From Tunnel Mtn, Banff on June 6, 2026

By Asheesh Kapur Siddique, Associate Professor of History, UMass Amherst

 

This is the second of the talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. Chris Nealon’s is here, my introduction to the panel is here.

Society needs the cultural knowledge that the humanities produces in its research and disseminates in its scholarship and pedagogy to make sense of the crises of the present. Chris has written about this need and convincingly argued for it, so I don’t have to. Instead, today I want to talk about politics: how do we make this happen?

                          

Society has a need for humanistic knowledge. But there is no political movement in support of the academic humanities. There is a political movement about the humanities in the US-- on the political Right and it is deeply destructive to the project of democracy. While the Right over the last decade has built institutions and invested in undermining us by stealing our resources, destroying humanities programs and departments, and sowing doubt in our scholarship, the Resistance has not responded with anything near the militancy required. We need something different.  I want to begin a discussion about what building a political movement looks like. The political structure of democracies is partisan: parties are the central vehicle through which politics happens. In the US, the ideologies of “Right” and “Left” are not exact correlates to “Republican” and “Democrat.’ These parties are, however, the only way that ideological visions get enacted in public institutions through legislation and bureaucracy.

 

My remarks will proceed in three parts. First, I will describe the political Right’s movement to supplant the academic humanities and why it is threatening to the work we do. Second, I will turn to the political Left in the United States and explain why it, in its own way, is anti-humanistic in important respects. The point of the first two parts is to argue that there is currently no meaningful political support for building the present we want. Third, and finally, I want to end on a hopeful note, by thinking about what it would take to build political support on the Left for robust publicly funded humanities research.

 

So to begin: the political Right has a project for the present and future of the humanities in higher education – the creation of parallel institutions to traditional academic departments that teach courses and sponsor research in humanities fields, though especially political and economic thought, that aligns with various center-right policy objectives. In the US, while there were early predecessors, like the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University (founded 1961; part of GMU since mid-1980s), and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (2000) at Princeton University, these are so-called ‘civic centers’ that began to proliferate around 2015, often funded by right-wing state legislatures and/or right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers. Their creation was co-extensive with a renewed assault on higher ed’s institutional autonomy.

 

These civic centers, such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida (initially funded by $3 million in taxpayer dollars by the Florida legislature), the Chase Center at Ohio State University (initially funded by $24 million in taxpayer dollars by the Ohio legislature), and the Civitas Institute (now School of Civic Leadership) at UT-Austin (funded both by the state and private donors), work within universities in the same way that tobacco and tech companies work to subvert publicly accountable, democratic knowledge structures and institutions.  As Alondra Nelson pointed out in her keynote lecture, they do this by casting doubt on the humanistic knowledge produced in universities, attacking it as “woke,” “political,” invalid, and unserious. They create parallel institutions that exist to produce politicized ideology disguised as “objective” scholarship and often cast in the rhetoric of “civics” that is squarely aimed at destroying the departments and cultures of teaching and scholarship in the humanities and the very idea of public funding for what we do.

 

Through civic centers, the right-wing is seizing on the crisis of funding and adjunctification in our universities for counter-majoritarian ends. As the historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd has written of these centers, “The right’s approach to higher education has been three-pronged: it has sought to create competing and parallel institutions, to wrest control from existing colleges, and ultimately, to defund public education entirely.”

 

None of the rhetoric is new, of course; if the ‘culture wars’ of the late 20^th century was the ‘new McCarthyism,’ this is the Red Scare 3.0 - the political right has not had a new idea about universities since Joe McCarthy. It  is the political right’s fixed vision of the future of the humanities in higher education go at least since Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967. You may know that, during a press conference in 1967 after being elected governor of California, and in the context of his push to introduce tuition into public higher ed in California, Reagan stated “we do believe that there are certain intellectual luxuries that perhaps we could do without for a year or two without hurting the cause of education.” Pressed to define these “intellectual luxuries,” Reagan pointed to only two examples: first, he referred to a course at UC Davis “where they teach you to hang the Governor in effigy.” Second, Reagan referred to “a state back in the Midwest where they discovered that a state university was offering a master's degree in the repair of band instruments, and I thought that this was sort of subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” We cannot give any concession or quarter to this continuing tradition of blanket hostility: it is completely dangerous and invalid. It is actually worse to have right-wing humanities than no humanities at all.

 

So far so retro culture war. Turning from the right’s attacks, I note that we have increasingly lost the center-left, the professional-managerial class (PMC) that once embraced what we do in public higher education.

 

As bad as the right has continued to be since 2020, I would argue that their attacks are not actually the politically worst for us: the center-left attacks have been far more damaging. Since the racist backlash to Black Lives Matter, followed by the backlash to campus protests opposing Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, the center-left has joined this campaign. Deeply influential institutions within American political liberalism like The New York Times and The Atlantic have peddled a version of the right-wing narrative aimed at casting doubt on the project of the university and indicting the humanities in particular as the source of the university’s now-dubious project. They are reshaping PMC opinion against the idea of publicly-funded humanities teaching and scholarship.

 

There is so much to say about this; I can talk more about how this is happening in the Q & A. As for higher-ed media, an event earlier this week encapsulated everything wrong with it: the Chronicle of Higher Education just re-published an essay that originally appeared at the right wing outlet Persuasion, arguing, and I am not making this up, that humanists should stop doing and publishing research because what we produce is trash. The literal title of the article is “Most Humanities Research Should Stop.” I’ll say it again: this is in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Maybe we need a panel at the next CHCI about why the media coverage of humanities research and teaching is so bad and destructive.

 

So the center-left has, in its own way, abandoned the idea of robust public support for curiosity-driven humanistic education and scholarship and has fully embraced neoliberalism. Where do they think the humanities fit in our educational landscape? The center-left has decided that the purpose of public higher education is to supply workers for the economy, not citizens to participate in democracy. The value of any public investment in public education – whether from the teaching side or the research side – must be justified in terms of “return on investment” where “return” is defined in purely monetary terms, with all the non-monetary returns rendered illegible according to neoliberal reason. According to this vision, the humanities are fine in private institutions but their role in public education is less clear. This is important: Democrats do not have any problem with, and indeed support, the teaching of the humanities in private colleges and universities.  This points to the center-left having no problem, per se, with adjunctification and contingency in humanities instruction in private institutions, and especially highly selective ones – look at the reliance on contingent faculty in core curriculum programs at UChicago and Columbia, or in History & Literature and Social Studies at Harvard; look, perhaps most egregiously, at contingent faculty in college writing programs, again, especially private ones. Do any private college or university writing programs have tenure-line appointments?

 

Whether the center-left supports research for the humanities in private colleges and universities is a more muddled question.  What is clear is that in public education, the Democrats post-Reagan have emphasized STEM above all. The Clinton administration began this with its pivot to STEM education as the focus of its priorities and public investment. Barack Obama famously quipped in 2014 that “folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” The Obama administration proposed reductions to NEH and NEA funding in 2011 and 2012. Joe Biden was better, but still, annual NEH funding even under Democratic administrations has never been anywhere near $1 billion. Prior to DOGE, the NSF spent 17.5 times more on undergraduate research than the Congressional funds available to the NEH for individual fellowships to scholars.

 

In 2022, Obama’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardonna, tweeted, “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.” Note the language here: the purpose of the public education system is to train workers for industry. Whatever industry demands, the taxpayer should supply. An echo of this came again in the context of the debate over student loan forgiveness during the Biden administration. In 2023, when the US House of Representatives voted to overturn Biden’s student debt relief program, the Democratic congresswoman and Reed College graduate Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, explained why she supported overturning the Biden student loan forgiveness program:

 

“Expansions of student debt forgiveness need to be matched dollar-for-dollar with investments in career & technical education. I can’t support the first without the other. The severe shortage of trades workers needs to be seen & treated as a national priority. It’s about respect.

I’m all for repairing what’s busted but the higher education system is totaled. College costs too much & the credentials produced get unwarranted social status, justifying more cost increases by our country’s elite. They need to snap out of it & the system needs a total overhaul.”

 

Let me underscore again that Congresswoman Perez went to Reed. She had the humanities experience we want students to have. But that experience does not seem to have led her to believe in the value of publicly-funded intellectual curiosity. There is no necessary correlation between classroom exposure to what we do and the willingness of either the college-educated public or college-educated politicians to then go out and support the university we want to build.

 

This is not because pedagogy is not important; far from it. It is because pedagogy in itself is not enough: we need politics – and we need politicians – to make political change happen. 

 

Now for a very brief part three. The construction of a robust public infrastructure for funding humanities research depends in the United States on winning political support. We don’t have that now. But I strongly believe we have a chance right now, even though things are so bad, to build this political support: the next Democratic administration will need to rebuild the federal government knowledge infrastructure, completely and totally. It’s time for us, as humanists, to lay out what we need in terms of public support.

 

We need to be talking to the administration in exile. Media is a huge part of this: the turn by center-left media outlets that influential Democrats read, like the New York Times and The Atlantic, against humanistic scholarship and teaching, is a big problem. The retreat of private funding for university-based humanities research is also a big problem, one that I have written about, but of course in electoral democracies, private foundations are not accountable to publics in the same way as state institutions are, and while we can and should say things about the retreat of private funding (and I have) we actually have an opportunity right now to articulate what a reconstructed NEH should look like and how much it should be funded. The center-right will not let this serious crisis go to waste; neither should we.

 

Wayne State, Detroit on April 12, 2019  

This is the corrected text of a talk I gave online to the Wayne State University conference, “Public Budgets, Public Good,” on April 30, 2026.  Many thanks to the audience, whose questions about theory and practice were excellent. Thanks also to the sponsors: Labor@Wayne, AAUP, HELU, and Public Good U. I’m still sorry I wasn’t there in person.

∞∞∞

I’ve always seen the university as a force for the general development of society, having been influence by a tradition that includes Humboldt & Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Du Bois, John Dewey, CJR James, and many thinkers since.   This has made it easier to grasp the fact that the university’s largest effects are a combination of non-monetary and public.  These public effects have been rendered “dark matter” by the political and business worlds, which have steered people exclusively toward the private pecuniary effect of the B.A. wage increment over high school. College presidents and other officials have simply echoed them.  This is overbearingly true in the US and the UK, and amounts to a mass miseducation about education. But it is also true elsewhere, and apparently in China.

Indiana University on November 3, 2025   

by Johannes Türk

Chair of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington

Indiana University, one of the great American public universities, is currently melting down with a speed and violence unprecedented in the history of higher education. It is difficult to recognize the world-class institution that was founded in the idyllic city of Bloomington in 1820 and built over decades, most decisively by the long-term president and chancellor of Indiana University, Herman B. Wells. Beloved among residents of the state of Indiana and a destination for thousands of students from across the United States and the world, the public university gained its national and global reputation in the 1950s primarily on the basis of its humanities departments and one of the country’s best music schools.

 

Bodrum Castle, Türkiye Sept 12, 2025   

 

 

At our friend Andrea’s birthday in Hampshire last weekend, the Man in the Lime Suit said to me above the din, “they’ve taken the spark out of everyone. Taken what’s inside people that belongs to them and makes them act.”  I nodded. The spark never does go out, but I knew exactly what he meant.

 

The spark to make one’s own things is the origin and outcome of teaching and research. It leads to a set of powers in art to show what’s not seen and to diverge from what exists. 

 

In politics, it’s to break with a nightmare of the present, and build an alternative to it, brick by brick, where you have to make most of the bricks yourself. 

 

In management, the spark enables the creation of the positive narrative of your institution’s destiny and the coordination of your people into a powerful movement towards it. (I wrote about these linked elements last time.)

London on April 18, 2015   

This is the talk I gave at the National Day of Action for Higher Education on April 17. My co-panelists and I, Tim Kaufman-Osborn and Amy Offner, each had 12 minutes.  To keep it short I organized it as a set of propositions.

 

1. The first necessary step has been taken –university  lawfare against the Trump Administration.

 

This recognizes that the Trump regime are not reformers of higher ed, but are its destroyers. This increasingly obvious fact has a hard implication, which is that the Trump administration is an enemy to be defeated, not a counterparty to be bargained with.

 

An organization that saw this immediately has been the AAUP, which rapidly went to court, and I can’t overstate how impressed I am by both the national organization and by so many individual chapters— AAUP Penn, Rutgers, it partner CUCFA at the University of California, multiple unions, and many other faculty and staff organizations.  You all have done great work at getting inside the high-speed operating loop of the Trump people, and being appropriately adversarial. There’s a real chance that we will win on many fronts, if we keep fighting hammer and tongs.

 

2. Higher ed must work with Democrats but must not be led by them.  

 

The reason is that the Democratic party has repeatedly failed to articulate the purposes and the political economy of higher education. The result is that Democrats see themselves as the natural party of education—they get the votes of most college graduates—while misselling what higher ed is and therefore not convincing the wider electorate of its value.

 

For example, the most painful chart I’ve recently seen is from the Democratic pollster David Shor via Ezra Klein.

 

 

Amazingly, the allegedly Democratic issues of education and student debt are actually in a toss-up with the Republicans.  Voters don’t really know whether the Republicans who want to eliminate the Dept of Education that administers financial aid including Pell Grants, or that wants to give student loans back to private banks, are better or worse for education than Democrats. This is an obvious disaster for Democrats, and for higher ed.

 

Voters are confused in part because mainstream Democrats have no strongly anti-Republican positions on college. Most Democratic politicians aren’t really for free college—that’s Bernie Sanders still out there on his own. Democrats aren’t really for debt cancellation.  Democrats aren’t really for full public funding of regional colleges so working-class people get really high quality degrees. Democrats are for college as job training—just like Republicans are. Democrats have one idea about college, which is that it’s tuition-based vocational training, with some means testing, but high net costs are okay.  This is Gov. Newsom in California, Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate.  They sell us out as job training and they still can’t get non-college voters. 

 

Democrats are bad on advancing strong higher education for the basic reason that they don’t listen to educators.  Educators need to lead ourselves.

 

3. Anti-intellectualism is always pervasive in America—and yet it is not popular in America. 

 

The Democrats aren’t convincing people to vote big for great public colleges not because college is too intellectual, but because the Democratic version isn’t intellectual enough. Republicans are the enemies of popular thinking, everyday study, affordable intellectuality. But as I’ve just suggested, so are tag-along job-fixated mainstream Democrats.  Governor Newsom had the professional college-hater Charlie Kirk on his podcast in March, and when Kirk mocked students who “go to Cal to go study North African lesbian poetry,” the Democratic education governor chuckled right along with him: “Well, I don’t know every single damn course,” the governor explained. “It should be like, no way.”  Meanwhile, the proverbial jobs of the future require more education, not less, across all disciplines, especially in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, including in North African lesbian poetry.  The Democrats are screwing up even their vocational issue without offering an alternative.

 

4. Higher ed’s own story – freed from the Democratic party-- must center on popular intellectuality. On popular thinking, thinking as popular, thinking for all.  College has a core role in this sense: college helps you think so you can have the life you want.  

 

College doesn’t help you adapt to “this modern world” by learning to use AI so it can think for you. College doesn’t mainly help you meet important people and make new friends. College doesn’t mainly give you practical workplace skills.  College helps you think so you can have the life you want.  You may think that’s a weak bumper sticker—it sure needs work-- but it’s a hell of a lot better than the college bumper stickers that political parties or university presidents are selling right now (“study a higher-wage major”)! 

 

We must stress as part of this re-narration the non-pecuniary benefits and the public benefits of learning as much as everyone already stresses the private benefits.  And yet the re-narration of college has to start with helping everyone of all backgrounds, working class, immigrant, racialized, boringly middle class, queer, everybody, build the personal life you want, not the life mapped out for you by your family, your neighborhood, your background, but the one gradually imagined and then given to you by you. Here’s why we don’t ban books but why we read them. College helps you think so you can have the life you want.

 

The next two items are a package. I’m going to raise a tricky issue and sound elitist, though I will argue that my claims are anti-elitist. 

 

5.  Higher education is being crushed both by propaganda-based Republican hate and by its twin, a widespread knowledge crisis among US voters.  

 

That last chart, David Shor’s, shows this aspect as well as the weakness of the Democratic storyline: many if not a majority of American voters are profoundly mistaken, wrong, misguided, or ignorant about political and social realities and causal connections, including education.

 

The data show that Republicans, on most of their powerhouse (lower right quadrant) issues, perform worse that they say they will on the basis of their wrong ideas —Republican presidents oversee lower growth than Democratic presidents and higher debt growth in relation to inflation; inflation was twice as high under Biden as under Trump 1, but that is not the general pattern. Or lower-left quandrant issues (less urgent, Republican advantage)—AI is a Republican issue because they will completely deregulate it and then it will work better? How is trade going? Unemployment: there’s the same scatter in the overall trend. Voters rate Republians as good as Democrats on civil Liberties even as Republicans favor summary deportations, arbitrary cancellations of student visas, etc. -- it’s as though most respondents aren’t sure about the meaning of the term. Drug addiction—voters prefer the party that kills any and all public health programs? Democrats are tied on voting rights with a Republican party obsessed with voter suppression for 25 years.  

 

Another chart on the knowledge issue: We have evidence that the misinformed voter voted Trump, and the “get the right answer” crowd voted Harris. (I discussed this chart in “Politics of Thinking”).

 

 

 So first, Democrats have a lot of weak positions that don’t resonate with voters.  (They were bad at taking inflation seriously, and Harris did drop the anti-corporate policies that are actually popular with voters.) But second, many, many voters also can’t correctly describe reality and then pick the policy and the candidate that correlates with the outcome they want.  Hence the term knowledge crisis, a phenomenon that is being exploited politically.

 

6. Higher education has to present itself as the solution to American wrongness. 

 

This is going to involve a few things.  I’ve mentioned one—redefining college as the key to the thinking that helps people have the lives they want. 

 

Another is the creation of an ethical framework around the duty to know. Nobody has the right to not bother to figure out whether a president really can engage in summary deportations and maybe not follow court orders to fix bad deportation mistakes. Shrugging about this, and staying confused or unsure, is an unethical position, as much for bystanders as for government agents of the policy. Tens of millions of people are indeed not bothering to think about this kind of Trumpian tyranny, or about the destruction of US university finances and of academic freedom.  Not thinking is a major reason why illegal, unjust, and destructive things keep happening. Voters have no right not to think about them.  We’re going to need a broader cultural change that both inspires and demands serious popular thinking about public issues.

 

Educators must figure out encouraging ways to take a stand on this, and must do this at a time when we have been largely brainwashed into thinking that it is elitist to expect US voters to be intelligent and to take responsibility for their mistakes. This is not elitist—it is a matter of survival. People know this in their personal lives, and every successful activist has known that it’s not elitist to know things. Authors of slave narratives knew things, Malcolm X knew things, your favorite auto mechanic knows things, indigenous leaders know things, your really good plumber knows things, all your sports heroes know things, all the activists we admire were successful because their action, their pursuit of power, was suffused in knowing things. And then these knowers didn’t back down from fights, but instead sought fights. The AAUP knows things. We know things. The only way to escape the Deplorables Taboo, in which college types and professionals offer a double standard of no intellectual accountability for “regular Americans,” is to embrace the conflict, create the conflict that needs to be created, hate the ignorance but love the knower, win the conflict on the basis of knowledge.

 

I’m suggesting that the university, collectively, must frame an existential duty to know. Zuckerberg has the duty to know how his products damage thinking, politics, and mental health. Bezos has the duty to know that the Donald Trump who would outlaw trans people and refugees would also kill trade with tariffs. A small majority of voters doesn’t get to be wrong again and again and then get all mad and hostile when people point that out –they do do this anger-based deflection, but they have no right, and in contrast they do have a duty to know—about the real consequences of how they think.  Universities, professors, students, everyone, have to lay out a large national narrative about this duty to know.

 

 

7. make the full ask for all of the  material conditions that will allow popular intellectuality to spread. We are twenty-five years into the student debt crisis and the public university funding crisis, and we do know what these are: 

A.    free public college.  The goal is Debt-free for all and free tuition is the most efficient means.

B.    Student debt cancellation. 

C.     Programs enabling full inclusion and radical diversity: full and defiant support for anti-discrimination measures leading to racial equality within colleges and universities. 

D.    Tenure-track jobs for all instructors who want them.

E.     Tenure for staff—by which I mean the replacement of “at will” with “just cause” employment for the staff of our colleges and universities 

F.     The full support of research costs for all fields – arts, social sciences, and humanities as much as STEM—at all types of colleges very much including community colleges. (Trump’s cuts to indirect cost recovery rates and deletion of many STEM grants could zero out institutional funding for the humanities and arts. This must not be allowed to happen.)

G.    Full academic freedom, which includes the financial means to allow bottom up, faculty-controlled collaborative design, not dictated by austerity and consultants, of new era college curricula that fit current conditions.  

H.    The democratization of university governance to allow the previous elements to be created over time—which will involve abolishing  governing boards, perhaps by converting them into powerless figureheads something like the Danish monarchy   

 

Yes I do have the budget slides to show how to pay for all this. But aluckily for you I’m out of time.

 

The fight for higher ed--the fight for the knowledge and for thinking—is on the front line of this battle for knowledge, justice, and democracy as indivisible issues.  And we need to think of all contingencies. So

 

8. Plan for the building the underground university. 

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.

As soon as the Biden-Harris victory was confirmed, the media pivoted to a ritual rediscovery of "Democratic Divergence" between their moderate and progressive wings. This very obvious fact about a coalitional party, visible to all by1968, shouldn't distract us from the 2020 reality that the lifelong moderate Joe Biden campaigned for president as a progressive, and that every kind of Democrat gave him and Kamala Harris the largest popular vote in U.S. history. I note this as a reason not to be complacent.

There's a silver lining in the mixed results overall. Democrats lost part of their majority in the House and failed to flip seats in competitive Senate races in Iowa, Maine, Montana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. If they don't win both Georgia run-offs on January 5th, then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell will continue to function as Washington's co-president, elected by 1.23 million voters in Kentucky, where he will control judicial appointments, environmental investment and fiscal policy, like his non-existent Covid-19 stimulus.

The silver lining?  Democrats have the chance to dig beneath their manifest differences to rebuild their intellectual foundations for the 2020s.  My goal for them is that they hold power as a center-left party that can protect more radical movements from the wholly toxic and destructive Republicans. But they can't do this unless they get the intellectual act together.

On the terrain covered by this blog, I noted last time that higher ed has internal contradictions and a weak overall narrative that, if not fixed, will keep it on the sidelines of the Biden Administration. The same is true for the Democrats on higher ed.  Their power is limited by the close election and Republican dominance in a majority of states, where public college funding is controlled. Longer term, their intellectual scope is limited, and not up to steering the economic and social forces currently in play. Though most of the great thinking being done about education is being done by people who at least vote Democrat, the Democrats as a party don't have a strong or even coherent tale about what higher education does. 

This might be okay.  The party itself may not be so relevant to a "scene that is irreducibly multiple," as Amanda Armstrong-Price reminds us about U.S. politics more broadly. But the major higher ed movements of the decade--student debt cancellation and free college--came about as partnerships (or collisions) between activists and national Democratic politicians.  This kind of synergy is useful and probably necessary in a country as dispersed and divided as the U.S. But real synergy will require intellectual transformation.

(1)

Taking him as he is, we can see Joe Biden doing a lot for higher ed with the executive branch. He can soon replace Betsy de Vos with someone much better (like former teacher-of-the-year, Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT), pictured above).  Most of Trump's damage to higher ed can be undone with executive actions (see the WaPo's good roundup of the coming "series of reversals" in K-12 and postsecondary federal policy; and also Michael Vasquez's overview of the higher ed portion in CHE). Biden can also do significant student debt reduction with executive actions. Congressional Democrats can push towards the version of free college that Biden supports.  Hope has been placed in the fact that the incoming First Lady, Jill Biden, is a working community college professor who was teased by Michelle Obama for grading papers on diplomatic trips.

And yet the Democrats' underlying narrative about higher ed isn't good.  It has allowed the party, over the decades, to participate fully in creating the student debt crisis, the student food and housing insecurity crisis, the faculty adjuncting crisis, and the crisis in core educational funding. I'll review a bit of this weakness as an example of what is required to enable Biden's effectiveness--and winning real Congressional power in 2022.

On the debt crisis, the government professor Suzanne Mettler showed that Democrats helped the Republicans erode the value of Pell grants as far back as the 1980s.

The compromises between [Democrats and Republicans] did not decimate the grants, but they took the entitlement option off the table and left benefit rates dwindling in real terms and falling well behind average tuition costs. Politicians in both parties found common ground instead on the expansion of student loans because that only required them to lift borrowing limits and waive restrictions on who could borrow. (Degrees of Inequality, 199)

35 years later, Biden has proposed the doubling of Pell grant ceilings that his party had previously managed only to tweak. But the deeper intellectual problem remains. The Democrats gave up "the entitlement option" that tied them to their only meaningful conceptual paradigm of the 20th century, in which people accessed relatively equivalent public goods like education with no reference to their personal market power.  The systemic racism built into the New Deal and Great Society programs starkly violated the universal entitlement, and in contrast built a legacy of white entitlement which damaged Black and brown lives and also U.S. democracy. But social rather than market allocation of essential goods remained a  distinctive conceptual lineage, one that the Democratic accommodation with Reaganism buried within the party. The parliamentary Democrats (elected officials and their managerial and financial apparatus) helped push ideas like free college out of its status as an established norm and widespread practice in the postwar period to a Left insurgency on the party fringes, from which it was rescued largely by Bernie Sanders in 2015. 

My point here is that non-market, rights-based allocation of educational goods isn't an inherently progressive position to be contrasted, as the media does, with centrist positions. It was the mainstream party position when the Democrats were in power, and it formed its only distinctive--and popular--conceptual frame.  (Its Dixiecrat segregationist base was popular but not distinctive.)

Democrats thought they'd invented a winning new paradigm after Bill Clinton's victory in 1992, but that helped create the problems we're facing now, starting with wholly unresolved white racism, inadequate public health systems, and economically dysfunctional, ethically indefensible economic inequality.  The New Democrat paradigm rested on attempts to get public benefits via the private sector, with the privatization of public revenue streams as the mechanism. A continuous side effect was the combination of higher costs and reduced and/or unequal services, that is, cuts in quantity and quality, usually both.  Democrats endlessly agonized over the legitimacy of health and welfare programs that did basic things like reduce childhood hunger, mostly because Republicans categorically denied it.

The private insurance-based health system is the most famous result of this ongoing history of cutting the private sector in as a provider, gatekeeper, and market allocator of public goods. It was preserved with Obamacare, improving an unpopular and exclusionary system in the classic New Democrat way--with higher government subsidies funneled through private firms so that the results of an unchanged system are more humane.

Putting their confused private--public good narrative into practice as standard Democratic coalitional compromise policy, the party got a reputation for not really solving the public problem at hand. As Biden's victory became more assured, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote powerful analyses of the damage these policies have generally done to racial justice and to the public fabric of society.  Cottom demanded full accountability for Republican damage--not bipartisanship--which would include restoring the status of professional analysis. Taylor recounted the damage that Democratic management has done to Black communities, among others.  The Democrats, she writes, must deal with

the depth of the bipartisan failure to address the tangled roots of racism, poverty, and inequality. . . . [T]he overwhelming majority of Black voters backed Biden, but the fact is that millions of African-Americans experience the daily failures of Democratic officials to respond to the poor conditions of their public schools, the lack of affordable housing, rampant police harassment and brutality, and usurious loans. The answer to these legitimate grievances can’t simply be to say that they are Republican talking points.

What Taylor correctly describes as chronic policy failure is also intellectual failure. Both follow from corruption in more than one sense.  Focusing on the aggression of the progressive wing against the center (or vice versa) is a total diversion from the intellectual condition of the Democrats as a whole.  

(2)

A good place to study the thinking of this coalitional Democratic party is California, where it effectively rules as a one-party state.  The Democrats have a nearly 2:1 voter registration advantage over Republicans, who have fallen from a third to a quarter of registered voters over the past 20 years.  Both legislative houses have for years been near or above a 2:1 Democratic supermajority (the Assembly is currently 3:1).  This month, Biden-Harris beat Trump-Pence by a nearly 2:1 margin. The same ratio appeared, this time within the Democrats, in the 2020 presidential primary. Sanders and Warren together got about half the votes, and Biden about a quarter (with Bloomberg picking up another 12 percent). Okay there goes the 2:1 margin, but progressives by any measure are a majority of California Democrats. Color-coding in this Wikipedia chart nicely captures the extent of Democratic control.

This is the same period in which California became the fourth most unequal state by income (after New York, Connecticut, and Louisiana), acquired the highest poverty rate (geographically adjusted), and made housing unaffordability a permanent problem. By 2000, the California Democratic party had embraced the low-tax Proposition 13 framework and focused on deficit reduction and safety net programs that left business alone.  Parliamentary Democrats accepted that, beyond safety-net maintenance that the private sector won't touch, public goods would be defined and shaped (though decreasingly funded) by the private sector.

In the domain we follow here, higher education, the Democrats allowed the most diverse college student population in U.S. history to suffer a massive decline in real per-student public funding.  Here's the UC case, explained in detail in this post.

As the white share of UC undergrad enrollment fell, state investment fell in lockstep.  For ten years, Democrats said, "well, if we send you less tax money your studnets can pay you more tuition," then felt political heat for that, so they froze tuition, but without restoring the lost state funds.  In short, after two decades of liberal Democratic control of state government, UC has between 40 and 60 percent of the total per-student net revenues that it began the century with.  

As a result of Democratic underfunding, the state university systems encountered the Covid-19 pandemic without enough funds to operate absent new debt (UC took on another $1.5 billion in the summer, on top of overall institutional debt that has doubled in the past ten years). Neither Cal State nor UC could afford to open safely, even for a partial student body. 

There were two more reminders of the constant grinding shortfalls last week. The Legislative Analyst's Office reported that most campuses in both systems have enough uncommitted reserves to cover only a week or two of operations.  And materials for the upcoming UC regents meeting identify $25 billion in facilities needs through 2026 that have no identified funding source.

(3)

There's one more Democrat policy area I want to discuss, where the economy and higher education meet.  The Democrats wholly committed themselves to human capital theory, which among other things defined bachelor's degrees and their student debt through the wage return on a financial investment. Non-monetary and social benefits were downgraded or completely ignored.  Human capital theory was always flawed. I wrote about this in The Great Mistake (Stage 8), and will have more to say elsewhere (this week I'm reading what looks like a major intervention, The Death of Human Capital?, as part of ongoing research on a new political economy for education.) 

Though it sounds odd to say, human capital theory entails the privatization of work itself.  It treats individual capabilities as a private good rather than as something that is created through social processes and is always interpersonal; it sets wages and working conditions with no regard for their political and social conditions or effects.  (See Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos for a definitive analysis of these.) Executive pay and founders' fortunes reflect, in reality, their beneficiaries' institutional and social power, not an objective valuation of a true contribution.  

Human capital theory has had many practical effects. One is that Democrats agree with Republicans on seeing capital gains, real estate, and very high net worth as entirely private goods, which makes them very hard to tax, even at the rate of wage labor. Another is that Democrats have participated in converting employees, entitled to benefits and legal protections, into contractors, without these benefits and protections. In this model, contractors voluntarily enter into private contracts as entrepreneurs of their human capital.

This Democratic confusion played out in several propositions up for a vote on the California ballot. There were three notable anti-progressive outcomes in the midst of a 2:1 Democratic majority vote, all of which implicate the university.

Proposition 15: Taxing commercial property at its market price.  This was another unsuccessful attempt to qualify Prop 13 from 1978, which tied property tax assessments on all property, commercial and residential, to the original purchase price and capped the tax rate at 1 percent of that value (plus a 2% annual increase).  California property owners keep the full value of the difference between purchase and sale price (doubling and tripling is not unusual if you stay put for a while), and don't have to share those gains with the state on an annual basis, though schools and other infrastructure, which must be funded annually, contribute to the property's value).  In the residential market, tying today's taxes to the prices of yesterday benefits the old over the young, who are doubly penalized by paying the newer, inflated purchase prices, which subsidize the capped taxes of the old.  Older homeowners are whiter, so racial injustice is also unofficial state tax policy. The artificially-lowered property tax dopes property values, letting asset price inflation sustain a housing crisis.  The situation with commercial property is even more irrational, and Prop 15 focused only on that, but it lost anyway. I've heard lots of tales of why--the hypocrisy and individualist selfishness of Californians is always a popular one. My candidate is the limit to Democratic thought that I've been discussing, which prevents it from advocating a public-investment model of private property that would allow proper taxation. 

Proposition 16 (to restore affirmative action).  This measure came from legislative Democrats, was oddly worded, appeared late, and had little money behind it, so faced an uphill battle (such was the KQED Forum verdict). I'd also point out that Democrats were unable to move from what I'd call the Level 1 justification for affirmative action to Level 2. Level 1 is that affirmative action is needed to breach an exclusionary white majority lock on an institution.  But in California, the most visible sites of contestation over race-conscious affirmative action--college admissions---now have minority-white student bodies (see the chart above). Voters might assume that on the goal of racial diversity, it is mission accomplished. The Level 2 justification for affirmative action is the persistence of both racism and racial inequality, very much including graduation gaps, student debt gaps, wealth gaps, and income gaps.  But these are issues that human capital theory (and the neoliberalism that rests on it) place in the private realm, as not a matter of public policy. Thus it's been decades since Democrats in any numbers espoused racial equality of outcome (proportionate admissions, income and wealth parity, etc.) as a vital goal. So party members would have no reason to turn out in force for affirmative action.

Proposition 22. (excepting some tech companies' contractors from re-conversion to employees via Assembly Bill 5). This was put on the ballot by a few Silicon Valley transportation companies, including Uber and Lyft.  AB 5 had been an example of parliamentary Democrats deciding in effect to rein in human capital theory, which was allowing some wealthy companies to evade labor law and force drivers to bear the structural costs of their employment privately.  Prop 22's passage (reverting drivers to contractors) exposed yet again the issue of whether the Valley will be allowed to use tech to force workers to negotiate the value of their  individual capital with huge platforms, whose size will allow the latter always to win the argument.  Prop 22 succeeded in part because of the tech plutocracy's access to customers' apps and their $200 million ad spend. But it also succeeded because the Democratic party has no clear intellectual critique of the political economy of the "independent" contractor. 

For example, on a Forum discussion of the proposition, a caller named Nick from San Rafael said this:

I voted to allow workers to stay independent--I voted for 22. I did it with mixed emotions. I just fundamentally believe that AB 5 is bad law. The most charitable description is that it has so many carve-outs for anybody who had friends in Sacramento that it doesn't have any teeth. but the practical effect has been really devastating to a lot of my friends. I'm over forty and I work in marketing, and if you're over 40 and you work in marketing you're probably a free-lancer. And if you're a freelancer in California, you didn't get any work this year. It's been a bad year for everybody. So I felt, not why shouldn't these Uber drivers be independent: I thought why shouldn't everyone? And it really frustrated me the way the conversation has been framed  as these big bad tech companies are trying to get away with it, when the reality is,  it's so hard to do business in California.  And trust me, it's easy to hire freelancers and contractors in other states. My downside to Prop 22 passing is now there's no muscle to fight AB 5 in Sacramento. . . . it's a classic story of posturing politicians, and I'm worried about my friends who don't have the money to fund a Prop 23 for themselves.

Nick's logic is a bit death drivey--California contractors had no work this year, so everyone should be contractors.  And AB 5 shouldn't prevent them from underbidding competitors in lower-cost states, so they can't afford to live in California.  Sam Harnett, KQED's Silicon Valley reporter, shot back, "why isn't [Nick] an employee with benefits and protections"? This didn't seem to cross Nick's mind. Nick's comment about "mixed emotions" makes me think he's a Democrat, which is also why he has no systemic critique of contracting. 

Marketing is one of the major career paths of non-STEM college grads, which puts universities in the position of enacting a human capital theory that makes the precarity of their (usually indebted) graduates that much more likely.  Even the people who go to college for personal development rather than marketable skills expect the degree to lead to relatively secure work. That is no longer happening,  and yet graduates of any age cannot turn to the Democrats for a worked-out conceptual alternative to white-collar precarity.  Nick in fact directed his wrath at Democrats rather than at the tech companies the Dems were trying for once to corral.  One likely reason is that he didn't see an underlying intellectual case. 

Universities are damaged by all three of these trends. Majorities want to keep state-suppressed property tax rates, which makes housing unaffordable for most university employees and students. Majorities don't support the strong forms of racial equality that should be a core public benefit of higher education. Majorities don't support secure employment for either non-college or college workers--and many of the latter don't either.

The common theme of these failures is the Democrats' tendency to hop on and off and on the Republican bandwagon of low taxes, racial laissez-faire, and business sovereignty over employees. They share a human capital theory until it gets a little too cruel. The immediate problem isn't the gap between the Democratic party's center and left, but that the party as a whole has not, for many years, narrated a clear alternative to the Republican paradigm.

Democrats now have to explain that government isn't a safety net. It's a coordinator, creator, orchestrator of collective effort--both builder and purchaser of goods in common (health, knowledge, transit, safety, justice, collective change). Democrats have to teach everyone in reach that public spending cannot be replaced by private spending for a wide range of fundamental public goods. That includes private tuition for university degrees. 

Nothing is going to get better in the coming era without more collective construction of common systems. The systems we have now, dominated by the self-interest of various firms and sectors (Uber, etc), are inefficient and unjust. We need structures that can transform climate change, warfare, poverty, migration, and human ignorance into better forms.  The current policy mashup, hatched in the 1990s, won't work. Really sophisticated governments will be essential.  Anti-masker individualism is finished as positive force: it can only generate a long series of national setbacks.  Democrats need a real story line about all this.