Academic freedom is under unprecedented threat, as seen in Rutgers historian Mark Bray’s forced exile after being branded a “domestic terrorist” for writing about anti-fascism. His experience illustrates how dissent and scholarship are being criminalized under rising authoritarianism. Across the world, from the United States to Hungary and India, universities face censorship, intimidation, and political control. When governments equate protest with terrorism, democracy itself begins to erode. At GCAS, we defend free inquiry through our cooperative, debt-free, borderless model of education—creating a refuge for scholars and a resistance against the silencing of truth in an age of growing repression.

When The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper asked, “If even the University of Chicago won’t defend the humanities, who will?” he exposed a crisis deeper than budget cuts. The humanities are collapsing under the psychological and material weight of debt. At GCAS College Dublin, we believe the solution is not to reform the old system but to replace it. By removing tuition debt entirely and giving students and faculty shared ownership, GCAS liberates the mind from economic fear. Only in freedom—intellectual and financial—can philosophy, literature, and the arts thrive again. The humanities will not be saved by bureaucracy; they will be reborn through cooperation.

At GCAS, the classroom has no borders. Students from Lagos, Berlin, Mumbai, and Indigenous communities learn together as equals. Time zones become collaborators, not barriers. Our planetary pedagogy blends economic solidarity, language justice, and knowledge sovereignty—creating a truly global classroom for the urgent questions shaping our shared future.