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.

 

by Christopher Nealon, John Dewey Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University

This is one of talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. My explanation of the context and my introduction to the panel are here.

** 

Thanks for having me, folks. I had been planning to devote my short presentation to an outline of the crisis facing STEM fields, and how understanding that crisis can make a difference for how we think about the assaults on the humanities. I’d be happy to talk about that in our conversation after this panel. But after listening to Professor Alondra Nelson’s fantastic opening keynote on Monday, I found myself wanting to pick up on her insights, and run with them a little bit.

 

As you recall, Professor Nelson walked us through a distinction between stochastic and epistemological frames for knowledge, where the stochastic names the random, unpredictable play of the material world, which nonetheless always holds out the promise of the predictability of phenomena, while epistemological language holds out a different promise, the knowledge of how and why things work the way they do. And she pointed us to the idea of agnotology, which if I followed right, describes both the production of obfuscatory anti-knowledge, and study of that obfuscation.

 

You probably also recall that Professor Nelson deftly unpacked the cynical production of ignorance among tech capitalists as they pivot between a masters-of-the-universe epistemology deployed in pitches to potential investors, and a disingenuous, shoulder-shrugging powerlessness when they tell the general public that the sheer stochastic scale of AI makes it a black box.

 

What I want to suggest in my presentation is that agnotology is not only about the production of ignorance, but about deskilling labor. I will also suggest that this deskilling is an old capitalist strategy – indeed it is as old as capitalist machinery itself. This is probably a familiar argument to many of you. I will add five things to it.

 

First: deskilling is never absolute, and the relative forms it takes reveal an important capitalist dynamic, which is that inter-capitalist competition takes the form of pitting different kinds of labor against each other.

 

Second: the epistemological conditions created by this shell game make many things not seem like products of capitalism at all.

 

Third: we can schematize this epistemological problem as the reduction of capitalism to a mere category of social life, instead of a living, breathing reproductive project that demands not categorization but conceptualization.

 

Fourth: we have the philosophical tools to develop this concept, and they’re not that hard to work with.

 

Fifth and finally: our training as humanists can help us understand capital as a moving concept because our experience with aesthetic objects invites us to see in multiple registers at once, but also to recognize how those registers form living, ever-shifting wholes.

 

I begin with a belief in Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of capitalist profit to fall, because this is where deskilling begins. Capitalists do not like the rate of profit to fall. They will therefore do anything they can to each other, through the medium of us, to counter that tendency.

 

In this regard, stochastic and probabilistic strategies for making us work harder and consume more are especially useful to capital because they promise to make up in sheer volume what droops and sags in terms of the rate of return on investment.

 

As the information scholar Justin Joque points out, long before the statisticians formalized the stochastic techniques that now drive large language models, capitalists had stumbled upon those techniques and developed them without a specific name for what they were doing, like the character in Molière’s play The Bourgeois Gentleman who exclaims, “Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it!” Joque shows how, in giving capitalists the gift of a formalized and replicable method for their two centuries of ad hoc discoveries, statisticians, data scientists and their fellow travelers have once again reignited the dream of what the business press currently calls “zero marginal cost”: the dream of a practice in which the effort to realize profit approaches zero because, at scale, it only take a few hits to make the minimal costs worth it. The catch, of course, is that only a very small number of firms can operate at the scale required to achieve anything even approaching that dream.

 

There is a brutal math behind this: one that keeps capitalists in a low-grade panic, and one whose costs they pass on to each other by way of passing them on to us. The reason capitalists place hope in mechanizing their labor processes is because they see it as a way to compensate for a competition-driven fall in prices per unit with the ability to sell more units.

 

Marx describes this as an inverse ratio between the rate and the mass of profit: if one goes up, the other must go down. What we now call stochastics is an attempt to avoid the irreducibly zero-sum character of capital, which despite its compulsion to expand forever can only expand through rounds of destruction. Think of it as a game of musical chairs or hot potato, in which every capitalist is trying to fob off the costs of business on all the others, with the main weapon being one version or another of cheapening labor. Think of it as an attempt to be infinite and zero-sum at the same time.

 

This strategy – and this problem – is as old as capitalism, though capitalists’ attempts to leverage the tech sector into the yellow brick road out of the 2008 crisis has made it freshly visible in the capitalist core. The historian Henry Snow refers to it as the drive to make us all “stochastically waged.”

 

Because big tech has been tasked with getting deindustrialized capital out of its late-20^th century messes, it is especially good at describing the dream of the fully stochastic wage, at least in its own sector. The brilliant communist geographer and independent scholar Phil A. Neel points us to a good example from Lukas Biewald, who founded CrowdFlower, a company that paid people in the 2010s to label data:

 

Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore.

 

And here’s how stochastic labor looks from a proletarian perspective, in this case represented by Neel, himself who has worked training AI to supplement his income:

 

If a worker were to walk by at [any given] moment and politely ask me what I was doing, my response would be frank: “I don’t fucking know.” The first lesson in AI work is dealing with an unknowing, persistent dissonance: complete this task for no apparent reason according to these hyper-specific (but continually updated and often contradictory) instructions; you are an employee but not an employee ...your wage can change at any moment, surging and dipping by as much as $20 an hour; you rely on the work for a major chunk of income, but it is not your “job.”

 

Neel’s description of his tasking is darkly hilarious: he spends a day asking the model questions; another day answering its questions. He is told to wear a GoPro camera and record audio in crowded places. He is warned never to utter an identifying name, to cover his tattoos, to look the other way if someone approaches. He writes that the training document he was given “gives arcane guidelines that read like dark age superstitions.”

 

The thrust of Neel’s argument is not that we are leaving capital behind and entering an era of “techno-feudalism,” however, but that his work conditions are the latest iteration of an old capitalist class deskilling tactic. The historian of science Matteo Pasquinelli puts it this way: “the current paradigm of AI – deep learning ... emerged not from theories of cognition ... but from contested experiments to automate the labour of perception, or pattern recognition” (page 21). The tactic, it turns out, it to turn jobs into tasks, and to stitch them together or separate them as needed. This is as true of the working day as it is of the tasks that populate it. And it is also true of the global recipe for profitability, which must necessarily include as wide a variety of types of labor as possible.

 

I said I would translate this into philosophical terms, so here goes capital moves according to the logic of essence and appearance. When Marx discovered this, he was leaning on Hegel, who was following Aristotle, knew this logic very well. Just as there is not a creature walking the earth called “the animal,” Aristotle points out, but only animals, capital cannot appear in any one way. It is abstract in its essence, but this is because it is endlessly appearing in material form. It has to.

 

This is why the theorist Beverley Best describes the activity of capitalist accumulation as a dynamic of “social averages and tipping points,” and why she has coined the term “perceptual physics” to describe our experience of this ever-shifting movement. The sheer variety of tactics capitalist classes have developed to accomplish their one task can make so much of our experience feel like it’s not exploitation or capitalism at all; it can feel like a side hustle, where your boss says he’s not your boss, that you’re not an employee, and that the money you make after all the fees and penalties is not a wage. Or it can feel so overwhelming, like the genocide in Gaza, that grasping it through the concept of capital seems like an unhelpful dogmatism, at least until you look at the artists’ renderings of the Dubai-like “Gaza 2035” commissioned by the Netanyahu government, dotted with electric vehicles and innovation labs, or until you read about the important role that anticommunism played in the British and American support for Zionism leading up to the Balfour Declaration, and onward to the founding of the Israeli state, because Zionism was seen as a bulwark against Jewish socialism.

 

This combination of infinite variety and relentless sameness creates a schizophrenic epistemological situation in the liberal academy. On the one hand, liberals will treat Marxists as though they only think categorically: oh blah blah blah, I get it, phenomenon X goes in the capitalism bucket, so does everything, do you have anything new to say? On the other hand, liberal discourse will keep the real meat of Marxist analysis, which is not the category but the concept of capital, out of view because it feels too overwhelming to confront. By construing Marxists as categorical thinkers, liberals can pride themselves on advocating pluralism, nuance, and the sensuous variety of the particular, and dismiss Marxism as a monological discourse that flattens all that beautiful humanities particularity.

 

There are complicated historical reasons we are in this strange situation, where a category of people devoted to truth-seeking (humanities scholars) do not even seem to realize that they have cut themselves off from strong conceptual knowledge of the objective conditions that shape our lives and link our lives to countless others.

 

But one way to name this complex of reasons is to identify it as the long shadow of anticommunism. Chris Hedges and Samuel Moyn have detailed, respectively, liberal purges of leftists from intellectual leadership in the academy, the arts, and religious spaces, and from the humanistic disciplines. John McCumber has meticulously documented the role of anticommunist politics in shaping the historical arc of a former anchor discipline, philosophy, which between the beginning and the middle of the 20^th century mutated from the practice most suited for questions about justice and the good life to a technical formalism focused on the possibility of determining the conditions for the validity of sentences. And if you came of age in the (anti-) humanist academy of the 90s you know the puzzlement masking a contempt in the postmodernist descriptions of Marxism as “totalizing.”

 

But the contempt the puzzlement was masking was itself masking a fear, hardly conscious at all. The story of American anticommunism isn’t only of intellectual arrogance or post-war capitalist triumphalism or post-Stalinist bitterness or post-1968 disillusionment. It’s the story of fear, fear that McCarthyism, however defeated, lurks dormant in our institutions. The University of California still requires newly hired faculty to sign an anticommunist loyalty oath, which I signed in 1996 because I wanted a job.

 

It’s also the fear that beyond American McCarthyism lies far worse, namely the anticommunist violence the Dulles brothers perfected abroad, long after McCarthy, a bloody campaign that Vincent Bevins compasses in The Jakarta Method, in which the murder of nearly a million Indonesians provided the formula for mass murder in Chile, for torture techniques and assassinations in the Congo, in El Salvador, in Guyana, and on and on. Every post-colonial attempt to launch an alternative to subordinating integration into global capital was rerouted, delegitimized, and terrorized out of existence. But because of our collective miseducation, liberals look at the global rise of the right and think, what is wrong with these people?

 

So I want to close by returning the term of art to which our brilliant keynote speaker introduced us, agnotology. I want to suggest that we are constantly at risk of practicing it on ourselves. Reducing capitalism to just a word that describes our terrible world is a kind of unnecessary self-hobbling in which capital becomes a Kantian thing-in-itself, at once all too familiar and utterly unknowable. But as Best points out, Marx himself felt that the complexity of capital’s shapeshifting was graspable by everyday people; as she writes, “Marx bet the farm on the potential for such popular cognitive work, in aid of which his own analysis was intended” (page 114).

 

This is a humanistic project – or it should be. As we know, the tech lords are fond of theorizing about the character, the fate, and the destiny of the human. We have abundant tools with which to reply to their bloviating. The human stares back at us, evolving, contradictory, somehow singular and universal at once, in both the art we make and the tools we use. This is why, once we get hold of the moving, contradictory character of capital, singular and general and universal by turns, we can arrive at a kindred kind of conceptual clarity around the aesthetic as well – or vice versa.

 

Late in his life, Georg Lukács argued that we can attain this clarity when we reflect on the thunderclap of aesthetic pleasure and on the dynamics of capital alike: it turns out that the grisly thing and the beautiful thing share a logic, a “unity of substance” born of the endless interplay of singularity and generality and universality. We can use either one to get better at understanding the other. This conceptual thinking is the source for a more objective and honest collective pursuit of the meanings of the human than anything that Silicon Valley will ever create. We cannot let them seize that.

 

Banff, Alberta back country on June 3, 2026  

This piece is my introduction to a panel at the Annual Meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes in Banff, Alberta. 

 

CHCI funds research initiatives, among other things--see their Climate Futures call and other initiatives. The theme of this year's meeting was "Building the Future We Want," which is also an implicit theme of this blog. Building that future means putting humanities research into modes of influence in the world, which involves transforming our existing knowledge system, an issue with which I'm a bit obsessed.  

 

My panel featured Dennis Hogan talking about using the AI-induced spotlighting of humanities skills to rebuild the humanities, Colleen Lye talking about the unexpectedly complex and even dialectical politics of fundraising, Asheesh Kapur Siddique on building a new public politics of humanities support, and Christopher Nealon on freeing our collective intelligence from capitalist labor strategies towards humanities knowledge.  Many thanks to them for giving such superb talks. I hope to get most of the papers up in the space in the next week or two.

 

*** 

 

This session is called, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now." One of the things I’ve loved about the sessions at this conference is the combination of disciplines that everyone is working with and bringing together: literature and history, philosophy and law, legal and psychological dimensions of academic freedom, institutional and cultural analysis, writing pedagogy and energy sciences, computational and narrative work. These combinations are powerful and difficult. Knowledge is shaped by problems and problems can only be addressed finally by multiple disciplines working together: Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice, a project run by economists at my own foundation, draws on critical microfinance specialists, experts on Chinese government guidance funds, cultural theorists, and climate scientists.   The panels here at CHCI feel to me bound together as research for alternative futures that emerge from current but recessive and often suppressed features of actuality that we want present in our lives right now. The full versions of these projecgts are expensive.

 

Our panelists are going to talk about various modes of conceptual building and transformation and some of their effects. But first, I’m going to spend a few minutes to mention the issue that often haunts me as I put together panels or workshops that are about bringing humanities research to bear on problems of cultures and their worlds. This issue is that we are obliged to build our research and the material pre-conditions for that research at the same time—which is to build parts of the plane while we are flying it. We are great at naming and describing new intellectual terrains—energy humanities, abolition university studies, the mining humanities I learned last night exists at the University of Wyoming, etc. We are great at describing our processes.  Going from processes to outcomes or from methods to findings--that is harder. It’s institutional. It costs real money. And yet getting humanities practices to the stage of research results, in my experience in working with scientists and engineers, is a precondition of full collaboration with them.

 

I’m convinced that the humanities need to have more real-world influence over the issues we’ve talked about at this conference, which would allow us to increase our direct benefit to communities outside the academy.  I’m also convinced that we are held back not by our methods or our data but by our funding, or lack thereof, which has produced an underdeveloped infrastructure and a certain longterm epistemic inferiority to other fields—in the eyes of those fields, of administrators, of policymakers, and perhaps also in our own eyes. Our fiscal positioning shapes our ambitions, particularly for circulating scholarly results that would materially change public discourse. 

 

The humanities have been changing the culture for decades, on topics involving race and sexuality—gay marriage came in no small part from 40 years of humanities theory and philosophy. Here we have heard scholars discussing their work on topics from energy and climate to the digital systems that are historically owned by the STEM fields plus economics.  We have real conceptual influence there too, but to help reverse the climate emergency or to block AI-induced cognitive offloading, we will need to do more building—and do this building under adverse fiscal conditions that we engage in an expectation of transformation.

 

In December 2022, the Modern Language Association issued a Statement on Research Funding in the Humanities through its Executive Council, in whose drafting I was directly involved. It reads in part as follows:

Were federal agencies to spend one percent of their [FY 2019] $46.1 billion R&D budget … on all humanities disciplines, these disciplines would receive $461 million per year. The NEH, however, spent approximately $32.6 million on research across all disciplines in [that year]. This comes to well under one-tenth of one percent of federal R&D funding. It appears to us [on the MLA EC] that US humanities scholars operate under funding constraints that unduly impair their scholarly output and limit the humanities’ public benefits.

 

… For the sake of comparability, we can combine the total agency budgets of both the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts: this brings the total federal budget for all programming for US arts and humanities—not just research—to approximately $400 million, or just short of 0.9 percent of the federal R&D total. In 2019–20, the United Kingdom allocated 3.4 percent of UK Research and Innovation funding to its Arts and Humanities Research Council. In that same year, Canada allocated 13.1 percent of national research funding to the arts, humanities, and social sciences in its Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council; the US equivalent, adding in federal funding for the social sciences, is 1.7 percent. Mexico allocated 15 percent of federal research funding to humanities and related researchers [though from a much lower base].

 

This was the baseline before Covid-19 and before Trump 2--low levels of formal extramural funding for the socio-cultural dimensions of world problems.

 

A further wrinkle: universities in the systems I know well do not cut against low extramural funding for their humanities scholars on campus by spending higher shares of their research funds on the humanities, but repeat the external pattern: internal funds for humanities research generally stay in that 1-2% range of campus funds dedicated to research, and at some major universities, this figure is less.  

 

Today, even those internal funds are being withdrawn at many major universities. Collaborative humanities research –required in my view for alliances with climate science groups for example—is particularly endangered. When I received an NEH Collaborative Research award in 2017, it was one of 9 in the United States—on a base of 80,000 college and university instructors just in literature and languages. I say this not to praise my application but to lament their scarcity.

 

I linked this grant to another grant from UC’s Humanities Research Institute in Irvine to form a residential research group, in which economists, geographers, and cultural scholars meet for 11 weeks to hash out our many differences: this put us in the position of being able to co-author a book together.  UCHRI still exists, but its residential group infrastructure has been stripped out, with no consultation with the UC humanities professoriat. 

 

This panel is about building, not about watching as our key stuff gets dismantled before our eyes—or behind our backs.  Building includes building funding and related resources and systems. You are builders.  What you do academically with what you have built makes you rather heroic in my eyes. I would like all this to be easier (and bigger) for you.  I would like our building to include the resources that will make the academic research of those who follow us—starting with today’s early-career scholars—easier (and bigger)-- to make it easier for all of us to be more influential in the world.

 

It's in this spirit of struggle and expansion that we'll get this panel going [with some papers to follow in this space].

 

UC Irvine on April 13, 2018     

by Trevor Griffey, School of Humanities, UC Irvine

Last May, 2025, I had the radicalizing experience of successfully lobbying for three months as part of a labor union coalition to prevent $270 million in proposed cuts to the University of California (UC) general fund allocation from the State of California, then watching multiple UC campuses go forward with tens of millions of dollars of budget cuts anyway. 

It was a level of cynicism and exploitation that I frankly hadn’t expected from a public sector employer. For months, the UC office of the President (UCOP) mobilized students and Regents to personally lobby legislators to prevent budget cuts that would be “devastating” to students. Legislators, facing tough choices about how to close a multi-billion dollar budget deficit, heard our pleas and protected us while passing on cuts to other government programs instead. Then UCOP said nothing when campus Chancellors, citing structural deficits compounded by uncertainty in the Trump age, went ahead and and made some of the same cuts that legislators had explicitly given UC money to prevent.

University of California, Irvine (UCI) was one of those campuses that unnecessarily cut tens of millions from its 2025-26 school year budget. In May, I wrote about UC’s “betrayal” of its faculty, staff and students for Chistopher Newfield’s blog, Remaking the University. In June, 2026, I led a protest against budget cuts to the UCI School of Humanities that drew more than a hundred students, faculty and staff. I also worked behind the scenes to help an outstanding teacher who was fired after four years of teaching write an op-ed about what it felt like to be fired to pad the reserves of your school in the name of navigating fiscal uncertainty— but unfortunately I couldn’t find a venue whose editors were willing to publish it. 

This May, 2026, UCI is re-upping on its unnecessary budget cuts while building its core reserves ever closer to $1 billion. As I write this, on May 7, my colleagues in European language instruction are being told that second year language instruction will be restricted to majors in the School of Humanities, a cost-cutting measure that could result in the end of Russian Studies and possibly other programs [note from May 22: this proposed change has been stopped for 2026-27]. In Asian languages, four teachers were recently put on notice that they will lose their jobs at the end the 2026-27 school year. These are career-ending budget cuts: two of those teachers being laid off in Asian languages have been teaching at UCI for over 20 years.

Why are these layoffs happening? UCI administrators would say that structural deficits must be addressed by reducing low-enrollment programs. UCI School of Humanities leaders would say quietly, behind the scenes, that UCI has adopted a new budget model that rewards high enrollment and punishes programs such as arts, writing, and language instruction that are taught best in seminar formats with small class sizes. 

Both explanations are partly true, and I’ll write about both UC’s structural deficits and its budget model in separate posts.

But there’s an addition reason for the budget cuts taking place to language instruction that UCI hasn’t made clear to faculty. UCI is intentionally limiting the amount of tuition and state allocation increases that it provides to its schools. 

In his January 27, 2026 memo to Deans, Vice Chancellors and Principal Officers, UCI Provost Hal Stern announced that “Current campus-level planning assumptions include a 6% increase in state funding, 3% increase to tuition and student fees, projected drops in ICR funding (5% drop in FY27, 10% drop in FY28, 5% drop in FY29), and 3% increase in general and administrative assessment (G&A) funds available.”

What Stern didn’t say is that (per the Legislative Analyst’s Office):

• UC will raise tuition for the 2026-27 school year by 4.4%, not 3%
• The Governor proposed a 7% increase in the state’s general fund allocation to UC for 2026-27, not 6% 
• The Trump administration has not followed through on its threats to place caps on ICR, nor has Congress substantially reduced the budgets of either the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health, making a projected 20% drop in ICR funding seem excessively cautious

In other words, UCI is planning to withhold 30% of UC’s tuition increases and 14% of UC’s state allocation increase from its schools in the 2026-27 school year. It is also making excessively cautious budget projections regarding declines in research grant funding that will compel even more cuts to UCI schools. The likely result is that UCI will be generating a surplus from funds that are intended to go straight to services that support students. 

Having talked to multiple state legislators and their staff both this year and last year about state budget issues, I can tell you that in a moment when politicians are mostly holding firm against pressure to eliminate support for health insurance for undocumented immigrants, they don’t increase the UC’s budget so it can pad its reserves while cutting services to students. 

As Christopher Newfield identified in a UCI Budget Town Hall that I co-hosted on February 13, 2026, UCI’s core fund reserves (excluding its medical centers and auxiliary operations) already exceed $800 million.

   

That’s approximately 8 months of operating reserves. UCI continuing to skim money away from what it extracts from students and receives from the state not only leads to unnecessary cuts in student services. If word gets out to the state legislature, this level of excessive skimming could politically backfire on UCI and the whole UC system.

 

510 E. Peltason Dr, UC Irvine  

by Trevor Griffey, School of Humanities, UC Irvine

The idea of continuing education— sometimes also called “lifelong learning”— is old and venerable. It taps into some of the best humanist ideals of self-improvement and the democratization of access to skills and knowledge.

But the management of contemporary continuing education programs by many universities has shown the perils of for-profit models for education hosted by supposedly non-profit and even public universities.

Venice, Italy on May 8, 2026   

by Sean L. Malloy, Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), UC Merced

In September 2025, I wrote a guest post for this blog entitled “Why Should We Stand Up for the UC?” that placed much of the blame for the current federal assault against the University of California on the complicity and weakness of UC leadership, including the Regents, UCOP, and the Academic Senate.  In bowing to the false claims of antisemitism that have served as the Trump administration’s pretext for attacking American universities and unleashing police and administrative terror on anti-genocide protesters, the UC invited federal intervention while crushing the grassroots movements of students, faculty, and staff that not only stood up for the best values of humanity, but also represented the best defense against rising fascism and authoritarianism.