UC Santa Barbara on March 5, 2020     

On Friday August 8, the Trump administration demanded a $1 billion "settlement" from UCLA after freezing $584 million in federal grants for vital scientific and health research. The proposed $1 billion agreement would be the largest settlement since Trump began extorting universities, and marks the first attempt of the federal government to ransom payment from a public university. These attacks have been waged under the guise of fighting antisemitism and investigating alleged Title VII violations, but we see them for what they are: an attempt to cripple public higher education in the nation’s premier public university system. 

UCLA on May 14, 2018    

It’s a Friday in the 6^th grade, when you eat at the lunch truck parked outside the school gate. While standing in line, the big kid behind you grabs the five-dollar bill out of your hand. When you turn around, he smirks and says, “I’ll give you this five back if you give me a ten.”  

 

This is the genius shakedown that Trump has imposed on UCLA.  He announced the freezing of $300 million, which UCLA officials said is really $584 million.  Two days later, it was like the first Dr. Evil scene in Austin Powers.  “We hold UCLA ransom for--one BILLION dollars.”

 

Obviously, the choice can’t be to pay $1 billion to get back $584 million. The choice is to say okay, keep the $584 million, or, instead, sue to get back the $584 million that has been (unlawfully) withheld. 

 

It’s not really a choice. UC must pick door number two.

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.

 

 

Columbia University on November 1, 2022

I learned of Columbia University’s surrender to Trump’s extortion using $400 million in federal research funds towards the end of a dinner in London.  We had a couple of good friends over, one American and the other Turkish, both have lived and worked in the UK for many years.  

We’d been joking about how we were all in the same situation now, the “oriental” and the American despots pacing their twin quarter-decks, ranting and illegally harpooning their enemies, while their crews tried to stay out of sight.  The analogy didn’t quite work, since Turkish students have been in the streets protesting president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s arrest of his strongest opponent, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul. But it diverted us for a few minutes.

 

 But reality sank in again. The American remarked that she saw the failure of Trump’s opposition as permanent. U.S. democracy was effectively over.

 

The people of the United States have grown up assuming that their institutions were set in stone, she said. That they could never crumble. No one could take them over.  Now look.  They don’t know what to do. They aren’t doing anything.

 

They are figuring it out now, I said.  People are scrambling to reassess. Trump is taking their government apart. They’re yelling at their congresspeople in town halls.  People are suing him right and left, which have blocked a lot of what he’s tried. When they get more of a grip they’ll start to fight.

 

They are years behind, the American pointed out. The right organized. They funded their institutes. They wrote a plan. They published the plan. The plan told everybody what they were going to do.  He got inaugurated and they are doing the plan.  The response of the Democrats is to let him do it.  

 

The lawsuits are working, I said. I noticed the other two seeing me flail.  Everything Trump is doing is either illegal or implemented illegally.  There’s a lot of resistance.

 

Yes, and so? She replied. Trump’s army of lackeys will appeal to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court will give Trump whatever he wants. End of story.

 

He doesn’t control all the judges, or the lawyers.  Federal workers are protesting.  There’s a lot of resistance out there and it’s starting to build, I exclaimed.  You’re not being sufficiently dialectical! We laughed at that.

 

I was getting a bit upset, not because my friend was wrong to prject total defeat for the Trump opposition but because my confidence in the opposition rang hollow in my own ears. 

 

I was expressing a confidence in the fighting will of the professional managerial class (PMC)—experts like judges and university managers—for which I knew perfectly well there is no historical evidence.  In my youth I had written a whole book about the cultural genesis of their submissive individualism.  

 

And there I was saying well, the existing PMC will take despotism lying down but the emerging PMC will fight! I was saying, to restate Bertolt Brecht’s line, “Would it not be simpler if the people dissolved the PMC and elected another?”   

 

Time to take a quick trip to the loo, where I saw that Michael Meranze had sent me the Wall Street Journalstory about Columbia’s capitulation.  Back downstairs, I said, Ok, just to prove your point, and read them the headline.  No laughter this time, just reckless eyeballing that said, of course. 

 

This is another one of those “shocked but not surprised” moments because it is a self-destructive capitulation that will encourage further Trumpian attacks on the sector while voiding academia’s rallying principles.  It follows a formula for academic mismanagement:

 

1. An outside power threatens a university with financial or legal pain and punishment. This can be a state legislature, a set of wealthy donors, a private-sector lobby, the federal government, an extramural funder, etc.

 

2. The threat has legal or financial flaws that potentially weaken its prospects, and professional experts and/or activists expose them.  Seeing the flaws requires practice experience and also generally the professional expertise of lawyers, international relations specialists, economists, critical race theorists, and the like. Not coincidentally, such people are found on university faculties, and thus some faculty members of the threatened university bring their scholarship to bear.  In effect, the professional half of the PMC offers knowledge-based authority to the managerial half. 

 

In this case, a group of Columbia law faculty devastated Trump’s procedure in relation to Title VI requirements.  A national group of legal experts did the same.  And an M joined the P in PMC: Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, approached the very threshold of calling for collective university solidary in confronting the Trump administration’s attacks: “Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”  

 

Also, the journalists Matthew Haag and Katherine Rosman detached the original $400 million figure from any basis in federal funding (opaquely related to the $988,670,000 that Columbia received in federal funds in FY 2023, Table 22). In the early 1990s, when Trump was facing bankruptcy, he tried to get Columbia to buy his former freight-yards property on the Upper West Side. He kept moving his asking price, and finally put it at … $400 million.  Columbia’s commercial property consultants told them its market value was $65-$90 million, meaning Trump was asking 5 times market. When Columbia tried to appease Trump by saying they’d pay the top of that range or $90 million, Trump stormed out of the meeting five minutes after it began. The sale never happened, but Trump seems not to have forgotten his price.

 

Similarly, student newspapers have been calling for their administrators to do meaningful battle against Trumpian repression. Obedience won’t save Columbia or any other university, the Harvard Crimson observed. The Daily Princetonian summarized the attacks on universities, scholars, and peaceful protesters before praising Eisbruber’s statement and then demanding that he walk the talk.)

 

3. The professorial knowledge appears as a power that creates a will to act against the threat. It inspires expectation—among faculty, staff, students, and parts of the public, including some journalists reporting on the situation and politicians looking on. The expectation is that this time senior management will stand up against the threat. They will refuse the blackmail, take Trump’s agencies to court, and organize other university administrators into a united front.

 

4. The senior managers ignore the professional expertise and submit to the threat. The opposition is defeated from within, by its institutional superiors. This degrades the conditions of opposition to all phony, predatory threats and the cycle promises to repeat. 

 

There are many infuriating aspects of this decision. They start with a total lack of common sense about dealing with bullies that any ten-year-old schoolkid could explain.  At the New York Times, Troy Closson reports, 

'It was not immediately clear whether the university’s actions would be sufficient to reclaim the $400 million in federal money. A spokeswoman for the Education Department, one of three federal agencies named in the letter, did not immediately respond on Friday to a request for comment, including to questions about the potential restoration of federal funding. . . . The Trump administration has told the university that meeting its demands was “a precondition for formal negotiations” over a continued financial relationship and that the White House may call for other “immediate and long-term structural reforms.”

You owe the bully obedience; the bully owes you nothing.'

 

Infuriating aspects continue with the gall of presidents to submit in the name of the very people who opposed submission and gave valid reasons for their opposition.

 

 As in most such cases, the surrender by the university managers brings bad concrete outcomes. In this case, it’s adherence to a wrong, repressive definition of antisemitism, more policing, intervention in admissions procedures, and a government-dictated supervision of a racialized academic department.  The Columbia administration has accepted the Trumpian premise that ethnic-type studies need if not total elimination then a firm hand as a permanent assembly of little brown brothers. This is an insult to higher education in general. 

 

Just as bad, the surrender converts the threat’s lie to truth.  The Columbia letter defines the campus that in reality most criminalized its anti-war movement and most militarized its response as indeed the hotbed of “Discrimination, Harassment, and Antisemitism” that the Trump regime falsely said it was.  

 

I’ve often criticized the petty versions of this. The annual thanks that University of California presidents give the governor for substandard funding have played a key role in suppressing opposition to cuts and impoverishing California’s public universities.  Columbia’s administration has now solidified the false premises of Trump’s campaign for authoritarian control over political speech and academic freedom. The next victims, the University of Pennsylvania and the others on Trump’s hit list, will have a much harder time establishing the public basis of their refusal.

 

What an unforced disaster.  I continue to believe in the potential power of the P in PMC. The professional critiques were superb and empowering.  However, I spent two decades trying to form P-M alliances via UC’s Academic Senate, and the power gulf kept getting wider and the M-accountability weaker.  

 

The P has lost an undeclared civil war to the Ms and are going to have to claw power back from them. Trumpism is an opportunity to do this. Professionals, including professors, can discover that power only by fighting not just Trumpian tyranny but its lesser forms embodied in academic managerialism. A vote of no confidence by the Columbia faculty would be start. But it will need to continue with a gradual but extensive development of professional self-determination via new forms of self-governance in academic units, and co-governance of the finance of the institution itself as a determinant of the existence of academic freedom.  It will require levels of confrontation of an intensity normally found, in the U.S., only in civil rights movements. 

 

Columbia’s Folly will inspire a new era!  There I go again.  Yes, well, it's up to us.

Ephesus, Türkiye on August 23, 2005

The subtitle to this post was originally “Five Ways to Counter It”—the Trumpian war, that is. But in the meantime, I’ve had disturbing exchanges with some senior humanities officials and colleagues that suggest that they will take no particular action at this time. 

 

The general strategy I was suggesting to one group was lawfare. I asked, why not start collaborative litigation to seek a temporary restraining order to stop the Department of Education from closing the International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) office and laying off all staff on March 21st. 

 

IFLE supervises the Title VI programs that are required by statute since their creation through the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958.   The lawsuits against the NIH reduction in indirect costs haveblocked that policy for the time being. NIH grants are nonetheless in a state of “utter and complete chaos,” but the complaints behind the TRO have brought illegality to light in a way that will help this and other litigation. I suggested that the MLA, Mellon, AHA, ACLS et al. collaborate on a lawsuit against the Department of Education aiming at a TRO on the closure in the hope of keeping the office.  

 

Some professors responded positively. The lead in the group of officials suggested that I buzz off.  As far as I know, no substitute plan is in place.

 

At around that time, Trump forced National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) chair Shelley C. Lowe (Navajo) out of the job. Lowe was the first indigenous person to hold that position.

 

I spent that same day at an AI summit at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. While chatting with an administrator from an Ivy League university, I learned that their office is starting to think about how to fight an anticipated move from the senior administration to eliminate the campus-wide writing requirement. “In today’s world, students need to learn to use AI,” especially to replace writing at work—you are already hearing the lines they expect.

 

The default humanities trajectory has been clear for some time: to furnish service departments, those which offer skills but aren’t expected to produce research knowledge because they aren’t seen as disciplines that create academic knowledge. They hire non-tenure track instructors and help spread adjunctification.  This humanities fate doesn’t rest on knowledge reality: of course humanities knowledge is generated in abundance and variety. The trend rests on academic down-classification of qualitative knowledge in general and fields without research funding in particular. It has been fueled by a decades-long hate campaign known as the cultural wars.

 

The humanities establishment has long responded to this familiar trend by letting it happen.  The strategy has been to live quietly off trickle-down from STEM disciplines which in turn lived off the positive reputation of technology and of higher education as a whole.  The latter too were eroding, and by 2017 Trump had renewed the Bush II administration’s attacks on science, gradually expanding to the whole university sector. These escalated again while Trumpism was out of the White House from 2021 through 2024.

 

I joined the MLA Executive Council as 2^nd Vice President in 2020, and began then to ask to develop a systematic response to the discipline’s research funding crisis as a root cause of its employment crisis. Five years later the Association is no closer to having a response.

 

Of course, the passivity party is not irrational. As M. Gessen put it, 

The tension is between surviving right now and, plainly, being able to exist in the future. For most universities, the best tactic is probably to try to stay under the radar. This means being careful with language (D.E.I., etc.) on their websites, hoping that they don’t have particularly noticeable protests or especially outspoken students or faculty members . . .  This would probably allow most universities to continue functioning, substantially as they have been, for a couple of years. 

 

This stance makes traditional sense. But it’s not going to work.  Gessen continues.

 

But in the end — and by the end I mean in two, three, four years — federal funding cuts to financial aid and research and the White House’s meddling in the politics and policies of education will be devastating for all institutions of higher learning.       

 

This is particularly the case for the humanities. Their research funding is devastated going in, as a matter of national policy that NEH et al. have in effect endorsed with a policy of silence. (See for example, “The Humanities Decline in Darkness.”) So addressing the current condition requires a radical break with establishment humanities tradition.

 

It’s a bit like the problem with the Democrats, as Rana Foroohar reminded me this morning.

 

I[I]f you believe that unfettered markets fail to provide key public goods, then you have to think genuine economic populism — not the fake Maga kind — will be the winning formula for the Democrats. But that means rich liberals must think beyond their own interests.

 

This tension is painfully evident right now in the failure of the party to fight against Trump’s tax cuts which, if the Democrats ever regain power, will place suffocating fiscal and budgetary constraints on their ability to get anything done. They didn’t speak out strongly enough in 2017, either, because wealthy donors like tax cuts.

 

The small number of people who decide national humanities policy are not wealthy donors. But they break towards Chuck Schumer rather than AOC.  

 

There’s also a Democratic Party-style split between the national leadership and the humanities rank-and-file across the country.  During the 2010s, I spoke about higher education, funding, and the humanities at dozens of universities. I learned that the rank and file everywhere want much better support structures from their administrations, their states, and the federal government.  But generally they cannot even get data from senior managers about their actual situation, much less start a discussion about how to get what they need.

 

Time has now run out. The Trump regime is systematically degrading universities starting with the most prestigious and undermining STEM disciplines starting with the most powerful. As they cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the budgets of the country’s most prominent research universities, crushing the humanities is an afterthought.  Yet crushing remains the default outcome. Trump’s core social strategy is dehumanization as a justification for any despotic and/or illegal measure, even as humanities scholarship rests on the terms Trumpism negates.  These disciplines need plans, resources, and serious countermeasures, and they need to come from their national organizations. 

 

The wait-it-out strategy was never good, but had surface plausibility during the 40-year-old Neoliberal Bargain.  Trumpism has now negated the bargain in its entirety and brought that period to an end.

 

The Bargain was bipartisan: the Reagan-Bush-Trump 1.0 lineage would tee off against government, bureaucracy, liberalism and the liberal arts and sciences, to the delight and fury of their base, while letting the Clinton-Obama-Biden lineage hang on to a (privatized and marketized) version of these things, to the resignation and complacency of theirs.  

 

The Bargain began to crumble with Obama’s mishandling of the Global Financial Crisis. He bailed out Wall Street not Main Street, igniting both Occupy and the Tea Parties. The latter was an opening for Trump’s rise in 2015-16. Trump converted the Tea Party to MAGA by embracing and harnessing its negative revolutionary energy, meeting it with his own. (For one of the root of vengeance, see Capitalism: A Love Story 1’10” to 1’13.30”). 

 

Trump found a familiar channel in US politics, diverting hatred from Wall Street and big business onto brown and Black migrants—and citizens.  Behind it all, he explained, lay liberalism and their endless explaining and their rules and their do-nothing government.  Trump 2025 promised to go after all of it—the incoherent vagueness of the mission was the promise of its totality.  The MAGA base still wants destruction. They will not brake the havoc they’ve been wanting for fifteen years, even when it comes for their Medicare.  It’s the end of the cycle.  

 

The mainstream media too now grasps the “authoritarian endgame.” That endgame is the destruction of the Neoliberal Bargain, followed by Trump’s dominance of the “sultanistic oligarchy” that he seeks to replaces our current “civil” version. MAGA 2025 targets all of the powers of (diverse) society over business and the wealthy. The powers of the Democratic party inhere in study, analysis, research, and reporting, and he is gutting these deliberately.  

 

Thus he and his people are destroying knowledge and knowledge workers, knowledge agencies (the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Consumer Financial Protection, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Bureau . . ), knowledge careers, knowledge structures. In other words, it’s all-out war on Richard Florida’s “creative class” from the Clinton era. 

 

The Trump regime is firing and humiliating scientists who work for the Forest Service or a national lab or who come up with better ways to forecast tornado trajectories or who are paid at a university on a federal grant. The regime is doing the same to data analysts and managers in the Department of Education who maintain statistics about, for example, racial disparities in college attainment.  

 

The regime is doing the same to the people who managed the near-beer equity programs we lump under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, whose job was to prevent racism both overt and covert, sexual harassment and abuse, and other forms of identity-based tyrannies in the workplace that still require constant vigilance.

 

There are multiple payoffs, financial in particular, but also psychological.  The destruction of knowledge work and workers is the liberation of what Mark Zuckerberg called “male energy” from the chains of mutual respect. The powerful should be able to do whatever they want, especially in their companies, and be revered, certainly uncriticized, for what they do, both in the company and in national discourse. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s interview with Ross Douthat convinced many people that top tech executives viewed the social values of big tech’s employees as a de facto insurrection.

 

It’s hard to miss the male rage at the basic protocols of citizenship and life in common. There’s rage at unionization and union-like opining in tech companies, in which it becomes clear that workers are as or more thoughtful and often more competent than the ownership class. These employees at the very least expect massive organizations to be run with some collaboration, if not actually democratized.  In contrast, the control that several dozen top tech executives have over the global communications infrastructure—over knowledge circulation negates democratization. If you think about it, about their proprietary algorithmic control of information distribution, their surveillance, their dependence on exploited labor in the Global South and also North, then tech appears as a kind of world tyranny.  And the wholesale endorsement of Trump and Trump’s masculinist theory of power suggests a tech executive focus on retaining those absolute powers over the system that their platform ecosystems control. That control must certainly include the knowledge workers inside their companies.

 

All this flies in the face of the needs of our era. The needs are for more cooperative capabilities, more distributed intelligence, and a higher order of intelligence regarding radically divergent information and diverse peoples.  The U.S. is at a cooperative disadvantage—its political system undermines collaboration, and so does its political culture.  Big-tech culture has been making this worse, first with its social media practices and now with its most powerful men lining up literally behind Trump and grooving on his contempt for other people.  

 

Their example is profoundly dysfunctional on the level of the socio-cultural knowledge required to address climate change and everything else. It’s a disaster for it. The same is true for their blanket hostility to socio-cultural disciplines in higher education—see Bret Stephens parroting vicious dismissals that go back to Reagan, Nixon, and Agnew and later DeSantis, Trump, Rufo, Stefanik.  The same goes for rabid hostility to basic equity programs, and to minimal protections from discrimination for racialized and variously gendered people. This categorical, even pathological contempt forfeits their authority, though in our coherent conceptual world rather than our physical one. And they hate the intellectual and professional types for refusing to defer to their authority on the level of ideas.

 

In short, this is a war on both knowledge and the ability to use knowledge properly across the full spectrum of our dissimilar societies.  Its goal isn’t the reduction but the annihilation of the authority of independent knowledge of the kind associated both with public schools and with universities. Discovery, learning, and the use of knowledge all require relatively egalitarian capacities of listening, working through confusing or ambiguous or offending information, communicating endlessly across antagonisms and gaps, and more. All of it is annihilated by the despotisms of DOGE deletion of units and people, by hatred for divergent identities, by rage at the processes of study, learning, research, discussion, revision—the neutralization of this is the point.  It threatens immigrants and trans people yesterday, lawyers and climate scientists today, all professional expertise tomorrow, really most people in different ways all of the time.

 

This is an all-out war on the knowledge class and its complex network of institutions.  Knowledge practices go far beyond higher education to encompass people who work and strategize in social movements, non-profits, medical and legal clinics, farming, plumbing, manufacturing, unionizing, construction, you name it. And yet full-timers in this world of knowledge creation across the arts and sciences, whose jobs are defined by and identified wholly with it, are the special targets.

 

 In the US, Trumpism thus involves the nullification of

·      The autonomy of universities

·      The First Amendment (the Khalil arrest is one prominent example)

·      Academic Freedom itself. 

The current reach-in to core academic decisions goes beyond McCarthyism: I know of no precedent in U.S. history. The government is deleting topics of research and words that are acceptable to use about them. The General Services Administration letter to Columbia University demands that it put a specific department in receivership, change admissions policies, define antisemitism so that it can punish anti-Zionists.

 

This campaign is bigger and more dangerous than anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes. It  requires an organized, planned, funded, collaborative response. I’ll discuss lawfare and other countermeasures next time. 

Seoul National University on Feb14, 2025

It’s increasingly clear that knowledge destruction is not a side effect of Trump’s regime but its central mission. 

A four-year presidential campaign based on lies, disinformation, and abusive accusations was the means. The elimination of knowledge—because it competes with power--is the end. 

This project has a number of branches.  One is to make corruption great again. This involves the suspending or dismantling of business law.  The law, for all its problems, encodes a long history of social knowledge that its practice always considers.  That’s why Trump lost a civil suit to E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse. That’s why U.S. corporations have lost cases for bribery of officials of foreign governments under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  The law knows and uses understandings of sexual abuse and of bribery that emerge from culture over generations and are then applied through dynamic legal processes.  This knowledge places real constraints on executive power. Trump’s war on the law is a war on legal knowledge. 

The nuclear war on DEI is another.  This has exploded from criticizing specific course requirements and administrative policies to seeking the erasure of the words, the practices, the offices, and the people involved with any whiff of it. It has become one of the most repressive political crusades in modern US history. It engages in censorship and erasure as a proxy for thought control.  

It goes beyond McCarthyism in the 1950s, which created a climate of fear by rooting out some finite number of Communists in the US government, to creating a climate of fear by defining the entire government workforce as the woke enemy. Woke is “gender ideology,” trans rights, civil rights, all the raced, gendered, sexual things not plainly supporting white patriarchal order.  Woke is the commonplace “belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”  The project is self-evidently ridiculous, understood literally as replacing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Uniformity, Hierarchy, and Exclusion. It is that, but also extremely damaging, since it aims at the destruction of the knowledge that underlies the banal procedures manged by DEI offices and personnel—knowledge from feminist studies, the sociology of race, biology and cognitive psychology and many many other fields and movements whose discoveries imposes constraints on the will to power. 

I have three points about this. It’s a total war on knowledge. The point is to eliminate interpretation, discussion, dispute, litigation, and debate, and to create reality with assertion as an act of power.  This was also the Bush II strategy, but Bannon, Trump et al. have brought it to a new stage of universal application.  

Trump doesn’t (and can’t) debate. He goes for the knock-out one liner, which is why his assertions are so often absurd. Saying “the U.S. will own” Gaza annihilates discussion of all the central issues about self-governance and right of return, which is the point; infuriating delusion is a feature not a bug: the only response is total rejection of the premise, which also stalls debate and Trump gets his way again.

You’ll remember all the decades in which we had to rebut right-wing arguments that professors were brainwashing students into political correctness by teaching Toni Morrison novels in humanities survey courses, down to the argument that the purpose of critical race theory was to make white students ashamed of their identities. 

The new Trump regime doesn’t argue. It eliminates the knowledge people who would do the arguing.  The purpose of Elon Musk’s DOGE is not to study the information systems and admin structures of the federal government to make them, say, 15% cheaper.  The purpose is to fire people who know things—the empiricists with data—so they can no longer participate, complicate, expose, or propose alternatives.  The purpose is not to fire some of them but all of them. Hence the lack of numerical goals – “we’ll reduce costs 18%, or the workforce 12% or 31% through the introduction of AI,” whatever.  Efficiency isn’t the point; destruction is. 

Second, the purpose is to harm people. Certainly they want to hurt poor people and people of color in order to silence them or to drive them off. It’s also very much to harm the government’s knowledge people. Trumpers explicitly seek to traumatize them.  The idea is to make them quit, take them out of the action, thus paralyzing the knowledge function and makes it go away.  

Ditto the attacks on the infrastructure of academic research at NIH and  (here, and at Inside Higher Ed)—starve the beast, hurt the scientists. The new head of Health and Human Services to which NIH reports, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is widely described as anti-vaccine.  But more deeply he is anti-knowledge—ignorant of and hostile to the collaborative system of millions of professional researchers who study, test, debate, circulate, challenge, and revise knowledge. All of this is to be overruled by his own impressions.  

Same goes for the destruction of the Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences, which includes the National Center for Education Statistics.   “It basically literally means we are stepping back in time decades,” one scholar said. That’s the idea.  Strip knowledge people of their knowledge and you control them absolutely. No data, no backtalk.   It’s the end of knowledge’s intrinsic constraint on power—and all that attitude. 

Musk sets the pace: he manages his conflicts of interest by eliminating the people who have knowledge of them. Again, this is not only to eliminate the rules that use the knowledge, but to eliminate the knowledge itself, at its root, by harming or purging the people that have the knowledge. 

My third point is that Trumpism is a total war on culture. Culture is the source of all the offending knowledges. It is the place where the multitudes abound and clash. It generates radically multifarious knowledges by its very existence, and also diverse methods of adjudicating these.  Some of the most settled of these wind up as law, but most remain in solution in the society, to use Raymond Williams’ metaphor. They are embodied in structures of feeling, where identity, experience, and more abstract political questions and economic questions exist indissociably together. They interact with each other sometimes in political movements and debates, and routinely in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts—poetry, commercial filmmaking, music, criticism, everything. 

Trumpism hates culture, starting with its innate diversity—culture is always a relation among plural cultures, as Fredric Jameson among many others have insisted across the decades. Trumpism also hates culture for its complexity and its power. It is too multitudinous and also simply intelligent to be assimilated or destroyed. It is rooted in millions of concrete experiences that cannot and will never be dispatched with the great man’s abusive assertion or his claim to ownership. One example is the unfathomable courage of Palestinians living in the ruins of their deliberately destroyed cities, homes, schools, universities, shops, and hospitals. Among other things, that is will as culture, in all its power.

The dumb stuff Trump does, like firing the board of the Kennedy Center in D.C. and replacing it with one that then appointed him chairman, shows the anxiety that lies behind his contempt for culture outside of television.  Apparently the Kennedy Center once had a drag show.  One can imagine Trump’s lifetime of offhand comments about culture, history, and feelings, that never fail to displease the listener. Same with Musk, a terrible bungler outside his core expertise of capitalizing tech monopolies. Culture delivers these men that little jolt of humiliation.  It’s their zone of confusion and weakness. Hence their attempts to establish the one knowledge to rule all others—the “deal” for Trump, some physics of social Darwinism for Musk. But it never works outside its own self-defined terrain.

The hatred behind all this will cause widespread suffering and death.  The default is move fast and kill folks.  Destroy their workplaces, labs, clinics, food distribution networks, institutes.  Fire everyone, burn everything.  If you don’t like it, try and sue me.    

Because of the abuse and the violence and the hostility baked into every statement and announcement and goal, it’s easy for us to see this engine of knowledge destruction as tremendously powerful.  It’s point is to make us too afraid to fight. It’s easy to take the bait. 

It’s made easier still by the total capitulation of the country’s corporate and tech elite to Trump’s lifelong practice of extortion through abuse of counterparty.  We were right to be alarmed when billionaire overlords Bezos and Soon-Shiong blocked Kamala Harris endorsements at the Washington Post and LA Times papers that they own: if these supremely powerful people are afraid of Trump, and appeal to him by stepping on their knowledge professionals, then shouldn’t I be too?

The right answer is no.  Trump’s hatred flows from anxiety, shame, and fear in the face of the general culture. It has often detested him but more importantly is indifferent to him and will proceed in its infinite variety and unpredictable directions on its winding course.  Trump’s sociopathology expresses his experience of his own weakness, which no success has ever overcome. He focuses on exterminating internal enemies because absolutely everyone is a threat. 

We should see ourselves that way, as what we actually are—a mortal threat to Trumpism.  We should side with the culture, because it is going to win.