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| UCLA on May 14, 2018 |
This is the genius shakedown that Trump has imposed on UCLA. He announced the freezing of $300 million, which UCLA officials said is really $584 million. Two days later, it was like the first Dr. Evil scene in Austin Powers. “We hold UCLA ransom for--one BILLION dollars.”
Obviously, the choice can’t be to pay $1 billion to get back $584 million. The choice is to say okay, keep the $584 million, or, instead, sue to get back the $584 million that has been (unlawfully) withheld.
It’s not really a choice. UC must pick door number two.
California governor Gavin Newsom has already picked that door. “We’ll sue,” Newsom announced during a press conference.
“He has threatened us through extortion with a billion-dollar fine, unless we do his bidding,” Newsom said.
“We will not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom on this extraordinary public institution. We are not like some of those other institutions,” he said.
New UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk and even newer UC president James Milliken have both denounced Trump’s demands. Milliken said, “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.”
Parts of UC admin still seem itching to surrender. Jaweed Kallem and Michael Wilner report that one “senior UC official said the [$1 billion] figure was understandable if it resolved all federal investigations across the system, even if UC may not ultimately agree to it.” UC Regents Chair Janet Reilly said the “university was still willing to negotiate,” though not on “unacceptable” terms.
Now and then, I’m grateful for Gavin Newsom. He grasps that staying free of Trump requires fighting Trump.
This is in pleasant contrast to the silence of much of the Democratic party, to the lapdog Republican party, and to the abject submission of the country’s most powerful CEOs, lined up behind him as a court endorsement at the inauguration, failing to emit a word of criticism of his destruction of the federal research system on whose back their businesses were built, or carrying gifts of gold to the Oval Office Domination Theater. Here Tim Cook, Apple CEO, angling for a chip tariff carve-out, serves Trump a special trophy.
In contrast, Newsom gets that there’s no percentage in a Trump deal except for Trump. California has already sued the Trump Administration 37 times, and UC should be lawsuit 38. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s weekly email could be titled “California v. Trump” or “We Sued the Feds.”
In June, Newsom tweeted a truly interesting threat to impound California’s federal income tax payments. It was serious enough to attract an threat from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent of charging criminal tax evasion. This isn’t the last time we’ll hear about this idea, since the Trump Administration is pushing federal obligations onto states for which they’ll need new revenues.
Even business is catching up: the Financial Times has a big spread called, “How Trump has turned tariffs into diplomatic shakedowns,” It announces that “many trade experts and officials” realize a Trump deal is merely a “cudgel” whose terms will change whenever Trump needs to increase control.
Same in politics: Brazil’s president, Lula Inácio da Silva, speaks for a growing group of counterparties when he says, “I won’t humiliate myself.”
As object lessons, the Penn, Columbia, and Brown University agreements paved the way for the attack on UCLA (Liner Notes 30, 34, and 35). This was predictable and predicted. The money itself is less important to the Trump project than owning the libs in the spaces they think are theirs, and performing a victorious takeover in cultural discourse.
Veteran UCLA analyst Dan Mitchell is right to guess that One Billion Dollars means “the feds don't want a settlement for now and want instead to keep the pot boiling.” The boiling pot is the right’s storyline that US universities are America’s enemy and Trump is heroically conquering them.
I don’t think the presidents and boards of Penn, Columbia , and Brown really get that their concession of guilt is a total defeat for universities in Trump’s cultural crusade. I’m not sure many onlookers do.
So in the rest of this post, I’ll link the UCLA and other attacks to what I take to be Trump’s underlying (anti) knowledge project. I’ll then plead for systemic, cooperative counterattacks from universities and their kin.
**
Linda McMahon’s official statements describe the university deals as part of a wholesale cultural revitalization. The ambition is on the scale of Thatcherism as described by Stuart Hall and his colleagues. Trump is affecting a “reversal” of “the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions,” the ending the tyranny of judging people by “their race or sex,” the liberating of women to compete only against other women, and a restoration of “our nation’s higher education institutions to places dedicated to truth-seeking, academic merit, and civil debate.”
The Wagnerian chorus of this Glorious Revolution drowns out university claims that we “preserved our academic integrity” or retrieved “funding for life-saving research.”
Without intending it, the universities are speaking a language of servitude, servitude to two Trumpian imperatives.
1. The glorious restoration of structural racism. This is a wolf in the familiar sheep’s clothing of standardized test results and purified merit.
Trump has always hated the claims of people of color to achievement. His is a standard Jim Crow racism that attributes everything a BIPOC person does well to a white handout. His belief, common in MAGA land, is that no student of color was ever admitted on personal accomplishments by a college that has rejected white students. His expectation is that if he can eliminate any consideration of all social identity, white superiority will increase the white share of students and faculty in all the universities that matter. (Do read Attorney General Pam Bondi’s total ban on social factors.)
Trumpian racism negates both academic freedom and a core social value of universities, which is to study culture and society in its actual radical diversity—past and present—while also incorporating that into its communities.
In contrast, Trump’s is a fanatical racist agenda. This understanding must circulate widely in the culture.
And yet you did not see Penn, Columbia, and Brown saying, “retaining our academic integrity, and preserving our core values, means that we will continue to practice diversity, equity, and inclusion, and study human identity and consciousness without restriction.” Instead, they promised not to do these things, and the Trump Administration promised to discipline and punish them if it gets a whiff later of them doing any of this, which Bondi’s memo makes pretty much everything in that zone.
The Trump Administration is institutionalizing its claim of blanket white superiority (in the military, the health agencies, the museums, history, etc). It hammers this into the culture through daily, angry repetition. America awaits with baited breath the next public burning of a big pretentious university that rejects 90-95% of its applicants, which now includes UCLA.
University concessions on race, gender, and sexuality simply fuel this cultural purge. Their silence on the core values they often claim, starting with the humble values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and continuing with their glory and their justice and their intellectual splendor, miseducates the country into seeing Trump and McMahon’s position as mostly factual mainstream politics.
But their position destroys knowledge and politics. And it aims to take as much of the majority as possible out of the electorate and the culture.
Another Trumpian imperative:
2. Pushing the post-knowledge society.
Weakening public university funding has been a bipartisan project, covered for many years on this blog. The issue has never been the money per se, but what the money supports: the university’s intellectual and thus social capacities, and the resulting benefits for students, knowledge, and the whole society.
UC president Milliken is right to say Trump’s cuts will devastate research. But that’s because UC research already runs at a large loss. In 2022-23, UCLA spent $356 million of its own money covering losses mainly on extramural grants (Table 58, Rank 16). Over decades, California has withdrawn much of the state’s copayment that helped fill those gaps. UC’s perpetual fiscal crisis is a feature of state budgeting that has been enforced by Governors Pete Wilson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, and Gavin Newsom, from both political parties.
Thanks to the 2024 election, the knowledge society, already made fragile by the fiscal weakening of independent researchers and creators, is now being pushed by Trump forces into post-knowledge status. This is a condition in which knowledge has no use other than to reinforce power, or have much existence independently of that use.
Trump is modeling this society by taking over programming at the Kennedy Center, and replacing the National Endowment for the Humanities programs with funding for a National Garden of American Heroes (that he pre-selects), and subjugating universities.
Post-knowledge is at the heart of the anti-regulation agenda. When Trump deregulates cryptocurrency and other digital assets, he sidelines technical and financial knowledge that doesn’t directly serve the powers that own those assets. Trumpian corruption establishes the effective non-existence of knowledge that conflicts in any way with Trump’s version of reality. Once experts and related knowers have been taken out of action, the sovereign decides what is real and what is true. Since every practice has knowledge and know how, Trumpism sees threats to post-knowledge sovereignty in farmers, undergraduate protestors, solar power retail, nurses, housing NGOs, etc. The post-knowledge society must be structured as a tyranny.
The post-knowledge society is in short one where academic freedom doesn’t exist in practice, and professional autonomy doesn’t either. At least partially self-managed professional life is replaced by line management, direct or indirect. For example, page view metrics have already shifted most journalists into cycles of 2-3 pieces per day, often mashed up from other internet fodder, with little chance for investigation, quality improvement through rewrites, and other features of quality knowledge creation. Where the general culture can’t see the value of knowledge for itself, for non-commercial or local or frankly antisystemic uses, this trend intensifies, helped along by the steady spread of AI slop.
The endpoint of Trumpism is to subordinate, into a state of cultural powerlessness, knowledge workers and the knowledge they produce—that’s everyone from ballet dancers and TV writers to acquisitions lawyers and the teachers and professors in between. Most will continue to exist and some will be well-paid, but, in a post-knowledge society, on terms dictated by their overlord employers. Since these represent capital as such, Trumpism sees this as efficiency as well as control.
This victory is still far from being achieved, but it is the (class) goal. To repeat, a vital step is to take the public university challenger out of the game, either by inducing self-harm--Minnesota’s hyponormalization, UC Irvine’s veiled thundercuts (Parts 1 and 2)—or with the extortion machine.
**
I think it’s fairly obvious that Trumpism seeks a cultural reversal as complete as Thatcherism or Reaganism against the latter-day New Deal. It’s a radicalization of those Eighties conservatisms in that it rejects even limited coexistence with liberalism and its institutions.
I’m going on about this because the threat is so serious, and potentially so destructive of civil rights and knowledge culture, both always endangered in the modern U.S. That’s also why I think the only workable response is a full tilt counterattack, by universities, that aims to destroy the extortion machine itself.
This will involve at least a couple of things.
One is lawfare, which openly challenges the legal foundation of the extortion racket. This means arguing in (and out) of court for the illegality of Trump and McMahon’s abuse of Title VI and related code. When university administrations accept the facticity of illegal freezes, they insure they continue, and continue to strengthen Trump’s white post-knowledge hegemony.
Consortia need to be organized and costs pooled. This legal fight is going to cost big. But no doubt less than one BILLION dollars.
The second is the construction of as big and noisy a cultural counternarrative as Trump’s itself. We all know that the Trump machine rests on a network of think tanks, centers, social media stars. It also works on a speed cycle: the King of Derp is a master of the OODA operations loop. (Do read Josh Marshall’s “The Way of the Doofus Warrior,” which explains much of the subsequent 10 years of US politics). A prime example of the speed loop are the funding freezes, created through edict-and-rant cycles, not actual law. I’m not saying we should do lying or bullshitting, but so serious confrontation with total nonsense and its relentless dismantling.
It’s important to notice that noisy counternarrative can get going with a few people. My sense is that Marc Andreessen, a leading MAGA mogul reactionary, has taken a credibility hit from the release of his WhatsApp threats against universities for daring to have considered race in admissions. The Washington Post published the texts, various outlets reported it.
Then two never-Trumpers at the Bulwark, Tim Miller and Jonathan Last, did a line-by-line excoriation in “Marc Andreessen’s Ugly White Grievance Rant.” They spanked his texts within an inch of their life on grounds of both crybaby hypocrisy and a short history of the gift of free public higher education still received in the Eighties and Nineties by white boys like Marc.
My point here is that maybe a dozen people, not really coordinated, but fully committed to the operating loop, exposed the racial roots of techno-optimism. This interacts with Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres’s critique of the TESCREAL bundle for eugenicism, written for a different audience, and then other people can take it up.
There are “positive tipping points” via small groups. In her review of Tim Lenton’s book by that title, the FT’s Pilita Clark writes, in the midst of our climate gloom, that there are many stories like
how Norway became the electric car colossus it famously is today. The shift began after Morten Harket, lead singer of the pop group A-ha, joined other environmentalists in a campaign of civil disobedience aimed at highlighting the need to make plug-in cars more attractive. Following the protesters’ attention-grabbing refusal to pay road tolls, parking fees and other charges, EVs were gradually exempted from a score of levies. That ushered in an era of “learning-by-using” that saw sales of green vehicles accelerate from less than 1 per cent of the market in 2010 to nearly 90 per cent last year.
Universities can do this too, with their millions of students, staff, and faculty. Administrators will have to work with their academic communities rather than hold them at arm’s length. They’ll have to work with protestors rather than having them arrested. They have to restore the great tradition of campus civil disobedience. They’ll need to coordinate across universities, as faculty groups have often said.
The educational ensemble will need to build a counternarrative that reestablishes the public value of universities. Mentions may include deep human learning, involvement of the intelligence of the whole population, the struggles and pleasure of thought, the importance of thinking to human survival, the feeling of suddenly understanding, the glimpses of a system of new thought, a new capacity, the power of self-development, the ongoing sense of knowledge as emancipation.
Lawfare and the reversal narrative can destroy the extortion machine. The latter can also build a much better system of higher education.
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