UC Board of Regents, March 2017    

That is the question.

This is the answer: Never.  

Or not at least until the campuses fight and change current Office of the President (UCOP) budget ideology and practice. They have never done that.  Not yet.  

I’m going to compare UCOP’s January state budget show with their offstage borrowing.  State funding yields little, while the debt yields a lot.  

I’ll keep my eye on two major implications for the campuses. The first is a lock-in of structural deficits with continuing cuts to the educational core--to both teaching and research.  

UCLA remains a case in point (Liner Note 48). At the UCLA Faculty Association Blog, Dan Mitchell has found a current-year deficit of $290 million, and a three-year cumulative deficit for UCLA of $1.37 billion and counting.  UCLA’s Council for Planning and Budget (CPB) has released a March update to their fall report that is close to this deficit estimate (see Table 4, DMS p 18). UPDATE March 26: Interim CFO reports, "Based on approved spending plans and current planning assumptions, UCLA’s closing deficit on central accounts for FY26 is projected at approximately $220 million" (email to UCLA community).

The second implication follows UCLA CPB’s confirmation of their previous finding that academic units and student affairs run small or zero deficits, while the big deficit spending comes from senior management initiatives (DMS 2).  Management initiatives may be crowding out academics through the former’s access to deficit spending and the proceeds of institutional borrowing that faculty units lack. 

To track both of these issues, every campus is going to need UCLA CPB-style vigilance from their Senates, for starters.  Much more light needs to be shed on this matter of academic units being made to pay for losses run up by non-academic other stuff.

∞∞∞

UCOP’s January budget presentation to the Regents’ Finance and Capital Strategies (Item F1) was oblivious to all this. Nathan Brostrom, system CFO, delivered it as usual, with his regular junior partner, Caín Diaz, Associate VP for Budget Analysis and Planning. Their theme was budget victory and enthusiastic Newsom support.

“The Governor introduced one of the strongest budgets . ..  that we have seen in the past two decades,” Brostrom said. That is like saying, “the Governor’s ramen noodle dinner tonight is one of the best ramen dinners of the last twenty nights.”   Click here for further discussion of UC’s Ramen Decades. But even this was an overstatement. Brostrom’s triumphalist framing headed off serious questions from individual regents about the adequacy of the governor’s offer.

In the Governor’s January proposal for 2026-27, the only good surprise was that he proposed actually to pay UC the full increase mandated by the Compact that he had signed, rather than deferring it as he usually does.  For 2026-27 the governor is proposing to keep his word! Again! This future miracle likely caused much of the room’s relief. 

The Governor’s proposal for the state allocation is better seen than heard.

FIGURE 1

In fact, the Governor is still not keeping his word on the current year, 2025-26. The 7% increase they described comes from giving back two pieces of the withheld 2025-26 Compact funding ($96.3M and $129.7M), while even next year not sending the third piece. $144.5 million remains deferred until 2027-28—after Newsom has left office.   

Well what the heck, because Brostrom and Diaz covered for the governor by misdescribing their own November 2025 budget request. At that time, they had asked for a $702.7 million increase in UC’s base budget from the state and $1.36 billion in one-time funds for deferred maintenance and related projects. The first amount came from the Compact’s 5% increase plus all past Compact increases on which the state reneged. The total ask rounded off to $2 billion.

I’ve explained why I thought this was asking for a minimal, carb-only budget (Liner Note 44).  But the total was big by ramen standards.

Here’s their January summary of their November request.

FIGURE 2

Brostrom and Diaz simply leave out their requested $1.36 billion for their deferred maintenance and related problems (already lowballed as $9 billion in Figure 6). They don’t explain what actually happened: that Newsom reduced the requested $702.7 million to $480.3 million, minus another $8.1 million for housing debt service, leaving $472.2 million. This is 2/3rds of November’s request for continuing base funding and less than one-quarter of UCOP’s overall November ask. 

Brostrom and Diaz didn’t point out Newsom’s reduction. Nor did any regent mention the apparently unmentionable: the state budget is nearly $250 billion, and Newsom could fully honor his UC Compact on base funding with an additional 0.05% of that. Better, apparently, not to mention the logical conclusion that Newsom (and the Democratic legislature) really don’t care too much about UC.

In the blue bubble—the funding Newsom offers—UCOP has thrown in nearly $300 million called “TSP + Asset Management Strategies. This gets the apparent total of new funding back up there in the $700 millions!  But TSP stands for Tuition Stability Plan, meaning it’s student not state money, and the assets being managed are also UC’s.

Inflation, the slide notes, means UC has an additional $937 million in costs for doing exactly the same thing as this year.  So UCOP has gotten half of what UC’s campuses need just to meet inflation. 

This is obviously bad news for the campuses—it means continuing structural deficits that will grow without further cuts. 

And yet you won’t hear doubts about UCOP’s deal for UC campuses in an open meeting of the UC Regents. The Brostrom spin was exactly the opposite, in which the Governor loves UC and proves his love with his powerful fiscal outlays.

With these misleading presentations, UCOP has turned the Board of Regents into a clinical case of hyponormalization. I’ve noted this before: “In hypernormality, the system’s dysfunction is widely noted. In hyponormality, information is withheld and discussion is blocked so that dysfunction can be denied. In both cases, administrative authority is maintained as program damage propagates through the system.”

In sum, the January presentation hid the deficits in what we might call UC Academic.  The meeting sailed on, obvious to programs dying of induced cost disease along the shore.

Does UCOP have any plan?  Well yes. Their same one plan!

FIGURE 3  

 One genuine success has been the increase in the share of UC students who graduate debt free. Affordability is extremely important, and when the regents hear directly from students the students always stress how strapped they remain financially.

However, high “return-to-aid” comes out of gross tuition receipts and lowers the revenues that support operations on the campuses. 

The affordability politics feed the rest of the UCOP plan, which is to continue to overcrowd UC campuses, in large part via enrollment growth the state doesn’t fund, offering the legislature a political bona fide for which UC gets nothing in return, while UCOP affirms the commodified B.A. as workforce preparedness, which in turn supports degraded learning conditions on the campuses.

Sorry it’s not better news. My point is that it doesn’t have to be like this.

Note that the theater of state budgeting is fought over puny amounts that offer no meaningful change year after year.  Meanwhile, if UCLA is typical, campus academic units live within their budgets, which are reduced in every typical year by inflation and politically-driven enrollment growth. 

The real money and any financial fun is clearly elsewhere in the UC budget.  Here we arrive at what presentations in the Board’s open finance sessions never directly discuss. That is UC Business—and their enormous debt.

∞∞∞

Here’s a new wonderful chart to show what overall UC operating revenues look like.  It runs for the better part of a decade through the most recent UC Financial Report.

FIGURE 4  

Because accounting conventions classify state appropriations as non-operating revenues, I’ve added them here.

Start with the $10 billion mark ($10,000 thousands) : I’ve arbitrarily pegged a reddish-brown line there, which tracks inflation since 2018.  This is not consumer inflation but the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI, designed to reflect what colleges and universities actually spend money on.

With one major and one minor exception, all UC revenues are at or below the $5 billion level– net student tuition and fees (orange), state funding (magenta), federal research funding (dark brown), and so on. Every one of these revenue sources fails to match higher ed inflation.

The minor exception is “Educational Activities, net.”  In spite of its name, it is “primarily medical professional fees” (Annual Financial Report 2024-25, p 21). 

The major exception is “Medical Centers, net.”  Their revenues (not profits!) have doubled in seven years to top $25 billion.

In short, the only way to be at UC and get resources that beat inflation is to generate medical income. Everything else—UC Academic —is flat or falling relative to inflation.

This is a Tale of Two Universities of California. The academic core is 20 or 30% of the total budget (around 30% if you rightly include research grants, Display 1). To repeat, it experiences steady fiscal stagnation and real-dollar decline. 

Medical operations are at least half of the remainder. They leverage the brains, the research, the tremendous energy of the faculty and staff of both the Academic and the Business sides—UC Health is a very high-end knowledge business the capabilities it houses and expands are obviously admirable.  The issue here, though, is that they experience continuous and exciting revenue growth  (“Budget for Current Operations,” 2025-26, p 4).

Were you a financial manager, which part of the operation would get your best care and feeding? Which part would most engage you as a regent, when forced to endure the state’s shell game in Figure 1?  

Personally I vote for the medical side. After a quarter-century of UCOP failure to get adequate funding increases for the core, my managerial alter ego might have given up on that.  (I define “failure” in charts like Figures 4 and 5 here.) 

So back to UC Business. Getting those huge revenues in UC Health actually costs a lot. The medical centers have very high staff and “supplies and materials” costs. Billing and compliance are an endless nightmare. University medicine also needs a steady diet of capital projects.  Capital projects require a steady diet of debt.  

A core feature of UC financing that Brostrom and Diaz don’t bring up in the open meetings is the growth of UC debt.

FIGURE 5

 

UC total debt has doubled in this same period. Totals vary slightly, but we can round UC’s total long-term debt on June 30, 2025 to $40 billion.

UCOP adds billions in debt every year. They took on $3 billion in net new obligations in FY25 (Table 13.2a). Their net borrowing in FY25 was in the range of what they received in state funding.  Accordingly, UC spent $1.3 billion last year in debt service (MDA.3, p 18).

Is this massive debt growth supposed to go on forever? And what does the debt actually build? Not all of this is medical debt.  But really a lot is. 

Where the debt actually goes came up in the January Finance and Capital Strategies Committee meeting in the form of a question from the only UC regent who exercises financial due diligence in public, Schwarzenegger appointee Hadi Makarechian, zooming in from the flight deck.

FIGURE 6

 

I’ve edited the exchange for length and clarity (@ 32’).

Regent Hadi Makarechian: We raised some bonds just last year. . . . How much of that is going to be football construction and expansion?

CFO Nathan Brostrom: we did a $2 billion bond issue in December. It was actually massively oversubscribed. We actually had over $5 billion of orders. So we actually increased the amount to $2.2 billion. 
That was almost all for new construction. A lot of it for our medical centers, for the San Francisco project, for the Davis project. We are doing another bond issue at the end of February, which will be almost entirely for refunding and refinancing. 

Yes, UC borrows so much that refinancing is a continuous issue. And it is pleased that market demand lets it borrow even more.

In the initial presentation, Brostrom noted proposed legislation that would get the state back in the business of issuing General Obligation bonds on its own credit and using the proceeds to fund UC and CSU construction.  The state did this for decades—it’s how it built UC and CSU, covering financing costs with tax receipts because the resulting academic buildings and large, high-quality campuses were a public benefit. The state stopped issuing general obligation bonds for higher ed this around 2006, during the Schwarzenegger years, so UC has had to use revenue bonds instead, meaning that interest must be covered by revenues generated by building activities (student rents in housing, patient fees in medical buildings; some discussion p 81).

Brostrom said more about the strategy.

NB: The bond issues that I mentioned in our presentation would be state GO bonds, general obligation bonds. So they would not be our obligation. We're going to be advocating for those in particular, because in our med centers and housing, we have a revenue source to repay them, but a lot in the education and research buildings, we don't have a ready revenue source. 


You might assume that student tuition and state funding are revenue sources. But they don’t work the same for rating agencies, and there isn’t actually any to spare to fund capital projects for UC Academic. General funds plus tuition don’t properly cover campus operations, and hence the deficits.

Makarechian persists on this point.

HM: Aside from those [prospective future GO bonds], what is our debt capacity . . . that's left for us?

B: So, right now, we have $30 billion of outstanding debt in our general lien, as well as a second lien for medical centers, and then a third lien for housing. That doesn't include any of the P3 projects that we have done. That's just our straight debt.

And the total rounds up to $40 billion.  (See Table 13.2a for some amounts and flavors.) Back to the exchange.

NB: You know, the good thing about the projects we've been doing, both on the medical center side and on housing, is that they are accretive in debt capacity. 
They create debt capacity, because we're adding beds that will have a revenue stream with them. Where we have less debt capacity is for education projects or research projects, where we're actually often times pledging our indirect cost recovery or other revenue sources that are threatened now.

So we have to be much more careful with those projects than with the-- I think most of the projects you're going to see are going to be in the health area and in housing.

HM: Yeah, but that's the side that limits our capacity for growth, because if you don't have classroom capacity or labs or whatever--they're not revenue, they're not housing or food services and all that stuff--but if you're limited in that area, then we couldn't accept more students.

That's really the gist of my question. What sort of debt capacity do we have left for that kind of expansion?  Because I don't think we can expect much from the state on that side.

B: Yeah, that's, um, uh, I'm not going to give a hard number now, because the rating agencies will slap my hand after this, but we did just get our ratings reaffirmed at AA, so, I will work with Meg, and come up with what we think are our current. It's usually a range, Regent Makarechian, because of the range and interest rates.

Actually, if Brostrom answered the question, the hand slapping would come from his own campuses.   At this point, Makarechian folded. “I’m good with the answer,” he said, even though he didn’t get an answer about debt capacity.  Brostrom managed to avoid having to tell the regents when UC might have to stop covering major costs with borrowing, which touches on the issue of when it would have to stop building.

Brostrom did clarify his thinking about the distinct funding status of UC Academic. To build a campus research facility, UC has to pledge “our indirect cost recovery or other revenue sources that are threatened now.”  Research doesn’t generate net positive revenue like new customers do—students paying rent or board, patients paying high American medical fees.

Nor, for Bostrom, can teaching fund borrowing. This is an interesting perspective, since finance does see students as customers. But California student customers don’t pay enough per Assignable Square Foot to build a new classroom, library, or student affairs building, given construction costs.  On the other hand, high growth in patient revenues creates huge revenues to expand debt capacity. This is obviously the better business.  Hence the strategy of campus overcrowding, and of using UC debt capacity for the businesses like medical and housing. 

I’m shocked by UC’s steady accumulation of debt. But it bothers me not so much because I think UC faces insolvency, which I don’t.  Its asset base is just too massive--$112 billion--and its net position, largely because of market gains, was $11 billion in FY2025 (Table MDA1).   The debt bothers me because it covers up, and even accelerates, shrinking academic capacity on the campuses.  And UCOP is all in on the strategy.

∞∞∞

Okay, this is getting a bit long even for me, so let me make one final point about deficits in the UC system overall.   What I see is that massive revenues do not give UC comfortable or stable overall margins on operations. Massive borrowing likely makes them worse.

Take 2024-25, which is close to a best case (markets up, endowments up, pension and retiree health benefits more manageable).  Narrating  their figures of “primary activities” (Table MDA.3), UCOP concludes, “revenues associated with primary activities exceeded expenses by $1.6 billion in 2025 primarily due to the decrease in pension expense and retiree health benefits expense. In 2024 and 2023, expenses exceeded revenues associated with primary activities by $0.5 billion and 2.2 billion, respectively.”

In other words, UC’s “primary” operations lost $2.7 billion in FY23 and FY24, and then swung positive in FY25 because of lower benefits costs.  In spite of massive revenues, and the constant feeding of UC Business, UC overall isn’t reliably running in the black year after year.

As I stare at Table MDA.3, I can make FY25’s positive income go away.  As is regularly the case, “operating revenues,” which lose a lot, are saved by “non-operating revenues,” and state funds indeed should be counted as operating revenues. However, UCOP books $2.2 billion in “Private gifts, net,” yet states in the notes that “the annual income distribution transferred to the campuses from endowments held by the University was $620.4 million” for FY25  (p 100-01). The campuses certainly got private gift revenue from their campus foundations, but UCOP doesn’t say how much.  Is cash flow from gifts really over $2 billion and not closer to $1 billion? 

I’m not comfortable with this. The same goes for the additional $1 billion in Other Revenues, defined as “including unrestricted investment income.”  This revenue is also a creature of market performance.

If we want to know how UC operations are doing, and include only education-based “non-operating” revenues (state funding, “Direct government grants,” and “Federal Pell Grants”), UC in FY25 stayed in the red. Not by much--$280 million.  But it looks like the University, with its enormous revenues, huge fiscal complexity, and titanic financing efforts, is barely scraping by.

In short, given the current model, UCOP will not be fixing the campus deficits.  Like never.

∞∞∞ 

At the end of the September 2025 meeting of the same regents’ finance committee, and a long delicate discussion of the Tuition Stability Plan renewal, its chair Michael Cohen thought it was over, and then saw a request to speak.

Q: I have a quick one, and I recognize I've been with the system for only 18 days.

Michael Cohen: Yes. Please, please add your insights from 10 days. 


Q. So, basically I’m all for affordability and low indebtedness for our students, completely committed to that. At the same time, the plans that we have, where we guarantee the tuition for student cohorts for five years, I mean, it's admirable, if we can afford it. The question is, can we afford it? 
Because all our costs, faculty costs, staff costs, student employee costs increase annually, not every five years. So, I think the structural deficits will keep increasing with this model. In my opinion, but again, I've been around for only a few days. 


CFO Bostrom: Truth is, the way it works, once you get fully baked in, it does increase by 5% every year . . . it's a 20% increase for the new class that comes in. So, it does average out to be 5%.

The questioner was Dennis Assanis, the new chancellor for UC Santa Barbara.  He went home and (re)did the math, put up a “transparency” website (99% data free!), and imposed cuts to UCSB Academic of 10%.

 

Cornell University on July 11, 2014   

By Dr. Lori Allen, writing from London 

Chris Newfield’s recent post discussed a trend in university administration craven behavior: hiding behind the principle of “institutional neutrality” (or “restraint”) as a way to avoid putting well-paid heads above the bushes to say anything principled about the real problems of the day. Chris writes: “Under Trump-turboed pressure from government and from a loud minority of heavyweight trustees, university presidents have largely muzzled themselves.” 

Among the many forms of pressure are lawsuits brought by government and pro-Israel lawfare activists alleging Title VI violations. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits institutions that receive federal financial assistance from engaging in discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or national origin,” has now been weaponized. An achievement of the Civil Rights Movement and originally passed as a measure to thwart racism, Title VI’s remit has been expanded to address discrimination on the basis of “shared ancestry”—the result of long years of agitation by Kenneth L. Marcus, a conservative movement lawyer and pro-Israel activist who succeeded in bringing antisemitism claims into the purview of Title VI.  

As shown by a remarkable recent Middle East Studies Association (MESA) report, jointly issued with AAUP, there has been a sharp increase in unfounded accusations of antisemitism made against universities. Battling the scourge of antisemitism and all forms of discrimination should be a goal of all institutions, universities not least. But this isn’t what’s going on. 

According to MESA research, all but one of the 102 antisemitism complaint letters that they analyzed focused on speech critical of Israel, and 79% of those simply describe criticisms of Israel or Zionism with no reference to Jews or Judaism—meaning: the complaints were about politics, not antisemitism. It’s all part of a right-wing method by which Trump’s administration and pro-Israel activists collude in pursuit of shared or parallel goals: bringing higher education (especially elite institutions) to heel and driving university pedagogy and cultures into ideological line, which includes stifling criticism of Israel and promoting Zionism. 

Making false claims of antisemitism is a tried-and-true tactic deployed by pro-Israel activists to silence and intimidate faculty, students, and staff who would dare speak out on behalf of Palestinian rights and against genocide. It was mobilized to great effect in the UK and across Europe—as research by the European Legal Support Center has shown—when universities adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which wrongly conflates political criticism of Israel with antisemitism, leading to false accusations of antisemitism being made against faculty and students.

These forms of harassment and smear campaigns have led to self-censorship, no doubt the goal of the parallel efforts in the US, too. The gateway to the chilling of academic freedom was opened by the IHRA in Europe; in the United States, it’s been Title VI. As the MESA-AAUP report indicates, even when those who are accused are eventually shown to be innocent of the egregious charges, the mere fact of being targeted works “to chill speech through exerting pressure on affected schools to investigate and scrutinize faculty, staff, and student speech.” 

It’s a round-robin of repression. In the wake of lawsuits concluded with settlement agreements (rather than judgements), some universities have adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism or announced they will follow federal guidance and use the IHRA (Harvard, Berkeley, NYU) including the definition’s attached examples of antisemitism that specifically equate criticism of Israel—which is protected political speech under the First Amendment—with antisemitism. 

The latest move in what has become a worryingly predictable game is the US government’s lawsuit against Harvard, filed on March 20, 2026, because its “faculty and leadership turned a blind eye to antisemitism and discrimination against Jews and Israelis.” It’s strange claim to make against Harvard, an institution that has violated core First Amendment protections to show obeisance to the government’s dictats, interfering in academic programs devoted to Middle East studies (as a MESA amicus brief spelled out). 

The tactic of weaponizing antisemitism claims, whether through the IHRA or Title VI, is now widely recognized and proven as that—a tactic, a cynical ploy. It’s time for university leadership to stop playing along with this dangerous and destructive game.

Genoa, Italy, on June 26, 2024   

You aren’t likely to have looked for criticism of Trump’s illegal war on Iran from college presidents or governing boards.  If you did type the search string, “university president criticizes war on Iran” early on March 5^th you would have gotten a string of university professors commenting as individuals (“Law school professors say strikes on Iran violate international law”).  I got the same result on March 8^th.

This is an established pattern: university professors go out in force and use their expertise to affect public debate about a major issue. Universities practice “institutional neutrality” and say nothing. The justification, as explained by an advocate, Daniel Diermeier, president of Vanderbilt University, is that an institutional position “risk[s] establishing a ‘party line’ and stifling debate among students and faculty.” 

UC President Mark Yudof Reviews Demands Nov 2011  

Chris here: I've criticized pervasive info failures in higher ed, from campus budget opacities to the inability of national associations in the humanities to gather data that can be used to strategize and build positions, organizations, and infrastructure.  Here's a group doing something about that.  The Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE) and the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace have launched a project called "Know Your Governing Board."  

One major element of it is a survey that they are asking campus groups across the country to fill out.  There's research involved! It will be worth it.  

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. 

 

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.