Liner Note 41: The Future of Communities of Scholars

Royce Hall, UCLA on October 29, 2025   

I spent most of October on the road, and one especially happy stop was a UCLA conference, "Academic Freedom and the Crisis of the Democratic University: A Symposium in Honor of Michael Meranze."  Michael is my longtime partner on this blog: the paper I've posted below is about his scholarship on university topics.  I sketch towards the end the elements of his theory of a radically rebuilt university, one that would properly support teaching and research; I also broach the issue of faculty time (lack thereof) for the work of institutional activism.  Other speakers were Wendy Brown, Rana Jaleel, Hank Reichman, and Joan Wallach Scott, and I am hoping Michael will reconstruct and soon post his excellent response to all of us at the end of a truly enjoyable day.

 **

Michael wound up being my partner on the blog, Remaking the University, back in 2009, not because he’d always dreamed of writing every week about universities but because of his commitment to real universities and to their consistent presence in society.  He had a commitment  the University of California, of course, where he first arrived as a doctoral student over 4 decades ago—but beneath that to the practice of the university as an indispensable intellectual agent in the world.

 

We’ve heard today about his research on the university as society’s special, perhaps unique, site of academic and intellectual freedom. It’s true that much of his work on the blog reflected his protective vigilance towards academic freedom.  But this work was also connected to everything else he wrote about, including state budgeting, student protest, weak-minded administration, and faculty governance (or its lack).  All of these issues affected the university’s ability to function as society’s special, place of scholarship, and its ability to underwrite communities of scholars. 

 

My relationship with Michael was shaped by the fact that  he created this community of scholars with me, by enacting it through continuous knowledge exchange and analysis.  This meant in practice his tireless search for evidence instanced in a nonstop flow of links to articles and, equally, to archival material.  He had a set of email colleagues and he sent them overlapping sets of links—only Michael’s devices know the full extent of his daily address to multiple scholarly communities (studying, for example, the perma-crisis of universities, academic freedom, 18^th century history, the history of prisons, Foucault and the theory of history, psychoanalytic theory & society, etc). His presence and daily engagement with materials new and old helped constitute these groups across distance.  Scholarly community in my case also meant his reading and critiquing draft posts, often within an hour or two of my sending them.  These communities were created through Michael’s personal enactment of what such a community should actually do, and do in an ordinary, everyday way. They were constituted by Michael’s remarkable breadth of interests, and especially, by his striking, unending generosity.

 

 

**

The blog took off during the 2009-10 fiscal crisis of the University of California and California State University. In response to the GFC, the State of California subjected UC and CSU to a third round of multi-year double-digit cuts to their state appropriation.  We covered the budget cuts and the budget’s administrative discourse in constant detail. But we also saw the budget crisis as a crisis of faculty governance and a crisis of the university’s social strategy, which was and is controlled by senior managers and governing boards.  By December 2009, Michael was analyzing both budget and governance through the underlying problem of the state’s poor understanding of the purpose of the university as such.

 

One landmark post was “Looking Back and Looking Forward” (December 7, 2009).  Michael noted a “fundamental lack of connection between UCOP and the Regents on the one hand and students and the Campuses on the other.” This lack of interconnection within the university extended to the faculty’s ambivalent relation to students and in particular to the faculty split over student opposition to capped or lowered tuition hikes. Many if not most faculty had decided to give up on the state and wanted big tuition hikes to protect their resources.

 

Michael took a step back and wrote that we should refuse to choose between blaming the state for funding cuts and blaming UC’s senior managers for not fighting cuts even as they hoarded reserves. “The first narrative allows the faculty to avoid accepting responsibility for what UC has become; the second narrative effectively reduces it to its money flows and money management.”  So did some of the statements of the Berkeley student occupation movement: Michael detected overlap between the managerial and the oppositional narratives.

As the “Communiqué from an Absent Future” put it: "The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor.” But to put things this way is to ignore history and not even correctly understand the present. The university is older than the dominance of capital, and as an institution it retains traditions and practices that cannot be reduced to capital. To reduce the university in the way of the Communiqué is, like the managerial ethos, to reduce it to its utility to capital. It is to ignore the practices of curiosity, of communication, of self-formation, of deepening engagement with thought that, however much they are devalued in the larger world, are essential aspects to any social change or even human life. 

Michael here identified the pervasiveness of a managerial ethos that can capture even its political opponents. He pointed to a vacuum in the thinking about what we do in universities that was shared and mutually reinforced by students, staff, managers, and faculty alike. So Michael was addressing all these groups in writing, “I worry that we are running around like people with fingers in the dike trying to patch up this and that but losing sight of what we think UC should be.”

 

What we think: three key words.  The institution of thinking has to proceed from that.  Michael wrote what he thought.

 

Much of what we do depends on suspending the immediacy of the present—even when it is most problem-centered. It is in the gap between the given and the imagined that insight flourishes.  This aspect of our work is hard to explain and communicate effectively. Humanistic education, at its best, provides students and society with worlds (both past, imaginary, and distant) that are not their own; social scientific education, at its best, provides students and society with ways to conceive of problems that escape from the given logics of the day; scientific education, at its best, allows students and societies ways of bracketing out the everyday in order to better understand the material world that we all inhabit.

 

In all cases, it is the suspension of the immediate and the possibility of the creative and contested communication of ideas that makes knowledge and understanding possible. It cannot be predicted in advance nor confined to a given product or utility.

 

The problem with seeing the University as a business or as a tool of capital is that it misses the day to day work that everyone actually does. Instead of allowing the University to be remade in the terms of narrow utility we need to insist that it deepen its commitment to the democratic exchange of ideas. This means developing solutions to problems in society, developing individuals who seek out further opportunities for public and intellectual engagement with society, and developing individuals whose curiosity and inquiry reshape themselves. . . .

That we all have allowed ourselves to be confined within increasingly narrow intellectual limits and failed to effectively converse across the university about the university and about what we do is one of our major intellectual weaknesses in the face of the serial crises that confront us all.  

 

Michael characteristically stresses the deep purposes of the humanities in the context of a whole university, one where all of the fields of study are together.  The fields should be talking amongst themselves, though that now mainly happens in the academic Senate.  And he was already warning everyone that the university without a narrative of its sheer intellectuality would be under permanent threat of destruction. In these things he was complete right. It’s better to listen to Michael the first time he tells you something.

 

**

That was written at the dismal dawn of the decade of the 2010s. Obama was president; his administration was bailing out Wall Street and abandoning Main Street, and the Tea Party was about to rise in anger. It was a good time for the Democrats to act like they had some sense. More fundamentally, it was the essential time for what Michael called the suspension of the immediate and the possibility of the creative. The university was letting itself get dragged into the crisis as passive collateral damage and Michael wanted it to make a serious collaborative internal effort to write its own destiny.

 

For Michael, the university couldn’t fulfill its social function if it weakened its scholarly function, and “scholarly” was rooted in the humanities.  Michael has always had sympathy and respect for scientists, but in November 2013 he wrote a post about making humanities methods stand out from the sciences.  The piece is called, “Curating the Humanities” (November 28, 2013). It identifies elements of what turns out to be the community of scholars. (Also see “Towards a New Community of Scholars.”)

 

Michael gets at this issue through some work by medievalist and punctum books impresario Eileen Fradenburg-Joy, and her emphasis on curation. “Forms of thinking matter,” Fradenburg-Joy wrote, “and there is no need to discard anything. Every area requires special curators and we should seek to increase the ranks of those, for this is a matter of the care as well as of the increase of knowledge.”   Michael outlines a proto-theory of university study under pressure:

 

First is the connection between the knowledge and the scholar that produces it:

 we tend--despite whatever commitments to method or theory we have--to take our specific research subjects seriously and personally.  To actually curate our fields today, though, means doing more than simply teaching or writing about them. . . .  we cannot succeed by turning away from what drew us to the humanities or interpretive social sciences in the first place. . .  . If we are going to curate both objects and subjects we need to recognize the personal dimension of our commitments.  We teach and write about them because we think that it is important that they be preserved and extended in some way.  We do so because we find them personally engaging and challenging.  Insofar as we claim that our knowledge can be transforming, we might give more thought to how, and if, our knowledge is transforming ourselves.

 

The second element of this theory is bringing in undergraduates.

“Faculty at … research universities will need to assume more responsibility for advising.  . . . At liberal arts colleges faculty are deeply involved with advising undergraduates and at research universities they are involved in advising graduate students.  But there is a large lacuna there: undergraduates at large research institutions.  In these situations students are left to overworked staff advisers.  . . . UC faculty will need to take more responsibility for the intellectual development of their students both undergraduate and graduate.  Disciplines in the humanities and social sciences often claim that their teaching and knowledge is designed for transformation; but without figuring out ways to make [teaching] part of the intellectual process of  education, it rings false.

 

Third, Michael wrote, “I think we might take some lessons from museums and libraries because it is in those latter spaces that curators and librarians aim to develop public knowledge.  For in curating you not only preserve but you present.”  The community of scholars would thus collaborate to produce both traditional peer-reviewed research and also forms of public address that would bring the general public back into scholarly processes and research results. Curating would also, in the midst of our mushrooming knowledge crisis, reduce the alienation between university and non-university populations.

 

Fourth, communities require serious efforts of maintenance by their members.  And one of Michael’s perennial themes is the slowly unfolding disaster of outsourced administration. It seemed like a good idea at the time: the educators hire professional administrators to handle institutional functions. UC had originally split tuition into a “registration fee” and an “education fee,” which were assumed to be distinct, and the ed fee was to be essentially zero while reg fees could go up in keeping with the expansion of administrative needs.  For Michael such a split was a major scholarly mistake. He wrote,

 

 If faculty in the humanities and social sciences do not take more collective responsibility for the institutions that make our scholarship and teaching possible and work in solidarity with other institutions or other departments, then our students will find themselves without a sustainable field to work in.  We need to acknowledge the centrality of the sustainability of the humanities infrastructure and of the crucial task of the university as a place for conserving knowledge as well as producing it. We must take greater responsibility for our conduct as it relates to the larger project that the humanities and social sciences engage in. 

In other words, the community of scholars requires meaningful self-governance, but this couldn’t be simply to set policy and go away. The community of scholars requires a faculty labor of administration—of shared participation in administrative decisions and also practices.  It would mean some meaningful administrative insourcing.  How much and how this would be done, giving research and teaching duties/desires, would have to be decided over time in a process managed by the community. And it would have to be done across departments, so as to avoid the current situation in which they are “pitted against each other.”

 

So Michael’s community of scholars requires four things: affective bonds between scholar and scholarship; involvement of students in thinking as such; curation of the resulting knowledge in public; and active governance of the scholarly infrastructure. It’s a powerful model, it would work!--and it’s also a lot.

 

I lectured (and appeared on The American Vandal podcast) at the University of Pennsylvania last week. Someone in the audience asked me, how would we start to bring about these changes you describe, concretely, in practice? I suggested several things, starting with collective faculty self-education about the institution---budgeting in relation to teaching and research, in particular. “It would involve something like a seminar for interested faculty and students, maybe 10 hours of meetings over the  course of a term,” I added.  At dinner that night, an eminent member of the department said, “Chris, you really had me until you said 10 hours of meetings in a term.  I just don’t have the time for that!”

 

Translated, that also means faculty scholars don’t have the time to constitute Michael’s community of scholars.  We’ve already seen this problem once, when medical expertise lost its independence to health insurance companies who promised cheap and complete administrative support, and it’s pretty far along in large universities. The time grind helped HMOs with doctors and administrative bloat seems to most professors like a help to them.  This has been possibly the heart of the resistance to these ideas about self-governance and to the blog’s calls for action over many years. “I’m just drowning in work,” many faculty can quite accurately say.  “How am I supposed to take on more?”

 

The short answer is always, “not more work, different work.”  In the community of scholars, democracy is less work not more. But this needs to be worked through and made concrete. Otherwise, faculty (or staff, or students) won’t be willing to try.

 

I was recently at a dinner with UC friends, and of the 6 faculty around the table, I was the only one of them who had never spent several years serving on the Senate’s Council for Academic Personnel. (I always volunteered for Planning and Budget instead.)  Academic Personnel (CAP) is important work, since it is the heart of the faculty’s collective self-governance of professional performance and advancement.  Yet CAP exhausts its faculty members--really drains them. They find it very interesting, and yet in my experience they have no thought left over for wider strategy and policy. CAP focuses entirely on individualistic dimensions of scholarship and reward, and not on the community of scholars, its purposes or support.  Our colleagues shudder at the idea of adding policy to their existing workload: it seems to them to be like serving on CAP and Planning and Budget at the same time. 

 

Much of Michael’s writing examined why our current shared governance system exhausted faculty rather than empowered them.   One fix for CAP would be to increase the size of the council, but more fundamentally the fix is to increase trust in the lower layers of review, particularly the department’s, so that the top layer doesn’t essentially duplicate the personnel review that has already been conducted by 3 layers before it. 

 

However, these kinds of practical changes that would make more self-governance less work would require a shift in ethos at UC towards first, reciprocal trust, and second, effort shifted towards collective rather than individual goods. These changes both enable and require the democratization of management.   

 

***

This was indeed one of Michael’s major themes: democratization.  University governance is always bad unless knowledge flows upwards.  One example of the badness—UC’s Office of the President (UCOP) at peak autocracy--was the state audit fiasco of Spring 2017, when the state found UCOP to have scrubbed surveys that it had sent to UC campuses of even the mildest, most balanced campus criticisms of UCOP’s performance.  Then-president Janet Napolitano and her office had managed to turn some routine audit problems and reasonable criticisms into a statewide scandal, leading to the dawn of a new era of legislative distrust of UC and new levels of micromanagement.  On May 7, 2017, Michael wrote:

Amidst all of the heated disagreement, …  there has been one fundamental, and fundamentally wrong, point about which all of the arguing parties appear to agree:  that the answer to the problems the audit revealed can and should be solved from the top down.  Wherever you turn in the discussion, . . . the common element in all of the proposals is that the answer is to be found in a closed loop of decision makers shuttling between Oakland and Sacramento (with the occasional nod to the campus chancellors). 

 

In fact, the most striking aspect of the auditor's report and UCOP's response was the almost total absence of any acknowledgement of faculty or staff knowledge or perspectives.  Where were the formal responses of Senate Committees in the report?  How exactly is the auditor to know if the programs that UCOP oversees are productive if they don't get unfiltered responses from the people who are providing the education and front-line services to students, are engaging in research, and are attempting to convey that research to the public?

 

He noted the Regents’ response to their own management disaster was to hire another set of outside consultants, ignoring the legions of UC faculty in business and public policy schools with precisely that expertise.  The Regents are now paying and outside contractor, he fumed, for the clarity and documentation they never bothered to demand from UCOP in the first place.

 

He concludes, “If the University really wants to think about how to educate and create knowledge more effectively for the twenty-first century,  they would do well to recognize that in universities knowledge flows upward”—when it isn’t actively obstructed.

 

This was the context in which Michael and I continued to write in the later 2010s: bloat, autocracy, declining managerial performance, and deepening resource starvation in the educational core. It was also the context in which we were begging our colleagues to embrace the labor of democratic practice—learning institutional information, sharing and discussing it, struggling to implement the better ideas that result from learning in a march through the institutions.  Michael was particularly aware of faculty sentiment—of how infuriating and pointless arguing with a dean seemed to our ambitious, focused, dedicated, high-output research colleagues compared to the relative lightness of being of their teaching and research.

 

This was awkward.  The one thing that would save the University’s finances—greatly increased public funding—was the one thing managers wouldn’t seek. The one thing that would save the University’s management—a fully informed and engaged faculty—was the one thing the faculty couldn’t do.

 

Or so the faculty might have thought.  Michael persisted on this theme of the community of scholars governing itself.  When a later audit of the earlier doctored audit came out in autumn 2017, Michael posted at length.  He concluded as follows (November 27, 2017):

UC needs new leadership.  But this cannot be limited to finding a replacement for President Napolitano.  The UC Regents, after all, have made the decisions--through their choices of presidents and policies--that have brought us to this point.  The Regents and UC must give up on trying to mimic the failed Michigan model in finance and the failed managerial model in administration.  The new leadership of the university must restore the primacy of academic judgment over the demands of finance, must seek new ways to transfer funds from administration to education, and must be open to ideas from below.  Meanwhile, the Senate must move beyond its current reactivity and begin to act as a producer of vision and not just a commentator on administrative proposals.  In addition, faculty throughout the system need to take ownership of their local budgets and campus futures.

Yes yes yes yes—this is where I should take off my shoe and bang it on the table.

 

**

 

What Michael did then was practice what he preached.  A consultant would call it “leading by example.”  He became increasing active in the Senate, culminating as you have heard with his vice chairship and chairship of the UCLA senate and co-chairship of a campuswide Covid task force. He has also been a stalwart on the AAUP’s Committee A, which analyzes and intervenes in violations of academic freedom and has produced a series of important reports.  These were an enormous existential investment in the well-being of the institution and its grinding processes, in the infrastructure of national higher education, and in acting in such a way that governance itself can function as a scholarly community. 

 

Michael wrote increasingly about some key ingredients of democratization: academic freedom, unionization, and student protest. Writing in support of the UC graduate strike in December 2022, he read the strike as “a sign of how deep the failure of the University has been in (not) providing a sustainable funding model both for students and faculty supporting students.”  Noting that “the Academic Senate has been pointing to this problem for at least two decades,” and citing chapter and verse, he concluded, “the long-term question raised by the strike is whether UC will continue as a research university; if we don’t make it possible for future scholars to attend, we will have forfeited our purpose.”  Michael read the grad strike as a defense of the infrastructure of the community of scholars, and never flinched from saying exactly how bad a problem actually is. The research university’s future depended on the strike’s success.

 

He made a similar argument about the protests against Israel’s annihilation of Gaza after the October 7^th attacks.  Michael wasn’t happy about a lot of the protests, but the attacks on them flipped a switch.  In “The Authoritarian Personality Comes to College,“ he wrote, “the current suppression of divestment encampments and the mobilization of anti-Semitism against them (despite the many Jewish alumni, faculty, and students who participate in and support the divestment movement), must be seen [as part of] the years long right wing attempt to destroy higher education as source of independent thinking.”  “For years,” he continued, “free speech warriors and nattering nabobs of neutrality have been complaining about the heckler's veto.  I share those concerns.  But this week we saw the result of one of the largest heckler's vetoes in recent history, as two universities responded to violence [against] and condemnation of protest by shutting down the protest itself.  No clearer message can be sent to those who disapprove of both dissent and American colleges and universities that their aggression will get them what they want.”  The attack on protesters was an attack on the core purpose of the university—the pursuit and dissemination of the truth of things---and a desecration the community of scholars that the university was supposed to protect.

 

My sense of Michael’s writing, as one title suggests, is that it looks backwards and forward, and that the vision of a community of scholars is not nostalgic but ahead of its time.  It remains to be constructed with the elements Michael has identified: the personal scholar-scholarship bond; undergraduates as scholars; curation; intellectual freedom; self-governance, plus a full embrace of dispute, conflict, protest, and resolutions that comes not from above but from the participants within. 

 

Here’s the main point.  For Michael the university is an enormous, powerful thing.  The university is a wonderful big thing.  Knowledge is great, students are great, study is great, scholarship is great, unionization is great, the community isn’t great but it’s a work in progress.  So Michael, with that gigantic ambition for the university that you always have, welcome to your retirement so you can get back to work on building the community of scholars inside and outside the university.