Sea of Marmara, Türkiye on October 3, 2025  

In the midst of enormous political pressures, universities also face a steady undertow from "AI" development, which is moving as fast as ever.  At the same time, 2025 has brought new studies, new evidence, and also new distress about the dominance of AI in economic and cultural life, in work and study.

 

For example, a British undergraduate who’s been discussing AI with her cohort told me, “Everyone is asking why am I at university? AI can do my homework and it’s already taken my job. So what are we doing here?”  The AI industry has saturated even its users with this mixture of resignation and dread.

Bodrum Castle, Türkiye Sept 12, 2025   

 

 

At our friend Andrea’s birthday in Hampshire last weekend, the Man in the Lime Suit said to me above the din, “they’ve taken the spark out of everyone. Taken what’s inside people that belongs to them and makes them act.”  I nodded. The spark never does go out, but I knew exactly what he meant.

 

The spark to make one’s own things is the origin and outcome of teaching and research. It leads to a set of powers in art to show what’s not seen and to diverge from what exists. 

 

In politics, it’s to break with a nightmare of the present, and build an alternative to it, brick by brick, where you have to make most of the bricks yourself. 

 

In management, the spark enables the creation of the positive narrative of your institution’s destiny and the coordination of your people into a powerful movement towards it. (I wrote about these linked elements last time.)

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

I’m opposed to the University of California’s current responses to the Trump Administration’s multiple shakedowns.  I want to explain why, and suggest an alternative, by starting with Charlie Kirk, shot dead on September 10^th on a public college campus.

 

Kirk’s killing deprives Trump’s movement of its best youth storyteller. Kirk told stories about current issues like migration, the Great Replacement of white people, and universities eating the brains of the people. Kirk worked, like Steve Bannon, in cultural narrative as a power that drives politics and state action downstream. In 2024 he ran his You’re Being Brainwashed Tour through the country’s campuses including Cas Mudde’s, who noted the escalation from his 2018 “exposing lies and leftist propaganda” tour. The Evil University was a central villain in Kirk’s script, not a bit player, and Kirk sought to stigmatize, censor, suppress, discredit, and revile it. He succeeded, as Jamelle Bouie nicely explains. 

 

Paris on September 1, 2016    

By Sean L. Malloy, Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), University of California, Merced

In early August 2025, the Trump administration extended its shakedown of higher education, which had previously focused on elite private universities such as Harvard and Columbia, to target the University of California (UC), the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. Beginning with UCLA, the administration froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding and demanded a $1 billion ransom along with other changes, including an end to gender-affirming care.  In response, the UC has launched a glitzy PR campaign enlisting alumni (including UCLA grad and Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to make the case for the university while urging Californians to “Stand Up for the UC.”  

 

UC Santa Barbara on March 5, 2020     

On Friday August 8, the Trump administration demanded a $1 billion "settlement" from UCLA after freezing $584 million in federal grants for vital scientific and health research. The proposed $1 billion agreement would be the largest settlement since Trump began extorting universities, and marks the first attempt of the federal government to ransom payment from a public university. These attacks have been waged under the guise of fighting antisemitism and investigating alleged Title VII violations, but we see them for what they are: an attempt to cripple public higher education in the nation’s premier public university system. 

Hyde Park, Chicago on June 25, 2017   

It’s great when you’re President of the United States and are unlawfully taking apart the national system for funding STEM research, and then some big universities step in and cut their non-STEM units instead.

 

Case in point: in July, UChicago’s Division of Arts and Humanities announced plans for a reorganization that would cut its number of departments in half, among other things.  The announcement came “just three months after UChicago Arts and the Humanities Division rebranded as a consolidated division.” In mid-August, the Division’s dean, Deborah Nelson, announced a reduction of PhD admissions for some departments and a full “pause” in others.  A week later, Nelson announced that the pause in PhD admissions would cover the entire Division, with a couple of exceptions. 

UCLA on May 14, 2018    

It’s a Friday in the 6^th grade, when you eat at the lunch truck parked outside the school gate. While standing in line, the big kid behind you grabs the five-dollar bill out of your hand. When you turn around, he smirks and says, “I’ll give you this five back if you give me a ten.”  

 

This is the genius shakedown that Trump has imposed on UCLA.  He announced the freezing of $300 million, which UCLA officials said is really $584 million.  Two days later, it was like the first Dr. Evil scene in Austin Powers.  “We hold UCLA ransom for--one BILLION dollars.”

 

Obviously, the choice can’t be to pay $1 billion to get back $584 million. The choice is to say okay, keep the $584 million, or, instead, sue to get back the $584 million that has been (unlawfully) withheld. 

 

It’s not really a choice. UC must pick door number two.

No Regrets Sunday Morning, Victoria Line   

I’ve often broached this topic, most recently in relation to the new UC Irvine plan for hyper-austerity (Liner Note 32; budget analysis in 31 and 33).   This question of professionals’ managerial authority is raised again by some faculty responses to the Columbia and Brown University deals with the Trump Administration, and to the new Trump attack on UCLA. 

 

One professor has aptly summarized the current situation as “a strange moment between critique and advocacy [in which] the two are inseparable.”  Faculty are still critiquing the responses of senior managers as lacking cooperation across the sector—Harvard is off by itself in the Ivy League in suing rather than signing with the Trump Administration. Some, like the members of the UCLA Faculty Association, continue to expose the futility of anticipatory obedience.  

Milos, Greece, on July 19, 2025   

There’s a drift towards seeing the Penn and Columbia University deals with the Trump Administration as templates for settlements across higher ed.  Secretary of Education Linda McMahon calls the Columbia Agreement a “road map for elite universities,” likely meaning Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, Princeton and even Harvard, which have all be subjected to the Administration’s unlawful funding freezes.

This would be a great way to further degrade the entire sector, and must be blocked.

 

A bit of background: When you are the weaker party as a long-term cultural cold war becomes a hot institutional war, you must create a public understanding of who you really are. It should include something like the following elements:

 

 

Kleftiko, Milos, Greece on July 21, 2025   

by Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

 

Note: This text is based on a longer paper completed in February 2024. In the following months, three prominent US-based journals promptly declined considering it for publication. In my mind, this proved the paper’s main point: that the modern West, including the academy, cannot genuinely entertain novel ideas, proposals and practices emerging from the world’s peripheries, essential to the fundamental task of rethinking and reconstructing the world. Ergo, it must be pushed into thinking, being, and doing otherwise than it does as a matter of life and death. My thanks to Christopher Newfield for including it in his blog, and to Clive Dilnot for his generous and pointed feedback. 

 

UCI May 25, 2018   

We saw in Part 1 that UCI Finance attributes losses to the Schools –the academic core—rather than to the non-core or medical center activities associated with research and various auxiliary services.  We also noted that in FY23 UCI needed to find $132.3 million in institutional funds to cover research costs. One result is unfortunate: dramatic cuts are coming to the core. 

 

Non-core and UCI Health may be conducting layoffs as well, but I haven’t seen any indication of this. The UC rule of thumb has been cuts to the educational core come only as a last resort.  It’s often honored in the breach, and I don’t see that UCI is following it now. 

 

UCI’s core funding is governed by a new Budget Model and multi-year planning process. It was tried out in 2024 -25 (FY25) and has been modified for the upcoming year (2025-26 or FY 26). 

 

Serpentine, Hyde Park London May 18, 2025   

UC Irvine is facing major cuts to its academic core, bigger in some places than others.  UCI lecturer Trevor Griffey analyzed them as the state budget was passed by the legislature. This post started life as the introduction to my analysis, UCI Part 2, but it has taken on a life of its own. 

 

As I mentioned in Part 1, there’s a national pattern at work, which is to assume and accept an even worse austerity norm – hyponormalization—rather than taking Trump’s assault on the foundations of the knowledge system as an opportunity to confront and change the university’s contradictory political economy. 

 

The confrontation will mean critique of various theories of the costs of college instruction that shape the thinking that operates universities. These theories are mostly bad, yet they are always with us.

 

Australian National University    

by Prof. Kylie Message-Jones, The Australian National University

The Australian National University (ANU) has said it needs to reclaim a budget shortfall of $250m. To do its bit, the College of Arts and Social Sciences last week published a roadmap to meet the University’s goal for its areas. Its change proposal boils down to a list of cuts that will damage staff, students, as well as local families, communities and economies. 

 

It might help to put the ANU’s situation in context. Although ANU is a small institution by Australian standards, with roughly 4500 staff and 22,000 students, it has historically been high performing. In the recently released QS 2026 World University Rankings, ANU, a member of the prestigious Group of Eight network, slipped slightly to come in fourth out of 36 Australian universities and 32^nd globally.

 

UC Irvine on May 8, 2018   

As Trump’s blunderbuss shoots the bottom out of the research boat, how will UC Irvine, the system’s middle case, stay afloat?

This is actually a national question. Trump has done a classic “heighten the contradictions” of the political economy of the US research university. 

 

This political economy has always been unstable, and three decades of reductions in per-student state funding have kept the boat rocking back and forth. Now the Trump Administration has blown holes in most sources of federal research funding. Meanwhile, state funding is mainly flat or down, and will be under renewed pressure as the provisions of Trump’s tax cut bill come into effect.

 

Dún Laoghaire Ireland on June 18, 2025

I haven’t found dissent in the standard places about Penn’s capitulation to Trump on transgender women athletes.  Maybe it’s because the deal seems to have gotten Penn’s $175 million back—those federal funds that Trump’s people had unlawfully suspended.  So let me say why it’s so bad. 

 

You may have heard that Penn president J. Larry Jameson settled with Trump’s Department of Education over the alleged Title IX violation of allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete for the Penn’s women’s team in 2021-22. This was actually Title IX compliance, since NCAA and Title IX guidance then required Penn to include trans women in women’s sports. (The Athletic has a good overview. See also Johanna Alonso at IHE.)