UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

I’m opposed to the University of California’s current responses to the Trump Administration’s multiple shakedowns.  I want to explain why, and suggest an alternative, by starting with Charlie Kirk, shot dead on September 10^th on a public college campus.

 

Kirk’s killing deprives Trump’s movement of its best youth storyteller. Kirk told stories about current issues like migration, the Great Replacement of white people, and universities eating the brains of the people. Kirk worked, like Steve Bannon, in cultural narrative as a power that drives politics and state action downstream. In 2024 he ran his You’re Being Brainwashed Tour through the country’s campuses including Cas Mudde’s, who noted the escalation from his 2018 “exposing lies and leftist propaganda” tour. The Evil University was a central villain in Kirk’s script, not a bit player, and Kirk sought to stigmatize, censor, suppress, discredit, and revile it. He succeeded, as Jamelle Bouie nicely explains. 

 

But crucially, Kirk’s narrative was anchored in institutions, which were in turn tied to an unending series of gatherings around events. His organization, Turning Point USA, was famous for rallies and festivals that made people feel like they were part of a community. This sense of belonging increased receptivity to the message and helped lock in agreement.  The dire content of the vision—violent, eliminationist white theocracy—doesn’t change the effectiveness of the community-building.  Having state power is enormously important, but it can flounder and fail without popular embrace (by a large base) and without demobilization (of opponents) as generated by sense-making tales that also form social attachments.

 

The same rules apply to universities: a clear, attractive story, rooted in well-supported internal communities, will lead sooner or later to majority embrace and political power.

 

I regret to say that university officials do neither the compelling popular narrative nor the supported community.  This is in spite of the glaring alienation of half the population from universities, in spite of analysts of far-right politics like Jared Yates Sexton saying for years that the right’s narrative addresses a “crisis of meaning and purpose” that liberals and the left must better address, and in spite of this blog and its related scholarship joining many other voices in proposing concrete ways to define and serve popular educational and social needs.  Even after a decade of Trump deciding the agenda, university officials reject the key elements of a stronger narrative that would win people back.  And UC’s senior managers like many of their counterparts, deconstruct their own communities with secrecy, deception, banality, and/or exposure to harm.

 

We all recently learned that UC Berkeley complied with Department of Education (DEd) demands and sent its Office of Civil Rights (OCR) the names and other personally identifiable information of 160 people accused of having some relation to “alleged antisemitic incidents.”  Berkeley officials informed the named people several weeks after the fact, while continuing to withhold the documents involved and the nature of the charges and also bypassing mandated campus procedures whereby the accused are able to answer.

 

Here a campus made famous for supporting the civil rights movement has suspended a basic civil right of 160 of its own people, while barely getting around to telling them about it.

 

UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler nicely laid out the civil rights dimensions on Democracy Now (Part 1 and Part 2).  Outrage poured in from far-flung places.  Former Greek Minister of Education Kostas Gavroglu and colleagues wrote from Athens:

 

We are deeply disturbed and outraged to hear that University of California at Berkeley, renown for academic probity and critical education, is pursuing baseless “allegations of antisemitic harassment and discrimination” against Professor Judith Butler and 160 of her colleagues initiated by the Trump Administration.  Judith Butler is a leading international scholar in philosophy, feminist and queer theory and critical studies. The allegation of “antisemitic harassment and discrimination” against a scholar who has been fighting racism, sexism and homophobia all their life is absurd. Professor Butler has been open about their critique of the policies of the state of Israel but has always fought against racism and antisemitism. Generations of scholars and students around the world have learnt from their scholarship which has been a beacon for combating antisemitism and discrimination. Professor Butler is innocent of these absurd allegations. The stigma on Berkeley for assisting this witch hunt will remain.

 

Berkeley’s compliance with the undisclosed order is also likely unlawful. The Berkeley Faculty Association explains:

 

We believe the release of PII [personally identifiable information] was wholly unnecessary and legally improper. As you [Chancellor Lyons and Chief Campus Counsel Robinson] know, an OCR investigation is not intended to determine whether students, faculty, or staff have violated any civil rights laws, but whether the university itself is in compliance with Title VI’s non-discrimination mandate. Personal information about individuals associated with discrimination complaints is irrelevant to a legitimate investigation into an institution’s management of such complaints. OCR’s demand for the broad disclosure of names of “all” individuals who have a “potential connection to reports of alleged antisemitism” does not meet the standard of relevance, and creates a substantial risk of harm to those individuals, including to their substantive and procedural rights under the Constitution.

 

BFA asks their administration to commit to open consultation with faculty, students, and staff about such requests for information, to refuse voluntary agreements, and to reject interference in campus personnel and disciplinary matters.  Their surprisingly necessary demand is that UC Berkeley restore the integrity of its own mandated procedures in the face of federal override.

 

To our theme, BFA is in effect calling on Berkeley’s senior managers to rebuild the community integrity that is the prerequisite to winning a fight.

 

It gets worse. UC Berkeley turns out to be the best case scenario in the UC system. Butler reported that “all of the University of California campuses gave names,” but none of the others told any of the people involved. (The compliance order apparently came from new UC president James Milliken.) Trump’s OCR now has an unknown number of names of UC people, accused of unknown offences by unknown accusers, with the non-Berkeley UC accused having no knowledge of being on an OCR list.  

 

Rooting around to explain a completely unacceptable situation in which UC people are given up by their own officials, someone found a Resolution Agreement between UC Office of the President on behalf of 5 campuses and the OCR. The named campuses are UC Davis, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz (but not Berkeley).  UC made this deal on December 18, 2024 with Biden’s OCR.  Without announcing this Agreement across the campuses (to the best of my knowledge), UCOP put the Title VI procedures of at least those campuses into a de facto federal receivership. 

 

Agreement Item I gives OCR the right to review and approve the “University’s systemwide anti-discrimination policies, procedures, and guidelines that it uses to address its compliance with Title VI.” (I.A). Mississippi can gerrymander Black residents out of a congressperson without federal consent but UC requires federal consent to change a single harassment policy.

 

II is Investigator Training, and III is Public Safety and Campus Officer Training.  The Agreement does see policing as part of the problem. The emphasis is learning to “respond promptly and effectively to alleged discrimination, including harassment, of [the University’s] students and employees.” Another emphasis is on support of students subjected to discrimination, notification, and timely resolution.  In addition, the Agreement explicitly calls for remedies for discrimination against Muslim students.  My sense is that by turning over names, UC campuses have breached the due process elements the University accepted in December.

 

Item IV, however, is an Audit of the 5 campuses of “all complaints and reports alleging discrimination, including harassment and disparate treatment, on the basis of actual or perceived national origin, including shared Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim, and/or Arab ancestry, or association with these national origins/ancestries, during the preceding year Paragraph IV.A lists a remarkable 23 fields of information that each campus’s “sortable spreadsheet” must include.  It requires that UC disclose personally identifiable information like the name of the complainant, their institutional status, and the name of the alleged discriminator.

 

I was shocked to be reading this for the first time.  UCOP officials knew when they signed it that it would be applied by Trump’s Office of Civil Rights, not Biden’s.  Biden would be gone in a month so what was the point? The Agreement may have served as a template for Trump’s demands of Columbia University and other universities. In my non-expert opinion, it breaches the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that protects the privacy of student educational data—one could at least make a case. As UC strategy, it seems deeply inept. And, again to the theme, UCOP doesn’t protect its own community but exposes it to danger. It does this without the due process or the basic decency of openly explaining what they did or how they will minimize the damage.

 

We can’t actually get to the glorious university counternarrative when admin should be sent to remedial education, so I will skip that here.  I’ll end with one last instance of admin’s abandonment of its community: the missing lawsuits. 

 

The first level of counter-narration for administrators is the lawsuit. Lawsuits tell stories, and universities have a really good one, which is that their essential functions are being illegally attacked by a tyrant who seeks their destruction. 

 

Universities are failing to point this out by suing over it, even though lawsuits joined by many cooperating universities would establish a national narrative. The isolation of Harvard as sole U.S. litigant disgraces the rest of the sector. The failure to use the law to tell the story that Trump’s power forces false charges down university throats will haunt higher ed for years to come. 

 

Meanwhile, Harvard has just defeated the Trump Administration over funding suspensions in district court, and a group of UCLA professors won their initial case in August. The difference is that the Harvard administration brought the first suit and UCOP didn’t join their own professors in the second. 

 

Worse, one UC professor lawsuit has had to be directed at the UC administration. Also on September 15^th, “the University of California Los Angeles Faculty Association (UCLA-FA) and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) representing faculty across all ten University of California (UC) campuses, filed a lawsuit under the California Public Records Act (CPRA) demanding access to the proposed settlement agreement sent by the U.S. Department of Justice to the University of California on August 8, 2025.”  Although Jaweed Kaleem at the Los Angeles Times has now reported on its contents, UCOP and UCLA continue to refuse to disclose the actual document to the overall UC organization.

 

UCOP’s tribute to Charlie Kirk lies in neither offering a full, positive counternarrative to Kirk’s very widespread one, which allows his to stand, nor building solidarity on its own campuses, which allows the right to rule.   Milliken et al. need to reverse direction on both fronts.

 

 

Paris on September 1, 2016    

By Sean L. Malloy, Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), University of California, Merced

In early August 2025, the Trump administration extended its shakedown of higher education, which had previously focused on elite private universities such as Harvard and Columbia, to target the University of California (UC), the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. Beginning with UCLA, the administration froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding and demanded a $1 billion ransom along with other changes, including an end to gender-affirming care.  In response, the UC has launched a glitzy PR campaign enlisting alumni (including UCLA grad and Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to make the case for the university while urging Californians to “Stand Up for the UC.”  

 

UC Santa Barbara on March 5, 2020     

On Friday August 8, the Trump administration demanded a $1 billion "settlement" from UCLA after freezing $584 million in federal grants for vital scientific and health research. The proposed $1 billion agreement would be the largest settlement since Trump began extorting universities, and marks the first attempt of the federal government to ransom payment from a public university. These attacks have been waged under the guise of fighting antisemitism and investigating alleged Title VII violations, but we see them for what they are: an attempt to cripple public higher education in the nation’s premier public university system. 

The coalition of UC unions urges the University of California not to capitulate to the Trump administration

In a message to the UC community on August 8, President Milliken asserted that this payment would "completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians." The Regents now have to decide if they will surrender to the Trump administration’s demands. As workers who have fought for academic freedom, equity in the workplace, and economic justice, we urge the Regents to refuse any compromise that undermines our values and puts workers at risk. Capitulating to the Trump administration will not only harm crucial life-saving research and healthcare, and the California taxpayers who have funded it, but will also undermine the educational experience of hundreds of thousands of present and future UC students, and threaten a major engine of the Californian and national economy. The University of California system:

• Is California’s third largest employer, with spending and activities that support more than a half million jobs across California.  
• Powers cutting edge innovation, producing an average of five inventions every day and powering California’s tech sector, biotech breakthroughs, climate solutions, and medical advancements. 
• Produces  $21 in economic output for every $1 of investment in the UC
• Generates  $82 billion in annual economic activity, helping to make California the fourth largest economy in the world.

It is imperative that in their response to this attack, UC leaders negotiate with the knowledge that what is at stake is not just research grant funding for UCLA, but the future of federal funding for the UC system, California’s political autonomy, and public higher education across the U.S. For that reason, President Milliken and the Regents should exhaust all available resources to  resist the Trump administration’s extortion and protect our scientific enterprise and the values that undergird its excellence.

The coalition of UC unions demands that the California state government step up to fight fascism and defend the future of the Californian economy.

While the current onslaught has little parallel, Californians have confronted threats to higher education before. Twenty years ago, when stem cell research was restricted under the Bush administration, the people of California voted overwhelmingly for the state to take the lead and fund new initiatives, which lead to groundbreaking research that has informed treatments for Parkinsons, spinal cord injury, and Type 1 diabetes. 

 

Trump’s assault is a clear attack not only on public higher education but on the most progressive state in the country. California has led the way on many progressive fronts, and it is time for it to set an example for the rest of the country in fighting fascism. California was the first state to legally end school segregation; Trump is trying to resegregate the public university.  The UC educates more first-generation and low-income students than any other major research university system in the country; Trump is trying to discontinue scholarships that support economic mobility and lift families out of poverty. California has led the charge in providing quality access to gender-affirming care and become a sanctuary state for transgender individuals; Trump is trying to end access to life-saving care and medication. California was the first state to commit to a statewide $15 per hour minimum wage for large employers; Trump is threatening half a million jobs and job security across the state. 

 

California can lead the way once again and defend public education and the future of the Californian economy: instead of continuing the historical trajectory of declining per-student funding, it is time for the state of California to stand its ground, for Newsom to double down on his fight against Trump’s regime, and for the legislature to increase funding to the UC to support the vital role it plays in millions of Californian lives and livelihoods.

 

Together we, employees of the University of California, demand: 

No concessions

No capitulation

No cuts

 

Yes to jobs

Yes to educating future leaders 

Yes to healthcare autonomy 

Yes to lifesaving research

Yes to protecting an engine of economic mobility

 

Signed, 

Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA)

UC American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), 

American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees 

(AFSCME) 3299 

California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee 

(CNA-NNOC) 

Committee of Interns and Residents-Service Employees International Union 

(CIR-SEIU)

United Auto Workers (UAW) 4811

American Association of University Professors (AAUP)

Hyde Park, Chicago on June 25, 2017   

It’s great when you’re President of the United States and are unlawfully taking apart the national system for funding STEM research, and then some big universities step in and cut their non-STEM units instead.

 

Case in point: in July, UChicago’s Division of Arts and Humanities announced plans for a reorganization that would cut its number of departments in half, among other things.  The announcement came “just three months after UChicago Arts and the Humanities Division rebranded as a consolidated division.” In mid-August, the Division’s dean, Deborah Nelson, announced a reduction of PhD admissions for some departments and a full “pause” in others.  A week later, Nelson announced that the pause in PhD admissions would cover the entire Division, with a couple of exceptions. 

UCLA on May 14, 2018    

It’s a Friday in the 6^th grade, when you eat at the lunch truck parked outside the school gate. While standing in line, the big kid behind you grabs the five-dollar bill out of your hand. When you turn around, he smirks and says, “I’ll give you this five back if you give me a ten.”  

 

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 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. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Regrets Sunday Morning, Victoria Line   

I’ve often broached this topic, most recently in relation to the new UC Irvine plan for hyper-austerity (Liner Note 32; budget analysis in 31 and 33).   This question of professionals’ managerial authority is raised again by some faculty responses to the Columbia and Brown University deals with the Trump Administration, and to the new Trump attack on UCLA. 

 

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 3/4^th 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.

 

**

 

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 31^st, 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 30^th. 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.