Milos, Greece, on July 19, 2025   

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

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

 

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

 

 

Kleftiko, Milos, Greece on July 21, 2025   

by Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

 

Note: This text is based on a longer paper completed in February 2024. In the following months, three prominent US-based journals promptly declined considering it for publication. In my mind, this proved the paper’s main point: that the modern West, including the academy, cannot genuinely entertain novel ideas, proposals and practices emerging from the world’s peripheries, essential to the fundamental task of rethinking and reconstructing the world. Ergo, it must be pushed into thinking, being, and doing otherwise than it does as a matter of life and death. My thanks to Christopher Newfield for including it in his blog, and to Clive Dilnot for his generous and pointed feedback. 

 

UCI May 25, 2018   

We saw in Part 1 that UCI Finance attributes losses to the Schools –the academic core—rather than to the non-core or medical center activities associated with research and various auxiliary services.  We also noted that in FY23 UCI needed to find $132.3 million in institutional funds to cover research costs. One result is unfortunate: dramatic cuts are coming to the core. 

 

Non-core and UCI Health may be conducting layoffs as well, but I haven’t seen any indication of this. The UC rule of thumb has been cuts to the educational core come only as a last resort.  It’s often honored in the breach, and I don’t see that UCI is following it now. 

 

UCI’s core funding is governed by a new Budget Model and multi-year planning process. It was tried out in 2024 -25 (FY25) and has been modified for the upcoming year (2025-26 or FY 26). 

 

Serpentine, Hyde Park London May 18, 2025   

UC Irvine is facing major cuts to its academic core, bigger in some places than others.  UCI lecturer Trevor Griffey analyzed them as the state budget was passed by the legislature. This post started life as the introduction to my analysis, UCI Part 2, but it has taken on a life of its own. 

 

As I mentioned in Part 1, there’s a national pattern at work, which is to assume and accept an even worse austerity norm – hyponormalization—rather than taking Trump’s assault on the foundations of the knowledge system as an opportunity to confront and change the university’s contradictory political economy. 

 

The confrontation will mean critique of various theories of the costs of college instruction that shape the thinking that operates universities. These theories are mostly bad, yet they are always with us.

 

Australian National University    

by Prof. Kylie Message-Jones, The Australian National University

The Australian National University (ANU) has said it needs to reclaim a budget shortfall of $250m. To do its bit, the College of Arts and Social Sciences last week published a roadmap to meet the University’s goal for its areas. Its change proposal boils down to a list of cuts that will damage staff, students, as well as local families, communities and economies. 

 

It might help to put the ANU’s situation in context. Although ANU is a small institution by Australian standards, with roughly 4500 staff and 22,000 students, it has historically been high performing. In the recently released QS 2026 World University Rankings, ANU, a member of the prestigious Group of Eight network, slipped slightly to come in fourth out of 36 Australian universities and 32^nd globally.

 

UC Irvine on May 8, 2018   

As Trump’s blunderbuss shoots the bottom out of the research boat, how will UC Irvine, the system’s middle case, stay afloat?

This is actually a national question. Trump has done a classic “heighten the contradictions” of the political economy of the US research university. 

 

This political economy has always been unstable, and three decades of reductions in per-student state funding have kept the boat rocking back and forth. Now the Trump Administration has blown holes in most sources of federal research funding. Meanwhile, state funding is mainly flat or down, and will be under renewed pressure as the provisions of Trump’s tax cut bill come into effect.

 

Dún Laoghaire Ireland on June 18, 2025

I haven’t found dissent in the standard places about Penn’s capitulation to Trump on transgender women athletes.  Maybe it’s because the deal seems to have gotten Penn’s $175 million back—those federal funds that Trump’s people had unlawfully suspended.  So let me say why it’s so bad. 

 

You may have heard that Penn president J. Larry Jameson settled with Trump’s Department of Education over the alleged Title IX violation of allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete for the Penn’s women’s team in 2021-22. This was actually Title IX compliance, since NCAA and Title IX guidance then required Penn to include trans women in women’s sports. (The Athletic has a good overview. See also Johanna Alonso at IHE.)