Terme di Caracalla, Rome on May 12, 2026 

The recent convergence of two kinds of AI news has unnerved a lot of us. 

The first kind is magic math solutions, like OpenAI’s claimed proof of the Navier-Stokes equations on fluid movement. These stories ask us to accept that AI superintelligence is indeed at hand. 

The second kind is news of criminal AI agents breaking internal guidelines and external laws and covering it up from their human controllers. These stories ask us to accept that AI superintelligence is indeed at hand. 

One person who studied OpenAI’s hack of Hugging Face, METR’s AI “loss of control” specialist Ajeya Cotra, concluded, “Compared to … reward hacks from six months ago, this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself.” So there’s a new wave of fear of an AI human extinction because AI's superintelligence is here! (Note Kevin Bass's Sankey chart of Anthropic money flowing through intermediaries to METR.)

Oxford, Ohio on April 28, 2016

by Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn

 

Dear colleague (Take #1)

    “Dear Colleague.” So begins the letter sent by the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) to colleges and universities on February 14, 2025. This communication, however, is anything but collegial if, as Merriam-Webster tells us, this term includes as one of its meanings: “marked by power or authority vested equally in each of a number of colleagues.” Ostensibly written “to clarify the nondiscrimination obligations of schools and other entities that receive federal financial assistance,” this letter’s salutation implies that what follows is so much legal counsel offered by one partner to another in the common cause that is education. In fact, however, this “guidance” quickly turns into an ominous bundle of accusations, imperatives, and threats directed against what JD Vance has labeled an “enemy” who must now be defeated.

    “In recent years,” the letter opens, “American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students.” Colleges and universities thereby stand accused of embracing “repugnant race-based preferences” and, indeed, of perpetuating forms of “segregation” that are “a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history.” To reproduce this ugly past under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is to traffic in a “smuggling” operation that reproduces forms of bias prohibited by Title VI of the Civil Right Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. 

This accusation quickly morphs into an imperative as the DoE announces that it “will vigorously enforce the law” against anyone who refuses to comply with its dictates; and that declaration soon becomes a threat as the letter’s recipients are warned that any institution that dares to disobey may find itself stripped of all federal funding. Those who are initially identified as “colleagues” are, by letter’s end, redefined as recalcitrant subjects whose conformity to federal law can only be secured by means of punishment, whether anticipated or actually inflicted.

Buried in a footnote, the February 14 letter concedes that it “does not have the force and effect of law and does not bind the public or create new legal standards.” This disclaimer, however, is belied by the letter’s coercive intent. What this document seeks is the reconstitution of colleges and universities as sites of ideological indoctrination committed to, among other things, the rescue of white supremacy, the reconsolidation of heterosexist gender identities, and a specious doctrine of meritocracy that will do no more than camouflage kleptocratic rule. Accomplishment of these ends demands higher education’s capture within a larger authoritarian regime that can have no place for colleges and universities dedicated to critical inquiry or the academic freedom that is its indispensable condition. That done, those addressed by the DoE as “colleagues” will in fact be so many subordinates.

 

Dear colleagues (Take #2)

  

          “Dear Colleagues.” So opens the March 10 communication sent by Harvard’s president and other senior executives officers to all who are this university’s employees. Composed in response to unspecified but “rapidly shifting federal policies,” which we must assume includes those announced in the DoE’s February 14 imperative, this letter imposes a freeze on all staff and faculty hiring. This order, its recipients are told, is effective immediately and will remain in place indefinitely. 

            What is the sense of the term “colleague” in this letter’s salutation? “We are enormously grateful,” effuses President Garber, “for your dedication and commitment as we work collectively to advance our mission.” Those who perform this work, it appears, are those indicated by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) when it defines a colleague as “a person who is employed in the same workplace or organization: a co-worker.” But this characterization of Harvard’s employees as partners in a shared endeavor presupposes and at the same time obfuscates the hierarchical structure of rule that authorizes some to issue this imperative and, by implication, denies this same prerogative to those whose foremost obligation is to obey. To concede this is to acknowledge that America’s colleges and universities are themselves legally organized as autocracies and for that reason replicate rather than repudiate the authoritarian regime within which they are now being subsumed. 

The basic legal structure of the American academy, as I have explained elsewhere, is an accident that emerges out of circumstances specific to the pre-Revolutionary era, most notably the absence of an established body of scholars who might undertake the work of institutional governance, as was true at Cambridge and Oxford. That lack enabled local elites, chiefly clerical and political, to maintain control over America’s earliest colleges; and it is the obdurate legacy of this colonial relic that we now find depicted in the hierarchical organization charts of U.S. institutions of higher education.

These diagrams demonstrate what Walter Metzger and Richard Hofstadter once labeled “the great anomaly of American higher education.” Whether specified in a charter, enabling statute, or state constitution, this peculiarity consists of the law’s location of the university’s powers of rule within incorporated boards that are conventionally dubbed “external” insofar as their members are not employees of the universities they govern and “lay” insofar as expertise in matters academic is neither required nor expected as a condition of appointment. These bodies in turn are authorized to appoint a chief executive whose principal duty is to implement board directives and oversee the academy’s everyday operation. Beneath this officer, we find everyone else, whether designated as staff or faculty (although each of these groups is internally stratified by, for example, the demarcations between deans and associate deans, tenure-track faculty and contingent instructors, directors and administrative assistants, etc.).

What renders this constitutional form autocratic is the disenfranchisement of those who are subject to these boards’ rule from any legally guaranteed title to participate in that power. These are the persons we classify as employees, and this economistic designation is itself an indicator of their lack of any political authority to make the rules by which they are governed or to select and hold accountable those who do so. This is so not because boards or their chief executive officers are wannabe despots, but because most American colleges and universities are structured as a specific kind of corporation. For legal purposes, each of these boards is the corporation that is any given college or university, and it is to these bodies that the law grants the power to rule over its designated jurisdiction. Those who are not members of these corporations are those who, by the law’s mandate, collectively comprise the ruled. 

True, certain categories of employees (for example, the faculty) may sometimes be permitted to play a role in the academy’s governance, but that opportunity is delegated and so may always be revised or even revoked by its rulers. That, to illustrate, is precisely what happened last year when the University of Kentucky’s governing board unilaterally stripped the faculty senate of its authority over the academic program and replaced that body with one whose role is entirely advisory. Should that university’s president call the members of this faculty “colleagues,” that will veil their situation as subjects whose power is held and exercised at the pleasure of monocratic others. To extend this label to contingent instructors and staff members who are at-will employees is to create a condescending veneer of equality that is mocked by the American academy’s antidemocratic legal form. Here, too, we find rulers and subjects but none who are rightly called “colleagues.”

 

Dear colleagues (Take #3)

When we weave together these two “dear colleague” letters, we see why Adam Sitze is right to label the American academy’s current situation “autocracy squared.” This is arguably the worst of all possible worlds, for here the autocratic academy ruled by external boards becomes a pawn of purposes dictated by those beyond, whether that be the Federal executive, state legislatures, plutocratic donors, and/or foundations that are no friends of the academy. Perhaps, therefore, now is the time to ask how U.S. colleges and universities might be reconstituted in democratic form, thereby rendering those who do its work not so many subjects in the guise of employees but, rather, “co-workers” in whom power is “vested equally” and who, for that reason, are in fact entitled to consider themselves colleagues. 

How that might be done is intimated by this definition of a college, which is also taken from the OED: “an independent self-governing corporation” established “for purposes of study or instruction.” What this sense suggests is the possibility of fashioning the American academy in the form of what state statutory codes typically call member corporations. California’s nonprofit incorporation statute, to illustrate, invites the creation of juridical entities whose members are defined as those who have the right to vote for as well as to remove directors, to adopt or amend their articles of incorporation and bylaws, and, more generally, to exercise the additional powers conventionally afforded by law to incorporated bodies (for example, to determine the disposition of capital assets).

The fundamental difference between member corporations and their autocratic counterparts turns on how the power of rule is organized within each. In the latter, the authority to rule is legally monopolized by these boards and delegated downward through the formal chain of command depicted in standard organization charts. In a member corporation, this chart is turned upside down. Ultimate authority resides not within a head severed from the subjects it rules but, instead, within a body whose members may (or may not) choose to delegate authority upward. That authority, however, can always be recovered by the incorporated body politic that is its source as well as the ground of its legitimacy; and it is for this reason that the 18^thcentury jurist William Blackstone was right to label this legal form a “little republic.”

Within this corporate form, the power of rule is exercised by its members over themselves; and they may do so either directly in assembly or indirectly via selection of the representatives they authorize to exercise a corporation’s powers on their behalf. These representatives may be organized within senates; but, unlike those within the autocratic university, these are not advisory bodies whose role is restricted to offering counsel to those who need not heed it. Instead, these senates are true legislatures whose officers may adopt, amend, or eliminate the statutes of a collegial enterprise whose members are so many citizens of a university organized as a self-governing corporation. 

 

Becoming colleagues

Not long ago, Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky published an op-ed titled “Harvard Must Take a Stand for Democracy.” There, they called on Harvard’s president to “give a high-profile speech defending democracy and condemning the administration’s assault on it.” To which Austin Sarat responded: “As professors continue to press college presidents to go beyond trying to protect the interests of their own places and take up the defense of democracy and the rule of law, faculty members, speaking through their own governing bodies, should also do so. They should pass and publicize their own statements and resolutions.” Were we scholars to do that, Sarat concludes, “our defense of democracy will be rooted, as it should be, in the democratic practices of faculty self-governance itself.”

Perhaps, though, Sarat does not go far enough insofar as he fails to ask whether faculty self-governance can in fact be realized within a legal form that renders their participation in institutional rule forever vulnerable to constriction and even elimination. Today, beset by a U.S. president that castigates us as foes, we find ourselves in a defensive crouch; and, from that posture, too often, we appeal to our institutional rulers to speak up against and save us from the autocrat without. That strategy, Sarat might have said but does not, will only leave us more dependent on the beneficence of autocrats within. Instead, let us dare to imagine an academy whose members, without equivocation, can address one another as “dear colleagues.”

 

 

 

Michael Burawoy Starts the Seminar on November 13, 2019

Grief-stricken only begins to describe how I feel about the loss of Michael Burawoy, a force for knowledge and of mutual support on so many fronts.  

I knew him as an allied analyst and critic of universities in general and the University of California in particular.  We were both preoccupied with the plague of privatization, which is not only a shift in revenue sources but also an overturning of society and the place of knowledge in it. Michael was particularly good describing the public world as the site of intellectual autonomy and collective self-determination, two things he frequently linked.

When I left UC Santa Barbara for my current job in London, I wrote him a long note about the shift, partly in the hope that I'd see more of him because of his visits to his sister, who lives in Highgate. 

I finished that email by thanking him for his work on universities in the context of his wider social analysis and for his support for mine and others'. "The meetings you’ve hosted at Berkeley have been among the most satisfying and interesting of my time at UC. I’m very grateful for the effort you’ve put into that, and for your consistency and responsiveness."  

That sounds formal, even understated, but he was incredibly consistent and responsive. These are humble yet powerful virtues that are the opposite of celebrity and influence.  Michael knew that they build intellectual communities and have the most lasting influence on the collective creation of future knowledge. 

One thing I remember about the seminar  in this Berkeley restaurant patio (pictured above) is that his students trusted him. I almost wrote "loved him," which is likely also true.  But what I saw was a trust in him with their ideas and their personal commitments that was perhaps more than that. 

Not long after that visit, he sent me a draft chapter for a book that I don't think has yet appeared. [Correction: Thanks to Tyler Leeds for pointing me to Public Sociology (Polity 2021), chapter 15]  I'm going to circle back on this blog to some of the themes he raises here, and will be writing about Michael's work again.  This post is a down payment.

One of his themes might be summarized as: commodified knowledge loses its power over power. 

A second theme is: "Public" is the name of (and means for) collective agency.  A world of privatized institutions is always oligarchic.  

This latter point now gets more obvious to everyone with each passing day. But there is still much confusion and hesitation about "public" as the functional alternative power.

We really need Michael Burawoy to help put out the bonfire of the knowledges and rebuild society with the principles he saw very clearly.  This is such a stupefying loss.

Here are some excerpts from Michael's chapter called "Defending the Public University." This is labeled Chapter 14 in my copy, so in the middle of a much longer argument, and with a diagram that he wasn't yet satisfied with.

'One can debate the specific origins of the transformation of the University of California, but it is part of a national and indeed global trend – symptomatic of third-wave marketization that turns what was once a public good into a private commodity. If knowledge used to be bgggtttregarded as something produced and distributed for the benefit of all, it is now increasingly bought and sold by those who can afford it, so that the university becomes a revenue generating machine, transforming its internal structure, and threatening its national and international standing. For so long we thought of the public university as exempt from the forces of commodification. Yes, there were periodic crises that involved defunding, but they were always followed by restoration, albeit at a lower level. Too few were ready to acknowledge how the secular decline in funding was leading to the structural transformation of the university. 

'We can gauge this transformation of the university by asking the same questions we earlier posed for academic disciplines – Knowledge for Whom? Knowledge for What? The university is oriented externally to the commodification of knowledge, what we might call policy knowledge, in pursuit of revenue to alleviate its fiscal crisis. The commodification of knowledge reverberates through the university, repurposing professional knowledge for instrumental ends, creating a governance crisis, but also an identity crisis as critical knowledge calls into question the direction of the university. The identity crisis becomes in the public sphere a legitimation crisis – the public calls into question the value of the university as a place of teaching and research, which only deepens the fiscal crisis.'

....

The pursuit of new, private revenue streams paradoxically weakens the university's finances, Michael writes. It forces new strategies on the core of the university's purpose, teaching and research. 

'The commodification of prestige and knowledge is one strategy, the commodification of labor is another. Universities can go after the weak and the vulnerable, outsourcing low paid service work to avoid paying benefits or even minimum wages. Economic restructuring led to dramatic change in teaching as expensive tenure-track faculty have been replaced by short-term, precarious instructional labor, known variously as lecturers, adjuncts, part-time or contingent faculty. At Berkeley some 40% of student credit hours are taught by lecturers. Across higher education lecturers now outnumber tenure-track faculty by two to one whereas 50 years ago the ratio was the inverse. As the number of tenure-track positions declines, relative to the numbers of students looking for academic jobs, the oversupply of PhDs has left them competing for lowpaid, insecure teaching positions. Tenure-track faculty become a shrinking labor aristocracy with higher income and security of employment. The conditions of lecturers vary a great deal across higher education, depending on the status of the college, but everywhere their conditions of employment are vastly inferior to tenure-track faculty who are released from teaching to become increasingly focused on research. While there is no reason to believe that lecturers are inferior teachers, nonetheless as their conditions of employment deteriorate so there is a long term degradation of education.

'As commodification makes inroads into the university, it brings about changes in the administrative structure. Fiscal crisis has been accompanied by “administrative bloat”. According to the university’s figures, the number of senior and executive managers at Berkeley increased 5 fold in the 20 years from 1994 to 2014, so that they now equal the number of tenuretrack faculty that remained constant over the same period. It’s not just the numbers but also the salaries. A senate committee reported that between 2010 and 2015 salaries of Berkeley’s central administration increased by 38% whereas the income of academic units increased by 13%. While Berkeley is at the extreme, for reasons are not clear, we can find similar administrative expansion at the other University of California campuses and indeed across higher education.

'Coincident with administrative expansion has been the recruitment of executives from the financial and corporate world. For example, Berkeley’s Vice-Chancellor for Finance and Administration came from the World Bank, knowing little about the operation of universities, let alone the peculiarities of a public university like Berkeley. He recruited personnel from the world of finance to help him govern the university. He lasted for 5 years. 

'The university attracts “spiralists” who enter the university from outside, perhaps from the corporate world, develop their own signature project and then spiral on (if they are lucky), leaving the university to spiral down. In this case the Vice-Chancellor tried to promote on “online” education which proved to be a flop, and he spiraled out and down. '

...

'Sobered by a succession of disasters, the Board of Regents chose a “local” for the next Chancellor. Carol Christ had been a faculty member at Berkeley since 1970 and became Executive Vice-Chancellor before moving on to become President of Smith College. After 10 years she returned to Berkeley to retire, but was pulled back in as interim Executive Vice- Chancellor as a stop-gap measure to clean up the mess left by her predecessors. The campus breathed a sigh of relief when she was appointed Chancellor. Convinced that privatization was the only strategy going forward, she pursued it deliberately and rationally. Her first goal was to eliminate the burgeoning annual deficit by multiplying revenue streams as well as trimming expenses. With soaring rents it was increasingly difficult for students and faculty to live in Berkeley or the surrounding areas, so Christ made it her priority to set about expanding university accommodation through public-private partnerships.

'The smoother operation of the new regime throws into relief what is taken for granted – the progressive commodification of knowledge, keeping the university alive with privatization strategies, even to the point of openly repudiating support for tuition-free education. With a disastrous credit-rating, due to the fiascos of the past, the administration is forced into high-risk investments, often over opposition from faculty. The restructuring of the administration has gradually expropriated control from all campus communities – faculty, lecturers, staff, students. From the hallowed shared-governance we have entered a regime of consultative-governance – consultations after the fact – driven by market forces.'

...

 'We live in an era where the university loses its autonomy. Increasingly focused on making money to stem its fiscal crisis, it undermines collective self-government and thereby bringing on a governance crisis, it mimics the capitalist corporation. This brings many tensions to the surface. Some regions of the university are better able to exploit the market place than others. The bio-sciences and engineering supply research allied to the expanding sectors of the economy; the business and the law schools supply managers and regulators; the medical school, public policy, and social welfare supply the expertise to administer and treat precarious populations. As tuition increased so students gravitate toward those disciplines that supply the best job opportunities, whether that be a path to a professional degree or directly into the more secure regions of the labor force. The university surreptitiously pushes toward vocationalism at the expense of a broad liberal education. The number of majors in the arts and humanities falls. The university follows student demand by redistributing resources among departments on the basis of “student credit hours” and the number of degrees. In a time of shrinking budgets the competition between departments becomes palpable, no longer on the basis of scholarly distinction but on the appeal to students.

 'The capitalist university not only creates lateral inequalities between disciplines, but also in the vertical direction. As we have seen cutting costs means employing armies of poorly-paid lecturers to do the teaching abdicated by a shrinking labor aristocracy of tenure-track faculty. At a prestigious public university, Senate or “ladder” faculty create the symbolic power of the university – the number of prominent scholars, Nobel Prize Winners as well as turning out outstanding graduate students. The tenure-track faculty are pampered with diminished teaching loads and off-scale salaries in order to keep up with Ivy League universities. The capitalist university creates an entrenched two-tier system – a lower caste of dedicated teachers and an upper caste of researchers. There is virtually no mobility between the two. In the short term, the interests of the ladder faculty lie in the multiplication of lecturers, but in the long term they suffer declining numbers. Graduate students, expecting to enter the ranks of tenure-track faculty, now face two tracks into the future (Burawoy and Hanks 2018). 

'The Berkeley Faculty Association takes as its mission the defense of the public university opposing privatization, the corporatization of the university, the commodification of knowledge. In practice this means we oppose economically irrational projects (public-private ventures, retrofitting the stadium, privileging athletics, campus shared services), the degradation of education through online education, and revenue making credentials with limited content. It means we support diversity at all levels of the campus, defend shared governance, build alliances with unions of GSIs, lecturers and staff. The BFA along with other University of California faculty associations has thrown its weight behind a plan to refinance higher education from increases in state taxation. Rather than pursuing the self-destructive strategies of privatization, we support the “$66 fix” – $66 being the extra tax a median income earner in California would pay in order to reset higher education to funding levels of the year 2000. This has the support of a wide range of unions and associations involved with higher education though it has yet to win the broad support of California’s population or the political establishment that runs the state.

'Accustomed to support from the state legislature as one of California’s symbols of progress, the university has experienced slow downgrading for some fifty years. It is now one of many public agencies competing for a diminishing slice of the state budget. State funding per student has fallen steadily over the last 50 years at the same time that fees have increased. Here lies one material reason for the declining public support for the university. As student fees increase, as total costs of attendance increase at an even greater rate, and as the degree itself buys less lucrative, more precarious jobs, so many wonder whether the university education is worth the increasing cost. . . . 

'To the public the university’s claim to be in perpetual economic crisis seems bogus in the light of rising tuition but also in the light of scandals that have swirled around the university, and exploited by the media: sexual harassment by the high and mighty, bribing one’s way into the university, misuse of funds by the Office of the President, increasing numbers of out-of-state and international students displacing Californians of equal or greater scholarly merit, exorbitant salaries of administrators, abysmal conditions of service employees receiving subminimum wages. Uninterested in its “international” prestige, Governor Brown likened the university to the fast food chain, Chipotle: it should offer a low cost fixed menu of courses. The public looks at the university through a different lens than its administrators and its faculty. . . .

'As the number of students of color and students from poorer backgrounds have increased the resources available for education have diminished and costs of attendance have increased – students are getting less but paying more. In short, it is not enough to think only of access, we also need to think of what happens to students once they arrive on campus. The university needs to be accessible but also accountable, and not just to its students but also to communities outside the university. Contesting the legitimation crisis requires us to extend ourselves into the wider communities from which students come. The university cannot survive as an ivory tower. Berkeley has made efforts in this direction building programs of scholarly engagement, but they are poorly funded and marginal to the university’s overall program. 

'Sociology has a particularly important role to play: it not only speaks to the crises facing students, it also speaks to the crisis facing so many communities in California. Sociology’s mission is more than to passively educate, it is to defend society against excessive marketization, not just of labor, land and money but of knowledge itself. It has to play a critical public role in the education of its students.'

 This is the table that Michael wasn't satisfied with. I think it shows useful things.

Focus on the crises in boldface. The deep policy mistakes--and the complicities between captive university management and a Democratic party that had lost interest in public goods and systems-- weakened the university's ability to create and circulate these four kinds of knowledge. 

The governance crisis weakens professional knowledge by making it dependent on non-expert managers and donors. 

The fiscal crisis weakens policy knowledge by making the university too poor and insecure to circulate it powerfully.

The identity crisis  weakens critical knowledge through this same loss of confidence and a resulting unwillingness to fight tooth and nail in society to get its power back.

The legitimation crisis weakens public knowledge by robbing the university of the stature and general understanding required to influence dominant classes. 

These crises need to be ended and replaced with some major reconstructive work.  This is just part of Michael's work that we need to carry on.  

Stories may seem feeble compared to big data or political power.  This is a false impression. In reality, data and power operate through stories and their effects are determined by them. Your budget slides or whatever have to have the proper story.

The strongest stories in 2020 were abolitionist: abolish student debt, abolish college tuition, abolish grad student rent burden, abolish the police. Abolish the at-will firing of abolitionist scholars. These stories always get out in front of the means of achieving their goals. This is a feature not a bug. Their point is to imagine and concretize the goal itself, and rally people to figure out how to achieve it. The same goes for abolishing Covid-19. Full eradication of pestilence of all kinds is what makes people jump out of bed in the morning.

My approach is chronically materialist and institutionalist, so I chronically focus on finance and budget.  We don't have the same abolitionist power with these narratives, and generally haven't found narrative power in other forms. I'm going to look at the national budget picture here, and then, in Part 2, turn to a local university budget insurgency that should be put to use. 

The Covid relief bill arrived six month late, with fractional funding for higher ed and nothing for the states that fund it. Its support for the overall public is a shadow of the need. The failure of the federal government to meet the basic requirements of its population is a two-party creation. The Democratic contribution has been an unconvincing narrative grounded in a failed economic model.  The compromise deal emerged from moderates from both parties who share the disastrous "safety net" model of government, and who agree that government's collective action produces no real value, just remediation. The Democratic leadership had no better storyline of mass enablement or intelligence working in common, so politics is trapped in the Victorian logic of public assistance, and treats a raging pandemic with quarter measures.

The glaring example of narrative success is Ronald Reagan's hydra-headed narrative, for which the series title was, "government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem." Thousands of smaller stories fleshed out this master plot. They had a stock cast of characters that were themselves compressed political types, like "welfare queen."  The Reagan machine perfected this narrative with remarkable discipline for decades. It dismembered the New Deal, discredited the civil rights movement, and turned every public system into a remedial function, the very opposite of what created economic value and national greatness. Public education became a problem rather than an asset, and public colleges and universities did not escape.  Reagan's story was a fabrication. But it changed the course of U.S. history.

Barack Obama has been known to quote Martin Luther King quoting Theodore Parker that "though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends towards justice." It's more accurate to say, "the arc of the moral universe bends towards narrative."  

This week's example is the $900 billion relief finally passed by Congress, that is, allowed to pass by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (It is likely to survive Trump's possible veto, with still more delay.)  The deal offers important material relief, but it is also the vehicle for a Republican story, to be told in Georgia.  The story has a goal, which is to keep the Republican Senate majority by delivering both special election seats to the Republican candidates, so McConnell can remain our shadow POTUS. 

The story is this: "Republicans like Kelly and David offered a helping hand to regular Georgians struggling with the pandemic. The delay was (not because they were busy insider trading with confidential Senate public health testimony--that's fake news, but) because we had to fight Democrats who wanted to take your money to bail out failed blue states." The story has to convince a lot of voters that Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, two of the most plutocratic, anti-Black, self-dealing members of that body, really do care about them.

The secondary story is, "the moderates saved the stimulus." The press is obliging with articles about how Romney, Collins, Manchin, Warner et al. produced a "road-map" for governing under Biden. Sanders, Warren et al failed to get a deal: the future is the bi-partisan center.  Unfortunately, moderation means no money for states and one-fifth of the economic stimulus envisioned by the "liberal" Pelosi in May.

What could help people buy these stories? The lack of a radically different and compelling alternative. That lack is being constructed as I write. For example, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is NOT authoring a narrative saying this: 

Senate Republicans gave you half a CARES act for a quadrupled pandemic. Mitch McConnell gave you that fraction of a loaf. The bill is crap compared to actual need, and crap compared to what the American people deserve, and it's crap entirely because Mitch McConnell controls the Senate, not me. Let me describe the great version the Democrats wanted that will rebuild the country, and if you want it you need to get Kelly and David the heck out of the Senate.

Republican values, Schumer could explain in the LP version, dictate mistreatment of regular people, because they oppose government, which is the only way to treat everyone fairly when we all need the same thing. In reality, Schumer reframes it as an "emergency survival bill" and promises to fight again next year. But that's not a story. That's an adaptation to defeat.  

Most people in this country are in trouble--unfed, sick, evicted, unemployed, lied to, and about to be further abandoned by their bankrupt states.  In building the true and motivating story out of this one, it's worth bearing in mind how tired people are of half-measures and excuses. Take the half-stimulus check.  $1200 (the CARES Act level) may have meant that you could pay a month's rent and focus entirely on your 12 other major problems.  $600, the new version, means you can pay half your rent, and have to keep "rent" on the top of your list of 13 things while you find the other half, who knows how. If you find it, you don't thank the Democrats for fighting for a new stimulus since May: you thank yourself, for scrambling for the other half.  

People are engaged in a continuous low-level resistance to weak support. Democrats don't seem to get this, and they are walking into an ambush in Georgia.

There are countless books and papers on narratology, like Paul Waldman's on politics; there's a whole discipline that studies narrative and affective engagements-- my home field of literary criticism. One general lesson is that it's essential to critique the false story, but critique is just the start.

First, the critiques, which are widely available: David Dayen drills into details and pronounces the stimulus to be not enough. It is, after all, about a fifth of the $4.3 trillion HEROES Act the House passed in May. The one-time stimulus check is half of the CARES Act's ($600 per person); extended unemployment is cut from 16 weeks to 11; the eviction moratorium extends only to the end of January. Jessica Haberkorn describes other ornaments on the Christmas tree.  

Eric Kelderman does the drilling for the higher ed elements: colleges and universities get $25 billion of a $125 billion need. The student debt moratorium, already running through January 31st, was not extended, leaving that up in the air at least through Joe Biden's inauguration.  Since the bill has no money at all for states and local governments, they will struggle to avoid more cuts to K-12 and higher ed. By undermining government employment and spending like they did after 2010, Congress is priming the country for Great Recession 2.0.

Some good things do happen: the ridiculous FASFA form for financial aid applications is greatly simplified, some loans to HCBUs are forgiven, and the bill finally extends Pell eligibility to formerly incarcerated students. There's more--but only a drop in the money bucket. On this point, Kelderman cites Ted Mitchell, president of the higher ed advocacy group, the American Council on Education: “The money provided in this bill will provide some limited relief, which is welcome news to struggling students and institutions. . . . But it is not going to be nearly enough in the long run or even the medium term.”

These are fundamentally important critiques and need to be widely circulated.  But they don't generate an alternative story.

A true counter story would have a feature that the UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, prolific author on the Democrats' inadequate framing and narrating, calls the "truth sandwich." You set out your own view, you then critique the false or opposing view in the context of your framework, and then state your truth or vision again. 

I started to illustrate this with Schumer above, though I had it a bit backwards: Schumer should start with the glories of the House's HEROES Act, and all the problems it would solve, then blast Mitch's phony, bail out-a-Republican Senator plan, then describe the better future of Builder Biden working with strong progressive Congressional support. 

The more radical and inspiring narrative won't come from above. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were exceptions at the national level, but they too had to devote themselves to counterpunching the Washington establishment.  Sanders is in fine form denouncing McConnell's fake Covid medicine, but of course this isn't a left alternative. It's missing the compelling social philosophy that has to do to bipartisan Reaganism what Reaganism did to the Great Society and anti-racism movements.

Abolitionism reminds us yet again that narratives of a new society are going to come from us--not from above but from below.  Sanders did enormous good putting free college and student debt cancellation on the political map, but he did this by advancing concepts developed by scholars (like UCSB's Bob Samuels early on) and activists. This bottom-up process works, but it needs a fully engaged and activated base, in real numbers, to work at the required speed. 

Where is that base?  I'll turn to a current university example in Part 2.

Trump will declare victory in the presidential election this week, but he will be lying, and after a ludicrous amount of maneuvering and some high-stakes drama in our McConnell-packed Federalist Society courts, Joe Biden will assume the battered office. Trump's infantile Rightism will be out of the White House, though not off the airwaves or the streets.

A long struggle of rebuilding will (re)start next year. The function of Democrats in my lifetime has been to clean up each Republican mess (Obama did mild financial re-regulation while paying down the Bush deficit) and get the country back to the starting gate.  We've had just two Democratic presidents in the last forty years, and the Republicans treated neither of them as legitimate. There was Whitewater and impeachment for Bill, and birtherism and blockage for Barack. Joe Biden can expect the same. 

His administration will need to work on twenty issues at once, and higher education will be about 18th, if it makes the list at all. Biden has a lot of social justice to do. He will also have to deal with a model of capitalism that's at the end of its functional life.

For higher ed, there's likely to be some immediate good news in a new stimulus bill in a Democrat-majority Senate.  Last spring, colleges got $14 billion from CARES (on a $50 billion request), only $7 billion of which could go to operations.  The later House bill that the Senate ignored (the HEROES Act) had $27 billion for higher ed. The American Council on Education has estimated the base need of colleges and universities to be $120 billion (for operating losses and increased Covid costs).  Even the full amount would just get colleges and universities back to square one. But getting some large percentage of a new $120 billion would stabilize the situation for the current academic year.

On the national flashpoints of high tuition and student debt, Biden, unless there's popular pressure, will stick with damage control. (Paul Basken has a good overview.) He has campaigned on a diluted version of the Sanders-Warren positions. He proposes free community college, free 4-year college for people from families earning under $125,000, and a cap on loan repayments at 5 percent of discretionary income for 20 years, after which both balance and interest are "forgiven."  In their valuable new report on free college, Georgetown's Center for Education and the Workforce has priced Biden's plan at about $50 billion in the first year, which would be a more than 25 percent increase in government support for  higher ed.  It's a pretty good "first dollar" plan that would offer better support for poor students and students of color. Biden should actually do this, right away. (It would help him hold the Senate in 2022 . . . )

However, the university is not actually the subject of Biden's proposal. The plan is "for education beyond high school."  It is very much about workforce training for mid-skill and middle-income jobs.  Free college and debt relief are way down the webpage, requiring repeated scrolling to find.  Biden notes that his wife is a community college professor, and that there are 30 million jobs paying around $55,000 that require education beyond high school but not a college degree.  

Community colleges are great, but Biden has no vision of educational effects or transformative powers. He doesn't quite have a 1990s New Economy human capital argument about the value of complex  cognitive powers through bachelors' degrees.  Obama was the same, seeing college as workforce development, with an emphasis on the kinds of jobs New Democrats helped Republicans ship overseas.  The model is patronizing and outdated.  It will have little economic benefit. And it won't do nearly enough for today's precarious students, who need full college and not the cut-rate version.

Higher ed is clinging to its individual monetary impacts after decades of lowering it with tuition hikes and student debt, and at the moment when capitalism is facing the death of human capital as we know it. It has tried to pivot to "social mobility," but this is the same thing--private pecuniary gain--measured differently. Colleges and universities need to redefine their roles in society. The Biden Administration will offer an stage, but all the dancing and singing will have to be done by social movements and by the people in universities.

There's this problem of not yet being back in the starting gate. Colleges and universities are fairly busted up inside. Their various constituencies have been set against each other. Here are the main fractures that need to be addressed.

1. Student Debt. Present and former students have had to address this crisis with little help and much opposition from universities. The white tax-revolt backlash that started in the 1970s always required high tuition, which in turned entailed high student debt. Nothing has damaged the public status of higher ed like high tuition and high debt have done, but administrators and most faculty continue to look to tuition hikes as their main fiscal strategy. Debt Collective's Can't Pay Won't Pay has just come out, as a leading example of a movement that universities need to join if they are going to regain public credibility.

2. Funding Cuts.  This is happening again under Covid.  When all is said and done, regular public funding cuts represent the deliberate forcing into mediocrity of the popular, public side of a higher ed system so it can't increase social equality.  Cuts are a classic example of systemic racism: the halving of per-student state support in California exactly tracks the declining share of whites in UC's student population. We're facing a new round of program closures plus a number of suspended PhD programs, particularly in the social sciences and humanities.  Universities and their godawful governing boards haven't attacked this crisis systematically, made a huge fuss, named names, denounced their political enemies, and figured out how to make them lose.  Universities don't care enough, because it's the students who pick up the tab in the form of higher tuition and lowered educational quality. Colleges have supported this extractive model.

3. Social Injustice. The current funding model has made college an engine of inequality: Black and brown students are most likely to go to the colleges with the fewest resources that reliability produce the lowest graduation rates.  The same is true for first generation and working-class students. Many are now being pushed by Covid back into for-profit debt mills because these have pre-existing proficiency with fully online ed.  Governments are doing nothing. The role of highly selective colleges has become completely absurd--they function as rejection factories that are to confer special title on the survivors.  As the new wave of critiques of meritocracy shows, they are protecting stratification rather than fighting it.  Even people who don't care about racial justice hate the renewed Stanfordization of the entire college system, where exclusivity is the sign of quality.  As they embrace individual social mobility as their major social benefit, they are staked to preserve economic inequality as the backdrop.  This is a total crisis for college's social mission, and a cauldron of hatred for the sector that goes well beyond the proverbial Trump lover.

4. Dreadful Governance. There's of course UC's self-serving regents, but they are fairly typical of boards that subject universities to external forces rather than cultivating their campuses by finding them resources and supporting their independence.  An important Chronicle of Higher Education study of governing boards showed that only 1 in 5 members go through a "meaningful bipartisan check."  Republican boards try to impose their political views directly onto faculty and students, while Democratic boards try to impose permanent austerity. Neither group knows much or cares about actual research and teaching, though both are preoccupied with increasing their direct control.  Both parties reliably give Black and brown students less money than their white forebears, though they talk differently about that. In short, cultures in which authority exceeds knowledge do not thrive over time. University boards present a classic organizational problem, and the divisions among major constituencies sown by their unaccountability  has undermined the entire sector.

5. Faculty Withdrawal.  In the major conflicts of the past thirty years, most tenured faculty have been  absent. A fairly small group works on important institutional issues they know well-- police abolition, admissions equity, faculty diversification, grad student unionization, among others.  Meanwhile, the majority of tenure-track faculty are completely silent on budgeting, administrative accountability, pseud-integration, and other major policy questions. Faculty senates work hard to prevent the worst, but they are 99 percent on the defensive. The AAUP and unions have done excellent emergency work, but are generally too busy putting out fires to rebuild the garden shed, to say nothing of the actual house. Rank and file TT folks have not developed an alternative to the austerity university for colored children or fought persistently over resources.  They have not fought obsessively against the adjunctification of the majority of their own ranks. This fracturing of TT from NTT faculty, and faculty from staff and students, is at the root of higher ed's status as a political basket case.

So there are some problems. 

There are also many many signs of academic mobilization. Just to stick with faculty: there has been good organization against anti-Black racism and campus police, for a New Deal for Higher Education, development of groups like Tenure for the Common Good, not to mention union campaigns against adjunct layoffs at CUNY, Ohio University, and many other places. The disaster has galvanized a broad counter-response.

One huge thing that must happen now is the writing of new stories for higher ed. Universities desperately need narratives about who they really are and what they really do. Such narratives are usually written for them. This is the most fundamental activity today of governing boards--to capture and define the story of the university for business, society, and the university itself.

With this in mind, I was happy to find the statement that the Berkeley Faculty Association wrote a couple of weeks ago. Called The University We Are For, it insists that higher ed admin should actively endorse the campaign to re-invest in public universities, noting that the “Keep California’s Promise” Campaign (or “the $66 fix,” for the $66 it would cost the median California taxpayer annually) would restore state funding of all sectors of California public higher education to their 2000 levels." 

At a time when Black Lives Matter movements are working to challenge systemic racism, the Berkeley Faculty Association insists that public higher education should not rise in cost and fall in quality at the moment that the historically excluded are at the university gates. . . . Social justice requires a bolder approach: one that sees California public higher education as an instrument of reparations for the historically excluded; one that seeks to renew its promise now, when it is most necessary.

Their first principle thus is, "A university in which all students have a genuinely equal chance to think, study and succeed.  This requires that all be able to attend school without having to work, without financial anxiety and without incurring debt."

Free college, not work but study, fully funded, $66 a year as the median personal public cost, genius spreading widely throughout the population--that's a good start on a new narrative.  Its authorship needs to be deep and wide, coming from every community that's connected or invested in the university.  The authors need to be much more diverse than they have been until now.

Getting ready for Biden--who will be in the White House next year-- means doing much work of internal reassembly as part of a multi-year campaign for a new public university.

UPDATE NOV 4.  Still prepping for Biden: I have an analysis of the first exit poll at my other blog.

Statement from the American Association of University Professors chapter at New York University

In ordinary circumstances, most of what AAUP chapters do is reactive—stepping up to advocate for the protection of faculty and student rights when they are under threat. At a time when higher education’s morbid expectation of its future is one of crushing austerity and, for some colleges, extinction, our NYU group decided to be proactive and assemble some principles for a post-COVID university. This was not done because we labor under the illusion that a university can be a morally purified space. Instead, we wanted to honor (by gathering together) the ideas and suggestions and arguments for reforming our institution that we have heard being made by faculty and students over the years. Of course, many of the action items on the list are far above our pay grade, but, at some point, we have to start behaving like self-organizing employees of the more humane workplace outlined here. --Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU

****

Principles for a Post-COVID University

How should NYU play its role in a “just recovery” from the COVID crisis? How can we build on the experience of the crisis and from the opinions, grievances, and solidarity that circulated in NYU communities during this period? In thinking about how the university can sustain and rebuild itself, the AAUP envisions NYU as a more transparent, democratic, caring and resilient institution, prioritizing the equitable treatment and rights of its students and employees, minimizing the cost of attendance, and striving more single-mindedly to live up to its motto—“a private university in the public service.”

For too long, NYU policy has been dictated by debt-leveraged expansionary growth, domestically and overseas, and by an institutional desire for upward mobility as measured by national and international rankings. Post-COVID, and in the spirit of social and ecological sustainability, we would like to see NYU focus on thriving in place rather than reaching after “performance” goals that are defined by financial institutions or managerial value metrics. 

Transparency

With the university’s finances under pressure, now is the time to provide faculty, students and staff full access to NYU’s fiscal affairs.

Participatory budgeting should be a key component of the transition to transparency

Executive policy-making should be open to faculty review, and senior administrators should draw more routinely on faculty expertise

Top-level decision-makers should consult and solicit input from the faculty body before making large-scale policy moves, especially on GNU matters

The terms of operation of global branches – in Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and other GNU “nodes” -- should be transparent to the entire NYU community.

Democratic

The faculty role in shared governance, as recognized by AAUP principles, should be fully restored and clarified.

The NYU administration should agree and affirm that the Faculty Handbook is contractually binding.

Faculty and students should be represented on the Board of Trustees.

Faculty who are elected, and not handpicked, should serve on committees to choose senior administrators, including the Provost and President.

Minutes of BOT and administrative leadership meetings should be accessible to faculty and students.

The right to organize (including that of contract and tenure-track faculty) should be upheld and encouraged, and NYU should recognize any bargaining unit formed by a majority of its eligible members.

Community-driven town halls and plenary assemblies should be instituted on the NYU Calendar to inform and review institutional decision-making.

Caring
NYU should be a sanctuary campus, prioritizing safety and sanctuary to members of the university and its host communities.

Resources and legal assistance should be extended to vulnerable and marginalized community members.

NYU should not operate branches of the university, domestic or overseas, in breach of its nondiscrimination policies.

Employees and students should have (free) access to comprehensive health care at Langone-Grossman if they choose.

Workplace welfare councils (with faculty, student, and staff representation) should be elected in every university unit to safeguard employee well-being and workplace quality.

Affordable

Every effort should be made to lower tuition and retire NYU’s reputation as poster child for student debt.

NYU’s unequal pay structures should be addressed, including gender salary gaps, salary compression, and the role of underrepresentation of minority faculty.

Senior administrator salaries should be sliced, and nonacademic administrative personnel positions downsized.

NYU should establish a much more equitable range spread between the highest and lowest paid of NYU employees, with total compensation packages included in these re-adjustments.

Salary and student fellowship increases should be tied to COLA, and not merit evaluations.

NYU should secure the steady conversion of NTT into TT faculty positions at every GNU location and in its US campuses; as a preliminary goal, NYU should aim for not more than 25% NTT positions in 5 years across the university.

NYU should extend protections comparable to those that accrue to tenure to all full-time faculty who have served continuously for seven years.

Faculty housing rent should be capped at an affordable percentage of income.

Sustainable

NYU’s carbon footprint should be minimized and its endowed funds should divest from the fossil fuel industry, and all enterprises involved in incarceration, immigrant detention, and military production.

Air travel, to global sites and to academic meetings, should be curtailed.

Cross-disciplinary climate crisis research and study should be prioritized.

New environmental justice and climate justice initiatives should be targeted and funded.

NYU should adopt an environmental stewardship role in downtown Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, modelling and propagating just practices.

Public Service

Since NYU sits on occupied lands of Lenni Lenape peoples, it should fully adopt a charter of decolonial ethics and practice.

NYU should extend public access (for meetings, workshops, assemblies) to its underutilized classrooms and buildings when they are not being used. It should also seek to provide students across the city access to its libraries and online research resources.

NYU should prioritize pathways for students from New York public schools and community colleges to matriculate at NYU; it should also extend and deepen support to such institutions in other ways that those institutions identify as arenas for collaboration.

NYU should make special efforts to support DACA and undocumented students.

NYU’s reach as a landlord and real estate owner should be surveyed and redefined to help address the city’s urgent housing crisis.

Representatives from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn communities should have the right to review and participate in the approval of all new building and expansion plans.

Local community representatives should have the right to serve on a committee for developing university-community initiatives that will benefit from NYU’s research and resources.

Racial and Social Justice

Indigenous study and engagement should be instituted and encouraged in all university programs.

NYU resources should prioritize the reduction of institutional inequalities for students, staff and faculty of color, along with LGBTQ, disabled community members, DACA and undocumented students.

NYU should insist on staffing reforms on the part of departments and units with an overwhelming majority of white instructors.

Gender balance and racial diversity should be adopted as an institutional principle of all NYU workplaces.

Truly affordable housing should be made available for faculty of color and first-generation academics who often have higher student debt burdens than their peers and cannot rely on family wealth.

Global University?

NYU should convene a community-wide review of the GNU mission and its record.

Free movement of students and scholars across borders and GNU sites should be guaranteed by NYU and host authorities.

NYU should loudly and visibly protest travel and enrollment restrictions at its GNU sites and NYC campuses and lobby the relevant political authorities to lift those restrictions. In cases where there are boycotts of NYU campuses by faculty and students in other parts of NYU because of these restrictions, NYU should recognize these as fundamental expressions of academic freedom.

Academic freedom protections, in all of the forms and expressions recognized by the AAUP, should be guaranteed across all NYU sites.

NYU should uphold the right of all employees, including those contracted to construct and maintain GNU buildings, to be protected by the ILO's basic international labor standards.

NYU should insist that US authorities remedy the challenges faced by international students and faculty--travel restrictions, embassy closures, and impractical visa protocols.
     
      The Executive Committee of the NYU Chapter of the AAUP
       
         Rebecca Karl, President
         Paula Chakravartty Vice-President
         Andrew Ross, Secretary
         Anna McCarthy, Treasurer
         Fred Moten, Member-at-large
         Vasuki Nesiah, Member-at-large
         Mohamad Bazzi, Member-at-large
         Marie Monaco, Immediate past President
     

American Society of Pediatrics

Dear President Bollinger, Dr. Halliday, and Dr. Redlener,

We, the undersigned members of the Columbia community, are disturbed to learn that the University has a contract with the Customs and Border Protection, the arm of the US Dept. of Homeland Security that is on the front line of this Administration’s policy of “zero tolerance” and detention of migrants and asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border.

The contract is with the Earth Institute’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness to develop for the CBP “a standardized, but basic health-screening tool to help determine whether a child might need urgent medical attention” and other medical protocols.

We beg to differ with the rationale for this contract, that “the federal agencies responsible for apprehending and assuming custody of people crossing the borders illegally are beyond overwhelmed” and that “much-maligned (often unfairly) Border Patrol agents, with essentially no medical training whatsoever, are doing a thankless job.” (ibid)

The crisis at the border and in CBP detention facilities is entirely of this administration’s making. It is the desired outcome of a deliberate policy to inflict bodily and psychic harm on asylum seekers, adults and children alike, under the guise of “deterrence.” CBP continues to separate children and infants from their parents. It confiscates migrants’ clothing, toothbrushes, and medicines when they are placed in detention. Migrants have inadequate access to water and food. The camps are kept at 55 degrees and lights are kept on 24 hours a day. Migrants must sleep on concrete floors; many cannot even do this, as the cells are so crowded as to be standing-room only. According to some observers, the horrific conditions in these facilities meet the legal definition of torture.

Some may argue that it is possible to do a small good in the context of a large evil. Perhaps contributing professional services to the CBP to alleviate suffering is an appropriate response to this crisis. We do not believe it is possible to provide such services under the aegis of CBP because the administration in general, and CBP in particular, has created this crisis in the first place. Well-intentioned actions clash with the agency’s mandate to implement an inhumane policy and its toxic culture. Worse, such actions may legitimate the CBP, which has no interest in attending to the medical needs of migrants. Legal advocates (including Columbia law professor Elora Mukherjee) have gone to court to gain access for independent doctors and a public health expert at the CBP facilities along the border. Notably, John Sandler, the acting director of the CBP, who reportedly reached out to Columbia to develop a screening tool, resigned on June 25 amidst outcry over conditions in detention camps. DHS's inspector general report (July 2) corroborate findings of independent monitors.

There are many ways for us to positively assist migrants in this crisis. Columbia faculty and students have provided independent translation, legal, and medical services at the border and elsewhere for migrants and asylum seekers. Columbia Law School's immigration clinic and Medical School's asylum clinic are two institutional venues that have responded to the current crisis. But we believe the University should have nothing to do with Customs and Border Patrol. Contracting with CBP is at odds with Columbia’s ethics, which led the University to divest from private prison and detention contractors. Regardless of good intentions, the CBP contract is a stain on our conscience and reputation as an institution that upholds human rights and ethical practices. We cannot work for concentration camps. We demand that Columbia cancel its contract with the CBP.

Sincerely,

1	Mae Ngai	Faculty	History
2	Nara Milanich	Faculty	History, Barnard
3	Shamus Khan	Faculty	Chair, Sociology
4	Dhananjay Jagannathan	Faculty	Department of Philosophy
5	Anupama Rao	Faculty	History, Barnard College and   MESAAS (CU)
6	Michael Harris	Faculty	Mathematics
7	Karen Van Dyck	Faculty	Classics Department
8	Susan Bernofsky	Faculty	School of the Arts
9	Michael Thaddeus	Faculty	Department of Mathematics
10	Nico Baumbach	Faculty	Associate Professor, Film/School   of Arts
11	Jane M Spinak	Faculty	Columbia Law School
12	Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi	Faculty	Barnard College Department of   Architecture
13	Naor Ben-Yehoyada	Faculty	Anthropology
14	Shelly Silver	Faculty	Visual Arts, School of the Arts
15		Faculty	English and Comparative Literature
16	Natasha Lightfoot	Faculty	History
17	Elsa Stamatopoulou	Faculty	Institute for the Study of Human   Rights
18	Francine Cournos, MD	Faculty	Mailman School of Public Health
19	Marianne Hirsch	Faculty	English and Comparative Literature
20	Gauri Viswanathan	Faculty	English and Comparative Literature
21	Jessica Collins	Faculty	Philosophy
22	J.C. Salyer	Faculty	Department of Anthropology &   Director of the Human Rights Program, Barnard
23	Herb Sloan	Faculty	Professor Emeritus, Department of   History, Barnard
24	Brent Hayes Edwards	Faculty	Department of English and   Comparative Literature
25	Todd Gitlin	Faculty	Journalism and Sociology
26	Gil Anidjar	Faculty	Religion / MESAAS
27		Faculty	Dept. of Germanic Languages, ICLS
28	Courtney Bender	Faculty	Department of Religion
29	Katharina Pistor	Faculty	Law School
30	Jack Halberstam	Faculty	English and IRWGS
32	Joseph Slaughter	Faculty	English and Comparative   Literatures, Institute for the Study of Human Rights
33		Faculty	Barnard College
34	Kristina Milnor	Faculty	Department of Classics, Barnard   College
35	Rosalind Morris	Faculty	Department of Anthropology
36	Vanessa Agard-Jones	Faculty	Anthropology
37	Reinhold Martin	Faculty	Architecture
38	Rhiannon Stephens	Faculty	History, A&S
39	Sheldon Pollock	Faculty	MESAAS
40	Lila Abu-Lughod	Faculty	Anthropology and IRWGS, Columbia
41	James Schamus	Faculty	School of the Arts
42	Janet Jakobsen	Faculty	Women's, Gender and Sexuality   Studies, Barnard College
43	Deborah Paredez	Faculty	School of the Arts Writing Program
44	Claudia Breger	Faculty	Germanic Lang and Lit
45	Richard Pena	Faculty	School of the Arts/Film
47	Susan Riemer Sacks	Faculty	Psychology Dept., Barnard College
48	Eric Foner	Faculty	History (emeritus)
49	Sharon Schwartz	Faculty	MSPH
50	Nick Bartlett	Faculty	Assistant Professor, AMEC, Barnard   College
51	Martha Howell	Faculty	Department of History
52	Merlin Chowkwanyun	Faculty	Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman   School of Public Health
54	Robert G. O'Meally	Faculty	English Department, African   American Studies Department, Center for Jazz Studies
55	Nadia Abu El-Haj	Faculty	Anthropology
56	Najam Haider	Faculty	Barnard College
57	Christy Thornton	Alumni	BC 02, SIPA 03, Assistant   Professor Johns Hopkins
58	Paige West	Faculty	Claire Tow Professor of   Anthropology; Director, Center for Study of Social Difference
59	Ralph Ghoche	Faculty	Department of Architecture,   Barnard College
60	Jean Howard	Faculty	Arts and Sciences
61	Branden W Joseph	Faculty	Art HIstory
62	Molly Murray	Faculty	Department of English and   Comparative Literature
63	Manisha Sinha	Alumni	University of Connecticut
64	Helen Weng, PhD	Alumni	CC '04
65	Sybill Chen	Student	History
66	Angela Aidala	Faculty	SMS/ MSPH
67	Andrew Liu	Alumni	GSAS, History
68	Julian Brave NoiseCat	Alumni	Columbia College
69	Audra Simpson	Faculty	Department of Anthropology
70	Lydia H. Liu	Faculty	East Asian Languages &   Cultures/Institute for Comparative Literature & Society
71	Marie Myung-Ok Lee	Faculty	School of the Arts + Center for   the Study of Race & Ethnicity (CSER)
72	Carly Goodman, Ph.D.	Alumni
73	Armando Lozano	Alumni	CC, LAW
74	Patricia Dailey	Faculty	English and Comp Lit
75	Daniel Morales	Alumni	History Department
76	Tovah Klein, PhD	Faculty	Director, Toddler Center, Barnard   College
77	John C Stoner	Alumni	History, University of Pittsburgh
78	Glenn Adler	Alumni	GSAS/Political Science
79	Ellie Hisama	Faculty	Department of Music
80	Timothy Patrick McCarthy	Alumni	PhD, History, IRAAS
81	Anne Goodwin	Non-Columbia affiliate	Affordable Power and Justice
82	Katrine Jensen	Staff	Council for European Studies
83	Steven Sherman	Alumni	Columbia College '86
84	Farina Mir	Alumni	GSAS 2002
85		Alumni	School of international and public   affairs
86	Michael Bernhard	Alumni	PhD 1988, Ehrlich Professor of   Political Science University of Florida
87	Michael Pollak	Alumni	GSAS Sociology
88	Anna Danziger Halperin	Alumni	GSAS '18
89	Melissa Morris	Alumni	GSAS
90	Pablo Piccato	Faculty	History
91	Michelle Philpo-Denney	Non-Columbia affiliate	Horrified U.S. Citizen
92	Deborah Eisenberg	Faculty	School of the Arts
93	Margaret E. Keck	Alumni	GSAS Political Science
94	Ian Shin	Alumni	GSAS '16
95	leah dworkin	Alumni	school of the arts
96	Lisa Brunet, Ph.D.	Alumni	GSAS
97	Premilla Nadasen	Faculty	History
98	Alexander Alberro	Faculty	Art History
99	Kurt Mettenheim	Alumni	Political Science - SIPA
100	Emmanuelle Saada	Faculty	Professor of French & Carnoy   Family Program Chair of Contemporary Civilization
101	Elizabeth Hutchinson	Faculty	Art History and Archaeology
102	Tom Kalin	Faculty	Professor, Columbia University   School of the Arts, Film
103	Deborah Valenze	Faculty	Barnard College
104	Judith Byfield	Alumni	GSAS (History) 1993
105	Penny Von Eschen	Alumni	William R. Kennan, Jr. Professor   of American Studies /History, University of Virginia
106	An Kint	Alumni	GSAS
107	Monika Nalepa	Faculty	Political Science, The University   of Chicago
108	Ana M Ochoa	Faculty	Department of Music
109	Rebecca Kobrin	Faculty	History Department
110	Graciela Montaldo	Faculty	LAIC, Columbia
111	Illan Gonen	Faculty	MESAAS
112	Brinkley Messick	Faculty	Anthropology
113	D. Max Moerman	Faculty	Professor & Chair, Department   of Asian & Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard; CC '86
114	Cailin Hong	Student	History, GSAS
115	Charry Karamanoukian	Faculty	MESAAS
116	Lien-Hang Nguyen	Faculty	History
117	Thai Jones	Staff	RBML
118		Alumni	GSAS Political Science
119	Nan A Rothschild	Faculty	Anthropology
120	Steve Askin	Alumni	Columbia Business School, MBA 1993
121	Andor Skotnes	Faculty	Former Acting and Assistant   Director, Columbia Oral History Research Office
122	Mark Von Hagen	Faculty	History
124	Mahmood Mamdani	Faculty	Herbert Lehman Professor of   Government and Professor of Anthropology
125	Alice gorton	Student	History, GSAS
126	Stephanie McCurry	Faculty	R Gordon Hoxie Professor of   History
127	Sahar Bostock	Student	History, GSAS
128	Jane Leftwich Curry	Alumni	Department of Political Science
129	Celia E. Naylor	Faculty	History and Africana Studies,   Barnard College
130	Alice Nash	Alumni	History Ph.D.1997
131	Joseph Howley	Faculty	Department of Classics
132	Mariana Katz	Student	PhD Student, History Department
133	J.T. Roane	Alumni	GSAS
134	Bailey yellen	Student	GSAS
135	Jennifer Wenzel	Faculty	Dept. of English & Comparative   Literature; MESAAS
136	Mary Gordon	Faculty	Barnard College
137	Darcy Krasne	Faculty	Classics Department
138	Genesis Garfio	Alumni	CC17
139		Alumni	Mailman School of Public Health
140	Jeffrey Fagan	Faculty	Law School
141	Jennifer Lee	Faculty	Sociology
142	Andrew Lipman	Faculty	History, Barnard College
143	Cora Cervantes	Alumni	GS 16’
144	Kendall Thomas	Faculty	Law School
145	Carol Mason	Faculty	Zuckerman Institute
146	Claudio Lomnitz	Faculty	Anthropology
147	Rebecca Vaadia	Student	Neurobiology and Behavior program
148	Matt Sandler	Staff	Center for the Study of Ethnicity   and Race
149	Karina Pantoja	Alumni	Columbia College
150	Sayantani DasGupta	Faculty	Graduate Program in Narrative   Medicine
151	Lucia Saldivar	Alumni	Barnard College, Class of 2017
152	Juan Gonzalez	Alumni	CC
153	Denise Frutos	Alumni	Psychology
154	Christia Mercer	Faculty	Philosophy
155	Lorenzo Bradford	Alumni	Columbia College ‘17
156	Silvia Bernardi	Faculty	Psychiatry
157	Karl Jacoby	Faculty	History Department
158	Daniela Rodriguez	Alumni
159	Alejandro P Desince	Alumni	CC ‘18
160	Elizabeth Castelli	Faculty	Religion, Barnard College
161	Romeo Guzman	Alumni	History, PhD
162	Amanda Hardin	Student	History
163	Elizabeth Heintges	Student	Dept. of Classics
164	Eder Gaona-Macedo	Alumni	SIPA
165	Eliza Zingesser	Faculty	French
166	Jennifer Scribner	Student	Neurobiology & Behavior
167	Jane E Turk	Alumni	Communications, GSAS
168	Dr. Benjamin Weiss	Alumni	Columbia College '05
169	Maria Victoria Murillo	Faculty	GSAS & SIPA
170		Faculty	Women’s, Gender and Sexuality   Studies, Barnard College
171	Rebecca E Karl	Alumni	Professor, History Department, NYU
172	Matthew Haugen	Staff	Libraries
173	Hong Deng Gao	Student	History, Graduate School of Arts   and Sciences
174	Jenni Ingram	Alumni	School of social work
176	Jonathan Beller	Faculty	Eng. & WGSS, Barnard College
177	Evan Jewell	Alumni	GSAS, Classical Studies
178	Rebecca Arteaga	Alumni	Columbia College
179	Gabriel Solis	Student	History PhD program
180	Nabiha Nuruzzaman	Alumni	Mailman School of Public Health
181	Georgia A. Mickey	Alumni	Business 1997, Arts & Sciences   2004
182	Harlan D. Chambers	Student	Graduate School of Arts and   Sciences, EALAC
183	Nataly Shahaf	Student	EALAC
184	Shao-Hung Teng	Alumni	Film and Media Studies MA
185	Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê	Student	GSAS History (PhD)
186	Nancy Kricorian	Alumni	School of the Arts
187	Ansley T. Erickson	Faculty	Teachers College and Department of   History
188	Lisa Tiersten	Faculty	Barnard College, History   Department
189	Cooper Lynn	Alumni	Institute of Comparative   Literature
190	Dorothea von Mücke	Faculty	Gebhard Professor of German   Language & Literature, Dept of Germanic Languages
191	Daniel Friedrich	Faculty	Teachers College, Dept. Of   Curriculum and Teaching
192	Rozena Raja	Student	Teachers College
193	Dinesh Rathakrishnan	Alumni	Mailman School of Public Health
194	Jennifer Lena	Faculty	Teachers College
195	Yasemin Akcaguner	Student	GSAS History
196	Sophie Schweiger	Student	Department of Germanic Languages
197	Helen Zhao	Student	Philosophy, GSAS
198	Rhonesha Blaché	Student	Teachers College
199	Zainab Bahrani	Faculty	Art History and Archaeology
200	Karen Seeley	Faculty	Anthropology
201	Carla Stockton	Alumni	G.S. and School of the Arts
202	Adam Kosto	Faculty	History
203	howard greenberg	Alumni	school of the arts
204	Vera A Nazarian	Alumni	School of Arts and Science
205	Robert Fuller	Student	Teachers College
206	Jordan Corson	Student	Teachers College
207	Jessica Reyna	Student	Barnard College ‘16; Columbia   School of Social Work ‘22
208	Silja Weber	Faculty	Germanic Languages
209	Lynne Guillot	Alumni	School of the Arts
210	Neil Ziolkowski	Student	Germanic Languages
211	Marc Van De Mieroop	Faculty	History department
212	Shezza Abboushi Dallal	Alumni	Barnard College
213	Rober Jack Gross	Alumni	Institute for Comparative   Literature and Society
214	Inderpal Grewal	Non-Columbia affiliate	Yale University
215	Ann Douglas	Faculty	English and Comparative Literature   Department
216	Nick Juravich	Alumni	Columbia GSAS (History)
217	Wendy Chavkin	Faculty	Mailman
218	Mary Beth Terry	Faculty	Epidemiology
219	Rick Moody	Alumni	School of the Arts
220	Frank Guridy	Faculty	History & African American   African Diaspora Studies
221		Faculty	Teachers College
222	Jacqueline Siapno	Non-Columbia affiliate	Independent Researcher and Former   Acting First Lady, East Timor (Timor Leste)
223	Rosana Koundakjian	Alumni	GSAS ‘90
224	Casey N. Blake	Faculty	History and American Studies
225	Dialika Sall	Student	GSAS
226	Vahe Habeshian	Alumni	GS
227	Rebecca Jordan-Young	Faculty	WGSS, Barnard College
228	Donna Medel	Alumni	Columbia College
229	Karen Ramirez	Alumni	Columbia College
230	Robert Tiburzi	Alumni	College
231	Bruce Robbins	Faculty	English and Comparative Literature
232	Ira Katznelson	Faculty	Political Science and History
233	María Fernanda Martínez	Alumni	Columbia College
234	Ayten Gundogdu	Faculty	Political Science, Barnard College
235	Victoria de Grazia	Faculty	History Department
236	Gregory Mann	Faculty	History
237	E. Mara Green	Faculty	Anthropology
238	Macayla Donegan	Student	Neuroscience
239	Mabel O. Wilson	Faculty	GSAPP/GSAS
240	Meredith Gamer	Faculty	Department of Art History and   Archaeology
241		Faculty	MESAAS
242	Christopher Hoffman	Student	Graduate School of Arts and   Sciences
243	Jessica Bulman-Pozen	Faculty	Law School
244	Kadambari Baxi	Faculty	Architecture, Barnard College
245	Samantha Van Doran	Student	Graduate School of Arts and   Sciences
246	Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez	Student	History
247	Bette Gordon	Faculty	School of the Arts/Film
248		Faculty	Psychology, Barnard College
249	Jessica Collins	Faculty	Associate Professor, Department of   Philosophy
250	Gwendolyn Wright	Faculty	Graduate School of Architecture,   Planning and Preservation
251	Madeleine Zelin	Faculty	EALAC and History
252	Mary Nolan	Alumni	GSAS History
253	Alan Stewart	Faculty	English and Comparative Literature
254	Kimi Traube	Alumni	CC, SOA
255	Kim Fader	Staff	Epidemiology, Mailman School of   Public Health
256	Sonam Singh	Faculty	Barnard College
257		Non-Columbia affiliate	Ball State University
258	Michael Perles	Alumni	GSAPP, 2016
259	Mohamed Kouta	Student	GSAS
260	Will Owen	Student	GSAS
261	Áine McLaughlin	Non-Columbia affiliate	University of Maryland student
262	Jonathan Slater	Student	GSAS
263	Stefan Andriopoulos	Faculty	Germanic Languages
264	Alexander Alberro	Faculty	Art History
265	Chloe Vaughn	Student	Germanic Languages (GSAS)
266	Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak	Faculty	University Professor, Columbia   University