Indiana University on November 3, 2025   

by Johannes Türk

Chair of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington

Indiana University, one of the great American public universities, is currently melting down with a speed and violence unprecedented in the history of higher education. It is difficult to recognize the world-class institution that was founded in the idyllic city of Bloomington in 1820 and built over decades, most decisively by the long-term president and chancellor of Indiana University, Herman B. Wells. Beloved among residents of the state of Indiana and a destination for thousands of students from across the United States and the world, the public university gained its national and global reputation in the 1950s primarily on the basis of its humanities departments and one of the country’s best music schools.

 

I’m going to discuss unilateral changes in faculty governance, protest rules, research funding, instructional regulations, and legislative policy: these factors interact in degrading the campus ecology, perhaps permanently, in ways that shed light on national trends.  

 

The flagship campus of Indiana University in Bloomington teaches more foreign languages than any other US institution of higher education, offers a broad spectrum of area studies, and has provided the Department of State and other federal institutions and businesses with generations of qualified young minds. It is also the home of world-class PhD programs ranging from French and Italian, Germanic Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, and English, to Political Science, Sociology, History, and Folklore and Ethnomusicology – overall Indiana University leads in the US in the production of humanities PhDs. In addition, many doctoral programs in the humanities rank, according to the National Research Council, among the best 10, 20, or 30 PhD programs in the US. According to the US News & World rankings, which only assess departments in large fields, Sociology, History, English, as well as Psychological and Brain Sciences rank between 16 and 24 nationally.

 

More recently, in the wake of its innovative online-program, the Kelley Business School has risen among the best in the US as well. As recently as in 2019, university president Michael McRobbie led a highly successful fundraising campaign based in part on research showing that Indiana University contributes more than any business to the economic success of the state of Indiana. Under his leadership, the university also founded a School of Global and International Studies and a Media School as new windows into the humanities. It seemed well positioned to shape the next decades, in spite of the national trend of lower enrollments in the humanities.

 

Fast-forward three years into the presidency of his successor Pamela Whitten: On April 16, 2024, the Bloomington Faculty Council held a full-faculty meeting where 93.1% of the voting faculty passed a motion of no confidence in Whitten, and 91.5% voted for no-confidence in Provost Rahul Shrivastav. These numbers are astounding and unparallelled.

 

During the faculty deliberation, a large variety of concrete grievances were discussed, ranging from the lack of advocacy for the university, a failure to engage graduate students and their unionization effort, the suspension of a professor without due process, the cancelation of an art exhibit years in the making, the potential severing of the renowned Kinsey Institute from the university, and the impression that the Whitten administration was encroaching on shared governance and academic freedom.

 

The most weight, however, was carried by the pervasive impression that the university leadership was incompetent and either not informed about the institution or willfully ignoring its needs, introducing random or inappropriate and at times unprofessionally conducted initiatives while not addressing important problems.

 

In addition, the president on several occasions made derogatory remarks about the publication of monographs, a benchmark in which Indiana University’s humanities departments are leading in the nation among public universities. Overall it seemed that the upper administration was overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the university system, lacked the serious engagement with the institution necessary to make good decisions, and couldn’t appreciate many of its most prominent features.

 

This seeming inability was screened by an artificial rhetoric of disruption and innovation, more recently culminating in pronouncements about “the end of old IU.” The incompetence might have been enhanced significantly by high turnover in many leadership positions on the university and campus level where Whitten hired within a few years many colleagues she had previously worked with at the University of Georgia, at Kennesaw State University, and at Michigan State University. Some in this nepotistic network seemed too inexperienced for their new position, with catastrophic results.

 

How can, for example, an administration reduce the number of trustee meetings with the result that tenure and promotion decisions can only be signed by the board of trustees after the deadline for the reappointment for the following academic year has to be made? Many departments and units began to fall into disrepair, requests for faculty lines central to the pedagogical and research mission were denied without a clear rationale, hiring authorizations were all centralized and then delayed and often rejected, the centralization of IT support had catastrophic fallout, while at the same time some extremely costly initiatives and the hiring on the executive level of the university continued and expanded. It seemed as if the leadership followed a recipe written for a smaller, lower ranking institution.

 

Within three years, Indiana University became an exemplary worst case-scenario for how the confluence of administrative failures, political interference, and public misinformation can push a proud institution to the brink. Yet within an hour after the vote of no confidence, the chair of the Board of Trustees wrote a message of support for the president – as one of the elected trustees revealed later this was done without consulting all members of the board. The promise of “listening  sessions” followed, yet after just two meetings with faculty Whitten abruptly ended these due to a scheduled eye surgery. She never resumed direct contact with faculty at the flagship campus of the university.

 

Just eight days after the vote of no confidence, on April 23, 2024, the administration formed an ad hoc committee in response to a request by students to protest the war in Gaza beginning the following day.  As a result, the policy for a designated free speech zone in Dunn Meadows dating back to 1968, was changed overnight. The Whitten administration called in the Indiana State Police and the peaceful protests were met with what many perceived as a disproportionate response, including snipers on the rooftop of surrounding buildings as well as arrests.

 

In the days following these events, all of the professional schools from the Kelley School of Business, the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, the School of Education, the Media School, the Jacobs School of Music, the School of Social Work, and the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental joined the College of Arts and Sciences and voted overwhelmingly for resolutions, most of them, including the business school, included the demand for the resignation of the president and the provost.

 

Whitten did not need to wait long for conservative political support. Jim Banks, at the time a Republican congressman from Indiana and now Senator, wrote an op ed in which he openly expressed his support for the president against the “immature faculty” of Indiana University Bloomington. He didn’t question the maturity of a president who publicly muses about what to do once all the money is gone, who makes derogatory remarks about core areas of achievement of the institution she leads, and who calls the faculty of IU Bloomington crazy.

 

Whitten commissioned Cooley LLP, a law firm, to produce a report on the police crackdown for approximately $400,000. On the basis of thin evidence, the law firm retrospectively found the administration’s actions justified and recommended millions in police raises, new surveillance capacity, as well as a new chancellor position. Following the script, David Rheingold was hired as chancellor in summer 2025 in order to provide an additional level of control over a campus Whitten smears as bonkers.

 

As a result of the initial vote of no confidence and the events at Dunn Meadows, which garnered national attention, the position of the president of IU – whose hiring resulted from a controversial search process in which she was not included in the list of finalists by the committee composed of trustees, faculty, and administrators – has become so weak that it is impossible to say if she has become a mere vessel for political interests or if she has orchestrated what has happened since.

 

On April 25, 2025, Indiana’s state legislature passed HB 1001, a last-minute budget reconciliation bill that included several revisions to state law that have accelerated the process of institutional erosion. Some of these seem so narrowly targeted that it is difficult for many not to see them as attempt to inflict damage on specific parts of the university. The legislation summarily removed three alumni-elected trustees from the board, deleted the provision for emeriti faculty to serve on faculty governance bodies or vote on their initiatives, among other intrusions into campus governance.

 

Separately, state regulators got involved in decertifying BA degrees it arbitrarily defined as “low-enrolling” if they graduate less than 15 majors per year. They did the same for PhD degrees if they graduate less than 3 students per year. All such degrees must to be eliminated or merged on the basis of falling below a quantitative threshold, regardless of academic quality or importance of mission. The new law also asks that costs associated with these degrees be eliminated. (While similar laws exist in other states, they have significantly higher thresholds: Ohio requires an average of 15 over 3 years, Arizona 24 for BAs.)

 

As a consequence, all language and literature departments except for Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University have been forced to merge their degrees (as well as a few STEM units, including Statistics and Atmospheric Science). This is happening in spite of the recognized value of the study of languages other than English for individual jobs as well as social benefits: a recent analysis by LinkedIn identified languages as one of the three standout areas that make IU graduates successful on the job market. Many of IUs language departments rank among the best in their field in the US, and many also stand among the larger departments in their national discipline.  And yet degree mergers are being marched ahead. The upper administration has dictated that the degree mergers be developed and implemented within the current academic year, which is a pace that undermines minimal professional standards and does not allow for a thoughtful restructuring. The law applies to all public universities in Indiana and includes the opportunity to apply for an exemption for degrees that do not meet the threshold, and yet the university administration at Indiana University refused to forward exemptions for degrees of such iconic departments such as Gender Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies, which are among the oldest and most prominent in their field.

 

The forced departmental restructuring escalates prior intrusions on academic freedom. In 2024, SEA 202, a law tying continued tenure to faculty members demonstrating “viewpoint diversity,” had passed without significant intervention from university leadership and without any demand or need: the Indiana Commission of Higher Education had surveyed students in the state in 2023 and found that only 6.4% of Indiana students disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement, “At (University) students can express their opinions freely.” The problems with the legislation --on this and other free-speech issues such as the censoring of the student newspaper IDS-- are so glaring that the free speech organization FIRE has taken out billboards that read, “Indiana University covered up the truth. What are they hiding?”

 

While faculty, students, and parents are confused by the onslaught of measures directed at imaginary foes, the Whitten administration is silent. Not only do senior officials not defend the institution they lead against attacks they are perhaps in fact complicit in, but they aggravate the damage by remaining silent while the media impugn the institution.

 

In case these events were not enough, the newly emboldened trustees, now all appointed by the Republican governor, decided in June of this year to make all faculty governance advisory only. On the same day they announced a $224,000 bonus for President Whitten, they decreased the University’s retirement contributions for faculty from 10 to 9%. All in all, faculty are silenced and marginalized at a moment when their voices are more needed than ever.

 

Is there any strategy behind all this weakening of the institution?

 

Whitten’s administration has three discernible programmatic feature. She aims to enhance the status of the branch campus in Indianapolis, site of the IU School of Medicine. She seeks to push students into narrowing corridors of degree completion. And she has been able to hit an arbitrary benchmark of $100 million in annual research expenditures. 

 

This third goal is quietly destructive of the campus’s research culture. The campus’s highest ranking departments are generally in non-STEM fields, where extramural research funding is scarce and comes in relatively small amounts (IU humanities does very well at attracting these).  At IU, high expenditure fields in STEM are generally less recognized nationally. So to raise IU expenditures to $100 million, her administration has in effect decided to shift investment out of high-ranking units whose research expenditures are low--as in the humanities—and into lower-ranking units where expenditures are high.  As a result, many now-disfavored units have shrunk to a level where it becomes difficult to maintain their academic integrity.

 

Given the campus profile, research expenditure is historically not a strong measure at IU Bloomington at all. Data from the National Science Foundation shows that it has a quite low research expenditure for a high ranking R1 university. In 2023, the last year for which data are available, its total expenditure was roughly $853 million, compared to nearly $2 billion at the University of Michigan and $1.55 billion at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Though reaching the $100 million research expense benchmark this year remains the main story the Whitten administration likes to tell, in addition to that of our Big-Ten-dominating football team IU remains far behind comparable public research universities on the expenditure metric.   

 

Another university with relatively low research expenditure and a very high ranking (higher than IU’s) is the University of Chicago, with a research expenditure of $628 million in FY 2023. UChicago resembles IU in one way, which is stature rooted in outstanding non-STEM disciplines, where research quality is not proportional—is rather unrelated—to expenditure benchmarks. All the more reason to think that investing primarily to spend more on IU research is not in accordance with the strengths of the institution and will weaken it.

 

To be fair, these developments did not begin under Whitten. But under Whitten the trend was accelerated and radicalized because now it was not just a lack of investment in some of the most prestigious part of the university but ruthless cuts in funding to institutional assets such as Indiana University Press, media outlets, special collections, and much else, in order to move money to subsidize high-cost research and an expanding administration.

 

Another model is possible. When some senior administrators at Duke University asked in the late 1970s how to elevate the university’s profile in the absence of the endowment wealth of Princeton or Stanford, they invested in the humanities. They hired prominent senior scholars like Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson to build major programs, recognizing that hiring the most prominent group of humanities scholars can happen at a fraction of the cost of hiring even modestly successful scientists. The increased prominence helped grow a budget to the point where it could then in turn support the sciences.

 

Ironically, IU’s Herman B. Wells built a very successful IU by leveraging limited funding to build strong lower-cost fields.  There’s no reason to see as inevitable Whitten’s push of IU towards becoming a second rank institution, a mere shadow of the proud Midwestern world-class university it has been over the decades. But that is the direction of her increasingly authoritarian and defensive administration as it invests resources int ineffective short-term initiatives with significant collateral damage.

 

 The only good path forward is a clear and sustained focus on what the mission of a public university is: not making money, not the production of a maximum of degrees in a minimum of time, not an alignment with short-term job-market opportunities, and certainly not advancing individual administrative careers with its benchmarks. The mission is the best possible research and teaching , and these depend on supporting and extending the knowledge and teaching ecologies of the university rather than unraveling them.

 

The author does not represent the views of Indiana University.

 

 

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. 

by Michael Meranze

This week's election, combined with the success of faculty led lawsuits against the Trump Administration's efforts to subordinate higher education, gives the lie to the idea that compliance is the only option facing university management and faculty.  

These events call into question what appears to be the strategy of the Regents and Office of the President:  keep your head down, don't make waves, and obey in advance.  The choice of UCOP not to pursue lawsuits against the Trump administration's efforts while fighting to block the release of the proposed UCLA settlement has always seemed dubious.  Now it seems incredibly short sighted.  The sudden cancellation of the President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program suggests that neither President Milliken nor Provost Newman have learned anything from recent events.

I mention this background because we're getting to the end of the systemwide review of proposed changes to faculty discipline and the establishment of a policy on expressive activities.  Comments to the Academic Senate need to be submitted by November 10 and to the Regents by November 26th.  If you have not been following this effort to change the Academic Personnel Manual (015 and 016) there are several very strong general analyses that you can find here, here, and here.  I urge everyone to read them if you haven't.  I want to make a few points in this post.

The proposed changes to faculty discipline combine two issues (structuring discipline for expressive activities and speeding up the disciplinary process) that have no logical connection.  Each proposal also offers solutions that exceed what was required by the problem. Importantly, they not only continue the centralization of power at UC but drag the Academic Senate into that centralization.  Finally, the "Disciplinary Sanction Guidelines for Misconduct Related to Expressive Activity" powerfully misrepresents the relationship between academic freedom and faculty discipline while also offering a somewhat sloppy reference to First Amendment jurisprudence.  Taken together they offer a normalization of the increasingly extreme policing of thought and expression that we have witness at UC over the past few years.  Let me try to explain.

A. The official impetus for the creation of the new policy on expressive activity was Section 219 (34) of the California Budget Act of 2024 (SB108).  That section required that "Each campus of the university shall prepare a campus climate notification by the beginning of the Fall 2024 term. The University of California Office of the President will develop a systemwide framework to provide for consistency with campus implementation and enforcement."  Section 34 does indicate that this implementation includes making clear the "consequences" for violating "relevant institutional policies, state law, or federal law, including, but not limited to, discrimination based on shared ancestry under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964"; however, those consequences were already laid out in APM 015 and 016.  The University might have simply reminded everyone of those and reported that to the Legislature.  But they did not follow that path.  Instead, they seized the opportunity to model judgments on expressive activity in parallel to the procedures for discipline under SVSH (Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment).

B.  What makes this decision even more dangerous is the way in which the proposed policies borrow from SVSH and characterize academic freedom and First Amendment law.  In Attachment A (at pg. 47) one "mitigating" factor is "Engaging in activity tied to a reasonable teaching or research purpose/Engaging in activity inside the broadest interpretation of academic freedom."  But activity within the "broadest interpretation of academic freedom" is not simply a mitigating factor:  it precludes discipline.  Academic Freedom is a threshold.  If an activity falls within it then it is protected.  If it falls outside of it then discipline becomes a question depending on a whole range of considerations.  Tellingly, I think, the proposal provides little consideration of the implications of APM 010 which guarantees full academic freedom in addition to constitutional rights of free expression to members of the faculty. Academic freedom is not a "mitigating" factor.  Just to underline the point, the SVSH policy is actually more definitive on the threshold nature of academic freedom.  If actually implemented it would be hard to see this treatment as anything but an opening towards the lessening of academic freedom at the university.

The proposal's gloss on the First Amendment is slightly better but still inadequate.  As the General Counsel's Attachment B (at pg. 51) puts it: "Faculty, like all University employees, are also entitled to First Amendment protection for speech on matters of public concern, but only insofar as the employee’s expressive interests outweigh the University’s interests in fulfilling its public service mission."  This is, I suppose, a narrowly correct representation of what is commonly understood known as the "Pickering" test, a the key balancing question in public employee speech law.  But it is worth noting that this balance is not something that can simply be decided by management.  It is a test that will be applied in the case of judicial intervention.  Therefore, while it is legitimate to take it as a guiding principle within the university,  it cannot be used as a unilateral management tool.  As with so much of this policy, one gets the sense that management is trying to put its finger on the scale before any case has appeared.

C.  Finally, I want to offer a brief discussion of the proposed new "Systemwide Network Committee on Privilege and Tenure."  Here the proposal suggests that when Divisional P&T committees cannot constitute a hearing committee within 14 business days (because of overall limits on the time that hearing decisions can take) that the Systemwide Network Committee would step in and establish their own hearing committee.  There has, to be sure, been long standing concern on the part of the Regents about delays in disciplinary decisions (remember they tend to only see the ones that reach dismissal of tenured faculty), but it is difficulty to believe that this effort (started in January 2025) was not provoked by the complaints that some regents had over the lack of discipline surrounding the Gaza protest encampments.  Hence the political, although not logical, intersection with expressive activities.

But there are some problems here.  First, to my knowledge there has never been any convincing evidence that delays in discipline take place on the Senate side of the process.  Instead, in my experience, delays have been on the administrative side as they give themselves extensions.  But even more problematic is the fact that the solution exceeds the problem.  If the problem truly is that divisional committees are not able to fill the rosters for hearings, then the logical solution would be to create a network committee whose members could supplement the numbers of divisional members, not replace them entirely.  In that case, we would still have a committee with local knowledge with the benefit of a different perspective.  What UCOP proposes instead is a replacement process where local faculty are potentially reduced to "consultants."  

Put another way, this proposal continues the long-term trend towards UC centralization that began under President Yudof.  Now, however, it is infecting the Senate as well.  It is difficulty to think of examples of how this process of centralization has benefited the university (UC Path, anyone?) nor that UCOP can claim to be particularly responsive to viewpoints from campuses (Trellix, anyone?).  It's distressing that the Senate itself might be sidelining its local committees.

Of course none of this is a good sign at a moment when the Regents and UCOP are in negotiations with the Trump administration.  UC management faces a series of choices that will help define whether UC will remain an important public university.  Their track record doesn't inspire confidence.  In fact, the only effective counter voice has been the faculty in alliance with unionized workers.  It is crucial that faculty keep using their voices to explain and defend academic freedom and the conditions of teaching and learning.  

Let both the Senate and the Regents know what you think.

Royce Hall, UCLA on October 29, 2025   

I spent most of October on the road, and one especially happy stop was a UCLA conference, "Academic Freedom and the Crisis of the Democratic University: A Symposium in Honor of Michael Meranze."  Michael is my longtime partner on this blog: the paper I've posted below is about his scholarship on university topics.  I sketch towards the end the elements of his theory of a radically rebuilt university, one that would properly support teaching and research; I also broach the issue of faculty time (lack thereof) for the work of institutional activism.  Other speakers were Wendy Brown, Rana Jaleel, Hank Reichman, and Joan Wallach Scott, and I am hoping Michael will reconstruct and soon post his excellent response to all of us at the end of a truly enjoyable day.

 **

Michael wound up being my partner on the blog, Remaking the University, back in 2009, not because he’d always dreamed of writing every week about universities but because of his commitment to real universities and to their consistent presence in society.  He had a commitment  the University of California, of course, where he first arrived as a doctoral student over 4 decades ago—but beneath that to the practice of the university as an indispensable intellectual agent in the world.

 

We’ve heard today about his research on the university as society’s special, perhaps unique, site of academic and intellectual freedom. It’s true that much of his work on the blog reflected his protective vigilance towards academic freedom.  But this work was also connected to everything else he wrote about, including state budgeting, student protest, weak-minded administration, and faculty governance (or its lack).  All of these issues affected the university’s ability to function as society’s special, place of scholarship, and its ability to underwrite communities of scholars. 

 

My relationship with Michael was shaped by the fact that  he created this community of scholars with me, by enacting it through continuous knowledge exchange and analysis.  This meant in practice his tireless search for evidence instanced in a nonstop flow of links to articles and, equally, to archival material.  He had a set of email colleagues and he sent them overlapping sets of links—only Michael’s devices know the full extent of his daily address to multiple scholarly communities (studying, for example, the perma-crisis of universities, academic freedom, 18^th century history, the history of prisons, Foucault and the theory of history, psychoanalytic theory & society, etc). His presence and daily engagement with materials new and old helped constitute these groups across distance.  Scholarly community in my case also meant his reading and critiquing draft posts, often within an hour or two of my sending them.  These communities were created through Michael’s personal enactment of what such a community should actually do, and do in an ordinary, everyday way. They were constituted by Michael’s remarkable breadth of interests, and especially, by his striking, unending generosity.

 

 

**

The blog took off during the 2009-10 fiscal crisis of the University of California and California State University. In response to the GFC, the State of California subjected UC and CSU to a third round of multi-year double-digit cuts to their state appropriation.  We covered the budget cuts and the budget’s administrative discourse in constant detail. But we also saw the budget crisis as a crisis of faculty governance and a crisis of the university’s social strategy, which was and is controlled by senior managers and governing boards.  By December 2009, Michael was analyzing both budget and governance through the underlying problem of the state’s poor understanding of the purpose of the university as such.

 

One landmark post was “Looking Back and Looking Forward” (December 7, 2009).  Michael noted a “fundamental lack of connection between UCOP and the Regents on the one hand and students and the Campuses on the other.” This lack of interconnection within the university extended to the faculty’s ambivalent relation to students and in particular to the faculty split over student opposition to capped or lowered tuition hikes. Many if not most faculty had decided to give up on the state and wanted big tuition hikes to protect their resources.

 

Michael took a step back and wrote that we should refuse to choose between blaming the state for funding cuts and blaming UC’s senior managers for not fighting cuts even as they hoarded reserves. “The first narrative allows the faculty to avoid accepting responsibility for what UC has become; the second narrative effectively reduces it to its money flows and money management.”  So did some of the statements of the Berkeley student occupation movement: Michael detected overlap between the managerial and the oppositional narratives.

As the “Communiqué from an Absent Future” put it: "The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor.” But to put things this way is to ignore history and not even correctly understand the present. The university is older than the dominance of capital, and as an institution it retains traditions and practices that cannot be reduced to capital. To reduce the university in the way of the Communiqué is, like the managerial ethos, to reduce it to its utility to capital. It is to ignore the practices of curiosity, of communication, of self-formation, of deepening engagement with thought that, however much they are devalued in the larger world, are essential aspects to any social change or even human life. 

Michael here identified the pervasiveness of a managerial ethos that can capture even its political opponents. He pointed to a vacuum in the thinking about what we do in universities that was shared and mutually reinforced by students, staff, managers, and faculty alike. So Michael was addressing all these groups in writing, “I worry that we are running around like people with fingers in the dike trying to patch up this and that but losing sight of what we think UC should be.”

 

What we think: three key words.  The institution of thinking has to proceed from that.  Michael wrote what he thought.

 

Much of what we do depends on suspending the immediacy of the present—even when it is most problem-centered. It is in the gap between the given and the imagined that insight flourishes.  This aspect of our work is hard to explain and communicate effectively. Humanistic education, at its best, provides students and society with worlds (both past, imaginary, and distant) that are not their own; social scientific education, at its best, provides students and society with ways to conceive of problems that escape from the given logics of the day; scientific education, at its best, allows students and societies ways of bracketing out the everyday in order to better understand the material world that we all inhabit.

 

In all cases, it is the suspension of the immediate and the possibility of the creative and contested communication of ideas that makes knowledge and understanding possible. It cannot be predicted in advance nor confined to a given product or utility.

 

The problem with seeing the University as a business or as a tool of capital is that it misses the day to day work that everyone actually does. Instead of allowing the University to be remade in the terms of narrow utility we need to insist that it deepen its commitment to the democratic exchange of ideas. This means developing solutions to problems in society, developing individuals who seek out further opportunities for public and intellectual engagement with society, and developing individuals whose curiosity and inquiry reshape themselves. . . .

That we all have allowed ourselves to be confined within increasingly narrow intellectual limits and failed to effectively converse across the university about the university and about what we do is one of our major intellectual weaknesses in the face of the serial crises that confront us all.  

 

Michael characteristically stresses the deep purposes of the humanities in the context of a whole university, one where all of the fields of study are together.  The fields should be talking amongst themselves, though that now mainly happens in the academic Senate.  And he was already warning everyone that the university without a narrative of its sheer intellectuality would be under permanent threat of destruction. In these things he was complete right. It’s better to listen to Michael the first time he tells you something.

 

**

That was written at the dismal dawn of the decade of the 2010s. Obama was president; his administration was bailing out Wall Street and abandoning Main Street, and the Tea Party was about to rise in anger. It was a good time for the Democrats to act like they had some sense. More fundamentally, it was the essential time for what Michael called the suspension of the immediate and the possibility of the creative. The university was letting itself get dragged into the crisis as passive collateral damage and Michael wanted it to make a serious collaborative internal effort to write its own destiny.

 

For Michael, the university couldn’t fulfill its social function if it weakened its scholarly function, and “scholarly” was rooted in the humanities.  Michael has always had sympathy and respect for scientists, but in November 2013 he wrote a post about making humanities methods stand out from the sciences.  The piece is called, “Curating the Humanities” (November 28, 2013). It identifies elements of what turns out to be the community of scholars. (Also see “Towards a New Community of Scholars.”)

 

Michael gets at this issue through some work by medievalist and punctum books impresario Eileen Fradenburg-Joy, and her emphasis on curation. “Forms of thinking matter,” Fradenburg-Joy wrote, “and there is no need to discard anything. Every area requires special curators and we should seek to increase the ranks of those, for this is a matter of the care as well as of the increase of knowledge.”   Michael outlines a proto-theory of university study under pressure:

 

First is the connection between the knowledge and the scholar that produces it:

 we tend--despite whatever commitments to method or theory we have--to take our specific research subjects seriously and personally.  To actually curate our fields today, though, means doing more than simply teaching or writing about them. . . .  we cannot succeed by turning away from what drew us to the humanities or interpretive social sciences in the first place. . .  . If we are going to curate both objects and subjects we need to recognize the personal dimension of our commitments.  We teach and write about them because we think that it is important that they be preserved and extended in some way.  We do so because we find them personally engaging and challenging.  Insofar as we claim that our knowledge can be transforming, we might give more thought to how, and if, our knowledge is transforming ourselves.

 

The second element of this theory is bringing in undergraduates.

“Faculty at … research universities will need to assume more responsibility for advising.  . . . At liberal arts colleges faculty are deeply involved with advising undergraduates and at research universities they are involved in advising graduate students.  But there is a large lacuna there: undergraduates at large research institutions.  In these situations students are left to overworked staff advisers.  . . . UC faculty will need to take more responsibility for the intellectual development of their students both undergraduate and graduate.  Disciplines in the humanities and social sciences often claim that their teaching and knowledge is designed for transformation; but without figuring out ways to make [teaching] part of the intellectual process of  education, it rings false.

 

Third, Michael wrote, “I think we might take some lessons from museums and libraries because it is in those latter spaces that curators and librarians aim to develop public knowledge.  For in curating you not only preserve but you present.”  The community of scholars would thus collaborate to produce both traditional peer-reviewed research and also forms of public address that would bring the general public back into scholarly processes and research results. Curating would also, in the midst of our mushrooming knowledge crisis, reduce the alienation between university and non-university populations.

 

Fourth, communities require serious efforts of maintenance by their members.  And one of Michael’s perennial themes is the slowly unfolding disaster of outsourced administration. It seemed like a good idea at the time: the educators hire professional administrators to handle institutional functions. UC had originally split tuition into a “registration fee” and an “education fee,” which were assumed to be distinct, and the ed fee was to be essentially zero while reg fees could go up in keeping with the expansion of administrative needs.  For Michael such a split was a major scholarly mistake. He wrote,

 

 If faculty in the humanities and social sciences do not take more collective responsibility for the institutions that make our scholarship and teaching possible and work in solidarity with other institutions or other departments, then our students will find themselves without a sustainable field to work in.  We need to acknowledge the centrality of the sustainability of the humanities infrastructure and of the crucial task of the university as a place for conserving knowledge as well as producing it. We must take greater responsibility for our conduct as it relates to the larger project that the humanities and social sciences engage in. 

In other words, the community of scholars requires meaningful self-governance, but this couldn’t be simply to set policy and go away. The community of scholars requires a faculty labor of administration—of shared participation in administrative decisions and also practices.  It would mean some meaningful administrative insourcing.  How much and how this would be done, giving research and teaching duties/desires, would have to be decided over time in a process managed by the community. And it would have to be done across departments, so as to avoid the current situation in which they are “pitted against each other.”

 

So Michael’s community of scholars requires four things: affective bonds between scholar and scholarship; involvement of students in thinking as such; curation of the resulting knowledge in public; and active governance of the scholarly infrastructure. It’s a powerful model, it would work!--and it’s also a lot.

 

I lectured (and appeared on The American Vandal podcast) at the University of Pennsylvania last week. Someone in the audience asked me, how would we start to bring about these changes you describe, concretely, in practice? I suggested several things, starting with collective faculty self-education about the institution---budgeting in relation to teaching and research, in particular. “It would involve something like a seminar for interested faculty and students, maybe 10 hours of meetings over the  course of a term,” I added.  At dinner that night, an eminent member of the department said, “Chris, you really had me until you said 10 hours of meetings in a term.  I just don’t have the time for that!”

 

Translated, that also means faculty scholars don’t have the time to constitute Michael’s community of scholars.  We’ve already seen this problem once, when medical expertise lost its independence to health insurance companies who promised cheap and complete administrative support, and it’s pretty far along in large universities. The time grind helped HMOs with doctors and administrative bloat seems to most professors like a help to them.  This has been possibly the heart of the resistance to these ideas about self-governance and to the blog’s calls for action over many years. “I’m just drowning in work,” many faculty can quite accurately say.  “How am I supposed to take on more?”

 

The short answer is always, “not more work, different work.”  In the community of scholars, democracy is less work not more. But this needs to be worked through and made concrete. Otherwise, faculty (or staff, or students) won’t be willing to try.

 

I was recently at a dinner with UC friends, and of the 6 faculty around the table, I was the only one of them who had never spent several years serving on the Senate’s Council for Academic Personnel. (I always volunteered for Planning and Budget instead.)  Academic Personnel (CAP) is important work, since it is the heart of the faculty’s collective self-governance of professional performance and advancement.  Yet CAP exhausts its faculty members--really drains them. They find it very interesting, and yet in my experience they have no thought left over for wider strategy and policy. CAP focuses entirely on individualistic dimensions of scholarship and reward, and not on the community of scholars, its purposes or support.  Our colleagues shudder at the idea of adding policy to their existing workload: it seems to them to be like serving on CAP and Planning and Budget at the same time. 

 

Much of Michael’s writing examined why our current shared governance system exhausted faculty rather than empowered them.   One fix for CAP would be to increase the size of the council, but more fundamentally the fix is to increase trust in the lower layers of review, particularly the department’s, so that the top layer doesn’t essentially duplicate the personnel review that has already been conducted by 3 layers before it. 

 

However, these kinds of practical changes that would make more self-governance less work would require a shift in ethos at UC towards first, reciprocal trust, and second, effort shifted towards collective rather than individual goods. These changes both enable and require the democratization of management.   

 

***

This was indeed one of Michael’s major themes: democratization.  University governance is always bad unless knowledge flows upwards.  One example of the badness—UC’s Office of the President (UCOP) at peak autocracy--was the state audit fiasco of Spring 2017, when the state found UCOP to have scrubbed surveys that it had sent to UC campuses of even the mildest, most balanced campus criticisms of UCOP’s performance.  Then-president Janet Napolitano and her office had managed to turn some routine audit problems and reasonable criticisms into a statewide scandal, leading to the dawn of a new era of legislative distrust of UC and new levels of micromanagement.  On May 7, 2017, Michael wrote:

Amidst all of the heated disagreement, …  there has been one fundamental, and fundamentally wrong, point about which all of the arguing parties appear to agree:  that the answer to the problems the audit revealed can and should be solved from the top down.  Wherever you turn in the discussion, . . . the common element in all of the proposals is that the answer is to be found in a closed loop of decision makers shuttling between Oakland and Sacramento (with the occasional nod to the campus chancellors). 

 

In fact, the most striking aspect of the auditor's report and UCOP's response was the almost total absence of any acknowledgement of faculty or staff knowledge or perspectives.  Where were the formal responses of Senate Committees in the report?  How exactly is the auditor to know if the programs that UCOP oversees are productive if they don't get unfiltered responses from the people who are providing the education and front-line services to students, are engaging in research, and are attempting to convey that research to the public?

 

He noted the Regents’ response to their own management disaster was to hire another set of outside consultants, ignoring the legions of UC faculty in business and public policy schools with precisely that expertise.  The Regents are now paying and outside contractor, he fumed, for the clarity and documentation they never bothered to demand from UCOP in the first place.

 

He concludes, “If the University really wants to think about how to educate and create knowledge more effectively for the twenty-first century,  they would do well to recognize that in universities knowledge flows upward”—when it isn’t actively obstructed.

 

This was the context in which Michael and I continued to write in the later 2010s: bloat, autocracy, declining managerial performance, and deepening resource starvation in the educational core. It was also the context in which we were begging our colleagues to embrace the labor of democratic practice—learning institutional information, sharing and discussing it, struggling to implement the better ideas that result from learning in a march through the institutions.  Michael was particularly aware of faculty sentiment—of how infuriating and pointless arguing with a dean seemed to our ambitious, focused, dedicated, high-output research colleagues compared to the relative lightness of being of their teaching and research.

 

This was awkward.  The one thing that would save the University’s finances—greatly increased public funding—was the one thing managers wouldn’t seek. The one thing that would save the University’s management—a fully informed and engaged faculty—was the one thing the faculty couldn’t do.

 

Or so the faculty might have thought.  Michael persisted on this theme of the community of scholars governing itself.  When a later audit of the earlier doctored audit came out in autumn 2017, Michael posted at length.  He concluded as follows (November 27, 2017):

UC needs new leadership.  But this cannot be limited to finding a replacement for President Napolitano.  The UC Regents, after all, have made the decisions--through their choices of presidents and policies--that have brought us to this point.  The Regents and UC must give up on trying to mimic the failed Michigan model in finance and the failed managerial model in administration.  The new leadership of the university must restore the primacy of academic judgment over the demands of finance, must seek new ways to transfer funds from administration to education, and must be open to ideas from below.  Meanwhile, the Senate must move beyond its current reactivity and begin to act as a producer of vision and not just a commentator on administrative proposals.  In addition, faculty throughout the system need to take ownership of their local budgets and campus futures.

Yes yes yes yes—this is where I should take off my shoe and bang it on the table.

 

**

 

What Michael did then was practice what he preached.  A consultant would call it “leading by example.”  He became increasing active in the Senate, culminating as you have heard with his vice chairship and chairship of the UCLA senate and co-chairship of a campuswide Covid task force. He has also been a stalwart on the AAUP’s Committee A, which analyzes and intervenes in violations of academic freedom and has produced a series of important reports.  These were an enormous existential investment in the well-being of the institution and its grinding processes, in the infrastructure of national higher education, and in acting in such a way that governance itself can function as a scholarly community. 

 

Michael wrote increasingly about some key ingredients of democratization: academic freedom, unionization, and student protest. Writing in support of the UC graduate strike in December 2022, he read the strike as “a sign of how deep the failure of the University has been in (not) providing a sustainable funding model both for students and faculty supporting students.”  Noting that “the Academic Senate has been pointing to this problem for at least two decades,” and citing chapter and verse, he concluded, “the long-term question raised by the strike is whether UC will continue as a research university; if we don’t make it possible for future scholars to attend, we will have forfeited our purpose.”  Michael read the grad strike as a defense of the infrastructure of the community of scholars, and never flinched from saying exactly how bad a problem actually is. The research university’s future depended on the strike’s success.

 

He made a similar argument about the protests against Israel’s annihilation of Gaza after the October 7^th attacks.  Michael wasn’t happy about a lot of the protests, but the attacks on them flipped a switch.  In “The Authoritarian Personality Comes to College,“ he wrote, “the current suppression of divestment encampments and the mobilization of anti-Semitism against them (despite the many Jewish alumni, faculty, and students who participate in and support the divestment movement), must be seen [as part of] the years long right wing attempt to destroy higher education as source of independent thinking.”  “For years,” he continued, “free speech warriors and nattering nabobs of neutrality have been complaining about the heckler's veto.  I share those concerns.  But this week we saw the result of one of the largest heckler's vetoes in recent history, as two universities responded to violence [against] and condemnation of protest by shutting down the protest itself.  No clearer message can be sent to those who disapprove of both dissent and American colleges and universities that their aggression will get them what they want.”  The attack on protesters was an attack on the core purpose of the university—the pursuit and dissemination of the truth of things---and a desecration the community of scholars that the university was supposed to protect.

 

My sense of Michael’s writing, as one title suggests, is that it looks backwards and forward, and that the vision of a community of scholars is not nostalgic but ahead of its time.  It remains to be constructed with the elements Michael has identified: the personal scholar-scholarship bond; undergraduates as scholars; curation; intellectual freedom; self-governance, plus a full embrace of dispute, conflict, protest, and resolutions that comes not from above but from the participants within. 

 

Here’s the main point.  For Michael the university is an enormous, powerful thing.  The university is a wonderful big thing.  Knowledge is great, students are great, study is great, scholarship is great, unionization is great, the community isn’t great but it’s a work in progress.  So Michael, with that gigantic ambition for the university that you always have, welcome to your retirement so you can get back to work on building the community of scholars inside and outside the university.