and sending them to Louisiana prisons like they did at Tufts University for co-authoring op-eds in the student newspaper.”

Something like this has happened before — in Hitler’s Germany. Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Billy Wilder all fled to America because of Nazi oppression.

So much of what Trump has done since he began his second term — his attempts to rule by decree, his emasculation of Congress, his disdain for the rule of law, the use of dubious arguments to round up foreign students for deportation, his shakedown of institutes of higher learning, his revenge on law firms that had been involved in cases against him — all of this is giving many of us a horrible feeling that American democracy is rapidly slipping away.

“We have months, not a year, before our democracy is rendered so damaged such that it can’t be repaired,” says Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

Or is it already too late?

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