Liner Note 42. Since Your Power is the Story Then Never Interrupt It (Updated)

 

Indiana University on November 6, 2025   

Critiquing universities is one thing and rebuilding them is another. Getting from the first to the second was a constant topic at the four U.S. universities where I spoke over the course of a few weeks this past month.

I visited the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and Indiana University Bloomington. Warm thanks to my hosts and audiences in all those places, who were generous in every way. I learned enormously from comments and various extensive discussions.

 

At each university, bad things were being done to faculty and their programs. In each place, faculty were doing things back.  We talked non-stop about whether this doing-back was working and what faculty members could and should do next.

 

Tenure-track faculty are in an odd position. They are neither principals nor agents: they lack corporate power in universities. They lack legal power of the kind possessed by governing boards.  They have lost the relationship power of the old collegiality that tenure-track faculty assumed. They’re now in a world that’s familiar to non-tenure track faculty and graduate students. What next?

 

Most of those I spoke with saw the first job as defense against outside attacks. And in fact, faculty legal defense has been working well. At UCLA, joint faculty and union lawsuits have now led to a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump Administration’s pursuit of a $1.2 billion fine against UCLA that aims to extort an agreement like that the Administration imposed on Columbia University (Jaweed Kaleem has an overview). Over the summer, a group of UC faculty sued Trump’s National Institutes for Health to restore blocked research funding. This lawsuit also succeeded at getting a temporary injunction.

 

It’s worth noting that the UC Board of Regents and the Office of the President have accepted if not condoned the Trump Administration’s unlawful coercion by failing to dispute it. Faculty groups have had to fill a leadership vacuum.  Incredibly, the UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) had to sue their own Board of Regents to obtain the text of the Trump demands to which they were thinking of committing the University: this suit was also successful.  (UC then asked the California Supreme Court to overturn the lower court ruling, which they declined to do.)  UC senior managers have neither defended the University in court against unlawful attacks nor acknowledged any obligation to collaborate with the UC community. It’s remarkable that their main legal actions have been taken against their own employees.

 

During the UCLA conference that had brought me to campus, I met an author of one of two major resolutions submitted to the November meeting of the UCLA Legislative Assembly.  The “Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning” recites chapter and verse of the obligations that managers have to work with faculty bodies on planning and budget.  It calls for the belated release of comprehensive financial statements for fiscal years 2024–25 and 2025–26, including “statements of revenues, expenditures, reserves, and a clear definition and accounting of the reported deficit.” It goes on to demand four modes of data sharing and communication that include “detailed analyses and forward projections” in nine separate categories.  The Resolution itself tells a story of breached collaboration that took some real work to put together.

 

Take a look--it is impressively strong and complete.  People often cite the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as having shifted state legislatures to the right by circulating model policies that members can cut and paste into bills for their state. Faculty Senates could treat this Resolution as a model policy and adapt it for their campus. 

 

 **UPDATE

The UCLA Academic Senate has announced the results of the votes on these Resolutions: 

Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning
 
  Legislative Assembly members voted via the Academic Senate Data Management System on the Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning. The Legislative Assembly received a total of 116 votes cast: 115 Approve, 1 Oppose. This Resolution required a majority of votes cast by present members to be approved. [AIPSC (2nd ed.) 5.1]. A majority of votes cast (99%) were to Approve this Resolution.

 

Resolution on Information Technology Accountability, Transparency, and Shared Governance
 
  Legislative Assembly members voted via the Academic Senate Data Management System on the Resolution on Information Technology Accountability, Transparency, and Shared Governance. The Legislative Assembly received a total of 106 votes cast: 104 Approve, 2 Oppose. This Resolution required a majority of votes cast by present members to be approved. [AIPSC (2nd ed.) 5.1]. A majority of votes cast (98%) were to Approve this Resolution

 

These are the strongest large-group Senate votes I have ever seen.  It's as though the repression isn't working anymore, and, to quote Avery Gordon, "when the repression isn't working anymore, the trouble that results demands re-narrativization."

 

 ** END UPDATE

 

For the most part, the faculty stories were painful to hear. They were mainly about having to react to the unilateral actions of more powerful people. The people who had power over the university mainly didn’t like the university. Their views ranged from indifferent to openly hostile. The powerful people decided actions that damaged faculty without working with them in advance: in many cases damage seemed like the aim of the action. The faculty got the job of accepting the decisions and then twisting them into place.  

 

I saw good stories interrupted.  There were great early chapters.  Chapter 1: the administration commits an offense against education or Thought Itself.  Chapter 2. Faculty organize and strike back!  Chapter 3: the governing board responds by curtailing faculty and student rights. That’s terrible!  I can’t wait to see what happens in Chapter 4! 

 

But what if there is no Chapter 4?

 

I am not sure how to talk about this. I don’t mean it as a criticism of the many university faculty members working like mules to be heard at all.  But I do want to head off a doomer reading that posits the general inability of faculty to defeat their senior managers and governing boards.  Some faculty do see the ongoing power of boards and managers as proof that this or that effort completely failed, and that therefore new efforts will fail too. This view is a psy-op, not reality.

 

Indiana was the only red state on my program, and its politicians have gone full MAGA with the war on universities you’d expect. In early 2024, its legislature passed a law requiring professors to promote “intellectual diversity” to keep their tenure, adding a post-tenure review to match, along with other stuff. They’ve continued to meddle, and have empowered an autocratic president, Pamela Whitten, to do what she will irrespective of the views of the faculty council among other university groups; she’s attracted national coverage with the disturbing results.

 

In early spring 2024, the Bloomington Faculty Council proposed a vote of no confidence in Whitten (core motivations listed in the petition).  The motion passed 827 to 29. (A parallel no-confidence vote also carried against IU provost Rahul Shrivastav.)

 

Yet Whitten and Shirvastav remain in post, and the IU Board’s response to the 96.6% no-confidence vote against Whitten was to give her a $175,000 bonus in September 2024, soon followed by a $200,000 raise.  Thus concluded our Chapter 3.

 

One member of the audience at my IU lecture used the board’s big middle finger to the faculty as proof that resistance was futile—just like the actions I described in my lecture.  I asked the audience, “after you voted no-confidence and the board then gave Whitten a bonus, what did you do next?”  The president of the Bloomington Faculty Council who’d gotten the remarkable vote made a zero with his fingers.  “It was followed by nothing,” he said.

 

Well ok, I said, you didn’t lose exactly. You just stopped playing. They didn’t stop playing. That doesn’t prove faculty can’t win.  It proves you have to keep playing.

 

I was constantly impressed with how intelligent and committed academics are, including graduate students who are facing futures without proper support. We don’t appreciate that enough about ourselves. Everyone I met showed the intelligence and commitment that comes partly from the long process of building intelligence in teaching and research.  These are real powers in the face of incessant negative propaganda and disrespect.

 

Hovering over all proposed solutions was the prospect of faculty unionization.  That wasn’t because people agree that tenure-track faculty are ready to unionize—most thought they weren’t—but because the traditional alternative, collegial shared governance, has been unilaterally degraded or rejected by senior managers and boards.  A lot of tenure-track faculty are now where graduate students were a few decades go.

 

Tenure-track as well as non-tenure track faculty do now need collective bargaining rights. But faculty won’t get them or get the public on their side or be clear about what to do once they have them unless they tell their stories, and never stop telling them, and never stop acting on them.