Leonora Carrington, Crookhey Hall seen July 17 2026  

I want to talk about the relations among AI, university teaching, and university budgeting. These links are not getting nearly enough combined attention.

College graduates are chief among the frontline victims of the AI story, joining non-college workers in a new phase of disposability (see Heck et al. 2026 for Brookings, with good Sankey graphics).  The economic analyses of job market effects remain contradictory (Number 5 of my Director's Note for July, “Top Seven AI Trends for the Summer Break”), and yet data suggest that “young graduates face the grimmest job market in years.”  

The human capital promise that learning leads (directly) to earning was never correct—earnings have always depended on a range of social and economic conditions (e.g. strength of unions), and salaries have always been set by firms and not by universities. But the wage benefit has been further destabilized by the AI industry’s claim that Large Language Models (LLMs) can surpass—and thus replace—all but the very best human cognition. 

Economists see the relatively protected worker as the one possessed of “bundles of diverse skills” (Acemoglu 2025, my discussion).  These allow the worker to perform “hard tasks” and not just “easy tasks” (predictable, thus more automatable). But what are these bundles, and how do you get them?

The basic answer is that the person who can do hard tasks can think independently of their tools, including a Large Language Model or other tech.  The worker faces a problem, parts of which are poorly defined and about which information is incomplete and ambiguous. The worker has to have intellectual agency in relation to the definition of the problem and be able to make good choices about parameters and methods. The worker has to be able to combine heterogeneous elements and think across multiple epistemic frameworks (whose assumptions they need to understand).  The worker must be able to admit and analyze error, be resilient with failure, repeat their effort with controlled changes of approach, take in criticism from others and also communicate in (complicated, sometimes adversarial) groups.

Universities discuss themselves almost entirely in terms of pecuniary benefits, usually measured by an individual graduate's personal salary.  But their most important effects are non-pecuniary and social. 

I set up a capabilities heuristic in The Great Mistake (before AI), and argued that every college should fund its achievement by every graduate. Last year, I modified it slightly for a presentation on AI to an interesting, sceptical group of Istanbulian engineers. 

Figure 1: 14 Intellectual Capabilities

The brown squares mark the only steps that, in my opinion, can be enhanced with AI.  All the others must be brain-only in their development, so that the resulting brain can use AI and not be used by it.  The first step, "ability to study," appears to be endangered by the passive use of LLMs services.  Same for "knowing what a research question is," which is trickier than it seems.  And the heart of both learning and research, Steps 6 and 7, creating a well-formed research question and then forming a thesis or hypothesis about it, are precisely what students can bypass with LLMs (as this classic undergrad essay explained).

Universities are not set up to help everyone have many or most, much less all of these capabilities. Under decades of financial pressure, most stopped trying.  As the latest and greatest ed-tech substitute for hands-on, face-to-face instruction, AI is causing cognitive damage whose variations are registered in new papers every day: yesterday's was AI's way of suppressing the ability to say "I don't know" in a way that enables thinking to continue. Academic advocates of AI increasingly insist on people actively using conceptual framings that stay independent of the models themselves (Andrew Piper).

There’s a large and growing literature of AI-related work about human capabilities and those that AI users absolutely need to have.  Pretty much all of those I’ve read insist that workers need to control technology and not be controlled by it. 

In his new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, tech expert Cory Doctorow wants today’s “reverse centaurs,” like Amazon warehouse workers, whose powerful cyborg horse body dictates to their human brain, to be centaurs instead. In the process, he makes a particularly stark case for intellectual agency for all.

Automation isn’t necessarily the enemy of warehouse work: there’s nothing wrong with a forklift! The difference between automation that helps a warehouse worker and automation that torments that worker is whether the worker gets to choose where, when, and how to use that automation . . . 

When you find yourself surrounded by people swearing that a given tool is worse than useless and others swearing that it has made their lives easier and better, you can bet that the former group is made up of reverse centaurs who’ve had AI imposed upon them, [and that] the latter group is all centaurs who’ve gotten to make up their own minds about where, when, and how to use AI tools.  The solution to the paradox is to stop thinking about what the gadget does, and pay attention to who the gadget does it to and who the gadget does it for. (10-11)

Being a centaur requires massive labor of intellectual self-development so that one is basically smart enough to run the tech and not let the tech replace one's thinking.  The university is a central agent in this creation of mind. 

For intellectual power to exist at scale, graduates would have to be people who’ve not just had classes on “how AI is being applied within their fields” (p 13) so they can adapt to it. Graduates would have to be people with the capacity to put AI to uses that they themselves have conceived and designed. This means having intellectual agency over one’s “bundle of skills.” 

This high standard flies in the face of widespread passive AI use. It also defies the history of capitalism’s replacement of labor (and labor’s judgment) with technology. This standard also runs afoul of the unbelievable capital investment being sunk into AI infrastructure almost entirely on the premise of imminent superintelligence that can replace untold millions of workers at a fraction of their cost. I am sure that this premise is wrong, but the enormous sunk costs are pushing the world’s most powerful capitalists into forcing it to be right. One way of forcing rightness is to run down the “median person”—and spread a technology that also insures their mediocrity by rotting their brains.

There isn’t a conspiracy, but there is a neo-eugenicist Valley disdain for the regular smart people of exactly the kind universities exist to enhance. (Check out Theo Baker’s Stanford saga, How to Rule the World.)  The mind-boggling amount of capital consumed by the AI industry assumes the replacement (not the complementary enhancement) of mass quantities of human workers, which requires the industry to escalate their war on human capabilities. This means a war on the project of human development via formal education that runs from Plato to Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, on through Emerson, Douglass, Du Bois, Dewey, Jordan, Lorde, et al., continuing with current deep investigations in philosophy, software design, and cognitive science. Today's California Ideology substitutes AI for what it posits (erroneously) to be inadequate human intelligence.  

This is an epic historical shift, from trying to make humanity more intelligent, by any means necessary including tech, to trying to make intelligence artificial, without really caring what happens to humanity. 

Or to put it another way: 

Doctorow’s apparently simplistic dualism that privileges the active intellectual use of technology is in fact supported by detailed scholarly analysis. I’ve especially benefitted from the thinking of Brian Cantwell Smith on reckoning vs. judgment (my review), Alan Blackwell on human agency with programming (my review), and Vivienne Ming on the complementary strengths of humans and machines, who notes, “exploring poorly structured possibility spaces remains a profoundly human talent” (23).

In spite of the variable and often fabulous uses to which we put AI (say, as every centaur’s Personal Assistant, Trend 2), it’s hard to see how big tech’s sunk capital will allow the AI industry to climb down from its categorical and unjustified minimization of human capabilities.  

This in turn heightens the contradiction faced by colleges and universities. Their core function has been the creation of knowledge labor, with the default aim being “middle-class” stability and enjoyment. Around 1980, using the Bayh-Dole Act as a symbolic watershed, universities increased their visible service to knowledge capital.  In addition to shifting science towards tech transfer and licensing returns (with important opposition from many science faculty members), university officials have in recent decades bought into every ed-tech capital substitute for knowledge labor. Now the AI industry is proposing the ultimate loyalty oath: universities must affirm the inevitability of replacing much—most—eventually all (depends on the day and the speaker) university-educated knowledge labor with AI.

Again, the point of the university, even economically, has been to graduate free workers rather than serfs to any company’s tech. That’s always been a key reason why people take the time, trouble, and expense to finish university.  

For example, the University of California’s Undergraduate Experience Survey asks students why they selected their major. When they respond, four-fifths of students say “intellectual curiosity”; three-quarters say “prepare for a fulfilling career.”  Only half pick “leads to a high-paying job" (Table 1, p 6). The pecuniary benefit is baked into a college degree; college is an exhausting, expensive way to get a decent salary if you don’t also really want to acquire intellectual strength so you can have the challenge and pleasure of grasping reality and affecting the world. 

How are universities going to cultivate “human judgment, creativity, and subject matter expertise,” as UCOP put it this month’s report, “The Economic Impact of a UC Degree”?  Many people will say that you just need decent skills with using AI so you can set up a rig that works for you. I love how many smart and dedicated people are sharing tips on excellent chatbot workflow transformation all over the internet.  But all of these setups can suck out intelligence rather than extend it. 

All users need to have mental strength going into AI use, and continue to develop that strength.  And that requires tremendous (and ongoing) offline, brain-only work.  This work is the point of colleges and universities. They need to offer the regularity of back-and-forth cultivation that only elite universities have even tried. The need to furnish tutorials and small-group learning  for the masses, for the first time. This will start with much smaller typical class sizes than publics have right now. You can no longer have classes with 140 students that you call “discussions.”  Even 40 students is way too many for deep individual development.  Large lectures can no longer lack discussion sections, and departments will need to fund face-to-face interactions on which teaching and assessment is based. How will, a university like UC Irvine pay for meaningful assessments when they should no longer have TAs grade 300 papers written on laptops with multiple AI subscriptions? Universities now need to offer group work that’s engaged and supervised by advanced faculty, on the model of crits in fine art--with help via reassigning middle managers to the educational core. In contrast, most students now appear to be using LLMs to complete take-home exams and problem-sets, making these useless: for just one example, see  “How a Blind Professor Saw Through His Students’ Cheating” at Brown University.  Universities will need to develop oral tutorials and exams, with tech assists monitored and complemented by new intensities of face-to-face contact between students and instructors.

Here we run into a big problem. Any meaningful combination of these upgrades will bankrupt the current business model.  The model has been draining funds from instruction for decades, through vendor outsourcing, adjunctification, administrative growth, capital projects, and the many varieties of “mission creep.”  Universities with money to spend, spend it on administration. At MIT, “faculty grew by only 9.2% between 1985 and 2023, while administrative staff grew by 189%.”  This is a decades-old problem that has led to diluted instruction, against the talents and the wishes of the contingent faculty who teach the majority of the nation’s college courses by rationing their per-student time to survive. Universities have never addressed the administrative bloat, the reduced per-student instructional resources, or the steady one-way adjunctification.  Only union bargaining has slowed the drift. 

By the 2010s, the U.S. university system had locked in reduced investment in students that also varied by racial group (Black, Indigenous, and Latino students go to poorer schools than Asians and whites): they had set instructional funding at less than one-third of overall expenditures (see Nate Johnson on both points, comparing Figure 1 to Figure 3).  Teaching at public colleges is highly dependent on state funding and tuition: at UC Irvine, for example, 70% of “core funding” comes from these sources this past year (and 81% the year before). Nationally, state revenues for public colleges are still 2 dollars short of their (inflation-adjusted) level of 1999, having spent most of that period below the level at the turn of the century. Even with a 50% increase in (inflation-adjusted) tuition, total revenues have only increased 14% over 25 years, with likely all of that increase--and more--going to non-instructional functions. 

In short, the typical public college or university lacks the money to improve instruction to the point that the vast majority of its graduates can run AI and not be run by it. Non-wealthy privates are in the same position. 

The UC report I linked above, on the "economic impact" of a degree, ducks the question by saying the current system is working fine because look at the graduate salaries. UC grads do have better salaries than non-graduates and the graduates of some public colleges.  It is indeed still better to have a B.A. degree than not. But a UC graduate's earnings tells you little about their actual learning on a UC campus: it tells you about labor markets, and in this case labor markets for people who left college 5-10 years ago, in the pre-AI era.  The cognitive crisis must be faced directly, and so must the need for new (public) investment--a new political economy-- to support real solutions to it.  I'll discuss this issue in Part 2.

Banff, Alberta back country on June 5, 2026  

by Dennis M. Hogan, Lecturer on History & Literature, Harvard University

This is the third of the talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. The others were Chris Nealon’s and Asheesh Kapur Siddique’s is here, along with my introduction to the panel.

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This paper is a response to two trends I've noticed over the past couple of years.

Landing Santa Barbara Airport on Jan 30, 2026   

 by Charlie Hale, Dean of Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies, UC Santa Barbara. This is his response as a scholar, whose writings were called into question by the Report.  The response does not represent the views of the dean's office, or of the university. 

Chris here: I'm posting a set of answers to a reporter’s questions from Charlie Hale, one of the authors cited for criticism in the Vanderbilt-Washington University “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.”  The reporter, Emma Whitford, wrote a good piece in Inside Higher Ed about the scholars who were cited as examples of the alleged decline of qualitative scholarship. None of the scholars she’d reached had been told that they were cited in it. 

From Tunnel Mtn, Banff on June 6, 2026

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

 

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

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

                          

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

** 

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

 

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

 

Banff, Alberta back country on June 3, 2026  

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

 

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

 

 

UC Irvine on April 13, 2018     

by Trevor Griffey, School of Humanities, UC Irvine

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

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

 

510 E. Peltason Dr, UC Irvine  

by Trevor Griffey, School of Humanities, UC Irvine

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

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

Venice, Italy on May 8, 2026   

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

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

Wayne State, Detroit on April 12, 2019  

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

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

New Haven People's Center on April 18, 2026  

I gave this talk at the 45^th Anniversary Conference of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University,  April 17, 2026. Many thanks to the organizers, speakers, audience, and my co-panelists.

I’m going to talk about humanities ambition in a time of diminished authority for its fields,  and I’ll say we need big increases in our ambition in response.  But I have to note that the humanities won’t get enough help from their universities, and in many cases will have to fight them.  The Trump administration’s systematic efforts to erase people of color from the American past and present has been translated on campuses as quiet acceptance, via, in particular, the deletion of DEI programs and the merging or closure of departments associated with ethnicity, sexuality, or countries and cultures MAGA America dislikes.

Stonehenge on December 21, 2025   

In the end, the university’s main value is its intellectuality, the treatment of everything that is with thinking and all its methods. 

 

That was the first line of the post I started drafting on Monday, on the holiday Easter Monday here in Britain. But I was struggling to concentrate.  I thought maybe I needed a rest day: I’d spent a couple of days last week writing a section on AI and the future of jobs for a collaborative report that we’re doing on the crisis of learning worsened by AI, and after devoting another chunk of time to it over the weekend it wound up at 6000 words. It’s not the length, it’s the sense of fighting inevitability from which I’d need a rest.

 

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.  

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.” 

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.”