East Village on October 31, 2022   

Looks like it.  

There’s some good stuff in Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic article, “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” but the piece unravels into a tool of the thing people actually hate about the humanities, which is not its implications for social justice but its civil wars. It blames the increasingly desperate struggles of the academic humanities not on right-wing enemies but on liberal humanists—a woke Mellon Foundation and its president Elizabeth Alexander.

I was one of the people that Harper interviewed for this article.  (Here, “Harper” always refers to the author, Tyler Austin Harper). He was fun to talk with, is a serious person, and worked hard on this piece, all of which I respect.  When we spoke, I emphasized our terrible money problems, which I argued tower over our manageable and ordinary methodological debates.  

 

I said that the real issue is our lack of the funding to produce and disseminate our knowledge at the scale that would get the kind of social attention allotted to medicine and computer science. We may think this is intrinsic to their topics and status but it is mainly the result of their vast organizational labor, labor of a kind that the humanities establishment, Mellon included, refuses to try. 

 

Harper cites my Public Humanities piece on funding—“Humanities Decline in Darkness”-- for a statistic in which federal humanities funding rounds to zero. But you have to get to his third-to-last paragraph before he makes his best causal claim about the current situation: 

The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch . . . 

 

I would have finished that last sentence by writing, “and so we don’t build the data and resource infrastructure that would make our needs visible to politicians and the public.”  But that’s not where Harper goes.

 

Harper’s other most effective moment comes from Phillip Brian Harper, the Mellon program director for higher learning: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change. It’s not to serve in perpetuity as the piggy bank for research.” Mellon, he said, was never supposed to be a panacea for the humanities.

 

 

Great, but who will do the shaking of university management? Mellon? Phil Harper says its role is to catalyze. On this topic, it’s not.  

 

He is of course right that the situation is completely appalling. To repeat, even though sociocultural knowledge is essential to solving any of the world’s epic problems, the rich universities listed below spend almost none of their institutional funds for R&D on non-STEM fields.

 

Figure 1. Institutional Expenditues on R&D, Selected Universities

 

SOURCE: NSF Higher Education R&D Survey (HERD) FY2024, Tables 14, 23, 29.

Yes, these figures likely exclude individual faculty research funds via outside grants, named chairs, and other department-managed funds.  But as indicators of institutional investment in humanities infrastructure, they are shocking. Universities’ own refusal to fund humanities research is also one cause of our society’s inability to deal with its core problems.

 

Yet Harper comes not to bury funding failure but to chastise social justice. The fault for him lies not in Trump’s destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities or 40 years of right-wing culture wars, but in Mellon’s interest in a better society.

 

∞∞∞

 

Harper makes two main claims. The first is that “classical” and “social justice” scholarship aren’t complementary approaches but rivals. They compete bitterly for scarce and dwindling funds. 

 

The solution to this is obviously an alliance between rivals to fight for massively better funding for all, at least ten times more funding than socio-cultural scholarship has today.  

 

But Harper diverts attention from funding with his second argument: “social justice” research is a betrayal of humanities scholarship, a kind of negation of it. This increase in “the decidedly sublunary work of furnishing political propaganda” makes Harper wonder whether the academic humanities are worth saving at all.  And Mellon, he writes, has shifted to funding this political propaganda since the arrival of Elizabeth Alexander as president.

 

Let’s try to understand this claim. Harper’s evidence for a policy shift is a Foundation announcement dated June 30, 2020. Mellon declared a new focus on “just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.” Board chair Kathryn A. Hall explained that “our reinvigorated mission and strategic direction . . . not only builds on our historic commitment to the arts and humanities, but rightly emphasizes a desire to make the ‘beauty, transcendence, and freedom’ found there accessible and empowering to all members of society.”  

 

The new direction assumes the complementarity of what we might call “basic” and “applied” humanities research, and not that applied research—addressing social questions—debases basic scholarship.  Complementarity—with awareness of different modes, aims, and questions--is assumed in every STEM field and social science of which I’m aware, so Harper has a special burden to show that the humanities are unlike all other forms of academic research in this way.

 

Alexander confirms complementarity in the announcement by adding, “We are a problem-solving foundation looking to address historical inequities in the fields we fund.” This also expresses reflexivity about Mellon’s own role in knowledge creation, which includes a past of supporting the kind of epistemic biases and limits that need constant correction in every field.

 

The new Mellon direction also seemed to aim at the democratization of humanities knowledge—at taking the results of humanities research outside of a small elite while also learning from communities about their existing knowledges and practices.

 

Harper presumably approves of problem-solving, and he definitely opposes the perpetuation of historical inequities which he agrees exist.  He sounds fine with humanities for the people, which is the official policy of the state humanities councils and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) whose origin story he affirms. He writes,

[U]nder Alexander, the foundation deserves credit for working to create a more economically just landscape within higher education. Before Alexander’s arrival, Mellon tended to disburse lavish funding to institutions that were already rich. Now, as part of Mellon’s commitment to equity, it is making a conscious effort to provide funding to public and less selective institutions. It has also increased funding for university-led prison education programs

 

All true, good, and important.  So what is so bad about Mellon’s new direction?  

 

Nothing, actually. (Its inaction on overall funding is a separate question to which I’ll return)  But to save what must have been the original idea for the story, Harper spends most of the piece making the false argument that “applied” humanities scholarship (not his term) is political propaganda.

 

How does he show this?  First there’s his prior, the false legacy dualism in criticism and some related humanities fields in which the criticism of texts and historical materials (basic) is denatured and corrupted by engaging in criticism of society (applied). It’s this dualism that turns “social justice” into “political propaganda” that ruins scholarship. 

 

This dualism may encourage him to search his anecdotes for polarity. For example, he spoke with a scholar who “confessed that . . .he had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant. I suspect that this may not be a rare occurrence.”  Harper’s assumed incompatibility between the first and more race-focused version of this scholar’s work makes this a problem rather than progress. 

 

Second is Harper’s assumption that it’s bad to get steered or shaped by a call’s language or a program officers. There seems to be a tacit idealization of “classical” humanities scholarship as pre-social and not in any good way developed by thinking about problems it might solve, or by being asked to change emphases in a proposal by an agency official.  

 

I see this as a humanities provincialism about sponsored research, which always involves calls, program officers, public pressures, institutional forces and so on.  This is not epistemically less valid than idealized autonomous scholarship. Remember actor-network theory and dozens of related ways of discussing the collaborative nature of thinking.  So the scholar who “reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race” likely improved his project. Program officers at NIH, NSF, and other STEM agencies do this advising routinely.  Agency shaping can be good or bad. 

Harper doesn’t have the evidence to rule out good shaping in that more-race-oriented project or the others. (Gabriella Coleman’s valuable commentary on Harper, “The Exposé that Wasn’t,” is really good on this point.)

 

So it’s not that “social justice” aims are inherently anti-intellectual and ruin scholarship. Better knowledge in many areas can come from working like Pasteur rather than like Einstein, to reference a classic study of the (complicated) relation between basic and applied research.  And it’s also not true that agency shaping is bad per se.   

 

So Harper falls back on a third way of making his claim that woke Mellon is ruining the humanities. That is to scorn sample program language as self-evidently non-scholarly.

Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice.

I assume Harper means this program, run by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).  Awarded titles include the following: 

 

·      The Dam, the Road, the Port: The Transformation of the Brazilian Northeast during the Long Twentieth-Century

·      State of Mine(Mind): Affective Geographies of California's Rural North

·      Urban Tropics: Dwelling under South and Southeast Asian Urban Microclimates

·      Uneasy Intimacies: Seeing Irei and Aesthetic Ambiguity Through Fukunosuke Kusumi's Art

·      Black Anti-settler Placemaking: Cooperation Jackson's Eco-villages from Mississippi to Vermont

·      Fiber Optics: Henequén Classification and its Consequences

·      Troubled Waters : Natural Disaster, Space, and the State in Precolonial Panjab (1707-1849)

 

Check these and the others out for yourself.  They all analyze major issues and strike me as likely to make original contributions to knowledge.  I don’t at all see Harper’s justification for assimilating all the projects to “identity” and “justice” studies. To do this, he needs to stereotype everyone on the basis of the appearance of words like “settler,” “queer,” “colonial” etc. I don’t even see how they’re all applied rather than basic research. He offers no evidence (just the legacy assumption) that these are not intensely scholarly, deeply intellectual projects.

 

At breakfast before drafting this post, I read an interesting review of The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture by Susanna Berger (Princeton University Press, 2025).  “Central to The Deformation,” the reviewer writes, “is the question of how religious elites wielded anamorphosis as a means of gatekeeping the divine.”  I love this kind of stuff. But is a book about the relations among perspective in drawing, theology, and institutional power in 17^th century Europe clearly epistemically “classical”—pure, basic research-- and thus intellectually superior to work on “Affective Geographies of California's Rural North”?  The answer is no. Mellon / ACLS funded research simply cannot and should not be delegitimated with superficial separating of the sheep from the goats.

 

The same goes for Harper’s disdain for a grant to Colorado College.

In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.

Harper doesn’t actually know what the conference organizers did and did not consider, but in any case, “how to dismantle systems of oppression” is one of the ‘permanent problems” of human beings. It is also a running theme of literature, history, and philosophy for thousands of years.  One might find the Colorado College formulations a bit plodding and yet not try to discredit the program through a false distinction between intellectual work and its social contributions.

 

I can imagine Harper doing a different kind of research that leads to a different article about the humanities.  He would go to Colorado College, interview the students, staff, and faculty involved in the program, and sit in on its courses for a few weeks while also visiting classes that aren’t part of the program.  He could then compare and contrast and identify the actual cognitive and other effects of the program on the participants. We would all learn something about what actually happens through humanities funding on college campuses to (and by) students and their teachers—for better and worse.  This is the real void in public understanding, and Harper’s dismissal of a program on the basis of its terminology doesn’t help fill it in.

 

So, Mellon’s new direction is less elitist. It puts greater emphasis on “applied” over “basic” research (“Pasteur’s Quadrant”) while insisting on their complementarity (and equal intellectuality). It funds some research on white supremacy and overcoming it--along with funding many other things, and really this funding is a drop in the bucket of overall social need for knowledge about racial nationalism, the authoritarian personality, etc.  Mellon program directors shape applications, as they always have.  They may now fund a higher proportion of outreach and communication programs compared to applied or basic research, but Harper doesn’t get into this important issue.  Finally, Mellon is the last big national funder in research-starved humanities field.  Only the last of these strikes me as a scandal.

 

∞∞∞

 

Daylight does appear when Harper takes the other side of his own argument. 

It is hard to argue that the tens of millions of dollars that Mellon is putting toward internships for working-class kids at public colleges and universities would be better spent financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France. But this calculus also says something about the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods—programs for humanities undergrads, resources for Ph.D. students, traditional humanities research, support for emerging fields and endowment-poor universities—against one another.

Yes, absolutely: we must address with the intent of solving “the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods against one another.”  We must at the same time argue for “financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France.” But it isn’t Elizabeth Alexander or Mellon that set up the zero-sum game. This happens when critics pit different kinds of humanities scholarship against each other.  

 

Mellon et al. didn’t set up the zero-sum funding game.  But what are they doing about fixing it? 

 

I’d trace some of Harper’s completely valid distress about the system to having grown up in this barren funding world where one’s work is always losing out to someone else’s.  The real issue with the humanities’ national leadership isn’t that they politicize scholarship, but that they don’t fight openly and systematically to fund a great deal more of it.  

 

This gets us back to Phil Harper’s statement: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change.”

 

But Mellon is not doing that. 

 

I can find reports galore about the crisis in STEM funding—everything from the cuts to indirect cost recovery to the losses of whole areas of research (like racial disparity in public health outcomes that NIH had funded for years) and of scientific personnel. I can find nothing from the humanities associations about their research funding problems.  

 

NEH has been gutted, yet MLA, which did indeed help sue the government over NEH, has joined NHA, AHA, APA et al. in neither collecting data to show the funding problem nor developing a systematic plan for building such funding. 

 

Similarly, the ACLS’s Strategic Framework 2025-2030 doesn’t have a sentence about tracking humanities research funding or expanding it. I see all these great scholars on the board. What are they doing?  What are we actually doing?  Why isn’t something like Figure 1 above on Mellon’s website as part of a large, structural analysis, rather than on the blog of an obscure professor? Universities need to be “taken by the collar.” But who will take the humanities agencies by the collar?

 

None of the solutions are really so abstract anymore.  People here and there have sketched out plans. I outlined one version in a long discussion paper for the MLA Executive Council in 2022, and ended my presidential address in January 2023 with a sketch of the steps we need to take, somewhat expanded in the print version (“Criticism After This Crisis”).  Also in 2022, a sub-committee of the Executive Council developed a reporting structure on cuts (or growth) across the country, planning to use the Association’s large, elected Delegate Assembly to feed information to headquarters for analysis and reporting. The Association never set this up. 

 

Two years went by, and the MLA then set up a panel explicitly about funding at the Convention in January 2025. 

 

Figure 2. MLA Convention Program 2023, Panel 139

 

The panel was an excellent (re)start on the topic, and the panelists had a good planning meeting afterwards.  We outlined NEH, Mellon, MLA, ACLS working together on research data, reporting, development. Then Trump took office and started his attacks. My colleagues bailed on the plan, which as far as I know, is dead.

 

With some discipline, we can replace our historic humanities pastime, discrediting each other’s research, with the project of building a material base for all of it.  If we can’t show basic mutual respect for divergent (and radical) research within the profession, then we are doomed.  But actually we can do this, and many, many of us already are.

 

I again invite both Harpers and everyone else into the effort of building the material base. 

 

By Michael Meranze

It is too soon to tell what will be the long term impact of the federal invasion of Minneapolis.  But it is clear that the images--both of the thuggish brutality of ICE and CBP and the solidarity and bravery of Minnesotans opposing the brutality and occupation--will not going away soon.  Minneapolis offers many lessons for possibility of a democratic future in the United States.  But, although less obviously, it also offers lessons for the future of a democratic higher education in the United States.  It is the latter that I want to point to here.

Before I go further though, I do want to acknowledge that what we have been seeing in Minneapolis may be an intensification but not a departure from long standing practices of policing in the United States.  Police, ICE, and the Border Patrol have long histories of violating constitutional rights, violently attacking disfavored--especially minority--communities, gaslighting the public through coverups afterwards.  And for the most part they have been able to get away with it.  The courts, legislators, and large swaths of the public have enabled these patterns.  What is newish is that they have now expanded the targets of their violence to include white Samaritans like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.  (That is why I have chosen a photograph of Kent State for my image.) Of course, as my son recently reminded me, that's because from the vantage point of the Trump Administration, Good and Pretti are race traitors.  Nor can we know what will happen if these cases get to the Taney  Roberts Court.  But given "Kavanaugh Stops" we cannot be confident.

Still, I think that it is clear that all who hope for a democratic United States and for a democratic higher education can take at least two points for inspiration from the courage shown by the citizens of Minneapolis.

First, organization and solidarity does matter.  The city's ability to challenge the occupation was the result of a culture and practice of solidarity and from lessons drawn from past efforts.  As draining and difficult as resistance to fascism may be, it does matter and people should take energy from it.  In this light, it is absolutely crucial that we continue to build upon the growing numbers of faculty who have joined the AAUP and other organizations recently and also that we recognize that, in the language of the IWW, "in injury to one is an injury to all."  Any day that you look at a newspaper you will see new efforts--especially but not only in red states--to attack academic freedom, to reduce higher education to a tool of state ideology, to eliminate tenure.  Even those who live in states where that is not an immediate threat should stand with their colleagues where it is.  Just as people throughout the country are now standing with Minneapolis, so must everyone stand together in higher education.  You may not be involved in Gender Studies and you may not live in Texas.  But the fact that Texas A&M is closing their Women and Gender Studies program because their state legislature and board of trustees decided to control the teaching of sex and gender is a threat to everyone.

Second, the importance of independent perspectives and evidence has made a huge difference in the politics of the invasion of Minneapolis.  This should remind everyone that what they do is important.  Truth-telling, challenging official propaganda with disciplined evidence and alternative perspectives--in other words what scholars and scientists do and what they teach their students--is crucial to challenging the effort of the state to define reality.  Given that the Trump administration has demolished so much of the federal government's ability to provide scientific and scholarly based knowledge, the capacity of scholars and scientists outside of their grasp becomes even more important.  This challenge is admittedly tricky.  Colleges and Universities depend on federal funding and the Trump administration has tried to reduce that dramatically.  So far, thanks to the efforts of the AAUP and other groups, they have faced serious push back in the courts.  But at stake in their efforts, in our resistance, and in the knowledge that we produce is the perpetuation of knowledge that can provide alternatives to the Regime.  Just following RFK Jr.  will make clear what failure in this struggle will mean.

In "Lying in Politics," her review of the Pentagon Papers, Hannah Arendt demonstrated the extent to which the Johnson and Nixon administrations engaged in self-delusion around Vietnam.  As she made clear, the government bureaucrats knew well that what their leaders were saying about the war and the situation in Vietnam were false; indeed they provided numerous reports to that effect.  But both administrations believed that they could impose their imagined reality upon the public at large.  What prevented this from happening in the end was wide spread protest situated within a culture of independent truth-telling that gradually penetrated into the most important magazines, newspapers, and television reports.  Our official mediascape is much more degraded--whether it be Jeff Bezos efforts to turn the Washington Post into a mouthpiece for the billionaire class prostrating itself at the feet of the President or Bari Weiss overturning the integrity of CBS news in an uncanny emulation of Mussolini's Italy--but even today we can see how public pressure is driving the NYT to cut down on euphemism.  Moreover, as we have seen, the ubiquity of cell phones means that neither DHS or the White House can easily control the narrative.  Even George Will understands that.

And again, it is in the practices of faculty, researchers, students, and independent scholars--that is to say the scholarly community--that a commitment to truth telling must be sustained and offered against the regime's efforts to destroy knowledge and eliminate free thought.  The federal government's knowledge production has been damaged--we should not let it happen to ours.  Nor should we let anyone tell us that that knowledge production is unimportant, or doesn't serve the needs of society, or should be silenced.  Minneapolis has shown how important that is.

There is one more lesson I want to raise.  The people of Minnesota have led the efforts to stop the invasion of Minneapolis.  But it is striking that the state's Democratic political leadership--Ellison, Frey and Walz--have stood with them.  I am not a huge fan of Walz and don't know enough about Frey; Keith Ellison has been a strong leader before.  At a moment of intense threat they have stood up to the federal government at potentially great personal risk.  How many of our college and university leaders can make the same statement?  Instead, we have seen compliance and euphemism, in some cases a willingness to throw faculty, student, and staff protesters under the bus, throughout a hedging of the bets and a reluctance to lead.  I understand that the situations are different, and that universities and colleges have been divided on pressing political questions.  But with (very) few exceptions where have those who claim to provide leadership actually shown leadership in defending academic freedom and the importance of scholarship and science as opposed to meekly dodging questions?  Collaborators or compliers I am not sure.  But I doubt future historians will look back at this period as anything but a nadir of university leadership.

So solidarity, truth-telling, and leadership.  We owe all of these to the people of Minneapolis, to the other victims of police and state violence, and to ourselves.

By Michael Meranze

In his last post, Chris made a call for increased faculty governance on budgetary matters and a proposal for how we might do it.  I want to follow up by taking up the problem of governance in a different realm: the very definition of universities.  It is here that faculty face not only an internal but an external challenge and also need to build upon recent efforts to challenge the managerial class's monopoly on definition and meaning.

If the Trumpist attack on higher education has taught us anything it is that university governance is broken.  Faculty, students, and staff can no more count on legally instituted university governors than on state legislators to protect the academic freedom or institutional autonomy of colleges and universities.  Of course, as we have been arguing on the blog, this inability of managers and boards to speak clearly and effectively against those who wish to reduce higher education to either job training or the mouthpiece of the state has been clear for years.  

But the last year has clarified in a national setting what was clear in states like North Carolina and Florida, as well as under blue state governors like Jerry Brown: Boards and managers will collaborate and comply when under pressure from politicians, donors, or the forces of anti-intellectualism.  I do understand that managers face complex situations and have to address multiple demands within a legal framework.  Their failure to fight does not necessarily stem from personal preference.  But whatever the cause, we have to recognize that we cannot count on them to defend colleges and universities from those who seek to control or reduce academic freedom, destroy whatever is left of faculty governance and autonomy, and strike at the very heart of academic research and teaching.

Indeed, if you look at the last year it is clear that it has been faculty, through organizations like the AAUP, that have led the charge to defend the independence of higher education far more than have universities.  Faculty organizations have the initiators of the vast majority of the lawsuits that have been filed to protect individuals, institutions, and the research enterprise.  It has been the faculty who have, at least since the Columbia administration chose to turn their campus into a surveillance state, who have acted to defend the rights of dissent and scholarly inquiry.  To be fair, there have been some presidents who have spoken out.  But they are so few as to confirm the point that administrative and board leadership has failed as a class.

I offer this summary as a backdrop to my real point:  it is now up to faculty as faculty to openly defend and define the mission of colleges and universities.  I am not naive about this: to do so runs against the structure of legal power in higher education (that allows boards and presidents to "speak" for the institution); it defies the conventional arguments for institutional neutrality; and it would take place at a moment when politicians are attacking not only professors but the very notion of professional autonomy.  But it is for all of these reasons even more necessary.

In taking up this project, we do have conceptual resources.  As the AAUP's 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure  put it regarding the relationship of Board to faculty: "The latter are the appointees, but not in any proper sense the employees, of the former. For, once appointed, the scholar has professional functions to perform in which the appointing authorities have neither competency nor moral right to intervene."  

As the Declaration continued, "So far as the university teacher’s independence of thought and utterance is concerned— though not in other regards—the relationship of professor to trustees may be compared to that between judges of the federal courts and the executive who appoints them."  Crucially, the Declaration insisted that this independence had to reside in the scholarly community as a collective if the university was to be a university: "It is, in short, not the absolute freedom of utterance of the individual scholar, but the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion and of teaching, of the academic profession, that is asserted by this declaration of principles.”  The implication was clear, colleges and universities exist to enable the scholarly community to fulfill its purpose and function and fulfilling that function required self-governance whatever the legal form of a college or university is (although we need to change those as well).

This position was never universally accepted of course.  It was challenged almost from its first articulation by Boards, Presidents, and organs of conservative public opinion; and the very basis of its assumption of a unified scholarly community has been undermined by decades of expanded precarious labor, the degradation of job conditions, the spread of managerialism, and the intrusions of donors and legislators.  The Trumpist assault on professional knowledge itself is only the latest, if most intense, version of this attack.

But conceding all of this history doesn't mean conceding the point or claims made in 1915.  There is a fundamental difference between legal and scholarly or moral authority.  The scholarly community may not have the legal authority to represent a college or university as a constituted institution.  But the community of scholars can, and must, speak for the purpose, mission, and function of a college or university and more especially for colleges and universities.  After all, although colleges and universities may have many "uses" as Clark Kerr insisted, they have one overriding mission: to enable the activity of the community of scholars.  And the scholarly community must seize the right--under academic freedom--to speak out when their managers are not upholding that mission.  We cannot  concede to the idea that speaking out on the nature and mission of the university is outside the scope of the faculty's "independence of thought and utterance."  Especially when boards and managers have failed to protect the scholarly community on so many fronts.

To be sure, this community of scholars is broader than what the founders of the AAUP may have intended.  They spoke largely for what we would call tenured and tenure track faculty.  That definition is too narrow--any full consideration of the scholarly community must include all university teachers and researchers as well as students engaged in scholarly activity.  But we will need to recognize that most of the managerial class--whether they bear academic titles or not--no longer speak for the scholarly community.  And we also have to recognize that in defending and reconstituting the university faculty will need to take a leading role--however much we may be demonized now by large sectors of the public. 

Moreover, they need to do it as faculty.  As Timothy Kaufman-Osborn recently pointed out, such a statement was made with great power by the faculty at Columbia when then President Shafik called in the NYPD faculty protested.  But they did so in a very particular way:

What rendered this protest unconventional was the appearance of faculty participants in full academic regalia. Consisting of a robe, a hood, and a cap, this garb is a relic of the earliest European universities that was transplanted to the American colonies and, until the Civil War, worn daily by faculty. By the late nineteenth century, this costume was mostly reserved for official rituals, like commencement, that celebrate the academy’s unique purpose, commend those who contribute to its accomplishment, and congratulate the newly degreed. At Low Plaza, however, this garb was worn at an improvised demonstration called by faculty whose purpose was to affirm their solidarity with students by dissociating themselves from the presidents who hold authority over both. What work does this regalia do, we might wonder, when incorporated within a protest called to castigate those who are entitled to speak on behalf of the university but, according to those assembled on April 22, have betrayed its true end?

Formally, when worn by faculty, academic regalia signifies its wearer’s completion of the requirements for an advanced academic degree, that achievement’s certification by those who were once one’s teachers but are now colleagues, and, finally, admission into a community of scholars that transcends the boundaries of any specific college or university. Cap and gown thus affirm a silent but very real claim to authority that is grounded in a faculty member’s esoteric knowledge; and it is this authority that the faculty of Columbia and Barnard asserted when they declared that these universities must now be “reclaimed” from those whose actions have demonstrated that they understand neither education nor the conditions of its possibility.

Their actions may only have been symbolic, and clearly Shafik and the Columbia Board were not listening.  But such actions—combined with continual work by academic senates, faculty groups and organizations, individuals writing about the purpose of higher education—will be a necessary outreach to the students and the publics.  It will not happen overnight.  

If we want to gain authority within our institutions we have to reach outside of them as well.  In this effort, academic freedom--its description, its range and limitations, its justifications, and its defense--will need to be at the center.  Universities exist to enable the scholarly community, their product is academic freedom: properly understood as the scholarly and disciplinary pursuit of knowledge, the self regulation of the scholarly community, and the provision of the material basis of knowledge production and transmission.  There is no genuine separation between academic freedom as a negative liberty and academic freedom as a positive freedom.  We separate them out because of our individualism and willingness to accept the terms of managerial austerity.    

Again, this will not be easy, there is no guarantee of success, and it will not happen overnight.  But as the last year has shown us, if the faculty and its organizations don't take the lead in opposing the federal and state efforts to restrict academic freedom, to destroy the system of academic research, and to turn higher education into a tool of the current regime, no one will.  And we must do it as defenders of our scholarly mission.  It is the only way to achieve our university.

Duke Women's Basketball 65-58 Virginia, Jan 16 2026

I’m in the middle of a two week residency at Duke’s Franklin Institute for the Humanities, and having a wonderful time with the discussions, which are pushing my thinking about both theory and practice. Many thanks to the people who have made the first week so fun and illuminating.  The first lecture, “The University System in the Knowledge Crisis,” is on You Tube with a nice intro by Ranjana Khanna and editing by Eric Barstow. 

 

On Friday we had a reading group on my Public Books piece, “Academics Must Seize the Means of Knowledge Production.” I do say there that university management has failed to improve or even sustain universities over the past 25 years, and that frontline people should aspire to taking direct control of daily operations. The model would be a variation of industrial democracy or academic self-management on a co-op model.  (This has in fact been the enabling illusion of university administration—that the top officials are professors doing a period of service to the institution and so, self-governance, we already have it!) Spain’s Mondragon, a large worker-owned co-op conglomerate, is so successful that positive coverage occasionally appears in the English-language press, like this New Yorker article on its portent of “an alternative future for capitalism.” Similarly, the UK has laws that make co-operative higher education feasible, and scholars like Joss Winn and Mike Neary worked on this through the 2010s.  At the same time, imagining academics seizing their universities also makes me wonder whether I’ve lost touch with reality.

 

And yet, self-governance has been a continuous issue in US higher education, a regulative ideal that rarely inspires faculty activism even as it measures the shortfalls of existing management.  Unionization remains a visible horizon, usually very distant for tenure-track faculty at research-intensive universities like Duke or UNC-Chapel Hill or the University of California. Full self-governance is well over that horizon, although faculty since the 19^th century have wanted much more direct control over academics than the governing board structure and its presidentialism have ever allowed.  On these points, universities were and are anti-democratic, and their officials have never supported any real variant of workplace democracy.  The very idea swims upstream against the torrents of autocracy that have steadily gathered force since 2000.

 

In the Duke discussion, some comments protested the infantilization of the faculty through the withholding of basic workplace information, particularly budgetary. Stories of being patronized and rebuffed by unpersuasive managers were lamentably familiar. And some questions asked about fixing that. What practical steps can staff and faculty take? Where are students in all this? 

 

In these contexts, I retreat from the event horizon of seizing the means of academic production to some “non-reformist reforms.”

 

The conversation got me to formulate a general four-step process in my mind. The content of each item needs to be filled out in any given process by the people actually involved. The work has to be collective; individuals don’t get that far fighting organizations, though they can inspire others.  Academic senates and faculty associations are meaningful platforms, if really used.

 

1. Identify the concrete issue(s), the specific problems that are damaging teaching, research, student welfare, morale, etc. One example has been the near-total absence of campus-based research funding in the humanities for the last 20 of the 30 years I taught at UCSB.  Another may be biases or other problems with the tenure and promotion process. Another might be bad administrative messaging about the use of Large Language Models in courses. 

 

2. Figure out what data, arguments, and solutions you do have, and also what you don’t.  Once you identify what’s missing, start asking the administration for it. Chasing admin isn’t the main action, however necessary: the process involves data assembly, analysis, narrative writing, arguing and persuading: it is a process of collaborative self-education, and might start as a study group.  

 

On the first examples, a campus Office of Research and perhaps some deans would have (and withhold!) information about the distribution of internal university research funds.  A center for teaching and learning or an office of information technology would have information about contracts they have been signed with LLM and other ed-tech providers that may be affecting administrative policies.  Note that this is a repetitive, iterative, frustrating, tedious, ongoing process. 

 

A great instance is the one started by some faculty at UCLA, frustrated with the failure of their administration to show why their austerity measures were required or to analyze openly where they would lead. The faculty wrote a “Resolution on Restoring Shared Governance in Campus Budget Planning,” which passed in the Legislative Assembly almost unanimously. Check out this specification of the information requirements in Point 4:

 

Provide detailed analyses and forward projections in time to inform deliberations for the 2026–27 budget cycle addressing:

a. the impact of reductions in state funding;

b. anticipated changes in federal funding across campus programs and research portfolios;

c. potential reductions in federal grants and their downstream effects on campus operations;

d. projected impacts of graduate student researcher (GSR) wage increases;

e. past and anticipated changes in campus debt service obligations;

f. costs and status of recent real estate acquisitions including expenditures needed to bring new properties into active use;

g. expenditures and commitments associated with campus-wide technology initiatives such as One IT and the integration of artificial intelligence tools;

h. recent and current agreements with external consulting firms; and

i. trends in the growth of administrative budgets relative to academic expenditure. 

 

Brilliant- I love this! After passage, the authors and their senate are faced with the grind of getting the actual info out of senior managers—and of institutionalizing the process of info circulation on which shared governance depends.  

 

Meanwhile, the chancellor and executive vice-chancellor have already written to the chair of divisional senate to say in effect, “you already have all that data so you don’t need any more.”  The gaslighting is designed to make busy faculty go away ine fear that they will endlessly waste their time.  This is the moment of danger (that is often repeated). The key is perseverance, as a version of ordinary self-management. 

 

3. Develop this linkage: problem—data—analysis—report—solutions—implementation process.  This will involve lots of work, haggling, repeated demands and refusals, difficult appraisals of the information, and arguing about what would and wouldn’t work to address the problem. Implementation is a whole siege in itself. 

 

However, this is not an all-consuming process: it can indeed be fit into the schedules of full-time faculty and staff.  But it takes a long time and requires stamina.  The UCLA Resolution was passed in December 2025.  If everyone sticks with it, and the senate can pass the project from one year’s officers to the next, they’ll have “restored shared governance in campus budget planning” possibly in 2027-28, and more likely 2028-29.  

 

It gives me no joy to state this duration.  But academic careers are far longer, and fixing chronic, grating suboptimalities is completely worth the effort.

 

This gets me back to the issue of reforms that not only fall far short of the anti-managerial revolution but may possibly not do much of anything. And why would getting full shared governance (really “co-governance,” really epistemic equality between management and academic employees on campus budget planning) count as a non-reformist reform?

 

4. Put each specific governance project into the longer narrative arc of knowledge workers getting control of their work.  For me, this involves telling the story of universities as developing the intellectual lives of the whole population, not just college elites, by undoing their capture by government and corporate vocationalism. It involves explaining why academically-led universities are better for society, for non-college people, for knowledge, for the general happiness of humanity.  Universities will never be seen for what they are, in their intellectual radiance, when neither their teacher-scholars nor their students steer the ship--nor are allowed by admin to tell the public where it’s going.

 

∞∞∞

 

I was reminded again of the drift caused by sidelined or withdrawn faculty while prepping for Friday’s discussion of “seizing the means.” Trying to get a list of required faculty powers back into my head, I searched my drive and found slides for a talk I gave at the University of Toronto.  It was organized around the American Association of University Professors’ struggle for faculty power in various arenas, now in its 111^th year.  

 

The baseline is that the quality of US universities was seen by nearly all parties as proportionate to the standing of the faculty, which I showed as a cycle. 

 

 

This depended on faculty authority in a range of arenas.

 

 

I numbered curricular control as 0 because it was basically assumed in 1915.  I recited some current cases that revealed that the faculty have made little progress in 110 years.  And in fact they have lost ground on Issue 0, control over core instruction—to ed-tech, to state legislative interference, to numbers-driven mergers and closures, to some university managers controlling course syllabi.  You know you are in trouble when a headline starts, “Plato Censored,” and names the censurers as Texas A&M officials.  Here's a summary

 

The outcome of turning even tenured faculty into employees subject to politicized control by line managers is not so great, and yet familiar.

 

 And I was interested to note that I’d boldfaced the problem of faculty members with their coherent reasons to withdraw from governance.

 

 

There was a slide on Practical Steps that faculty should take, which I’ll spare you because it overlaps with the list above. I ended with more boldface. 

 

Reframe U’s public mission via professional autonomy: Professional vision of U as skills, learning, creative capabilities, unfolding the destiny of mankind  

 

Yes, yes, hell yes!

 

And look where it would lead!

 

 

 

 

I do think this can, should, even must happen.  But the thing is, I delivered this talk in November 2014.  That was 11 years ago.  Over that time we have gotten no closer to mastery, and have enabled plenty of drift. 

 

I already felt that faculty inaction was a big part of the problem, but always try to be encouraging. My slide notes at the end read, “Hugely exciting trends now.  Mass global demand for HE.  Students who want creative capabilities and not machine learning & routine skills. Public realization that business management isn’t the answer to everything!”

 

True again. Still true. And I think now more than ever, in the spirit of lost time, and unstunted by the hostile climate, faculty need to do Steps 1 through 4 above.

 

Train Entering Station NYC on Oct 30, 2022   

I mean the question literally.  The New School (TNS, by which I’ll mean all its colleges) has advantages most private colleges would die for. Why is it now trying to push out 40% of its faculty and most experienced staff, mainly on the academic, non-arts side? How did it develop a $48 million deficit for the current year, or around 10% of operating expenditures? President Joel Towers has announced these things but does not explain them.  His administration has  published a closure list with no academic reasoning about the choices.

 

I’ve read all the documents I can access. My sense is that senior managers have made important financial errors over a number of years, and yet the underlying problem is poor academic planning. 2025’s Summer Working Groups notwithstanding, senior management have not yet constructed a multi-year collaborative academic planning process involving all faculty and frontline staff. 

 

Selling The Catalyst, UCSB on April 12, 2014   

2025 saw a shift in the hard right’s measure for the success of its decades-long attacks on universities: it moved from discrediting to subjugating the university system. It used decades-old methods in which culture wars and budget wars work together. These were now yoked under Trump II with federal coercion campaigns that extorted changes in core institutional policy through the unlawful withholding of federal funds.

 

University boards and presidents have not formulated common aims much less a joint strategy to fight the most powerful attack in higher education’s modern history, one already more destructive than McCarthyism. They have followed the mantra of corporate America: shut up, suck up, and try not to stand up.  I’ve noted that all the fighting has come from faculty groups and some professional associations.

 

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

Every meeting tells a story as Rod Stewart once sang, more or less.  What stories have UC’s Office of the President and Board of Regents been singing when they met every two months?  Side A in November was “protecting student affordability.”  Side B was their perennial favorite, “budget rules everything.” The bonus track, unadmitted, was “stagnation conquers all.”

 

Fiscal stagnation means permanent austerity and the damage past and future appeared in the unscripted parts of the story in the public comment periods.  There some speakers opposed the termination of the campus hiring program associated with the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). This seems to have been prematurely announced / decreed by the systemwide Provost Katherine Newman to a group of Executive Vice Chancellors, who brought the decision as an accomplished fact back to their campuses, which ignited a protest campaign from faculty, staff, PPFP alumni, academic consortia and, apparently, an unusually large number of chairs, deans and other administrators. The upshot was a letter from UC President James Milliken stating that reports of the death of PPFP’s faculty hiring incentives were greatly exaggerated. This was a real success for the protests, however unacknowledged by the president.