McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education

Eve Darian-Smith is Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Global and International Studies; and affiliated faculty in the Law School, Department of Anthropology and Department of Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine and author of “Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters.”

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About the speaker

Eve Darian-Smith is the founding chair of the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent book is Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025). As universities across the United States become epicenters of ideological warfare — from the contentious debates surrounding free speech and curriculum control to the denial of tenure for outspoken faculty — Policing Higher Education contextualizes these skirmishes within a broader global framework. Darian-Smith examines the intersecting global trends of rising authoritarianism and declining academic freedom, revealing how the United States is part of a larger pattern seen in democracies worldwide, including in Brazil, Hungary, Germany, India and the Philippines. Policing Higher Education challenges readers to view educational conflicts not merely as culture wars but as intense and connected struggles over economic, political and social power. Drawing from extensive scholarship, she humanizes the impacts of these attacks on scholars and students, offering poignant stories of persecution and resilience.

She is also author of Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2022), recognized by the Independent Publisher Book Awards (silver medal in the Environment/Ecology Category) and winner of the 2022 Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award, sponsored by the Association for Humanist Sociology.

Darian-Smith worked as a commercial lawyer in Australia before coming to the United States to pursue a PhD in sociocultural anthropology. Trained as a lawyer, historian and anthropologist, she is a critical interdisciplinary scholar interested in issues of postcolonial and decolonial theory, human rights, legal pluralism and sociolegal theory.

James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education honors the esteemed vice chancellor of students, who died in 2011. The lecture series addresses the role of the liberal arts in higher education, a subject especially meaningful to Dean McLeod.

Headline image by Lianhao Qu via Unsplash