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| Genoa, Italy, on June 26, 2024 |
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.”
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| UC President Mark Yudof Reviews Demands Nov 2011 |
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| UCLA Royce Hall on May 14, 2018 |
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 5th, 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.
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| East Village on October 31, 2022 |
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
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 ExposĂ© 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: HenequĂ©n 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 17th 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.
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.
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| Duke Women's Basketball 65-58 Virginia, Jan 16 2026 |
On Friday we had a reading group on my Public Books piece, “Academics Must Seize the Means of Knowledge Production.” I do say there that university management has failed to improve or even sustain universities over the past 25 years, and that frontline people should aspire to taking direct control of daily operations. The model would be a variation of industrial democracy or academic self-management on a co-op model. (This has in fact been the enabling illusion of university administration—that the top officials are professors doing a period of service to the institution and so, self-governance, we already have it!) Spain’s Mondragon, a large worker-owned co-op conglomerate, is so successful that positive coverage occasionally appears in the English-language press, like this New Yorker article on its portent of “an alternative future for capitalism.” Similarly, the UK has laws that make co-operative higher education feasible, and scholars like Joss Winn and Mike Neary worked on this through the 2010s. At the same time, imagining academics seizing their universities also makes me wonder whether I’ve lost touch with reality.
And yet, self-governance has been a continuous issue in US higher education, a regulative ideal that rarely inspires faculty activism even as it measures the shortfalls of existing management. Unionization remains a visible horizon, usually very distant for tenure-track faculty at research-intensive universities like Duke or UNC-Chapel Hill or the University of California. Full self-governance is well over that horizon, although faculty since the 19th century have wanted much more direct control over academics than the governing board structure and its presidentialism have ever allowed. On these points, universities were and are anti-democratic, and their officials have never supported any real variant of workplace democracy. The very idea swims upstream against the torrents of autocracy that have steadily gathered force since 2000.
In the Duke discussion, some comments protested the infantilization of the faculty through the withholding of basic workplace information, particularly budgetary. Stories of being patronized and rebuffed by unpersuasive managers were lamentably familiar. And some questions asked about fixing that. What practical steps can staff and faculty take? Where are students in all this?
In these contexts, I retreat from the event horizon of seizing the means of academic production to some “non-reformist reforms.”
The conversation got me to formulate a general four-step process in my mind. The content of each item needs to be filled out in any given process by the people actually involved. The work has to be collective; individuals don’t get that far fighting organizations, though they can inspire others. Academic senates and faculty associations are meaningful platforms, if really used.
1. Identify the concrete issue(s), the specific problems that are damaging teaching, research, student welfare, morale, etc. One example has been the near-total absence of campus-based research funding in the humanities for the last 20 of the 30 years I taught at UCSB. Another may be biases or other problems with the tenure and promotion process. Another might be bad administrative messaging about the use of Large Language Models in courses.
2. Figure out what data, arguments, and solutions you do have, and also what you don’t. Once you identify what’s missing, start asking the administration for it. Chasing admin isn’t the main action, however necessary: the process involves data assembly, analysis, narrative writing, arguing and persuading: it is a process of collaborative self-education, and might start as a study group.
On the first examples, a campus Office of Research and perhaps some deans would have (and withhold!) information about the distribution of internal university research funds. A center for teaching and learning or an office of information technology would have information about contracts they have been signed with LLM and other ed-tech providers that may be affecting administrative policies. Note that this is a repetitive, iterative, frustrating, tedious, ongoing process.
A great instance is the one started by some faculty at UCLA, frustrated with the failure of their administration to show why their austerity measures were required or to analyze openly where they would lead. The faculty wrote a “Resolution on Restoring Shared Governance in Campus Budget Planning,” which passed in the Legislative Assembly almost unanimously. Check out this specification of the information requirements in Point 4:
Provide detailed analyses and forward projections in time to inform deliberations for the 2026–27 budget cycle addressing:
a. the impact of reductions in state funding;
b. anticipated changes in federal funding across campus programs and research portfolios;
c. potential reductions in federal grants and their downstream effects on campus operations;
d. projected impacts of graduate student researcher (GSR) wage increases;
e. past and anticipated changes in campus debt service obligations;
f. costs and status of recent real estate acquisitions including expenditures needed to bring new properties into active use;
g. expenditures and commitments associated with campus-wide technology initiatives such as One IT and the integration of artificial intelligence tools;
h. recent and current agreements with external consulting firms; and
i. trends in the growth of administrative budgets relative to academic expenditure.
Brilliant- I love this! After passage, the authors and their senate are faced with the grind of getting the actual info out of senior managers—and of institutionalizing the process of info circulation on which shared governance depends.
Meanwhile, the chancellor and executive vice-chancellor have already written to the chair of divisional senate to say in effect, “you already have all that data so you don’t need any more.” The gaslighting is designed to make busy faculty go away ine fear that they will endlessly waste their time. This is the moment of danger (that is often repeated). The key is perseverance, as a version of ordinary self-management.
3. Develop this linkage: problem—data—analysis—report—solutions—implementation process. This will involve lots of work, haggling, repeated demands and refusals, difficult appraisals of the information, and arguing about what would and wouldn’t work to address the problem. Implementation is a whole siege in itself.
However, this is not an all-consuming process: it can indeed be fit into the schedules of full-time faculty and staff. But it takes a long time and requires stamina. The UCLA Resolution was passed in December 2025. If everyone sticks with it, and the senate can pass the project from one year’s officers to the next, they’ll have “restored shared governance in campus budget planning” possibly in 2027-28, and more likely 2028-29.
It gives me no joy to state this duration. But academic careers are far longer, and fixing chronic, grating suboptimalities is completely worth the effort.
This gets me back to the issue of reforms that not only fall far short of the anti-managerial revolution but may possibly not do much of anything. And why would getting full shared governance (really “co-governance,” really epistemic equality between management and academic employees on campus budget planning) count as a non-reformist reform?
4. Put each specific governance project into the longer narrative arc of knowledge workers getting control of their work. For me, this involves telling the story of universities as developing the intellectual lives of the whole population, not just college elites, by undoing their capture by government and corporate vocationalism. It involves explaining why academically-led universities are better for society, for non-college people, for knowledge, for the general happiness of humanity. Universities will never be seen for what they are, in their intellectual radiance, when neither their teacher-scholars nor their students steer the ship--nor are allowed by admin to tell the public where it’s going.
∞∞∞
I was reminded again of the drift caused by sidelined or withdrawn faculty while prepping for Friday’s discussion of “seizing the means.” Trying to get a list of required faculty powers back into my head, I searched my drive and found slides for a talk I gave at the University of Toronto. It was organized around the American Association of University Professors’ struggle for faculty power in various arenas, now in its 111th year.
The baseline is that the quality of US universities was seen by nearly all parties as proportionate to the standing of the faculty, which I showed as a cycle.
This depended on faculty authority in a range of arenas.
I numbered curricular control as 0 because it was basically assumed in 1915. I recited some current cases that revealed that the faculty have made little progress in 110 years. And in fact they have lost ground on Issue 0, control over core instruction—to ed-tech, to state legislative interference, to numbers-driven mergers and closures, to some university managers controlling course syllabi. You know you are in trouble when a headline starts, “Plato Censored,” and names the censurers as Texas A&M officials. Here's a summary
The outcome of turning even tenured faculty into employees subject to politicized control by line managers is not so great, and yet familiar.
And I was interested to note that I’d boldfaced the problem of faculty members with their coherent reasons to withdraw from governance.
There was a slide on Practical Steps that faculty should take, which I’ll spare you because it overlaps with the list above. I ended with more boldface.
Reframe U’s public mission via professional autonomy: Professional vision of U as skills, learning, creative capabilities, unfolding the destiny of mankind
Yes, yes, hell yes!
And look where it would lead!
I do think this can, should, even must happen. But the thing is, I delivered this talk in November 2014. That was 11 years ago. Over that time we have gotten no closer to mastery, and have enabled plenty of drift.
I already felt that faculty inaction was a big part of the problem, but always try to be encouraging. My slide notes at the end read, “Hugely exciting trends now. Mass global demand for HE. Students who want creative capabilities and not machine learning & routine skills. Public realization that business management isn’t the answer to everything!”
True again. Still true. And I think now more than ever, in the spirit of lost time, and unstunted by the hostile climate, faculty need to do Steps 1 through 4 above.
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| Train Entering Station NYC on Oct 30, 2022 |
I mean the question literally. The New School (TNS, by which I’ll mean all its colleges) has advantages most private colleges would die for. Why is it now trying to push out 40% of its faculty and most experienced staff, mainly on the academic, non-arts side? How did it develop a $48 million deficit for the current year, or around 10% of operating expenditures? President Joel Towers has announced these things but does not explain them. His administration has published a closure list with no academic reasoning about the choices.
I’ve read all the documents I can access. My sense is that senior managers have made important financial errors over a number of years, and yet the underlying problem is poor academic planning. 2025’s Summer Working Groups notwithstanding, senior management have not yet constructed a multi-year collaborative academic planning process involving all faculty and frontline staff.
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| Selling The Catalyst, UCSB on April 12, 2014 |
University boards and presidents have not formulated common aims much less a joint strategy to fight the most powerful attack in higher education’s modern history, one already more destructive than McCarthyism. They have followed the mantra of corporate America: shut up, suck up, and try not to stand up. I’ve noted that all the fighting has come from faculty groups and some professional associations.
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| UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024 |
Fiscal stagnation means permanent austerity and the damage past and future appeared in the unscripted parts of the story in the public comment periods. There some speakers opposed the termination of the campus hiring program associated with the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). This seems to have been prematurely announced / decreed by the systemwide Provost Katherine Newman to a group of Executive Vice Chancellors, who brought the decision as an accomplished fact back to their campuses, which ignited a protest campaign from faculty, staff, PPFP alumni, academic consortia and, apparently, an unusually large number of chairs, deans and other administrators. The upshot was a letter from UC President James Milliken stating that reports of the death of PPFP’s faculty hiring incentives were greatly exaggerated. This was a real success for the protests, however unacknowledged by the president.
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| MLA Convention, New Orleans on January 11, 2025 |
To Executive Director Paula Krebs, and Members of the MLA Executive Council,
I am writing to inform you that, regretfully, I must decline the 2025 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies offered by the Modern Language Association (MLA). I can no longer consider the MLA my academic home, given its leadership’s refusal, in the midst of an ongoing genocide, to pass to the Delegate Assembly for debate a resolution in support of the 2005 Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). As a scholar of Palestine Studies and Israel Studies, whose research addresses this very region, I oppose this blatant silencing of dissent and, specifically, of Palestinian voices. I am unwilling for my book to serve as a fig leaf for the Association’s leadership, to cover over its failure to address Israeli violence in the region or its attempt to foreclose any discussion of this violence.
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| Indiana University on November 3, 2025 |
Chair of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana University, one of the great American public universities, is currently melting down with a speed and violence unprecedented in the history of higher education. It is difficult to recognize the world-class institution that was founded in the idyllic city of Bloomington in 1820 and built over decades, most decisively by the long-term president and chancellor of Indiana University, Herman B. Wells. Beloved among residents of the state of Indiana and a destination for thousands of students from across the United States and the world, the public university gained its national and global reputation in the 1950s primarily on the basis of its humanities departments and one of the country’s best music schools.
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| Indiana University on November 6, 2025 |
Critiquing universities is one thing and rebuilding them is another. Getting from the first to the second was a constant topic at the four U.S. universities where I spoke over the course of a few weeks this past month.
I visited the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and Indiana University Bloomington. Warm thanks to my hosts and audiences in all those places, who were generous in every way. I learned enormously from comments and various extensive discussions.
At each university, bad things were being done to faculty and their programs. In each place, faculty were doing things back. We talked non-stop about whether this doing-back was working and what faculty members could and should do next.
Tenure-track faculty are in an odd position. They are neither principals nor agents: they lack corporate power in universities. They lack legal power of the kind possessed by governing boards. They have lost the relationship power of the old collegiality that tenure-track faculty assumed. They’re now in a world that’s familiar to non-tenure track faculty and graduate students. What next?
Most of those I spoke with saw the first job as defense against outside attacks. And in fact, faculty legal defense has been working well. At UCLA, joint faculty and union lawsuits have now led to a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump Administration’s pursuit of a $1.2 billion fine against UCLA that aims to extort an agreement like that the Administration imposed on Columbia University (Jaweed Kaleem has an overview). Over the summer, a group of UC faculty sued Trump’s National Institutes for Health to restore blocked research funding. This lawsuit also succeeded at getting a temporary injunction.
It’s worth noting that the UC Board of Regents and the Office of the President have accepted if not condoned the Trump Administration’s unlawful coercion by failing to dispute it. Faculty groups have had to fill a leadership vacuum. Incredibly, the UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) had to sue their own Board of Regents to obtain the text of the Trump demands to which they were thinking of committing the University: this suit was also successful. (UC then asked the California Supreme Court to overturn the lower court ruling, which they declined to do.) UC senior managers have neither defended the University in court against unlawful attacks nor acknowledged any obligation to collaborate with the UC community. It’s remarkable that their main legal actions have been taken against their own employees.
During the UCLA conference that had brought me to campus, I met an author of one of two major resolutions submitted to the November meeting of the UCLA Legislative Assembly. The “Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning” recites chapter and verse of the obligations that managers have to work with faculty bodies on planning and budget. It calls for the belated release of comprehensive financial statements for fiscal years 2024–25 and 2025–26, including “statements of revenues, expenditures, reserves, and a clear definition and accounting of the reported deficit.” It goes on to demand four modes of data sharing and communication that include “detailed analyses and forward projections” in nine separate categories. The Resolution itself tells a story of breached collaboration that took some real work to put together.
Take a look--it is impressively strong and complete. People often cite the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as having shifted state legislatures to the right by circulating model policies that members can cut and paste into bills for their state. Faculty Senates could treat this Resolution as a model policy and adapt it for their campus.
**UPDATE
The UCLA Academic Senate has announced the results of the votes on these Resolutions:
Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of
Shared Governance in Budget Planning
Legislative Assembly members voted via the Academic Senate Data
Management System on the Resolution on Financial Transparency and the
Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning. The Legislative Assembly
received a total of 116 votes cast: 115 Approve, 1 Oppose. This
Resolution required a majority of votes cast by present members to be approved.
[AIPSC (2nd ed.) 5.1]. A majority of votes cast (99%) were to Approve this
Resolution.
Resolution on Information Technology Accountability,
Transparency, and Shared Governance
Legislative Assembly members voted via the Academic Senate Data
Management System on the Resolution on Information Technology Accountability,
Transparency, and Shared Governance. The Legislative Assembly received a total
of 106 votes cast: 104 Approve, 2 Oppose. This Resolution required
a majority of votes cast by present members to be approved. [AIPSC (2nd ed.)
5.1]. A majority of votes cast (98%) were to Approve this Resolution
These are the strongest large-group Senate votes I have ever seen. It's as though the repression isn't working anymore, and, to quote Avery Gordon, "when the repression isn't working anymore, the trouble that results demands re-narrativization."
** END UPDATE
For the most part, the faculty stories were painful to hear. They were mainly about having to react to the unilateral actions of more powerful people. The people who had power over the university mainly didn’t like the university. Their views ranged from indifferent to openly hostile. The powerful people decided actions that damaged faculty without working with them in advance: in many cases damage seemed like the aim of the action. The faculty got the job of accepting the decisions and then twisting them into place.
I saw good stories interrupted. There were great early chapters. Chapter 1: the administration commits an offense against education or Thought Itself. Chapter 2. Faculty organize and strike back! Chapter 3: the governing board responds by curtailing faculty and student rights. That’s terrible! I can’t wait to see what happens in Chapter 4!
But what if there is no Chapter 4?
I am not sure how to talk about this. I don’t mean it as a criticism of the many university faculty members working like mules to be heard at all. But I do want to head off a doomer reading that posits the general inability of faculty to defeat their senior managers and governing boards. Some faculty do see the ongoing power of boards and managers as proof that this or that effort completely failed, and that therefore new efforts will fail too. This view is a psy-op, not reality.
Indiana was the only red state on my program, and its politicians have gone full MAGA with the war on universities you’d expect. In early 2024, its legislature passed a law requiring professors to promote “intellectual diversity” to keep their tenure, adding a post-tenure review to match, along with other stuff. They’ve continued to meddle, and have empowered an autocratic president, Pamela Whitten, to do what she will irrespective of the views of the faculty council among other university groups; she’s attracted national coverage with the disturbing results.
In early spring 2024, the Bloomington Faculty Council proposed a vote of no confidence in Whitten (core motivations listed in the petition). The motion passed 827 to 29. (A parallel no-confidence vote also carried against IU provost Rahul Shrivastav.)
Yet Whitten and Shirvastav remain in post, and the IU Board’s response to the 96.6% no-confidence vote against Whitten was to give her a $175,000 bonus in September 2024, soon followed by a $200,000 raise. Thus concluded our Chapter 3.
One member of the audience at my IU lecture used the board’s big middle finger to the faculty as proof that resistance was futile—just like the actions I described in my lecture. I asked the audience, “after you voted no-confidence and the board then gave Whitten a bonus, what did you do next?” The president of the Bloomington Faculty Council who’d gotten the remarkable vote made a zero with his fingers. “It was followed by nothing,” he said.
Well ok, I said, you didn’t lose exactly. You just stopped playing. They didn’t stop playing. That doesn’t prove faculty can’t win. It proves you have to keep playing.
I was constantly impressed with how intelligent and committed academics are, including graduate students who are facing futures without proper support. We don’t appreciate that enough about ourselves. Everyone I met showed the intelligence and commitment that comes partly from the long process of building intelligence in teaching and research. These are real powers in the face of incessant negative propaganda and disrespect.
Hovering over all proposed solutions was the prospect of faculty unionization. That wasn’t because people agree that tenure-track faculty are ready to unionize—most thought they weren’t—but because the traditional alternative, collegial shared governance, has been unilaterally degraded or rejected by senior managers and boards. A lot of tenure-track faculty are now where graduate students were a few decades go.
Tenure-track as well as non-tenure track faculty do now need collective bargaining rights. But faculty won’t get them or get the public on their side or be clear about what to do once they have them unless they tell their stories, and never stop telling them, and never stop acting on them.
