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.

Highlights 14: Authoritarian America

Haley Street, Santa Barbara on April 5, 2014   

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION BEGINS INTERVIEWING UC FACULTY AS PART OF ANTISEMITISM PROBE

‘Federal officials have begun contacting University of California faculty members for an antisemitism probe after the school complied with a subpoena from the Trump administration seeking the personal information of around 900 faculty members, two UC employees with knowledge of the situation told POLITICO.

 

‘The employees, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, said federal officials have begun reaching out and speaking with faculty members last week, raising concern from faculty that the federal government is trying to pit them against each other as President Donald Trump continues to cut funding from top universities around the country.

 

‘The university sent information the administration requested for all faculty who signed open letters about the school’s response following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission following a subpoena from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to a letter sent March 27 by Charles Robinson, the UC’s chief legal officer. That information includes the employee’s position, date of hire, personal phone number and email address and whether the person is a current or former employee.

 

…

 

‘The first [letter], signed by more than 380 faculty members at UC Berkeley and sent shortly after the attack, expressed “deepest sympathies to Israelis and to Jews worldwide in this hour of terror and brutal devastation” as well as “deep sympathy and concern for the people of Gaza as they face a major military onslaught whose impact will indeed be brutal.”

 

‘The second letter, sent last May, called for university leadership to do more to protect Jewish students and faculty and had more than 500 signatures.

Robinson told faculty in the March 27 letter that the EEOC may “reach out to you as part of its investigation regarding your own experiences at the University,” but said they did not have to speak to the agency officials or tell the university if they are cooperating.

 

SOURCE: Eric He, Politico, April 10, 2025. 

 

EXPLOSION OF VISA TERMINATIONS

 

‘On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department had revoked 300 or more student visas, claiming these students were “lunatics.” Rubio claims students sought entrance into the U.S. “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.”’

 

‘Over the past few weeks, more colleges and universities have shared that their students have lost their F-1 or J-1 student visas—some related to their activism and participation in student-led protests against the war in Gaza, others for minor crimes. Most college officials say they’re unsure of why foreign-born students had their legal residency status terminated or have yet to receive formal notification of the changes. A majority have yet to receive any communications from immigration authorities.’

SOURCE: Ashley Mowreader, Inside Higher Ed April 8, 2025 and ongoing 

THE ECONOMIST OPPOSES TRUMP ON UNIVERSITIES 

 

‘This is an economic revolution and we will win.” Donald Trump’s line on tariffs sounds like something from Robespierre or Engels. And as any revolutionary knows, to sweep away the old order it is not enough just to raise import duties. You also have to seize and refashion the institutions that control the culture. In America that means wresting control of Ivy League universities which play an outsize role in forming the elite (including Mr Trump’s cabinet). The maga plan to remake the Ivies could have terrible consequences for higher education, for innovation, for economic growth and even for what sort of country America is. And it is only just beginning.

 

‘The target has been exquisitely chosen. Over the past decade elite universities have lost the bipartisan support they used to enjoy . . . But the most substantive change has been within the Republican Party. Conservatives considered elite universities to be hostile territory even before William F. Buckley published “God and Man at Yale” in 1951. Yet they also respected the basic compact that exists between universities and the federal government: that taxpayers fund scientific research and provide grants for students from poor families, and in return, universities do world-changing research.

'Some of the researchers may have views that irk the White House of the day. Many are foreigners. But their work ends up benefiting America. That is why, in 1962, the government funded a particle accelerator, even though some people who would use it had long hair and hated American foreign policy. And why, later that decade, researchers at American universities invented the internet, with military funding.

'This deal has been the source of military as well as economic power. It has contributed to almost every technological leap that has boosted output, from the internet to mrna vaccines and glp-1 agonists to artificial intelligence. It has made America a magnet for talented, ambitious people from around the world. It is this compact—not bringing car factories back to the rust belt—that is the key to America’s prosperity. And now the Trump administration wants to tear it up.

…

‘What [Trump] wants in return varies. Sometimes it is to eradicate the woke-mind virus. Sometimes it is to eradicate antisemitism. It always involves a double standard on free speech, according to which you can complain about cancel culture and then cheer on the deportation of a foreign student for publishing an op-ed in a college newspaper. This suggests that, as with any revolution, it is about who has power and control.

 

‘So far, universities have tried to lie flat and hope Mr Trump leaves them alone, just like many of the big law firms that the president has targeted. The Ivy presidents meet every month or so, but have yet to come up with a common approach. Meanwhile, Harvard is changing the leadership of its Middle East studies department and Columbia is on its third president in a year. This strategy is unlikely to work. The maga vanguard cannot believe how quickly the Ivies have capitulated. The Ivies also underestimate the fervour of the revolutionaries they are up against. Some of them don’t just want to tax Harvard—they want to burn it down.'

 

SOURCE: “The Campus Counterrevolution,” The Economist April 10, 2025

 

TRUMP CHAOS IS ALIENATING REPUBLICANS

 

‘The speed and scale of the American public’s souring on Trump’s economic agenda are stunning. Last week, 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.

 

‘All-time records were also shattered for the share of people who expect the economy to further deteriorate over the next year. Just 25 per cent of US adults said they expect their finances to look better in five years than today — lower even than at the nadir of the Great Recession.

 

‘Notably, these sharp deteriorations are being felt across the aisle. Even before “liberation day”, a third of Republicans disapproved of Trump’s actions on the economy, a remarkable feat given levels of partisan polarisation in America. A lot of people who thought they were an “us” have discovered they are a “them”.’

...

 

‘[T]he narrow subset of voters who identify as Maga Republicans continue to approve of the president at astronomically high levels, even after the tangible turmoil of the past 10 weeks.

 

‘But the larger group of other voters who backed Trump last November is rapidly souring on his economic policies and overall record. (Interestingly, the same does not yet appear to be true of Trump’s performatively hostile immigration policy, where arrests and deportations have done little to turn off those who backed the president in November.)

 

 

‘Trump, his vice-president JD Vance, Elon Musk and the other senior figures around him operate largely in their own closed media ecosystem, populated by vocal members of the deeply ideological Maga community. As such they tend to be detached from both wider public opinion and dissenting voices.

 

‘This may give the president and his team the sense that their actions have been much better received than they have. But the data suggests that while the Maga echo chamber may be impervious, it is far from all-pervasive.’

…

 

‘There are two clear lessons from Trump’s second term thus far. The first is that he’s not ushering in a new era of American prosperity. The second is that as more people realise this, the political situation could start to change quite quickly.’

SOURCE: Burn-Murdoch, John. “Trump Chaos Is Alienating Republicans.” FT, April 4, 2025 

 

THE ONGOING FAILURE OF LIBERAL ELITES

 

‘My view of US history is not just janus-faced, but developmental. To locate Trump we need to offer a historical account of how we got here, an account that is path-dependent and means that Trump is not just a shock but indicative of a deeper and longer-term trend. You don’t have to start your story-telling “at the beginning”. We all think and speak in “medias res”. But if you don’t see that the coalition that supported US globalism in its liberal variant has collapsed and that that didn’t start in 2024 or in 2016, you are missing the point.

 

‘Of course, [Joseph] Nye’s argument is also historical. Indeed, as a policy intellectual, he is truly a figure of the American century. But the mode of his historical narration and the way he situates the current Trump moment is different. It might be described as episodic or seasonal. In rather strong terms one might call it cyclical rather than developmental.

 

‘Characteristic moments where the episodic and seasonal view of history in Nye’s article reveals itself, include the following:

 

• American soft power has good moments and bad - as opposed to a series of interconnected and mutually conditioning phases in a path-dependent development towards illegitimacy.
• After Trump 1.0 came Biden and global confidence rebounded - de facto Trump is the exception and Biden-style globalism the norm.
• Whatever the antics of the White House, there are checks and balances - glossing over the possibility that those might be systematically and progressively subverted not just by MAGA but by trends in US politics more generally, including on the liberal side. Nye acknowledges that all is not well with US democracy, but immediately passes on to the question of “solutions”.
• American civil society is the ultimately decisive force and it is attractive and positive - as opposed to riven by profound tensions and contradictions of which the ugly state of US democracy is a fair reflection.
• Musk is simply a “billionaire” - as opposed to the most extreme instance of a new type of oligarchy that disrupts familiar patterns of elite lobbying and political economy.

 

‘This kind of episodic view of history relieves its exponents of the need to actually consider current historical trends and what they signify. You can simply shrug and remark that American soft power has ups and downs and it is currently going through a bleak phase.

 

‘In the seasonal variant, the episodic view of history promises that winter will be followed by spring. The GOP sweep in 2024 will be followed by a Democratic Party comeback in the midterms in 2026.

 

‘Thinking about Nye’s piece I realize that since the start of the year I have encountered this mode of historical thinking two times “in the flesh” in interaction with Democratic Party elites and also in reading interviews with prominent figures like Jake Sullivan.

 

‘The lite version of this quiescent logic was on display at a meeting of the American Academy with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Froman and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

 

‘Rather than facing the dramatic, irreversible and historic implications of the second Trump Presidency, my co-panelists shuffled comfortably back and forth between the present and the past, exchanging lessons learned in the Obama administration. The prevailing mood was one of accommodating oneself to the “turn-taking” in Washington - “so the wheel of history turns”.

..

 

‘[In a second event], What prevailed amongst the veterans of the Biden administration was that same mixture of regret and self-congratulation. The two were resolved in the celebration of “legacy”, “lesson learning” and locker room backslapping. There was no sign, at all, of a clear-eyed assessment of the historic defeat in 2024. Instead, my American co-panelists peddled lessons for their European audience, as if nothing had happened in November 2024. Indeed, they professed themselves particularly proud of documents (“work products”) published in the lame duck period following their defeat. Like Sullivan, the Bidenaughts seemed oblivious to the significance of their own failure.

...

‘If Trump 2.0 takes the politics of the imaginary to a new level, is this a rupture with the supposedly more grounded Biden administration? Or, in light of the exit interviews with team-Biden, do we have to face the fact that both sides are trapped in their own mythologies? In which case, what we living in now is not so much a descent into madness, as a new season of West Wing, this time “West Wing for deplorables”.'

 

SOURCE: Adam Tooze, Chartbook 359, March 9, 2025

 

FASCISM SCHOLAR JASON STANLEY KNOWS IT WHEN HE SEES IT, LEAVES AMERICA

 

‘Martínez: If Yale had told you maybe off the record that they were going to try and work behind the scenes maybe to protect academic freedom, but that it would be much more difficult to do without the federal funds. How would you have responded to that?

 

‘Stanley: I would respond by saying that's the wrong tack. You need a very loud defense of democratic institutions. That response would not take seriously the point that this is a war.

 

‘If universities think they can work behind the scenes and make friends, they're simply confused about the nature of the conflict. Yale University, like other leading universities, needs to take the lead, take a leadership role with and collectively work with other universities loudly to protect democracy.

 

‘Martínez: But what war can be won without funding?

 

‘Stanley: You might lose anyway. But you can't win a war unless you recognize it's a war. This way they're going to pick us off one by one. And history is watching here. Our institutions will be written about. They're being attacked for this entirely fake reason that's furthermore fomenting antisemitism in the United States. It's going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people.

 

‘So, if universities want to fight anti-Semitism, they need to stand up and say, “No, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews.”’

 

SOURCE: A. Martínez, “Why This Yale Professor Is Fleeing America.” NPR, April 1, 2025.

 CAMPUS POLICE ARE USING ISRAELI SPY TECH TO CRACK DOWN ON STUDENT PROTEST

 

‘Police militarization has been further accelerated by more than two decades of “training expeditions” in which thousands of U.S. police have traveled to learn from Israeli police and military who enforce an occupation of Palestinians with the aid of high-tech surveillance technology. Such trips are also an opportunity for Israeli-based companies to sell their surveillance products. These include the ironically named Nice Systems, which provides camera networks; SuperCom, which deals in electronic monitoring; and Cellebrite, which specializes in phone-hacking technology and has sold its products to agencies in at least 20 states. This influence is detailed by author Antony Loewenstein in his influential text The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. He writes that Israel engages in the surveillance of all Palestinians en masse, “regardless of age, location, or intent.”

 

‘A report from Deadly Exchange, a campaign launched by Jewish Voice for Peace, details how such exchanges “expose US law enforcement to the comprehensive monitoring and infiltration tactics and technologies in the Israeli arsenal, modeling the apparatus of a sweeping surveillance state.”

 

‘Some universities in the U.S. are also complicit in these trainings, such as the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program based at Georgia State University, where Israeli police are invited to train U.S. law enforcement from major U.S. cities. Activists have called for ending the GILEE program, sponsored in part by the Atlanta Police Foundation, the nonprofit behind the large police training facilitysouth of the city known as “Cop City.”

In 2019, Wayne State University’s chief of police traveled to Israel “to share law enforcement strategies” as part of a “delegation” of other police officers visiting from Cleveland, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. He noted the importance of the university police’s jurisdiction, “not only [on] campus, but also [in] the greater Midtown Detroit area — all neighbors and members of our community.”

‘As police try to legitimize their growing repression, communities continue to resist. In 2020, Tufts University students voted in a referendum to prohibit campus police from attending future retreats in Israel. Amnesty Internationalnoted that funds spent “to train our domestic police in Israel should concern all of us,” explaining that many domestic police abuses documented parallel “violations by Israeli military, security and police officials.”

 

‘Spying From the Ivory Tower

 

‘During the wave of pro-Palestine encampments that swept the country last spring, campus police took the opportunity to amplify traditional strong-arm behaviors (which included numerous violent assaults against professors and students alike) with newly acquired surveillance technology. This dangerous combination led to more than 3,200 arrests nationwide.

 

‘Universities supported these efforts by quickly suspending First Amendment rights to peaceable assembly, with some even enforcing archaic anti-mask laws against student protesters (originally enacted in response to the Ku Klux Klan) to aid police use of facial recognition software.

 

‘The student newspaper Columbia Spectator exposed in September how the administration at Columbia University and Barnard College spied on student activists before and after the encampments. Following a “Resistance 101” workshop held by a campus divestment group earlier in the spring, campus police started collecting information on demonstrators, gathering footage from campus surveillance cameras and tracking student IDs swiped at building entrances. They also sent private investigators to interrogate students at home, Columbia Spectator reports. The administration then began to suspend students, expel them from housing and call them before disciplinary hearings. New York City Police Department (NYPD) conducted multiple sweeps of student spaces.

 

‘In a press conference on May 1, during the height of the campus protests, New York City Mayor Eric Adams thanked Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who joined him onstage, for “monitoring the situation” when protests first began across the city. Professor Weiner, who conveniently moonlights as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, serves as the liaison between NYPD’s Tel Aviv branch (built in 2012 on the rubble of the destroyed Palestinian village Kfar Saba) and NYPD stateside. Weiner boasted that her office in New York had received “hourly updates” from the NYPD’s Tel Aviv precinct since October 7, ensuring that the militarized army terrorizing Palestinians was aligned with those harming U.S. students.

 

‘At Yale University, the 93-officer private police department kept an eye on campus protests with help from the FBI. As journalist Theia Chatelle reported in Jewish Currents, documents obtained from the settlement in a lawsuit for public records revealed that Jennifer Wagner, the head of the FBI’s New Haven office, reached out to Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell to offer assistance: “The FBI has been monitoring the widespread protests related to the Israel/Hamas conflict at several colleges and universities.” After an alleged assault in April, the FBI got a search warrant for the home of a pro-Palestine student and performed what Yale Public Safety referred to as a “dump” of information from their cell phone, a serious invasion of their personal property. The Yale Police Department “installed cameras on campus, tracked students’ social media accounts and monitored students using aerial drones,” according to Chatelle.'

 

SOURCE: Tara Goodarzi  and Brian Dolinar, “Campus Police Are Using Israeli Spy Tech to Crack Down on Student Protest.” Truthout, February 24, 2025. 

 

 

TRUMP MANIPULATES AMERICAN JEWS WHILE BANNING BLACK CIVIL RIGHTS

 

‘In the aftermath of the excessive use of force, the university created a Task Force on Antisemitism, which actually came up with a sensible definition:

 

‘Antisemitism is prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis. Antisemitism can manifest in a range of ways, including as ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures; stereotypes; antisemitic tropes and symbols; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards applied to Israel.’

 

‘The task force added: “To be clear, we do not think that a statement should be impermissible just because it qualifies as antisemitic under this definition. Offensive statements generally are protected under the University’s rules, so the University can encourage vibrant debate. The purpose of this definition is to educate, not to ban.”

 

‘However, other universities, including Harvard, have gone further, equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Harvard has adopted the much broader International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which considers some anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli criticism to be antisemitism per se. And Trump would arrogate to himself the prerogative to define what is antisemitism and what consequences offending universities, and students, should suffer.

 

‘Meanwhile, some 2,500 Jewish university professors have signed a statement called “Not in Our Name” objecting to the weaponization of antisemitism. The statement reads in part: “We hold various views about Israel and Palestine, politics in the Middle East, and student activism on our campuses. But we are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name—and cynical claims of antisemitism—to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities. We specifically reject rhetoric that caricatures our students and colleagues as ‘antisemitic terrorists’ because they advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom.”

 

‘This week, Netanyahu is hosting a global conference on antisemitism. His featured speakers are Europe’s worst right-wing leaders, who have no love of Jews but opportunistically embrace Israel. The whole idea smelled so bad that several of Europe’s mainstream leaders pulled out. Even the ADL bailed. But this is exactly what Trump is doing at home.

 

‘One bitter irony in Trump’s love-bombing of the Jews has not gotten nearly enough attention. Trump has paired his exaggerated and hypocritical solicitude for the Jews with his escalating punishment of any institution that embraces affirmative action for Black people, otherwise known as DEI.

 

‘Think about it. Trump is singling out Jews to get special consideration and protection, while he bans and punishes any special consideration of Black people and blocks even basic civil rights enforcement. Yes, antisemitism is a blight. But honestly, if you compare the Jewish experience in America—a refugee community that thrived here as nowhere else in the world—with the Black experience—suffering the inhumanity of slavery, persecuted through the ravages of Jim Crow, and never really escaping the scourge of discrimination—which community has more of a right to say, “I don’t feel safe”? Which has more of a claim on the government for extra protection?

 

‘Ideally, civil rights and civil liberties should be protected evenhandedly. But here is Trump, using fake solicitude for Jews to bash liberal universities and abolish civil rights enforcement for Black people.

 

‘This will not end well.’

 

 SOURCE: Kuttner, Robert. The American Prospect, March 25, 2025. 

 

 

Liner Note 21. First Call All the Lawyers

Palenque, Chiapas, on April 11, 2005   

The Eye of Sauron has fallen on the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).  This means the arrival of DOGE’s chaotic and opaque destruction in copycat mode to that which earlier came to the Institute for Education Sciences in the Department of Education (and the Department overall), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and multiple agencies across the federal government.  

 

At the NEH, the DOGE attack seems to mean cancellation of most grant programs and to mandatory administrative leave, leading to termination for 70-80 percent of its 180 staff.  This is double the estimates of the standard staff reduction that DOGE demands; a skeleton crew is to staff the remainder.  Grantees are receiving termination notices, some of which they’re posting online.  Confusion reigns as to the current status and future of grants, not to mention people’s jobs and the endowment itself. It’s the kind of situation you’d expect during a world war, except for DOGE’s additional dosage of contempt for the people and the missions being “demolished,” as one Health and Human Services staffer described the effects.

 

In response, the Modern Language Association (MLA), the National Humanities Alliance (NHA), the American Studies Association (ASA) and many other humanities associations have called on everyone to contact their elected representatives to object as loudly as they can. The American Folklore Society has a very good pagefor doing this.   

 

Humanities people are racing out to join the Hands Off protests, 

 

 

which are increasingly gigantic and amazing. 

 

 

The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) has called for the collection of stories of the effects of the cuts.  The stories are out there (Oklahoma, New Mexico, Ohio, Tennessee, Illinois, etc) and can (and must) be assembled into a national picture.  Various entities have set up pages to record grant cancellations (The Association for Computers and the Humanities; The National Humanities Alliance).  This is a great start. 

 

Some current and terminated federal employees have set up Alt National Forest Service, Alt CDC, Alt NIH Bluesky  which has been joined by, among others, Alt National Endowment for the Humanities. A shadow federal government is taking shape on line.

 

This is the best mobilization of humanities forces that I’ve seen in my academic lifetime. I couldn’t be happier about this energy and determination. Many thanks to everyone who is throwing themselves into the cause with such intelligence and abandon.

 

This brings us to the question of remedies.  A few need to be set aside.

 

First, the executive branch is not an audience for reasoned explanations of the value of the humanities for knowledge and the public.  It’s not that Trump and his people don’t care. They deeply care about the humanities—in the sense of deeply hating them-- and want to erase them and the socio-historical realities they represent.  The grant termination letters read:

 

“Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination.” [The letter] went on, “Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.” Instead, the NEH would be “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda.”

 

The language asserts a categorical contradiction between the research the NEH funds and the president’s agenda. I am sure that is what Trumpism believes. The sadism of blanket terminations is the self-affirmation of a righteous and also victimized cause--no audience there.

 

Second is our elected Congress: also not an audience. Angry calls do need to be put in the historical and political record, but Congress didn’t do this hit. Trump’s DOGE did, and Congress has no effect on Trump or DOGE.  The Republicans are fine with most of what is happening, very much including resubordinating people of color, and anyway for 40 years they’ve been saying all these jobs and agencies are undergrowth to be cleared from the yellow brick road to tax cuts. Their own voters aren’t happy, but they cast them as boozers if they want services and clowns if Musk cuts their government job.  On the other side, the Democrats can’t come to the phone right now. 

 

So, the main audiences I see are: 

(1) academics and our kindred knowledge workers in and out of federal government, whose laboriously-created expertise in science, arts, letters, social research is getting torched and their public missions sneeringly destroyed. (See the great description of science labor in this piece by Neel V. Patel). This cross-institutional solidarity around work and public mission is very important. 

(2) academic administrators, who are accommodating their institutions to Trump’s rules and will continue to without strong pressure from their faculty, staff, and students (e.g. Harvard, Rutgers, Indiana University-Bloomington,  U Mass-Amherst . . .).

(3) the wider non-MAGA public, which is increasingly distressed by the chaos and damage and could use good information and storylines. 

(4) the courts, both state and federal. This means lawfare as never before waged by humanities associations.

 

Suing is the key action now, as I see it--suing the Trump administration and its agents to get temporary restraining orders pending further action by the courts.  DOGE has a known playbook. There has been a flood tlawsuits against DOGE’s actions, and “as of March 25, at least 53 of those rulings have at least temporarily paused some of the administration’s initiatives.”  Lawfare has a litigation tracker, which shows how busy the Trump ligitation world has been. 

 

The courts have arguably been the most successful venue of opposition to Trump destruction, for the basic reason that these attacks on government agencies and employees are illegal and/or unconstitutional in whole or in part, in process or in substance.  Illegality suggests gradual or eventual plaintiff victory, barring blanket rejection of court orders in the coming months.

 

In addition to this long chain of litigation, three recent cases support this positive trajectory.  I will name them without comment on their claims, because the important thing here is the growing ecosystem of legal contestations of Trump’s unbounded executive authority.

 

The AAUP, with the American Federation of Teachers and the Democracy Project sued the Trump administration over their $400 million in extortionate cuts to Columbia University unless they control academic units and expression to the dictates of the Department of Education. This is an essential collaboration between teachers in K-12 and universities for the defense, autonomy, and better governance of their institutions. It should be something of a model for other suits in education.

 

Second is the lawsuit against Trump and associations brought by 21 states to block the gutting of NEH’s kindred agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  The Introduction to the complaint for declarative and injunctory relief argues,

One option that our Constitution does not give the President is to shutter the agencies himself, in defiance of the administrative procedures that Congress required to be followed, the appropriations that Congress ordered to be spent, and the separation of powers that every officer of our government has sworn to uphold. Accordingly, the Closure Order should be declared unlawful, and Defendants’ actions implementing that unlawful order should be vacated.

The attempt to stop the gutting of IMLS joins this ever-growing mass of complaints that establish a pattern of administrative illegality that in turn sets the stage for reversals.

 

Which brings me to a third case: a defeat in the Supreme Court for plaintiffs that had challenged the summary termination of the Department of Education’s teacher training grants (Department of Education v. California et al.). The Court vacated a temporary restraining order that had invoked the Administrative Procedures Act so that DofEd can continue to withhold grant funding.  

 

The decision is important for its dissents. Justice Kagan noted, “Nowhere in its papers does the Government defend the legality of canceling the education grants at issue here.” Similarly, Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor, wrote that the Court wades in to allow “its new summary grant termination policy . . .  even though the TRO preserves the pretermination status quo and causes zero concrete harm to the Government. By contrast, reinstating the challenged grant-termination policy will inflict significant harm on grantees—a fact that the Government barely contests. Worse still, the Government does not even deign to defend the lawfulness of its actions.”  Such opinions repeatedly flag Illegality as the essence of this administration’s summary practices, and build a cumulative case in defeats (of which there are more to come) as well as victories. 

 

As I write, there are rumors that the NHA is indeed planning to sue.  I hope this is true! I hope they are joined by the MLA, AHA, APA, ACLS, Mellon—the many agencies who possibly for the first time need to stand and battle together. 

 

I have a final thought about the sometimes hidden centrality of the humanities disciplines to the whole society. 

 

The humanities are at the bottom of the official epistemological ladder, but are at the top of the mystery index of direct mass impacts on humankind.  They feed directly into The Culture, and in the common understanding are inseparable from it.  Over the past sixty years there has been a revolution in the knowledge that history, philosophy, criticism, ethnic studies, linguistics, folklore, ethnomusicology and their many related fields have produced. That knowledge has underwritten a cultural revolution, all pointing toward (though never achieving) something like general egalitarian diversity—in sexuality, gender, race, culture, national and linguistic status.  This revolution in consciousness is real, though DOGE, building on decades of right-wing counterrevolution of the kind chronicled by John Ganz and many others, is trying to stuff it in a coffin.  

 

We humanities folk don’t often believe in our own revolution in part because, being inside it, we clearly see its incompleteness and failures. These are real, and so much remains to be done. Meanwhile, the political right believes passionately in our revolution. It has been trying to destroy it for the same sixty years—Nixon was a culture warrior, Agnew was a culture warrior, Reagan was a culture warrior, Wallace was a culture warrior, etc. 

 

The right believes in the left’s cultural revolution because it did in fact shift the ethical momentum of West towards equality, reciprocity, recognition, just distribution, and now a just climate transition and economic justice for the global South.  These ideas—wrong word--these atmospheres of pervasive feeling and expectation define the trajectory of progress as widely understood across the world. The right is angry in part because it is always in a reactionary posture in relation to what seems to be, in spite of reversals and incompletions, the flow of general expectations for common life. 

 

This humanities power is why the right fights so hard against diversity. “Diversity” to the academic left marks the dilution and betrayal of the civil rights vision of full racial equality, Black power, the giving of rules to institutions by people of color—dilution through its replacement with a procedural surveillance that preserves white institutions while also flattering them.  To the right, however, diversity means the end of white patriarchy, free markets, and America.  The war on diversity has merged with the war on pro-Palestinian students and with the corporate right’s war on “bureaucracy,” now put into hyperdrive by the tech broligarchy. As Evgeny Morozov writes,

Unable to reprogram their workforce through direct means, Silicon Valley’s oligarch-intellectuals adopted a more elegant solution: condemning “woke” infiltration with the fervor of medieval witch-hunters while disguising national security behind the rhetoric of patriotic duty.  

 

[Alex] Karp, having already crowned “wokeness” the “central risk to Palantir and America,” now demands geopolitical fealty from his payroll peasantry. They must support Israel and oppose China; those who disagree are free to look for employment elsewhere. As he told his Davos audience in 2023, “we want [employees] who want to be on the side of the West. You may not agree with that and, bless you, don’t work here.

 

The current government is therefore trying to erase the word diversity from the language, exterminate its offices, terminate its people, and wipe what it represents—the value, power, the simple abundant presence of people of color—off the face of society.  

As Joan W. Scott rightly notes, Trump’s “history executive order is nothing less than the takeover of educational and cultural institutions—schools, museums, public statues, commemorative anniversary events—in the name of an official authoritarian ideology committed to white supremacy, Christian theology, and the promotion of intolerant nationalist pride.”  

Equally, DOGE goes after centers of government expertise regarding society because these knowledge centers and knowledge workers are rival centers of power and creation.  DOGE orders effectively eliminate academic freedom for academics and government workers alike. 

 

My point here is that the Trump-Musk escalation of a sixty-year crusade is so savage, so destructive, so degenerated, so hostile to counter- knowledge, to history, to social reality itself, precisely because of the power of those diverse knowledges and peoples and government agencies to which the humanities disciplines are bound.  It is the (painfully unfinished and yet real) triumph of the humanities that they are trying to undo.

 

To quote George Lipsitz quoting Rahsaan Roland Kirk, “this ain’t no sideshow.” And for that reason the humanities system have to fight to win.