UCLA Royce Hall on May 14, 2018   

By early spring of the annus horribilis 2025, the UCLA Senate had lost patience with a UCLA Administration that had locked it out of any meaningful role in major decisions.  

The new CFO, Stephen Agostini, appointed in 2024, wasn’t working with the Senate in established ways. A new chancellor, Julio Frenk, had arrived in January, was to be inaugurated on June 5^th, and seemed okay with increased opacity.  The Senate chair, Kathy Bawn, must have been worried that something much worse than shared governance could get locked in by the new administration. 

 

The campus budget was also bad. Although the Trump Administration wouldn’t unlawfully freeze UC federal funding until late July / early August, UCLA had already decided that its 2010s revenue formula would no longer work, had started budget clawbacks in 2019, doubled them the following year as COVID-19 settled in, and by late 2021 had developed a new Bruin Budget Model for the 2020s.  Though the BBM would reallocate expenditures towards units that were growing fastest, it wouldn’t do much of anything to increase revenues. 

 

In this context, Chair Bawn wrote a two-page letter to EVCP Hunt on March 17, 2025. I’m going to block-quote Bawn in this letter and a later one to emphasize the necessarily confrontational nature of an assertion of rights.

 

 Bawn cited the Senate’s establishment clauses and then stated:

 

Effective shared governance depends on meaningful Senate consultation at all stages of decisionmaking. For this reason, we are particularly concerned about the recent practice under your leadership  in which workgroups related to budgetary issues (in one case, on the funding of graduate education) are convened without Senate representation. Our repeated requests for Senate inclusion in campus planning have been rebuffed with promises that Senate leadership would be regularly briefed  separately: to date, no such briefings have been scheduled. More importantly, briefing of Senate leadership post hoc does not constitute meaningful Senate consultation.

 

After condemning the misuse of confidentiality to “avoid transparency,” she continued,

 

Senate exclusion from budgetary planning groups is but the latest in a series of steps away from meaningful shared governance. . . . Weak shared governance leads to an all-too-familiar pathology: scarce resources invested in projects  that don’t contribute to the academic mission. More important, it leads to mistrust. Faculty are keenly  aware of the magnitude of the threats we currently face. There is growing concern that the  administration is unwilling to defend our core mission of research and teaching.

 

Bawn’s call for renewed collaboration was accompanied by an insistence on openness: 

 

Following Senate norms of transparency, we will post this letter on the Senate website, as we have done with other recent letters. We hope that you will respond to us in writing with concrete steps you will take to restore meaningful Senate consultation, particularly in budgetary planning. We would be  pleased to post any response you provide to us on our website as well.

 

To her point, Bawn got no response from the EVC.

 

It was a very bad summer for universities.  Cuts and restrictions increased at UCLA. UC faculty got no help from senior management in restoring their frozen research funds, though a faculty group won a partial restoration in federal district court in September.  

 

Making matters worse, in June, UCLA’s CFO Agostini announced that he would remove money from departmental and center accounts.  Some UCLA Faculty pick up the story:

These “sweeps” hurt the power of internal units to backfill Trump’s gangster cuts. They seemed arbitrary—accompanied by conflict rationales—and autocratic. They created faculty anger, confusion, and deep mistrust, all of which seem to persist.

 

At the end of her term as chair, Bawn wrote Hunt again (August 28, 2025, DMS 11-13). She noted “some areas of progress” in Senate-admin relations, but added that they “were overshadowed by the magnitude of deficiencies regarding proactive consultation with the Senate on this year’s budget, and the troubling trend of excluding the Senate from critical early stages of decision-making.” 

 

In the absence of consultation with CPB, strategic decisions regarding the budget and deficit reduction were made by an unofficial, behind-the-scenes administrative workgroup from which the Senate was excluded, despite repeated requests by Senate leadership. Similarly, campus strategy with regard to the future of graduate education was developed by an administrative workgroup. Here, too the Senate was excluded despite repeated requests. A letter on this subject from the Senate Chair went unanswered. [This is the letter of March 17, 2025 excerpted above.]

 

Insisting that “Senate consultation must not be shirked,” Bawn moved on to the matter of instructional modality during emergencies. 

 

The administration does not have the authority to mandate remote instruction during emergencies. Only the Senate can make this decision. This authority was breached during the Spring of 2024, when a small (but serious) protest in one building led to a weeklong imposition of remote learning. Campus was open for all activities except instruction. This was a low moment for shared governance, and a clear instance of administrative convenience being prioritized over the academic mission. To avoid further such instances, the Senate developed a protocol for rapid decision-making regarding instructional modality during crises. The protocol was unfortunately not followed by Administration during the early weeks of January’s fire emergency.

 

Bawn goes on to make four demands, starting with, “The CFO will follow historic and systemwide norms in engaging with CPB” (Council for Planning and Budget).

 

This time, Hunt replied (September 8^th). (This letter is available in the same compendium, DMS-7-10). He wrote that the Senate letter “requires correction.”  He was offended that the Senate saw “the Administration as routinely violating protocol,” and seemed to take Bawn’s statements as claiming a Senate “expectation of unilateral authority or veto power.” He defined shared governance as “respecting distinct roles,” in which it was the Administration’s separate role not only to decide and act, but to deliberate as it chose.  This included, though Hunt didn’t say so, unilateral control over budgetary information. He also didn’t agree that the Academic Senate has primary authority over instruction: “Instructional authority resides with the Senate in normal conditions. In emergencies, the Administration must act”--apparently without consulting the Senate.

 

The incoming chair, Megan McEvoy, responded (September 17^th, in this same web file, DMS 3-6). Stressing points of agreement, she nonetheless insisted that administrative committees with a handpicked professor or two amounts to a workaround of the Academic Senate, not shared governance. She proposed additional town halls, a survey, and other modes of collective communication. 

 

However, the Senate’s core criticism, its lack of systematic budget data and justification, stayed unaddressed throughout the fall. Somewhat softer stonewalling by Frenk, Hunt, Agostini, et al. led directly to a “Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning.” It is hardcore.  It passed the Legislative Assembly by a vote of 115-1, or 99.13%).  

 

The Resolution’s 7^th Whereas clause states, “this absence of transparency and consultation undermines financial accountability, shifts burdens to Senate faculty to seek extramural funds to address deficits, and weakens the University’s ability to uphold its core academic missions of teaching, research, and service.”  

 

The recitals of fact lead to 5 separate resolutions regarding changed policy on budgetary data. The 5^thresolution itemizing 9 specific categories of data the Senate requires (e.g. “past and anticipated changes in campus debt service obligations).  

 

This is the single best data demand list that I have ever seen from an Academic Senate.  You can marvel at it in the Legislative Assembly’s January 2026 compilation on budget consultation (DMS 14-16).

 

After transmittal to Chancellor Frenk and EVCP Hunt, they responded with the claim that what, we’ve been talking with you this whole time.  And amazingly, they said, to paraphrase, that you already have all that stuff you’ve wanted—anyway the first 7 of the 9 categories of data. (December 18, 2025, DMS-9-11).

 

This bought them a rebuttal. On January 20, 2026, Senate Chair McEvoy sent, “Corrections of Fact on Your 12/18/2025 Letter on the Legislative Assembly Budget Planning Resolution.” She broke their letter down into five separate screenshots and logged the gap between their claims and actual instances of administrative consultation: “October 13, 2025: CFO Agostini presented three slides at the CPB meeting, which were neither shared in advance nor after the meeting [itemization omitted]  . . .  October 27, 2025: CFO Agostini presented five slides at the CPB meeting, which were neither shared in advance nor after the meeting . . . “  

 

McEvoy wrapped up: “Again, the intention of this corrections of fact letter is to promote meaningful shared governance and transparent communication,” which she showed had not occurred. 

 

Then, time sped up.  On January 29^th, CPB issued a labor-intensive report on the UCLA budget. It offered some important findings that I’ll summarize below, and was also at pains to emphasize that the deliberate incompleteness of the data provided by the Administration had blocked a conclusive Senate analysis. Reporter Natalia Mochernak covered it in the UCLA Daily Bruin on February 6^th.

 

One week later, on February 13^th, Mochernak broke a huge story about alleged systemic budget incompetence at UCLA, whose source was none other than CFO Agostini.  In “Financial mismanagement contributed to $425 million annual deficit, UCLA CFO says,” Agostini made some full-metal accusations.

 

He claimed that “the unaudited annual financial reports the university has posted on its website since 2002 are erroneous.” He claimed, “I spent a long time in the federal government … I have rarely seen the kind of financial management flaws and failures that I see here when I got here.”  He advertized that he "would prefer not to advertise how badly the place has been managed financially.” He asserted that the new Ascend Finance Transformation Project isn’t the solution to UCLA mismanagement but a symptom of it.  

 

Having burned his bridges with his senior management colleagues, Agostini went on to blame the deficit on academics: “There has been an observation made that the reason we have this problem is that their growth has been solely in administrative units,” Agostini said. “That’s not correct. It really has been in schools.” 

 

Finally, he claimed that the financial situation is dire.  “[H]e is currently looking at how long UCLA can continue to function and meet payroll without developing a cash reserves problem, as the school is currently spending money it does not have.”

 

This was quite a performance.  I have no idea what Agostini thought he was doing. I don’t know any UCLA faculty who think he’s a whistle-blower: The Senate experienced him as a player of budget shell games and not as an honest broker or truth-teller.  Maybe he thought he could regain lost stature with the campus by taking the Trump stance, “only I can fix it."  Having described the Administration as incompetent and the faculty as a money pit, whom did he think he was rallying to his side?  The strategy makes no sense, and casts everything he said into question.  (As far as I know, his claims haven't been refuted or challenged either.)

 

Agostini was soon pushed out of his job: Frenk announced his departure on February 17^th, having found an interim replacement. Management took the opportunity to issue a blanket denial of the $425 million deficit Agostini alleged.  Having apparently learned little from the Senate’s many letters, they didn’t state what the deficit actually is. 

 

Maybe Agostini was doing damage control in relation to the January 29^th Senate Interim Report (IR) that I mentioned, which cast him in the unflattering role of data Withholder-in-Chief.

 

CPB’s “Analysis of UCLA Campus Structural Deficit (FY24–FY27)” describes its arduous procedure as dictated by having received very incomplete data, I assume from Agostini, and, amazingly, only in the form of PowerPoint slides.

 

Data were manually transcribed from tables embedded in PowerPoint presentations (no machine readable files provided, despite the existence of database systems). Coverage is incomplete, with notable absences in high-impact areas (DGSOM, OCCS, Athletics, Chancellor’s units). Proxies and deductive analysis were required. In the future, machine-readable data, explicit reconciliation methodology, and public dashboards are expected for effective consultation on budgetary matters. (3)

 

Admin made CPB’s process difficult to the point that they could reasonably hope the Council would give up. But they did not.

 

The following passage is the kind that makes normal brains desperately seek immediate distraction. Do read it anyway: it refers to one of today’s major mechanisms for throttling university policy.

 

The precise relationships among unit-level budgets for General Funds (19900), Core Funds, and Other Funds with respect to the campus-wide structural deficit in General Funds remain unclear. This includes the potential use of General Funds to backfill negatives in Core Funds or Other Funds. Significant recurring deficits in the Other Funds category for operational units such as IT and Facilities (and likely Athletics, though no data were provided for that unit) raise concerns about how these shortfalls are covered. Similarly, contributions from other revenue sources such as investment returns . . .  remain unclear in their relationship to the structural deficit and require administrative clarification. (4)

 

In an admin context, this counts as savage condemnation of data quality.  

 

Yet, in my experience, top university managers generally do try to create exactly the structural data gap with which UCLA’s Senate contends.   Officials may provide top-level summary data with functional categories like “Instruction,” “Research,” “Student Affairs,” “Administrative Support,” and big summary numbers to match. Then, they either provide no unit data (schools, divisions, departments, centers), or they provide some unit data with categories that cannot be matched to top-level data.  What goes missing are data about comparative surplus vs loss in specific units or activities.  

 

This leads to the situation that CPB criticizes: the typical faculty committee can’t see the surpluses and losses created by particularly units that end up creating an overall budget deficit or surplus.  

 

Who runs deficits? Whose surpluses cover them?  These are the central policy questions to which deliberate data gaps prevent faculty from contributing.

 

To repeat, the key academic questions are, where are the losses coming from? And secondly, can the units who cause the losses / costs cover them, rather than making other units who don’t cause them cover them instead? 

 

CPB’s key finding is momentous. 

 

Preliminary analysis strongly indicates that the reported structural deficits (−$280 million FY25, −$274 million FY26 prior to December 2025 additions) are driven predominantly by recent central commitments (yet to be fully mapped), unchecked operational overhead escalation, accumulating subsidies to cover Athletics deficits, and systemwide assessments—not core academic instructional and research activities of existing units. Available academic unit data reveal significant fiscal restraint, with near balance achieved through efficiencies and prior reserves. In contrast, central operational and non-academic areas exhibit persistent and escalating shortfalls. (emphasis added, 2)

 

So, here’s a summary. UCLA was starting to have a deficit in 2018-19, and was already projecting the current large ones.  The 2010s model was breaking by that point, even at UC’s wealthiest campus, but senior UC officials wouldn't talk about it. Now, UCLA's current-year deficit (FY26) was $274 million by December. This means that a full-year deficit of $425 million, Agostini’s estimate, is possible.  Meanwhile, in this as in preceding years, the rule for academic units has been austerity and “near balances” in its accounts. The “solution” to a chronic deficit has been for the academic core to subsidize the non-core, academic austerity supporting relative prosperity in the corporate operation.  And the faculty are to stay away from the issue.

 

On February 19^th, the administration released  the“2025-26 UCLA Budget Book.” Its summary data is stuck in 2023-24. And the data gap CPB criticized is still here—units are presented in isolation, with no links between their summary budgets and the University as a whole.

 

I'll end by emphasizing that long-term academic austerity hits academic quality. You’d think this would be obvious--and urgent to fix as a thousand AI vendors claim to be selling models that can replace teaching. But in the Office of the President and other managerial domains, this is ignored or denied.  In mostly unread administrative papers like the Bruin Budget Model Overview, one can sometimes find examples. 

 

Life Sciences headcount enrollments . . . grew by 49 percent between 2009-10 and 2019-20, but ladder faculty headcounts grew by only 14 percent in the same time period. As a result, the student-to-faculty ratio in Life Sciences has deteriorated from 54.9-to-1 to 71.5-to-1 (a 30 percent increase). Similarly, enrollments in Physical Sciences grew by 43 percent between 2009-10 and 2019-20, while ladder faculty headcounts only grew by 6 percent. For Engineering and Applied Science, enrollments grew by 26 percent and ladder faculty grew by 12 percent. (16)

 

A 71.5-to-1 student-faculty ratio all but eliminates personal feedback and individual responses for the concerned undergraduates. Students absolutely notice this: here's one example from a UC Berkeley undergrad in 2014.  Getting AI help for homework is rational under such conditions.  And yet that’s the on-the-ground reality created by continuous underbudgeting which senior managers accept and conceal. 

 

The overcrowding crisis in key departments on all UC campuses is screened by official UC data that calculates the aggregate ratio as 21.9-to-1, which is already 3 to 4 times more students per professor than at a gold-standard private university.  By these metrics, a UCLA bio major may be competing for a professor’s attention with 12 times more peers than students attending that major private research university. And yet this disservice to core education is off limits for the senior officials who speak for the university--with the educational results that UC faculty know intimately.

 

The BBM Overview treats these ratios as an allocation problem. In fact they are an underfunding problem, one made worse by senior managers’ power to make academics pay for their own continued expansion while not letting them see this overall picture. 

 

The threats to academic quality have no chance of being fixed over any length of time without the full budget data of the kind UCLA’s Senate is demanding. The good news is that the UCLA Senate, Faculty Association, and student press have cracked open the deficit issue. All encouragement for their persistence--and for academic senates to follow suit.

 

 

East Village on October 31, 2022   

Looks like it.  

There’s some good stuff in Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic article, “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” but the piece unravels into a tool of the thing people actually hate about the humanities, which is not its implications for social justice but its civil wars. It blames the increasingly desperate struggles of the academic humanities not on right-wing enemies but on liberal humanists—a woke Mellon Foundation and its president Elizabeth Alexander.

I was one of the people that Harper interviewed for this article.  (Here, “Harper” always refers to the author, Tyler Austin Harper). He was fun to talk with, is a serious person, and worked hard on this piece, all of which I respect.  When we spoke, I emphasized our terrible money problems, which I argued tower over our manageable and ordinary methodological debates.  

 

I said that the real issue is our lack of the funding to produce and disseminate our knowledge at the scale that would get the kind of social attention allotted to medicine and computer science. We may think this is intrinsic to their topics and status but it is mainly the result of their vast organizational labor, labor of a kind that the humanities establishment, Mellon included, refuses to try. 

 

Harper cites my Public Humanities piece on funding—“Humanities Decline in Darkness”-- for a statistic in which federal humanities funding rounds to zero. But you have to get to his third-to-last paragraph before he makes his best causal claim about the current situation: 

The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch . . . 

 

I would have finished that last sentence by writing, “and so we don’t build the data and resource infrastructure that would make our needs visible to politicians and the public.”  But that’s not where Harper goes.

 

Harper’s other most effective moment comes from Phillip Brian Harper, the Mellon program director for higher learning: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change. It’s not to serve in perpetuity as the piggy bank for research.” Mellon, he said, was never supposed to be a panacea for the humanities.

 

 

Great, but who will do the shaking of university management? Mellon? Phil Harper says its role is to catalyze. On this topic, it’s not.  

 

He is of course right that the situation is completely appalling. To repeat, even though sociocultural knowledge is essential to solving any of the world’s epic problems, the rich universities listed below spend almost none of their institutional funds for R&D on non-STEM fields.

 

Figure 1. Institutional Expenditues on R&D, Selected Universities

 

SOURCE: NSF Higher Education R&D Survey (HERD) FY2024, Tables 14, 23, 29.

Yes, these figures likely exclude individual faculty research funds via outside grants, named chairs, and other department-managed funds.  But as indicators of institutional investment in humanities infrastructure, they are shocking. Universities’ own refusal to fund humanities research is also one cause of our society’s inability to deal with its core problems.

 

Yet Harper comes not to bury funding failure but to chastise social justice. The fault for him lies not in Trump’s destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities or 40 years of right-wing culture wars, but in Mellon’s interest in a better society.

 

∞∞∞

 

Harper makes two main claims. The first is that “classical” and “social justice” scholarship aren’t complementary approaches but rivals. They compete bitterly for scarce and dwindling funds. 

 

The solution to this is obviously an alliance between rivals to fight for massively better funding for all, at least ten times more funding than socio-cultural scholarship has today.  

 

But Harper diverts attention from funding with his second argument: “social justice” research is a betrayal of humanities scholarship, a kind of negation of it. This increase in “the decidedly sublunary work of furnishing political propaganda” makes Harper wonder whether the academic humanities are worth saving at all.  And Mellon, he writes, has shifted to funding this political propaganda since the arrival of Elizabeth Alexander as president.

 

Let’s try to understand this claim. Harper’s evidence for a policy shift is a Foundation announcement dated June 30, 2020. Mellon declared a new focus on “just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.” Board chair Kathryn A. Hall explained that “our reinvigorated mission and strategic direction . . . not only builds on our historic commitment to the arts and humanities, but rightly emphasizes a desire to make the ‘beauty, transcendence, and freedom’ found there accessible and empowering to all members of society.”  

 

The new direction assumes the complementarity of what we might call “basic” and “applied” humanities research, and not that applied research—addressing social questions—debases basic scholarship.  Complementarity—with awareness of different modes, aims, and questions--is assumed in every STEM field and social science of which I’m aware, so Harper has a special burden to show that the humanities are unlike all other forms of academic research in this way.

 

Alexander confirms complementarity in the announcement by adding, “We are a problem-solving foundation looking to address historical inequities in the fields we fund.” This also expresses reflexivity about Mellon’s own role in knowledge creation, which includes a past of supporting the kind of epistemic biases and limits that need constant correction in every field.

 

The new Mellon direction also seemed to aim at the democratization of humanities knowledge—at taking the results of humanities research outside of a small elite while also learning from communities about their existing knowledges and practices.

 

Harper presumably approves of problem-solving, and he definitely opposes the perpetuation of historical inequities which he agrees exist.  He sounds fine with humanities for the people, which is the official policy of the state humanities councils and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) whose origin story he affirms. He writes,

[U]nder Alexander, the foundation deserves credit for working to create a more economically just landscape within higher education. Before Alexander’s arrival, Mellon tended to disburse lavish funding to institutions that were already rich. Now, as part of Mellon’s commitment to equity, it is making a conscious effort to provide funding to public and less selective institutions. It has also increased funding for university-led prison education programs

 

All true, good, and important.  So what is so bad about Mellon’s new direction?  

 

Nothing, actually. (Its inaction on overall funding is a separate question to which I’ll return)  But to save what must have been the original idea for the story, Harper spends most of the piece making the false argument that “applied” humanities scholarship (not his term) is political propaganda.

 

How does he show this?  First there’s his prior, the false legacy dualism in criticism and some related humanities fields in which the criticism of texts and historical materials (basic) is denatured and corrupted by engaging in criticism of society (applied). It’s this dualism that turns “social justice” into “political propaganda” that ruins scholarship. 

 

This dualism may encourage him to search his anecdotes for polarity. For example, he spoke with a scholar who “confessed that . . .he had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant. I suspect that this may not be a rare occurrence.”  Harper’s assumed incompatibility between the first and more race-focused version of this scholar’s work makes this a problem rather than progress. 

 

Second is Harper’s assumption that it’s bad to get steered or shaped by a call’s language or a program officers. There seems to be a tacit idealization of “classical” humanities scholarship as pre-social and not in any good way developed by thinking about problems it might solve, or by being asked to change emphases in a proposal by an agency official.  

 

I see this as a humanities provincialism about sponsored research, which always involves calls, program officers, public pressures, institutional forces and so on.  This is not epistemically less valid than idealized autonomous scholarship. Remember actor-network theory and dozens of related ways of discussing the collaborative nature of thinking.  So the scholar who “reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race” likely improved his project. Program officers at NIH, NSF, and other STEM agencies do this advising routinely.  Agency shaping can be good or bad. 

Harper doesn’t have the evidence to rule out good shaping in that more-race-oriented project or the others. (Gabriella Coleman’s valuable commentary on Harper, “The Exposé that Wasn’t,” is really good on this point.)

 

So it’s not that “social justice” aims are inherently anti-intellectual and ruin scholarship. Better knowledge in many areas can come from working like Pasteur rather than like Einstein, to reference a classic study of the (complicated) relation between basic and applied research.  And it’s also not true that agency shaping is bad per se.   

 

So Harper falls back on a third way of making his claim that woke Mellon is ruining the humanities. That is to scorn sample program language as self-evidently non-scholarly.

Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice.

I assume Harper means this program, run by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).  Awarded titles include the following: 

 

·      The Dam, the Road, the Port: The Transformation of the Brazilian Northeast during the Long Twentieth-Century

·      State of Mine(Mind): Affective Geographies of California's Rural North

·      Urban Tropics: Dwelling under South and Southeast Asian Urban Microclimates

·      Uneasy Intimacies: Seeing Irei and Aesthetic Ambiguity Through Fukunosuke Kusumi's Art

·      Black Anti-settler Placemaking: Cooperation Jackson's Eco-villages from Mississippi to Vermont

·      Fiber Optics: Henequén Classification and its Consequences

·      Troubled Waters : Natural Disaster, Space, and the State in Precolonial Panjab (1707-1849)

 

Check these and the others out for yourself.  They all analyze major issues and strike me as likely to make original contributions to knowledge.  I don’t at all see Harper’s justification for assimilating all the projects to “identity” and “justice” studies. To do this, he needs to stereotype everyone on the basis of the appearance of words like “settler,” “queer,” “colonial” etc. I don’t even see how they’re all applied rather than basic research. He offers no evidence (just the legacy assumption) that these are not intensely scholarly, deeply intellectual projects.

 

At breakfast before drafting this post, I read an interesting review of The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture by Susanna Berger (Princeton University Press, 2025).  “Central to The Deformation,” the reviewer writes, “is the question of how religious elites wielded anamorphosis as a means of gatekeeping the divine.”  I love this kind of stuff. But is a book about the relations among perspective in drawing, theology, and institutional power in 17^th century Europe clearly epistemically “classical”—pure, basic research-- and thus intellectually superior to work on “Affective Geographies of California's Rural North”?  The answer is no. Mellon / ACLS funded research simply cannot and should not be delegitimated with superficial separating of the sheep from the goats.

 

The same goes for Harper’s disdain for a grant to Colorado College.

In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.

Harper doesn’t actually know what the conference organizers did and did not consider, but in any case, “how to dismantle systems of oppression” is one of the ‘permanent problems” of human beings. It is also a running theme of literature, history, and philosophy for thousands of years.  One might find the Colorado College formulations a bit plodding and yet not try to discredit the program through a false distinction between intellectual work and its social contributions.

 

I can imagine Harper doing a different kind of research that leads to a different article about the humanities.  He would go to Colorado College, interview the students, staff, and faculty involved in the program, and sit in on its courses for a few weeks while also visiting classes that aren’t part of the program.  He could then compare and contrast and identify the actual cognitive and other effects of the program on the participants. We would all learn something about what actually happens through humanities funding on college campuses to (and by) students and their teachers—for better and worse.  This is the real void in public understanding, and Harper’s dismissal of a program on the basis of its terminology doesn’t help fill it in.

 

So, Mellon’s new direction is less elitist. It puts greater emphasis on “applied” over “basic” research (“Pasteur’s Quadrant”) while insisting on their complementarity (and equal intellectuality). It funds some research on white supremacy and overcoming it--along with funding many other things, and really this funding is a drop in the bucket of overall social need for knowledge about racial nationalism, the authoritarian personality, etc.  Mellon program directors shape applications, as they always have.  They may now fund a higher proportion of outreach and communication programs compared to applied or basic research, but Harper doesn’t get into this important issue.  Finally, Mellon is the last big national funder in research-starved humanities field.  Only the last of these strikes me as a scandal.

 

∞∞∞

 

Daylight does appear when Harper takes the other side of his own argument. 

It is hard to argue that the tens of millions of dollars that Mellon is putting toward internships for working-class kids at public colleges and universities would be better spent financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France. But this calculus also says something about the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods—programs for humanities undergrads, resources for Ph.D. students, traditional humanities research, support for emerging fields and endowment-poor universities—against one another.

Yes, absolutely: we must address with the intent of solving “the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods against one another.”  We must at the same time argue for “financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France.” But it isn’t Elizabeth Alexander or Mellon that set up the zero-sum game. This happens when critics pit different kinds of humanities scholarship against each other.  

 

Mellon et al. didn’t set up the zero-sum funding game.  But what are they doing about fixing it? 

 

I’d trace some of Harper’s completely valid distress about the system to having grown up in this barren funding world where one’s work is always losing out to someone else’s.  The real issue with the humanities’ national leadership isn’t that they politicize scholarship, but that they don’t fight openly and systematically to fund a great deal more of it.  

 

This gets us back to Phil Harper’s statement: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change.”

 

But Mellon is not doing that. 

 

I can find reports galore about the crisis in STEM funding—everything from the cuts to indirect cost recovery to the losses of whole areas of research (like racial disparity in public health outcomes that NIH had funded for years) and of scientific personnel. I can find nothing from the humanities associations about their research funding problems.  

 

NEH has been gutted, yet MLA, which did indeed help sue the government over NEH, has joined NHA, AHA, APA et al. in neither collecting data to show the funding problem nor developing a systematic plan for building such funding. 

 

Similarly, the ACLS’s Strategic Framework 2025-2030 doesn’t have a sentence about tracking humanities research funding or expanding it. I see all these great scholars on the board. What are they doing?  What are we actually doing?  Why isn’t something like Figure 1 above on Mellon’s website as part of a large, structural analysis, rather than on the blog of an obscure professor? Universities need to be “taken by the collar.” But who will take the humanities agencies by the collar?

 

None of the solutions are really so abstract anymore.  People here and there have sketched out plans. I outlined one version in a long discussion paper for the MLA Executive Council in 2022, and ended my presidential address in January 2023 with a sketch of the steps we need to take, somewhat expanded in the print version (“Criticism After This Crisis”).  Also in 2022, a sub-committee of the Executive Council developed a reporting structure on cuts (or growth) across the country, planning to use the Association’s large, elected Delegate Assembly to feed information to headquarters for analysis and reporting. The Association never set this up. 

 

Two years went by, and the MLA then set up a panel explicitly about funding at the Convention in January 2025. 

 

Figure 2. MLA Convention Program 2023, Panel 139

 

The panel was an excellent (re)start on the topic, and the panelists had a good planning meeting afterwards.  We outlined NEH, Mellon, MLA, ACLS working together on research data, reporting, development. Then Trump took office and started his attacks. My colleagues bailed on the plan, which as far as I know, is dead.

 

With some discipline, we can replace our historic humanities pastime, discrediting each other’s research, with the project of building a material base for all of it.  If we can’t show basic mutual respect for divergent (and radical) research within the profession, then we are doomed.  But actually we can do this, and many, many of us already are.

 

I again invite both Harpers and everyone else into the effort of building the material base. 

 

By Michael Meranze

It is too soon to tell what will be the long term impact of the federal invasion of Minneapolis.  But it is clear that the images--both of the thuggish brutality of ICE and CBP and the solidarity and bravery of Minnesotans opposing the brutality and occupation--will not going away soon.  Minneapolis offers many lessons for possibility of a democratic future in the United States.  But, although less obviously, it also offers lessons for the future of a democratic higher education in the United States.  It is the latter that I want to point to here.

Before I go further though, I do want to acknowledge that what we have been seeing in Minneapolis may be an intensification but not a departure from long standing practices of policing in the United States.  Police, ICE, and the Border Patrol have long histories of violating constitutional rights, violently attacking disfavored--especially minority--communities, gaslighting the public through coverups afterwards.  And for the most part they have been able to get away with it.  The courts, legislators, and large swaths of the public have enabled these patterns.  What is newish is that they have now expanded the targets of their violence to include white Samaritans like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.  (That is why I have chosen a photograph of Kent State for my image.) Of course, as my son recently reminded me, that's because from the vantage point of the Trump Administration, Good and Pretti are race traitors.  Nor can we know what will happen if these cases get to the Taney  Roberts Court.  But given "Kavanaugh Stops" we cannot be confident.

Still, I think that it is clear that all who hope for a democratic United States and for a democratic higher education can take at least two points for inspiration from the courage shown by the citizens of Minneapolis.

First, organization and solidarity does matter.  The city's ability to challenge the occupation was the result of a culture and practice of solidarity and from lessons drawn from past efforts.  As draining and difficult as resistance to fascism may be, it does matter and people should take energy from it.  In this light, it is absolutely crucial that we continue to build upon the growing numbers of faculty who have joined the AAUP and other organizations recently and also that we recognize that, in the language of the IWW, "in injury to one is an injury to all."  Any day that you look at a newspaper you will see new efforts--especially but not only in red states--to attack academic freedom, to reduce higher education to a tool of state ideology, to eliminate tenure.  Even those who live in states where that is not an immediate threat should stand with their colleagues where it is.  Just as people throughout the country are now standing with Minneapolis, so must everyone stand together in higher education.  You may not be involved in Gender Studies and you may not live in Texas.  But the fact that Texas A&M is closing their Women and Gender Studies program because their state legislature and board of trustees decided to control the teaching of sex and gender is a threat to everyone.

Second, the importance of independent perspectives and evidence has made a huge difference in the politics of the invasion of Minneapolis.  This should remind everyone that what they do is important.  Truth-telling, challenging official propaganda with disciplined evidence and alternative perspectives--in other words what scholars and scientists do and what they teach their students--is crucial to challenging the effort of the state to define reality.  Given that the Trump administration has demolished so much of the federal government's ability to provide scientific and scholarly based knowledge, the capacity of scholars and scientists outside of their grasp becomes even more important.  This challenge is admittedly tricky.  Colleges and Universities depend on federal funding and the Trump administration has tried to reduce that dramatically.  So far, thanks to the efforts of the AAUP and other groups, they have faced serious push back in the courts.  But at stake in their efforts, in our resistance, and in the knowledge that we produce is the perpetuation of knowledge that can provide alternatives to the Regime.  Just following RFK Jr.  will make clear what failure in this struggle will mean.

In "Lying in Politics," her review of the Pentagon Papers, Hannah Arendt demonstrated the extent to which the Johnson and Nixon administrations engaged in self-delusion around Vietnam.  As she made clear, the government bureaucrats knew well that what their leaders were saying about the war and the situation in Vietnam were false; indeed they provided numerous reports to that effect.  But both administrations believed that they could impose their imagined reality upon the public at large.  What prevented this from happening in the end was wide spread protest situated within a culture of independent truth-telling that gradually penetrated into the most important magazines, newspapers, and television reports.  Our official mediascape is much more degraded--whether it be Jeff Bezos efforts to turn the Washington Post into a mouthpiece for the billionaire class prostrating itself at the feet of the President or Bari Weiss overturning the integrity of CBS news in an uncanny emulation of Mussolini's Italy--but even today we can see how public pressure is driving the NYT to cut down on euphemism.  Moreover, as we have seen, the ubiquity of cell phones means that neither DHS or the White House can easily control the narrative.  Even George Will understands that.

And again, it is in the practices of faculty, researchers, students, and independent scholars--that is to say the scholarly community--that a commitment to truth telling must be sustained and offered against the regime's efforts to destroy knowledge and eliminate free thought.  The federal government's knowledge production has been damaged--we should not let it happen to ours.  Nor should we let anyone tell us that that knowledge production is unimportant, or doesn't serve the needs of society, or should be silenced.  Minneapolis has shown how important that is.

There is one more lesson I want to raise.  The people of Minnesota have led the efforts to stop the invasion of Minneapolis.  But it is striking that the state's Democratic political leadership--Ellison, Frey and Walz--have stood with them.  I am not a huge fan of Walz and don't know enough about Frey; Keith Ellison has been a strong leader before.  At a moment of intense threat they have stood up to the federal government at potentially great personal risk.  How many of our college and university leaders can make the same statement?  Instead, we have seen compliance and euphemism, in some cases a willingness to throw faculty, student, and staff protesters under the bus, throughout a hedging of the bets and a reluctance to lead.  I understand that the situations are different, and that universities and colleges have been divided on pressing political questions.  But with (very) few exceptions where have those who claim to provide leadership actually shown leadership in defending academic freedom and the importance of scholarship and science as opposed to meekly dodging questions?  Collaborators or compliers I am not sure.  But I doubt future historians will look back at this period as anything but a nadir of university leadership.

So solidarity, truth-telling, and leadership.  We owe all of these to the people of Minneapolis, to the other victims of police and state violence, and to ourselves.

By Michael Meranze

In his last post, Chris made a call for increased faculty governance on budgetary matters and a proposal for how we might do it.  I want to follow up by taking up the problem of governance in a different realm: the very definition of universities.  It is here that faculty face not only an internal but an external challenge and also need to build upon recent efforts to challenge the managerial class's monopoly on definition and meaning.

If the Trumpist attack on higher education has taught us anything it is that university governance is broken.  Faculty, students, and staff can no more count on legally instituted university governors than on state legislators to protect the academic freedom or institutional autonomy of colleges and universities.  Of course, as we have been arguing on the blog, this inability of managers and boards to speak clearly and effectively against those who wish to reduce higher education to either job training or the mouthpiece of the state has been clear for years.  

But the last year has clarified in a national setting what was clear in states like North Carolina and Florida, as well as under blue state governors like Jerry Brown: Boards and managers will collaborate and comply when under pressure from politicians, donors, or the forces of anti-intellectualism.  I do understand that managers face complex situations and have to address multiple demands within a legal framework.  Their failure to fight does not necessarily stem from personal preference.  But whatever the cause, we have to recognize that we cannot count on them to defend colleges and universities from those who seek to control or reduce academic freedom, destroy whatever is left of faculty governance and autonomy, and strike at the very heart of academic research and teaching.

Indeed, if you look at the last year it is clear that it has been faculty, through organizations like the AAUP, that have led the charge to defend the independence of higher education far more than have universities.  Faculty organizations have the initiators of the vast majority of the lawsuits that have been filed to protect individuals, institutions, and the research enterprise.  It has been the faculty who have, at least since the Columbia administration chose to turn their campus into a surveillance state, who have acted to defend the rights of dissent and scholarly inquiry.  To be fair, there have been some presidents who have spoken out.  But they are so few as to confirm the point that administrative and board leadership has failed as a class.

I offer this summary as a backdrop to my real point:  it is now up to faculty as faculty to openly defend and define the mission of colleges and universities.  I am not naive about this: to do so runs against the structure of legal power in higher education (that allows boards and presidents to "speak" for the institution); it defies the conventional arguments for institutional neutrality; and it would take place at a moment when politicians are attacking not only professors but the very notion of professional autonomy.  But it is for all of these reasons even more necessary.

In taking up this project, we do have conceptual resources.  As the AAUP's 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure  put it regarding the relationship of Board to faculty: "The latter are the appointees, but not in any proper sense the employees, of the former. For, once appointed, the scholar has professional functions to perform in which the appointing authorities have neither competency nor moral right to intervene."  

As the Declaration continued, "So far as the university teacher’s independence of thought and utterance is concerned— though not in other regards—the relationship of professor to trustees may be compared to that between judges of the federal courts and the executive who appoints them."  Crucially, the Declaration insisted that this independence had to reside in the scholarly community as a collective if the university was to be a university: "It is, in short, not the absolute freedom of utterance of the individual scholar, but the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion and of teaching, of the academic profession, that is asserted by this declaration of principles.”  The implication was clear, colleges and universities exist to enable the scholarly community to fulfill its purpose and function and fulfilling that function required self-governance whatever the legal form of a college or university is (although we need to change those as well).

This position was never universally accepted of course.  It was challenged almost from its first articulation by Boards, Presidents, and organs of conservative public opinion; and the very basis of its assumption of a unified scholarly community has been undermined by decades of expanded precarious labor, the degradation of job conditions, the spread of managerialism, and the intrusions of donors and legislators.  The Trumpist assault on professional knowledge itself is only the latest, if most intense, version of this attack.

But conceding all of this history doesn't mean conceding the point or claims made in 1915.  There is a fundamental difference between legal and scholarly or moral authority.  The scholarly community may not have the legal authority to represent a college or university as a constituted institution.  But the community of scholars can, and must, speak for the purpose, mission, and function of a college or university and more especially for colleges and universities.  After all, although colleges and universities may have many "uses" as Clark Kerr insisted, they have one overriding mission: to enable the activity of the community of scholars.  And the scholarly community must seize the right--under academic freedom--to speak out when their managers are not upholding that mission.  We cannot  concede to the idea that speaking out on the nature and mission of the university is outside the scope of the faculty's "independence of thought and utterance."  Especially when boards and managers have failed to protect the scholarly community on so many fronts.

To be sure, this community of scholars is broader than what the founders of the AAUP may have intended.  They spoke largely for what we would call tenured and tenure track faculty.  That definition is too narrow--any full consideration of the scholarly community must include all university teachers and researchers as well as students engaged in scholarly activity.  But we will need to recognize that most of the managerial class--whether they bear academic titles or not--no longer speak for the scholarly community.  And we also have to recognize that in defending and reconstituting the university faculty will need to take a leading role--however much we may be demonized now by large sectors of the public. 

Moreover, they need to do it as faculty.  As Timothy Kaufman-Osborn recently pointed out, such a statement was made with great power by the faculty at Columbia when then President Shafik called in the NYPD faculty protested.  But they did so in a very particular way:

What rendered this protest unconventional was the appearance of faculty participants in full academic regalia. Consisting of a robe, a hood, and a cap, this garb is a relic of the earliest European universities that was transplanted to the American colonies and, until the Civil War, worn daily by faculty. By the late nineteenth century, this costume was mostly reserved for official rituals, like commencement, that celebrate the academy’s unique purpose, commend those who contribute to its accomplishment, and congratulate the newly degreed. At Low Plaza, however, this garb was worn at an improvised demonstration called by faculty whose purpose was to affirm their solidarity with students by dissociating themselves from the presidents who hold authority over both. What work does this regalia do, we might wonder, when incorporated within a protest called to castigate those who are entitled to speak on behalf of the university but, according to those assembled on April 22, have betrayed its true end?

Formally, when worn by faculty, academic regalia signifies its wearer’s completion of the requirements for an advanced academic degree, that achievement’s certification by those who were once one’s teachers but are now colleagues, and, finally, admission into a community of scholars that transcends the boundaries of any specific college or university. Cap and gown thus affirm a silent but very real claim to authority that is grounded in a faculty member’s esoteric knowledge; and it is this authority that the faculty of Columbia and Barnard asserted when they declared that these universities must now be “reclaimed” from those whose actions have demonstrated that they understand neither education nor the conditions of its possibility.

Their actions may only have been symbolic, and clearly Shafik and the Columbia Board were not listening.  But such actions—combined with continual work by academic senates, faculty groups and organizations, individuals writing about the purpose of higher education—will be a necessary outreach to the students and the publics.  It will not happen overnight.  

If we want to gain authority within our institutions we have to reach outside of them as well.  In this effort, academic freedom--its description, its range and limitations, its justifications, and its defense--will need to be at the center.  Universities exist to enable the scholarly community, their product is academic freedom: properly understood as the scholarly and disciplinary pursuit of knowledge, the self regulation of the scholarly community, and the provision of the material basis of knowledge production and transmission.  There is no genuine separation between academic freedom as a negative liberty and academic freedom as a positive freedom.  We separate them out because of our individualism and willingness to accept the terms of managerial austerity.    

Again, this will not be easy, there is no guarantee of success, and it will not happen overnight.  But as the last year has shown us, if the faculty and its organizations don't take the lead in opposing the federal and state efforts to restrict academic freedom, to destroy the system of academic research, and to turn higher education into a tool of the current regime, no one will.  And we must do it as defenders of our scholarly mission.  It is the only way to achieve our university.