Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova,
Coimbria, Portugal on April 26, 2025   

by Trevor Griffey, UC Irvine

 Before 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom developed a reputation for being a modest advocate for public higher education compared to his predecessors. This year, he proved that this reputation depended on flush state budgets, not on principle. 

 

When Newsom first came into office in 2019, the state had a projected $20 billion surplus, which allowed Governor Newsom to substantially boost spending for public higher education as part of what he called a “California for All” budget for 2019-20. 

 

And in 2022, with the state of California still receiving substantial CARES Act funding from the federal government, Newsom negotiated a 5-year “compacts” with the University of California and California State University systems that committed him to advocating for 5% annual increases to UC and CSU budgets. In exchange, the school systems committed to increase enrollment of California residents and increase student retention and graduation rates.

 

Though the compacts were legally nonbinding, they promised a sense of stability and modest recovery to UC and CSU after decades of inadequate and unpredictable funding. Unfortunately, they would soon be shredded because of a catastrophic accounting error.

 

Years of Austerty to Pay for Budget Mismanagement

 

According to CalMatters reporting, during the same legislative session that Governor Newsom negotiated the compacts, budget analysts working in his Department of Finance massively overestimated tax revenue for future years. They treated an anomalous spike in income taxes as normal, and over-estimated state revenue in future years by $200 billion per year. Legislators relying on these projections believed that they were balancing the state’s budget in 2022, and thereby set the state on a course to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than it would collect in taxes. 

 

As the effort to undo the damage of faulty budget projections continued into 2024, Governor Newsom proposed “deferring” funding increases in the compact to future years. UC and CSU leaders successfully negotiated to receive a modest increase to their general funds in 2024-25, but in exchange for accepting an 8 percent cut in 2025-26. Since the Governor and the state legislature were also proposing an 8 percent cut to other state agencies, the shared sacrifice seemed fair. The compact was temporarily saved, but the Governor’s commitment to it was effectively over.

 

Governor Puts Majority of Budget Cuts Onto Public Universities

 

Budget cuts negotiated in 2024 seemed like a done deal. Then something unexpected happened: new, more optimistic revenue forecasts came in, and the state of California entered 2025 with a projected $363 million budget surplus.

 

The Governor could have proposed to use some of this money to give a reprieve to the UC and CSU systems, or try to sustain the compact another year. 

 

Instead, the Governor’s January budget proposal reduced planned cuts to state agencies, while leaving the 8 percent cut and compact deferral in place for UC and CSU. 

 

As the Legislative Analyst Office has highlighted, this move increased state government spending by $2.4 billion over the 2024 budget deal. The Governor also proposed increasing discretionary spending by $507 million, and proposed $150 million in new tax breaks for 2025-26.

 

To pay for this new spending, as well as cover billions of dollars of unexpected Medi-Cal expenses and rising costs for other programs, the Governor proposes to withdraw state reserves by about $7 billion in 2025, leaving $17 billion for next year. Remarkably, the Governor did not propose using any of those reserves to prevent or reduce cuts to public universities.

 

Indeed, whereas the State’s Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties is normally kept at $3.5-4 billion, the Governor proposed to increase that fund to $4.5 billion. If the Governor had simply thought to keep it at a normal $3.75 billion, he could have eliminated cuts to the UC and CSU system entirely for 2025-26. 

 

The rhetoric about the state budget in Sacramento is pessimistic. Concern that Trump’s reckless actions will weaken the economy further add to a sense of foreboding. Cuts to essential services seem inevitable, and this rhetoric of inevitability undermines politicians’ willingness to vote against the Governor’s proposed budget.  

 

Staff for the California Assembly’s subcommittee on education finance have instructed legislators that even though “CSU appears to be facing a fiscal crisis,” and “UC clearly faces significant financial challenges,” politicians should focus their hearings less on stopping the cuts and more on how the school systems “will weather increasing costs and potentially declining state and federal revenue.” 

 

This fatalism is baffling— more cowardice than analysis.  Decisions made by the Governor demonstrate that the need for cuts to higher education has been manufactured by treating UC and CSU differently than other state agencies. While state budget cuts may be necessary, they are being spread unevenly for political reasons, not financial ones.

 

As Jason Sisney, the budget advisor to the California Assembly Speaker, recently wrote, the July 2024 budget deal was that budget cuts would be equitably distributed across state agencies, and UC and CSU cuts would make up 22 percent of the state’s projected budget shortfall. Instead, Governor Newsom wants to increase spending, increase tax breaks, reduce cuts to state agencies, drawn down reserves, and still leave cuts to UC and CSU in place to cover 53 percent of the state’s resulting budget deficit. 

 

In other words, the Governor is proposing balancing the state’s budget on the backs of its four-year college students. This will take the form of increased class sizes, increased tuition, and increased debt, and possibly even one or more CSU campus closures and mergers. 

 

Can Democrats Stand Up to Their Governor?

 

On April 25, 2025, State Senator Catherine Blakespear, who describes UC San Diego as “in the heart of my district”, sent an email to constituents titled “Fighting for UC.” In it, she decried the Trump administration’s research cuts to UCSD, and pointed out that UCSD had already implemented a hiring freeze and was reducing graduate student enrollment. 

 

What Blakespear failed to mention is that she has declined to sign onto a letter from more than 60 of her colleagues in the state legislature opposing cuts to the University of California’s budget. In fact, she didn’t mention the Governor’s proposed budget cuts at all, or encourage her constituents to speak out against them. 

 

Blakespear made it seem as if UCSD hiring freezes and budget cuts were coming from the federal government controlled by Republicans, when much if not most of it is currently coming from the state government controlled by Democrats.

 

Like many Democrats, Blakespear is happy to oppose Donald Trump’s policies. But when it comes to standing up to a Democratic Governor, will she or others really “fight for UC”?

 

In my conversations with multiple state legislators this term, both Republican and Democrat, I have yet to find a single one who wants to cut the UC or CSU budget. I have yet to find a single one who wants the quality of instruction to go down while the cost of tuition goes up. 

 

Many California state legislators graduated from one or more public colleges or universities in the state. They know that California voters are mostly proud of their public higher education system, and see it as a core part of the services that the state provides.

 

And yet, when you ask a California state legislator if they’d vote against a budget that includes cuts to the UC and CSU, most Democrats— even those who sign letters opposing the cuts— will tell you that they have no choice but to vote for whatever budget the Governor, the Assembly Speaker and the Senate leader negotiate behind closed doors. Their ability to move legislation requires ceding their agency on the budget, or else be ostracized by their party leadership. 

 

When you meet with the staff of the Assembly or Senate leaders, you get the reverse message: the leadership needs to hear as much as possible from members before they head into negotiations about the need to protect higher education. 

 

Few will commit. Almost everyone is equivocal. One legislator I met with repeatedly asked if we could talk about how the state legislature could oppose Trump’s attacks on higher education, so we could avoid discussion of the state budget altogether.

 

And some share legislators whispers that because the Governor provided a 6 month delay to people impacted by wildfires to file their income taxes, and a 12 month delay to file their property taxes, his “revised” budget proposal, coming very soon, is likely to be even worse. 

 

Not treating delays in revenue collection as shortfalls is also somehow off the table. 

 

Taking their cues from elected leadership over the past couple years, UC has already increased non-resident student tuition 10 percent, and the CSU system is in the midst of raising tuition 34 percent over 5 years. Who knows what more may be coming?

 

Fighting for Higher Ed at the State and Federal Level

 

Shared sacrifice may be necessary during times of budget woes, even ones created by administrative error. Yet we as college teachers, students, staff and community members need to tell our politicians that balancing the budget on the backs of college students is totally unacceptable. 

 

For decades, politicians across the US, regardless of political party, have consistently raided the budgets of their public universities during recessions, or to cover the rising costs of health care, corrections, and other services they don’t want to tax people for. Politicians may publicly bemoan tuition increases. But they secretly depend on increasing student debt to balance state government budgets.

 

That game may be coming to an end. It ultimately relies upon federal grants and loans to students that Republicans are threatening to eviscerate in what the Debt Collective has called “the most dangerous higher education bill in history.” And it relies upon students believing that the inferior education provided to them in increasingly large and online classes is worth going into debt.

 

It's up to campus labor unions to invest their resources into organizing not just their own members but organizing students and community members to contact their legislators to oppose state government budget cuts.

 

It would be great if the defense of public higher education only required standing up to Donald Trump. But for now, we also have to stand up to Democrats whose support for public higher education is always hostage to their other priorities.

 

Contact your legislator to Stop the Cuts!

·      UC-AFT: For teachers and librarians represented by AFT

·      Teamsters: For UC and CSU clerical workers and building trades

·      University of California: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/get-involved/advocate/state-budget

·      California State University: https://www.calstate.edu/impact-of-the-csu/government/Advocacy-and-State-Relations/Pages/Budget-Advocacy.aspx

Universidade de Coimbra on April 25, 2025   

by Charlie Eaton. Crossposted from Progressive Disclosure 

It was only 2 weeks ago that I called for spending endowments to defend universities from Trump’s attacks. Since then, I’ve been flooded with messages from readers about how to move from my essay's broader points to the harder work of crafting organizational strategy. And university leaders are beginning to ask these same strategic questions.

After a publishing a courageous essay in The Atlantic, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has vowed again to fight Trump. Harvard’s former President Larry Summers called for universities to hold their ground and for endowments “to be drawn down” if necessary. Former President Obama gave a fiery speech, declaring, “If…you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.” And both Harvard and Princeton have taken steps to do so by borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars through bonds effectively backed by their endowments.

While I’m happy to see Summers and Obama back up my endowment proposal, my friend Beth Popp Berman is 100% correct when she says endowments can’t fund everything that is threatened forever – especially at less wealthy schools. What they can do is buy time. Time for Trump’s economic chaos to undermine is support base. Time to litigate against cuts and unlawful detentions on campus. And most importantly, time for universities to adopt a political strategy to defend themselves and their allies from Trump’s political assault on civil society.

This approach is not in universities’ wheelhouse. As former Columbia President Lee Bollinger just told the Chronicle of Higher Ed about university presidents, “They haven’t played hardball politics.”
Having played and studied hardball politics, my view is that any successful political strategy will 1) need to change the public narrative so that more Americans see the attack on universities as an attack on themselves. This will help to 2) mobilize a coalition of allies through universities’ far-reaching social ties, and 3) put social pressure on other powerful actors who otherwise are content to sit on the sidelines.

I’m planning another post next week for how universities with medical centers might change the public narrative by working with their doctors, cancer patients and others whose lives are literally threatened by Trump’s cuts. And I’ve been invited to talk later this month with leaders of the nation’s largest healthcare workers union. If you have your own narrative ideas, send me an email!

For this post, I’m going to focus on how it is important for any narrative to be crafted with an eye to 1) many powerful potential allies that universities connect, and 2) making Trump’s attacks on universities a career ending mistake for swing-district Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections. I will also 3) provide detail how endowments can sustain universities as they and their allies do this work.

Coalition Building and Universities as Parallel Social Organizations

It’s easy to forget today that universities are powerful social organizations. They operate parallel to politics and the economy, connecting people—and especially elites—connect across geography and different domains of industry, medicine, recreation, and government. The top of these connective organizations are university boards of trustees. In the Ivy league, these boards have always been dominated by the wealthy. But over the last forty years, Ivy League boards have particularly become populated by private equity and hedge fund managers, and to a lesser extent, Silicon Valley billionaires. 

You can see that in this graph from my “Elite Embeddedness” article with Albina Gibadulina:

The quick capitulations of Columbia and others likely occurred in part because university presidents devote much of their work to fundraising with this class of board members. During crises like today’s, the interests and relationships of such groups can become more legible in a complex system like higher education. This class of elites have sought has sought to accommodate Trump in other domains, and many have after expressed uneasiness or outright opposition around diversity initiatives and academic freedom questions around the Gaza war.

But even Ivy League trustees are not a unitary block beholden to Trump. And the present destabilization of social systems can also open space for transformation and realignment of interests. Surely many trustees are appalled by the attacks on universities to which they have devoted their time, donations, and fundraising ties. Broader fissures are opening as we speak around Trump’s destructive economic policies. Nor are trustees the only people who connect universities to other potential elite and non-elite allies. Alumni networks maintain a rich array of ties for universities.

The task then is to craft a narrative and a coalition that mobilizes both sympathetic trustees and others with valuable resources. At my own University of California, financially the largest public university in the nation, the executive committee of our faculty senate just unanimously passed an appeal to UC’s President and Regents along these lines.

Such a coalition can help raise financial resources to buttress endowments in backstopping Trump funding cuts. A coalition could also bring together civic organizations, elected officials, and others with different resources and competencies than universities to make the public argument that attacks on universities are an attack on all of us.

An effective public campaign would bolster universities’ ability to convince just the two or three Republican congressional defectors needed block further cuts in legislation planned for later this year. Persuading these kinds of defections becomes possible if Republicans start to see cuts to universities as a potentially career ending mistake in the 2026 elections. A public campaign could also aid appeals to progressive state governors for funding to backstop public university cuts.

Holding Out to a Midterm Powershift

Trump’s attacks on universities are ultimately about power. Like other autocrats, Trump and his allies see free speech, critical debate, and the foundation of universities as a threat to their power. So they are likely to prosecute their attacks until Trump loses power or universities abandon their mission.
But the persistence of Trump’s leverage over universities is not a given. As long as free and fair elections survive in the US, elections are key inflection points in the allocation of power. This suggests a financial imperative for universities: they need sufficient resources to keep the lights on until the 2026 mid-terms and ideally until 2028.

It’s worth remembering that Republicans only have a two-seat majority in the House and a three-seat majority in the Senate. Democratic control of the House in 2026 seems very likely. And with markets upended by Trump’s tariff chaos, Democratic control of the Senate even seems within reach. To get to 50, they would have to run the table in Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, states where Democrats have won at least some elections statewide in recent years. A 51^st Democrat would need to win in Alaska, Florida, Texas or somewhere else that only crisis and a blue wave could make possible. But the chaos of Trump 2 expands the confidence interval for these kinds of scenarios.

How could a coalition help universities muster the resources to endure Republican cuts through the midterms?

Here I’ll speak to an astute question I received from one reader:

I'm curious what the basis for your confidence is that it would be so easy to "replenish endowments" from "sympathetic alumni." That's not my sense. My sense is that many donors are annoyed at universities for various reasons and they aren't keen to have their money expropriated by Washington. 

 

To be fair, I probably overstated the ease of this task in my NYT essay. It does appear to me, however, that many middle- and upper-class alumni are hungry for ways they can support their own corners of civil society that are threatened by Trump. About 500 of them submitted comments on my NYT piece to that effect. These are not the kind of high-dollar or small-dollar fundraising appeals that universities are accustomed to making. But they are the kinds of appeals that were perfected in recent years by universities allies like Obama campaign legacy organizations.

President Obama said in his speech last week that to defend core university values, “that’s why we got this big endowment.” This is an opening. Has Columbia picked up the phone to ask for help from the former president, its most famous alumnus? Imagine how much money Columbia could raise if Obama cohosted a high-dollar event with a prominent Columbia Republican alum to fund biomedical research cut by Trump? Imagine how much Columbia could raise in small-dollar donations from digital fundraising appeals by such a duo?

This kind of jujitsu could make a fundraising opportunity out of a Trump attack on a university.

Using Endowments to Maximum Effect

Others have noted that 19^th century justifications for endowments were that they insulated universities from precisely the kinds of government attacks underway today. But my reader quoted above also noted that donors might fear their donations to universities will just be expropriated through a Trump tax increase on endowments. This is indeed a threat. But another correspondent tells me that their Ivy League institution is exploring other donor vehicles that could circumvent endowment taxes. This is good news and entirely predictable. Eight years ago, I published another NYT article about how elite endowments use offshore tax blocker corporations to avoid taxes on some of their hedge fund investment financing. 

Remember, university boards and their finance committees are populated by some of the wealthiest financial engineers in the world. They can figure this out if they want to.

Something governors may be able to do is to buttress the legal authority of universities to tap their endowments. I have only become more certain that wealthy schools can tap their endowments for this purpose, even without action by governors.

The most convincing evidence that universities can tap their endowments is that Larry Summers says he did it as Harvard’s President. Here are his exact words in his NYT essay:

Columbia University’s recent capitulation, in which it agreed to a raft of changes in an attempt to avoid losing hundreds of millions in funding, must not be emulated. Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely.

[Universities] should make clear that their formidable financial endowments are not there to simply be envied or admired. Part of their function is to be drawn down in the face of emergencies, and covering federal funding lapses surely counts as one. As a former president of Harvard University, believe me when I say that ways can be found in an emergency to deploy even parts of the endowment that have been earmarked for specific use by their donors. 

 

I have no special knowledge of the techniques Summers has in mind. But tapping the endowment does not necessarily require straightforward additional expenditure of endowment assets. During the 2008 financial crisis, for example, Harvard liquidated two-thirds of a $2.9 billion stock portfolio and borrowed roughly $2.5 billion through bond issuances. These bonds were effectively backed by Harvard’s endowment. This was a smart move as the bond interest rates ranged from just 3.2% to 6.5% compared to the Harvard endowment’s 10% average rate of return over the previous 30 years. In recent weeks, Princeton and Harvard have borrowed several hundred million dollars each through such bond offerings, with Harvard saying the borrowing was explicitly for Trump funding cut contingencies.

The University of California took similar measures early in the COVID19 pandemic. UC’s Office of the President liquidated its entire $1.8 billion Blue and Gold endowment fund in 2020. This amounted to an extraordinary expenditure that effectively more than doubled spending from the endowment over a short period of “funding lapses” in Summers’ words. The Blue and Gold fund was subsequently recapitalized and has grown to $6.9 billion in value. UC’s overall systemwide endowment is valued at $29.5 billion.

These financial measures were undertaken under the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA), a version of which has been adopted by all US states to govern non-profit endowment management. I have corresponded with a few tax experts and university fundraising executives since my NYT essay. They point to constraints under these acts, but nothing that prohibits universities from spending more than the common 5% of endowment value annually. Prior to UPMIFA, some state regulations of non-profit endowments included a “rebuttable presumption of imprudence” for expenditures above 7% of the endowment. The key word was rebuttable. If states have maintained the 7% threshold since adopting UPMIFA, universities could make a case for the prudence of spending more. Endowments’ higher average annual rates of return than 7% could form part of such a case.

UPMIFAs can also be modified by friendly state governments. For example, Massachusetts removed its 7% presumption of imprudence by adopting its version of UPMIFA during the 2009 financial crisis. So Harvard and MIT face no such constraint.

UPMIFA also specifies how universities can obtain consent from donors for the modification of endowment restrictions established by the donor. One would hope that many donors would consent to release restrictions needed to defend the university from existential threats. If not, the wealthiest universities typically have billions of dollars in unrestricted endowment funds, like the University of California’s $6.9 billion Gold and Blue fund mentioned above, that they can use more easily. Harvard has more than $10 billion in unrestricted endowment assets. Columbia has almost $5 billion.

Any modification of endowment restrictions should be done with the utmost care. Another former executive at elite public and private universities reminded me that some large endowments are dedicated to funding financial aid for low-income students. I hope it’s obvious that no university should plunder financial aid to preserve even life-saving biomedical research.

Looking beyond the immediate crisis, a former Ivy League head of fundraising also suggest, “these schools should have paid more attention to raising flexible dollars, but chose not to.” This, and much more should change. As the same executive wrote to me, “Ginning up applications so one can reject more is a recipe for resentment.”

The Courts Won’t Save Us

The prospects of university’s litigation are outside my areas of expertise. But others have written that the Supreme Court majority seems intent on avoiding confrontationwith Trump that could result in him defying its orders. This does not bode well for university litigation. It is likewise ominous that none of the largest US law firms have filed amicus briefs to defend Perkins Coi against Trump’s attacks.

I also agree with one reader who wrote to me that “Instituting cy pres litigation would take years.” Cy pres here refers to litigation that distributes damages in class action lawsuits to charitable organizations and benefits that are close to the purpose of the original litigation.

Nevertheless, we should remember that a majority of today’s Supreme Court justices did reject Trump’s litigation to overturn the 2020 election. That was a different political moment than our present crisis. But that is the point.

Universities should not surrender in this most dire moment of uncertainty. At the very least, they should use every resource they have hold the line as long as they can in hopes that Trump undermines himself with his own chaos.

Better still universities should partner with allies to convince Americans that Trump is threatening their own lives and health by attacking universities (more on that next week). This could shape the outcomes of the 2026 midterms in ways that might give our politicized Supreme Court pause just as they are considering legal challenges to Trump’s assault on the university.
********
If this wasn’t enough of my thoughts for you, Mother Jones just published a related extended interview with me here.

If you’re in the UC Berkeley area, I’ll be giving a talk there on Wednesday, April 30 at 2 pm. Just reply here for details.
  

UC Santa Barbara on April 11, 2014   

by Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, delivered April 17, 2025

Introduction

            Today, I want to offer four propositions about the situation we confront today. Woven together, these propositions hint at a broader argument that I won’t be able to develop now but will be happy to expand on later. My hope is that these remarks will provide a useful context for those offered by Amy and Chris.

Proposition #1: The threat posed to US colleges and universities today is quite literally an existential threat.

To some, this claim may sound hyperbolic; it is not. A coordinated right wing assault on higher education has been underway for a half century now, and its origins can be traced back at least as far as Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. More recently, this campaign has assumed more aggressive form as multiple state legislatures have amplified the precarity of the instructional workforce; eliminated programs that challenge racialized, gendered, and other forms of inequality; imposed gag orders on what faculty can and cannot say in the classroom; and much more. The state of Florida is the prototype of this campaign to employ governmental power to secure control over higher education; but, as we all know, this assault has now spread to states throughout the nation. 

What we have seen in the second Trump administration is an emboldened deployment of the federal government’s power to advance this right wing project. The exemplar here is Columbia where, after impounding $400 million in funding, the federal government demanded that Columbia overhaul its admissions system; adopt an expansive definition of what counts as antisemitism; empower Columbia’s security officers to arrest so-called “agitators;” place specific academic departments under external control; and much more. On March 21, as we also all know, Columbia’s board of trustees and president acceded to most of these imperatives; and, in my view, that surrender is the act that identifies the American academy’s situation at this moment in time.

The larger lesson we should draw from this abbreviated history is this: The political right seeks to strip the American academy of its autonomy and hence its capacity for self-governance by rendering colleges and universities subject to state control on behalf of authoritarian ends. This is what Florida’s attorneys clearly told us when, in defending the law colloquially known as Stop WOKE, they declared that the university is merely an administrative unit of the state and its instructional employees are, and I quote, that unit’s “mouthpieces.” Should this construction come to prevail, what we call “academic freedom” will no longer exist, and what we call “universities” will no longer be worthy of that name. That, in short, is what I mean when I contend that the contemporary threat to higher education is indeed existential in nature.

Proposition #2: We cannot assume that those who rule US colleges and universities will defend the cause of higher education against this existential threat.

As evidence for this proposition, I would cite the failure of all but a very few university presidents and governing boards to fight back against this threat. This deplorable fact cannot be explained merely by citing the cowardice of the academy’s rulers. There is, I believe, a deeper structural cause at work here. We like to think of our universities as central to the vitality of a democracy and hence as sources of resistance to creeping authoritarianism. But that article of faith proves problematic when we recognize that America’s colleges and universities are themselves legally organized as autocracies. And, if that is so, then their structure of rule does more to replicate than to repudiate the authoritarian order that now seeks to reduce institutions of higher education to the status of compliant subjects. 

To see the point, in your mind’s eye, conjure up a picture of the typical organizational chart of any American college or university or, alternatively, take a look at the charter, the constitution, or the enabling statute that dictates how the power to rule is distributed at the institution that now employs each of us. What one finds at the top of these hierarchically structured entities are governing boards, whether called trustees, regents, or whatever. The academy’s fundamental powers of governance are located by law within these bodies; and those powers include the authority to appoint as well as to remove the presidents whose foremost duty is to do the bidding of their superiors. Beneath these boards and presidents we find everyone else, whether designated as faculty or staff. 

What renders the legal form of the American academy essentially autocratic is the structural exclusion of those subject to its rulers from any legally guaranteed title to participate in the exercise of rule. In our capacity as employees, in other words, we are defined by our lack of any enforceable right to make the rules by which we are governed or to select and hold accountable those who monopolize that authority. True, we may sometimes pass resolutions of no confidence in these rulers, but, because those resolutions have no binding force, in the last analysis, they testify not to our collective power but to our status as subordinates whose fate is ultimately determined by others. 

Proposition #3: As we seek to contest the academy’s incorporation within an authoritarian regime, we need to think carefully about the tools available to us for that purpose.

Think, for example, of the idea of shared governance. At those colleges and universities where shared governance has not already been gutted, appeals framed in this vernacular can sometimes provide faculty a voice, as is the case, for example, in faculty senates. But the fact remains that the power exercised by these representative bodies is always subject to constriction or even abolition, whether by governing boards and/or, in public institutions, by state legislatures. To grant this is not to suggest that we should abandon entirely appeals framed in the language of shared governance. But it is to say that these appeals will remain inadequate as vehicles of faculty empowerment so long as the legal form of the American academy remains essentially autocratic.

For a second tool of resistance, think of unionization and collective bargaining. True, unions can push for better working conditions, higher wages, and due process protections against the worst excesses of arbitrary rule. Equally if not more important, unions can organize faculty struggles to withhold the form of power that the university cannot do without: the power of our labor. That said, it remains true that unions operate within the confines of an essentially antidemocratic institutional structure; and, for that reason, unionization is a strategic tool that can accomplish many things but not everything. 

In the last analysis, each of these two tactics—shared governance and unionization—represent strategies of accommodation insofar as they accept as a given the academy’s autocratic legal structure. That structure is a contingent relic of colonial America that was first adopted not to ensure realization of the academy’s educational mission, but, instead, to guarantee the ongoing control of our earliest colleges by political, economic, and clerical elites. Until we question this anachronism, our universities will continue to be ruled by governing boards whose members are unequipped as well as indisposed to safeguard the distinctive work of the academy. To plead with these bodies or their chief executive appointees to save us from the likes of Ron de Santis and Donald Trump is not to affirm the cause of self-governance. Rather, it is to acknowledge our dependence on those who enjoy the powers we are denied.

Proposition #4: Our choice of strategies today must be informed by an ideal of what we believe the American academy should be and must become if it is to sustain the fragile good we call free inquiry.

Because today’s onslaught against US higher education is so aggressive, I worry that we will lapse into a defensive crouch where our only aim is to safeguard what we have not yet lost; and I worry that we may seek to defend institutionalized arrangements that are deeply problematic, whether that be higher education’s current dependence on federal and state funding or the ways we now seek to accomplish the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yes, of course, we must do what we can to resist governmental encroachments on higher education, but we must also nurture our collective capacity to imagine a very different university than the one we inhabit today.

As we consider possible futures, I would suggest that our inquiry be informed by two principles that must be realized if free inquiry is in fact to remain free. First, the American academy must be sufficiently autonomous to ward off intruders who would betray its proper end; and, second, the American academy must be self-governing in the sense that those who do its work must enjoy the capacity to determine how the university’s end is to be accomplished. Autonomy and self-governance, in my view, are the watchwords that should inform our strategies and struggles in the days to come; and that is especially so since, today, these are precisely the two conditions that the right wing assault on US higher education now seeks to eliminate.

Let me close with this: In 1913, a scholar whose name we do not know declared that it is self-contradictory and indeed dangerous to believe that a nation can remain democratic if its universities are organized autocratically. In response, another scholar asked how the American academy might be reconstituted as a “democracy of scholars serving the larger democracy of which it is a part.” That, I submit, is not a bad way to frame our task today.

London on April 18, 2015   

This is the talk I gave at the National Day of Action for Higher Education on April 17. My co-panelists and I, Tim Kaufman-Osborn and Amy Offner, each had 12 minutes.  To keep it short I organized it as a set of propositions.

 

1. The first necessary step has been taken –university  lawfare against the Trump Administration.

 

This recognizes that the Trump regime are not reformers of higher ed, but are its destroyers. This increasingly obvious fact has a hard implication, which is that the Trump administration is an enemy to be defeated, not a counterparty to be bargained with.

 

An organization that saw this immediately has been the AAUP, which rapidly went to court, and I can’t overstate how impressed I am by both the national organization and by so many individual chapters— AAUP Penn, Rutgers, it partner CUCFA at the University of California, multiple unions, and many other faculty and staff organizations.  You all have done great work at getting inside the high-speed operating loop of the Trump people, and being appropriately adversarial. There’s a real chance that we will win on many fronts, if we keep fighting hammer and tongs.

 

2. Higher ed must work with Democrats but must not be led by them.  

 

The reason is that the Democratic party has repeatedly failed to articulate the purposes and the political economy of higher education. The result is that Democrats see themselves as the natural party of education—they get the votes of most college graduates—while misselling what higher ed is and therefore not convincing the wider electorate of its value.

 

For example, the most painful chart I’ve recently seen is from the Democratic pollster David Shor via Ezra Klein.

 

 

Amazingly, the allegedly Democratic issues of education and student debt are actually in a toss-up with the Republicans.  Voters don’t really know whether the Republicans who want to eliminate the Dept of Education that administers financial aid including Pell Grants, or that wants to give student loans back to private banks, are better or worse for education than Democrats. This is an obvious disaster for Democrats, and for higher ed.

 

Voters are confused in part because mainstream Democrats have no strongly anti-Republican positions on college. Most Democratic politicians aren’t really for free college—that’s Bernie Sanders still out there on his own. Democrats aren’t really for debt cancellation.  Democrats aren’t really for full public funding of regional colleges so working-class people get really high quality degrees. Democrats are for college as job training—just like Republicans are. Democrats have one idea about college, which is that it’s tuition-based vocational training, with some means testing, but high net costs are okay.  This is Gov. Newsom in California, Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate.  They sell us out as job training and they still can’t get non-college voters. 

 

Democrats are bad on advancing strong higher education for the basic reason that they don’t listen to educators.  Educators need to lead ourselves.

 

3. Anti-intellectualism is always pervasive in America—and yet it is not popular in America. 

 

The Democrats aren’t convincing people to vote big for great public colleges not because college is too intellectual, but because the Democratic version isn’t intellectual enough. Republicans are the enemies of popular thinking, everyday study, affordable intellectuality. But as I’ve just suggested, so are tag-along job-fixated mainstream Democrats.  Governor Newsom had the professional college-hater Charlie Kirk on his podcast in March, and when Kirk mocked students who “go to Cal to go study North African lesbian poetry,” the Democratic education governor chuckled right along with him: “Well, I don’t know every single damn course,” the governor explained. “It should be like, no way.”  Meanwhile, the proverbial jobs of the future require more education, not less, across all disciplines, especially in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, including in North African lesbian poetry.  The Democrats are screwing up even their vocational issue without offering an alternative.

 

4. Higher ed’s own story – freed from the Democratic party-- must center on popular intellectuality. On popular thinking, thinking as popular, thinking for all.  College has a core role in this sense: college helps you think so you can have the life you want.  

 

College doesn’t help you adapt to “this modern world” by learning to use AI so it can think for you. College doesn’t mainly help you meet important people and make new friends. College doesn’t mainly give you practical workplace skills.  College helps you think so you can have the life you want.  You may think that’s a weak bumper sticker—it sure needs work-- but it’s a hell of a lot better than the college bumper stickers that political parties or university presidents are selling right now (“study a higher-wage major”)! 

 

We must stress as part of this re-narration the non-pecuniary benefits and the public benefits of learning as much as everyone already stresses the private benefits.  And yet the re-narration of college has to start with helping everyone of all backgrounds, working class, immigrant, racialized, boringly middle class, queer, everybody, build the personal life you want, not the life mapped out for you by your family, your neighborhood, your background, but the one gradually imagined and then given to you by you. Here’s why we don’t ban books but why we read them. College helps you think so you can have the life you want.

 

The next two items are a package. I’m going to raise a tricky issue and sound elitist, though I will argue that my claims are anti-elitist. 

 

5.  Higher education is being crushed both by propaganda-based Republican hate and by its twin, a widespread knowledge crisis among US voters.  

 

That last chart, David Shor’s, shows this aspect as well as the weakness of the Democratic storyline: many if not a majority of American voters are profoundly mistaken, wrong, misguided, or ignorant about political and social realities and causal connections, including education.

 

The data show that Republicans, on most of their powerhouse (lower right quadrant) issues, perform worse that they say they will on the basis of their wrong ideas —Republican presidents oversee lower growth than Democratic presidents and higher debt growth in relation to inflation; inflation was twice as high under Biden as under Trump 1, but that is not the general pattern. Or lower-left quandrant issues (less urgent, Republican advantage)—AI is a Republican issue because they will completely deregulate it and then it will work better? How is trade going? Unemployment: there’s the same scatter in the overall trend. Voters rate Republians as good as Democrats on civil Liberties even as Republicans favor summary deportations, arbitrary cancellations of student visas, etc. -- it’s as though most respondents aren’t sure about the meaning of the term. Drug addiction—voters prefer the party that kills any and all public health programs? Democrats are tied on voting rights with a Republican party obsessed with voter suppression for 25 years.  

 

Another chart on the knowledge issue: We have evidence that the misinformed voter voted Trump, and the “get the right answer” crowd voted Harris. (I discussed this chart in “Politics of Thinking”).

 

 

 So first, Democrats have a lot of weak positions that don’t resonate with voters.  (They were bad at taking inflation seriously, and Harris did drop the anti-corporate policies that are actually popular with voters.) But second, many, many voters also can’t correctly describe reality and then pick the policy and the candidate that correlates with the outcome they want.  Hence the term knowledge crisis, a phenomenon that is being exploited politically.

 

6. Higher education has to present itself as the solution to American wrongness. 

 

This is going to involve a few things.  I’ve mentioned one—redefining college as the key to the thinking that helps people have the lives they want. 

 

Another is the creation of an ethical framework around the duty to know. Nobody has the right to not bother to figure out whether a president really can engage in summary deportations and maybe not follow court orders to fix bad deportation mistakes. Shrugging about this, and staying confused or unsure, is an unethical position, as much for bystanders as for government agents of the policy. Tens of millions of people are indeed not bothering to think about this kind of Trumpian tyranny, or about the destruction of US university finances and of academic freedom.  Not thinking is a major reason why illegal, unjust, and destructive things keep happening. Voters have no right not to think about them.  We’re going to need a broader cultural change that both inspires and demands serious popular thinking about public issues.

 

Educators must figure out encouraging ways to take a stand on this, and must do this at a time when we have been largely brainwashed into thinking that it is elitist to expect US voters to be intelligent and to take responsibility for their mistakes. This is not elitist—it is a matter of survival. People know this in their personal lives, and every successful activist has known that it’s not elitist to know things. Authors of slave narratives knew things, Malcolm X knew things, your favorite auto mechanic knows things, indigenous leaders know things, your really good plumber knows things, all your sports heroes know things, all the activists we admire were successful because their action, their pursuit of power, was suffused in knowing things. And then these knowers didn’t back down from fights, but instead sought fights. The AAUP knows things. We know things. The only way to escape the Deplorables Taboo, in which college types and professionals offer a double standard of no intellectual accountability for “regular Americans,” is to embrace the conflict, create the conflict that needs to be created, hate the ignorance but love the knower, win the conflict on the basis of knowledge.

 

I’m suggesting that the university, collectively, must frame an existential duty to know. Zuckerberg has the duty to know how his products damage thinking, politics, and mental health. Bezos has the duty to know that the Donald Trump who would outlaw trans people and refugees would also kill trade with tariffs. A small majority of voters doesn’t get to be wrong again and again and then get all mad and hostile when people point that out –they do do this anger-based deflection, but they have no right, and in contrast they do have a duty to know—about the real consequences of how they think.  Universities, professors, students, everyone, have to lay out a large national narrative about this duty to know.

 

 

7. make the full ask for all of the  material conditions that will allow popular intellectuality to spread. We are twenty-five years into the student debt crisis and the public university funding crisis, and we do know what these are: 

A.    free public college.  The goal is Debt-free for all and free tuition is the most efficient means.

B.    Student debt cancellation. 

C.     Programs enabling full inclusion and radical diversity: full and defiant support for anti-discrimination measures leading to racial equality within colleges and universities. 

D.    Tenure-track jobs for all instructors who want them.

E.     Tenure for staff—by which I mean the replacement of “at will” with “just cause” employment for the staff of our colleges and universities 

F.     The full support of research costs for all fields – arts, social sciences, and humanities as much as STEM—at all types of colleges very much including community colleges. (Trump’s cuts to indirect cost recovery rates and deletion of many STEM grants could zero out institutional funding for the humanities and arts. This must not be allowed to happen.)

G.    Full academic freedom, which includes the financial means to allow bottom up, faculty-controlled collaborative design, not dictated by austerity and consultants, of new era college curricula that fit current conditions.  

H.    The democratization of university governance to allow the previous elements to be created over time—which will involve abolishing  governing boards, perhaps by converting them into powerless figureheads something like the Danish monarchy   

 

Yes I do have the budget slides to show how to pay for all this. But aluckily for you I’m out of time.

 

The fight for higher ed--the fight for the knowledge and for thinking—is on the front line of this battle for knowledge, justice, and democracy as indivisible issues.  And we need to think of all contingencies. So

 

8. Plan for the building the underground university.