MLA Convention Hallway Meeting on January 10, 2025

The organization has chosen an interpretation of fiduciary responsibility beyond the wildest hopes of Chicago School economists.

by  MATT SEYBOLD  

(This is cross-posted from his blog American Vandal, where you can find his important podcast.)

JAN 08, 2025

In March, I was nominated to for the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA). In December, I learned that I had lost that election.

Don’t cry for me. I was never fully convinced I was a good fit for the position and, as such, could not campaign for it with much vigor.1

I wasn’t even an active MLA member at the time of my nomination, an irregularity which clearly bothered the Executive Director, Paula Krebs, when she reached out to discuss (and possibly dissuade me from) accepting the nomination.

I still have no idea how I came to be nominated, but I decided to stand for the election in spite of my reservations.

And I’m glad I did. Because what did happen in the intervening nine months was that I had to think about the oldest, largest, and nominally most influential organization in my profession as I never had before. And I had far greater capacity to do so thanks to the dozens of MLA members who reached out to me after the nominations were made public in June to discuss their experiences and their concerns.

Those who spoke with me are disproportionately worried about two things.

They perceive the leadership of MLA to be overrepresented by tenured professors at flagships or elite private universities, whose experiences of the contemporary profession might be radically different from that of MLA members who work at small colleges, community colleges, branch campuses, HBCUs, etc.2

They believe MLA leadership is ignorant of, or perhaps even an impediment to, the academic labor movement. What little care the organization expresses for the well-documented job insecurity of most academic workers in language and literature departments is widely regarded as pretense and lip service.3

During that phone call in March, I was told multiple times that “the MLA is not a labor organization.” I’m not the only one who has heard this refrain. But the fact that the MLA is not empowered to collectively bargain does not, I believe, justify abdicating from all labor advocacy on behalf of its members.

On the very same day Director Krebs informed me that I had not been elected to the Executive Council, a collective of MLA members who had proposed a resolution of support for the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which the MLA Executive Council refused to pass on to the MLA Delegate Assembly, published an open letter in LitHub alleging “the handling of our resolution fundamentally unconstitutional from the beginning” and the decision “unprecedented in the history of the organization.” They called on the MLA leadership to “let members decide.” That call has since been publicly endorsed by eight past presidents of the MLA. And two members of the Executive Council, Esther Allen and Rebecca Colesworthy, have resigned in solidarity.4

I heard much about the BDS resolution in the months leading up to the election. And what I heard made me uneasy. But I want to be perfectly clear, I had plenty of time and opportunity to remove my name from the ballot, and I did not, because I desperately want to believe the MLA can be an ally to and advocate for humanities scholars and teachers, even if I presently believe it is failing spectacularly at that task.

There are many disgruntled members who remain committed to reforming the MLA from within. I still think they might be able to, and I certainly hope they succeed.

I, however, withdrew from the 2025 MLA Convention in New Orleans and signed the pledge not to renew my membership or otherwise financially support the MLA under its existing leadership.

I disagree with the Executive Council’s decision regarding the BDS resolution, but the BDS resolution is not something about which I would claim to speak as an expert. What provoked my withdrawal from the convention is my career-long commitment to the study of political economy from a humanities perspective.

As such a scholar, I regard the report the MLA Executive Council published on December 16 to explain their suppression of the BDS resolution as a contradiction of the work done by myself and my peers, as well as a betrayal of the professional class whom the MLA claims to serve and represent. And if the logics and rationales of that report are broadly legitimized by scholars of language and literature, they will be assisting in the programmatic defunding, deskilling, and delegitimization of their own disciplines.

To fully comprehend this, we have to start with the MLA Executive Council’s extensive use and expansive definition of terms of art like “fiduciary responsibility,” “fiduciary duty,” “fiduciary standards,” and “fiduciary review.”5

These terms were a minor, relatively inconsequential, part of the U.S. economic and legal lexicon until the 1960s. They proliferated in the decades which followed because they were associated with Chicago School Economics, and specifically the theory of Corporate Social Responsibility, introduced to the public by Milton Friedman in his 1962 manifesto, Capitalism & Freedom, then further popularized through a New York Times editorial published on September 13, 1970.

Befitting a “doctrine,” Friedman’s editorial does not exhaustively respond to any specific event or application of contrasting “social responsibility,” but through paratexts - the above abstract, a series of eight portraits of social responsibility activists, and a photo of protestors dressed in cloaks and gas masks - the Times frames Friedman’s position as a response to Ralph Nader, Campaign G.M., and the combined labor, consumer protection, and environmental movements which over the course of the late sixties converged on General Motors and eventually forced from it some concessions on working conditions, product testing, and pollution.

At its origins, the Chicago School doctrine of Corporate Social Responsibility is simply a rhetorical justification for private corporations to do what they prefer to do anyway: act contrary to the interests of rank-and-file employees, harmed communities, and social activists. This is what the MLA is endorsing when it treats revenue maximization as the sole measure of fiduciary responsibility. It is a resoundingly anti-labor doctrine. There is simply no other way to interpret it.

But even beyond revealing the MLA Executive Council to be, as many of its members and ex-members have long alleged, hostile to labor generally, the zealous adoption of Chicago School Economics further confirms a hostility to humanities labor specifically.

If you want to understand this in granular and historicist terms, I would point you towards “The Chicago Fight” episodes of The American Vandal, as well as towards the scholarship of Andy Hines, Edward Nik-Khah, and Anna-Dorothea Schneider upon which those episodes are based. What they show is that Chicago School Economics is designed to denigrate the knowledge claims of other disciplines, to colonize their institutional spaces, and, quite literally, to steal their resources. When Milton Friedman and his band of self-described pirates toasted the founding of Chicago School Economics, they had not yet constructed anything of note, what they have done is conquer and destroy a series of humanities and soft social science programs and departments which had thrived in their university through most of the first half of the 20th century.

This was accomplished at University of Chicago, and extensively imitated at other institutions, scholastic and governmental, around the world, exactly by insisting that fiduciary review be given priority over all other considerations of mission or obligation. Chicago School Economists would argue that the preservation and expansion of an institutions capital base be placed at the foundation of an organization’s hierarchy of needs because upon that capital base all other organizational missions and obligations depend.

But this prudent-sounding rational masks the more insidious reality: fiduciary review is an economic forecast. Economic forecasts are famously unreliable. But the standard of Corporate Social Responsibility expects executives to treat those forecasts as contractual stipulations. So what has really being placed at the foundation of the institutional hierarchy of needs is the beliefs and desires of economists (or, economic prognosticators). As one lawyer who found himself litigating against the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility put it, “The Chicago response was, well, those objections weren’t economics, and if it wasn’t economics, it didn’t count.”

The recent statements made by the authors of the BDS resolution and the coalition of past MLA presidents both question the legitimacy of the fiduciary review carried out on behalf of Executive Council and complain of the unnecessary lack of transparency regarding the method and accounting of that review. Even were we privy to all the budgetary details, the MLA Executive Council’s Report would be dependent upon an economic prognostication which claims to be able to forecast the actions of dozens of educational institutions, state governments, and courts. And also offers no accounting of the counter-effects of the EC’s decision (including, for example, the loss of membership dues and registration fees).

Economic forecasting is the mask for ideological prescription which has characterized neoliberal governance since the 1970s. And, across that span, has consistently rationalized the defunding and dismissal of alternative methods of knowledge-creation, most especially those practiced by literature and language scholars.

So long as revenue maximization is the top priority of the MLA, it will be doing far more harm to its member scholars, and the rest of us who care about literature and language research and instruction, than any bevy of handbooks, bibliography subscriptions, and teaching collections can arbitrage.

NOTES

1. As one friend put it recently, by losing the election I “saved myself the trouble of resigning in solidarity.”

2. I want to acknowledge that I was not the only candidate for the Executive Council this year who would represent greater diversity in this respect, and two candidates who were elected hail from a small, private HBCU and a small, regional public. I regard this as an unalloyed good.

3. The 2023 presidential theme of “Working Conditions” came up in several conversations as a kind of bait and switch. One member called it “a marketing push to suck a few more years of dues out of people who would be better off if they’d given to mutual aid.”

4. Colesworthy made her letter of resignation public earlier this week.

5. The word fiduciary appears fifteen times is the 3,000-word December 16 Report, more times than iterations of Palestine (13), Gaza (10), Israel (9), academic (8), protest (7), violence (2), labor (0), worker (0), or genocide (0).

This prepublication paper (March 25th) uses newer data than that of the Ferguson et al. paper (March 16th) that I drilled into last week.  It also focuses on the U.S. situation, broken out by state. And the executive branch seems to be using it to design shutdown policy. The headlines:

The University of Washington paper projects 81,114 deaths, with a very large Uncertainty Interval (UI) belying the precision of those numbers (at left).  This is in the ballpark of the lower bound of Anthony Fauci's estimate of 100,000-200,000 deaths. These are high numbers.  The bottom is about  3 times typical death counts from influenza.  But they are 20 times lower than the "doing nothing" estimate in the Ferguson et al. paper. The two papers agree on the scale of reduction that suppression measures achieve.

(UPDATE: This number of total fatalities was revised to 93,765 on April 2nd. It was revised downward in the wake of sustained social distancing measures, and has stood at around 60,400 since April 9th).

The authors also modeled health care capacity, estimating demand for hospital beds peaking at 7 percent above the national bed count, and Intensive Care Unit demand peaking at 25 percent above the national ceiling.  This means that suppression measures do not eliminate the health system crisis (this looked better in the Ferguson et al's projections for the UK).

The  UW team couldn't estimate ventilator shortages because they couldn't find reliable counts for these. Bed and ICU shortfalls are expected to vary greatly by state, with "peak excess demand" for beds being particularly bad in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Michigan, and excess demand for ICUs being more widely spread across the country.  California is in comparatively decent shape on both fronts, though that isn't saying much.  Excess ICU demand is figured below.

All the estimates (reduced deaths, very serious but perhaps non-catastrophic excess hospital demand) assume social distancing that approximates Ferguson et al.'s suppression regime.  I find this to be the least convincing aspect of this paper.

For states that have not implemented 3 of 4 measures (school closures, closing non-essential services, shelter-in-place, and major travel restrictions), we have assumed that they will be implemented within 7 days, given the rapid adoption of these measures in nearly all states. At this point in the epidemic, we have had to make arbitrary assumptions in our model on the equivalency between implementing 1, 2, or 3 measures – and we have implicitly assumed that implementing 3 of 4 measures will be enough to follow a trajectory similar to Wuhan – but it is plausible that it requires all 4 measures. (8) 

I see two obvious problems with this. First, we are not seeing "the rapid adoption of [suppression] measures in nearly all states."  Duringthis past week, many Republicans politicized social distancing as anti-business.  Although some Republican governors have not followed this line, Covid suppression has now been polluted by the country's toxic political discourse. POTUS is angling for ways to pin an extended shutdown (anything past Easter Sunday on April 12) on the libs, and his proposal for a NY-NJ-CT quarantine didn't have to be implemented to tar the country's leading Democrat stronghold as a disease-carrying Gommorah. Florida governor Ron de Santis has set up border checkpoints partly aimed at excluding New Yorkers; at the same time, Rhode Island's Democrat governor is proposing door-to-door searches for infected New Yorkers.  The American political system may not be good at public health, but it is world-class at finger-pointing. This does not bode well for a national suppression regime and its 20x reduction in mortality.

Second, I see no reason to assume, as the authors do, that "implementing 3 of 4 measures will be enough to follow a trajectory similar to Wuhan."  That is the best-case trajectory, in which full shutdown in  Wuhan on January 23rd led to no new cases by March 15th.  (That included a peak rate of daily deaths 27 days after that shutdown date.)  Wuhan implemented all 4 of 4 measures and then some--Wuhan authorities also instituted an app that used personal data to restrict movement for people rated "red" or "yellow," and broke disease clusters through family separations, in which some members were sent to medical dormitories for isolation.

In other words, the UW model may be way too optimistic--landing us back in a mitigation model which halves deaths (to about a million in the U.S.) while overwhelming the medical system.

This study notes but, as far as I can tell, ignores two other major differences between Wuhan (and South Korea) on the one hand and the U.S. on the other.  One is our lack of mass testing, including testing of people without Covid-19 symptoms.  Testing allows the health care system to identify people who need total isolation and/or treatment, making social distancing much more efficient.  The U.S. seems to have missed the crucial testing window (the New York Times' investigation of the serious failure of Trump's executive branch is worth reading in full). The other is China's massive mobilization of equipment and facilities--the new hospital constructed in two weeks and the like.  In stark contrast, the U.S. story is of shortages--of ventilators, of masks and gowns, of swabs, and, soon, of trained and healthy medical personnel.  All this also casts doubt on our powers of suppression. We will have to fall back on brute isolation, which is of course is the longest and the most costly mode economically--and educationally.

The paper ends on this note:

Our estimate of 81 thousand deaths in the US over the next 4 months is an alarming number, but this number could be substantially higher if excess demand for health system resources is not addressed and if social distancing policies are not vigorously implemented and enforced across all states.

We are thus encouraged to continue the most stringent version of a difficult lockdown with the clear possibility that the disease itself will be much less lethal than we have been assuming.

I do take this as encouragement.  We could start seeing a real ebbing of fatalities and infections in the Wuhan 60-day period: by mid-May in the New York region, and not too much later elsewhere. (See Bryan Alexander's Three Scenarios for other possibilities.)

Stay strong--indoors.

April  3rd.   The Washington Post has a big piece entitled, "Experts and Trump's advisers doubt White House's 240,000 coronavirus deaths estimate."  There's nothing new that we haven't covered here, but it's interesting to note the ongoing refusal of the White House "to explain how they generated the figure" of 100,000-240,000 national Covid-19 deaths, beyond the mashup of the two studies we've analyzed here - Ferguson et al. at Imperial College and the UW model discussed here, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, with its user-friendly projections, one of which appeared in Deborah Brix's briefing.   "But what remains unclear and alarming to many modelers is whether the White House is using their data to create a coordinated, coherent long-term strategy." The answer is no they're not, for example, implementing a national stay-at-home order called for by Anthony Fauci.

April 5th Covid-19 continues to receive saturation coverage, but the single most interesting piece to me was NYT coverage of the German response to the virus. So far, Germany's case-mortality rate is 1.4 percent, nearly a tenth that of Italy and about half that of the United States. Some reasons why: the German infections "started as an epidemic of skiiers" coming back from Italy and Austria, so younger people were infected first. Second, Germany has run many more tests, so they capture a higher share of infections than Italy or the U.S. (their denominator is bigger). The piece goes through other crucial factors:"early and widespread testing and treatment, plenty of intensive care beds and a trusted government whose social distancing guidelines are widely observed."  The U.S. can't really draw on any of these.

I thought ruefully of UC Health when I read this passage:

Before the coronavirus pandemic swept across Germany, University Hospital in Giessen had 173 intensive care beds equipped with ventilators. In recent weeks, the hospital scrambled to create an additional 40 beds and increased the staff that was on standby to work in intensive care by as much as 50 percent.

“We have so much capacity now we are accepting patients from Italy, Spain and France,” said Prof. Susanne Herold, the head of infectiology and a lung specialist at the hospital who has overseen the restructuring. “We are very strong in the intensive care area.”

All across Germany, hospitals have expanded their intensive care capacities. And they started from a high level. In January, Germany had some 28,000 intensive care beds equipped with ventilators, or 34 per 100,000 people. By comparison, that rate is 12 in Italy and 7 in the Netherlands. By now, there are 40,000 intensive care beds available in Germany.

Separate item: People say the infection numbers are bad but the death counts are good.  A WaPo piece reminds us that they're bad too.  Covid-19  caused deaths are likely undercounted worldwide, perhaps by a lot.
 
April 12th

Today is Easter Sunday, which POTUS wanted to be America is Open for Business Day.  It isn't.  For example, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly's executive order to close churches was opposed by Republican legislative leaders, but yesterday they lost before the Kansas Supreme Court.

Yesterday was also Peak Resource Use in the UW (or "Chris Murray") model I've discussed here.  Peak fatalities were to occur April 10th.  Early infection zones--Washington State, New York, and California--are all heading in the right direction.  Other areas (New Orleans, Detroit) are not yet.  The South remains a wild card.  Here in Santa Barbara County, we had 264 cases as of 5 pm on April 11th, with two deaths, a number that has held steady for a week.  Many of the new infections are in the Federal Prison in Lompoc.

Some states have released some incarcerated people in response to the pandemic (like Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania).  The Federal Bureau of Prisons is screening prisoners to release some into home confinement.

California is going to be closed at least through the end of the month, and LA County among others through mid-May.  But the debate on openings is heating up in Europe.

April 17th

STAT has an interesting overview of the criticisms of the methodology of the University of Washington model covered here.

Earlier this week, the AAUP issued a new statement entitled In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education.   In it, the AAUP offers both a defense of the importance of knowledge opposed to opinion and a critique of the growing efforts to undermine the authority of scholars and expertise.  It helps clarify the relationship between Academic Freedom and Free Speech and marks the importance of defending the ongoing collective work of scholarly and academic communities.  As it concludes:

In 1915 the founders of the AAUP characterized the university as “an inviolable refuge” from the “tyranny of public opinion,” as “an intellectual experiment station, where new ideas may germinate,” but also as “the conservator of all genuine elements of value in the past thought and life of mankind which are not in the fashion of the moment.” On that basis they asserted “not the absolute freedom of utterance of the individual scholar, but the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion and of teaching, of the academic profession.”²¹ They pledged, as do we, to safeguard freedom of inquiry and of teaching against both covert and overt attacks and to guarantee the long-established practices and principles that define the production of knowledge.

It is up to those who value knowledge to take a stand in the face of those who would assault it, to convey to a broad public the dangers that await us—as individuals and as a society—should that pledge be abandoned.

I urge everyone to read and share it.

As it enters week 3, the promising new series Operation Varsity Blues is running out of gas. The story of wealthy white folks bribing their kids’ way into college debuted to huge numbers. But the writers are losing the story line, so it might help to make at least two root causes explicit.

The series has been a blast – it offered the pleasure of seeing rich crooks getting caught looking stupid, in this case by bribing their privileged kids into privileged colleges with dumbbell plans. $50,000 bought strategy like the fake water polo star above. Scam maestro William Singer went with this strategy more than once: “I’ll photoshop his face on a kicker,” he said to William McGlashan, the impact fund manager, Friend of Bono, and backer of gig-economy paragons Uber and Spotify, while wired by the FBI, referring to the face of McGlashan's son, suggesting that such a picture would convince the USC football empire that the son played football. That pious bully, the College Board, turned out to have proctors on the take. Early reviews called the FBI’s 200 page script a probing look into the way we live now, one worthy if not of Dickens then Tom Wolfe or the David E. Kelley of Big Little Lies.

There was also widespread rage at American plutocracy. Most people are pissed at institutions that were to make society fairer and now do the opposite. Universities are on that list. 50 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, racial inequality is pervasive and deep, and all levels of schooling reflect this through resegregation and racially disparate outcomes at all levels. Neoliberal economic policy, a duet sung by both major parties, has reversed the limited economic equality that emerged from the Cold War project of showing off a large, white middle class. For forty years, the country’s big national project has been to strengthen business by weakening the public systems that, though flawed, are to allocate roughly similar resources to everyone. Equality stopped being a goal, and a pathetic symptom is the assumption that getting into UCLA will protect your life while going to UC Irvine will not. The previous theory was that there should be no quality cliff as you moved from district or campus to another, and the population could stop spending every day jockeying for position, since most of the positions would be good.

Meritocracy not only didn’t keep plutocracy from happening: it collaborated with it. It was supposed to signal reward for effort and accomplishment (more than for innate “ability”). But it became another system to be gamed. Proof of its decline in public opinion is that every commentator in scandal week 1 claimed that admissions scams were not the exception but the rule. The instant New York Times editorial was sarcastically entitled, “Turns Out There’s a Proper Way to Buy Your Kid a College Slot.” In other words, “until yesterday, we thought there were no limits to the power of money over universities.” It wasn’t only that Singer’s scams proved again that the needs and insecurities of rich people define American culture and society today. Even elite outlets agreed that private wealth doesn’t violate meritocracy because meritocracy is structured to serve private wealth.

As Operation Varsity Blues made white privilege index a rotten democracy, the governor of California was asked on a Sunday talk show about the admissions bribery changes "What about the legal bribery that exists in higher education?" he replied. “What about the folks writing the $20-million dollar check, putting their name on that building? Connect the dots to the folks they quietly called for admission, or wrote a letter of recommendation.”

What about the legal bribery? I’m glad Newsom mentioned it, since that gets to the first root cause—long-term shortages of non-private ed money that have restructured public universities. Since he has long sat on the Board of Regents of the University of California, he knows perfectly well that “legal bribery” is “philanthropy,” and philanthropy is a cornerstone of the strategy of "multiple revenue streams," and that in turn is a response to repeated public funding cuts (which used to be eased by eager tuition increases, but never mind that for the moment). UC started obsessing about fundraising in the wake of the 1992-95 state cuts, and began to show the Board of Regents fundraising growth charts in the mid-1990s. Every campus has its own large development operation and some kind of endowment campaign. Fundraising duties have been pushed down to deans and department chairs and even individual faculty. Fundraising has also changed the culture of public universities, shifting affective relations toward research while empowering departments and people with market and donor potential over basic research or teaching people and departments. Fundraising has strengthened the pecuniary dimensions of higher ed overall, which distorts public understanding of its total effects. Fundraising's virtues are articles of faith—no one can rise in academic administration without pledging tacit allegiance to continuous fundraising. One need not be a philanthropy abolitionist to marvel at the lack of public discussion of philanthropy's effects, which was nonexistent until a hedge fund titan gave $400 million to Harvard in 2015. OVB is another milestone, but it remains to be seen whether colleges will examine philanthropy's vices, which include increasing exactly the inequality within and between universities that the OVB outrage denounced (an example). There is certainly research that could be pondered: mine has focused on fundraising's leveraging of public resources and its insufficiency at a public scale; Anand Giridharadas's widely noted work, in Winners Take All and elsewhere, describes it as a straightforward tool of tax avoidance and political control. These problems are easily described, and yet university leaders still feel they have no choice—they must show unflinching loyalty to the practice if only because, in public universities, they are constantly, permanently short of money.

Now that he is governor, Newsom could in fact downsize legal bribery, precisely by rebuilding public funding. It would take a few annual state funding increases of 15-20 percent. How serious is he about shrinking fundraising until he can drown it in the bathtub? He was upset, but that will pass. Proposals need to come from universities.

Ironically, private colleges have seen their financial models weakened by the philanthropy they depend on. OVB broke in the wake of the biggest previous national higher ed story, which was the mindboggling news that the governing board and president of renowned Hampshire College were trying to put the college up for sale. The most likely source of their panic was that an anniversary capital campaign hadn’t been going well. Why would that lead to bankruptcy? Because like all private college boards, Hampshire’s could not see a solvency strategy that didn’t involve philanthropy.

This is why Macalester College president Brian C. Rosenberg wrote, “The Only Surprising Thing in the Admissions Scandal is that Anyone is Surprised."

I see nothing wrong with soliciting wealthy parents after their children have been fairly admitted. I do it with some regularity and with no sense of guilt. Most colleges, moreover, are "need aware" in admissions, making it more likely that an applicant coming from wealth will gain admission to more colleges than one without means.

What is maddening, though, is that the colleges most likely to be given large gifts in return for an offer of admission are the ones that are most prestigious, selective, and wealthy — in other words, the ones that need the money least. I would actually be pretty sympathetic if a struggling college were tempted by such an offer, but those offers tend not to be forthcoming.

Tuition has hit a ceiling for all but the superbrands, so if fundraising isn’t working, the model says sell off, shut down. And they are: at least 22 liberal arts college have closed since 2016.

The second root cause of OVB is that college admissions is a conceptual mess. It has two separate projects—supporting racial and economic democracy on the one hand, and forming a master class on the other. The latter, since Jefferson, Adams, and Emerson, has meant finding a “natural aristocracy.” For all our discussion of diversity, we're only slightly less essentialist about ability than our ancient forebears. To identify the greatest talents, we are supposed to use standardized tests and grades. Ross Douthat’s recent attempt to question meritocracy still equates test scores with academic merit. The SAT and ACT have been repeatedly debunked as a racial and political project of highly restricted validity and that has traditionally sought to measure a probably nonexistent entity (general aptitude and/or context-free achievement) (Lemann, Kohn, Guinier, Douglass, etc.). And yet standardized tests are still widely treated as though they captured natural ability. All attacks on race-based affirmative action invoke standardized tests as the gold standard of measurable achievement. And as Jerome Karabel and others have shown, holistic admissions has a history of reflecting the university's anti-semitic and racist biases, against which test scores seemed the main countermeasure.

Admissions continues to use exams that people don’t trust but are intimidated by, and at the same time, acknowledges their badness with incompatible gold standard #2 - this same holistic admissions.

In the 1978 Bakke case, involving a white plaintiff who sued UC Davis's medical school on the grounds that race-based affirmative action had wrongly trumped his color-blind merit, Justice Lewis Powell saved a reduced version of affirmative action by invoking Harvard's "holistic" admissions practices. These used race only as a “plus factor” –not as a claim to compensation for past or present discrimination—and threw in a bunch of other stuff, including sports and family ties to the college. It seems very nuanced and humanistic, since it cares about the whole person and not mainly test results. It always looks better than the test-score absolutists. That’s before you look at it too closely.

We did get a closer look at Harvard’s practice last fall, when a suit brought by anti-affirmative action zealot Edward Blum against Harvard went to trial. His group, Students for Fair Admissions, argued that Asian Americans were being rejected in favor of preferred minorities by being given a lower “personal rating” than are other groups. I have always been a strong supporter of affirmative action and think that Blum’s position is racist (all hardships can be introduced in admissions except race-based ones) and irresponsible (“He said he couldn’t comment on exactly what barring admissions officials from considering race would mean for applicants — that is, whether it would bar them from mentioning their race in applications”). But Harvard’s admissions people had a hard time explaining how they defined the factors they used on top of academic achievement—athletics, extracurricular, personal, overall—or how they interacted. The attitude about their careful sifting of a “wealth of information” was weakened by reports that application files at elite colleges may not get more than eight minutes of a reader’s time, and by the basic fact that a committee of 40 people is reading 40,000 applications (p 3, p 7). Harvard's witnesses didn’t really explain why Asian Americans do get lower personality scores, or the problems flagged by their own previous investigation (plaintiff’s analysis pp 11-20).

In my reading, Harvard won the narrow question: they are compliant with Grutter and related decisions by staying “flexible enough to ensure that each applicant is evaluated as an individual and not in a way that makes an applicant’s race or ethnicity the defining feature of his or her application” (p 24). But Harvard ignored the broader question, which is precisely whether all this flexibility in choosing is legitimate in the first place. Hostility to race as a criterion is the venerable right-wing issue, and 4/5ths of whites continue to oppose it. The related issue under plutocracy, for a broad slice of the public, is whether elite preferences are really better than invalid standardized tests. During their trial, Harvard made holistic admissions look like a secret formula that elites use to come up with whatever kind of class they want—which is always the class that will keep Harvard on top.

Neither test-based nor holistic admissions is convincing. Each needs the other—many people pointed out that test scores helped Jews overcome earlier admissions bias, as they help Chinese Americans now. And yet their mash up is internally contradictory, has confused everybody for decades, and aggravated white racial backlash. The results also aren’t great: elective admissions has had 50 years to fix racial disparities and it has not. With a more diverse student body than ever, selectivity has only managed to increase rates of rejection at the most selective schools while increasing inequality in the overall system.

What are we supposed to do about OVB’s root causes? Nicholas Lemann is right that the solution is not reforming admissions, and so is Ian Bogost that it's "pathetic" to be reverting to the admissions status quo. It's crucial not to let the superbrands orbit their own planet while controlling the definitions of intelligence (test scores), merit (you’re one of us), and the value of college (pecuniary gain, social mobility) on ours.

 Lemann writes, “a recent Pew survey showed that the only admissions criterion that gets majority support from the public is grades, and there are far more students with perfect transcripts than there are places in the most selective colleges, so that won’t work.”

Here I don't agree. What will work is growing the system so there are enough really good seats for all the perfect transcripts, and the other transcripts as well. The point would be to replace selectivity with scale, and today's highly unequal with generally equivalent quality.

To do that, the white middle and upper classes will need to reverse their entire Reagan-era private welfare strategy—tax cuts, public cuts, austerity, private school, restricted public quality, selectivity, fixation on monetary outcomes, and dependence on prestige. Undoing this culture will mean moving a lot of private money back into the public realm. And it would make America smart again.

The season's higher ed masterplot is easy to state: liberal arts education is a financial failure; financial success requires mega-universities.

Whatever the partial truths contained in these claims, nothing this winter provided actual evidence for them.  They also conceal the real factor that's undermining private as much as public higher ed-: the unnecessary obsession with its private funding.

Alleged proof of the liberal arts's fiscal demise is coming in the form of closed or closing liberal arts colleges.  These arrived on the heels of the closure of liberal arts programs last year (like Wisconsin's Stevens Point that we covered in two parts).  Stephens Point now appears to be the tip of the iceberg: In January, CHE announced a forthcoming Modern Languages Association finding that 651 language programs have closed in the last 3 years, without academia really noticing.  Meanwhile, with only local fanfare, 17 liberal arts colleges have closed in the last five years in Massachusetts alone. Moody's claims that 1 in 5 small liberal arts colleges are under stress.

The best known case is Hampshire College.  Forever young and poor, it epitomized the creativity ideals of the whole liberal arts college genre, tied to customized majors and the small, intense classes that underwrite the "active learning" we are all supposed to have.  But Hampshire's enrollments fell 17 percent between 2010 and 2017.  Most universities survive on enrollments, and Hampshire's small endowment meant it had to find new revenues. (How much money they had and what they borrowed is in dispute.)

But Hampshire didn't become a poster child for liberal arts failure until the president's bizarre January 15th announcement that Hampshire was "carefully considering whether to enroll an incoming class this fall." This was followed by a February 1 Board of Trustees decision not to admit a full freshman class--which, as sociology professor Margaret Cerullo noted in her excellent Nation piece, was an attack on their own revenue base.

And yet Hampshire's trouble doesn't prove anything about the innate unsustainability of the liberal arts if it is self-inflicted.  That is clearly the situation.  President Miriam Nelson's initial statement didn't really make sense, as she combined her declaration of emergency with the comment that, "at Hampshire our budget is balanced, our $52 million endowment has performed well, and the success of our educational model is confirmed by an array of stellar data. We continue to be among the top three percent of institutions whose students go on to earn a research doctorate." 

Instead, Nelson and the Board seem to have artificially induced Hampshire's crisis to court potential suitors, most likely to UMass-Amherst, which had just taken over failing Mt Ida College in Newton.

Instead of praise for making the tough call, Nelson and the Hampshire Board of Trustees got the harshest appraisals I've seen dished out to college management.  In her overview in the New Yorker, Masha Gessen wrote, "Secrecy and confusion remain the defining characteristics of the Hampshire crisis."  Since its founding, Hampshire College has raised the question of whether students and faculty could manage themselves without top-down administration.  The question is being raised again, this time by its managers' incompetence.

The college leadership has wrought disaster.  Gessen writes,

Nelson is expected to announce a second wave of layoffs, in April. She told me that the scale of the layoffs would match the loss of revenue resulting from admitting a much smaller freshman class—that is, around a quarter of the college’s operating budget. Hampshire faculty members, in keeping with the school’s education philosophy, are not protected by tenure—back in the sixties, the idea was that tenure encouraged passivity in academics, and its absence would motivate them to continue to grow and develop. Word among Hampshire faculty members is that half of them are likely to lose their jobs. According to Barskova, because Hampshire has traditionally fostered co-teaching, the looming layoffs will kill the academic program.

Nelson and her board may turn out to have destroyed the college rather than sold it, and for no good reason.

Other criticism came from Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a specialist in higher education leadership.  He was writing in Fortune, which you'd expect to support this apparent example of disruptive innovation, except that just about everybody is sick of it and its regular failure to make things better.  Sonnenfeld noted a total failure of the Board to make use of the college's assets:

the college board’s executive committee framed this [matriculation] challenge as an existential crisis . . . and their actions have since created chaos. And rather than locate better ways to mobilize their own many assets—Hampshire’s distinctive mission, the Five College Consortium community, a strong alumni network, and a largely successful existence as an innovative education model—to a recovery, Hampshire’s leadership appears to have panicked.

Interestingly, Sonnenfeld tied this gross underestimation of the college's value to a failure of management to work with its wider community.

Over the course of the fall, Nelson never consulted her five living predecessors, faculty leaders, or other campus constituencies. Nor did she appeal to alumni about her dire assessment of Hampshire’s financial situation, a list which includes Stonyfield Farms chairman Gary Hirshberg, former CEO of Seventh Generation Jeffrey Hollender, renowned documentarian Ken Burns, and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Humes. Gregory Prince, who was president of Hampshire College 16 years, envisioned tapping such alumni for a recovery plan involving various interconnected institutes. But in the panic, consultation—a cultural necessity in a liberal arts college founded on participation and engagement—simply did not occur and this important resource was overlooked.

Collaboration is in fact the foundation of intelligence in pretty much everything, but education managers only sometimes sees this.  Cerullo chronicles Nelson's failures on this front. Sonnenfeld cited former Hampshire president Prince calling for restored campus partnerships in Hampshire policy-making.  In spite of the insight of various individuals, higher ed admin culture has shifted in recent decades toward autocracy.  That has justified many a mediocre decision, including this one.

The inevitable New York Times mediation on the demise of communitarian ideals misses the point that Hampshire may close not because of liberal arts economics but because of the autocratic replacement of shared governance.

The liberal arts are often scapegoated for economic problems that come from the spread of the market model in higher ed.  Many, many people who can and should benefit from higher education cannot pay market price for it.  Markets fails to allocate higher ed efficiently--they give too much to the rich and too little to the poor.  Markets hand education out according to ability to pay, as they are supposed to do. But that isn't how societies allocate true public goods like quality healthcare, high school diplomas, and now bachelor's degrees.  Societies need relatively equal distribution of public goods that meet the same quality standard in all cases.  Such a distribution is always subsidized--where "subsidy" means society pays collectively for a just distribution through the tax system.  In other terms, capitalist societies are always partly socialist or they function very badly.  The key feature of neoliberalism--privatization of all interests and allocations--actually degrades the capitalism it seeks to expand.

In higher ed wea have this jerry-rigged system called student financial aid that offers selective subsidies without having to own market failure.  A college like Hampshire, which is private, typically uses endowment returns, gifts, and the full tuition of affluent students to subsidize poorer students.  Public colleges do the same thing with state appropriations (including direct aid to students).  Whether the college is private or public, its finances are now constituted by market failure. It needs the subsidy work-around from somewhere.

Private colleges are facing an artificial crisis borne of the national--wholly political--demand that they cover their very high quality educational operations entirely with private revenues.  Their students can't actually come up with this money: colleges are now discounting tuition in many cases by 50 percent in order to fill their classes.  This has nothing to do with the quality of the students but reflects the normal smart person's very limited personal wealth.  (The actual economics of public goods suggests that colleges should be discounting tuition anyway, since at least half the total value of a college degree is non-private, students should never pay actual cost in the first place (Stage 1)).

To function, Hampshire has to get a tuition subsidy for many or most of its students; enrollments decline because of insufficient subsidies that declining enrollments make even more insuffiicent.  The doom loop I describe in The Great Mistake applies to private as well as public colleges.  If President Nelson did in fact want Hampshire to be taken over by UMass, she was acknowledging (in a destructive way) that her private subsidy stream wasn't big enough, and could be fixed only with a bigger public one.

Let's pause to note that the thirty years propaganda war on the liberal arts, first for PCness and now for non-vocationality, has successfully scared customers away. But the liberal arts aren't only the most powerful rival of literalist, dispensationalist Christianity on the one hand and business autocracy on the other, but are the exception to college's problem with "limited learning," all of which happens in vocational majors (Figure 6).  The irony is that liberal arts colleges aren't just the most vulnerable sector of higher ed, but also its best.  The constant attacks on them are lowering overall college quality.  The attacks are enabled by the failure to understand public-good economics.

I drafted a Twitter thread on this a couple of days ago.  Liberal arts college quality comes from a combination of intense workload for students and small classes for active engagement with the material.   To make a crude contrast: a typical public college student takes 48 quarter courses for a 4-year BA. Of those 48 courses, how many will have 15 students or fewer?  Probably no more than 1 or 2, and quite possibly zero.  In contrast, at my alma mater, Reed College, I had only two courses with more than 15 students. The engagement difference adds up.

It costs much more money to do high-quality active learning.  Instead of facing this fact, the US is letting cost end the policy discussion rather than start it. The policy questions are: does the United States want to limit Hampshire-style quality to a small elite that can pay? Does it want to limit it to a group that is economically more diverse but still small (the high-tuition/high-financial aid model)? Or does it seek mass quality and see the liberal arts as something to scale up?

Politicians have been stuck in an anti-ambition mode for thirty years, catering to the tax revolt which is in large part a symptom of structural racism, which leads them not to want to pool public resources across racial lines. Operationally, this is moronic and self-destructive. it has lowered the quality of the entire national infrastructure, from roads to schools to housing.  The same is true of liberal arts colleges, public and private. Since they are more or less the best we have, refusing to fund them is tantamount to lowering overall attainment.

Liberal arts college leadership has been on the defensive for years, and is completely intimidated by criticisms of price. But the solution is not to let these colleges die so an even smaller elite gets to have their quality.  One alternative, mega-universities, with their dependence on charging significant tuition for online enrollment, are a way of kidding ourselves about quality as we give it up.

The key issue is that the whole ecosystem of higher education has been destabilized by shifting to a private cost structure that doesn't work.  Seeing colleges as private goods insures that society under-invests in them. A confident society sets goals for things like education and then figures out how to pay for it.  It does not downsize the goal to fit benighted leaders' ideas about the budget. The US has to decide if it wants real learning for all college students or just for the traditional, limited group.

If we do decide we want mass learning or democratic education, we're going to have to fix the business model. That will mean reversing privatization at private colleges too. Society and business will have to increase subsidizes to colleges and universities, not demand that universities subsidize society and business--which happens when we make students pay the cost of educational benefits that are actually half public. 

This social support for private college students will take the form of public funding for places like Hampshire.  This is a good year to start thinking about how to do it.

Photo credit: Katherine Taylor, New York Times

UPDATE. Both Hampshire's president and Board chair have resigned.   President Miriam Nelson's resignation letter can be read here.  It acknowledges that the secrecy of admin's deliberations was a problem while also trying to justify it as part of Hampshire's original charter.

Students, staff, and faculty are proceeding with the Renvisioning Hamphsire project. It's Facebook site is here.

Reflections on the 150th Anniversary Symposium of the University of California Academic Senate, Part I, by Anneeth Kaur Hundle (Asst. Prof. of Anthropology) and Ma Vang (Asst. Prof. of Ethnic Studies & History), UC Merced. Photo courtesy of Merced Prodigy. 

Arrival in Oakland

We felt anxious as we entered the cocktail reception that preceded the keynote and first panel of the symposium and celebration. Located in a large hall of the iconic Waterfront Hotel on Jack London Square in Oakland, we felt like out-of-town infiltrators, from the seemingly otherworldly UC Merced of the San Joaquin/Central Valley and rural California. We felt out of time and place in the almost entirely white space of senior UC Academic Senate leadership, and marked by our generational, racialized, gendered, and cultural differences.  To the right of the entrance was a bar, and most of the attendees had gathered around it, engaged in exuberant conversation as they sipped on cocktails and greeted each other like old pals. People turned to look at us with friendly smiles and also quizzical looks of non-recognition--they did not know who we were and what we might be doing there.

A little nervous but determined, we maneuvered through the crowded entrance to look for a seat. We spotted our fellow panelists and moderator already seated at a table, and upon their invitation, took our seats at the table. Exchanging glances wrought from friendship and solidarity, we thought a drink or two might be in order to make it through the night. We worked our way through the crowd back to the entrance and bar.

The feelings of nonbelonging lingered through the evening’s panel and those of the next day. To be clear, we also belonged at the symposium because we are UC faculty and, at the suggestion of one of our senior faculty mentors at UC Merced, were invited to present a talk for the 150th anniversary of the UC Academic Senate based on our perspectives as junior faculty at UC Merced. However, we also felt that we were token faculty of color in the exclusive space of senior Academic Senate leaders. We were not sure if our visible phenotypical presentation of “difference” as faculty from UC Merced was conflated with or would even erase our substantive, intellectual contributions about our experiences of UC Merced as a neoliberal university. Were we there as objects to represent diversity or were we there to speak as subjects of history about the UC system?
   
Thinking the “Twenty-First Century Neoliberal Research University”

Our talk at the anniversary symposium was based on a longer, collaborative paper that we co-wrote together, alongside UCM student contributions, which is now in press in the journal Critical Ethnic Studies and which provides an analysis of UC Merced as an exceptional university and institution in the UC system because of its origins, development, and expansion in the context of neoliberal conditionality specific to the Californian and U.S. context from the late 1980s onwards. Our mode of celebrating the 150th anniversary of the UC “multiversity” (to use former President of the UC Clark Kerr’s phrase) and the academic senate was to think about the UC’s mission to uphold public values, connect to larger civic issues and social problems, and envision a democratic polity. Importantly, we did not speak from administrative, or technocratic-managerial perspectives, but as professors and teachers who are deeply invested in the stated public mission of the UC, and who must provide our students with intellectual toolkits to understand their society and circumstances. Thus, our talk was positioned in relation to the everyday struggles of navigating UC Merced and the UC system as junior scholars and researchers, teachers, and mentors for minoritized/racialized and working class students.

Our mode of celebrating the 150th anniversary of the UC Academic Senate began by stating student demands that were expressed at the 2016 celebration and groundbreaking of the UC Merced’s 2020 Project, the next phase of UCM’s campus expansion.

UPRISE (Uprising People Power to Resolve Issues of Space and Equity) is a graduate and undergraduate student coalition at UC Merced, largely led by queer women of color, that demanded the redistribution of university resources for student needs as well as the recognition of their humanity, dignity, and personhood on campus. The student coalition called for cultural and other student centers, increased funding for mental health services, better undergraduate student recruitment and retention, resources for the critical race and ethnic studies program, the diversification of the faculty, and the de-militarization of the campus.

Foregrounding campus structural inequality and the student activism of students of color in our lecture, we argued that UC Merced enacts neoliberal projects by retooling concepts and ideals central to historical and liberal-humanist visions of the University of California--projects such as “diversity,” “access,” “equity,” and “public”--to put them in line with neoliberal campus expansion initiatives. In mobilizing these concepts, rooted in a model of the UC informed by the 1960s-era Master Plan for Higher Education, we addressed how the work of late capitalist inequality is made invisible and normalized in the day to day workings of UC Merced.

We also addressed neoliberal processes as a relationship between late liberal capitalism and multicultural diversity discourses, suggesting that the university deploys “diversity speak” as a technology of governance and mode of managing difference and students’ substantive demands for racial and economic justice through what we define as top-down “neoliberal solidarity projects” (i.e. the celebration of “first-generation” identity etc.)

Finally, we explored the relational politics and practices among staff, faculty, and students of color to comprise what we describe as “nonaligned solidarities in formation”--solidarities that inform a set of strategies of both “playing along” and resisting the university’s neoliberal governance and management of its subjects. Such solidarities are often fractious, messy, and precarious, but they reveal a sense of community and belonging to UCM, as well as a bottom-up vision for a just university that functions to actually serves its students, faculty and staff of color, and communities of California’s Central Valley.

Our intention was to make visible our experiences, those of our students, and both the neoliberal development and governance of UC Merced to showcase the capitalist contradictions of the UC system (much of which is now majority students of color, and which features growing structural inequality) and to build a necessary link between the ongoing labor of the UC Academic Senate’s responsibility to supervise the academic mission of the system and the reality of faculty and student of color needs.

We did this knowing that we had yet to experience sitting on higher level, system-wide Academic Senate committees, and knowing full well that the Academic Senate’s mandate of democratic and decentralized governance exists to represent our needs and demands in lieu of being formally unionized faculty. Our discussion of UC Merced was not meant to parochialize or marginalize the campus as an anomaly, as many in the UC system continue to see it, but rather to suggest that our racialized and gendered experiences, alongside the extraction of our labor, speaks to a larger problem about the UC system as a “neoliberal multiversity.”

We hoped that those in attendance understood that our commitment to the new campus, and to a region of California where people from our own communities (Hmong and Punjabi Sikh) live, requires a serious critique of the contradictions of building a new university that celebrates tokenized and phenotypical diversity, yet does less to direct resources towards understanding the complexity of student personhoods and livelihoods in the region.

For instance, we are concerned about the market-driven instrumentality of educational priorities that result in the divestment of critical humanities education, critical race and ethnic studies, and globally-informed coursework, including language courses, that speak to the realities of student life stories and non-Western forms of knowledge. We wanted to stimulate serious conversations about how the dilemma of neoliberal development and governance at UCM is shaping the direction of the UC. Indeed, public discourse about UC Merced touts it as the “future of the University of California" based upon the high percentage, 53%, of Latinx students. (UC Berkeley and UCLA have 13% and 21% Latinx student populations respectively.) This is what we mean by "neoliberal diversity" logic" UCM’s development and expansion depends on the visible appearance of Brown and Black bodies on our campus, while its diversity discourses and ideologies undermine more substantive financial investment for the hiring of under-representative Latinx faculty and faculty who specialize in course-work relevant to Latinx students.

Thus, as public funds for higher education dwindle, we wonder, are UCM's struggles indeed the future of the University of California system? How would the Academic Senate address our concerns, and how could we work to re-invigorate the Senate with a new sense of urgency and creativity, working towards collective goals of securing public investment, defending the public mission of the UC system, and committing to hiring faculty of color to help educate the next generation of students of color in the UC system?

We presented our talk on the final panel of the day, and at that point, many important guests at the symposium, including UC system President Janet Napolitano and Provost Michael T. Brown, had already left. We had not pre-circulated our talk, and so the discussants on the panel provided commentary that was independent of the talk. Unfortunately, there was no additional time for a question and answer period, which limited intellectual engagement with the talk's ideas, beyond several questions that came from audience members after the symposium was over for the day.

Our overall sense was that we both visibly represented the abstract notion of “diversity” of the UC system, and also provided “raw material” or “data” about the day-to-day experiences of junior faculty and students of color at UCM. Thus the content of our talk, particularly its critical analysis of neoliberal diversity, was relegated to the margins of the intellectual conversations at the symposium, rather than helping to formulate the constitutive core of conversations by and about the Academic Senate.

In the end, it wasn’t that those in attendance did not understand the concerns we raised. It seemed that they valued our perspective of critical disruption and understood it to be a part of the historical tradition of the UC. Yet the critical substance of our talk was still co-opted into a celebratory narrative about the UC as an institution that values diversity and the public good. The logic of this narrative prioritized the ways in which the UC had successfully fulfilled its mission of administrative and managerial planning to establish and open UC Merced.

We don’t discount the opportunities that UCM has afforded us as tenure-track faculty in a highly precarious job market, or the important ways it has provided and expanded access to higher education for undergraduate students from California. However, we continue to worry about the quality of that educational access.  We are worried about high lecturer to tenure-track faculty ratios.  For example, in Fall 2018, the proportion of contingent to ladder-rank UCM faculty was 143 to 249,  meaning that over 1/3rd of the UCM faculty are off the tenure track.

We are worried too about over-worked faculty and staff, and the lack of additional tutoring and mentoring services for first-generation, poor and working students.  We are worried about insufficient numbers of critical humanities course offerings, and of faculty of color who can serve as mentors for the students who take them.  "Trickle-down economics” had revealed to us the ways in which ideological and increasingly fictive notions of the universalized public university and its liberal-humanistic imperatives mask late liberal capitalist university development and its negative ramifications for its racialized and gendered subjects.

In the end, we left the conference reeling from the burdensome weight of the universalist, liberal-humanist tradition of the University of California, established in 1868.  We will address this issue in a future post.