MLA New Orleans on January 11, 2025

This is the first section of my talk at the MLA Convention, "Humanities Dies in Darkness," an extension of a theme.  It's paired with the Public Humanities paper.  I go into more detail in another section about why I think anticipatory obedience is the right term for the profession's relation to its funding masters. I'll elaborate in a later post.

**

In spite of its very bad start, the thought of our new year 2025 leaves me somewhat optimistic, or at least determined. 

The first reason for this is that Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza has generated the strongest anti-war movement of the past 50 years. This movement has changed public discourse, so that recently unsayable terms—genocide, apartheid—have become central terms of public discussion of Israeli policy.  The movement has opened up new possibilities for peace, for Palestine, for the Middle East, even as these possibilities face new waves of repression and nasty uphill battles. Many of us in the room have been active in this struggle, including in the struggle to allow debate of a resolution in the MLA’s Delegate Assembly. Please join me in thanking them for their work. I’ll say more about this in the talk.

The second reason for my determination is that our scholarship has never been better. So much work keeps opening our eyes to new things. I can barely keep up with the podcast version of literary books on the New Books Network. I’d also mention Matt Seybold’s American Vandal podcast series, which has become the decade’s more or less best genealogy and critique of the profession’s current institutional conditions. It is another reminder of how our intellectual lives thrive in spite of material conditions that do not.

The third reason for optimism is that the elements are in place to make Trump Part 2 the end of our current long political cycle rather than its revitalization.  This ending won’t be pleasant, and I obviously can’t time it. But I can talk about what our profession needs to do with the elements that are in place—emphasis on the word do.  

This is not the first time that we confront a Western government in the grip of authoritarian populism, as Stuart Hall named it in 1978. This term refers to a socio-political and cultural condition in which leaders build authoritarian state power with the consent of a voting bloc that believes these leaders will uniquely address their genuine needs. Hall saw that the power of Thatcherism lay in its insight that cultural power would decide its fate, not just state power or economic policy.

Now in 2025, the second Trump administration will again try to remake society from above while alleging that this expresses the national will. Trump and Musk seem to be trying to create steampunk 19th century American imperial expansionism for a world to be run by a League of Extraordinary Dictators. At home and abroad, culture war will remain central: smearing the identities of migrants and trans people, exclusionary definitions of normative values—these are not by-products of Trumpism but Trumpism as such. 

One thing that has changed since 1978, or 2008, or 2016 is the destabilizing crisis in the culture industries of which the academic humanities are a part.  Authoritarian populism has always targeted rival cultural producers for destruction. As it continues to do so, it can take advantage of a materially weakened opposition that is also not well organized institutionally. 

I’m talking about us of course--cultural producers whose employment base has been under attack from various directions for 30 to 50 years. Language instructors, journalists, screenwriters, poets, musicians, playwrights—all of our colleagues in culture have been facing steadily increasing levels of precarity, inadequate salaries, unemployment, or replacement, and also few organizational tools to establish basic parity. 

Trump’s return will deepen the well-structured assault on all non-reactionary cultural knowledge production and on their institutions, especially the news media and the university. In addition, Trump’s Big Tech brigades will use so-called artificial intelligence to make this even worse.  We are facing a unique conjuncture within a system that has been under construction for 50 years.

At this point in this system’s cycle, we must confront and reject the humanities fields’ standard response to adversity. Our response has been, in my view, accommodation, coupled with a passive-aggressive reluctance to engage the external demands for positive public knowledge that the university’s social contract involves.   It’s submissive individualism, inherited from Emerson among many others.  

A related term that emerged thirty years ago to describe such a response to authoritarian systems, and now popularized by the historian Timothy Snyder, is anticipatory obedience.  I  want to pose the following question in the context of the MLA Executive Council’s recent decision to block debate of a valid resolution about boycotting Israel: if we cannot debate BDS, how can we demand that others—Congress, university presidents--debate the unacceptable material conditions of our own cultural and academic labor? Without confrontational courage, across the full range of justice issues, how, regarding my topic here, can literary study avoid further budgetary defeat?

Obedience damages the state of others, and also of ourselves.  Overcoming our long-running financial defeat now requires building a countermodel for an alternative culture and society, using elements of both dominant and emergent cultures, in Raymond Williams’ terms. Building a United States not dominated by Trumpism—a minimal but difficult step-- will not happen without the kind of discursive and cultural analysis that defines the work of most of the members of the MLA. I believe that the study of literature, language, writing, and culture will either be central to the next historical cycle or that next positive cycle will occur too late.

I have four points to make about this today. The first is that MLA disciplines cannot be bystanders to building the countermodel.  

The second is that when critics like Hall, Williams, and also Said, Ferguson, Butler, and many others called for the conceptual tools that would build away from authoritarian-democratic and white-nationalist societies in what Williams called the long revolution—literary study successfully answered the call.  Our fields have developed the forms of knowledge that can enable this transition. This development has not slowed down but sped up over the past twenty years.  I only assert this now—perhaps we can discuss a bit later.

Third, we have the intellectual means to attain meaningful public significance as producers of knowledge. But we lack the institutional and financial means.  We are not too slow or too radical to sit at the research table. We are too poor. What this means is that we are unable to fulfill the tacit social contract under which all academic disciplines labor, which is to produce knowledge that ordinary people can use to solve problems in their lives—intellectual problems, not just problems of employment.  I will lay out our financial poverty in the humanities and define it as a social problem and enormous intellectual block.

Fourth, on top the funding scandal is the scandal of our lack of will and failure to confront the funding crisis over a period of decades.  When I say we are intellectually ready but not ready with the required infrastructure, it is partly our own fault. I’ll end by calling for us to transform our relation to funding politics, which must include transforming our structure of feeling about research capital and its institutions. 

We will need a new level of militance if the profession is to survive to fight another day, to say nothing of contributing to the long revolution in democratic affects and practices on which peace and ultimately human survival depend. 

MLA Convention Hallway Meeting on January 10, 2025

The organization has chosen an interpretation of fiduciary responsibility beyond the wildest hopes of Chicago School economists.

by  MATT SEYBOLD  

(This is cross-posted from his blog American Vandal, where you can find his important podcast.)

JAN 08, 2025

In March, I was nominated to for the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA). In December, I learned that I had lost that election.

Don’t cry for me. I was never fully convinced I was a good fit for the position and, as such, could not campaign for it with much vigor.1

I wasn’t even an active MLA member at the time of my nomination, an irregularity which clearly bothered the Executive Director, Paula Krebs, when she reached out to discuss (and possibly dissuade me from) accepting the nomination.

I still have no idea how I came to be nominated, but I decided to stand for the election in spite of my reservations.

And I’m glad I did. Because what did happen in the intervening nine months was that I had to think about the oldest, largest, and nominally most influential organization in my profession as I never had before. And I had far greater capacity to do so thanks to the dozens of MLA members who reached out to me after the nominations were made public in June to discuss their experiences and their concerns.

Those who spoke with me are disproportionately worried about two things.

They perceive the leadership of MLA to be overrepresented by tenured professors at flagships or elite private universities, whose experiences of the contemporary profession might be radically different from that of MLA members who work at small colleges, community colleges, branch campuses, HBCUs, etc.2

They believe MLA leadership is ignorant of, or perhaps even an impediment to, the academic labor movement. What little care the organization expresses for the well-documented job insecurity of most academic workers in language and literature departments is widely regarded as pretense and lip service.3

During that phone call in March, I was told multiple times that “the MLA is not a labor organization.” I’m not the only one who has heard this refrain. But the fact that the MLA is not empowered to collectively bargain does not, I believe, justify abdicating from all labor advocacy on behalf of its members.

On the very same day Director Krebs informed me that I had not been elected to the Executive Council, a collective of MLA members who had proposed a resolution of support for the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which the MLA Executive Council refused to pass on to the MLA Delegate Assembly, published an open letter in LitHub alleging “the handling of our resolution fundamentally unconstitutional from the beginning” and the decision “unprecedented in the history of the organization.” They called on the MLA leadership to “let members decide.” That call has since been publicly endorsed by eight past presidents of the MLA. And two members of the Executive Council, Esther Allen and Rebecca Colesworthy, have resigned in solidarity.4

I heard much about the BDS resolution in the months leading up to the election. And what I heard made me uneasy. But I want to be perfectly clear, I had plenty of time and opportunity to remove my name from the ballot, and I did not, because I desperately want to believe the MLA can be an ally to and advocate for humanities scholars and teachers, even if I presently believe it is failing spectacularly at that task.

There are many disgruntled members who remain committed to reforming the MLA from within. I still think they might be able to, and I certainly hope they succeed.

I, however, withdrew from the 2025 MLA Convention in New Orleans and signed the pledge not to renew my membership or otherwise financially support the MLA under its existing leadership.

I disagree with the Executive Council’s decision regarding the BDS resolution, but the BDS resolution is not something about which I would claim to speak as an expert. What provoked my withdrawal from the convention is my career-long commitment to the study of political economy from a humanities perspective.

As such a scholar, I regard the report the MLA Executive Council published on December 16 to explain their suppression of the BDS resolution as a contradiction of the work done by myself and my peers, as well as a betrayal of the professional class whom the MLA claims to serve and represent. And if the logics and rationales of that report are broadly legitimized by scholars of language and literature, they will be assisting in the programmatic defunding, deskilling, and delegitimization of their own disciplines.

To fully comprehend this, we have to start with the MLA Executive Council’s extensive use and expansive definition of terms of art like “fiduciary responsibility,” “fiduciary duty,” “fiduciary standards,” and “fiduciary review.”5

These terms were a minor, relatively inconsequential, part of the U.S. economic and legal lexicon until the 1960s. They proliferated in the decades which followed because they were associated with Chicago School Economics, and specifically the theory of Corporate Social Responsibility, introduced to the public by Milton Friedman in his 1962 manifesto, Capitalism & Freedom, then further popularized through a New York Times editorial published on September 13, 1970.

Befitting a “doctrine,” Friedman’s editorial does not exhaustively respond to any specific event or application of contrasting “social responsibility,” but through paratexts - the above abstract, a series of eight portraits of social responsibility activists, and a photo of protestors dressed in cloaks and gas masks - the Times frames Friedman’s position as a response to Ralph Nader, Campaign G.M., and the combined labor, consumer protection, and environmental movements which over the course of the late sixties converged on General Motors and eventually forced from it some concessions on working conditions, product testing, and pollution.

At its origins, the Chicago School doctrine of Corporate Social Responsibility is simply a rhetorical justification for private corporations to do what they prefer to do anyway: act contrary to the interests of rank-and-file employees, harmed communities, and social activists. This is what the MLA is endorsing when it treats revenue maximization as the sole measure of fiduciary responsibility. It is a resoundingly anti-labor doctrine. There is simply no other way to interpret it.

But even beyond revealing the MLA Executive Council to be, as many of its members and ex-members have long alleged, hostile to labor generally, the zealous adoption of Chicago School Economics further confirms a hostility to humanities labor specifically.

If you want to understand this in granular and historicist terms, I would point you towards “The Chicago Fight” episodes of The American Vandal, as well as towards the scholarship of Andy Hines, Edward Nik-Khah, and Anna-Dorothea Schneider upon which those episodes are based. What they show is that Chicago School Economics is designed to denigrate the knowledge claims of other disciplines, to colonize their institutional spaces, and, quite literally, to steal their resources. When Milton Friedman and his band of self-described pirates toasted the founding of Chicago School Economics, they had not yet constructed anything of note, what they have done is conquer and destroy a series of humanities and soft social science programs and departments which had thrived in their university through most of the first half of the 20th century.

This was accomplished at University of Chicago, and extensively imitated at other institutions, scholastic and governmental, around the world, exactly by insisting that fiduciary review be given priority over all other considerations of mission or obligation. Chicago School Economists would argue that the preservation and expansion of an institutions capital base be placed at the foundation of an organization’s hierarchy of needs because upon that capital base all other organizational missions and obligations depend.

But this prudent-sounding rational masks the more insidious reality: fiduciary review is an economic forecast. Economic forecasts are famously unreliable. But the standard of Corporate Social Responsibility expects executives to treat those forecasts as contractual stipulations. So what has really being placed at the foundation of the institutional hierarchy of needs is the beliefs and desires of economists (or, economic prognosticators). As one lawyer who found himself litigating against the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility put it, “The Chicago response was, well, those objections weren’t economics, and if it wasn’t economics, it didn’t count.”

The recent statements made by the authors of the BDS resolution and the coalition of past MLA presidents both question the legitimacy of the fiduciary review carried out on behalf of Executive Council and complain of the unnecessary lack of transparency regarding the method and accounting of that review. Even were we privy to all the budgetary details, the MLA Executive Council’s Report would be dependent upon an economic prognostication which claims to be able to forecast the actions of dozens of educational institutions, state governments, and courts. And also offers no accounting of the counter-effects of the EC’s decision (including, for example, the loss of membership dues and registration fees).

Economic forecasting is the mask for ideological prescription which has characterized neoliberal governance since the 1970s. And, across that span, has consistently rationalized the defunding and dismissal of alternative methods of knowledge-creation, most especially those practiced by literature and language scholars.

So long as revenue maximization is the top priority of the MLA, it will be doing far more harm to its member scholars, and the rest of us who care about literature and language research and instruction, than any bevy of handbooks, bibliography subscriptions, and teaching collections can arbitrage.

NOTES

1. As one friend put it recently, by losing the election I “saved myself the trouble of resigning in solidarity.”

2. I want to acknowledge that I was not the only candidate for the Executive Council this year who would represent greater diversity in this respect, and two candidates who were elected hail from a small, private HBCU and a small, regional public. I regard this as an unalloyed good.

3. The 2023 presidential theme of “Working Conditions” came up in several conversations as a kind of bait and switch. One member called it “a marketing push to suck a few more years of dues out of people who would be better off if they’d given to mutual aid.”

4. Colesworthy made her letter of resignation public earlier this week.

5. The word fiduciary appears fifteen times is the 3,000-word December 16 Report, more times than iterations of Palestine (13), Gaza (10), Israel (9), academic (8), protest (7), violence (2), labor (0), worker (0), or genocide (0).

Mississippi River from MLA Convention Hilton on January 8, 2025

I'm cross-posting our ex-presidents letter from Lit Hub, updated to reflect the addition of Michael Bérubé. He co-chaired the Ad Hoc Committee that authored the review policy that the EC used to justify blocking the Delegate Assembly debate of the BDS resolution. 

For other materials, please see the initial headnote and resignations letters (MLA v. BDS 1), and the letters from ex-members of the EC (MLA v. BDS 2) and of the MLA Academic Freedom Committee (MLA v. BDS 3).

**

December 16, 2024, updated January 3, 2025

As former presidents and Executive Council members of the MLA who were highly concerned with the fiduciary obligations of officers during our tenure at the association, we strongly oppose the decision to refuse Delegate Assembly debate on Resolution 2025:1. We request that the Executive Council re-convene to reconsider its decision in the light of widespread and legitimate publiccriticism. Having studied the reasons given in the EC’s message and its FAQ’s, we urge that members of the Delegate Assembly be permitted to discuss and exercise their right to vote on Resolution 2025:1.

While we respect the work and thoughtfulness that went into the Executive Council’s recently released documents, we do not see the rationale provided as strong or persuasive enough to merit the action taken. We do not, in particular, judge the financial risks mentioned as having been fully explained or, as currently described, worthy of taking precedence over the MLA's commitment to open debate on urgent issues presented by its members. Indeed, we note that the MLA has itself recommended that administrators of universities and colleges defend dissenting or “unpopular” speech and confront courageously those who would quell speech--which would include deliberative procedures. These principles can be found in our Association’s published statements on Academic Freedom and in the well-formulated letter that the Executive Council released last March about Emergency Motion 2024-1. That letter emphasized the Association’s “unwavering” support for academic freedom and for the right of faculty, student,and staff members to “speak out against Israel’s violence in Gaza.”

The EC makes several claims without supplying substantiation: 

1.  The EC writes that "fully two-thirds of the operating budget of the MLA comes from sales of products to universities and libraries. If states with anti-BDS laws began refusing to allow their universities, colleges, and libraries to purchase MLAsubscription products, the MLA could lose two-thirds of what enables it to carry out its mission, and students and teachers would lose access to these resources."

We note the apparent assumption that states would be able to invalidate contracts or refuse renewal on the basis of the membership resolution. Some states might attempt this. On the other hand, cancellation would pose a case of viewpoint discrimination that would involve legal and even constitutional questions that could be challenged. We note as well the lack of evidence for your core claim that passage of the resolution could put 2/3rds of the MLA’s revenues at risk. You are not procedurally obligated to withhold the financial data that might make your argument more convincing. We are concerned that the lawyers and financial team have been given a de facto veto prior to any discussion of the issues with the DA as representatives of the membership. This is indeed neither democratic nor respectful of the position of the membership as the substance of the Association.

It would be most helpful to have a list of colleges, universities, and libraries to whom MLA sells its products, and what percentage of MLA total revenue would be at risk. Without evidence to assess the scope and validity of the claim, the representation of danger to the MLA appears to amplify fears that are already quelling discussion in the academy. We caution against capitulating to censorship before it happens.

2.   The EC states that “The proposed Resolution 2025-1 sought to mitigate this danger by phrasing the resolution such that itfocused on the members of the MLA as distinct from the organization. But we cannot count on legislators and their constituents tomake that distinction or recognize it as a meaningful one. News articles proclaiming that ‘MLA supports BDS’ wouldn’t likely highlight the distinction between a resolution expressing a majority of members’ individual views and a policy being supported and adopted by the MLA itself. Moreover, in various of these laws and policies, the language in the resolution on “support” for BDS is sufficiently general that a vote by the Delegate Assembly could be taken by many legislatures as prima facie running afoul of the statute by advancing the BDS movement."

These arguments are fully conjectural, again imagining scenarios in which the MLA has no power to stand up to those who might misconstrue its proceedings. This argument forebodes an unwillingness to defend any future action that the Delegate Assembly might take as its right and to rebut any possible distortions of the precise language of the resolution. On the contrary, anticipating a misreading, the EC concedes spectral allegations in advance of their actual emergence in the public media.

The Chronicle of Higher Education cites Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, who tracks anti-BDS state initiatives. She does not believe that "a resolution expressing members’ sentiments toward BDS would violate anti-boycott laws, but that 'doesn’t mean that you won’t see blowback.' Friedman said these contract laws are weaponized by lawmakers to impose a chilling effect on companies. 'Folks who are behind these laws, to some extent, are counting on [organizations] not being willing or able to defend their free-speech rights in court,’ she said.”

We urge the Executive Council to reconsider your decision, and to present at the Delegate Assembly meeting a projection of possible costs based on the evidence we have asked you to supply. Debating a resolution does not and cannot predict its outcome. An affirmative vote would not alter MLA policy. And the right to open debate is as central to academic freedom as it is to declared MLA principles. We expect the MLA to counter any possible critics and threats with an affirmation of the right to assemble, debate, and decide. These are the basics of deliberative democracy and the guiding mandate of the Delegate Assembly.

Now is surely the time to stand up to unjustifiable censorship and retaliation, given how many faculty have been charged, suspended, or terminated for expressing their extra-mural commitments and how many books are being banned while the attack on the humanities and critical thought continues. At a moment when academic freedom is being seriously undermined in our universities and colleges and a new authoritarianism is taking hold, we look to our professional organizations to act not from the fears that increasingly pervade US academia, but from the courage our members will need to continue our work.

With all best wishes, and with thanks for considering our requests,

Michael Bérubé

Judith Butler

Frieda Ekotto

Margaret Ferguson 

Marianne Hirsch

Christopher Newfield

Mary Louise Pratt

Sidonie Smith

Diana Taylor

Former Presidents, Modern Language Association

 

Santa Barbara, CA on December 29, 2024

I have a new paper out at the inaugural issue of Public Humanities.  I thought a bit of summary might be useful, and here's the thread version of that.

I'll be talking about the need for a whole new militance about funding humanities research at the MLA convention in New Orleans on Thursday, January 9th, 5:15 pm. The panel is number 139, "Humanities Funding, Visibility, and the Future of Research," with very good people from ACLS, MLA, NEH, and Mellon. 

**

This new paper on how humanities research funding works was posted as part of the first issue of the new journal *Public Humanities* for the Christmas Eve market in budget analysis.   So a few new year’s thoughts. 

I called it “Humanities Decline in Darkness” because deliberate darkness shrouds university research funding patterns. This reduces humanities research, lowers its public value, causes doubts about its quality

And drives away undergraduate majors while undermining tenure-track jobs for early-career scholars. 

My premise is that the humanities should not adopt scientific norms—obvs—but “should have the *financial means* to complement, contest, or rival science in explaining people, societies, and cultures.”

“to do this properly today, they need a step-function increase in funding.”  How? The first step is to understand how research funding works. 

I start the piece by talking about why it took me 8 years to turn my dissertation into a book. The good reason: a new grounding of Emerson’s texts in a cultural psychology I called submissive individualism

Which meant years of solo reading in other people’s fields. The bad reason for the delay: there was no research infrastructure to collaborate so as to accelerate learning and ¬also link the results ¬directly to those other disciplines (like economic history)

Modern STEM depends on collaborative infrastructure.  Where is that for the humanities? Nowhere. I was not only studying C19 but, academically speaking, living in it. 

In the paper I outline university research funding structures. There is extramural funding, both federal and private (foundations), and internal funds (“Institutional”) from universities themselves.

The federal picture is dismal. In FY2022, the federal government spent $54 billion on higher ed research, of which $69 million went to the humanities. That’s 0.13% to history, literature, etc.

Very bad. But what about private foundations? There’s no aggregate data, and the biggest hum player, Mellon, spent $48.6 million in 2017 on “Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities,” decreasing to $35.4 million in 2018. 

The pattern here is that a few elite universities do have solid research programs funded by Mellon or NEH, and some others. The overall disciplines—166,070 college hum instructors-- have nearly nothing. 

Nearly, but not nothing. The NSF survey I use shows that higher ed “spent $713,685,000 on humanities R&D across the 547 surveyed institutions.” That’s about $4300 per instructor per year—say 1% of a STEM prof’s $ but not zero.

A memory aid: “universities spend $100 billion on research (from all sources). One tenth of that goes to all non-STEM fields as a group, social sciences included….  

“And then one-tenth of these non-STEM funds go to humanities disciplines. There’s a tacit One Percent Rule for the humanities—with the one percent as a ceiling not a floor.”

What fraction of this overall hum money winds up in scholars’ direct research? We have no data on this. 

The other big funding category is institutional funds.  “Of the nearly $100 billion that universities spent on research in FY2022, $25 billion came from the universities themselves.”  (That’s a major financial problem for STEM research too.) But hum fields have another chance here. 

Here are some examples of research revenue sources (simplified categories). I also go into the student subsidy for research a bit in the paper. Watch the grey--the universities' own money

And here’s what the humanities fields get at those same universities from the institutional/ internal funds. Fractional amounts to the humanities even of internal funds.

A few elite university humanities programs do well. Princeton at 10.6% of institutional funds for humanities is the highest I’ve found.

On the other hand, U of Oregon and Stanford spent 0.2% of their internal research funds on humanities research. Clearly, interest in or respect for humanities research is not a function of whether or not you can afford it. 

In 2018-19, the University of California spent 0.5% of its total research expenditures on the arts and humanities--and then 2 years later A&H disappears from the record.

In other words, with a few exceptions, universities do not compensate for extramural funding injustice towards the humanities but perpetuate it.

Where does the vast majority of the university’s own research money go? It goes to subsidizing STEM research, which loses money for their universities (yes you have been gaslighted about this by your own administrators). I explain this in brief.

What strategies do we have to address the humanities funding crisis, one which I claim is the core threat to these fields’ future? So far, bad ones.

The humanities establishment has tried to address humanities decline by stressing teaching and public engagement. These will fail to build interest and confidence—or jobs--since these depend on cutting-edge research for their value and impact.

The same goes for alternative careers.  Other cultural knowledge jobs—curation, journalism, publishing, etc.—are also shrinking (and are not better paid). Most “alt-ac” is actually an admin job back on campus.

Students and the wider public are attracted to fields that generate visible, useful knowledge about problems in their lives. 2023’s famous New Yorker article by Nathan Heller, “The End of the English Major?” produced evidence that students follow research investments.

Science works under this social contract to generate knowledge, and so do we. The equation is Research—funding—future.

Right now, this future is in the hands of humanities deans and the directors of major humanities institutions like the MLA, ACLS, NEH, and also Mellon.  I’m speaking about this with reps from those institutions at the MLA Convention in New Orleans.

If you’re there, please come. We need new strategies—I outlined  one path in my presidential address. Please make building the humanities research future more participatory, which is our best chance and the knowledge future we deserve.