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| Banff, Alberta back country on June 3, 2026 |
CHCI funds research initiatives, among other things--see their Climate Futures call and other initiatives. The theme of this year's meeting was "Building the Future We Want," which is also an implicit theme of this blog. Building that future means putting humanities research into modes of influence in the world, which involves transforming our existing knowledge system, an issue with which I'm a bit obsessed.
This is the corrected text of a talk I gave online to the Wayne State University conference, “Public Budgets, Public Good,” on April 30, 2026. Many thanks to the audience, whose questions about theory and practice were excellent. Thanks also to the sponsors: Labor@Wayne, AAUP, HELU, and Public Good U. I’m still sorry I wasn’t there in person.
∞∞∞
I’ve always seen the university as a force for the general development of society, having been influence by a tradition that includes Humboldt & Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Du Bois, John Dewey, CJR James, and many thinkers since. This has made it easier to grasp the fact that the university’s largest effects are a combination of non-monetary and public. These public effects have been rendered “dark matter” by the political and business worlds, which have steered people exclusively toward the private pecuniary effect of the B.A. wage increment over high school. College presidents and other officials have simply echoed them. This is overbearingly true in the US and the UK, and amounts to a mass miseducation about education. But it is also true elsewhere, and apparently in China.
WHEN THE CALL TO STRIKE COMES FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS
Notre Dame de Paris on December 3, 2024
“All sites closed in Lille, the alarm ringing in Evry, a suspension of classes in Nice... Everywhere, in red and black letters, the slogan is displayed on the buildings: ‘Universities in danger’. At the call of France Universités, an association which brings together heads of establishment, the universities are mobilizing each in their own way, Tuesday December 3, to mark their ‘refusal to see themselves condemned to degrade the quality of their training.
“While the finance bill for 2025 shows a budget for higher education and research at half mast – an increase of 89 million euros, but a decrease in constant euros – the time must be to ‘take of conscience’ of a reality on the ground that the public authorities pretend to ignore, according to the association. Already on Thursday, November 21, around thirty university presidents converged on foot towards the Ministry of Higher Education, and invited themselves to the office of the minister, Patrick Hetzel.
“In a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, Friday November 29, which Le Monde obtained, France Universités now calls for ‘personal arbitration’ on the part of Michel Barnier so that the French university can respond to the ambition of the country’” [N.B. Barnier has now been forced to resign by a no confidence vote in the National Assembly.]
“Expressing its “anger”, the association specifies that “the meeting with [Patrick Hetzel] did not dispel the fears resulting from an unprecedented situation of a shift towards a very degraded functioning of the universities”. Eighty percent of them will be in deficit by the end of 2024 and ‘projections show that the situation will be worse in 2025,’ warns France Universités.”
SOURCE: Soazig Le Nevé, Le Monde.
THE KNOWLEDGE CRISIS WAS INVENTED BY ST. PAUL
“His book is certainly timely. As he notes, there are certain epochs, and surely we are slap bang in the middle of one, when “evident truth” is cast aside in favour of all manner of imbecile imaginings. “Mesmerised crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumours trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.” There, encapsulated in a sentence, is the predicament we face in our present-day social and political lives. . . .”
“At the heart of the book is an invigorating excursus on St Paul, the founding father of the most consequential and, some would contend, most pernicious religious cult the world has known. Lilla knows his man: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the history of western populism – spiritual and political – began with Paul.’ He is ‘the cultured despiser of culture’, ‘a learned fanatic of the highest order.’ who ‘held up as spiritual models innocent children, uneducated workmen, and lambs with vacant eyes, forever enshrining reverse snobbery as a Christian virtue.’ If the next resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is in need of a patron saint, surely Paul is the one:
“’For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent … If any man among you seems to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.’”
SOURCE, John Banville, review of Mark Lilla, The Observer
A TALE OF TWO AMERICAS: HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN TRUMP-WON V. HARRIS-WON STATES
SOURCE: The Intellectualist, X
CRYPTO ADVOCATE PAUL ATKINS PICKED AS SEC CHAIR BY DONALD TRUMP
“Donald Trump has nominated cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to chair the US Securities and Exchange Commission, drawing cheers from across the finance industry as it hopes for a more favourable regulatory climate under the incoming administration.
“’Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations,’ Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. Atkins ‘also recognises that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.’ . . .”
“In another significant move for business, the president-elect also nominated Gail Slater, a top aide to vice-president-elect JD Vance, to head the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.
“The finance industry has had a fractious relationship with the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who has pursued a broad rulemaking agenda and tough enforcement stance, clamping down on traditional Wall Street players as well as cryptocurrency businesses.
“Gensler targeted many of the biggest crypto companies with lawsuits and declined to craft rules for digital assets, arguing many tokens were securities and that existing laws were sufficiently clear. He branded the sector a “wild west” rife with fraud and investor risk.”
SOURCE: Stefania Palma, Financial Times
UK UNCOVERS VAST CRYPTO LAUNDERING SCHEME FOR GANGSTERS AND RUSSIAN SPIES
“A UK-led operation has uncovered a multibillion-dollar money laundering scheme run out of London, Moscow and Dubai that enabled Russian spies and European drug traffickers to evade sanctions using cryptocurrency.
“The UK’s National Crime Agency said on Wednesday that its ‘Operation Destabilise’ investigation centred on two companies — Smart and TGR — that acted as a financial hub for cash-rich global criminals and sanctioned individuals relying on cryptocurrency outside the banking system.
“The NCA said the network had been used by clients including the Kinahan cartel, Irish cocaine traffickers linked to numerous contract killings, as well as funding ransomware groups, and ‘Russian espionage operations’ from late 2022 to summer 2023.
“The illicit network, operating across more than 30 countries, illustrates the growing interaction between hostile states and organised criminals as economic sanctions have forced countries such as Russia to find new ways of operating in the west. The case also shows the increasing use of cryptocurrencies by those cut off from the global banking system.
“Rob Jones, director-general of operations at the NCA, said the investigation ‘is the most significant money laundering operation’ that the NCA had ever undertaken.
“’It targets . . . a laundromat that brings together at scale street cash and cryptocurrency,’ he said. It ‘takes you from McMafia, through to Narcos, through to le Carré, where you have espionage, where you have transnational organised crime and you have elite Russian-speaking money launderers and cybercriminals.’
“The network used couriers to collect physical cash from criminals in one country such as the UK in exchange for cryptocurrency, with Tether the most favoured. The cash would then be laundered through companies and the equivalent value made available in other countries.
“This two-way, mutually beneficial trade meant that cash rich cocaine kingpins simultaneously helped Russian cyber criminals and elites to launder stolen crypto and access cash while evading western sanctions.”
SOURCE: Miles Johnson and Suzi Ring, Financial Times
OVERSHOOTING WITH DONALD TRUMP
SOURCE: Simon Evans, X
ANY RETURN FROM THE ASSET ECONOMY?
“One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according not just to conventional statistical measures (such as GDP or life expectancy) but also to the preferred measures of the governing party. What would those measures be? Since George Osborne, who made debt and deficit reduction his central economic goals, departed the Treasury it has been difficult to know what kind of future Tory governments have been aiming at, or how we’d know if we were to arrive in it. Real wages have stagnated, no higher today than when the Cameron-led coalition first came to power in 2010, while the scant growth in GDP since then has been largely an effect of high immigration – GDP per capita has barely risen. The national debt, which Osborne elevated to the indicator par excellence, climbed above 100 per cent of GDP last year, up from around 65 per cent in 2010. Business investment and trade in goods have both collapsed as a consequence of Brexit.
“House prices, however, have risen handsomely, up from an average of £170,000 in 2010 to £280,000 today (or, for Londoners, £280,000 to £500,000). More than a decade of the lowest interest rates in the Bank of England’s history – driven even lower than they might have been by multiple rounds of quantitative easing – converted torrents of cheap credit into asset price appreciation, for those fortunate enough to benefit. By withdrawing demand from the economy (through reduced public spending) and forcing the Bank of England to hold interest rates down (to stave off deflation), Osborne ensured that Britain became the textbook example of an ‘asset economy’, in which collective and productive progress is sacrificed for capital gains. This has produced an eerie temporality: society stands still, while certain households seem to pull away magically from others.”
“Between 1974 and 2007, Britain’s average rate of productivity growth (the clearest gauge of prosperity) was more than 2 per cent per year; since then, it has been less than 0.5 per cent per year. We shouldn’t underestimate how much of the political economy of the 2010-24 era – with its zero-sum conflicts over the public purse, rising in-work poverty, highest tax burden since 1945 and increasing influence of inherited assets – stems from the inability to build wealth through investment in people, ideas and technology. When Adair Turner, then chairman of the Financial Services Authority, declared in 2009 that much of what banks did was ‘socially useless’, this was viewed as an extraordinary attack on one of Britain’s last globally competitive sectors. In 2024, it would almost be surprising to discover that great wealth (or even a basic level of financial security) could be achieved by doing something socially useful.
The expanded remit of the Bank of England, now encompassing responsibility for the overall health of the financial sector, is the outstanding constitutional and political consequence of the financial crisis in the UK. The use of quantitative easing to stimulate a stagnant economy during the post-2008 years, to boost it a couple of months after the Brexit referendum, then to put it on life support under Covid, was the distinguishing economic policy of the era. The distributional effects of QE have been sharply regressive, pumping up asset portfolios, but because the policy was enacted outside the democratic arena by an independent Bank of England, party-political and media attention to these effects has been minimal.”
SOURCE: William Davies, London Review of Books
HONG KONG IMPRISONS DEMOCRACY PROTESTERS, LAUNCHES NEW CULTURE STRATEGY
“The road map is part of government efforts to create new economic drivers while also offering more opportunities in professions popular among young people, in a bid to make Hong Kong a more appealing global city.
“The blueprint will also outline the city’s efforts to align with the mandate from Beijing’s 14th five-year development plan for Hong Kong to become an “East-meets-West” centre for international cultural exchange. . . . “
“The insiders also said the latest version of the blueprint mapped out four key positions: promoting Chinese culture; developing diverse creative industries; building an international platform for East-meets-West cultural exchanges; and refining the ecosystem for creative industries.
“The push to promote Chinese culture will cover the intangible heritage of the country’s south and involve collaborations with the Greater Bay Area.
“The bay area is an emerging economic zone that combines Hong Kong, Macau and nine mainland Chinese cities and has a population totalling about 87 million.
“The road map also covers 71 measures to bolster the development of industries such as the performing and visual arts, music, animation, dance, film and fashion, among other sectors. . . .”
“The same source said the government would also put the existing funding schemes under review so that grants could reflect market demand.
“’It does not necessarily mean that funding is market-driven, at least, a performance or a show has to include some market elements,’ the insider said.
The source explained that some shows that received government funding sometimes were too niche, and did not have a clear market.
SOURCE: Denise Tsang, South China Morning Post
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| July 19, 2024, Three Cliffs Bay, Wales |
Michael Meranze and I stopped this blog not long after I left UC Santa Barbara to take up my current job as Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) in London, England--it’s great!--and Michael became divisional chair of the UCLA Academic Senate and then co-chair of that campus’s Covid task force.
We had a few relapses. I wrote a late-pandemic post on the UC budget in October 2021 and another in January 2022. Michael fell off the wagon in Spring 2024 to critique the New McCarthyism and the authoritarianism of administrators’ handling of student anti-war protests.
But generally this has been my cooling-off period from the dominant focus on higher ed. I have now been out of my professor job for four years. I moved from Santa Barbara to London, and am now a resident of the UK. I’m also nearly two years past my period on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and my year as MLA president (2022). My focus there was the political economy of the academic humanities and the need to build research infrastructure (my columns are here). The break from higher ed blogging helped my research and writing to expand into other areas.
And yet none of the issues we worked on here have been resolved or ameliorated. Many have gotten worse, like academic freedom. Understanding their interconnections with other topics, forces, and sectors has become more pressing.
I’m going to restart the blog to cover an expanded range of issues confronting the creation and use of knowledge. It will cover the culture industries as well as education. It will continue Remaking the University’s linking of teaching, research, academic content, consciousness, et al. to political economy. Political economy blogs don’t tie their topics to culture: Adam Tooze’s excellent Chartbook is a case in point: no cultural or educational drivers there, though he has great art. Here I’ll study these factors together. I’ll emphasize social and cultural knowledge in our era of tech determinism
Remaking II will also cover protest knowledge of the kind that Israel’s war in Gaza has provoked on campuses across the country and that has changed public framework for discussions of Israeli policy and the Middle East.
The blog will continue my version of critical university studies, with its focus on higher ed’s material conditions and its effects on learning and research. Thanks to Michael (and other, occasional contributors), we analysed a wide range of university matters from 2008 through early 2022. Now the blog will cover related institutions as well.
In addition to US higher ed coverage, I will be linking UC and US higher ed to university systems elsewhere in the world. I have a front-row seat at UK higher ed crisis—now openly recognized as such—and it’s an important parallel to the US situation.
I used that baggage-laden term, culture industries. The three I follow diligently are journalism, publishing, and theatre, and will be writing about these. By virtue of longstanding local friendship circles I have a good sense of the working lives of many London artists, and will link to commentary on the current art system.
My foundation, ISRF, funds annual grant competitions on open topics as well as focused internal research. Our current research topics include “Alternatives to Green Finance,” “Political Affect,” “Political Economy and Race,” “AI, Learning, and Attention,” and “Future Universities.” I’m a kind of P.I. on these, and will discuss work in these areas as it becomes relevant here. I continue to study the nature and social effects of literary and cultural knowledge, so that will turn up as well.
Given my job now, I also follow Greater Academia: foundations, think-tanks, museums, libraries, public engagement councils, and research-oriented community-based organizations. They will turn up from time to time.
Since public knowledge emerges as much from social movements as from universities, we’ll cover their work in relation to higher ed, media industries, and tech, especially their efforts to improve working conditions.
This sounds like we’ll be spread very thin. We will be. I can’t actually cover these terrains of cultural knowledge and activity without the shift from “I” to “we” that just happened. But we’ll figure out how to do this as we go.
Part of the solution is that we’ll cover much of this material through citations and excerpts of other people’s writing rather than writing all the posts ourselves. We’ll have three kinds of posts:
Liner Notes: regular posts, likely one from me per week.
Highlights: links and excerpts from pieces about the topics named above.
Archives: institutional material, which will help correct the misleading histories of academia created by university PR operations and the media.
In the process, the blog will set a few themes on a collision course: the varying states of organized knowledge in the world today, knowledge labor, knowledge management, society’s knowledge needs and demands, propaganda and disinformation. And of course money.
I’m going to focus somewhat less on the knowledge refusers that on the knowledge producers. What is happening to knowledge work, broadly conceived? What has happened to the working conditions especially for cultural work—humanities professors of course but also graphic designers, local musicians, set dressers, and other trades and crafts? Working conditions was my MLA presidential theme in 2022. I will continue that theme here.
The same goes for persistent funding problems. I’ll carry on with Remaking’s political economy of the university and its professional workers, and expand it to non-academic workers.
Culture work is grossly underfunded everywhere. This is happening at a time in world history when none of our major problems can be solved without bringing cultural knowledge to collaborate with the technological dimensions. Problems like climate crisis, inequality, oligarchy, racism, xenophobia, and nonstop warfare all require STEM and non-STEM disciplines to work together. The polycrisis has been entrenched by the continuing acceptance of C.P. Snow’s 1950s model of a divergence between “two cultures” (for him, physics v. literature).
At the same time, culture should exist for culture’s sake. It is an intrinsic good. It is a human right. Its sidelining, its funding neglect, creates cognitive shortfalls for addressing both personal and world issues and a rights problem as well.
Underfunding is a root cause of epistemic injustice, suffered by non-normative standpoint knowledge of every kind. Epistemic justice depends on budget justice. We’ll cover it.
What about the new title: Long Revolution? I was thinking of doing Remaking Knowledge Work, to reflect my preoccupation with knowledge labor and its institutional conditions.
My colleague Stuart said, why not Knowledge Strikes Back. That’s pretty close actually.
The current title, Remaking II: Long Revolution, is meant to reference not only the knowledge wars in which my entire career has taken place, but pathways out of them.
I spent part of last summer on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, where I go to swim and read. I wrote a chapter there for a volume on Raymond Williams’ concept of structure of feeling. The chapter is called “Raymond Williams’ Subtheory of Cultural Revolution,” and begins like this:
New politics, new economics, new societies: where do they come from? How do they eventually emerge? How do cultural changes come to affect political and economic systems that seem hopelessly entrenched, if not determined to restore a vanquished past?
Raymond Williams called the process of emergence the long revolution. It was slow, and bogged down in its own hesitations and backsliding. It often stalled out for decades at a time. The general direction of the long revolution was democratization. This was democratization of politics but for Williams it was more particularly democratization of culture.
Within culture, the long revolution meant a democratization of intelligence, in which the entirety of a given society gradually gets full access to the infrastructures of learning and communication that eventually allows everyone to enact their creative agency in the society overall.
I do believe we’re slouching towards world democratization in spite of our new dark age. But there’s no arc of the universe bending toward it. It takes continuous work amidst the constant backsliding.
I would like the blog to be a place for that work, where we can think these issues through collaboratively, and generate better ideas about how we can overcome our knowledge troubles and their kindred crises. I hope you enjoy the new version of Remaking.
