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One professor has aptly summarized the current situation as “a strange moment between critique and advocacy [in which] the two are inseparable.” Faculty are still critiquing the responses of senior managers as lacking cooperation across the sector—Harvard is off by itself in the Ivy League in suing rather than signing with the Trump Administration. Some, like the members of the UCLA Faculty Association, continue to expose the futility of anticipatory obedience.
At the same time, I read moving faculty calls for mutual understanding across disciplines and collaborative development of definitions of universities that the wider society can get behind. The question is by what process?
As someone who has sought mutual understanding across disciplines on topics such as humanities research starvation and the actual (negative) revenue results of indirect cost recovery since around 2002, I’m pretty sure the current consensus won’t work. The only way forward is through candid encounters with reality, and these will involve passages through conflict and negative feelings on all sides.
So I look for a certain tone that risks conflict as it deliberately strips away the euphemisms and doctored data that underwrite what we might call the discursive hegemony of academic management.
Obviously attack isn’t the only desirable tone. But faculty solidarity will be much stronger if it can honestly work through the issues that divide it by disciplinary interests among other things.
There’s also a question of whether most tenure-track faculty want managerial power for the sake of co-governed control over their working conditions.
Real co-governance means time, study, effort, argument—and also, to be frank, an initial campaign to seizethis power. This is pretty clear from the general exclusion of faculty from strategizing about fighting Trump. The worst higher ed crisis since the 1930s has not obviously increased faculty-admin collaboration for the sake of a united front, which suggests yet again that admin will not share power voluntarily. And yet my default hypothesis is that faced with this situation, most TT faculty, perhaps 80-90%, would rather hunker down and accept some decent approximation of what they had in 2024 (say 2/3rds to 3/4th of their grants, ½ to 3/4ths of their academic freedom-based candor in classrooms or campus policy debates) than fight a two-front war with Trump and their own provost and president. That’s a big likely constituency for hunkering down out of sight of the Trump Administration’s Operation University Shakedown, and waiting for the storms to pass.
I think hunkering down is a very bad strategy: the storms are intensifying and each accommodation causes lasting damage to the public reputations of universities that don’t fight for their core values.
So first I’ll justify this claim (about the need to fight) in relation to the Brown University Agreement, and then I’ll move on to the faculty responses.
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The first problem with Brown’s agreement is that it is more genteel than Columbia’s and thus more likely to encourage Signing-Not-Suing by the other targeted Ivies and their ilk (Cornell and Princeton, also the big holdout, Harvard, plus Northwestern, UCLA, et al).
This is the template problem, in which McMahon and the Trump Administration use each settlement as a precedent for others ones to come.
That week this happened to UCLA, which on July 29th confessed to antisemitism and flagellated itself with payments totaling $8.8 million, mostly to individual plaintiffs and their attorneys. Meanwhile, on the very same day, the Department of Justice generated findings of antisemitism that Attorney General Pam Bondi termed a “disgusting breach of civil rights against students” requiring DOJ to “force UCLA to pay a heavy price.” Two days later, on July 31st, that price was announced as $300 million in research funding withheld from multiple federal agencies.
In their impressive letter, the UCLA Faculty Association noted, “UCLA’s anticipatory obedience has put itself in a place of weakness and we must instead choose to stand up.” I hope UCLA does sue rather than sign, but the administrative precedents point the other way.
Brown’s Agreement was announced on July 30th. It gained stature from its president, Christina Paxson, who is widely respected, even admired by her faculty, and who has taken public stands on behalf of academic freedom and related values. She has even defended the humanities.
Her letter of explanation goes much easier on getting the federal money back than did Columbia’s Acting President Claire Shipman. It goes much harder on preserving “the integrity of Brown's academic foundation.” It’s also obviously better to pay $50 million rather than $500 million as Columbia did, and pay it to (Trump-approved) workforce programs in Rhode Island rather than to some part of the federal government.
And yet this esteemed senior manager has approved some familiar elements:
· Categorical rejection of transgender athletes, plus a ban on gender reassignment surgery and “puberty blockers or hormones to any minor child for the purpose of aligning the child’s appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex” (§12).
· Establishment of Jewish students as a uniquely victimized group entitled to special programs and protection (§13a-f).
· Mandatory campus climate surveys, conducted by a third party and reported to offices at the Department of Education (DEd) and at Health and Human Services, focused on antisemitism (§13c i-ii), coupled with mandatory reporting to DEd of complaints (§13d i-iv).
· Monitoring of racial and related characteristics of admissions for any trace of DEI (§17).
· Research grant funding restored, but only to HHS/NIH recipients (§8a-c).
In addition, Brown agreed to
· the monitoring of student course evaluations “to identify any reports of antisemitism” (§13f). It’s not clear whether this is done by the government or the campus Office of Equity Compliance and Reporting (OECR), operating on their own.
There are massive big picture problems here.
Brown agreed to the external monitoring of admissions, climate surveys, and student evaluations of courses. As with Columbia, one student complaint can trigger an investigation of any instructor (Scott Lemieux calls this this “Brown’s Total Surrender”). The survey is required to be a fishing expedition for antisemitism, violating basic survey research protocol.
As with Columbia, the Agreement restores only “Brown's medical and health sciences research funding”: most STEM research, and research in the social sciences, arts, and humanities, stay out in the cold. My favorite people, “future historians,” may indeed ask whether the elite universities of the United States led the sector into a new age of political control of research, teaching, and admissions to restore the short-term cash flow of its medical centers.
Most fundamentally, Brown joins Penn and Columbia in condoning authoritarian illegality in the federal government’s relation to higher education. I noted with Columbia that public respect depends on the perception that you are fighting for principle. Brown now joins the others in not doing this. It accepts extortionary bargaining without evidence, argument, institutional reply, attempted resolution prior to punishment, or any other feature of the Congressionally-mandated Title VI process.
Brown, Columbia, and Penn have all failed to challenge the authoritarian practice of punishment-by-decree that undermines core academic freedoms. Even non-MAGA onlookers with think, well, looks like Trump had a point about universities—they really are the ones most guilty of discrimination in America.
**
Here’s where we get to the faculty responses.
One I briefly mentioned regarding Columbia. It is by law professor David Pozen, “Regulation by Deal Comes to Higher Ed.” Pozen defines regulation by deal as a shift
away from guidance documents addressed to the entire sector, and toward bespoke deals foisted upon individual schools after summarily terminating or threatening their federal funds. It is important to emphasize that this shift does not reflect an increased interest in enforcement, leading to an increased number of consent decrees or out-of-court settlements. These deals will not be the product of thorough investigations or judicial findings of misconduct by the schools in question. No established legal process was followed for the Columbia agreement; no genuine legal dispute was resolved. The dealmaking is the main regulatory event from start to finish.
Noting the deal’s coercive and authoritarian features, its sidestepping of due process, he concludes, “Deals like Columbia’s enhance the power of presidents and their allies within targeted universities; sideline Congress, the courts, and most faculty; and sow fear and uncertainty throughout civil society. They are fundamentally inconsistent with the logic of academic freedom.”
I completely agree. Pozen in effect answers my perennial question, how will the PMC (professional-managerial class) enter history as an independent agent (and not as capital’s servant), by defining a form of administrative tyranny to which professionals, by virtue of their practice, must object.
The next response is by Adam Tooze, Columbia professor, podcaster, Substack legend, , and global eminence on political economy. In “Iterations of the ‘Unstate,” discussing the Columbia settlement, he cites Pozen in full, and then redirects him.
modern power - both the capitalist and other kinds - have never had a straight-forward relationship with the rule of law. . . . The exception, the emergency, the crisis, the ad hoc are not bugs they are features of our reality. They are both systemically produced. And at least since the early 20th century it is clear that one mode of capitalist governance that may emerge is precisely the kind of ad hoc intervention seen in 2008. The most spectacular form of this kind of governance is what Franz Neumann in his masterwork on the Nazi regime called the “un-state” or Behemoth.
But Tooze is not endorsing Pozen’s quiet call to arms against the tyranny of the deal. To the contrary, his point is that administration is always a bit fascist.
I am NOT suggesting that what we are witnessing in the US today is fascism. But rather the opposite.
You are far more tempted to make the absurd Trump=fascism equation, if you start from a silly and simplistic account of “liberal reality”. If instead, we start from the position that modern power - both the capitalist and other kinds - have never had a straight-forward relationship with the rule of law, that idealized models of “regulation” are just that, idealized, that the line between regulation, government and goverance [sic] is always blurred, which is why the terms are blurry, then at any given moment the real question is how this awkwardness is being managed. What are the tools? What are the “discourses” and justifications? What passes for a deal and what does not?
Calling the Trump administration’s “governance by bullying” a “departure in style, tone, and ferocity,” he concludes that Trump’s treatment of Columbia is grounded in preexisting “routine of civil lawfare” that typifies U.S. corporate and political behavior. “This mess is what produces and reproduces American power as we know it.”
Tooze never does say what he or other Columbia faculty should do now. He treats Columbia as a teachable moment about capitalist democracy, where the Deal is more or less par for the course.
I of course take Tooze’s conceptual point that administration, democracy’s monstrous double, is rests on and operates with fascist / authoritarian features. This is particularly true of academic management, which disavows its status as management while exerting the top-down command and information control it invariably involves. (This blog is a 17-year record of wrestling with those features.)
But so what, exactly? Tooze gave me flashbacks to the 1980s American Foucault of my grad school years. Once we accept that power is a matter of governmentality rather than sovereignty, aren’t we under more obligation to engage the givens of our institutional conditions as not unchangeably imposed? The 1980s answer in literary theory was generally no!-- often given with a dose of disdain for the naïveté of the question. (Foucault’s own answer was yes, engage.)
The naïf role versus Tooze is taken up by historian John Ganz, naming himself “as a proponent of the ‘absurd Trump=fascism’ thesis.”
I also have a bit of trouble understanding the logic here. Surely, if Nazism is at the extreme end of the breakdown of the state, with its regular notions of law and right, into factional and clique-based power politics, and we are entering a more fierce and disturbing era of unstatehood, then one must at least say, we are heading in a fascist direction? And I don’t think the fascism thesis relies upon a naive separation of the idealized liberal rule of law and the present disorder and reign of terror. Quite the opposite. I think rather it can show how fascism is implicit in liberal democratic institutions and develops out of their internal contradictions and failures. As Mick Jagger sings, “It's just a shot away.” This was the position of the Frankfurt School, of which [Franz] Neumann [cited by Tooze on the Nazi “unstate”] was a member.
Ganz’s conclusion is that liberal society, though fundamentally compromised, has elements retaining a “commitment to right,” while the state retains some “integrative function.” These are presumably worth fighting for as means to some other ends.
Yet what that fight look like is beyond his scope—including the fight in universities whose current form depends on the (partially autocratized) due process of the liberal state.
**
The faculty mode we need now, as a necessary interruption, is that of prolific Lawyers Guns and Money blogger Paul Campos, talking not about Columbia or Brown but about his own law school at Boulder, Colorado. Campos has been on this beat for a while, from the inside. I draw five lessons from his work.
Campos had previously filed a discrimination complaint against this dean, Lolita Buckner Inniss, which he won—and also discussed (Part 1, Part 2). Lesson 1: He doesn’t let personal involvement silence him. To the contrary, he makes his interests explicit and carries on putting his insider knowledge to use.
Lesson 2 is open confrontation with senior managers. This is hard and against the lifetime practice of elite and near-elite academics. Yet in a set of recent posts, on the dean’s reappointment, “A Note on the Economic Sociology of Law Faculties,” and “A World of Lies,” Campos names everyone and keeps all the political affects in play. He cites administrative content at length and the subjects it to critique.
This is the third lesson – use of one’s academic expertise and skills against the standard PR, information withholding, and gaslighting that regularity emerges from academic managers engaged in opinion control, paired with being explicit about the campus battle between analysis and bullshit.
For example, Campos cites two paragraphs of the administration’s explanation of why they reappointed Inniss in spite of majority opposition. "The university’s response to this disgraceful situation is to just keep lying about it,” he writes, “while hoping that no one will have the temerity to point out that the lies are just that."
Campos takes this job upon himself. Citing a university explanation for the reappointment, he offers 6 points of rebuttal. The explanation “is all fabricated," he says, while showing the reality behind it.
Lesson Four is naming the managerial / professorial divide, thus making it a thing to discuss and fix.
As to why [Dean Inniss] was reappointed, Campos said, “My personal opinion is the provost did it because, even though he hates Lolita, he hates the faculty more.”
“It’s just the whole notion of faculty governance is utterly inimical to the way these central administrators think,” Campos said. “It’s like, they’re the C-suite bosses and you’re the employees— it’s their job to decide everything important and it’s your job to shut up and follow orders.”
“That’s the attitude in higher ed right now, and this is just an extreme example of it,” he added.
Faculty won’t increase their influence over policy without starting from this subordination.
The fifth lesson is to not let the professoriat off the hook. Campos’ “economic sociology of law faculties” boils down to faculty turning a blind eye to opaque and unreal budgeting when it is packaged as salary increases for them plus more hiring.
(The law school faculty is 53% larger now than it was in the late 1990s, while the student body is around 10% larger).
This missive [about a slate of new hires] triggered the realization that, in my 35 years on the faculty, we have never to the best of my recollection ever had a discussion about how large the law faculty should be. . . .
The reason for that seems obvious: The law faculty’s answer to the question of how large the faculty should be is, absent external controls or pressures of some sort, the same as its answer to the question of how large our salaries should be, which is to say “as large as possible.” Indeed these two questions are to a significant extent the same question, since a larger faculty is a kind of indirect form of remuneration, since it means smaller classes and teaching loads, more freedom in regard to which classes a particular faculty member can choose to teach, more research leaves, etc.
Awkward! But basically true in my experience. To repeat, your typical professoriat/ PMC thought collective has no chance of finding its own path against managerial alignment with Trumpism if it can’t name and then work though its own complicities.
Plan A is a democratized university whose autonomy and academic freedoms rest on full collective deliberation. This won’t be built in a day, and much of the current university would rather die. So Plan B, and a final faculty voice.
A recently retired Columbia professor of modern Middle East history, the renowned Rashid Khalidi, wrote an op-ed about cancelling his planned visiting lecture course in the wake of Columbia’s surrender to the Trump Administration. Describing Columbia as now an anti-university helping the Trump Administration cover up complicity with the genocide in Gaza, he adds that he is taking his course off campus for the wider public:
I am planning to offer a public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed and available for later viewing. Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.
True again. And why not a university outside the university, a university of the commons, an underuniversity?
I’ve long been interested in bootleg universities, governed and operated directly by faculty and students with minimal administrative support. These would be financially sustainable with decent salaries—i.e., better than what the army of adjuncts mainly earn now--and with low student fees. They would work, in the arts, humanities, and social sciences freed from STEM infrastructure and its costs.
Personally I quite like STEM research, and I’d rather keep university subjects together and hang on to the enormous infrastructure, resources, and research that universities currently wield. But if the real democratization of universities is impossible, if co-governance among faculty, staff, students, and administrators can’t happen in an American unstate, then let’s try multiplying a Khalidi course into a curriculum and a network of academics. It would be hard, but preferable to Trump’s Orbanized universities.
3 comments:
I love the idea of bootleg universities. At the University of Florida in the late sixties, we had our alternative university, underground newspaper, feminist consciousness-raising groups, and progressive child care center. At Berkeley in the seventies and eighties, we studied Marxism at the Wright Institute with the Marxist professors Berkeley had purged, along with professors from its Demography and Criminology programs that the university disbanded for its radical analyses of carcerality. We studied and taught at the East Bay Socialist School. We formed Marxism study groups, and others on topics that similarly didn't exist in the university, of which film theory was one (the feminist and socialist Camera Obscura Collective emerged from this setting). Back then, we took for granted that we had to create our own higher education, which we later worked to bring into the academy to transform hoary disciplines and pedagogies. With Trump's purging of disfavored ideas and disciplines from the university, along with the devastation of academic freedom and "shared governance" (that was always a sham), we need alternative curricula and universities all over again.
Thank you for this powerful and spot-on analysis. It seems indeed, as with so much else, that Adorno & Co. were right about the genetic links between liberalism and fascism, or whatever it precisely is we want to call the system unfolding before our eyes. I hope we can take your lessons and use them as the foundation for a manifesto for collective response to the traumatic acceleration of authoritarian neoliberal managerialism that had already took control of the university as you've so well shown long before Trump returned to the WH.
I would like to emphasize a few points:
1. University leaderships, whatever their unimpressive protestations, clearly see the Biden and then Trump administrations' assault on academic freedom and shared governance - and yes, this process began under Biden, with alleged anti-Semitism on campus the spearhead - not as a problem to be managed to salvage what remains of the liberal university working "in the public interest," as my alma mater NYU likes to say, but as an opportunity to finish the job of destroying shared governance and ensuring a powerless, compliant professoriate as well as staff and students. Trump is merely the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism incarnated into higher education, and they are simply behaving like over-paid capitalist managers behave in every other sector.
2. Professor Khalidi, a mentor and scholar of exceptional courage, has shown the way when the university fails in its mission. But of course, he's retired so has little to lose. It's going to be harder for scholars still drawing salaries rather than pensions - and particular for those without pensions, ie adjuncts - to simply leave, so we need to fight. Thus the importance of actualizing your agenda above.
I would point out here - and ask for help in this regard - that a group of professors, from UC, Harvard and other locations, came together to create a "University in Exile" earlier this year, specifically to provide continued teaching, supervision and mentorship to students suspended, expelled, or deported because of their solidarity activism (or for no particular reason at all). We have our materials and process finished and a basic design for a website/portal to fun the program, but lost the programmer who was completing our website. A demo/beta of the site with some description is here: https://osmsha.dreamhosters.com/. If anyone has those skills and would like to help please contact me at mlevine@uci.edu.
3. The reason Palestine is so important is because it shows how the university leaderships instrumentalized lies long before the present crisis. The concocted/manufactured crisis of anti-Semitism on campus is no different than various manufactured or self-inflicted financial crises you have so well described the last 2 decades. But once so many faculty who should have known better - and let's be honest, the majority are from STEM - not merely accepted but pushed and weaponized claims with little basis in fact rather than fight them in the name of intellectual and political integrity, the way was open for the kind of extortion we see now, with STEM as a primary victim as it was the primary beneficiary of large-scale government funding. But what begins with humanities and the arts ends with STEM - we all are losing.
4. At least at UC, imho, the most important weapon to fight back would be unionizing the senate faculty. Why allegedly very smart professors are so dumb when it comes to unionizing is something I'll never understand, but they need to wisen up soon. Together, organized and recognized legally as a corporate body, we can fight back. Separately and relying on our senates to protect us and the faculty associations to pressure them we don't stand a chance. We need to unionize and we need to do it now.
Angela Davis was right, we can't just do our praxis in our heads until the time is right to put it into practice (as Adorno advised her when she told him she was returning to the US to join the struggle). We are running out of time; what good is our profession if we can't be the example for the rest of the country and fight like our lives depend on it. Because they do.
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