UC Irvine on May 8, 2018   

As Trump’s blunderbuss shoots the bottom out of the research boat, how will UC Irvine, the system’s middle case, stay afloat?

This is actually a national question. Trump has done a classic “heighten the contradictions” of the political economy of the US research university. 

 

This political economy has always been unstable, and three decades of reductions in per-student state funding have kept the boat rocking back and forth. Now the Trump Administration has blown holes in most sources of federal research funding. Meanwhile, state funding is mainly flat or down., and will be under renewed pressure as the provisions of Trump’s tax cut bill come into effect.

 

Colleges are taking on water, and this is to say nothing of the deeper crisis of social mission and public support, embodied in editorials like “It’s a Bad Time to Be a Graduate.”)

 

The US university sector now has a choice: it can face its structural crisis, in particular the crisis of its research funding system, or force campuses to dig even deeper to subsidize it. 

 

In a recent post, I discussed the evidence that the senior management of the University of Minnesota is choosing the second path. I presume that this is the default choice across the country. That’s not good, because this path means, at best, austerity and, more likely, major cuts to instruction and to non-sponsored research, which is most research in law, arts, humanities, and the qualitative social sciences. 

 

Couple this with what Peter Byrne calls “AI hypnosis,” which can be used as an excuse for further instructional cuts, and the cognitive gains of completing college face gradual evaporation.

 

Like the University of Minnesota, UC Irvine offers an important case study. Its administration  has been proactive. The Division of Finance wrote an informative “Budget and Financial Overview: Fiscal Year 2024-25 (FY25).”  The Budget Office has a new “Budget Model and All Funds Multi-Year Planning” mechanism.  This is coupled with a “Financial Stability Plan” that is responding to a campus structural deficit that they have presented publicly. So far, so good.

 

I’m going to tell the story of the UCI Budget Overview. I’ll then have to dispute its overall portrait of the campus economy—of who loses money and who doesn’t.

 

**

 

UC Irvine is a $6.7 billion university operation. (It was 56^th in the US in R&D expenditures in 2022-23, so is more typical of the body of research universities than giants like UCSD or UCLA.) Half of that income comes from UCI Health, the medical center which has recently acquired four more hospitals and does a massive revenue business—nearly $3.5 billion in 2024-25 (FY 25).  

 

In the Overview, medical business is booming, and the Overview claims that “funds flow from the health enterprise to the campus, contributing significantly to academic and support functions across the main campus, including the UCI School of Medicine” (p 7). 

 

The non-medical operation is split 3:2 between “non-core” and “core” operations.  Non-core funds includeauxiliary units (like housing and parking) as well as research contract and grant expenditures (C&G).  Research is of course fully academic and core to the educational mission in spite of being put in non-core.  Research funds depend on academic faculty submitting successful research proposals to funding agencies with the full involvement of staff, postdocs, graduate students, and lecturers who also cover the teaching that grant-writers aren’t doing.  Faculty apply to federal agencies like NSF, and also get lesser funding from state, corporate, and foundation sources.

 

Figure 1

 

The UCI Overview presents this 4/5^th of UC Irvine as robust and profitable. It presents the “core” as not so much.   

 

Note that in Figure 1, all the entities, even the medical center, are trying to help the core’s Schools by sending money, apparently with nothing being generated by the Schools.  The Schools are charted like a sinkhole—Schools aren’t givers but takers!

 

The core is inseparable from the campus and teaching students. Although the “core missions” are “teaching, research, and public service,” nearly all of UCI core revenues are tied to instruction.  This means both state funding and the many kinds of student tuition that UC campuses now charge. Some grant-based indirect cost recovery (ICR) is here as well, some investment earnings, etc.  But the core’s salaries for tenure-track faculty, lecturers, Graduate Student Employees (GSEs), and staff are tied to revenues from instruction. 

 

UCI defines the problem of the core in simple terms.  Core revenues go up 1-4% a year (Chart 3.2).  Core expenses go up 5-8% a year (Chart 3.3).  Costs rising at twice the rate of income has led to a projected $ 70 million deficit in 2026-27, or 5% of the core budget. 

 

The only good revenue news for the core is ICR, which gets special praise.  More on this in a bit.   

 

So, UCI defines its budget problem as the core’s expenses, and the Financial Stability Plan as the solution. It’s a model, but at heart is a plan for cuts, of familiar kinds. The UCI core will proceed by “not filling vacant faculty and staff positions, increasing revenue where possible, reducing programs and services where possible, leveraging existing non-core resources, and reducing other operating costs.”  The idea is to reduce instructional staff and services—that is to reduce instruction itself. (The only hint of growth again comes from “non-core resources.”

 

In the UCI Overview story, all losses are occurring in the academic core, founded on instruction.  It assigns no losses to the non-core or to UCI Health. Therefore, all the cuts might logically come from the core as well.  

 

**

 

The UCI core does lose money, particularly on teaching California resident students, because the state has long underfunded the University very badly, refusing to compensate for quasi-frozen residential tuition, among other things.

 

But, contrary to the Overview story, the rest of the university loses money as well.   Even massive clinical revenues and other auxiliary activities  barely cover costs in specific units. (And UCI seems to have negative “uncommitted reserves” (Figure 4)).

 

First, there’s UCI’s Medical Center, subject to audited systemwide Financial Reports.  In the most recent Report, for 2023-24, UCI Health’s Income from Operations was negative $28.6 million  (p. 60). Its Change in Net Position is negative $230.8 million (p. 60). Its Transfers to University is negative $91.9 million, meaning the campus sent it about $92 million that year (p 62).  

 

Caveats: these numbers fluctuate from year to year, there are others one could report, they require interpretation (cash flows from Med Center to UC campus are likely repayments / recharges for activities not specified in financial reports), med center accounting is very complicated, and I am not an expert in it.  

 

That said, the Budget Overview is not justified in presenting UCI Health as a general financial donor to the core and its Schools.  The arrows in Figure 1 are at best misleading when they show the Schools getting surplus funds from UCI Health, while generating none of their own.

 

This is an especially dangerous claim at this point in time, as the 1/3^rd of UCI Health that comes from Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement is subject to cuts when Trump’s health care cuts become fully effective after the 2026 midterm elections.

 

Next, there’s the “non core,” with its very large research expenditures. The Overview story is that non-core runs in the black and that ICR is a special boon.

 

Of the core fund sources outlined here, one source that has kept pace or exceeded inflation has been indirect cost recovery (ICR) from grants and contracts, which grew 15% each year for the past two years. This accomplishment reflects years of intentional investments in faculty, infrastructure, pre- and post-award administration, and incentive programs that have resulted in clear progress toward the strategic goal of increasing the impact of UCI research. The resulting growth in indirect cost recovery resources helps to cover existing costs for administration, maintenance, utilities, and other research-related costs that cannot be charged directly to grants. Continued growth at a steady pace is essential to achieving a sustainable financial model for the campus.

 

This is mostly crazy talk.  It’s obviously right about the rate of ICR increase, but the ICR growth rate is a function of UCI faculty’s increased grant acceptance rate, not an independent revenue stream. Those grants have costs.

 

Which gets us to the next point. ICR is not a positive revenue stream on top of the allegedly positive net revenue of Contracts and Grants. 

 

 I’ll focus on this, but note in passing a third problem. That is the Overview’s suggestion that ICR comes from the administration’s capital investments rather than from the labor of the faculty, staff and students who write the grants (5-10 proposals for every success) and who then do the research. They are not mentioned here.  This is not petty carping about wording: academic accounting misrepresents academic reality in large part because of its abstraction from universities’ core academic work.  “Continued growth” in research activity is labor first, with secondary capital support that in fact, at all UC campuses, Irvine included, struggles to be adequate. 

 

**

 

Back to ICR.  The idea that ICR is a positive revenue stream is one of the most destructive myths in university political economy. 

 

ICR is the supplement to direct research costs that are covered more in less in full by an extramural grant. However, in the U.S. and the U.K., ICR does not cover the full indirect costs associated with running a research grant at a university. Not ever.

 

Many or most of these indirect costs fit under “Facilities and Administration” that many grants need and share.  (The American Association of Universities has a short primer). The Trump cuts to ICR from 56.5% at UCI’s campus down to 15% are still tied up in court, but will be devastating if they go through. The reason is not only because they cover real expenses, as has been stressed in this crisis period, but because they aren’t enougheven at 60% or 75% to cover a university’s costs in laboratory research.

 

Here are two ways of depicting the universal ICR shortfall at universities.  The first comes from the UK’s Office of Students’ Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) database. TRAC tries to account for the “full economic cost” of all university activities. Here’s the picture from the 2023-24 TRAC Report.

 

Figure 2

 

UK universities lose money on teaching home students (dark blue bar) whose fees are quasi-capped (much like California resident student tuition).  They lose even more money conducting research (mint green).  Each year, the gap between full recovery of costs and their actual recovery gets bigger, as do their losses. 

 

The report spells out the problem: 

The full economic cost recovery rate showed a deterioration to 66.0 per cent compared with 68.5 per cent of full economic costs for 2022-23, and notably lower than in 2010-11 when the recovery rate for research peaked at 77.8 per cent. The median rate for full economic cost recovery was 58.1 per cent for the UK sector.

 

The typical UK university loses nearly £400,000 for every £1 million of research it conducts. This is nearly double what it lost a dozen years earlier. If sponsors paid the full cost of UK university research, the fiscal crisis of the UK university would go away.

 

 

The second ICR figure comes from the AAU primer, and brings us back to the U.S.

 

Figure 3

 

This figure expresses an implied loss on sponsored research: it is expressed by the share of research expenditures that come out of the university’s own pocket. In the AAU’s prose, 

Federal data show that colleges and universities pay for 25 percent of total academic R&D expenditures from their own funds. This university contribution amounted to $27.7 billion in FY23, including $6.8 billion in unreimbursed F&A costs. These institutional commitments to academic R&D significantly exceed the combined total of all other non-federal sources of support for academic R&D: state and local government (5 percent), industry [businesses] (6 percent), and foundation [other non-profit organizations] (6 percent) support in FY23. (emphasis added)

 

What does that mean for UCI’s the “non-core’s” Contracts & Grants allegedly running in the black, even making money on ICR?  It means this happens only because UCI spent $132,261,000 of its own money on research (FY23 Table 22, Rank 56; the most recent federal data).  In other words, 21.7% of its overall R&D expenditures that year ($609.6 million) came from its institutional funds.

 

Caveat: a small percentage of these institutional funds went non-STEM fields (an NSF accounting category) perhaps as direct internal research funding.  

 

Figure 4

 

 

 

But it’s a very modest non-STEM number ($8.2 million for the humanities, for example, and $36.8 million for all non-STEM fields (Table 58, rank 60); some share of it goes to subsidize (much smaller) losses on non-STEM research. (More info is at Liner Note 13, “Humanities Decline in Darkness” or, for detail, Stage 2 of The Great Mistake).  

 

So about one-fifth of UCI C&G funds take the form of internal subventions of extramurally sponsored research.

 

**

For the record, I am zealously pro-research and think there should be much more of it, not less. But the sector has long needed to stop bullshitting itself and pay for it fully and honestly, now more than ever--without sacrificing instruction or research in politically weaker disciplines like history and feminist studies. 

 

This is not a new issue with Trump: for ye historians, here’s a call for full research costing on this blog—in July 2009, or Gerald Barnett and I kicking off the 2010s with a Chronicle piece on the same subject, or me trying to use UCSD losing three core members of its Center for Theoretical Biological Physics to Rice University as a teachable moment in 2011, or trying to use UCLA losing a neuroimaging lab to USC as a teachable moment in 2013, etc..)

 

The reason it’s even more urgent now is that the Trumpian war on the knowledge system is slated to cause universities to lose much more money on research than ever before. Their administrations will be looking to free up resources everywhere, very much including the large payrolls tied to the instructional core.  

 

Given the damage this will cause, they are likely to set it up as UC Irvine has done, in which research is allegedly profitable for the university while instruction runs at a loss that must now, in trying times, be staunched.  UCI finance, having obscured the $100+ million it spends to subsidize research (leaving aside UCI Health), plans to cut its Schools of Humanities and of Arts and then keep the reductions to about 4% next year with subventions in the $2.8-$2.9 million range.  

 

I’ll discuss this issue in Part 2 of this piece.  But we should go into it with the understanding that “subventions” are the lifeblood of higher education. They can be made very large when education needs or wants them large, as with basic research in the STEM disciplines.  

 

The political economy of universities rests on the socialization of costs. It’s just a matter of whose costs and whether we admit them or cover them up. 

 

Dún Laoghaire Ireland on June 18, 2025

I haven’t found dissent in the standard places about Penn’s capitulation to Trump on transgender women athletes.  Maybe it’s because the deal seems to have gotten Penn’s $175 million back—those federal funds that Trump’s people had unlawfully suspended.  So let me say why it’s so bad. 

 

You may have heard that Penn president J. Larry Jameson settled with Trump’s Department of Education over the alleged Title IX violation of allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete for the Penn’s women’s team in 2021-22. This was actually Title IX compliance, since NCAA and Title IX guidance then required Penn to include trans women in women’s sports. (The Athletic has a good overview. See also Johanna Alonso at IHE.) 

 

The Trump Administration approaches most issues through coercive bargaining.  The play is always the same: accusation, conviction and punishment come first, pleading out the charges come after.  “First I hit you in the face. Then we’ll sit down to make a deal.”

 

Penn had the same three main choices as do other universities.

 

1. Comply with current policy as demanded by the Administration. In this case, that means the outcomes described by the Department of Education: “specifying that UPenn will not allow males to compete in female athletic programs or occupy Penn Athletics female intimate facilities.” 

 

Penn also went the extra mile: “UPenn will adopt biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ pursuant to Title IX and consistent with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”  (If the agreement said “consistent with biological science” it would have the opposite of Trump’s intended effect, but it’s Trump defining the biology of the Penn agreement.)

 

2. Contest the policy on procedure or substance or both. Build alliances to organize independent policy formation through federal procedures. In this case, that would mean the NCAA, Ivy League Athletics, etc., continuing to defend Biden-era Title IX rules for trans inclusion on various grounds: harms exaggerated and politicized rather than defined; known biology analyzed and incorporated; and equity, ethical, psychological, and rights issues accomodated. One goal would be creating a better public discussion to counter the current bigoted and dangerous discourse established by Trump’s Executive Orders.

 

3.  Comply with current Trump policy and also retroactively repudiate your own.  

 

Option 3 has become more likely as U.S. elites have largely collapsed before Trump’s coercive bargaining. They seem to think playing dead will make Trump go away.  This also means that Option 2 isn’t happening, though it has to happen if higher education is to recover its autonomy.  

 

Some university administrators, like Penn’s, also erase the difference between Options 1 and 3.   They aren’t only knuckling under to rules they opposed only months ago, doing U-turns to unfreeze federal funds that the Administration has unlawfully withheld. In Penn’s case, they are in effect endorsing the Trump-McMahon position and repudiating their own.

 

Penn’s president Jameson did this when he agreed to McMahon’s language and then stripped Thomas of her medals.  Treating her like a cyclist caught doping says that she cheated in the competitions because a trans woman is not a woman. McMahon’s Department of Education confirms this when it writes, “The Department commends UPenn for rectifying its past harms against women and girls.” 

 

Penn’s Note on their record page makes it worse. ““Competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Lia Thomas set program records in the 100, 200 and 500 freestyle during the 2021-22 season.”  In other words, she competed because of a regulatory fluke, and very much not because trans women are women.

 

Penn’s settlement is a Pandora’s box from which many bad conclusions can now be drawn by the wider public. Here are six.

 

1.     University modes are wrong (science, gender studies) and “traditional values” are right. 

2.     Civil rights means excluding transgender people, not including them.

3.     Universities pretend they care about vulnerable and oppressed people because they stand for principle. But they will not fight for them. They’ll take the money instead.

4.     Universities demand independence on the grounds that they answer to a higher power—thought itself—but they answer to power, just like everybody else. 

5.     Trans women are not vulnerable people in need of civil rights protections but oppressors, starting with oppressors of cis-women. (See McMahon’s testimonials.)

6.     Universities are wrong and Trump is right.  (That is the headline for the whole saga.)

 

Universities are supposed to stand up for truth even when it is unpopular.  Here Penn endorses fake truth and the premises of Trumpian persecution.  This undermines public respect for university research findings and deepens society’s knowledge crisi.

 

In a single capitulation, Penn’s administration has made both transgender people and universities easier prey to Trumpism.  

 

My heart goes out to the former, including Lia Thomas.  As for the latter, senior administrators--my god what will school these people? 

Berlin on June 23, 2025   

This is going to be short--I’m between the 3^rd and the 4^th of my conferences in the second half of June—but have a brief comment on the Supreme Court decision about national injunctions and a research funding chart.

The headline is of course the chaos created for birthright citizenship and the 14^th Amendment by the 6-3 majority decision, written by Amy Coney Barrett.  The decision doesn’t pronounce on the (flagrant un)constitutionality of Trump’s attempted nullification of birthright citizenship through executive order, but decides whether, under the “Judiciary Act of 1789, federal

courts have equitable authority to issue universal [national] injunctions.”   The Six said no, except under special circumstances (complaints from states, class-action suits). The decision disempowers lower courts as they try to enforce the executive’s compliance with law, and will require the Supreme Court to adjudicate pretty much every national injunction, as far as I can tell. It will be easy enough to block national unjunctions under SCOTUS’s brand-new legal standard (not created to strike down national injunctions against Biden’s student debt relief). 

 

In substance, the Court thus opened “the door for a majority of states to at least temporarily enforce President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship.” A good working definition of constitutional chaos is some states following the 14^th Amendment while others don’t. I omit comment on this but do agree with Adam Serwer’s deleted tweet.

 

The government has 30 days to spell out how it can make Trump’s nullification of birthright citizenship legal. As Leah Litman explains on the aptly titled episode, “SCOTUS Just Blew Up Nationwide Injunctions, “Because lower courts had blocked the order before it ever went into effect, the federal government said, we never actually had the 30 day period to create a set of guidelines for how we were going to implement this. And so that's what they are going to begin doing. And then if it's not blocked before then, it could go into effect July 27th.”

 

It’s not clear to me what the state-by-state effects of a blocked executive order would be, given the new weakness of court enforcement.  Trump and his SCOTUS wing have made the US post-constitutional. Operationally, Trump doesn’t need clarity, but confusion: confusion about the mixture of truth and falsity in my previous sentence is how authoritarian governments demobilize people and weild power.

 

For universities, the practical effect is that their temporary reprieves from Trump’s massive funding cuts—more or less all based on court injunctions-- are no longer sound.  I see three effects.  

 

First, the injunctions will have to be adjudicated case-by-case, as questions about the specific jurisdiction and the status of the plaintiffs have become determinant and will have variable outcomes. 

 

For example, there was this news in May:

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted a temporary restraining order to block the Trump Administration’s dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The decision was issued in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Library Association (ALA) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), represented by Democracy Forward and Gair Gallo Eberhard LLP.

 

What happens to this TRO? I’m not a legal scholar, but am not optimistic about its continuation.  The American Library  Association’s president, Cindy Hohl, had already noted, “Even with a temporary restraining order in place, Congress also must act to ensure our nation's libraries can continue to serve their communities,” which won’t happen this year or next.

 

Second, Trump’s agencies are now more likely to ignore court injunctions and continue to cancel grants, withhold funds, and carry on with next year’s cuts.  The injunctions’ status has been damaged. There’s been a major power shift from the judicial to the executive branch.  As the SCOTUS podcast Strict Scrutiny noted, "the court here is telling the administration that the restraints are now off. [It is] literally unfettered. Anything you were thinking about doing, but were worried that the lower courts would stop, there's [now] nothing to stop you."

 

The same goes for a swing in the psychological advantage. A third outcome is a big chilling effect on the federal judiciary: how many judges will say, okay, I have this state-led complaint so it’s still valid and I’m reissuing it even though that the Trump administration will appeal it again, on newly hallowed grounds.  Sam Stein does a nice job of describing this regressive spiral with Litman. with The chill comes from the dark force of the ever-expanding unitary executive.  

 

In short, the Trump v. Casa decision has lowered the odds of federal funding claw-backs. 

 

The decline was already continuing: while NIH is to restart grant reviews, for example, STAT has found that the agency’s “extramural funding deficit has grown over the past two months — from $2.3 billion at the end of April to at least $4.7 billion by mid-June. That’s a 29% drop from average funding levels during the same months of the previous nine years.” Now, Plan A is recertified as 30-50% losses in federal research revenues.

 

Here’s a visualization of research funding for most of the campuses of the University of California. Ignore the green band completely right now, and look at the others.

 

 

 

 

There are two UC systems in research, UC Big and UC Small.  This was not the plan, but is the direct result of state underfunding over several decades, which has blocked the infrastructural expansion of the newer campuses (for background, see “Liner Note 26. The University of California’s Fiscal Crisis”).

 

The largest (blue) band is federal research funding. Leaving aside the Trumpian destruction of academic freedom and peer review, the prime fact here is its very large share of total research expenditures. 

 

Note the grey band, which is the amount each campus spends of its own internal funds to support research.  It is generally the second-largest amount. The national average is that extramural research loses 20-25 cents on the dollar, which universities make up out of their own pockets. UCLA is closer to losing one third on every dollar of extramural research funding.

 

Note, too, how small the orange band is, which is state and local funding for research.  The states have let the federal government support (mainly STEM) research while they pay a share of instructional funding and other costs.  

 

Now, picture the blue band being cut by 1/3^rd.  Picture it being cut in half.  How would campuses maintain research effort measured by expenditures? 

 

They wouldn’t.  Every campus’s research would go down.  The big campuses will restart the arguments some made in the 1990s that a small campus or two might be closed, or, more likely, lose most doctoral programs. The smalls could cease being research campuses in the full sense.

 

Campuses would try to protect research with institutional funds.  These can’t be expanded without further cuts to the operations that diverting institutional funds to research have already eclipsed – facilities maintenance, upgraded instruction, graduate student employment, tenure-track faculty hiring, etc. 

 

What can happen, however, is that the small share going to support arts and humanities research be diverted to supporting extramural STEM research, taking arts and humanities research to zero.  By “humanities research” I include the staff that help raise the external funds for faculty projects—my sense is that little UC core funding now goes directly to intramural faculty research in the arts and humanities.  These staff would be laid off or shifted to STEM disciplines, and faculty would be (even more) self-funded than before. 

 

The only funding source that could replace lost federal funds are state funds.  But state legislatures have never been asked to do this, don’t want to do it, and have many competing urgent needs in their populations. Making matters worse, senior managers like UCOP’s finance and government relations people have spent the last 25 years never asking for more state funds or connecting funding to UC’s research mission. 

 

At my conferences, the quality of intellectual work was very high and the level of mobilization was very low.  The crisis is paralyzing academia, not galvanizing the rank and file.  

 

I don’t need to mention that, to block the fatal Doofus Warrior and his high-speed OODA Loop, academics desperately need emergency mobilization. 

Dublin Bay on June 17, 2025   

Universities can’t fight an impeding fiscal disaster if they can’t face its size and destructive power.  Are they facing it?  Would they fight it? 

It's sometimes yes on the first question, but the public versions so far suggest not fight but capitulation.  

 

Today’s example is Minnesota--with condolences and heartfelt solidarity to everyone affected by the recent political assassinations in the Twin Cities.

The AAUP chapter at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities put together a presentation for faculty about their administration's budget announcement. They cite their administration saying, “a financial model that relies on maintaining academic programs and activities at current levels is not sustainable, nor is attempting to be great at everything.” This suggests both downsizing scale and diluting quality.

 

The administration’s plan is a 6.5-7.5% tuition hike coupled with 7% cuts to academic units.  While academic units are cut $89 million, non-academic units lose $2.7 million, which aggravates existing administrative bloat.  The result would be our old friend “pay more to get less," and our newer friend “enshittification” of the academic core.

 

These cuts to the core come at the end of a decade of cuts.  Cuts on cuts, for some reason a tacit reset to the benchmark each year as though there’s no real cumulative damage, which of course there is.

 

 

While they are cutting academic units by $89 million, Minnesota’s administration describes a decline in direct and indirect research income of $85 million, perhaps a bit more than 10% of their total research revenues. 

 

Two things jump out here. One is the likelihood that they are robbing teacher Peter to pay researcher Paul.  The numbers are oddly similar.  President Cunningham's administration might say this is a misleading oversimplification, but if so, they should detail why. 

 

 

The administration can conceivably force instruction to fill in for research cuts only if those cuts are smallish, like 10%. But what if the research cuts are actually much bigger?  Then the instructional cuts are pointless, and also allow admin to avoid the real fix to the Trump cuts—a big, coordinated political fight with large state bridge funding, 

 

If Trump’s cuts go through, they will be catastrophic. To reduce my previous list of ten sources of cuts to a big three, they are happening to state funding, student tuition (international and residential), and federal research funding. 

On international student revenues, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suspended interviews for student visas worldwide, so new international student numbers could go to zero in the fall. That will mean a loss of about one quarter of international student fees off the top—plus other losses due to departure, non-matriculation, deportation, and the like.

 

There are also three kinds of cuts to federal research funding.  First is the cut of all indirect cost recovery rates paid by NIH and other major agencies to 15%. I estimated the effects in February (see lower estimates via Eric Hays’s calculations for the University of California).  ICR policy is tied up in the courts, but the agencies may implement it anyway, and seem already to be. Universities could lose half to two-thirds of their ICR.

In Minnesota, "If the 15% cap is extended to all federal agencies, [the University of Minnesota Office of Cost Analysis] has projected that cuts to the University would increase to a range between $155M to $188M per year over the next five years"--on a base declining to $750 million.

 

The second kind of cut is current-year cancellation of grants coupled with non-payment on grants that haven’t been officially canceled. The Financial Times reports,

Treasury department data shows cash disbursed from the National Institutes of Health dropped to $2.8bn in May, down 28 per cent from April and the lowest absolute-dollar outlay since September 2014, according to Jefferies, an investment bank.

 

There’s also the spectacular blanket withholding from universities like Harvard, Penn, Cornell, Columbia, and Northwestern on top of the large numbers of individual grant cancellations. Grants Watch recently raised its estimates of non-disbursements and cancellations. The total is now about 20% of NIH’s current-year budget for research. I don’t know why the University of Minnesota thinks its losses are half that.

 

The FT again:

The frozen NIH funds have blown a hole in university budgets across the country. For example, Northwestern University has been spending about $40mn a month to cover the missing NIH funds, according to Carole LaBonne, a professor at the Chicago-area school.  

“Research labs are looking at really stark choices about laying off personnel and not being able to take graduate students,” she said. 

 

Northwestern had not been paid since late March but had received no official notification from the government about a funding freeze, a university spokesman said. He confirmed the university was spending tens of millions of dollars a month to continue research.

 

Northwestern is a bad case, but there’s a lot of other overdue funding that may never come in.  Similarly, current-year NSF cuts were over a billion a month ago, on about $9 billion (Table 4). This 11% cut may now be higher.  

 

The third type of research cuts is the set of massive reductions slated for next year.  

Trump has requested cuts to science funding across the board — the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) would lose roughly 40% of its budget compared with 2024 levels, and NASA would be pruned by about one-quarter — but the NSF would lose a whopping 57%, taking its roughly US$9-billion budget down to $3.9 billion. These top-line numbers aren’t new: the administration released a ‘skinny’ budget with similar figures in early May. But the detailed budget released last week gives a fuller look at the historic cuts intended for the NSF — including the elimination of 99% of funding for clean-energy research and the surprise shuttering of a gravitational-wave observatory.

 

Let’s imagine that after some bargaining in Congress the two lead agencies, NSF and NIH, only get cut by 1/3rd.  For NIH that’s 33% on top of a 20% cut on the current year.  So Minnesota and everyone else should put their default guesstimate on 2024-26 cuts to direct research funding at 50%. 

 

This is in fact such an assault on the public science / federal funding model that university managers are dreaming of private equity.   You may be soon be reading more paragraphs like this one in STAT about Harvard.

 

Under the deal announced Monday, İş Private Equity, a Turkish firm, has committed $39 million to a laboratory run by Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, a professor of genetics and metabolism at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The firm, which is a branch of Turkey’s İşbank Group, also plans to invest an undisclosed amount of money in any drug candidates that come out of Hotamışlıgil’s laboratory and are moved into a new biotech called Enlila.

 

This model is a disaster for basic research and public missions without big return on investment, which is all of them.  But it might explain the University of Minnesota president’s use of $74 milion in reserves—perhaps to prime the private investment pump by giving sciene and tech investors some funding up front.  I’m speculating, but that’s the logic.

 

The default admin plan seems to be (1) backfill reseach losses with teaching and department funds; (2) hope the cuts are a fraction of the stated Trump plan; (3) use admin reserves to seed private partnerships for research; (4) project no need for serious new state support; (5) keep the faculty demobilized with minimal and lowballed information.

 

Paul Campos has a truly exasperated post about the structural deficit at the University of Colorado-Boulder School of Law that was deliberated created and then absurdly plastered over, so “that the law school is effectively broke, and we’re going to have to start laying off people in the next year or two, including some of the faculty who have been paying no attention to any of this because it’s so boring.”  

 

Campos is right that budgeting fairytale storytime is a standard management strategy, generally leading its docile auditors to accept Matt Seybold’s Ponzi Austerity.  It’s a go-to resource because it’s the Great Demobilizer, and also mad suppressor of noncapitalist realism and structural change. However, the Trumpian Massacre raises the question yet again of how much longer budget surreality can carry on.

 

Or hyporeality.  And hyponormalism.  If society has moved into the hypernormal, university management is still enforcing the hyponormal in relation to its expanding fiscal crisis. 

 

In both cases, people carry on as though the system wasn’t actually broken. In hypernormality, borrowing Alexei Yurchak’s term, the system’s dysfunction is widely noted. In hyponormality, information is withheld and discussion is blocked so that dysfunction can be denied.  In both cases, administrative authority is maintained as program damage propagates through the system. 

 

If the Trump Administration follows through, it means public universities need an entirely new state funding system.  If it follows through, states will need to figure out how to send fewer taxes to the feds in exchange for picking up more federal programs, academic research included.  But Minnesota’s hypo-planning will keep that discussion from happening. 

 

Like everywhere, that campus needs a much deeper and more open set of arguments about what to do.

Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on May 28, 2025

The foundation I direct, the ISRF, had particularly good annual board meetings at the end of May, in Amsterdam as usual. I then got food poisoning, which was a uniquely energy-draining experience that lasted a week. My advice is never ingest campylobacter bacteria for any reason, which seems to be what I did.  I did barely manage to write a Director’s Note about the research we discussed, “ISRF in the Polycrisis,” about which more at the bottom.

 

While we were meeting, the Atlantic made the New Dark Age official, via a piece by Adam Serwer. This got my attention, partly because it’s true and partly because it’s a favorite phrase of mine. I relaunched this blog just before Trump’s 2024 election by calling for an epic fight for knowledge in “our new dark age.”  I’d liked James Bridle’s 2018 book, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. I’d also thought a new dark age had started with the Global Financial Crisis in 2007-08, just before I’d moved to Lyon, France as the director of UC study centers there. 9/11 had militarized politics and society,  the financial crisis had crushed working people and spread anger everywhere, the Obama administration bailed out Wall Street not Main Street, and the Occupy movement couldn’t counter the base of the Tea Party that led directly to Trump and MAGA six years down the road.  I was also watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica at the time. 

 

The only way deal with knowledge destruction is to ramp up knowledge creation.  This was brought home to me at the start of the current crisis of federal persecution of higher education, which was the Congressional hearings in December 2023 on the alleged antisemitism epidemic on America’s college campuses. The most important first-round result was the purging of Harvard University’s first Black president, Claudine Gay. 

 

Like most of you, I’d been following private equity mogul Bill Ackman’s vendetta against both pro-Palestinian campus speech and Harvard’s new, now ex-president Claudine Gay.  He linked her with the alleged corruptions of merit known as diversity, equity and inclusion. He stoked the charge that she’s soft on antisemitism. Then he loudly pressed charges that she is a plagiarist, dubbing Harvard’s retention of her “Gaygate.” Harvard’s Corporation board finally capitulated and accepted Gay’s resignation, meaning that they let go the university’s first Black president and second woman president six months after they’d proudly hired her.

 

On January 2, 2024, the New York Times published Claudine Gay’s resignation letter. On January 3^rd, Business Insider ran a story about Ackman’s successful campaign in which he exonerated himself of bullying charges. On January 4^th, Business Insider flipped the script with their now famous story, “Bill Ackman's celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation is marred by plagiarism.” You probably remember the rest: Ackman went nuts in the defense of his wife. Among other things he promised to review every single MIT faculty member for plagiarism, using “AI.” He also had to explain an apparent double standard in which Gay had to be fired for her plagiarism while Oxman had to be excused for hers. 

 

Part of Ackman’s attempt to distinguish the wife he was defending from the president he was hounding was to question whether it’s possible to plagiarize Wikipedia.  He asked a series of incredulous questions to that effect.

 

Under fire, it’s not easy to know how to deal with knowledge immunity—possessed by people who are too rich, powerful, connected, or managerially entrenched to have to care about what you know that they don’t.  

 

It’s not easy to know how to deal with plutocratic bombast. It’s especially not easy in the normal situation in which the bombast has created its own reality and the analysis will be too little too late. 

 

And yet tech analyst Molly White dealt with these issues straight on by reviewing Ackman’s questions and answering them.  

 

“How can one defend oneself against an accusation of plagiarizing Wikipedia for a dissertation written 15 years ago in 2009?” Ackman exclaimed. White showed him Wikipedia’s “view history” link you can click to see any page on a given date. 

 

“Has anyone (other than my wife) ever been accused of plagiarism based on using Wikipedia for a definition of a word?” Ackman wailed. White showed him the Wikipedia page listing the many people accused of plagiarising Wikipedia. 

 

In each case, White offered literal, professional answers to each of his questions and with less snark than they deserved.  

 

What moved me was White’s confidence that knowledge mattered.  She acted as though her knowledge could confront his power--professional knowledge could confront managerial or executive power.  She wouldn’t change Ackman’s mind. But her knowledge could reduce his power by changing (or clarifying) other people’s minds. She made it less likely that he’d again defend Oxman by claiming that Wikipedia is community property that no one can steal. 

 

Asking myself why I was so impressed by White’s approach, I saw it as a sign that my baseline assumption about the practical effects of professional expertise had gone negative during my years of scholar-activism at the University of California and then at the Modern Language Association. The lack of institutional back-up created a default sense of the inevitable triumph of mistakes. 

 

White had started her answers by commenting about her knowledge status. She noted that she’d been editing Wikipedia since 2006, that she had over 100,000 edits, and that she’d spent six years on Wikipedia’s version of the Supreme Court. I know a little bit about Wikipedia, she said, which referred to what was a major expertise that had taken the form of a “hobby”—a serious hobby in the sense that writing open source software as part of a global network where you aren’t getting paid by a corporation is a hobby. Or that professional humanities scholarship, generally unfunded by universities or the government, is a hobby.

 

You nerds who also have a “niche hobby,” White said, 

probably know that very unique rage that you feel when somebody tries to speak confidently about that hobby without actually bothering to learn that much about it. This happens to me a lot with Wikipedia, because everyone knows what it is. . . . But in spite of knowing what it is, people don’t actually understand much about how Wikipedia works. That apparently includes Bill Ackman, who came out today with a list of questions about Wikipedia that he’s definitely curious about, and somehow unable to look up the answers to.

 

So, there’s the skill and knowledge that some unknown person painstakingly builds up over years and years of their life, in total obscurity and generally at their own expense. There’s the oblivion to that skill from the figure of power, the casual not knowing that the skill much less the person even exists. There’s that big person’s indifference to the labor of finding out.  There’s that big person’s demand that someone else do the work of answering the questions he could answer if he did his own work.  There their replacement of knowledge with conventional wisdom propped up by their high status. There’s that figure of power’s indifference if not hostility to the people who do know—all the non-managers and the non-executives with laboriously acquired skills whom we could call the cognotariat, the vast majority of whom do not work in colleges or universities.

 

The situation that causes unique rage –the confident wrong speaking from empowered ignorance—afflicts knowledge institutions and runs politics and the media, which is a powerful agent in the political field.  It fuels the orc armies of the worst overlords. It makes the solutions seen by ordinary people impossible to implement or even to hear.  The rage comes partly from the willingness of Ackman et al. to use power without knowledge and to refuse to see knowers as agents of history.  The rage comes from how well this works to keep professional knowers from seeing themselves as agents--not to mention from allying themselves with non-professional and non-university educated knowers (French farmers spring to mind, as well as authors of community projects like this digital museum co-created by one of our ISRF fellows, Dr Chamion Caballero. And so on).

 

The University of California was the main site where Remaking studied this core situation, in which the academic professionals—and their lives in knowledge--are ruled absolutely by amateurs.  The blog has been about evidence-based argumentation as a weapon of the (relatively) weak.  It sought to correct the record—the record about the budget, about the state of teaching and research in universities, about what wilful administrative blindness was making no longer possible, about the gap between publicity and reality, about everything that needed to be done.  The blog has also about entirely reframing the status of knowledge work. 

 

Of course, the wider context is the plight of knowledge and its institutions around the world. Rulers have always been bad for non-state knowledge, but today there’s a massive contradiction between the war on knowledge and the knowledge that survival requires—about climate, finance, racism, inequality, and war itself.  War’s override of global cooperation is becoming the hallmark of the 2020s. 

 

Later in “A Wikipedian explains Wikipedia to Bill Ackman,” Molly White goes into some detail about copyright, authorship and communing. Ackman wants to brush off Wikipedia apparently because he thinks that something  collectively created is basically public property, and anyone can help themselves to it. This is the commons in the zone of tragedy, in which a lot of people work basically for free to create a common good of enormous and ever-growing common value, and the Ackmans ignore them, don’t pay them, disparage them, and appropriate it. 

 

White explained that images, writing, etc. are copyrighted as soon as they are recorded – as established by the Berne Convention in 1886.  This has nothing to do with plagiarism, she says, which is failing to attribute and thus take someone else’s work as your own (a labor issue!), as Oxman did. In addition, she pointed out, Wikipedia is not overall a public domain but a commons operating with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, which “requires that you attribute Wikipedia and its various editors who actually wrote that content.”

 

In direct opposition to Ackman, White expressed a knowledge commons founded on the rights of the creators.  The rights include the right to attribution—to recognition of the labor and its product—and, unmentioned but everywhere in the knowledge crisis, the right to payment for work. 

 

White writes for a lot of newspapers and magazines, as we used to call them. At most points in history, she would have had a full-time unionized job with benefits at a major newspaper, writing about tech with the always-developing expertise that one finds among specialized journalists like the FT’s Katie Martin on finance.

 

But academia’s sibling, journalism, is famously being gutted.  Three weeks after its plagiarism scoop about Neri Oxman, Business Insider lost 8 percent of its staff due to cuts from its owner Axel Springer.  

 

For a while, the sector thought it might be rescued by billionaire charity. But billionaires generally don’t care about unsung local journalism where much of the most important coverage happens, and they don’t like to lose money. The doctrinal billionaire who bought the venerable and pretty good local paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press, in the 1990s, ruined it by dictating the editorial line and by decimating its professional staff. She finally closed it in mid-2023, so a wealthy, near-majority Latino, militantly environmentalist, highly educated, well-known smallish city with a research university lacks daily news coverage, with the online Noozhawk and weekly Independent trying to cover behind-the-scenes manoeuvres during a dicey transitional period for the region. Its archives were nearly sold off to a Malta-based operator of zombie sites, and were saved only by last-minute local efforts.

 

Meanwhile, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post shrank staff in October 2023, while billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong started 2024 at the Los Angeles Times by cutting 115 reporters, including a set of younger Black and Latino staffers. Both have interfered editorially to shield Trump from criticism on behalf of their business interests.  The long 2010s saw journalist employment fall by 26 percent.

In the mid-1980s, an unknown reporter named Gary Webb broke the Iran-Contra scandal that exposed the Reagan administration’s murderous meddling in Central America with money illegally extracted from the Iranian government. He was backed up against massive state-sponsored criticism by his paper, the San Jose Mercury-News.  Would that regional paper cover a reporter caught in a global controversy today?  Could it? Journalism and universities are struggling in parallel to sustain knowledge creation.  Meanwhile, much of the most important work has had to become self-platforming.   

 

The extractive structural economics infuriate me, but the people surviving and even thriving in the semi-ruins inspire me.  

I’ll mention just a couple more. There’s Daniel Denvir, perhaps the most comprehensive and rigorous preparer for interviews I’ve ever heard.  

There’s Paris Marx, now heading towards his 300th episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, which more or less the best critical tech podcast in English. As far I as I can tell he did the whole thing by himself each week until fairly recently.  He had a breakthrough when The Nation magazine agreed to carry him in some form I wasn’t clear about, until he mentioned that they were promoting his podcast but weren’t actually paying him something to do it. He depends on Patreon—I am proud of my premium subscription, and encourage you to join me if you follow tech at all. Marx has 1443 paying subscribers after several years of brilliant and heroic work. I mean heroic, in the sense of high-quality work under a very heavily workload of reading and prepping a book and more a week while staying on top of tech in general. One day, he mentioned to another similarly accomplished younger tech intellectual that before he started the podcast he had been working as a phone agent in a call center. “Me too!” his guest replied. They’d learned a lot about the limits of tech, and no doubt helped a lot of callers like me, while also wondering, I imagine, how they could possibly take their leaps basically by their flying bootstraps into careers of non-stop and even influential analysis, which they then did. 

 

So really this blog is the least I can do, in solidarity, to keep thinking and writing as part of a massive collective effort to build a radically different knowledge system that can repair the world.

 

In so doing, every problem can be paired with a knowledge response.  Here’s the one I showed at our foundation meetings—ISRF research in red, other research that needs doing in black. Join us.