Mississippi River Outside the MLA New Orleans on Jan 10 2025

by Bruce Robbins

I didn’t sign the pledge not to renew my MLA membership. (Mine is a lifetime membership, so in any case the organization would not miss out on any money from me). The pledge says, “I refuse to be affiliated with or financially support an organization that both silences its members and is complicit in genocide.” As an American, I am paying taxes that have been financially supporting the genocide, and though sorely tempted, I am (literally) unprepared to resign from the United States. Complicity with genocide is not something I can pledge away. The MLA’s silencing of its members is another story.

You can resign without signing the pledge.

The craven illogic of the Executive Council’s decision not to allow discussion of BDS has been laid out in scrupulous detail by Rebecca Colesworthy, Anthony Alessandrini, David Palumbo-Liu, and Matt Seybold, among others. Anyone who has not yet found time to read their resignation letters is passing up on an indispensable moral archive, and a very good-bad story. Anyone who does not see the power of their case-- well, I suppose all I can say is that you and I probably don’t have much to discuss with each other. But things have changed in the last month. There is a fragile ceasefire. Donald Trump is in office. Adding insult to atrocity, he is threatening to take over Gaza and displace its population permanently.

The once unimaginable things Donald Trump has been doing since he took office put the cravenness of the MLA leadership in a new light.

The leadership has demonstrated that it is afraid to listen to its members. What it has not demonstrated is a willingness to lead.  Leadership, amid the flurry of Trump’s threats and closures, blockages and executive orders, will require something other than obeying Trump’s Republicans in advance. Obeying in advance is exactly what the MLA’s Executive Council did when they claimed fiduciary responsibility and closed down debate. 

As the new McCarthyism expands, much the same anticipatory obedience is to be anticipated from university administrations. That is what Harvard offered up to Trump when it accepted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which allows vocal critics of Israeli violence to be classified as anti-Semitic (including Jews like me) and menaced with legal action. At other universities, apparently including mine, that definition is already in use behind closed doors to shut down freedom of speech and, it seems, to get student protesters deported.  

The MLA leadership did not start all this, but it certainly did nothing to stand apart from what was coming, let alone stand up to it. What we need from our leaders is principled integrity and a willingness to fight on behalf of the university’s principles and mission, if only in court (where MLA could have pledged to go), if only to defend freedom of speech. The MLA has meant a lot to me, and I don’t rule out the possibility that if it were under different leadership, I might want to participate in it again.  But that leadership would have to show that it’s leading.

And it would have to do so before Trump leaves office. No credit for waiting and seeing. As Omar El Akkad puts it, one day everyone will always have been against this. Some of us will be there to remind you that when it mattered, you weren’t.

Columbia University 

February 11, 2025

Bosphorous from Boğaziçi University on February 5, 2010

I've written two dozen posts on this blog about indirect cost recovery (ICR), going back at least to 2009. But this is my first when the topic has made national news, unfortunately as part of Trump's total war on professional knowledge (that series started here). 

ICR seems like a boring, technical budget subject.  In reality, it is a major source of the long-running budget crises of public research universities. Misinformation about ICR has also confused everyone about the university's public benefits.  

These paired problems--concealed shortfalls and midirection--didn't cause the ICR cuts being implemented by Trump's man at NIH,  one Matthew J. Memoli, M.D. But they are the basis of Memoli's rationale. 

Trump's people will sustain these cuts unless academics can create an honest counter-narrative that inspires wider opposition.   I'll sketch a counter-narrative towards the end of this post. 

The sudden policy change is that the NIH is to cap indirect cost recovery at 15% of the direct costs of a grant. This will apply to all grants to all institutions, regardless of the existing negotiated rate for each.  Memoli's Notice has a narrative that is wrong but internally coherent and plausible.

It starts with three claims about the $9 billion of the overall $35 billion budget that goes to indirect costs: 

• Indirect cost allocations are in zero-sum competition with direct costs, therefore reducing the total amount of direct research.
• Indirect costs are "difficult for NIH to oversee" because they aren't entirely entailed by a specific grant.
• "Private foundations" cap overhead changes at 10-15% of direct costs and all but a handful of universities accept those grants.

Memoli offers a solution:  

• Define a "market rate" for indirect costs as that allowed by private foundations (Gates, Chan-Zuckerberg, some others). He then claims that 
• this foundation-set market rate is equal to the share of indirect costs that are valid. The foundations' rate "discovers"  real indirect costs rather than inflated or wishful costs that universities skim to pad out bloated administrations. (Many scientists share this latter view: see UCSF's Vinay Prasad's points 3 & 4.)
• On this analytical basis, currently-wasted indirect costs will be reallocated to useful direct costs, thus increasing rather than decreasing scientific research. 

There's a logic here that needs to be confronted.  How are we doing so far? 

The current strategy is to focus on outcomes rather than on the logic of the claims or the underlying budgetary reality of STEM research in the United States.  This continues a longtime, standard response to cuts (these are by no means the first)--to call the new ICR rate cap an attack on US scientific leadership and on public benefits to U.S. taxpayers (childhood cancer treatments that will save lives, etc.).  Most current coverage feature these arguments  (Science, NYTimes, WaPo, APLU). 

For example, one scientist wrote, "The NIH cap on indirect costs will kneecap biomedical research in the US." "It will mean shuttering labs across the country, layoffs in red and blue states, & derailing lifesaving research on everything from cancer to opioid addiction," wrote Sen. Patty Murray.  The University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom put together a good BlueSky thread: 

This is all good stuff.  The next step is to file lawsuits claiming illegality and seek a court injunction.  

And yet these claims don't refute the NIH logic. Nor do they get at the hidden budget reality of academic science. 

 

On the logic: NIH-Memoli's first two points as stated above misdescribe indirect costs. They aren't in competition with direct costs because direct and indirect costs pay for different categories of research ingredients.   

Direct costs apply to the individual grant: chemicals, graduate student labor, waste disposal, that are only consumed by that particular grant.

Indirect costs support "infrastructure" used by everybody in a department, discipline, division, school, or university.  Infrastructure is the library that spends tens of thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to just one important journal that is consulted by hundreds or thousands of members of that campus community annually. Infrastructure is the accounting staff that writes budgets for dozens and dozens of grant applications from across a department or schools. Infrastructure is the building, new or old, that houses multiple laboratories: if it's new, the campus is still paying it off; if it's old, the campus is spending lots of money keeping it running.  These things are the tip of the iceberg of the indirect costs of contemporary STEM research.

In response to the NIH's social media announcement of its indirect costs rate cut, Bertha Madras has a good starter list of what indirects involve. 

Good list! Then there are people who track all these materials, reorder them, run the daily accounting and payroll, etc etc.--honestly people who aren't directly involved in STEM research have a very hard time grasping its size and complexity, and therefore its cost.  (Memoli is a NIH lab director and surely knows this.) 

As part of refuting the first claim--that NIH can just not pay for this and therefore pay for more research--the black box of research needs to be opened up, Bertha Madras-style, and properly narrated as a collaborative (and exciting) activity.

This matter of human activity gets us to the second NIH-Memoli claim, which involves toting up the processes, structures, systems, and people that make up research infrastructure and adding up their costs.  The alleged problem is that it is "difficult to oversee."  

Very true, but difficult things can and often must be done, and that is what happens with indirect costs. Every university every year compiles indirect costs as a condition of receiving research grants.  Specialized staff (more indirect costs!)  use a large amount of accounting data to sum up these costs, and use expensive information technology to do this to the correct standard. (They do routinely the very thing Elon Musk and DOGE claim to be bringing for the first time to the federal government, which is advanced IT applied to complex systems.) University staff then negotiate with federal agencies for a rate that addresses their particular university's actual indirect costs.  These rates are set for a time, then renegotiated at regular intervals to reflect changing costs or infrastructural needs.  

The fact that this process is "difficult" doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it. This claim shouldn't stand--unless and until NIH identifies flaws would need to be identified. As stated, the NIH- Memoli claim that overhead cuts will increase science is easily falsifiable.  (And we can say this while still advocating for reducing overhead costs, including ever-rising compliance costs imposed by federal research agencies. But we would do this by reducing the mandated costs, not the cap.)

The third statement --that private foundations allow only 10-15% rates of indirect cost recovery--doesn't mean anything in itself.  Perhaps Gates et al. have the definitive analysis of true indirect costs that they have yet to share with humanity. Perhaps Gates et al. believe that the federal taxpayer should fund the university infrastructure that they are entitled to use at a massive discount. Perhaps Gates et al. use their wealth and prestige to leverage a better deal for themselves at the expense of the university just because they can.  Which of these interpretations is correct?  NIH-Memoli assume the first but don't actually show that the private foundation rate is the true rate.  (In reality, the second explanation is the best.)

However, the cuts to 15% depend entirely on the private status of these foundations insuring that 15% is the true and valid ICR rate. Since they don't and  it isn't, the solution of 15% isn't right either (the second set of bullets above).  

This kind of critique is worth doing, and it can be expanded. The NIH view reflects right-wing public-choice economics that treat teachers, scientists et al. as simple gain maximizers producing private not public goods. This means that their negotiations with federal agencies will reflect their self-interest, while in contrast the "market rate" is objectively valid. (See Nancy McLean's book on James Buchanan, etc.) However, critique is only half the story.

The other half is the budget reality of large losses on sponsored research, all incurred as a public service to knowledge and society. 

Take that NIH image above. It makes no logical sense to put the endowments of three very untypical universities next to their ICR rates: they aren't connected. It makes political narrative sense, however: the narrative is that fat-cat universities are making a profit on research at regular taxpayers' expense, and getting even fatter. 

The only way to deal with this very effective, very entrenched Republican story is to come clean on the losses that universities incur.  The reality is that existing rates of ICR recovery do not cover actual indirect costs, but require subsidy from the university that performs the research.  ICR is not icing on the budget cake that universities can do without. ICR buys only portion of the indirect costs cake, and the rest is purchased by each university's own "institutional funds."  

For example, here are the top 16 recipients of NIH funds (under HHS- Heath and Human Services). The second largest is UC San Francisco, winning $795.6 million in grants in 2023. (The Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey tables for FY 2023 are here.)

UCSF's negotiated indirect cost recovery rate is 64%. This means that it has shown HHS and other agencies detailed evidence that it has real indirect costs in something like this amount (more on "something like" in a minute).  It means that HHS et al. have accepted that UCSF evidence of their real indirect costs as valid.

If the total of UCSF's HHS $795.6 million is received with a 64% ICR rate, this means that every $1.64 of grant fund has $0.64 in indirect funds and one dollar in direct.  The math-- x=(795.6/1.64)0.64 -- estimates that UCSF receives about $310 million of its HHS funds in the from of ICR.

Now, the new NIH directive cuts UCSF from 64% to 15%. That's a reduction of about 77%. Reduce $310 million by that proportion and you have UCSF keeping $71.3 million of its ICR, or losing $238 million in one fell swoop. 

There's no mechanism in the directive for shifting that into the direct costings of UCSF grants, so let's assume a full loss of $238 million.  That's over 10% of UCSF's research budget.

In Memoli's narrative, this $238 million is the Reaganite's "waste, fraud, and abuse." The remaining $71 million is legitimate overheads as measured (wrongly) by what Gates et al have managed to force universities to accept in exchange for the funding of their researchers's direct costs.  (To repeat, this is quasi-free riding on the federal government by private foundations, not a measure of real vs. fake indirect costs. We do need to make this critique.)

But the actual situation is even worse than this.  It's not that UCSF now will lose $238 million on their NIH research.  In reality, even at (allegedly fat-cat) 64% ICR rates, they were already losing tons of money. Here's another table from the HERD survey.

There's UCSF in the No. 2 national position again, a major research powerhouse.  It spends over $2 billion a year on research.  However, moving across the columns from left to right, you see federal government, state and local government, and then this category "Institution Funds." As with most of these big research universities, this is a huge number.  UCSF reports to the NSF that it spends over $500 million a year of its own internal funds on research.  

The reason? Extramurally sponsored research, almost all in science and engineering, loses massive amounts of money even at current recovery rates, day after day, year in year out. This is not because anyone is doing anything wrong.  It is because the infrastructure of contemporary science is very expensive. 

Here's where we need to build a full counter-narrative to the existing one. The existing one, shared by university administrations and Trumpers alike, posits the fiction that universities break even on research.  UCSF states, "The University requires full F&A cost recovery."  This is actually a regulative ideal that has never been achieved.  

The reality is this:

For every million dollars in research expenditures at UCSF, the university spends $250,000 of its own money. That adds up to half a billion dollars of its own funding spend to support its $2 billion in research.  That money comes from the state, from tuition, from clinical revenues, and some, less than you'd think, from private donors and corporate sponsors.  If NIH's cuts go through, UCSF's internal losses on research--the money it has to make up--suddenly jump from an already-high $505 million to $743 million in the current year.  This is a complete disaster for the UCSF budget. It will massively hit research, students, the campuses's state employees, everything.

The current strategy of chronicling the damage from cuts is good: the best MSM coverage so far is Kaleem & Watanabe.  But it isn't enough. We also need the critique of NIH and this true story of the already existing negative research budget reality.  I'm pleased to see the American Association of Universities, a group of high-end research universities, stating plainly that "colleges and universities pay for 25 percent of total academic R&D expenditures from their own funds. This university contribution amounted to $27.7 billion in FY23, including $6.8 billion in unreimbursed F&A costs." All university administrations need to shift to this kind of candor.

Unless the new NIH cuts are put in the context of continuous and severe losses on university research, the public, politicians, journalists, et al. cannot possibly understand the severity of the new crisis.  And it will get lost in the blizzard of a thousand Trump-created crises, one of which is affecting pretty much every single person in the country.

Finally, our full counter-narrative needs a third element: showing that systemic fiscal losses on research are in fact good, marvelous, a true public service. A loss on a public good is not a bad and embarrassing fact.  Research is supposed to lose money: the university loses money on science so that society gets a long-term gain from it.  Science has negative return on investment for the university that conducts it, so that there is a massively positive ROI for society, of both the monetary and non-monetary kind. Add up the eduction, the discoveries, the health, social, political and cultural benefits: the university courts its own endless fiscal precarity so that society benefits.

We should also remind everyone that the only people who make money on science are in business. And even there ROI can take years or decades. Commercial R&D, with a focus on product development and sales, also runs losses.  Think of "AI": Microsoft alone is spending $80 billion on it in 2025, on top of $50 billion in 2024, with no obviously strong revenues yet in sight.  This is a huge amount of risky investment, --it compares to $60 billion for federal 2023 R&D expenditures on all topics in all disciplines.  I'm an AI skeptic, but appreciate Microsoft's reminder that new knowledge means taking losses and plenty of them.

These up-front losses generate much greater future value of non-monetary as well as monetary kinds. We can remind people of these abundant future benefits as we insist that they confront the size of these research losses (here, here, here, here Stage 2). Look at Penn, Madison, Ann Arbor, Harvard, Pitt in Table 22 above. The sector spent nearly $28 billion of its own money generously subsidizing sponsors' research, including subsidizing the federal government itself. 

There's much more to say about the long-term social compact behind this--how the actual "private sector" gets 100% ICR or significantly more, how state cuts have screwed up the university's lower rate, how student tuition now subsidizes more of STEM research than is fair, how research losses have been a denied driver of tuition increases. There's more to say about the long-term decline of public universities as research centers that, when properly funded, allow knowledge creation to be distributed widely in the society. (See this 2011 post on UCSD losing a major research team to Rice University, when one of the departing scientists broke the silence on the role of public cuts in his departure.)

But my point here is that opening the books on large everyday research loses, especially biomedical losses of the kind NIH creates, is the only way that journalists, politicians, and the wider public will see through Memoli's Trumpian lie about these "no problem" ICR "efficiencies." It's also the only way to move towards the full cost recovery that universities deserve and that research needs. 

UPDATE FEBRUARY 11: (Washington Post)

'Judge Angel Kelley, in federal district court in Massachusetts, ordered the National Institutes of Health not to implement a funding change the agency had announced Friday night, which would dramatically reduce funding to universities and other research organizations for indirect costs related to research.

'Twenty-two Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health on Monday, charging that the action is in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

'In their complaint, the attorneys general said the impact would be immediate and result in layoffs, suspension of clinical trials, disruption of research and laboratory closures. It sought the temporary restraining order only in the 22 states that brought the action, Andrea Joy Campbell, the attorney general of Massachusetts, said in a news conference Monday. The cuts affect everyone in the country, but only Democratic attorneys general stepped up, she said.

'Later Monday, three higher-education associations representing colleges and universities nationally — the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the American Council on Education — also sued in federal district court in Massachusetts.'

Michael Burawoy Starts the Seminar on November 13, 2019

Grief-stricken only begins to describe how I feel about the loss of Michael Burawoy, a force for knowledge and of mutual support on so many fronts.  

I knew him as an allied analyst and critic of universities in general and the University of California in particular.  We were both preoccupied with the plague of privatization, which is not only a shift in revenue sources but also an overturning of society and the place of knowledge in it. Michael was particularly good describing the public world as the site of intellectual autonomy and collective self-determination, two things he frequently linked.

When I left UC Santa Barbara for my current job in London, I wrote him a long note about the shift, partly in the hope that I'd see more of him because of his visits to his sister, who lives in Highgate. 

I finished that email by thanking him for his work on universities in the context of his wider social analysis and for his support for mine and others'. "The meetings you’ve hosted at Berkeley have been among the most satisfying and interesting of my time at UC. I’m very grateful for the effort you’ve put into that, and for your consistency and responsiveness."  

That sounds formal, even understated, but he was incredibly consistent and responsive. These are humble yet powerful virtues that are the opposite of celebrity and influence.  Michael knew that they build intellectual communities and have the most lasting influence on the collective creation of future knowledge. 

One thing I remember about the seminar  in this Berkeley restaurant patio (pictured above) is that his students trusted him. I almost wrote "loved him," which is likely also true.  But what I saw was a trust in him with their ideas and their personal commitments that was perhaps more than that. 

Not long after that visit, he sent me a draft chapter for a book that I don't think has yet appeared. [Correction: Thanks to Tyler Leeds for pointing me to Public Sociology (Polity 2021), chapter 15]  I'm going to circle back on this blog to some of the themes he raises here, and will be writing about Michael's work again.  This post is a down payment.

One of his themes might be summarized as: commodified knowledge loses its power over power. 

A second theme is: "Public" is the name of (and means for) collective agency.  A world of privatized institutions is always oligarchic.  

This latter point now gets more obvious to everyone with each passing day. But there is still much confusion and hesitation about "public" as the functional alternative power.

We really need Michael Burawoy to help put out the bonfire of the knowledges and rebuild society with the principles he saw very clearly.  This is such a stupefying loss.

Here are some excerpts from Michael's chapter called "Defending the Public University." This is labeled Chapter 14 in my copy, so in the middle of a much longer argument, and with a diagram that he wasn't yet satisfied with.

'One can debate the specific origins of the transformation of the University of California, but it is part of a national and indeed global trend – symptomatic of third-wave marketization that turns what was once a public good into a private commodity. If knowledge used to be bgggtttregarded as something produced and distributed for the benefit of all, it is now increasingly bought and sold by those who can afford it, so that the university becomes a revenue generating machine, transforming its internal structure, and threatening its national and international standing. For so long we thought of the public university as exempt from the forces of commodification. Yes, there were periodic crises that involved defunding, but they were always followed by restoration, albeit at a lower level. Too few were ready to acknowledge how the secular decline in funding was leading to the structural transformation of the university. 

'We can gauge this transformation of the university by asking the same questions we earlier posed for academic disciplines – Knowledge for Whom? Knowledge for What? The university is oriented externally to the commodification of knowledge, what we might call policy knowledge, in pursuit of revenue to alleviate its fiscal crisis. The commodification of knowledge reverberates through the university, repurposing professional knowledge for instrumental ends, creating a governance crisis, but also an identity crisis as critical knowledge calls into question the direction of the university. The identity crisis becomes in the public sphere a legitimation crisis – the public calls into question the value of the university as a place of teaching and research, which only deepens the fiscal crisis.'

....

The pursuit of new, private revenue streams paradoxically weakens the university's finances, Michael writes. It forces new strategies on the core of the university's purpose, teaching and research. 

'The commodification of prestige and knowledge is one strategy, the commodification of labor is another. Universities can go after the weak and the vulnerable, outsourcing low paid service work to avoid paying benefits or even minimum wages. Economic restructuring led to dramatic change in teaching as expensive tenure-track faculty have been replaced by short-term, precarious instructional labor, known variously as lecturers, adjuncts, part-time or contingent faculty. At Berkeley some 40% of student credit hours are taught by lecturers. Across higher education lecturers now outnumber tenure-track faculty by two to one whereas 50 years ago the ratio was the inverse. As the number of tenure-track positions declines, relative to the numbers of students looking for academic jobs, the oversupply of PhDs has left them competing for lowpaid, insecure teaching positions. Tenure-track faculty become a shrinking labor aristocracy with higher income and security of employment. The conditions of lecturers vary a great deal across higher education, depending on the status of the college, but everywhere their conditions of employment are vastly inferior to tenure-track faculty who are released from teaching to become increasingly focused on research. While there is no reason to believe that lecturers are inferior teachers, nonetheless as their conditions of employment deteriorate so there is a long term degradation of education.

'As commodification makes inroads into the university, it brings about changes in the administrative structure. Fiscal crisis has been accompanied by “administrative bloat”. According to the university’s figures, the number of senior and executive managers at Berkeley increased 5 fold in the 20 years from 1994 to 2014, so that they now equal the number of tenuretrack faculty that remained constant over the same period. It’s not just the numbers but also the salaries. A senate committee reported that between 2010 and 2015 salaries of Berkeley’s central administration increased by 38% whereas the income of academic units increased by 13%. While Berkeley is at the extreme, for reasons are not clear, we can find similar administrative expansion at the other University of California campuses and indeed across higher education.

'Coincident with administrative expansion has been the recruitment of executives from the financial and corporate world. For example, Berkeley’s Vice-Chancellor for Finance and Administration came from the World Bank, knowing little about the operation of universities, let alone the peculiarities of a public university like Berkeley. He recruited personnel from the world of finance to help him govern the university. He lasted for 5 years. 

'The university attracts “spiralists” who enter the university from outside, perhaps from the corporate world, develop their own signature project and then spiral on (if they are lucky), leaving the university to spiral down. In this case the Vice-Chancellor tried to promote on “online” education which proved to be a flop, and he spiraled out and down. '

...

'Sobered by a succession of disasters, the Board of Regents chose a “local” for the next Chancellor. Carol Christ had been a faculty member at Berkeley since 1970 and became Executive Vice-Chancellor before moving on to become President of Smith College. After 10 years she returned to Berkeley to retire, but was pulled back in as interim Executive Vice- Chancellor as a stop-gap measure to clean up the mess left by her predecessors. The campus breathed a sigh of relief when she was appointed Chancellor. Convinced that privatization was the only strategy going forward, she pursued it deliberately and rationally. Her first goal was to eliminate the burgeoning annual deficit by multiplying revenue streams as well as trimming expenses. With soaring rents it was increasingly difficult for students and faculty to live in Berkeley or the surrounding areas, so Christ made it her priority to set about expanding university accommodation through public-private partnerships.

'The smoother operation of the new regime throws into relief what is taken for granted – the progressive commodification of knowledge, keeping the university alive with privatization strategies, even to the point of openly repudiating support for tuition-free education. With a disastrous credit-rating, due to the fiascos of the past, the administration is forced into high-risk investments, often over opposition from faculty. The restructuring of the administration has gradually expropriated control from all campus communities – faculty, lecturers, staff, students. From the hallowed shared-governance we have entered a regime of consultative-governance – consultations after the fact – driven by market forces.'

...

 'We live in an era where the university loses its autonomy. Increasingly focused on making money to stem its fiscal crisis, it undermines collective self-government and thereby bringing on a governance crisis, it mimics the capitalist corporation. This brings many tensions to the surface. Some regions of the university are better able to exploit the market place than others. The bio-sciences and engineering supply research allied to the expanding sectors of the economy; the business and the law schools supply managers and regulators; the medical school, public policy, and social welfare supply the expertise to administer and treat precarious populations. As tuition increased so students gravitate toward those disciplines that supply the best job opportunities, whether that be a path to a professional degree or directly into the more secure regions of the labor force. The university surreptitiously pushes toward vocationalism at the expense of a broad liberal education. The number of majors in the arts and humanities falls. The university follows student demand by redistributing resources among departments on the basis of “student credit hours” and the number of degrees. In a time of shrinking budgets the competition between departments becomes palpable, no longer on the basis of scholarly distinction but on the appeal to students.

 'The capitalist university not only creates lateral inequalities between disciplines, but also in the vertical direction. As we have seen cutting costs means employing armies of poorly-paid lecturers to do the teaching abdicated by a shrinking labor aristocracy of tenure-track faculty. At a prestigious public university, Senate or “ladder” faculty create the symbolic power of the university – the number of prominent scholars, Nobel Prize Winners as well as turning out outstanding graduate students. The tenure-track faculty are pampered with diminished teaching loads and off-scale salaries in order to keep up with Ivy League universities. The capitalist university creates an entrenched two-tier system – a lower caste of dedicated teachers and an upper caste of researchers. There is virtually no mobility between the two. In the short term, the interests of the ladder faculty lie in the multiplication of lecturers, but in the long term they suffer declining numbers. Graduate students, expecting to enter the ranks of tenure-track faculty, now face two tracks into the future (Burawoy and Hanks 2018). 

'The Berkeley Faculty Association takes as its mission the defense of the public university opposing privatization, the corporatization of the university, the commodification of knowledge. In practice this means we oppose economically irrational projects (public-private ventures, retrofitting the stadium, privileging athletics, campus shared services), the degradation of education through online education, and revenue making credentials with limited content. It means we support diversity at all levels of the campus, defend shared governance, build alliances with unions of GSIs, lecturers and staff. The BFA along with other University of California faculty associations has thrown its weight behind a plan to refinance higher education from increases in state taxation. Rather than pursuing the self-destructive strategies of privatization, we support the “$66 fix” – $66 being the extra tax a median income earner in California would pay in order to reset higher education to funding levels of the year 2000. This has the support of a wide range of unions and associations involved with higher education though it has yet to win the broad support of California’s population or the political establishment that runs the state.

'Accustomed to support from the state legislature as one of California’s symbols of progress, the university has experienced slow downgrading for some fifty years. It is now one of many public agencies competing for a diminishing slice of the state budget. State funding per student has fallen steadily over the last 50 years at the same time that fees have increased. Here lies one material reason for the declining public support for the university. As student fees increase, as total costs of attendance increase at an even greater rate, and as the degree itself buys less lucrative, more precarious jobs, so many wonder whether the university education is worth the increasing cost. . . . 

'To the public the university’s claim to be in perpetual economic crisis seems bogus in the light of rising tuition but also in the light of scandals that have swirled around the university, and exploited by the media: sexual harassment by the high and mighty, bribing one’s way into the university, misuse of funds by the Office of the President, increasing numbers of out-of-state and international students displacing Californians of equal or greater scholarly merit, exorbitant salaries of administrators, abysmal conditions of service employees receiving subminimum wages. Uninterested in its “international” prestige, Governor Brown likened the university to the fast food chain, Chipotle: it should offer a low cost fixed menu of courses. The public looks at the university through a different lens than its administrators and its faculty. . . .

'As the number of students of color and students from poorer backgrounds have increased the resources available for education have diminished and costs of attendance have increased – students are getting less but paying more. In short, it is not enough to think only of access, we also need to think of what happens to students once they arrive on campus. The university needs to be accessible but also accountable, and not just to its students but also to communities outside the university. Contesting the legitimation crisis requires us to extend ourselves into the wider communities from which students come. The university cannot survive as an ivory tower. Berkeley has made efforts in this direction building programs of scholarly engagement, but they are poorly funded and marginal to the university’s overall program. 

'Sociology has a particularly important role to play: it not only speaks to the crises facing students, it also speaks to the crisis facing so many communities in California. Sociology’s mission is more than to passively educate, it is to defend society against excessive marketization, not just of labor, land and money but of knowledge itself. It has to play a critical public role in the education of its students.'

 This is the table that Michael wasn't satisfied with. I think it shows useful things.

Focus on the crises in boldface. The deep policy mistakes--and the complicities between captive university management and a Democratic party that had lost interest in public goods and systems-- weakened the university's ability to create and circulate these four kinds of knowledge. 

The governance crisis weakens professional knowledge by making it dependent on non-expert managers and donors. 

The fiscal crisis weakens policy knowledge by making the university too poor and insecure to circulate it powerfully.

The identity crisis  weakens critical knowledge through this same loss of confidence and a resulting unwillingness to fight tooth and nail in society to get its power back.

The legitimation crisis weakens public knowledge by robbing the university of the stature and general understanding required to influence dominant classes. 

These crises need to be ended and replaced with some major reconstructive work.  This is just part of Michael's work that we need to carry on.