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| Sea of Marmara, Türkiye on October 3, 2025 |
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.
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| 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.)
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| UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024 |
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.
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| Paris on September 1, 2016 |
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.”
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| UC Santa Barbara on March 5, 2020 |
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| Hyde Park, Chicago on June 25, 2017 |
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.
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| UCLA on May 14, 2018 |
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.
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| No Regrets Sunday Morning, Victoria Line |
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.
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| Milos, Greece, on July 19, 2025 |
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:
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| Kleftiko, Milos, Greece on July 21, 2025 |
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.
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| UCI May 25, 2018 |
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).
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| Serpentine, Hyde Park London May 18, 2025 |
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.
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| 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 32nd globally.
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| UC Irvine on May 8, 2018 |
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.
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| Dún Laoghaire Ireland on June 18, 2025 |
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.)
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| Berlin on June 23, 2025 |
The headline is of course the chaos created for birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment by the 6-3 majority decision, written by Amy Coney Barrett. The decision doesn’t pronounce on the (flagrant un)constitutionality of Trump’s attempted nullification of birthright citizenship through executive order, but decides whether, under the “Judiciary Act of 1789, federal
courts have equitable authority to issue universal [national] injunctions.” The Six said no, except under special circumstances (complaints from states, class-action suits). The decision disempowers lower courts as they try to enforce the executive’s compliance with law, and will require the Supreme Court to adjudicate pretty much every national injunction, as far as I can tell. It will be easy enough to block national unjunctions under SCOTUS’s brand-new legal standard (not created to strike down national injunctions against Biden’s student debt relief).
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| Dublin Bay on June 17, 2025 |
It's sometimes yes on the first question, but the public versions so far suggest not fight but capitulation.
Today’s example is Minnesota--with condolences and heartfelt solidarity to everyone affected by the recent political assassinations in the Twin Cities.
The AAUP chapter at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities put together a presentation for faculty about their administration's budget announcement. They cite their administration saying, “a financial model that relies on maintaining academic programs and activities at current levels is not sustainable, nor is attempting to be great at everything.” This suggests both downsizing scale and diluting quality.
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| Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on May 28, 2025 |
While we were meeting, the Atlantic made the New Dark Age official, via a piece by Adam Serwer. This got my attention, partly because it’s true and partly because it’s a favorite phrase of mine. I relaunched this blog just before Trump’s 2024 election by calling for an epic fight for knowledge in “our new dark age.” I’d liked James Bridle’s 2018 book, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. I’d also thought a new dark age had started with the Global Financial Crisis in 2007-08, just before I’d moved to Lyon, France as the director of UC study centers there. 9/11 had militarized politics and society, the financial crisis had crushed working people and spread anger everywhere, the Obama administration bailed out Wall Street not Main Street, and the Occupy movement couldn’t counter the base of the Tea Party that led directly to Trump and MAGA six years down the road. I was also watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica at the time.
The only way deal with knowledge destruction is to ramp up knowledge creation. This was brought home to me at the start of the current crisis of federal persecution of higher education, which was the Congressional hearings in December 2023 on the alleged antisemitism epidemic on America’s college campuses. The most important first-round result was the purging of Harvard University’s first Black president, Claudine Gay.
Like most of you, I’d been following private equity mogul Bill Ackman’s vendetta against both pro-Palestinian campus speech and Harvard’s new, now ex-president Claudine Gay. He linked her with the alleged corruptions of merit known as diversity, equity and inclusion. He stoked the charge that she’s soft on antisemitism. Then he loudly pressed charges that she is a plagiarist, dubbing Harvard’s retention of her “Gaygate.” Harvard’s Corporation board finally capitulated and accepted Gay’s resignation, meaning that they let go the university’s first Black president and second woman president six months after they’d proudly hired her.
On January 2, 2024, the New York Times published Claudine Gay’s resignation letter. On January 3rd, Business Insider ran a story about Ackman’s successful campaign in which he exonerated himself of bullying charges. On January 4th, Business Insider flipped the script with their now famous story, “Bill Ackman's celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation is marred by plagiarism.” You probably remember the rest: Ackman went nuts in the defense of his wife. Among other things he promised to review every single MIT faculty member for plagiarism, using “AI.” He also had to explain an apparent double standard in which Gay had to be fired for her plagiarism while Oxman had to be excused for hers.
Part of Ackman’s attempt to distinguish the wife he was defending from the president he was hounding was to question whether it’s possible to plagiarize Wikipedia. He asked a series of incredulous questions to that effect.
Under fire, it’s not easy to know how to deal with knowledge immunity—possessed by people who are too rich, powerful, connected, or managerially entrenched to have to care about what you know that they don’t.
It’s not easy to know how to deal with plutocratic bombast. It’s especially not easy in the normal situation in which the bombast has created its own reality and the analysis will be too little too late.
And yet tech analyst Molly White dealt with these issues straight on by reviewing Ackman’s questions and answering them.
“How can one defend oneself against an accusation of plagiarizing Wikipedia for a dissertation written 15 years ago in 2009?” Ackman exclaimed. White showed him Wikipedia’s “view history” link you can click to see any page on a given date.
“Has anyone (other than my wife) ever been accused of plagiarism based on using Wikipedia for a definition of a word?” Ackman wailed. White showed him the Wikipedia page listing the many people accused of plagiarising Wikipedia.
In each case, White offered literal, professional answers to each of his questions and with less snark than they deserved.
What moved me was White’s confidence that knowledge mattered. She acted as though her knowledge could confront his power--professional knowledge could confront managerial or executive power. She wouldn’t change Ackman’s mind. But her knowledge could reduce his power by changing (or clarifying) other people’s minds. She made it less likely that he’d again defend Oxman by claiming that Wikipedia is community property that no one can steal.
Asking myself why I was so impressed by White’s approach, I saw it as a sign that my baseline assumption about the practical effects of professional expertise had gone negative during my years of scholar-activism at the University of California and then at the Modern Language Association. The lack of institutional back-up created a default sense of the inevitable triumph of mistakes.
White had started her answers by commenting about her knowledge status. She noted that she’d been editing Wikipedia since 2006, that she had over 100,000 edits, and that she’d spent six years on Wikipedia’s version of the Supreme Court. I know a little bit about Wikipedia, she said, which referred to what was a major expertise that had taken the form of a “hobby”—a serious hobby in the sense that writing open source software as part of a global network where you aren’t getting paid by a corporation is a hobby. Or that professional humanities scholarship, generally unfunded by universities or the government, is a hobby.
You nerds who also have a “niche hobby,” White said,
probably know that very unique rage that you feel when somebody tries to speak confidently about that hobby without actually bothering to learn that much about it. This happens to me a lot with Wikipedia, because everyone knows what it is. . . . But in spite of knowing what it is, people don’t actually understand much about how Wikipedia works. That apparently includes Bill Ackman, who came out today with a list of questions about Wikipedia that he’s definitely curious about, and somehow unable to look up the answers to.
So, there’s the skill and knowledge that some unknown person painstakingly builds up over years and years of their life, in total obscurity and generally at their own expense. There’s the oblivion to that skill from the figure of power, the casual not knowing that the skill much less the person even exists. There’s that big person’s indifference to the labor of finding out. There’s that big person’s demand that someone else do the work of answering the questions he could answer if he did his own work. There their replacement of knowledge with conventional wisdom propped up by their high status. There’s that figure of power’s indifference if not hostility to the people who do know—all the non-managers and the non-executives with laboriously acquired skills whom we could call the cognotariat, the vast majority of whom do not work in colleges or universities.
The situation that causes unique rage –the confident wrong speaking from empowered ignorance—afflicts knowledge institutions and runs politics and the media, which is a powerful agent in the political field. It fuels the orc armies of the worst overlords. It makes the solutions seen by ordinary people impossible to implement or even to hear. The rage comes partly from the willingness of Ackman et al. to use power without knowledge and to refuse to see knowers as agents of history. The rage comes from how well this works to keep professional knowers from seeing themselves as agents--not to mention from allying themselves with non-professional and non-university educated knowers (French farmers spring to mind, as well as authors of community projects like this digital museum co-created by one of our ISRF fellows, Dr Chamion Caballero. And so on).
The University of California was the main site where Remaking studied this core situation, in which the academic professionals—and their lives in knowledge--are ruled absolutely by amateurs. The blog has been about evidence-based argumentation as a weapon of the (relatively) weak. It sought to correct the record—the record about the budget, about the state of teaching and research in universities, about what wilful administrative blindness was making no longer possible, about the gap between publicity and reality, about everything that needed to be done. The blog has also about entirely reframing the status of knowledge work.
Of course, the wider context is the plight of knowledge and its institutions around the world. Rulers have always been bad for non-state knowledge, but today there’s a massive contradiction between the war on knowledge and the knowledge that survival requires—about climate, finance, racism, inequality, and war itself. War’s override of global cooperation is becoming the hallmark of the 2020s.
Later in “A Wikipedian explains Wikipedia to Bill Ackman,” Molly White goes into some detail about copyright, authorship and communing. Ackman wants to brush off Wikipedia apparently because he thinks that something collectively created is basically public property, and anyone can help themselves to it. This is the commons in the zone of tragedy, in which a lot of people work basically for free to create a common good of enormous and ever-growing common value, and the Ackmans ignore them, don’t pay them, disparage them, and appropriate it.
White explained that images, writing, etc. are copyrighted as soon as they are recorded – as established by the Berne Convention in 1886. This has nothing to do with plagiarism, she says, which is failing to attribute and thus take someone else’s work as your own (a labor issue!), as Oxman did. In addition, she pointed out, Wikipedia is not overall a public domain but a commons operating with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, which “requires that you attribute Wikipedia and its various editors who actually wrote that content.”
In direct opposition to Ackman, White expressed a knowledge commons founded on the rights of the creators. The rights include the right to attribution—to recognition of the labor and its product—and, unmentioned but everywhere in the knowledge crisis, the right to payment for work.
White writes for a lot of newspapers and magazines, as we used to call them. At most points in history, she would have had a full-time unionized job with benefits at a major newspaper, writing about tech with the always-developing expertise that one finds among specialized journalists like the FT’s Katie Martin on finance.
But academia’s sibling, journalism, is famously being gutted. Three weeks after its plagiarism scoop about Neri Oxman, Business Insider lost 8 percent of its staff due to cuts from its owner Axel Springer.
For a while, the sector thought it might be rescued by billionaire charity. But billionaires generally don’t care about unsung local journalism where much of the most important coverage happens, and they don’t like to lose money. The doctrinal billionaire who bought the venerable and pretty good local paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press, in the 1990s, ruined it by dictating the editorial line and by decimating its professional staff. She finally closed it in mid-2023, so a wealthy, near-majority Latino, militantly environmentalist, highly educated, well-known smallish city with a research university lacks daily news coverage, with the online Noozhawk and weekly Independent trying to cover behind-the-scenes manoeuvres during a dicey transitional period for the region. Its archives were nearly sold off to a Malta-based operator of zombie sites, and were saved only by last-minute local efforts.
Meanwhile, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post shrank staff in October 2023, while billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong started 2024 at the Los Angeles Times by cutting 115 reporters, including a set of younger Black and Latino staffers. Both have interfered editorially to shield Trump from criticism on behalf of their business interests. The long 2010s saw journalist employment fall by 26 percent.
In the mid-1980s, an unknown reporter named Gary Webb broke the Iran-Contra scandal that exposed the Reagan administration’s murderous meddling in Central America with money illegally extracted from the Iranian government. He was backed up against massive state-sponsored criticism by his paper, the San Jose Mercury-News. Would that regional paper cover a reporter caught in a global controversy today? Could it? Journalism and universities are struggling in parallel to sustain knowledge creation. Meanwhile, much of the most important work has had to become self-platforming.
The extractive structural economics infuriate me, but the people surviving and even thriving in the semi-ruins inspire me.
I’ll mention just a couple more. There’s Daniel Denvir, perhaps the most comprehensive and rigorous preparer for interviews I’ve ever heard.
There’s Paris Marx, now heading towards his 300th episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, which more or less the best critical tech podcast in English. As far I as I can tell he did the whole thing by himself each week until fairly recently. He had a breakthrough when The Nation magazine agreed to carry him in some form I wasn’t clear about, until he mentioned that they were promoting his podcast but weren’t actually paying him something to do it. He depends on Patreon—I am proud of my premium subscription, and encourage you to join me if you follow tech at all. Marx has 1443 paying subscribers after several years of brilliant and heroic work. I mean heroic, in the sense of high-quality work under a very heavily workload of reading and prepping a book and more a week while staying on top of tech in general. One day, he mentioned to another similarly accomplished younger tech intellectual that before he started the podcast he had been working as a phone agent in a call center. “Me too!” his guest replied. They’d learned a lot about the limits of tech, and no doubt helped a lot of callers like me, while also wondering, I imagine, how they could possibly take their leaps basically by their flying bootstraps into careers of non-stop and even influential analysis, which they then did.
So really this blog is the least I can do, in solidarity, to keep thinking and writing as part of a massive collective effort to build a radically different knowledge system that can repair the world.
In so doing, every problem can be paired with a knowledge response. Here’s the one I showed at our foundation meetings—ISRF research in red, other research that needs doing in black. Join us.
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| Irvine, California on May 25, 2018 |
How does it feel to be laid off unnecessarily?
June 1 is the deadline for University of California (UC) campuses to reappoint lecturers, who teach one third of all undergraduate classes at UC, for the 2025-26 school year. Our union, UC-AFT, expects hundreds of UC instructors across the state to lose their jobs, their health insurance and possibly their careers.
UC campus administrators will blame its mass layoffs on a budget cut from the state legislature. But that budget cut may never come. And even if it does, many UC campuses likely have enough money in their reserves to offset the resulting cuts.
In January, the Governor proposed cutting the UC’s general fund allocation by 8 percent, or $397 million, for the 2025-26 school year. UC campuses incorporated these cuts into their budget plans for next year.
In response to months of lobbying from faculty, students, staff, regents and even administrators, the Governor reduced his proposed budget cut on May 14 from 8% to 3%, from $397 million to $130 million. That’s a difference of $247 million, enough to save hundreds— if not thousands— of jobs from the chopping block.
Publicly, the UC President praised the proposal, saying “We are deeply grateful to Gov. Newsom for recognizing the value of the University of California’s contributions to our state in the May Revise.”
But privately, the UC’s campuses are moving forward with 8% budget cuts in 2025-26 anyway, as if the Governor never made his announcement.
At UC Irvine (UCI), where I teach US History, the effects are devastating. If UCI were not moving forward with the assumption that the state will cut UC’s budget by 8%, UCI could save as much as $21 million next year. Instead, UCI is cutting over $10 million from its schools in 2025-26. The School of Law will receive a 30% cut next year. Pharmacy, Nursing, and Arts will all be cut by more than 10 percent. Business, 8%. The School of Humanities is managing a 4% cut by laying off over 20 lecturers and likely even more graduate student employees, making it likely that there won’t be enough composition classes next year for first year students to meet the prerequisites to take upper division courses.
And so the story goes, across the state, with dozens of potentially unnecessary cuts at each campus. UC Santa Cruz, which is planning on cutting $13.7 million from its budget this year to cover for state budget cuts that may never come, is decimating its language instruction— eliminating German and Farsi instruction altogether, cutting half the Italian curriculum, eliminating second year Arabic. UC Merced, which has already budgeted for a more than $11 million cut from the state next year, has already laid off eight senior composition instructors who each had over 6 years of teaching experience. Hundreds of others nervously await the June 1 deadline for UC to reappoint them for next year.
There is a particular cruelty to UC campuses laying off instructors that it may not need to, while sitting on a combined $6.5 billion they could draw from in the Blue and Gold Endowment Pool. The Pool, which is a short-term investment vehicle for UC campuses, has had double-digit annual growth until Trump was elected. According to UC, the fund “helps our campuses increase their revenues while reducing reliance on state funds.” Campuses zeroed it out entirely in 2020, withdrawing $1.8 billion to help manage budget uncertainties during the COVID pandemic. Yet it’s not clear if any campuses plan on drawing it down to mitigate or prevent the $397 million in cuts that they’re making next year.
UC budget cuts also set up a nightmare scenario for the state government. The Governor—responding to lobbying from UC students, faculty, staff, and the public— has risked political capital by proposing to reduce the cut to UC’s budget in a year when California is facing a significant deficit. At the same time, the Governor’s revised budget includes painful cuts to health care for undocumented immigrants, and wage freezes for state employees that may violate their collective bargaining agreements.
If the California state government cuts UC’s budget only $130 million, but UC campuses continue to cut $379 million from their budgets anyway, UC won’t just inflict needless suffering on its students and teachers. It will have completely violated the goodwill of the Governor and the legislature by padding its reserves with money that could have gone elsewhere.
That’s why, if the legislature is going to protect 4-year higher education from deep cuts this year, as it should, it may have to stipulate that in exchange, no recipient of UC or CSU general fund revenue should increase its reserves during the 2025-26 school year.
The problem of UC campuses moving forward with hundreds of millions of dollars of unnecessary budget cuts also highlights a need for greater transparency in public higher education spending.
The California Legislative Analyst Office recently identified that “While the composition of the [UC] workforce has not changed much from 2014-15 through 2023-24, the most pronounced change has been in the share of managers, which has grown from 7 percent to 10 percent of the total workforce.” In addition, while UC faculty hiring has been relatively flat since COVID, the number of managers employed at its nine campuses that teach undergraduates has growth 26 percent, from 3,266 to 4,122. During that same time, the number of senior professionals working at undergraduate serving campuses increased by 39 percent, from 5,823 to 8,106.
Partly as an effect of this top-heavy growth, more than half of UC campuses are suffering from “structural deficits”, and they’re making painful cuts to instruction that should focus more on upper management and administration instead.
One fix for this lack of transparency would be for the California state legislature to require that all public four-year higher education institutions and their medical centers share their budget models for the 2025-26 school year, and each year thereafter. That way, the state legislature will be able to evaluate in future years whether the money that it allocates to UC and CSU for instruction isn’t diverted and spent in ways that don’t directly serve our schools’ students.
