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| Stonehenge on December 21, 2025 |
In the end, the university’s main value is its intellectuality, the treatment of everything that is with thinking and all its methods.
That was the first line of the post I started drafting on Monday, on the holiday Easter Monday here in Britain. But I was struggling to concentrate. I thought maybe I needed a rest day: I’d spent a couple of days last week writing a section on AI and the future of jobs for a collaborative report that we’re doing on the crisis of learning worsened by AI, and after devoting another chunk of time to it over the weekend it wound up at 6000 words. It’s not the length, it’s the sense of fighting inevitability from which I’d need a rest.
So, I took the stupid kind rest I take while writing, which is to check the internet where life always carries on when mine is stuck. I went to my Remaking the University Facebook group, where I always learn something from the members.
Sure enough, someone had posted something I hadn’t seen—news that the director of the Middle East Center at the University of Washington, Seattle, associate professor Aria Fani, had been fired overnight from that director position for two discussions of the war on Iran to the Center listserve.
Fani “wrote the war isn’t against the Islamic Republic but against the state of Iran and its people, cultural heritage, ecology and civilian infrastructure, and said Israel was committing acts of terrorism. He wrote that he saw Zionism as ‘cancerous, a potentially fatal outgrowth in our planetary body.’”
The head of the Jackson School of International Studies, Daniel Hoffman, first blocked his posting to the list and then took him out of his job as center director. “According to Fani, Hoffman told him he was unfit for leadership because his emails had made some members of the Middle East Center community feel attacked for their views. Hoffman directed a request for comment to the UW media relations office.”
The story ends with this: “I feel profoundly hurt and betrayed,” Fani said. “There’s a chilling effect on, not just my academic freedom, but that of my colleagues, anyone who dares to speak out against the war and against aggression.” Uh huh, I thought, very definitely. And it feels like that’s exactly what UW Jackson School director Hoffman wants—the chilling of academic speech.
But what gnawed at me was the interest from one or maybe two faculty members in the FB group in firing Fani. This was a small sample of comments, but nobody laid out his academic freedom protections as preventing summary removal without a hearing. And nobody seemed to care about Fani feeling “profoundly hurt and betrayed.”
I imagine Fani feels betrayed not just by summary removal, though that does violate his academic freedom, but by the indifference of his boss and co-workers to his feelings. I good too annoyed to let myself comment so I went back to this post. I was writing about the attacks on intellectuality anyway.
U.S. universities, I wrote, are now subject to a largely unimpeded crusade against academic freedom that is damaging intellectuality wherever it arrives. It promises to make the U.S. more fundamentalist, more reactionary in the literal and figurative senses, and much less capable. It attacks mass intellectuality as something the wider population must have. Ideological tests are being imposed as prior restraint on teaching and research. In Indiana, the state requires new academic programs to ask “How does the proposed program cultivate civic responsibility and commitment to the core values of American society?” (see Indiana University professor Deborah Cohn’s “Letter to Indiana Commission for Higher Education.”)
The UW case is example of a variant on external regulation of academic content, which is the post-facto attack from within. Culture wars run by administrative proxy are now often in the hands of the states. The 2020s are the most state-repressive period toward since the 1950s Everyone is now familiar with the many cases, like Indiana noted above, where codes create prior restraint on teaching and research or post-facto punishment for having offended someone with one’s teaching or research. Both create massive chilling effects, which is their intention. And they don’t have to be legal to chill (see John K. Wilson’s discussion of one Indiana case).
I wrote that on Monday and then my mind wandered to how much worse it is elsewhere. Israel committed systematic scholasticide in Gaza—every university there was annihilated. I thought about my review of Maya Wind’s book on Israeli universities—now up at the Journal of Palestine Studies—where one of the unpleasant surprises for me was that “only one university president has met with a Palestinian university counterpart, and that happened in 1979.” This led me to Iranian universities, the U.S. and Israel have been bombing, including Sharif University of Technology. I found out by reading this tweet from Arnaud Bertrand.
Yes, exactly. And it’s to the shame of their senior managers that Israeli universities made no official objections to the destruction of their Gazan counterparts, and that U.S. universities aren’t objecting now to the destruction of their Iranian counterparts.
The second heavy pressure on intellectuality is permanent budgetary austerity. We’ve talked about that quite a bit here so enough said for today. The sad mediocrity of most state allocation deals creates permanent national constraints on teaching and research. Many research projects never get off the ground for lack of funding: Liner Notes 50, 48, 45, 44, and 43 are a few of the most recent posts that discuss the financial squeezing of academic thought.
Wow, I thought, I didn’t realize I was writing about budgets so much, testing everyone’s patience even as I try to convince them the political economy of the university is in ruins, but that we can fix it.
OK well at least no one’s dropping Made in the USA bombs on us. Yet. The feeling I can’t shake is helplessness. Helplessness about the toxic wrongness of nearly all public positions on education, of the 21st century’s forever wars, of constant attempts to make teachers and professors come to heel, and the terrible reasons people are given for learning anything.
The third destructive pressure on intellectuality is the job imperative. The idea here is that educational value of a major is its wage value, and majors that don’t hit an average wage target should be cut. Trump’s one big ugly bill included a mandate called “Gainful Employment for All” that pulls federal loans from programs whose graduates don’t have average wages above those for high school graduates in the state. In March, Indiana’s governor signed a law that the majors of lower-earning graduates will by state law have to close.
Among many problems with this plan, the theory is completely wrong. A subject’s material in fact has nothing to do with the wages that result from studying it. The claim that learning=earning was invented by economists Human Capital Theory (HCT) in the 1950s and 1960s. No causal link between cognitive development and your labor market salary was even shown. There were correlations and proxies galore, and these didn’t settle the question of where the private pecuniary gains really came from. The economist Aashish Mehta and I reviewed a particularly useful book on HCT, which showed that the theory works mainly for the top 10% of wage earners, and doesn’t justify making universities responsible for graduate wages. Universities, however, have foolishly made a cottage industry of creating wages-by-major dashboards to keep the miseducation of America alive.
What had supported the apparently general effects of HCT before 1975—namely, generally rising wages for ordinary workers--was not higher levels of human capital being fed into the labor markets. The broad effects of HCT came from three things. First, was the country’s modest post-war social democracy, which included health insurance, pensions, free college, and other benefits that helped support general wage growth. Second, were the civil rights movements, which forced somewhat better cross-racial wage equity. Third was the country’s temporary industrial dominance of the global economy, which supported strong wage growth.
The last of these inevitably passed as countries like Germany and Japan recovered their previous industrial power with other countries soon the follow, Neoliberalism deliberated killed off the first two: the already-pallid social democracy that had supported unions, regulations on capital formation and investment, and the like; and Reagan’s 1980 election to the presidency formally renewed rollbacks of civil rights that have only become more frenzied. Meanwhile, contemporary mainstream economics of education has come up with a fourth reason: social position, in which higher ed offers the strongest financial benefits to students who already have them.
The idea that students should study a high-wage subject wrongly attributes wages to subjects while depriving students of the academic freedom to study something they love. It’s likely they love it because it speaks to them in the sense of answering their sense of ideas, methods, practices that they need to be who they are. The Bildung goal for students and academic freedom as its basis is more efficient for the individual and for the society, as well as vastly more ethical than arm-twisting hundreds of thousands of students to do something they don’t actually want to do.
We have to confront this continuous economic harassment of academic freedom of the third kind—the freedom to study what you like, to find what fits you, to find the subjects that develop you and that you will therefore transmit as benefits to society. Luckily hope springs eternal on this. And in this case, in the Financial Times.
John Burn-Murdoch made the crucial point for the first time that I’ve seen in the major mainstream press: learning does not equal earning; economic development and investment equals earning.
“’Is university still worth it?’ is the wrong question” includes this crucial passage.
It may seem obvious to you but this is a breakthrough in public discourse.
Burn-Murdoch adds that “it’s not just about what skilled jobs pay, it’s also how many there are.” If your economy isn’t generating enough skilled jobs, then your skilled graduates will find non-graduate jobs and make less money, no fault of their own. If you graduate from Indiana University, the best way to raise your salary is to leave the state (39th in per-capita personal income) and move next door to Illinois (16th), which has more high-skill jobs. The point here is that universities are not responsible for the graduates’ wages; corporations, investors, and politicians are.
The article has some interesting charts, including this one.
Burn-Murdoch is mostly focusing on the UK. Its business and investment community, its FTSE 100 companies and the City of London, haven’t invested to raise productivity. Skilled job creation has lagged.
Note that the share of university graduates working in the classic “white-collar” fields to which they are generically sent has gone sideways in the relatively strong economies of the U.S. and Germany. The West hasn’t been creating enough skilled jobs, and have been blaming universities for the wage results.
We should be entering a new era of non-pecuniary reasons to attend university, and universities should be pushing them even harder than they are still pushing wage gains. I’ll be talking about this later this month at Yale and Illinois, if you’re in either of those neighborhoods.
I’ll end with yesterday’s second paragraph that got so interrupted.
Intellectuality recovers and transmits the past, develops powers of thinking in the present, for society as well as individuals, and breaks with the axioms of the present for the sake of the future. I’ve been enjoying these things with workshops we hold regularly at the ISRF. I write a Director’s Note every month, and April’s, about our workshop on Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice, appeared under the title “We Can Get There From Here” because the papers and discussions gave me the palpable sense that we do know how to reorganize the economy such that then the green transition actually happens. We know really a lot about its mechanisms, we’ll learn many more things, other people will teach us and each other, we’ll experiment, accept, and reject, and the unfolding of thought will solve even the worst problems—as long as basically dumb power doesn’t put itself in the way.
Hoping that for tomorrow and the days to come.