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.)

 

In practice, these capabilities lead to divergence, conflict, confrontation and pitched battling.

This spark is what the right organizes to stamp out.  They got Disney CEO Bob Iger to agree with Trump to cancel the First Amendment via the Jimmy Kimmel suspension. That happened as the Regents of the University of California started the school year by loading up on ammo to use on its students.  (See Javeed Kaleem’s “Pepper-balls, rifle rounds, drones: UC police get green light for more weapons.”) 

Later there was Jimmy Kimmel’s uncancellation. It marked less the return of the First Amendment than the continuation of the regime’s underlying power to cancel speech rights by proxy. What shortly followed was the indictment of former FBI director James Comey on phony charges, which promises a new round of persecutions of perceived enemies, to be intensified by Trump’s National Security Presidential Memoradum (NSPM-7) on domestic terrorism. (See Jeff Sharlett's “Rubber-Glue Fascism” and Hasan Abi's explication,"This is Straightforward Facism.")

There’s a systematic strategy behind this, and Will Saletan has a very clear explanation of the overall Trumpist crusade against dissenting speech and basic debate.  I’m going to going through it in a moment.

This isn’t because I think you don’t already grasp the situation. It’s because I’m not feeling the wider spark required for resistance and full counterhegemonic narratives.

Here’s an example. The Trump regime is expanding its unlawful probes to the California State University System. As LA Times reporters Clara Harter and Jaweed Kaleem point out,

 

The new CSU probes leave almost no public universities in California untouched by antisemitism investigations under the Trump administration. The EEOC is also working with the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of antisemitism on all 10 University of California campuses, where officials have complied with federal orders to turn over hundreds of employees’ contact information to the government.

Harter and Kaleem spoke to faculty at Cal State LA.

Jeffrey Santner, a Jewish faculty member at Cal State L.A., said he is not worried about antisemitism on campus and did not feel like it was a problem during the 2024 protests.

 

He said he assumes the probe is related to the Cal State L.A. pro-Palestinian encampment, and feels the investigation is an example of the government equating anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitism.

 

“I think most of us probably disagree with [that] and don’t think that the government is the same as a religion,” he said.

 

Santner said he wasn’t surprised by the chancellor’s response, given the Trump administration’s funding threats to universities that don’t comply with its demands.

 

“It would be nice if we fought back ... if our leader tried to take some leadership, since we have so many universities,” he said. “But the government is the government; it’s big and powerful.”

 

All good here until the last paragraph.  Santner does not equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, doesn’t think pro-Palestinian protests are anti-Semitic, seems fine with encampments as First Amendment expression of political viewpoints, opposes theocracy, and has, with experience, lowered his expectations for administrative speech.

 

But he’s wrong to say, “it would be nice if we fought back … if our leader tried to take some leadership.”  Fighting back is not optional but essential.  Putting fighting the “would be nice” category is the lack of spark. 

 

This is not about Prof. Santner as an individual, who sounds like a smart, reasonable colleague. This is about our professional-managerial class in which the professionals have mostly given up the struggle with managers, except in extreme cases that provoke the one-off intervention.

 

Professional submission is most easily induced by managerial  budget discourse. It’s especially effective because managers display their own submission to budget forces and so convince professors et al. that they’re not putting one over on them.  In my next post, I’ll get to the latest example, from the September UC Regents budget committee meeting.

 

But worse now is the submission to relentless federal government cancellations of basic academic freedom. My point here isn’t only that the view, “fighting would be nice to have,” will always fail against a serious threat. My point is that “fighting would be nice to have” is tailor- made to lose to Trumpian strategy. It’s the exact political affect Trumpism most wants in its enemy.

Will Saletan on September 27, 2025

SO: The Bulwark is a never-Trumper Republican operation, run by constitutionalist moderates and conservatives with William Kristol as a key figure. They do know how to fight (a good intro to their position is Tim Miller’s confrontation with the editor of The Daily Caller). Saletan’s Bulwark episode starts like this. 

We've been telling you for some time that Donald Trump is an authoritarian, and now there's a new threat, which is we might not be allowed to tell you that anymore.

 

Mentioning Trump’s defiance of court orders, sending troops into cities against the will of local officials, overriding due process with summary deportation, he says,

 

This is authoritarian government. And by corrupting law enforcement and using the military to seize more power, it is a fascist government.

 

What I want to talk to you about today is the next stage of their seizure of power. They are trying to criminalize anyone who points out that they are authoritarian.

 

Saletan focuses on Trump’s right-hand ideologue and U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance.

 

Here he is on Wednesday after a shooter attacked an immigration enforcement building in Dallas and killed a detainee. Vance didn't just blame the shooter who acted alone. He used the shooting to go after Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California.

 

[Vance]: “When Democrats like Gavin Newsom did say that these people are part of an authoritarian government, when the left-wing media lies about what they're doing, when they lie about who they're arresting, when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement, what they're doing is encouraging crazy people to go and commit violence.”

 

That is a clear warning from the vice president. If you use the A word, if you say, this is an authoritarian government, you are inciting violence. And that's not the only forbidden word.

 

If you use the F word, fascism, you are also guilty of inciting violence. Here's what Vance said on Thursday in an interview with Laura Ingraham.

 

[Vance:] “A reasonable response to fascism, to Nazism would be violence, right? So what they're saying effectively is that you should engage in violence because the regime, using Jasmine Crockett's words, are so bad.”

 

And never mind the A word or the F word. If you so much as suggest that people on the right are responsible for political violence, you, just by saying that, are, according to Vance, inciting violence on the left.

 

 After a couple of examples, Salaten gets to universities.

 

ABC, NBC, CBS, who's next? And they're not just going to take people off the air. They're going to use the power of federal funding to pressure universities to crack down on free speech that Vance considers incitement.

 

[Vance]: “If you are using federal dollars to incite violence against conservatives, you're not going to get those federal dollars anymore, and we're looking at that right now. So Georgetown needs to make sure that it's actually making it safe for everybody, whether they're liberal or conservative, to express their views.”

 

And then they're going to dismantle the network of people who, according to Vance, celebrate violence or apologize for violence. They're going to treat these people as accessories to crime.

 

We’ve been seeing this process of pre-convicting universities of incitement via the research funding extortion racket. The strategy is moving forward so that any isolated protect or unapproved speech act by one student will be treated as the university’s consent to incitement.

 

This is telling university administrators to take pro-Palestinian speech to zero on the grounds that any advocacy on campus makes university officialdom a collective accessory to the crime of incitement. This claim has been made about critique of Charlie Kirk’s white nationalist speech, which takes a big step away from the anti-Semitism cover. It can be extended to apply to rallies for DEI programs or affirmative action or a human rights student club, any of which could be interpreted as “inciting” anger at the right and potential violence gains them.

 

For the skeptics among you who think liberal officials won’t cave to obviously unconstitutional arguments, Saletan has this reminder:

 

Now, you might think that the Constitution of this country protects you from being prosecuted for speech. But Vance is making it clear that they're going to use the term incitement to void that protection and go after you.

 

[Vance]: “But the First Amendment does not protect imminent incitements to violence. If you are actively promoting your fellow man to kill other people, that is not protected by the First Amendment. And we have to be clear about that. We have to go after that stuff.”

 

[Saletan:] Look, this is complete bullshit. Vance and the rest of these goons in the Trump administration are stretching the definition of incitement to criminalize dissent. And on the other side, they are totally blowing off incendiary language on the right.

 

And yet that is exactly the framework universities will need to defy. Right now, as Sean Malloy pointed out, they are collaborating or lying low, which is basically the same thing.

 

Around 100% of the official higher ed defiance is coming from one university, Harvard, which is singlehandedly succeeding in court.  Other university administrators are not rushing in to be on Harvard’s winning side.

 

This is a ridiculous situation. Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (of all people) clearly states what should be happening.

The idea that each university has to fight this battle by themselves, that’s truly crazy to me. . . . And I know it’s hard. I know it’s scary. But any time a university is attacked, there should be 500 university presidents standing up together, or 1,000 boards of trustees standing up together and saying, ‘We’re in solidarity.’ And that would send such a different message.”

 

Higher ed officialdom’s current message is, “we aren’t people who fight.”  This is easy read as, “Universities don’t offer anything worth fighting for.” This is the worst possible message at a very bad time.

 

The defiance has come from alliances of employees unions, faculty groups like Save Our Science, and other organizations, particularly the American Association of University Professors.

 

·      Attempts to reveal the extent of (and to stop) the disclosure of personal identifying information to the Department of Education by UC campuses have come from the Council of UC Faculty Associations (like the San Diego Faculty Association) and from individual faculty members like Judith Butler.

 

·      UC unions, not the UC Regents, have sued the Trump administration on the grounds that Trump “is illegally forcing ‘ideological dominance’ over a UC education, has violated the constitution and endangered jobs by suspending research grants and seeking a $1.2-billion fine against UCLA,” while violating “employee free speech and due process rights” (AAUP et al. v Trump).The headline for the Kaleem article got at the issue: “UC employees, not waiting on leaders, sue Trump for ‘financial coercion’ over UCLA cuts.”

 

·      Earlier, a group of faculty researchers, not the UC Regents,  sued and have won restoration of over $500 million of UCLA grants suspended by the Trump administration.  This was an interesting and important filing by six UC researchers “on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated.” It assembled a pattern of unlawful suspensions across multiple government agencies (including the NEH) and has generated a series of temporary injunctions from Judge Rita F. Lin.  (See the information page set up for Thakur v. Trump, No. 25-cv-04737-RFL, 2025 WL 1734471, filed N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025.)  Effects are ongoing, and they include the restoration of UCLA’s $500 million that the Trump Administration has suspended

 

These are wonderful and effective initiatives that make a real difference. They have a couple of limitations.

 

First, they express the fracturing of the higher education sector between its senior managers--governing boards on the one hand and the mass profession on the other, including its staff and students.  “Colleges are Torn” is the right headline since university heads are sending journalists and the society a bunch of mixed messages that will prevent people from rushing to higher ed’s defense. Universities need to unite around action, starting with lawsuits, rather than demobilizing everyone with this waiting-and-seeing from their boards and presidents.

 

The second problem is that these actions aren’t generating a daily unending stream of commentary that intervenes in the discourse.  An alliance of unions needs to have a media wing, not for a press release but for nonstop daily broadcasting of the same positive, powerful realities of higher education over and over and over again, sending podcasting and constant writing and social-media-ing counternarratives all over the place. 

 

I am not sure why this seems so hard to do.  Charlie Kirk did it, for god’s sake.  There are models (high-volume like The Bulwark, weekly like Behind the News etc.)  There are 4000 colleges and universities.  There are 19 million students.  There are so many professional associations. We can actually build a much better velocity and coordination of counternarratives as a national practice.

 

Finally, attack theory is already in place. There’s the tireless Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. I’ve discussed his foundational insight about Trump from August 2015, when he correctly asked “how a doofus and blowhard, awash in derp, can nonetheless have a tactical genius that allows him to defeat all enemies again and again.” The answer is speed in the operations loop: “whoever controls the tempo controls the fight” (see Highlights 12).  Higher ed isn’t in the loop and has no tempo.

 

Marshall recently wrote on this again.

 

my perennial axiom: We are in a contest of spectacles of power. The first and most important thing is not to react or complain or bewail but to attack. To this end, where I would start, especially if I were a Democratic elected official, is by taunting every journalist I came into contact with from ABC, CBS and every other news and media organization that is now owned by the White House — which is a rapidly growing list. It may soon include CNN if Paramount/Skydance succeeds in purchasing Warner Brothers Discovery. “Yes, I will happily answer your question, but first, how can we trust your company, since it is owned by Donald Trump? You have to do whatever he demands.”

 

Every time. Attack and attack and attack. Don’t complain. Attack. People are bewildered by what they’re seeing. They don’t like it. Everything that raises the salience of this issue is a win. They want to see someone talk back. There is a rich history which correctly views the tyrant not as a symbol of strength but as a weak and contemptible figure, vain and fragile, addicted to fawning and praise, murdered in his heart by the most innocuous of criticism. The whole system of autocracy is one built on individual degeneracy, the strongman and the toadies together.

 

The general point is very true.  It’s true in higher education, where people need to see universities talking back.  Are they seeing this?

 

So basic attack theory: attack is the prerequisite for respect from the opposition. Attack is the prerequisite for respect from your own people.   Attack is a prerequisite for converting opponents to your side.  Attack is the mode in which one’s movement story is written while one’s base is being organized. 

 

Higher ed as a body must try it. The specific examples above are a really good start.

 

 

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. 

 

But crucially, Kirk’s narrative was anchored in institutions, which were in turn tied to an unending series of gatherings around events. His organization, Turning Point USA, was famous for rallies and festivals that made people feel like they were part of a community. This sense of belonging increased receptivity to the message and helped lock in agreement.  The dire content of the vision—violent, eliminationist white theocracy—doesn’t change the effectiveness of the community-building.  Having state power is enormously important, but it can flounder and fail without popular embrace (by a large base) and without demobilization (of opponents) as generated by sense-making tales that also form social attachments.

 

The same rules apply to universities: a clear, attractive story, rooted in well-supported internal communities, will lead sooner or later to majority embrace and political power.

 

I regret to say that university officials do neither the compelling popular narrative nor the supported community.  This is in spite of the glaring alienation of half the population from universities, in spite of analysts of far-right politics like Jared Yates Sexton saying for years that the right’s narrative addresses a “crisis of meaning and purpose” that liberals and the left must better address, and in spite of this blog and its related scholarship joining many other voices in proposing concrete ways to define and serve popular educational and social needs.  Even after a decade of Trump deciding the agenda, university officials reject the key elements of a stronger narrative that would win people back.  And UC’s senior managers like many of their counterparts, deconstruct their own communities with secrecy, deception, banality, and/or exposure to harm.

 

We all recently learned that UC Berkeley complied with Department of Education (DEd) demands and sent its Office of Civil Rights (OCR) the names and other personally identifiable information of 160 people accused of having some relation to “alleged antisemitic incidents.”  Berkeley officials informed the named people several weeks after the fact, while continuing to withhold the documents involved and the nature of the charges and also bypassing mandated campus procedures whereby the accused are able to answer.

 

Here a campus made famous for supporting the civil rights movement has suspended a basic civil right of 160 of its own people, while barely getting around to telling them about it.

 

UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler nicely laid out the civil rights dimensions on Democracy Now (Part 1 and Part 2).  Outrage poured in from far-flung places.  Former Greek Minister of Education Kostas Gavroglu and colleagues wrote from Athens:

 

We are deeply disturbed and outraged to hear that University of California at Berkeley, renown for academic probity and critical education, is pursuing baseless “allegations of antisemitic harassment and discrimination” against Professor Judith Butler and 160 of her colleagues initiated by the Trump Administration.  Judith Butler is a leading international scholar in philosophy, feminist and queer theory and critical studies. The allegation of “antisemitic harassment and discrimination” against a scholar who has been fighting racism, sexism and homophobia all their life is absurd. Professor Butler has been open about their critique of the policies of the state of Israel but has always fought against racism and antisemitism. Generations of scholars and students around the world have learnt from their scholarship which has been a beacon for combating antisemitism and discrimination. Professor Butler is innocent of these absurd allegations. The stigma on Berkeley for assisting this witch hunt will remain.

 

Berkeley’s compliance with the undisclosed order is also likely unlawful. The Berkeley Faculty Association explains:

 

We believe the release of PII [personally identifiable information] was wholly unnecessary and legally improper. As you [Chancellor Lyons and Chief Campus Counsel Robinson] know, an OCR investigation is not intended to determine whether students, faculty, or staff have violated any civil rights laws, but whether the university itself is in compliance with Title VI’s non-discrimination mandate. Personal information about individuals associated with discrimination complaints is irrelevant to a legitimate investigation into an institution’s management of such complaints. OCR’s demand for the broad disclosure of names of “all” individuals who have a “potential connection to reports of alleged antisemitism” does not meet the standard of relevance, and creates a substantial risk of harm to those individuals, including to their substantive and procedural rights under the Constitution.

 

BFA asks their administration to commit to open consultation with faculty, students, and staff about such requests for information, to refuse voluntary agreements, and to reject interference in campus personnel and disciplinary matters.  Their surprisingly necessary demand is that UC Berkeley restore the integrity of its own mandated procedures in the face of federal override.

 

To our theme, BFA is in effect calling on Berkeley’s senior managers to rebuild the community integrity that is the prerequisite to winning a fight.

 

It gets worse. UC Berkeley turns out to be the best case scenario in the UC system. Butler reported that “all of the University of California campuses gave names,” but none of the others told any of the people involved. (The compliance order apparently came from new UC president James Milliken.) Trump’s OCR now has an unknown number of names of UC people, accused of unknown offences by unknown accusers, with the non-Berkeley UC accused having no knowledge of being on an OCR list.  

 

Rooting around to explain a completely unacceptable situation in which UC people are given up by their own officials, someone found a Resolution Agreement between UC Office of the President on behalf of 5 campuses and the OCR. The named campuses are UC Davis, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz (but not Berkeley).  UC made this deal on December 18, 2024 with Biden’s OCR.  Without announcing this Agreement across the campuses (to the best of my knowledge), UCOP put the Title VI procedures of at least those campuses into a de facto federal receivership. 

 

Agreement Item I gives OCR the right to review and approve the “University’s systemwide anti-discrimination policies, procedures, and guidelines that it uses to address its compliance with Title VI.” (I.A). Mississippi can gerrymander Black residents out of a congressperson without federal consent but UC requires federal consent to change a single harassment policy.

 

II is Investigator Training, and III is Public Safety and Campus Officer Training.  The Agreement does see policing as part of the problem. The emphasis is learning to “respond promptly and effectively to alleged discrimination, including harassment, of [the University’s] students and employees.” Another emphasis is on support of students subjected to discrimination, notification, and timely resolution.  In addition, the Agreement explicitly calls for remedies for discrimination against Muslim students.  My sense is that by turning over names, UC campuses have breached the due process elements the University accepted in December.

 

Item IV, however, is an Audit of the 5 campuses of “all complaints and reports alleging discrimination, including harassment and disparate treatment, on the basis of actual or perceived national origin, including shared Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim, and/or Arab ancestry, or association with these national origins/ancestries, during the preceding year Paragraph IV.A lists a remarkable 23 fields of information that each campus’s “sortable spreadsheet” must include.  It requires that UC disclose personally identifiable information like the name of the complainant, their institutional status, and the name of the alleged discriminator.

 

I was shocked to be reading this for the first time.  UCOP officials knew when they signed it that it would be applied by Trump’s Office of Civil Rights, not Biden’s.  Biden would be gone in a month so what was the point? The Agreement may have served as a template for Trump’s demands of Columbia University and other universities. In my non-expert opinion, it breaches the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that protects the privacy of student educational data—one could at least make a case. As UC strategy, it seems deeply inept. And, again to the theme, UCOP doesn’t protect its own community but exposes it to danger. It does this without the due process or the basic decency of openly explaining what they did or how they will minimize the damage.

 

We can’t actually get to the glorious university counternarrative when admin should be sent to remedial education, so I will skip that here.  I’ll end with one last instance of admin’s abandonment of its community: the missing lawsuits. 

 

The first level of counter-narration for administrators is the lawsuit. Lawsuits tell stories, and universities have a really good one, which is that their essential functions are being illegally attacked by a tyrant who seeks their destruction. 

 

Universities are failing to point this out by suing over it, even though lawsuits joined by many cooperating universities would establish a national narrative. The isolation of Harvard as sole U.S. litigant disgraces the rest of the sector. The failure to use the law to tell the story that Trump’s power forces false charges down university throats will haunt higher ed for years to come. 

 

Meanwhile, Harvard has just defeated the Trump Administration over funding suspensions in district court, and a group of UCLA professors won their initial case in August. The difference is that the Harvard administration brought the first suit and UCOP didn’t join their own professors in the second. 

 

Worse, one UC professor lawsuit has had to be directed at the UC administration. Also on September 15^th, “the University of California Los Angeles Faculty Association (UCLA-FA) and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) representing faculty across all ten University of California (UC) campuses, filed a lawsuit under the California Public Records Act (CPRA) demanding access to the proposed settlement agreement sent by the U.S. Department of Justice to the University of California on August 8, 2025.”  Although Jaweed Kaleem at the Los Angeles Times has now reported on its contents, UCOP and UCLA continue to refuse to disclose the actual document to the overall UC organization.

 

UCOP’s tribute to Charlie Kirk lies in neither offering a full, positive counternarrative to Kirk’s very widespread one, which allows his to stand, nor building solidarity on its own campuses, which allows the right to rule.   Milliken et al. need to reverse direction on both fronts.

 

 

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. 

The coalition of UC unions urges the University of California not to capitulate to the Trump administration

In a message to the UC community on August 8, President Milliken asserted that this payment would "completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians." The Regents now have to decide if they will surrender to the Trump administration’s demands. As workers who have fought for academic freedom, equity in the workplace, and economic justice, we urge the Regents to refuse any compromise that undermines our values and puts workers at risk. Capitulating to the Trump administration will not only harm crucial life-saving research and healthcare, and the California taxpayers who have funded it, but will also undermine the educational experience of hundreds of thousands of present and future UC students, and threaten a major engine of the Californian and national economy. The University of California system:

• Is California’s third largest employer, with spending and activities that support more than a half million jobs across California.  
• Powers cutting edge innovation, producing an average of five inventions every day and powering California’s tech sector, biotech breakthroughs, climate solutions, and medical advancements. 
• Produces  $21 in economic output for every $1 of investment in the UC
• Generates  $82 billion in annual economic activity, helping to make California the fourth largest economy in the world.

It is imperative that in their response to this attack, UC leaders negotiate with the knowledge that what is at stake is not just research grant funding for UCLA, but the future of federal funding for the UC system, California’s political autonomy, and public higher education across the U.S. For that reason, President Milliken and the Regents should exhaust all available resources to  resist the Trump administration’s extortion and protect our scientific enterprise and the values that undergird its excellence.

The coalition of UC unions demands that the California state government step up to fight fascism and defend the future of the Californian economy.

While the current onslaught has little parallel, Californians have confronted threats to higher education before. Twenty years ago, when stem cell research was restricted under the Bush administration, the people of California voted overwhelmingly for the state to take the lead and fund new initiatives, which lead to groundbreaking research that has informed treatments for Parkinsons, spinal cord injury, and Type 1 diabetes. 

 

Trump’s assault is a clear attack not only on public higher education but on the most progressive state in the country. California has led the way on many progressive fronts, and it is time for it to set an example for the rest of the country in fighting fascism. California was the first state to legally end school segregation; Trump is trying to resegregate the public university.  The UC educates more first-generation and low-income students than any other major research university system in the country; Trump is trying to discontinue scholarships that support economic mobility and lift families out of poverty. California has led the charge in providing quality access to gender-affirming care and become a sanctuary state for transgender individuals; Trump is trying to end access to life-saving care and medication. California was the first state to commit to a statewide $15 per hour minimum wage for large employers; Trump is threatening half a million jobs and job security across the state. 

 

California can lead the way once again and defend public education and the future of the Californian economy: instead of continuing the historical trajectory of declining per-student funding, it is time for the state of California to stand its ground, for Newsom to double down on his fight against Trump’s regime, and for the legislature to increase funding to the UC to support the vital role it plays in millions of Californian lives and livelihoods.

 

Together we, employees of the University of California, demand: 

No concessions

No capitulation

No cuts

 

Yes to jobs

Yes to educating future leaders 

Yes to healthcare autonomy 

Yes to lifesaving research

Yes to protecting an engine of economic mobility

 

Signed, 

Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA)

UC American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), 

American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees 

(AFSCME) 3299 

California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee 

(CNA-NNOC) 

Committee of Interns and Residents-Service Employees International Union 

(CIR-SEIU)

United Auto Workers (UAW) 4811

American Association of University Professors (AAUP)

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.

 

California governor Gavin Newsom has already picked that door. “We’ll sue,” Newsom announced during a press conference.  

 

 “He has threatened us through extortion with a billion-dollar fine, unless we do his bidding,” Newsom said.

 

“We will not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom on this extraordinary public institution. We are not like some of those other institutions,” he said.

 

New UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk and even newer UC president James Milliken have both denounced Trump’s demands. Milliken said, “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.”  

 

Parts of UC admin still seem itching to surrender. Jaweed Kallem and Michael Wilner report that one “senior UC official said the [$1 billion] figure was understandable if it resolved all federal investigations across the system, even if UC may not ultimately agree to it.” UC Regents Chair Janet Reilly said the “university was still willing to negotiate,” though not on “unacceptable” terms.

 

Now and then, I’m grateful for Gavin Newsom. He grasps that staying free of Trump requires fighting Trump.  

 

This is in pleasant contrast to the silence of much of the Democratic party, to the lapdog Republican party, and to the abject submission of the country’s most powerful CEOs, lined up behind him as a court endorsement at the inauguration, failing to emit a word of criticism of his destruction of the federal research system on whose back their businesses were built, or carrying gifts of gold to the Oval Office Domination Theater.  Here Tim Cook, Apple CEO, angling for a chip tariff carve-out, serves Trump a special trophy. 

In contrast, Newsom gets that there’s no percentage in a Trump deal except for Trump. California has already sued the Trump Administration 37 times, and UC should be lawsuit 38.   Attorney General Rob Bonta’s weekly email could be titled “California v. Trump” or “We Sued the Feds.”  

 

In June, Newsom tweeted a truly interesting threat to impound California’s federal income tax payments. It was serious enough to attract an threat from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent of charging criminal tax evasion. This isn’t the last time we’ll hear about this idea, since the Trump Administration is pushing federal obligations onto states for which they’ll need new revenues.

 

Even business is catching up: the Financial Times has a big spread called, “How Trump has turned tariffs into diplomatic shakedowns,”  It announces that “many trade experts and officials” realize a Trump deal is merely a “cudgel” whose terms will change whenever Trump needs to increase control. 

 

Same in politics: Brazil’s president, Lula Inácio da Silva, speaks for a growing group of counterparties when he says, “I won’t humiliate myself.”  

 

As object lessons, the Penn, Columbia, and Brown University agreements paved the way for the attack on UCLA (Liner Notes 30, 34, and 35). This was predictable and predicted.  The money itself is less important to the Trump project than owning the libs in the spaces they think are theirs, and performing a victorious takeover in cultural discourse. 

 

Veteran UCLA analyst Dan Mitchell is right to guess that One Billion Dollars means “the feds don't want a settlement for now and want instead to keep the pot boiling.” The boiling pot is the right’s storyline that US universities are America’s enemy and Trump is heroically conquering them. 

 

I don’t think the presidents and boards of Penn, Columbia , and Brown really get that their concession of guilt is a total defeat for universities in Trump’s cultural crusade. I’m not sure many onlookers do.  

 

So in the rest of this post, I’ll link the UCLA and other attacks to what I take to be Trump’s underlying (anti) knowledge project. I’ll then plead for systemic, cooperative counterattacks from universities and their kin. 

 

**

 

Linda McMahon’s official statements describe the university deals as part of a wholesale cultural revitalization. The ambition is on the scale of Thatcherism as described by Stuart Hall and his colleagues. Trump is affecting a “reversal” of “the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions,” the ending the tyranny of judging people by “their race or sex,” the liberating of women to compete only against other women, and a restoration of “our nation’s higher education institutions to places dedicated to truth-seeking, academic merit, and civil debate.”  

 

The Wagnerian chorus of this Glorious Revolution drowns out university claims that we “preserved our academic integrity” or retrieved “funding for life-saving research.”

 

Without intending it, the universities are speaking a language of servitude, servitude to two Trumpian imperatives. 

 

1.  The restoration of structural racism. This is a wolf in the familiar sheep’s clothing of standardized test results and purified merit. 

 

Trump has always hated the claims of people of color to achievement. His is a standard Jim Crow racism that attributes everything a BIPOC person does well to a white handout.  His belief, common in MAGA land, is that no student of color was ever admitted on personal accomplishments by a college that has rejected white students. His expectation is that if he can eliminate any consideration of all social identity, white superiority will increase the white share of students and faculty in all the universities that matter. (Do read Attorney General Pam Bondi’s total ban on social factors.)

 

Trumpian racism negates both academic freedom and a core social value of universities, which is to study culture and society in its actual radical diversity—past and present—while also incorporating that into its communities.  

 

In contrast, Trump’s is a fanatical racist agenda.  This understanding must circulate widely in the culture.

 

And yet you did not see Penn, Columbia, and Brown saying, “retaining our academic integrity, and preserving our core values, means that we will continue to practice diversity, equity, and inclusion, and study human identity and consciousness without restriction.”  Instead, they promised not to do these things, and the Trump Administration promised to discipline and punish them if it gets a whiff later of them doing any of this, which Bondi’s memo makes pretty much everything in that zone.  

 

The Trump Administration is institutionalizing its claim of blanket white superiority (in the military, the health agencies, the museums, history, etc).  It hammers this into the culture through daily, angry repetition. America awaits with baited breath the next public burning of a big pretentious university that rejects 90-95% of its applicants, which now includes UCLA.

 

University concessions on race, gender, and sexuality simply fuel this cultural purge.  Their silence on the core values they often claim, starting with the humble values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and continuing with their glory and their justice and their intellectual splendor, miseducates the country into seeing Trump and McMahon’s position as mostly factual mainstream politics.  

 

But their position destroys knowledge and politics. And it aims to take as much of the majority as possible out of the electorate and the culture.

 

Another Trumpian imperative: 

 

2. Pushing the post-knowledge society. 

 

Weakening public university funding has been a bipartisan project, covered for many years on this blog.  The issue has never been the money per se, but what the money supports:  the university’s intellectual and thus social capacities, and the resulting benefits for students, knowledge, and the whole society.

 

UC president Milliken is right to say Trump’s cuts will devastate research. But that’s because UC research already runs at a large loss.  In 2022-23, UCLA spent $356 million of its own money covering losses mainly on extramural grants (Table 58, Rank 16).  Over decades, California has withdrawn much of the state’s copayment that helped fill those gaps. UC’s perpetual fiscal crisis is a feature of state budgeting that has been enforced by Governors Pete Wilson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, and Gavin Newsom, from both political parties.  

 

Thanks to the 2024 election, the knowledge society, already made fragile by the fiscal weakening of independent researchers and creators, is now being pushed by Trump forces into post-knowledge status.  This is a condition in which knowledge has no use other than to reinforce power, or have much existence independently of that use.  

 

Trump is modeling this society by taking over programming at the Kennedy Center, and replacing the National Endowment for the Humanities programs with funding for a National Garden of American Heroes (that he pre-selects), and subjugating universities.

 

Post-knowledge is at the heart of the anti-regulation agenda.  When Trump deregulates cryptocurrency and other digital assets, he sidelines technical and financial knowledge that doesn’t directly serve the powers that own those assets.  Trumpian corruption establishes the effective non-existence of knowledge that conflicts in any way with Trump’s version of reality. Once experts and related knowers have been taken out of action, the sovereign decides what is real and what is true. Since every practice has knowledge and know how, Trumpism sees threats to post-knowledge sovereignty in farmers, undergraduate protestors, solar power retail, nurses, housing NGOs, etc.  The post-knowledge society must be structured as a tyranny.

 

The post-knowledge society is in short one where academic freedom doesn’t exist in practice, and professional autonomy doesn’t either.  At least partially self-managed professional life is replaced by line management, direct or indirect. For example, page view metrics have already shifted most journalists into cycles of 2-3 pieces per day, often mashed up from other internet fodder, with little chance for investigation, quality improvement through rewrites, and other features of quality knowledge creation. Where the general culture can’t see the value of knowledge for itself, for non-commercial or local or frankly antisystemic uses, this trend intensifies, helped along by the steady spread of AI slop.

 

The endpoint of Trumpism is to subordinate, into a state of cultural powerlessness, knowledge workers and the knowledge they produce—that’s everyone from ballet dancers and TV writers to acquisitions lawyers and the teachers and professors in between. Most will continue to exist and some will be well-paid, but, in a post-knowledge society, on terms dictated by their overlord employers.  Since these represent capital as such, Trumpism sees this as efficiency as well as control. 

 

This victory is still far from being achieved, but it is the (class) goal. To repeat, a vital step is to take the public university challenger out of the game, either by inducing self-harm--Minnesota’s hyponormalization, UC Irvine’s veiled thundercuts (Parts 1 and 2)—or with the extortion machine.

 

**

I think it’s fairly obvious that Trumpism seeks a cultural reversal as complete as Thatcherism or Reaganism against the latter-day New Deal.  It’s a radicalization of those Eighties conservatisms in that it rejects even limited coexistence with liberalism and its institutions.

 

I’m going on about this because the threat is so serious, and potentially so destructive of civil rights and knowledge culture, both always endangered in the modern U.S. That’s also why I think the only workable response is a full tilt counterattack, by universities, that aims to destroy the extortion machine itself.

 

This will involve at least a couple of things. 

 

One is lawfare, which openly challenges the legal foundation of the extortion racket. This means arguing in (and out) of court for the illegality of Trump and McMahon’s abuse of Title VI and related code.  When university administrations accept the facticity of illegal freezes, they insure they continue, and continue to strengthen Trump’s white post-knowledge hegemony.  

 

Consortia need to be organized and costs pooled. This legal fight is going to cost big.  But no doubt less than one BILLION dollars. 

 

The second is the construction of as big and noisy a cultural counternarrative as Trump’s itself.  We all know that the Trump machine rests on a network of think tanks, centers, social media stars. It also works on a speed cycle: the King of Derp is a master of the OODA operations loop. (Do read Josh Marshall’s “The Way of the Doofus Warrior,” which explains much of the subsequent 10 years of US politics).  A prime example of the speed loop are the funding freezes, created through edict-and-rant cycles, not actual law.  I’m not saying we should do lying or bullshitting, but so serious confrontation with total nonsense and its relentless dismantling.

 

It’s important to notice that noisy counternarrative can get going with a few people.  My sense is that Marc Andreessen, a leading MAGA mogul reactionary, has taken a credibility hit from the release of his WhatsApp threats against universities for daring to have considered race in admissions. The Washington Post published the texts, various outlets reported it. 

 

Then two never-Trumpers at the Bulwark, Tim Miller and Jonathan Last, did a line-by-line excoriation in “Marc Andreessen’s Ugly White Grievance Rant.” They spanked his texts within an inch of their life on grounds of both crybaby hypocrisy and a short history of the gift of free public higher education still received in the Eighties and Nineties by white boys like Marc. 

 

My point here is that maybe a dozen people, not really coordinated, but fully committed to the operating loop, exposed the racial roots of techno-optimism.  This interacts with Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres’s critique of the TESCREAL bundle for eugenicism, written for a different audience, and then other people can take it up.

 

There are “positive tipping points” via small groups. In her review of Tim Lenton’s book by that title, the FT’s Pilita Clark writes, in the midst of our climate gloom, that there are many stories like

 

how Norway became the electric car colossus it famously is today. The shift began after Morten Harket, lead singer of the pop group A-ha, joined other environmentalists in a campaign of civil disobedience aimed at highlighting the need to make plug-in cars more attractive. Following the protesters’ attention-grabbing refusal to pay road tolls, parking fees and other charges, EVs were gradually exempted from a score of levies. That ushered in an era of “learning-by-using” that saw sales of green vehicles accelerate from less than 1 per cent of the market in 2010 to nearly 90 per cent last year.

 

Universities can do this too, with their millions of students, staff, and faculty. Administrators will have to work with their academic communities rather than hold them at arm’s length. They’ll have to work with protestors rather than having them arrested.  They have to restore the great tradition of campus civil disobedience.  They’ll need to coordinate across universities, as faculty groups have often said.

 

The educational ensemble will need to build a counternarrative that reestablishes the public value of universities. Mentions may include deep human learning, involvement of the intelligence of the whole population, the struggles and pleasure of thought, the importance of thinking to human survival, the feeling of suddenly understanding, the glimpses of a system of new thought, a new capacity, the power of self-development, the ongoing sense of knowledge as emancipation. 

 

Lawfare and the reversal narrative can destroy the extortion machine. The latter can also build a much better system of higher education.