Liner Note 22. Now Ask For the University We Actually Want

Paris on March 22, 2004   

The Coalition for Action in Higher Ed has organized a Day of Action on Thursday, April 17^th.  I’m speaking with Tim Kaufman-Osborn and Amy C. Ofner on a panel called, “Who Rules the Academy (and How To Fight Back)?” at 10 am Pacific. 

 

I’m going to argue that this is the best time to make the full ask for the university we actually want, not some triangulated dilution in the style of 1995 through about 2015, when Bernie Sanders made free college a national issue. It’s the best time because the insufferable right, wildly wrong about education, isn’t negotiating now but just hitting us in the face.  

 

Tim recently posted a piece in this space, and his book The Autocratic Academy argues for the democratization of higher ed. Join us if you can. I will post my talk on the blog later on and also the other two if they're willing.

 

Here I want to point out, as we start the 13^th week of the reign of Trump II, how fluid the political situation has already become. Fighting will be the opposite of futile. It will be essential and, over time, successful.

 

First, well, yes, the U.S. has now fulfilled its potential as a police state. M. Gessen is right about this.  Black Lives Matter--not to mention the 1950-1960s civil rights movement--long ago identified the practices that have now been systematized and turned into summary deportations of alleged gang members to a US-subsidized supermax “terrorist” prison in El Salvador, unannounced summary visa cancellations for noncitizen student critics of Israel and for non citizen students with no known contact with protests. Universities have not come together to object to this abuse of the student visa system. Nor are they openly opposing an escalation of tech-based spying and policing—or the low-tech version, like asking the University of California for the electronic details of all signatories of two letters (which the University submitted).  This harassment of critics of Israel, international students, and the university sector will continue.

 

But second, Trump’s aura of power has entered premature decline.  The best polling evidence I’ve seen are charts from John Burn-Murdoch which I’ve excerpted. 

All Republicans continue to support his draconian and frequently illegal immigration policy, but he’s losing non-MAGA Republicans on everything else. Burn-Murdoch noted,

The speed and scale of the American public’s souring on Trump’s economic agenda are stunning. [Just] before the tariff chaos, 63 per cent of Americans had a negative view of the government’s economic policy, comfortably the highest figure since records began almost 50 years ago.

 

As a result, third, Trumplash is well underway. The mass mobilizations are building. Hands Off and other national protests have been getting a lot of coverage abroad.  This will increase as Trumpian destruction moves deeper and deeper into the society and around the world. Trump has created simply enormous opposition to himself, of a range of types that will be hard to deal with all at once. The emerging consensus, even in the New York Times mainstream, is that “capitulation is doomed.”

 

Fourth, Big Capital has caught up with the rest of us in recognizing that Trump is an uncontrolled menace. $50-million-a-year executives, financiers, and the business press that didn’t mind his genocidal plan to turn Gaza into a Palestinian-free beach resort are enraged at his idiotic and destructive tariffs, two words now being applied routinely by the commentariat.  “Crazy” and “stupid” are routine descriptions.  I watched James Surowiecki lose his mind on X when he realized how badly Trump’s people had calculated their country-by-country tariffs  (here and here; see also the strangely accurate Saturday Night Live version.  

 

The FT  finance columnist, Robert Armstrong, who has icewater in his veins, shredded the tariff illogic in one paragraph and then wrote, 

 

Anyone with firmly held false beliefs will have regular, unpleasant run-ins with reality. They change course, only to drive right back into the same ditch. Trump won’t get what he wants from his tariff policy, so he will keep changing it, leaving markets scrambling to catch up. The tactics will zigzag as the fundamental strategic error remains.

 

Trump’s tariff calculation is just one example of the un-priceable chaos that markets find themselves in. 

 

True to Armstrong’s predication on April 4^th, Trump did a carve-out on his multiply-hiked China tariffs for smartphones and other products where his 145% tariffs was goring the oxen owned by the tech moguls who’d lined up behind him at his inauguration. 

 

A bit more on corporate disillusion: Armstrong is also right that this heightens rather than purges the contradictions. An angry Nouriel Roubini exclaimed, “Expensive IPhones 📱 and other high end consumer electronics purchased mostly by the well-off/affluent are exempted; but the 80% of good Chinese cheap consumer goods purchased by his left-behind blue collar base at Dollar Stores, Walmart, Costco, and other low price retailers are slapped with a 145% tariff. . . . This 145% tariff is the most regressive tax in US history that shafts the working class that he pretends to want to help while leading to almost no reshoring ever of jobs on goods we stopped producing in the US in the 1960s nor of the tech goods we want to reshore.”  

 

Confirming that latter point, Apple CEO Tim Cook was filmed somewhere explaining why Apple manufacturing will stay in China: 

There’s an impression that companies come to China because of low labor costs.  I’m not sure what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. The reason [companies come to China] is because of the skill—the quantity of skill in one location. And the type of skill it is. The products we do require really advanced tooling, the precision that you have to have in tooling, and working with the materials that we do, are state-of-the-art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. Now in the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.  It’s that vocational expertise—it’s very deep here.

 

The mainstream business world is now belatedly focused on containing (without defeating) Trump. He faces a business class that went from supine endorsement to red alert in about a week.

 

Fifth, after much initial waffling between respectful engagement and obsequious appeasement, governments have become clear about Trump’s one-trick mafia method. It was nicely summarized by Pascal Lamy, former head of the World Trade Organization and ex-EU trade commissioner. 

Referring to Trump’s tactics, Lamy said it was best to respond robustly in a way the US president understood: “I think Mr. Trump learned to do business in the New York mafia-influenced real estate market and that his tactics are based on extortion – you hit and keep hitting for as long as you do not get a good price for stopping. Showing your muscle, it seems to me, is the way to transact with him and his people.”

Some people are figuring out the “good price for stopping.”  It can be the withholding of personal attacks coming from inside Trump House. The pro-tariff Trumper mogul (and Harvard ex-president Claudine Gay terminator) Bill Ackman tweeted on April 7^th to his 1.7 million followers:  

 

I just figured out why @howardlutnick is indifferent to the stock market and the economy crashing. He and Cantor are long bonds. He profits when our economy implodes. 

 

It’s a bad idea to pick a Secretary of Commerce whose firm is levered long fixed income. It’s an irreconcilable conflict of interest.

 

Nine hours later he tweeted an apology: “It was unfair of me to lash out at @howardlutnick. I don’t think he is pursuing his self interest. I am sure he is doing the best he can for the country while representing the President as Commerce Secretary” blah, blah, blah.  But message sent in the first tweet.  Message apparently received about a potential cost of internal division that Trump didn’t want to pay, not negated by the ritual apology.   

 

Meanwhile, other governments are preparing not only negotiations but further retaliation. In Europe, they’re finally gathering resources for a fight to protect a longer process of decoupling.    Germany is abandoning its cherished “debt brake” and the UK its restrictive “fiscal rules.” Trump is the best thing since Covid for European public spending and capacity building. 

 

Sixth, and in contrast, the Democratic opposition now consists of Bernie Sanders (a non-member) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their Fighting Oligarchy tour plus Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) recording daily video critiques of Trump on X.  

 

More power to them, but their party has disappeared.  Kamala Harris has announced, “I’m not going anywhere,” which is literally true, and Gavin Newsom is focused on his podcast guests, particularly the election deniers helping him get in touch with his inner broligarch.  Party elders like James Carville are giving terrible advice, in this case, to do nothing, at which the party excels. Rising stars like Gretchen Whitmer are dooming themselves by accepting Trump’s framing on tariffs or whatever. 

(Dan Pfeiffer pointed out that “the better argument here is that he is a chaotic clown stumbling about the world stage, hurting American families by raising prices for no reason” [28’52”].) 

The American one-party Republican state is a big problem for organizing, and organizers obviously need to be much more aggressive in this bad environment.

Seventh, in spite of the #Hands Off and other movements amongst academic and government workers among many others, university boards and senior managers are not speaking out for universities, students, academic freedom, or education. There are a handful of exceptions that prove the rule—Michael Roth, Christopher Eisgruber, Danielle R. Holley, and Patricia McGuire, the presidents of Wesleyan, Princeton, Mt. Holyoke and Trinity Washington respectively. Nor are universities releasing data estimating Trump’s catastrophic research cuts--which demobilizes faculty, staff, and students--or banding together to denounce education’s enemies, including the irreparable harm of deportations, threatened as well as real. 

 

However, eighth, unions and faculty associations are speaking out, first by trying to activate their administrations and second by proposing their own schemes. 

 

Faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst wrote a proposal for the 60 universities under investigation by the Trump administration to “unite in a coordinated, proactive defense,” with 11 policy items for their proposed Task Force. 

 

The Rutgers University Senate passed a “Resolution to Establish a Mutual Defense Compact for the Universities of the Big Ten Academic Alliance in Defense of Academic Freedom, Institutional Integrity, and the Research Enterprise.”  

 

University of Minnesota faculty asked its administration to take a much stronger stand in protected students under summary deportation orders.  

 

News of dozens of cancelled visas of University of California students has lead to a joint faculty-union “call upon UC to immediately address Student Visa Revocations.”  

 

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has been fully engaged on multiple fronts. For example, they wrote a 13-page letter to college and university general counsels offices on April 2^nd advising them that they are not legally obligated to “provide the personally identifiable information of students and faculty” to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.  

 

Ninth and last, there are inspiring student examples of still fighting for your original principles. There's the principle of full academic freedom to advocate for justice in Palestine without being deported, and there are the Columbia University students who chained themselves to a Columbia gate to protest the failure of Columbia to release information about the targeting and ICE arrest of Mahmoud Khalil.  

Amy Goodman interviewed some of the students for Democracy Now. 

 

SHEA: My name is Shea. I’m a junior at Columbia College. ...

AMY GOODMAN: You’re wearing a keffiyeh and a yarmulke.

SHEA: Yes. That’s standard for me.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you willing to be expelled?

SHEA: If the university decides that that is what should happen to me for doing this, then that is on them. I would love to not be expelled, but I think that my peers would also have loved to not be expelled. I think Mahmoud would love to not be in detention right now. This is — I obviously worked very hard to get here. So did Mahmoud. So did everyone else who has been facing consequences. And, like, while I obviously would prefer to, you know, not get expelled, this is bigger than me. This is about something much more important. And it ultimately is in the hands of the university. If they want to expel me for standing up for my friend, for other students, then that is their choice.

 

This kind of unflinching opposition needs support and national coordination into student-staff-faculty alliances--and alliances between university and government workers. It display the primal ingredient of meaningful victories down the road.