UCLA on May 14, 2018    

It’s a Friday in the 6^th grade, when you eat at the lunch truck parked outside the school gate. While standing in line, the big kid behind you grabs the five-dollar bill out of your hand. When you turn around, he smirks and says, “I’ll give you this five back if you give me a ten.”  

 

This is the genius shakedown that Trump has imposed on UCLA.  He announced the freezing of $300 million, which UCLA officials said is really $584 million.  Two days later, it was like the first Dr. Evil scene in Austin Powers.  “We hold UCLA ransom for--one BILLION dollars.”

 

Obviously, the choice can’t be to pay $1 billion to get back $584 million. The choice is to say okay, keep the $584 million, or, instead, sue to get back the $584 million that has been (unlawfully) withheld. 

 

It’s not really a choice. UC must pick door number two.

 

California governor Gavin Newsom has already picked that door. “We’ll sue,” Newsom announced during a press conference.  

 

 “He has threatened us through extortion with a billion-dollar fine, unless we do his bidding,” Newsom said.

 

“We will not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom on this extraordinary public institution. We are not like some of those other institutions,” he said.

 

New UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk and even newer UC president James Milliken have both denounced Trump’s demands. Milliken said, “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.”  

 

Parts of UC admin still seem itching to surrender. Jaweed Kallem and Michael Wilner report that one “senior UC official said the [$1 billion] figure was understandable if it resolved all federal investigations across the system, even if UC may not ultimately agree to it.” UC Regents Chair Janet Reilly said the “university was still willing to negotiate,” though not on “unacceptable” terms.

 

Now and then, I’m grateful for Gavin Newsom. He grasps that staying free of Trump requires fighting Trump.  

 

This is in pleasant contrast to the silence of much of the Democratic party, to the lapdog Republican party, and to the abject submission of the country’s most powerful CEOs, lined up behind him as a court endorsement at the inauguration, failing to emit a word of criticism of his destruction of the federal research system on whose back their businesses were built, or carrying gifts of gold to the Oval Office Domination Theater.  Here Tim Cook, Apple CEO, angling for a chip tariff carve-out, serves Trump a special trophy. 

In contrast, Newsom gets that there’s no percentage in a Trump deal except for Trump. California has already sued the Trump Administration 37 times, and UC should be lawsuit 38.   Attorney General Rob Bonta’s weekly email could be titled “California v. Trump” or “We Sued the Feds.”  

 

In June, Newsom tweeted a truly interesting threat to impound California’s federal income tax payments. It was serious enough to attract an threat from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent of charging criminal tax evasion. This isn’t the last time we’ll hear about this idea, since the Trump Administration is pushing federal obligations onto states for which they’ll need new revenues.

 

Even business is catching up: the Financial Times has a big spread called, “How Trump has turned tariffs into diplomatic shakedowns,”  It announces that “many trade experts and officials” realize a Trump deal is merely a “cudgel” whose terms will change whenever Trump needs to increase control. 

 

Same in politics: Brazil’s president, Lula Inácio da Silva, speaks for a growing group of counterparties when he says, “I won’t humiliate myself.”  

 

As object lessons, the Penn, Columbia, and Brown University agreements paved the way for the attack on UCLA (Liner Notes 30, 34, and 35). This was predictable and predicted.  The money itself is less important to the Trump project than owning the libs in the spaces they think are theirs, and performing a victorious takeover in cultural discourse. 

 

Veteran UCLA analyst Dan Mitchell is right to guess that One Billion Dollars means “the feds don't want a settlement for now and want instead to keep the pot boiling.” The boiling pot is the right’s storyline that US universities are America’s enemy and Trump is heroically conquering them. 

 

I don’t think the presidents and boards of Penn, Columbia , and Brown really get that their concession of guilt is a total defeat for universities in Trump’s cultural crusade. I’m not sure many onlookers do.  

 

So in the rest of this post, I’ll link the UCLA and other attacks to what I take to be Trump’s underlying (anti) knowledge project. I’ll then plead for systemic, cooperative counterattacks from universities and their kin. 

 

**

 

Linda McMahon’s official statements describe the university deals as part of a wholesale cultural revitalization. The ambition is on the scale of Thatcherism as described by Stuart Hall and his colleagues. Trump is affecting a “reversal” of “the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions,” the ending the tyranny of judging people by “their race or sex,” the liberating of women to compete only against other women, and a restoration of “our nation’s higher education institutions to places dedicated to truth-seeking, academic merit, and civil debate.”  

 

The Wagnerian chorus of this Glorious Revolution drowns out university claims that we “preserved our academic integrity” or retrieved “funding for life-saving research.”

 

Without intending it, the universities are speaking a language of servitude, servitude to two Trumpian imperatives. 

 

1.  The glorious restoration of structural racism. This is a wolf in the familiar sheep’s clothing of standardized test results and purified merit. 

 

Trump has always hated the claims of people of color to achievement. His is a standard Jim Crow racism that attributes everything a BIPOC person does well to a white handout.  His belief, common in MAGA land, is that no student of color was ever admitted on personal accomplishments by a college that has rejected white students. His expectation is that if he can eliminate any consideration of all social identity, white superiority will increase the white share of students and faculty in all the universities that matter. (Do read Attorney General Pam Bondi’s total ban on social factors.)

 

Trumpian racism negates both academic freedom and a core social value of universities, which is to study culture and society in its actual radical diversity—past and present—while also incorporating that into its communities.  

 

In contrast, Trump’s is a fanatical racist agenda.  This understanding must circulate widely in the culture.

 

And yet you did not see Penn, Columbia, and Brown saying, “retaining our academic integrity, and preserving our core values, means that we will continue to practice diversity, equity, and inclusion, and study human identity and consciousness without restriction.”  Instead, they promised not to do these things, and the Trump Administration promised to discipline and punish them if it gets a whiff later of them doing any of this, which Bondi’s memo makes pretty much everything in that zone.  

 

The Trump Administration is institutionalizing its claim of blanket white superiority (in the military, the health agencies, the museums, history, etc).  It hammers this into the culture through daily, angry repetition. America awaits with baited breath the next public burning of a big pretentious university that rejects 90-95% of its applicants, which now includes UCLA.

 

University concessions on race, gender, and sexuality simply fuel this cultural purge.  Their silence on the core values they often claim, starting with the humble values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and continuing with their glory and their justice and their intellectual splendor, miseducates the country into seeing Trump and McMahon’s position as mostly factual mainstream politics.  

 

But their position destroys knowledge and politics. And it aims to take as much of the majority as possible out of the electorate and the culture.

 

Another Trumpian imperative: 

 

2. Pushing the post-knowledge society. 

 

Weakening public university funding has been a bipartisan project, covered for many years on this blog.  The issue has never been the money per se, but what the money supports:  the university’s intellectual and thus social capacities, and the resulting benefits for students, knowledge, and the whole society.

 

UC president Milliken is right to say Trump’s cuts will devastate research. But that’s because UC research already runs at a large loss.  In 2022-23, UCLA spent $356 million of its own money covering losses mainly on extramural grants (Table 58, Rank 16).  Over decades, California has withdrawn much of the state’s copayment that helped fill those gaps. UC’s perpetual fiscal crisis is a feature of state budgeting that has been enforced by Governors Pete Wilson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, and Gavin Newsom, from both political parties.  

 

Thanks to the 2024 election, the knowledge society, already made fragile by the fiscal weakening of independent researchers and creators, is now being pushed by Trump forces into post-knowledge status.  This is a condition in which knowledge has no use other than to reinforce power, or have much existence independently of that use.  

 

Trump is modeling this society by taking over programming at the Kennedy Center, and replacing the National Endowment for the Humanities programs with funding for a National Garden of American Heroes (that he pre-selects), and subjugating universities.

 

Post-knowledge is at the heart of the anti-regulation agenda.  When Trump deregulates cryptocurrency and other digital assets, he sidelines technical and financial knowledge that doesn’t directly serve the powers that own those assets.  Trumpian corruption establishes the effective non-existence of knowledge that conflicts in any way with Trump’s version of reality. Once experts and related knowers have been taken out of action, the sovereign decides what is real and what is true. Since every practice has knowledge and know how, Trumpism sees threats to post-knowledge sovereignty in farmers, undergraduate protestors, solar power retail, nurses, housing NGOs, etc.  The post-knowledge society must be structured as a tyranny.

 

The post-knowledge society is in short one where academic freedom doesn’t exist in practice, and professional autonomy doesn’t either.  At least partially self-managed professional life is replaced by line management, direct or indirect. For example, page view metrics have already shifted most journalists into cycles of 2-3 pieces per day, often mashed up from other internet fodder, with little chance for investigation, quality improvement through rewrites, and other features of quality knowledge creation. Where the general culture can’t see the value of knowledge for itself, for non-commercial or local or frankly antisystemic uses, this trend intensifies, helped along by the steady spread of AI slop.

 

The endpoint of Trumpism is to subordinate, into a state of cultural powerlessness, knowledge workers and the knowledge they produce—that’s everyone from ballet dancers and TV writers to acquisitions lawyers and the teachers and professors in between. Most will continue to exist and some will be well-paid, but, in a post-knowledge society, on terms dictated by their overlord employers.  Since these represent capital as such, Trumpism sees this as efficiency as well as control. 

 

This victory is still far from being achieved, but it is the (class) goal. To repeat, a vital step is to take the public university challenger out of the game, either by inducing self-harm--Minnesota’s hyponormalization, UC Irvine’s veiled thundercuts (Parts 1 and 2)—or with the extortion machine.

 

**

I think it’s fairly obvious that Trumpism seeks a cultural reversal as complete as Thatcherism or Reaganism against the latter-day New Deal.  It’s a radicalization of those Eighties conservatisms in that it rejects even limited coexistence with liberalism and its institutions.

 

I’m going on about this because the threat is so serious, and potentially so destructive of civil rights and knowledge culture, both always endangered in the modern U.S. That’s also why I think the only workable response is a full tilt counterattack, by universities, that aims to destroy the extortion machine itself.

 

This will involve at least a couple of things. 

 

One is lawfare, which openly challenges the legal foundation of the extortion racket. This means arguing in (and out) of court for the illegality of Trump and McMahon’s abuse of Title VI and related code.  When university administrations accept the facticity of illegal freezes, they insure they continue, and continue to strengthen Trump’s white post-knowledge hegemony.  

 

Consortia need to be organized and costs pooled. This legal fight is going to cost big.  But no doubt less than one BILLION dollars. 

 

The second is the construction of as big and noisy a cultural counternarrative as Trump’s itself.  We all know that the Trump machine rests on a network of think tanks, centers, social media stars. It also works on a speed cycle: the King of Derp is a master of the OODA operations loop. (Do read Josh Marshall’s “The Way of the Doofus Warrior,” which explains much of the subsequent 10 years of US politics).  A prime example of the speed loop are the funding freezes, created through edict-and-rant cycles, not actual law.  I’m not saying we should do lying or bullshitting, but so serious confrontation with total nonsense and its relentless dismantling.

 

It’s important to notice that noisy counternarrative can get going with a few people.  My sense is that Marc Andreessen, a leading MAGA mogul reactionary, has taken a credibility hit from the release of his WhatsApp threats against universities for daring to have considered race in admissions. The Washington Post published the texts, various outlets reported it. 

 

Then two never-Trumpers at the Bulwark, Tim Miller and Jonathan Last, did a line-by-line excoriation in “Marc Andreessen’s Ugly White Grievance Rant.” They spanked his texts within an inch of their life on grounds of both crybaby hypocrisy and a short history of the gift of free public higher education still received in the Eighties and Nineties by white boys like Marc. 

 

My point here is that maybe a dozen people, not really coordinated, but fully committed to the operating loop, exposed the racial roots of techno-optimism.  This interacts with Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres’s critique of the TESCREAL bundle for eugenicism, written for a different audience, and then other people can take it up.

 

There are “positive tipping points” via small groups. In her review of Tim Lenton’s book by that title, the FT’s Pilita Clark writes, in the midst of our climate gloom, that there are many stories like

 

how Norway became the electric car colossus it famously is today. The shift began after Morten Harket, lead singer of the pop group A-ha, joined other environmentalists in a campaign of civil disobedience aimed at highlighting the need to make plug-in cars more attractive. Following the protesters’ attention-grabbing refusal to pay road tolls, parking fees and other charges, EVs were gradually exempted from a score of levies. That ushered in an era of “learning-by-using” that saw sales of green vehicles accelerate from less than 1 per cent of the market in 2010 to nearly 90 per cent last year.

 

Universities can do this too, with their millions of students, staff, and faculty. Administrators will have to work with their academic communities rather than hold them at arm’s length. They’ll have to work with protestors rather than having them arrested.  They have to restore the great tradition of campus civil disobedience.  They’ll need to coordinate across universities, as faculty groups have often said.

 

The educational ensemble will need to build a counternarrative that reestablishes the public value of universities. Mentions may include deep human learning, involvement of the intelligence of the whole population, the struggles and pleasure of thought, the importance of thinking to human survival, the feeling of suddenly understanding, the glimpses of a system of new thought, a new capacity, the power of self-development, the ongoing sense of knowledge as emancipation. 

 

Lawfare and the reversal narrative can destroy the extortion machine. The latter can also build a much better system of higher education. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Regrets Sunday Morning, Victoria Line   

I’ve often broached this topic, most recently in relation to the new UC Irvine plan for hyper-austerity (Liner Note 32; budget analysis in 31 and 33).   This question of professionals’ managerial authority is raised again by some faculty responses to the Columbia and Brown University deals with the Trump Administration, and to the new Trump attack on UCLA. 

 

One professor has aptly summarized the current situation as “a strange moment between critique and advocacy [in which] the two are inseparable.”  Faculty are still critiquing the responses of senior managers as lacking cooperation across the sector—Harvard is off by itself in the Ivy League in suing rather than signing with the Trump Administration. Some, like the members of the UCLA Faculty Association, continue to expose the futility of anticipatory obedience.  

 

At the same time, I read moving faculty calls for mutual understanding across disciplines and collaborative development of definitions of universities that the wider society can get behind. The question is by what process? 

 

As someone who has sought mutual understanding across disciplines on topics such as humanities research starvation and the actual (negative) revenue results of indirect cost recovery since around 2002, I’m pretty sure the current consensus won’t work. The only way forward is through candid encounters with reality, and these will involve passages through conflict and negative feelings on all sides.   

 

So I look for a certain tone that risks conflict as it deliberately strips away the euphemisms and doctored data that underwrite what we might call the discursive hegemony of academic management. 

 

Obviously attack isn’t the only desirable tone. But faculty solidarity will be much stronger if it can honestly work through the issues that divide it by disciplinary interests among other things.

 

There’s also a question of whether most tenure-track faculty want managerial power for the sake of co-governed control over their working conditions. 

 

Real co-governance means time, study, effort, argument—and also, to be frank, an initial campaign to seizethis power.  This is pretty clear from the general exclusion of faculty from strategizing about fighting Trump. The worst higher ed crisis since the 1930s has not obviously increased faculty-admin collaboration for the sake of a united front, which suggests yet again that admin will not share power voluntarily.  And yet my default hypothesis is that faced with this situation, most TT faculty, perhaps 80-90%, would rather hunker down and accept some decent approximation of what they had in 2024 (say 2/3rds to 3/4^th of their grants, ½ to 3/4ths of their academic freedom-based candor in classrooms or campus policy debates) than fight a two-front war with Trump and their own provost and president.  That’s a big likely constituency for hunkering down out of sight of the Trump Administration’s Operation University Shakedown, and waiting for the storms to pass.

 

I think hunkering down is a very bad strategy: the storms are intensifying and each accommodation causes lasting damage to the public reputations of universities that don’t fight for their core values.

 

So first I’ll justify this claim (about the need to fight) in relation to the Brown University Agreement,  and then I’ll move on to the faculty responses.

 

**

 

The first problem with Brown’s agreement is that it is more genteel than Columbia’s and thus more likely to encourage Signing-Not-Suing by the other targeted Ivies and their ilk (Cornell and Princeton, also the big holdout, Harvard, plus Northwestern, UCLA, et al). 

 

This is the template problem, in which McMahon and the Trump Administration use each settlement as a precedent for others ones to come. 

 

That week this happened to UCLA, which on July 29th confessed to antisemitism and flagellated itself with payments totaling $8.8 million, mostly to individual plaintiffs and their attorneys. Meanwhile, on the very same day, the Department of Justice generated findings of antisemitism that Attorney General Pam Bondi termed a “disgusting breach of civil rights against students” requiring DOJ to “force UCLA to pay a heavy price.” Two days later, on July 31^st, that price was announced as $300 million in research funding withheld from multiple federal agencies.   

 

In their impressive letter, the UCLA Faculty Association noted, “UCLA’s anticipatory obedience has put itself in a place of weakness and we must instead choose to stand up.”  I hope UCLA does sue rather than sign, but the administrative precedents point the other way.

 

Brown’s Agreement was announced on July 30^th. It gained stature from its president, Christina Paxson, who is widely respected, even admired by her faculty, and who has taken public stands on behalf of academic freedom and related values.  She has even defended the humanities.

 

Her letter of explanation goes much easier on getting the federal money back than did  Columbia’s Acting President Claire Shipman. It goes much harder on preserving “the integrity of Brown's academic foundation.”  It’s also obviously better to pay $50 million rather than $500 million as Columbia did, and pay it to (Trump-approved) workforce programs in Rhode Island rather than to some part of the federal government.  

 

And yet this esteemed senior manager has approved some familiar elements:

 

·       Categorical rejection of transgender athletes, plus a ban on gender reassignment surgery and “puberty blockers or hormones to any minor child for the purpose of aligning the child’s appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex” (§12).

·       Establishment of Jewish students as a uniquely victimized group entitled to special programs and protection (§13a-f).

·       Mandatory campus climate surveys, conducted by a third party and reported to offices at the Department of Education (DEd) and at Health and Human Services, focused on antisemitism (§13c i-ii), coupled with mandatory reporting to DEd of complaints (§13d i-iv).

·       Monitoring of racial and related characteristics of admissions for any trace of DEI (§17).

·       Research grant funding restored, but only to HHS/NIH recipients (§8a-c).

 

In addition, Brown agreed to 

·      the monitoring of student course evaluations “to identify any reports of antisemitism” (§13f).  It’s not clear whether this is done by the government or the campus Office of Equity Compliance and Reporting (OECR), operating on their own. 

 

There are massive big picture problems here.

 

Brown agreed to the external monitoring of admissions, climate surveys, and student evaluations of courses. As with Columbia, one student complaint can trigger an investigation of any instructor (Scott Lemieux calls this this “Brown’s Total Surrender”).  The survey is required to be a fishing expedition for antisemitism, violating basic survey research protocol.  

 

As with Columbia, the Agreement restores only “Brown's medical and health sciences research funding”: most STEM research, and research in the social sciences, arts, and humanities, stay out in the cold. My favorite people, “future historians,” may indeed ask whether the elite universities of the United States led the sector into a new age of political control of research, teaching, and admissions to restore the short-term cash flow of its medical centers. 

 

Most fundamentally, Brown joins Penn and Columbia in condoning authoritarian illegality in the federal government’s relation to higher education.   I noted with Columbia that public respect depends on the perception that you are fighting for principle. Brown now joins the others in not doing this. It accepts extortionary bargaining without evidence, argument, institutional reply, attempted resolution prior to punishment, or any other feature of the Congressionally-mandated Title VI process.  

 

Brown, Columbia, and Penn have all failed to challenge the authoritarian practice of punishment-by-decree that undermines core academic freedoms. Even non-MAGA onlookers with think, well, looks like Trump had a point about universities—they really are the ones most guilty of discrimination in America. 

 

**

 

Here’s where we get to the faculty responses. 

 

One I briefly mentioned regarding Columbia. It is by law professor David Pozen, “Regulation by Deal Comes to Higher Ed.”   Pozen defines regulation by deal as a shift

away from guidance documents addressed to the entire sector, and toward bespoke deals foisted upon individual schools after summarily terminating or threatening their federal funds. It is important to emphasize that this shift does not reflect an increased interest in enforcement, leading to an increased number of consent decrees or out-of-court settlements. These deals will not be the product of thorough investigations or judicial findings of misconduct by the schools in question. No established legal process was followed for the Columbia agreement; no genuine legal dispute was resolved. The dealmaking is the main regulatory event from start to finish.

Noting the deal’s coercive and authoritarian features, its sidestepping of due process, he concludes, “Deals like Columbia’s enhance the power of presidents and their allies within targeted universities; sideline Congress, the courts, and most faculty; and sow fear and uncertainty throughout civil society. They are fundamentally inconsistent with the logic of academic freedom.”

 

I completely agree. Pozen in effect answers my perennial question, how will the PMC (professional-managerial class) enter history as an independent agent (and not as capital’s servant), by defining a form of administrative tyranny to which professionals, by virtue of their practice, must object. 

 

The next response is by Adam Tooze, Columbia professor, podcaster, Substack legend, , and global eminence on political economy.  In “Iterations of the ‘Unstate,” discussing the Columbia settlement, he cites Pozen in full, and then redirects him. 

modern power - both the capitalist and other kinds - have never had a straight-forward relationship with the rule of law. . . . The exception, the emergency, the crisis, the ad hoc are not bugs they are features of our reality. They are both systemically produced. And at least since the early 20th century it is clear that one mode of capitalist governance that may emerge is precisely the kind of ad hoc intervention seen in 2008. The most spectacular form of this kind of governance is what Franz Neumann in his masterwork on the Nazi regime called the “un-state” or Behemoth.

But Tooze is not endorsing Pozen’s quiet call to arms against the tyranny of the deal.  To the contrary, his point is that administration is always a bit fascist.

I am NOT suggesting that what we are witnessing in the US today is fascism. But rather the opposite.

 

You are far more tempted to make the absurd Trump=fascism equation, if you start from a silly and simplistic account of “liberal reality”. If instead, we start from the position that modern power - both the capitalist and other kinds - have never had a straight-forward relationship with the rule of law, that idealized models of “regulation” are just that, idealized, that the line between regulation, government and goverance [sic] is always blurred, which is why the terms are blurry, then at any given moment the real question is how this awkwardness is being managed. What are the tools? What are the “discourses” and justifications? What passes for a deal and what does not?

Calling the Trump administration’s “governance by bullying” a “departure in style, tone, and ferocity,” he concludes that Trump’s treatment of Columbia is grounded in preexisting “routine of civil lawfare” that typifies U.S. corporate and political behavior.  “This mess is what produces and reproduces American power as we know it.”  

 

Tooze never does say what he or other Columbia faculty should do now. He treats Columbia as a teachable moment about capitalist democracy, where the Deal is more or less par for the course.

 

I of course take Tooze’s conceptual point that administration, democracy’s monstrous double, is rests on and operates with fascist / authoritarian features.  This is particularly true of academic management, which disavows its status as management while exerting the top-down command and information control it invariably involves.  (This blog is a 17-year record of wrestling with those features.)  

 

But so what, exactly? Tooze gave me flashbacks to the 1980s American Foucault of my grad school years. Once we accept that power is a matter of governmentality rather than sovereignty, aren’t we under more obligation to engage the givens of our institutional conditions as not unchangeably imposed? The 1980s answer in literary theory was generally no!-- often given with a dose of disdain for the naïveté of the question. (Foucault’s own answer was yes, engage.)

 

The naïf role versus Tooze is taken up by historian John Ganz, naming himself “as a proponent of the ‘absurd Trump=fascism’ thesis.”

I also have a bit of trouble understanding the logic here. Surely, if Nazism is at the extreme end of the breakdown of the state, with its regular notions of law and right, into factional and clique-based power politics, and we are entering a more fierce and disturbing era of unstatehood, then one must at least say, we are heading in a fascist direction? And I don’t think the fascism thesis relies upon a naive separation of the idealized liberal rule of law and the present disorder and reign of terror. Quite the opposite. I think rather it can show how fascism is implicit in liberal democratic institutions and develops out of their internal contradictions and failures. As Mick Jagger sings, “It's just a shot away.” This was the position of the Frankfurt School, of which [Franz] Neumann [cited by Tooze on the Nazi “unstate”] was a member.

 

Ganz’s conclusion is that liberal society, though fundamentally compromised, has elements retaining a “commitment to right,” while the state retains some “integrative function.” These are presumably worth fighting for as means to some other ends.

 

Yet what that fight look like is beyond his scope—including the fight in universities whose current form depends on the (partially autocratized) due process of the liberal state.

 

**

 

The faculty mode we need now, as a necessary interruption, is that of prolific Lawyers Guns and Money blogger Paul Campos, talking not about Columbia or Brown but about his own law school at Boulder, Colorado.  Campos has been on this beat for a while, from the inside.  I draw five lessons from his work.

 

Campos had previously filed a discrimination complaint against this dean, Lolita Buckner Inniss, which he won—and also discussed (Part 1, Part 2). Lesson 1: He doesn’t let personal involvement silence him.  To the contrary, he makes his interests explicit and carries on putting his insider knowledge to use. 

 

Lesson 2 is open confrontation with senior managers. This is hard and against the lifetime practice of elite and near-elite academics. Yet in a set of recent posts, on the dean’s reappointment,  “A Note on the Economic Sociology of Law Faculties,” and “A World of Lies,” Campos names everyone and keeps all the political affects in play. He cites administrative content at length and the subjects it to critique. 

 

This is the third lesson – use of one’s academic expertise and skills against the standard PR, information withholding, and gaslighting that regularity emerges from academic managers engaged in opinion control, paired with being explicit about the campus battle between analysis and bullshit. 

 

For example, Campos cites two paragraphs of the administration’s explanation of why they reappointed Inniss in spite of majority opposition. "The university’s response to this disgraceful situation is to just keep lying about it,” he writes, “while hoping that no one will have the temerity to point out that the lies are just that." 

 

Campos takes this job upon himself.  Citing a university explanation for the reappointment, he offers 6 points of rebuttal. The explanation “is all fabricated," he says, while showing the reality behind it.

 

Lesson Four is naming the managerial / professorial divide, thus making it a thing to discuss and fix.

 

As to why [Dean Inniss] was reappointed, Campos said, “My personal opinion is the provost did it because, even though he hates Lolita, he hates the faculty more.”

 

“It’s just the whole notion of faculty governance is utterly inimical to the way these central administrators think,” Campos said. “It’s like, they’re the C-suite bosses and you’re the employees— it’s their job to decide everything important and it’s your job to shut up and follow orders.”

 

“That’s the attitude in higher ed right now, and this is just an extreme example of it,” he added.

 

 

Faculty won’t increase their influence over policy without starting from this subordination.

 

The fifth lesson is to not let the professoriat off the hook. Campos’ “economic sociology of law faculties” boils down to faculty turning a blind eye to opaque and unreal budgeting when it is packaged as salary increases for them plus more hiring. 

 

(The law school faculty is 53% larger now than it was in the late 1990s, while the student body is around 10% larger).

 

This missive [about a slate of new hires] triggered the realization that, in my 35 years on the faculty, we have never to the best of my recollection ever had a discussion about how large the law faculty should be. . . .

 

The reason for that seems obvious: The law faculty’s answer to the question of how large the faculty should be is, absent external controls or pressures of some sort, the same as its answer to the question of how large our salaries should be, which is to say “as large as possible.” Indeed these two questions are to a significant extent the same question, since a larger faculty is a kind of indirect form of remuneration, since it means smaller classes and teaching loads, more freedom in regard to which classes a particular faculty member can choose to teach, more research leaves, etc.

 

Awkward! But basically true in my experience.  To repeat, your typical professoriat/ PMC thought collective has no chance of finding its own path against managerial alignment with Trumpism if it can’t name and then work though its own complicities. 

 

Plan A is a democratized university whose autonomy and academic freedoms rest on full collective deliberation. This won’t be built in a day, and much of the current university would rather die. So Plan B, and a final faculty voice.

 

A recently retired Columbia professor of modern Middle East history, the renowned Rashid Khalidi, wrote an op-ed about cancelling his planned visiting lecture course in the wake of Columbia’s surrender to the Trump Administration.  Describing Columbia as now an anti-university helping the Trump Administration cover up complicity with the genocide in Gaza, he adds that he is taking his course off campus for the wider public: 

I am planning to offer a public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed and available for later viewing. Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.

True again.  And why not a university outside the university, a university of the commons, an underuniversity? 

 

I’ve long been interested in bootleg universities, governed and operated directly by faculty and students with minimal administrative support. These would be financially sustainable with decent salaries—i.e., better than what the army of adjuncts mainly earn now--and with low student fees.  They would work, in the arts, humanities, and social sciences freed from STEM infrastructure and its costs.

 

Personally I quite like STEM research, and I’d rather keep university subjects together and hang on to the enormous infrastructure, resources, and research that universities currently wield.  But if the real democratization of universities is impossible, if co-governance among faculty, staff, students, and administrators can’t happen in an American unstate, then let’s try multiplying a Khalidi course into a curriculum and a network of academics. It would be hard, but preferable to Trump’s Orbanized universities. 

Milos, Greece, on July 19, 2025   

There’s a drift towards seeing the Penn and Columbia University deals with the Trump Administration as templates for settlements across higher ed.  Secretary of Education Linda McMahon calls the Columbia Agreement a “road map for elite universities,” likely meaning Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, Princeton and even Harvard, which have all be subjected to the Administration’s unlawful funding freezes.

This would be a great way to further degrade the entire sector, and must be blocked.

 

A bit of background: When you are the weaker party as a long-term cultural cold war becomes a hot institutional war, you must create a public understanding of who you really are. It should include something like the following elements:

 

1.     Your opponent is very unfair, has become a tormenter and a bully, and is doing serious damage to you that you don’t deserve.

 

2.     When it comes to what you believe in, you stand and fight. You never give up.  This is because you are weak but right.  

 

3.     You and you alone define your values and practices. You say what they are, constantly, concretely, and inclusively.

 

4.     Your institutional community supports you. Persecution makes you collectively stronger.

 

5.     When you do win, the majority of everyday people win too. You are working with them on this mutual benefit.

 

Universities need to get through this whole list, including the last item. Trumpism casts all knowledge institutions as the enemies of the people, especially news media and universities. Universities already needed to be redesigned to serve non-college people more obviously and directly, which will include massive reductions in student costs and student debt. 

 

Trumpism has made this medium-term project more urgent. In the short run, the first three elements can get an immediate response from everyday people: you are a fighter, you fight for your values, and you are fighting unjust attacks.  

 

Even more importantly, your own people, academics, can see you, university presidents, board chairs, provosts, deans, everyone with access to official channels, working towards a transformed public framework that show public value especially under persecution.  

 

Individual academics are very good at this (e.g. law professor James Grimmelman’s impromptu response to Columbia, h/t Meranze; some Penn faculty responding to the Penn deal). But public impact depends on official discourse from the institutions themselves.

 

How did Columbia’s administration do in this context? 

 

Trump of course declared an epic victory over the forces of university darkness. Acting University President Claire Shipman claimed,

 

This agreement marks an important step forward after a period of sustained federal scrutiny and institutional uncertainty. The settlement was carefully crafted to protect the values that define us and allow our essential research partnership with the federal government to get back on track. Importantly, it safeguards our independence, a critical condition for academic excellence and scholarly exploration, work that is vital to the public interest.  Today’s agreement . . . affirms Columbia’s unyielding commitment to academic freedom, freedom of expression, and open inquiry. 

 

The language reminded me too much of Penn president’s statement about that settlement, which masked a disaster (see Liner Note 30). So I read the actual Agreement. It is something else entirely.

 

Columbia gets exactly one thing, restored federal grant funding flows.  There are several pieces of this. One is restoration of federal grant money withheld by “HHS or NIH” (§7), which includes “drawdown of overdue payments on Non-Terminated Grants” and a promise not to yank the same grants again for the same reason (§8a).  

 

The government also promises not to display “disfavored treatment” towards future Columbia applications for federal money (§8b). Access to future federal research funding was clearly Columbia admin’s overriding concern.

 

And yet, “The Terminated Grants by Ed. and any other terminated contracts are excluded from this provision” (§7).  Columbia biomedical researchers will get their money back, but it seems that nothing will be returned to other disciplines.

 

Everything else in the Agreement is about Columbia’s guilt. This starts with the unbelievable payment of $200 million dollars, with the first installment of $21 million to “be made within five (5) business days of the Effective date” (§10).  Even Paramount coughed up only $16 million as an extorted fee for the government’s approval of its sale to Skydance.  Columbia formally admits no wrongdoing.  And yet their $200 million payment screams guilty.  

 

The Agreement requires special supervision of all academic regional studies units, including the review of hiring at least non-tenure track and perhaps other faculty, of “all aspects of leadership and curriculum,” and of program creation (§12).  These provisions are obvious violations of academic freedom.

 

Columbia loses the right to provide programs, “benefits or advantages” on the basis of “protected characteristics” (§15), except for Jewish students, whose wellbeing is to be rather patronizingly overseen by a “Student Liaison” for their exclusive use (§14).  

 

Columbia loses the right to pursue any kind of diversity, equity, or inclusion goals.  This is also a violation of academic freedom, where terms of educational engagement are, in contrast, supposed to be set by faculty via co-governed internal procedures.

 

Columbia admissions process must also be cleansed of any considerations of “race, color, or national origin.” This goes well beyond policing “preferences” to banning “personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity as a means to introduce or justify discrimination” (§§15-16). In practice, this means any applicant reference to racialized identity, while identities like whiteness, Christianity, and Jewishness are not banned. In addition to being textbook racism, this demand exceeds the requirements of the Supreme Court’s Harvard and North Carolina affirmative action decisions and is in my view unlawful.  But Columbia has agreed to it. 

 

There are “when did you stop beating your wife” digs here and there. “Columbia will, as needed, engage with experts on laws and regulations regarding sanctions enforcement, anti-money laundering, and prevention of terrorist financing” (§25).  The storyline here is that Columbia harbors diffuse criminal tendencies that only the Trump Administration brutal intervention has been able to stop.

 

Like so many felons, Columbia must be put on probation.  Columbia’s lasts for three years.  The government maintains the right to reopen complaints on all aspects of university activity (e.g. §17), with the sole exception, as far as I can see, of the previously-terminated NIH grants.  

 

Section VI is called “Monitoring.” It names a Resolution Monitor, who is to “monitor Columbia’s compliance with this Agreement” in all particulars. There are 13 paragraphs on these, including the Resolution Monitor’s “timely access to interview all Agreement-related individuals, and visit Agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of Agreement-related meetings and disciplinary hearings, and reviews, and the scene of any occurrence” deemed relevant to the Agreement (§49). The government “and its consultants and agents” will have access to all personnel, etc. related to the Agreement (§51). 

 

Because the Monitor and government will keep materials confidential from the wider Columbia community and public, they imply that their regime will not breach existing privacy laws that protect students and others.  But I really don’t see any precise limits on the Monitor-government surveillance of all academic and related administrative activity. 

 

Any firm protections of faculty, staff, or students will need to be worked out in practice by a university under tremendous stress and that has already made clear it will compromise for funding.  Given the government’s reach-in powers in every aspect of this Agreement, I don’t expect the University to regularize protections.

 

Columbia students are cast as incipient criminals, especially the foreigners. The Agreement requires Columbia to report “all disciplinary actions involving student visa-holders resulting in expulsions or suspensions”-- like the 70-80 expulsions or suspensions of July 22^nd, announced the day before this Agreement (§23). Columbia loses control of its policing and disciplinary systems. 

 

The Agreement also sets up an informant system. The University is to organize a complaint process  such that “Any member of the Columbia community can report allegations of noncompliance with the reforms detailed in this Agreement” (§33). Literally one person can for any reason trigger a federal-Monitor investigation.

 

In short, Columbia has not preserved its academic freedom in this Agreement.  As McMahon stated,

Columbia University has agreed to pay $200 million, discipline student offenders for severe disruptions of campus operations, make structural changes to their Faculty Senate, bring viewpoint diversity to their Middle Eastern studies programs, eliminate race preferences from their hiring and admissions practices, and end DEI programs that distribute benefits and advantages based on race.  

 

That’s the national narrative this agreement allows the Trump Administration to circulate far and wide. It’s flexibly twistable enough to get slapped onto any and all universities.

 

The university system needs a counternarrative in the worst possible way. It would start by flipping reality right-side up again: the funding freeze was wrong, the smearing of student protesters was wrong, the attacks on the University were wrong, this is why we are fighting them, here’s who we are and what we stand for.

 

But Columbia seems unable even to discuss in public the illegality of the freezing of funds that set up this terrible deal.

 

The Trump Administration got here with coercive bargaining—we took your money, now do what we say if you want any of it back. I’m not a lawyer, but I assume this sort of tactic would invalidate a commercial contract and would be (and in fact is) illegal in administrative law. 

 

And yet in her appearance on CNN, Shipman said Columbia didn’t replicate Harvard’s strategy in suing the Administration because they were so worried about losing their financial relationship with the federal government (@(5’40”).  She doesn’t mention that Harvard has exactly the same worry, or the illegality of the freezing of funds that is precisely what Harvard is suing about.  Shipman’s pleading tone belongs to someone pleased that they’ve managed to bargain their felony down to a misdemeanor. 

 

David Pozen, who is a lawyer, has argued that Columbia’s consent to Trump’s coercive dealmaking helps to undermine the system of public administration.  Trump is also doing this with tariffs in the global economy, with deportation policy-- coercion is really the foundation of everything he does. The weaker party can never win by accepting this game, as Suresh Naidu explains.  Harvard has partially refused it and Columbia and Penn have accepted it. 

 

The university system has many weapons of the weak, starting with proclaiming their teaching, relations of care, original research, and self-development for everyone who wants it. They are places of unique challenge, novelty, and happiness, of intellectual revolutions and personal transformations. I can barely imagine what continuous federal and “monitor” surveillance will do to the atmosphere of classrooms, labs, departmental policy debates, dormitory arguments—to everything about unfettered exchange and their everyday revelations.   

 

Many people have been fighting Trumpian oppression.  Students have been doing this, both in their long months of protests of Israel’s war of extermination in Gaza—at escalating personal risk of expulsion, degree rescinding, incarceration and deportation—and in defenses of academic freedom (see “Penn Descends Into Fascism”).    

 

It would really help if Columbia faculty bodies lay out how the Agreement violates the core practices of higher education—starting with the curtailing of the autonomy of the Senate.  But if the institutions don’t fight officially, they are finished.