Selling The Catalyst, UCSB on April 12, 2014   

2025 saw a shift in the hard right’s measure for the success of its decades-long attacks on universities: it moved from discrediting to subjugating the university system. It used decades-old methods in which culture wars and budget wars work together. These were now yoked under Trump II with federal coercion campaigns that extorted changes in core institutional policy through the unlawful withholding of federal funds.

 

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.

 

The split between universities and the Trump Administration is one problem, and the internal split between university administration and faculty is another.  While faculty groups have called on their administrations to reject Trump’s illegally-compelled deals, their managers have regularly accepted them. Northwestern, Virginia, and my PhD alma mater Cornell are three that capitulated since I discussed Columbia and Penn and UCLA hanging by a thread.

 

In this post I will discuss this management—faculty split, which I nominate as the most important internal trend of 2025. I’ll discuss new revelations about the fraudulent federal case against UCLA, revelations which haven’t obviously stiffened spines. I’ll then analyze the UC budget as a paradigm of top-level administrative groupthink that has lost touch with educational reality (sections 3 and 4). The final section will discuss the larger historical exhaustion of the current regime as the context in which academics will need to ponder building of the shadow or parallel university.

 

§§

 

The Northwestern University deal was the last straw for veteran academic freedom expert John K. Wilson.  He wrote,

It is common to describe these agreements as a surrender to the Trump regime, but it’s actually much worse. This isn’t capitulation; it’s collaboration. This is complicity, not compulsion.

 

Northwestern officials made an agreement with the Trump administration, not because they were forced to, but because they wanted to do it. . . .

 

Bowing down before the Trump administration only makes sense as a strategy when both sides share the same goals. These agreements allow administrators to impose tighter controls over almost every aspect of campus life.

 

Wilson notes that the deal defied a Northwestern faculty vote of 595 to 4 against “any capitulation on the part of Northwestern University to these or similar demands that undermine constitutional rights, democratic principles, faculty governance, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom.”  He states that “the Northwestern agreement includes a long list of right-wing demands related to race, sex and politics.”

 

Wilson has been making patient arguments on behalf of academic freedom for thirty years. I’d say his patience has now run out.

Until administrators suffer the consequences of an alumni and campus backlash, they will continue bowing down to the Trump administration, sacrificing academic freedom every time they are forced to choose between free speech and the spigot of money.

This is true.  He continues: 

Students, faculty, staff and alumni need to create a subversive alternative university lurking within the shadows of the university itself. This shadow university is essential because trustees, administrators and wealthy donors ultimately control the structure of universities.

 

The first step is financial: encouraging alumni to cut off all donations to the university. The problem is that when progressive donors withhold money, progressive causes at the university will tend to suffer the most. So the solution is to create a shadow fund, an independent non-profit that alumni can donate to continue support for these goals. In the case of Northwestern, it could include independent funding for efforts being banned in the Trump agreement.

 

After offering some detail, drawn in part from AAUP-Northwestern’s president Jacqueline Stevens, he concludes, “We need shadow universities to preserve academic values and academic freedom at a time when they are under attack by government officials and campus administrators.”

 

There’s been quite a bit of thinking about this over the years, and that thinking’s time has come.  I’ve previously pondered storefront or bootleg universities in which already-employed tenure-track faculty would teach one course a year for free while hiring otherwise-adjuncted scholars for regular pay.  Figuring out how to fund this would be fun.  Some colleagues in Bologna, Italy, run courses as an International Parallel University out of a bookstore.

 

Wilson and Stevens imagine something similar being run from or next to a major university, and perhaps integrated into it with an autonomous funding and governance structure.  The autonomous governance structure could serve as practical experiment in democratized, bottom-up academic governance of a kind now purged from the country’s colleges and universities, to their intellectual and also financial detriment.

 

§§

The University of California would likely have followed Columbia, Penn, Brown, Northwestern et al.   had Gov. Gavin Newsom not publicly threatened to cut state funds to UC in exact proportion to any state monies and student tuition the UC Regents sent to Trump.  To repeat, Harvard remains the only university in the United States to have sued the Trump Administration for obvious violations of the federal statues it is using. UC faculty had to sue the Administration on their own to recover blocked research funds that a district court verified where withheld unlawfully.  It’s been a terrible year for the credibility of university managers as people who stand up for the integrity and autonomy of the sectors over which they have unilateral authority.

 

The university presidents all claim that their accords with Trump preserve academic freedom and university values, but these are self-interested and superficial readings of what is happening. MAGA is waging total war on knowledge and expertise, and as culture war discredits knowledge workers, their motives, and their expertise, budget wars undermines the material resources that allow them to do their research and teaching.

 

University managers err in thinking that compromising university principles attracts mainstream admiration. This past week saw signs that self-censoring professors (as at the University of Texas at Austin) are losing the trust and respect of their students. There are also signs that students are now rejecting campus surveillance culture: see Timothy Burke’s excellent piece on the growth of this culture over the 2010s and student opposition at Swarthmore.

 

In keeping with the year’s theme, new reporting by Jaweed Kaleem at the Los Angeles Times reveals how the investigations of UC campuses by Trump’s Department of Justice violated the Department’s professional standards. The front-page headline is hard to misunderstand.

 

Figure 1 

 

The federal investigation was rushed and inadequate, while its conclusions were determined in advance by political appointees and then publicized with a PR campaign that was “’essentially saying workplaces or colleges were guilty of discrimination before finding out if they really were,’ said one attorney, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.”

 

Another former investigator said, “It shows just how unserious this exercise was. It was not about trying to find out what really happened.” The DOJ attorneys assigned to UC managed to narrow the charges from multiple UC campuses to UCLA, where they felt there were Title VII violations that justified a lawsuit, though even there the attorneys “believed that such a lawsuit had significant weaknesses.” 

 

Kaleem’s findings come too late for UCLA, which already confessed to enabling antisemitism by settling a lawsuit for $6.45 million.  UC statements about the settlement sent the message that UCLA must be continuously monitored for signs of antisemitism. This confirms cultural warrior claims that universities are hotbeds of prejudice rather than being, in general, less prejudiced that society as a whole and dedicated to professional research that reduces prejudice over time.  Antisemitic atrocities like the heartbreaking mass murder of Jews at Bondi Beach in New South Wales, Australia by father-son killers should help us see campus protest and critique as the benefit it is, as even in our grief we refuse to run everything together.  

 

Put another way, UC’s response to orchestrated culture war attacks does not emerge from the educational practices of the campuses over which officials preside. These practices are hardly perfect, but their standards of argument, evidence, and at least semi-respectful dispute are demonstrably superior to those of their accusers and of political knowledge more generally. 

 

When administrators or Board chairs accept and echo generalizations about antisemitism and other systemic bias on U.S. campuses, they insult the intelligence of the academics on those campuses while dumbing down the university in the public eye.

 

§§

 

Having financial resources would give universities a chance to fight their way out of this corner—if their executives would allow it--but those are under continuous attack as well. Here I turn not to Trump’s savaging of research funding—nicely parsed this month by Aatish Bhatia et al. in the New York Times, and Anil Oza and J. Emory Parker in STAT—but to the UC Office of the President’s own budget requests for the 10 campuses of the system.

 

UC’s Office of the President (UCOP) presented its 2026-27 budget proposal at the November Board of Regents Meetings.  These are Groundhog Day for me:  the arguments and inadequate dollar increments repeat themselves again and again, as does their inadequate theory of the university: higher learning is to be measured in degree outputs, production time, and costs of production. That educational theory is pretty much what UC students started to complain about around 1964. Here’s the version in the budget item for November 2025 (page 5).

 

Figure 2 

 

Four of the six goals are about getting students onto campus in the first place. A fifth is about using ed-tech to make it unnecessary to go to a campus in the first place. The sixth defines a university education as job training. 

 

Once UCOP defines UC’s B.A. degrees as commodity outputs measured with those metrics,  then it can, year after year, request state funding that’s at best flat when corrected for cost inflation (higher than CPI) without the Senate or anyone else saying that yet another inadequate request will hurt UC quality, even though it clearly does.

 

UCOP also foolishly continues to overenroll students, defined as admitting students for whom the state doesn’t pay (4,047 of 210,635 in 2024-25, Display 3). Student throughput continues to increase at no cost to the state, which teaches the state that payment for student infrastructure is optional. The conditions of education stagnate or decline.

 

So, the budget request: in 2022, UCOP signed a multi-year Compact with Governor Newsom that locks in stagnant state budgets:  UC is to receive a 5% annual increase in its base state allocation, conditioned on increased enrollment in resident undergraduates. UCOP thus asks for this percentage for 2026-27, which comes to an additional $262.8 million, or around 2.5 percent of “core funds” (these are nearly $11 billion combining state outlays with all forms of student tuition and fees).

 

UCOP also asks for an additional $401.5 million that the state owed but failed to pay when it promptly reneged on its Compact. Odds and ends bring the requested state increase to about $703 million. UCOP further requests one-time funds of $1.36 billion for “Capital Support for Facilities Renewal, Enrollment Growth, and Clean Energy Projects.”

 

The regents’ discussion cast this as a bold request.  It’s not.  It’s a remedial budget, and a very incomplete one at that.

 

In reality, UCOP’s funding requests have locked UC campuses into structural deficits—structural in the sense that with efficiency measures already taken, and operating at capacity, costs consistently exceed revenues.  UCSB calculates a $120 million deficit heading to $160-180 million in the next couple of years. UC Davis estimates a $53 million deficit just on tuition and state funds, with campus losses from federal government follies of $118-$408 million. In their September meeting, the regents saw UCSD’s chancellor visualize his campus’s $132 million deficit.  

 

Figure 3 

UC Santa Cruz had a deficit of $95 million at the end of 2024-25 and a larger one this year.  UC Irvine claims to have reduced its deficit to $31 million, but only if every unit achieves cuts that analysis suggests are destructive and unsustainable (Part 1 and Part 2). Though UCLA has withheld an official quantification of its deficit, it is serious enough to have led to 10% cuts in administrative units along with others that prompted a nearly-unanimous Senate Resolution for full disclosure and budget collaboration with faculty.    

 

If we conservatively estimate $100 million in shortfalls per campus, these add up to a systemwide “structural deficit” of $1 billion for 2025-26.  The total is likely larger. Campus deficits have become recurring, campus allocations don’t follow need, deficits are likely larger than publicly stated, many cuts have already been factored in, and none of the deficits count federal withholdings. Therefore, even “full” compact finding will not close the campus gaps.

 

UCOP officials didn’t mention that the University of California lost a lot of money on operations in FY2025: $5.9 billion (Table MDA.3).  It lost $8.3 billion in FY 2024 and nearly $9 billion the year before that.  Obviously this suggests a broken funding model that cohort tuition and state Compacts don’t address.

 

These large losses are apparently being covered with borrowing (see below), but my point here is that they aren’t being discussed and confronted in the open session on budget and finance.

 

UCOP declines to educate the Board on the institution’s budget history.  They can therefore pretend that any given current 2-3 year period of flat or falling state funding is a temporary pause in decent growth in a healthy system.  In medicine, this would be malpractice: the actual budget context looks like this.

 

Figure 4  

 

All the additional student tuition (green line) does not bring UC to the per-student funding it would receive if its budget had grown in proportion to state per-capita income (blue line) and to enrollment growth (yellow line). 

These data also falsify UCOP’s claim that state budget challenges cause UC cuts (page 1), since these challenges don’t diminish other state agencies in the aggregate.

 Figure 5

The gap between the purple like (overall state budget) and the red line (UC's state appropriation) shows that UC's record of receiving state funds is, in the company of CSU, uniquely terrible. 

Insufficient funds over many years has meant a double reality on the campuses.  First, faculty of every kind along with graduate student employees teach and research their hearts out in an effort to achieve the highest possible quality.  Second, their working conditions steadily deteriorate out from under them, for years at a time.

 

Examples abound, though they remain uncollected: Program ambitions are quietly downgraded, projects are discontinued, great ideas never see the light of day.  All universities now desperately need to intensify personal instruction in response to “AI,” but, as The Economist recently recognized, they lack the money to do this.  Above all, budgets control, even pre-empt, academic initiatives, which curtails academic freedom. Programs for teaching and research, justified by faculty expertise, are instead subject to the decisions of budget officials, who rarely if ever share their data or their thinking with their campuses. 

 

Since students and faculty generally love their schools and feel loyalty to them, open discussion of quiet, steady quality declines is taboo.  Academic needs get lost when the professional half of the PMC relates to the managerial half via loyalty without voice. Silent loyalty is repaid by decline.  The silence enables chronic mis-budgeting on the UCOP level.

 

Though this is not our intention, we very effectively hide budget damage from the public with our silence. Faculty and students will need to be much more public about the effects of enshittified budgeting over many years.

 

§§

 

This section offers some detail about UC’s budgetary inadequacy as a primary source of vulnerability and decline.

 

–Visible Shortfalls: The regents who responded to UCOP’s budget openly disbelieved its estimates for deficit size and closure.  Regent Lee’s plausible guess was that a $400-500 million gap would remain even by UCOP’s narrow and misleading definition.  

 

—Capital Projects: In the long-time absence of state capital project support, two-thirds of the 2025-2031 Capital Financial Plan, requiring $48.3 billion, has no identified funding source (page 130).  The one-time request for $1.36 billion invites non-repetition. Spread ambiguously across new projects and deferred maintenance, the amount is one-sixth the cost of the deferred maintenance backlog on UC’s existing buildings. That is seven times larger than it was a decade ago.

 

Figure 6

 

 

 

—Tuition Increases: These are bad for students without doing enough for UC. UCOP led with evidence that UC student debt has declined, and that 2/3rds of residents graduate debt-free, which is a genuine achievement)

 

Figure 7

 

  But the regents are supposed to think that UC has eliminated financial hardship for resident undergraduates.  Averages of course conceal all sorts of bad specific cases, and student protesters interrupted the presentation until Board Chair Janet Reilly responded to their concerns by asking the police to get them out.  There’s a simple reason why many if not most UC students feel constant financial pressure, and that is that all financial aid has a “self-help expectation” in which students have to come up with at least $10,000 a year; UC reduces aid to make sure $10,000 comes from the student. 

 

Figure 8

 

 

A student earning $20 an hour would need 500 hours to fill that gap; in reality work hours are likely quite a bit more.  “Debt-free” means high workloads, including working while a full-time student. Student financial stress is another example of a problem that insufficient state increases makes unsolvable.

 

UCOP’s plan was to add one percent to the renewed cohort tuition plan (first passed in 2021), and earmark it for campus capital projects in student services.  This was rejected by the Board, which approved an additional 1% but converted it to any campus use at the chancellor’s discretion.

 

UC’s policy of cohort tuition increases revenue annually by about one-fourth of the (up to)  5% (to be 6%) increase on each new class of students. This is a pretty big increase, getting close to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Compact of 7% annual increases (for all students) of 2004.  The discussion made clear that the regents like the automatic nature of the increase so they don’t get blamed. They like the ratchet, and they like not having to re-approve the policy for years at a time (one regent suggested revisiting it every 7 years). Of course a regent who doesn’t want to receive and respond to criticism of their voted policy should immediately resign—this is a public policy position after all.  As if.

 

—Student housing. This is an ongoing problem that adds mightily to students’ Total Cost of Attendance.  The state withdrew support for new student housing years ago. The result is that even on-campus housing is geared to off-campus market standards, where developers had figured out that they can charge students by the bed rather than the room. UC responds by offering on campus housing at 79% of (an unaffordable) market, to cite the UC Santa Barbara case. UCSB’s student housing project—delayed for a decade by the Yang- Munger “dormzilla” fiasco—is to happen on a campus whose capital program is 78% unfunded (page 108). A set of astute, detailed questions to the campus officials from Student Observer Isha Khirwadkar (@2’10”), suggested its future customers already don’t like the project’s very high cost per bed ($883 and up).  Campus housing now extends the affordability crisis rather than cutting against it.

 

—Research Funding. Maintaining the air of budget normality depends on bracketing out the federal threats to up to one-third of UC’s overall budget, most of that tied to research.  This issue was simply ignored.  Equally ignored, as always, are all universities’ structural losses on research: adding up institutional fund expenditures on R&D in FY2023 for the 3 big medical campuses (LA, SD, SF) comes to well over $1 billion (Table 22), to say nothing of losses at the other campuses. 

 

It’s irresponsible to continue to ignore these costs in a major research university budget, and to not use the current crisis to move towards a sustainable research funding system.

 

­­–Institutional Debt: In the absence of adequate state funding, and with necessary limits on tuition increases, UCOP has turned to annual debt increases as an additional revenue stream. It added $7.1 billion in debt in FY2025, and $4.9 billion in FY2024 (Table MDA.2)  

 

Long term debt in FY2025 is $36.2 billion (page 30). It is triple the debt in 2009-10 of $12.5 billion (“09/10 Annual Financial Report, my archives), and nearly double outstanding debt of ten years ago ($20 billion, Annual Financial Report 15/16, page 6). 

 

UC’s net position is positive, there are lots of reserves and revenue streams, and for such reasons nobody seems to care.  But really for how much longer at today’s interest rates can UC borrow its way out of shortfalls in state support for operations and capital projects?  It’s a failure of the management system to have no public generation of discourse and ideas about this.

 

§§

 

 

It’s a truism to say that universities are now banks with a sideliner in education, but that’s all the more reason to work seriously on the reversal. Financialization actively harms UC education and that of other public universities. The whole period has erased the previous era’s interest in advanced education for non-elites.   That interest was limited to the white middle-class, but it also underwrote the period’s free public colleges.  The Trump war on knowledge and universities is an opportunity to undo our own era’s maladaptations, which rest on a bipartisan consensus that social resources should go disproportionately to elites because they uniquely know how to maximize returns on investment.  Jerry Brown saw public universities as remedial, and tech as where value came from. Gov. Gavin Newsom means the same thing when he mis-sells higher ed as a “conveyer belt for talent” into the workforce.  They both mean public universities are for worker bees, so if a Latina bookworm has to work 3 full shifts a week to stay in your lit course, well, there’s just no money to fix that.

 

If you poll people about whether college should lead to employment, of course they will answer yes.  Unemployed people suffer and die in America, and no one will go into student debt for that.  But a job is baked into college expectations and existing funding levels, meaning the public is okay with keeping the university even with inflation but can’t see why “workforce development” earns it meaningful new investment.

 

More importantly, working-class and other non-college people value thinking as much as college grads.  This should be obvious, but in any case I make this generalization on the basis of decades of teaching mixed-class courses in public university. The future’s parallel university is going to center on offering the non-market, intellectual benefits of university and not the job training.

 

Quantity has always eclipsed intellectual quality in mass higher education. Massification entered a new phase around the turn of the century, when a critical mass of politicians and business people,  with a lot of help from the right, began to doubt that a generic BA degree added much value to the economy or society. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s multi-year cuts (2003-05) operationalized a disdain for egalitarian quality. That was twenty years ago, but UCOP has never developed the educational theory to unearth the roots of permanent austerity.

 

The Canadian higher ed analyst Alex Usher recently explained that international higher education has never developed a sustaining justification for quality massification.   First, “We increased access but allowed the already-privileged to hold on to their near-monopoly at the top.” This creates a pervasive link between universities, economic inequality, and mass mediocrity. 

 

Second, “there are huge swathes of the population that deeply resent the idea that they need to spend more time in school in order to enjoy a middle-class life. . . . [A] lot of the social polarization and populism comes down, I think, to the belief that the front-of-the-class kids, the swots, whatever you want to call them (us), have monopolized good jobs.” I’d add that job training is precisely what non-college people do not want from colleges: they rightly see it as overpriced overkill if you’re just trying to get a job.

 

Third, “from the perspective of government, once higher education becomes something that is nearly universal, why should it be treated differently from secondary schools?”

 

In reality there is an evident answer to that last question that admin refuses to provide. Universities create cognitive gain, public knowledge, and social self-understanding on a mass scale. Our ancestors used to bundle these elements as “education for democracy.”  It is the best way yet devised, in tandem with social movements and other institutions, of getting a whole population in position to solve complex and frightening problems without today’s elevated levels of fear, revulsion, and violence. Universities are the main systemic developer of the capacity to go a little deeper – on a mass scale.

 

The parallel or shadow university will need its separate governing structure.  And it will also be able to grow on the basis of now-hidden intellectual missions that, I believe, will enjoy mass popularity that job training does not.

 

In the meantime, please say in any format you can what is happening to you.  We need an outpouring of tales from the front.

 

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

Every meeting tells a story as Rod Stewart once sang, more or less.  What stories have UC’s Office of the President and Board of Regents been singing when they met every two months?  Side A in November was “protecting student affordability.”  Side B was their perennial favorite, “budget rules everything.” The bonus track, unadmitted, was “stagnation conquers all.”

 

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.

 

Yet his letter placed the program on standard austerity probation for all things academic: the University, he wrote, continues to assess the program’s “long-term financial sustainability,” which may lead to “some changes to elements of the program including the total number of incentives supported.” PPFP hiring incentives will be allowed out in the community until UCOP says otherwise. Permanent budgetary shortfalls mean it can be cancelled at any time.   

 

The UC Regents meet every two months, and these meetings narrate budgetary deficits and inadequate resources in a way that normalizes the authority of inadequate resources over the academic core.

 

Specific bad effects are regularly in the news: UCLA has cancelled in First Year Scholars Program for humanities and social science majors, which among other things offered that nearly unknown thing at public research universities—one-on-one faculty academic advising—to save what tiny fraction of the instructional budget?  UCLA has a large structural budget deficit, which in the current regime justifies any cuts.

 

Another example comes from UCSD, where a Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions produced a Final Report that registered an alarming collapse in the math skills of admitted students.  (A Decline in writing skills was also noted.)  These math levels are indeed very bad and need to be addressed.  But I was most struck that the recommendations don’t include the creation of foundation or bridge courses on campus to get student skills where they need to be.  The recommendations all involve more and better measurement, including a return of standardized testing (UC Regents dropped the SAT requirement for the 2021 cohort), plus tougher oversight and perhaps more use of admissions to reject rather than admit these students. The report’s focus is on sorting out rather than lifting up.  UCSD has a large structural budget deficit, which in the current regime justifies ignoring essential programs.

 

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a simple point: UCOP never asks for enough money to maintain quality UC academics.  And it has no plan ever to ask for enough money.  

This isn’t a result of Trump or Covid-19, and resulting campus deficits predate them (see 2016 and 2019, etc). It began in earnest in the 2000s and has carried on under Democratic governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom.  I refer any uncertainty you have on this matter to Liner Note 26 on Newsom’s May Revision budget for UC, where Figure 1 shows his broken compact and Figure 2 the 25 year history of underfunding.

 

I’m over 700 words into this post and I haven’t gotten to UCOP’s budget story this month--or to my counternarrative.  Why not? This opening is my attempt to get you to care about these sober, earnest, tedious, repetitious unto nausea, humble-brag self-declaringly “prudent” bullshit budgets.  I do this because I think the Academic Senate has given up on trying to critique and counter UCOP budgets, with some great exceptions like the Resolutions brought by frontline assistant and associate professors to the UCLA Senate (Liner Note 42). Am I wrong about this?

 

My comrades in the faculty unionization movement may have given up too, waiting for the collective bargaining of the future?  Instead of proposing alternative budgets for UC workers, UC unions often focus on misallocation (true) and underused reserves (also true, and this could indeed help in the current crunch, as AFSCME’s great research director Claudia Preparata showed for the Covid crunch—also see Priced Out, her co-authored report on UC’s contribution to the affordability crisis). Failure to deploy internal resources is an effect of UCOP’s perm-austerity story, whose wreckage we definitely do care about even if we don’t trace it directly to an austerity system whose narrative elements we don’t think we can replace.

 

As I said, normalization that leads to a lower New Normal has been happening at (and by) UC for 25 years. Hypernormalization is a concept that ascends to us from the media philosopher Jean Baudrillard, was given its name by UC Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, was used alarmingly by the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, and is nicely summarized by journalist Adrienne Matel for Trump Volume II in her Guardian read, “systems are crumbling—but daily life continues.”  Baudrillard described the replacement of reality with a simulacra that substituted for it in people’s minds, and there’s no less resistible simulacra than a budget discourse. Hypernormalization creates an affective split between “the system is broken and must be fixed” and “the system is broken and cannot be fixed.” Hypernormalizing narrative is what UCOP produces at regents meetings. Demobilization of the kind I just fretted about is its effect. Normal life is bad, and yet you can only accept it, since to refuse it is the definition of unreasonable.

 

I called this hyponormalization in my analysis of some University of Minnesota budget materials (Liner Note 28). “In hypernormality, the system’s dysfunction is widely noted. In hyponormality, information is withheld and discussion is blocked so that dysfunction can be denied. In both cases, administrative authority is maintained as program damage propagates through the system.”

 

Hyper or hypo, normalization leads to a fatalism about decline. It raises the question, can we care enough about its result, permanent austerity, to fight it consistently and seriously? Can we care enough for austerity, for its political economy, to replace it?

 

I’ll leave it there and examine UCOP’s November normalization in a separate post.

MLA Convention, New Orleans on January 11, 2025   

By Liron Mor, Comparative Literature, UC Irvine

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.

 

A genocide is still raging in Gaza. To date, even the most conservative estimates put the number of Gazan fatalities above sixty thousand. Israel has been pulverizing Gaza for over two years— starving, maiming, and killing its population; destroying its landscape, homes, and infrastructures; and committing a scholasticide so complete that not a single institution of higher education is left standing in the Gaza Strip. Consider the words of our colleague, Haider Eid, Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at what used to be al-Aqsa University in Gaza, who spoke at the Gaza Tribunal. He testified that he has personally lost 54 relatives, 39 colleagues from al-Aqsa University, and over 280 students, including his “best literature students,” and that Israel’s actions made Gaza “literally unlivable.”

 

Against the backdrop of this annihilatory violence, which was already abundantly clear a year ago, the MLA Executive Council undemocratically refused to bring Resolution 2025-1, “Resolution to Endorse the 2005 Palestinian BDS Call,” before the Delegate Assembly for discussion and vote during the January 2025 MLA annual convention. I remain unconvinced by the rationale offered by the Executive Council, which cited various economic pressures, as well as bureaucratic procedural limitations.

 

The failure of the MLA leadership is not merely a failure to protect freedom of speech and safeguard democratic procedures, though these are becoming increasingly important in the current political climate. It is also not merely a failure to stand up to financial and political pressures, though this failure, too, is alarming given the speed with which higher education is being hollowed out by business interests.

 

The most disturbing failure displayed by the Executive Council was the failure to consider Palestine worthy of discussion—the cleaving, once again, to the “Palestine exception to free speech,” even at a time of great urgency. This is the ethical and pedagogical failure to even acknowledge, let alone discuss, the genocide that is being visited on Palestinians in Gaza in general and on our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza in particular. This is the ethical and pedagogical failure to hear and respond to the call issued by Palestinian civil society at large and, again, by our own Palestinian colleagues, to support BDS—a non-violent mode of engagement through disengagement, meant to communicate to those supportive of Israeli policies and actions that these have long crossed all lines. How can an Association, so utterly absorbed with concern for its own freedom of expression, deny this freedom when it pertains to Palestinians and to the issue of Palestine?

 

I am honored to have been selected. I would like to thank the Selection Committee for the work that must have gone into reading through the submissions, and I appreciate their decision to showcase this “controversial” topic, which the Executive Council was unwilling to put forward for debate. I hope that the Association will soon change course, so that perhaps it might become, once again, a home for all of us with humanistic concerns.

 

Indiana University on November 3, 2025   

by Johannes Türk

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.

 

 

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.