Dún Laoghaire Ireland on June 18, 2025

I haven’t found dissent in the standard places about Penn’s capitulation to Trump on transgender women athletes.  Maybe it’s because the deal seems to have gotten Penn’s $175 million back—those federal funds that Trump’s people had unlawfully suspended.  So let me say why it’s so bad. 

 

You may have heard that Penn president J. Larry Jameson settled with Trump’s Department of Education over the alleged Title IX violation of allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete for the Penn’s women’s team in 2021-22. This was actually Title IX compliance, since NCAA and Title IX guidance then required Penn to include trans women in women’s sports. (The Athletic has a good overview. See also Johanna Alonso at IHE.) 

 

 

MLA New Orleans on January 9, 2025

by Rebecca Colesworthy

“A democracy worth its name won’t abandon some people to a principle of non-participation.” — Judith Butler, speaking at the MLA convention on Jan 11, 2025

This is not an exposé. It won’t be a barn burner. It may be a bridge burner despite my efforts to avoid that. I’m not revealing state secrets or breaching confidentiality. I only cite and refer to information and documents that are publicly available or shared with permission. You won’t find accusations or attacks. Some critiques, but I presume good faith on the part of all. 

This is my attempt to pull a lot of threads of recent Modern Language Association (MLA) history together in one place, for colleagues trying to make sense of things and for my own sanity. I don’t claim to be an expert, and I’m certainly not officially authorized, but I have a fair bit of experience and have tried to keep up with the reading, linked throughout here. 

It concludes as most everything I write does—with hope for greater solidarity, including between scholars and publishers, and within and between professional organizations in the humanities, especially as we look toward an increasingly terrifying future.

Here’s the brief version of events:

During the fall of 2024, a group of MLA members submitted a resolution by the September 1 deadline with extensive supporting documentation, including signatures from more than 100 additional members. The resolution responds to expert characterizations of the Israeli war on Gaza as a genocide and scholasticide by saying we, as the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) call. As per the MLA constitution (the relevant section is VII.B.3.), the resolution was reviewed by the executive council (EC) at its October 25 meeting. The EC—of which I was then an elected member—voted not to forward the resolution to the Delegate Assembly (DA) for debate and a vote at its meeting during the annual convention in January. As reported by Inside Higher Ed (IHE), the vote by the EC was “unanimous,” though not all EC members were in attendance at the meeting. Esther Allen, with whom I later resigned from the EC, was not present.

 The resolution proposal and preparation process is, as the MLA notes on its website, “complex.” I won’t reiterate all the steps here. In short, if the resolution had gone to the DA, and if the DA had approved it by a majority vote, then it would have gone to the membership for ratification. Ratification requires that at least 10% of the eligible membership cast a ballot. The MLA website currently estimates over 20,000 members.

 So, what happened after the EC blocked a DA vote? As former MLA president Chris Newfield notes in his own helpful summary of “the Story Thus Far,” the decision “generated some strong responses.” 

Here is a timeline of (some of) those responses and the aftermath of the Oct meeting:

Oct 29: As reported in IHE, the executive director sends the resolution’s proposer, Anthony Alessandrini, a brief email saying “the council has decided it cannot forward your resolution to the Delegate Assembly. As the fiduciary of the association, the council considers the many ways the association could be impacted by any resolution, including the financial and legal effects.” In the subsequent days, Alessandrini writes at length to the EC, asking for further explanation and sharing an email he’d sent in September explicitly offering to discuss any potential legal and fiduciary concerns with the council.

 Nov 5: Alessandrini learns more about the council’s reasoning, not from the council, but from IHE, when a reporter relayed it to him. Later that day, a statement from the EC and an FAQ about its decision are sent to Alessandrini and the DA and posted on the MLA website; I have linked to them here but a member login is required to access them.

Nov 6: The piece in IHE is published.

Nov. 8: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the blocked resolution.

Nov 17: Throughout this period, the EC receives letters from concerned members, including one from 7 former MLA presidents on Nov 17. Though this date wasn’t previously made public, the Dec 16 report from the EC explicitly notes that “a number of members, including a group of former presidents, expressed their puzzlement and distress over [the EC’s] decision.”

 Nov 25: The EC meets for further discussion.

 Dec 6: Esther Allen and I resign from the EC in protest over the EC’s decision.

 Dec 12: 7 of the resolution proposers publish a statement on LitHub. Allen and I share publicly that we have resigned.

Dec 16: The EC publishes its report to the DA about the resolution on the MLA website, responding to various concerns and explaining its decision not to forward the resolution for “legal and fiduciary reasons.” 

·      The legal considerations: “No fewer than twenty-seven states now have laws or regulations forbidding any state entity from purchasing goods or services from any company that engages in or that merely supports boycotts around the world.” There’s the rub: supports boycotts. While the resolution did not commit the organization to participating in BDS and was framed as an expression of members’ endorsement, per the constitution, any resolution is “an official statement from the organization.”

·      The fiduciary considerations: “Fully two-thirds of the operating budget of the MLA comes from sales of resources to universities and libraries, including the MLA International Bibliography. States with anti-BDS laws have already begun requiring their contractors to affirm in writing that they do not participate in or support boycotts, and the MLA has signed such contracts . . . In addition, the MLA does business with states in other ways, including the annual convention, on-site summer seminars, and MLA memberships, which are often funded by institutional resources. Losing the ability to engage with members in those ways or to distribute our resources in those states would also mean that students and teachers in those states would lose access to these resources. If we lose subscription income, our very ability to produce these resources for anyone would be in jeopardy.” 

Significantly, the report omits mention of the fact that Allen and I resigned. Instead, it gives an impression of unanimity at the Nov 25 meeting of the EC, saying “We [i.e. the EC] reluctantly concluded once again that we couldn’t advance this resolution.” But we did not all reach that conclusion.

Dec 17: 13 former EC members send a letter to the EC. The letter was later published on this blog on Dec 29. More former EC members sign on. As of January 7, the letter includes 26 signatories.

Dec 18: The former MLA presidents publish their letter to the EC on LitHub, now with 8 signatories total. In early January, the letter is cross-posted on this blog with a ninth signatory—Michael Bérubé. The addition is significant. As Newfield notes, Bérubé “co-chaired the Ad Hoc Committee [on Advocacy Policies and Procedures] that authored the review policy that the EC used to justify blocking the Delegate Assembly debate of the BDS resolution.” The report of the Ad Hoc Committee is not publicly available on the MLA website; otherwise, I would link to it.

Dec 19: Allen and I publish our resignation letters on this blog.

Dec 24: 9 of the 19 current and former members of the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR) who have served since 2020 send a letter to the EC. On Dec 30, the letter is published on this blog with 7 of those signatories.

Jan 9 –12: MLA Members for Justice in Palestine stage a number of successful protests at the MLA annual convention, including a die-in and walkout at the Saturday DA meeting, as covered in IHE, Common Dreams, and LitHub. I cannot do justice to the scale and impact of the protests here, but will share the words of Karim Mattar, a Palestinian American professor of English, who told Common Dreams that “Saturday's protest brought tears to his eyes. ‘To see this protest, this movement emerging at the MLA, to see this national and international movement of solidarity with Palestine to emerge in the last year, has been incredibly moving for me.’” In that, Mattar is not alone.

In advance of the convention, organizers issue a press release announcing, among other things, that over 100 members signed a pledge to quit the association. Now, less than one week since the convention, they tell me that more than 300 members have taken the pledge. Among them is Matt Seybold, who was recently nominated to run for the MLA EC and has written two incisive, must-read assessments of the situation, posted on Jan 8 and Jan 12 on his American Vandal blog. 

Missing from this timeline are the many months proposers spent carefully preparing the resolution, gathering evidence and signatures, and trying to work with the MLA to address any potential concerns—including legal and financial concerns—well in advance of the EC’s October meeting. The protests were spectacular and effective, but we should remember that they were not the goal. The goal was to mobilize MLA members to pass a resolution answering a longstanding but never more urgent call for solidarity with Palestinians. That call still stands.

The MLA Members Behinds the Numbers

300+ members who have pledged to leave is about 10% of annual convention attendees. That’s major. Still, the numbers here may seem relatively small compared to the total of 20,000+ members. I can say with confidence that those who are leaving the organization are for sure part of a larger whole of concerned members. How large exactly I don’t know. Data is a moving target and scale is hard to gauge. Communication channels are informal.

The significance of the names behind the numbers cannot be overstated. I’m not talking about the prestige they carry, though there’s plenty of it there. I’m talking about the decades upon decades of service to the organization they represent. Concerns are being raised across age and rank.

Then there are the dates of these actions—many in December, perhaps not the cruelest month but close to it in academia. I read through this collection of documents and see care and commitment. I think of the labor, coordination, and outreach it took to produce them. I see MLA members finding time no one has—on top of jobs, service work, the holidays, and family obligations—to fight not against the MLA so much as for it. And yes, I include the executive council in that group but I’m above all talking about the rank and file whose dissent doesn’t translate into a line on their CVs. 

What you’ll also find, if you read through these materials, is a wide range of concerns—about Palestine but also, and even more so, about the organization.

The letter from current and former CAFPRR members, for example, doesn’t mention Palestine, above all expressing concern about the MLA potentially replicating the very usurpation of shared governance members are facing on their campuses and what they characterize as an “exercise of communicational control.” 

In this vein, the former presidents write to the officials, “You are not procedurally obligated to withhold the financial data that might make your argument more convincing.” It’s a common refrain: worry and frustration over a degree of opacity in excess of procedural mandates. My own resignation letter said I felt troubled by the EC’s “lack of communication and transparency with the [resolution] proposers and [MLA] members.” That concern has not been allayed in the month or so since I sent it. 

 Some of the members now leaving the organization joined relatively recently. Others have been members for decades. Many who wrote and signed letters are staying but the fact of their staying should not be taken as a sign of satisfaction. 

Across these groups what I see is people who have been calling on their professional organization to be the model that so many academic institutions are failing to be right now, to live up to its self-proclaimed status as a “leading advocate for the humanities.” Perhaps, beyond a certain point, it’s an impossible demand, but it’s not an untoward one in our era of rampant de-professionalization and attacks on higher education from all corners. Members aren’t wrong to demand more. They—we—deserve more.

Some Not So Ancient Organizational History

MLA has a history with BDS. At the 2017 convention, the Delegate Assembly voted down a pro-boycott resolution and voted up an anti-boycott resolution. The latter was then ratified by the membership and can be found, along with all ratified resolutions, on the MLA website. It’s one of two resolutions ratified in 2017 and one of the last two resolutions ever ratified.

The 2017 resolutions were only peripherally on my radar, and I am not going to revisit them at length here. This year’s lead proposer, Anthony Alessandrini, told IHE that the new resolution was “essentially a fresh start” and I’ll follow his lead, except to note that there were two EC resignations following the 2017 resolutions, too. You can read the two members’ joint statement of resignation on the Critical Inquiry blog, In the Moment, along with a series of letters, a response, and a rejoinder. Unsurprisingly, we MLA members are extremely good at writing letters. 

There’s also a more immediate predecessor to this year’s resolution—an emergency motion calling on the EC to defend pro-Palestine speech that was passed at the 2024 DA meeting. On March 4, the EC sent a letter to members about the motion, affirming its support of academic freedom and announcing a newly planned webinar and special issue of Profession.

This year’s resolution, Alessandrini further said, stemmed from “a lot of concern to make sure that Palestine continued to be discussed within the MLA.” Some may wonder whether a resolution endorsing BDS was the best way to do that. As the proposers explain on LitHub, a number of other scholarly and professional organizations have endorsed BDS. This resolution, it bears reiterating, was framed as an endorsement by members. Again, the challenge, per the EC report, was 1) that the MLA constitution says that any resolution, whatever its wording, is “an official statement of the organization,” and 2) laws and executive orders that target not just boycotts but also support of boycotts.

 I am not personally interested in debating whether this year’s resolution was the “right” way to address concern for Palestine. The resolution is what it is, i.e., what the members who wrote and supported it wanted it to be and what they thought would pass muster based on their communication with the MLA during the proposal process. 

The leadership’s handling of the resolution also is what it is. That for many is the core issue: How the resolution was handled and—fittingly for language and literature experts—the terms in which it was handled. 

Fiduciary Review and Trust

As the Dec 16, 2024 report reminds us, in 2019 members voted to move the EC’s review of resolutions before a potential debate and vote by the DA—and with good reason. That change was initially suggested by the aforementioned Ad Hoc Committee on Advocacy Policies and Procedures. Again, the committee’s report is not publicly available on the MLA website, or I would link to it here. (I read it while a member of the EC.) 

You can, however, read the minutes from the 2019 DA meeting where the report’s recommendations were debated and voted on and see all the changes that were made to the previous resolution procedure: Resolution word maximums were changed from 100 to 200; the deadline for resolutions was moved to Sept 1; proposers would now have to collect 100 instead of 10 supporting signatures to further engage members; and the EC would review resolutions at its October meeting to decide whether or not to forward them to the DA. Not forwarding resolutions is well within the EC’s power—but it’s not a foregone conclusion, even if there are legal and fiduciary concerns.

Passage is also not a foregone conclusion. In 2023, a motion calling on the association to annually contribute $250,000 to union organizing efforts was defeated in the DA by a vote of 81 to 3 on legal and fiduciary grounds. 

Resolutions and motions are different and have different procedures. The 2023 situation is not the same as this year’s. But it does provide an example of the MLA leadership making a case to the DA and engaging in open deliberation about legal and fiduciary concerns. I am not convinced that, as the executive director told IHE, the resolution “couldn’t possibly go forward,” that we couldn’t have entrusted members to weigh different factors and worked more with members to surface and address concerns.

The executive council is the fiduciary of the organization. “Fiduciary” is not a synonym for “financial.”  As my friend and former colleague on the EC, Samer Ali, reminded me, the root of “fiduciary” is the Latin term for “trust.” (Ali was also a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Advocacy Policies and Procedures that recommended putting the fiduciary review before the DA deliberation.) This valence, however, continually seems to be missing from the EC’s calculus. 

Matt Seybold, in his recent writing about the MLA, draws on his expertise in political economy from a humanities perspective to draw out the anti-labor roots of the MLA’s understanding of “fiduciary responsibility,” aligning the latter with the same corporate logics and rationales being used to gut members’ colleges and universities.

Where then is the trust? How much trust has been lost? How is it to be measured against the organization’s other resources?

To have disallowed members from voting on the resolution, the former EC members write, “not only erodes our trust in the MLA with regard to Palestine, but with regard to any other possibly controversial matters. Will you stand strong as the Trump administration attacks things like Critical Race Theory, for example, or queer theory, trans literature? Surely the new administration will punish scholars in these areas and impose penalties on those who defend them. Can members trust you to stay strong?”

Trump takes office on Monday and, whatever happens with the ceasefire currently—finally—being negotiated, these questions very much stand.

Members and/versus Publishers: Solidarity not Exceptionality

The 2017 resolutions were before my time—not as a member but as an engaged member. At the time, membership bought me access to the convention where I may or may not have had interviews in any given year. 

2016–17 was the last year I applied to tenure-track jobs. I had one interview at the convention that year, for a job at a school 20 minutes from my home. The job went to an inside hire and should have from the start, without the rigamarole of a search. 

I started a job in publishing nine months later and stayed on as a self-subsidized MLA member because I believe in the organization’s mission and work and have been lucky to have the “disposable” income to support it. Indeed, it’s only after I stopped trying to be a professional teacher and scholar that I became more involved in “my” professional organization.

I am, to my knowledge, the second-ever publisher to serve on the EC—which is surprising given how central the business of publishing is to the MLA and, hence, to the EC. It’s primarily as the fiduciary of the MLA as a publisher that the EC suppressed the resolution, writing in their Dec 16 report:

“The MLA has a very different financial profile than most of the other humanities member organizations. While we, like they, collect dues and conference registrations, these funds are only a small portion of the revenues on which the MLA relies to pursue its mission in publishing, convening, professional development, and advocacy for humanities teaching and research. Fully two-thirds of the operating budget of the MLA comes from sales of resources to universities and libraries, including the MLA International Bibliography.”

 Much could be said about the tone of this passage. In his own reading of its substance, Seybold calls out the tautology. It seems to be saying, as he puts it, “We need our publishing business to pay for our publishing business.” 

I am, as I know Seybold is, a fierce supporter of nonprofit publishing businesses. And the idea here is that the MLA’s publishing business helps subsidize all kinds of other activities and resources that benefit members, which is all fine and good until members pose a risk to the business by, say, proposing a resolution that might jeopardize contracts with anti-boycott clauses. 

As a publisher and independent scholar, I don’t have institutional access to the MLA Bibliography, which is held up as the resource that must be protected at all costs. Believe me, I wish I did. 

But I also understand how institutional subscriptions work—although, in one of my darker moments this past fall, it occurred to me that I basically voted in October to protect a resource I can’t use. Worse, I voted to protect the finances of an organization that, because of that same vote, I don’t especially feel represents me as a member. Nevertheless, I have not yet signed the pledge to let my membership lapse—though it’s highly possible that the leadership would like me to at this point.

Perhaps because I don’t identify with any single scholarly profession, but work within several, what most troubles me about the above passage is the blitheness with which it claims the MLA is different from other humanities member organizations. 

While it may technically be true that the MLA has a different financial profile, the MLA is not so different from its peers in leaning on its status as more than a member organization when pushed to take a stand on Palestine. In January, at their annual meeting, members of the American Historical Association voted to approve a resolution opposing scholasticide in Gaza. The AHA resolution does not mention BDS—but that didn’t stop it from raising concerns among leadership. According to the New York Times, the organization’s executive director read a report stressing that “We are not a political organization, which is essential if we are to have any standing to provide Congress with briefings on such issues as the histories of deportation, taxation, civil service, and other pressing issues.” The resolution, the ED implied, could conflict with other advocacy activities. 

UPDATE JANUARY 18th: AHA leadership then officially decided as much on January 17. Following the MLA’s lead, the AHA council announced that it had decided to veto the resolution on the grounds that it “lies outside the scope of the Association’s mission and purpose.” Like the MLA, the AHA appears to be a member organization until members threaten to get in the way of the “real work” of the organization. 

I don’t doubt the commitment of these organizations’ leaders to members. But I do think I’m aptly summarizing the message some members are getting. The outgoing MLA president told IHE “’the primary reason’ for the council’s decision ‘was fiduciary.’" But she also mentioned concerns about dividing the membership over endorsing the BDS movement, noting that "collegiality was one of many things that we were considering.” 

This quote should stop you in your tracks. “Collegiality” and potential divisiveness have not been part of the official narrative of the EC’s decision making before now.

 What worries me is the pretense that the membership hasn’t already been divided—not by any activism or even dissent and protests, but rather by decisions on the part of leadership and by how those decisions are being spun for public consumption. Of course, I want members in both red and blue states with anti-boycott legislation to have access to the full panoply of MLA resources. Of course, I don’t want a resolution to conflict with that. But I personally am desperate for some more open reckoning with lines that are implicitly being drawn all the time between different parts of the membership and different parts of the mission—between who counts and who does not, between which activities are mission-critical and which are not. 

My partner in resignation, Esther Allen, told IHE, “They [MLA leadership] really don’t feel comfortable with any kind of member activism; they really don’t want it at all on any subject.” Whether or not that’s entirely true, it is for sure a, if not the, message being sent to members.

There may be specific things the MLA can do to address that—such as proposing changes to the constitution that would enable members to take activist stances without threatening its subscriptions. But I would also love to see the organization itself be more activist. There is strength in numbers. 

Rather than declaring the MLA’s difference, why not make an effort to partner with other organizations? Why not leap at the chance to learn more about how they are navigating anti-boycott laws and the barrage of contemporary threats we all are facing? That would be a mark of bold leadership.

If the MLA is not ultimately so different from other member organizations, I wonder: is it “very different” from other publishers? Have other university presses (the MLA is a member of the Association of University Presses) signed contracts requiring them to confirm in writing that they don’t participate in or support boycotts? Do authors ever have to make such pledges to collect royalties? 

I ask these questions not to cast judgment but to try to identify sources of collective power. Now is the time for greater solidarity and collective strategizing within and between humanities member organizations—and, yes, publishing businesses. Because truth be told, I’m not sure any of us who care about the humanities can afford to insist that we’re exceptional right now.

In recent weeks, supporters of Prime Minister Modi's government have increased attacks (both physical and verbal) against secular institutions of higher education in India--particularly in response to protests against the passage of a new citizenship law that is discriminatory against Muslims.  You can find a first person account at Academe and further coverage here.

In January, the Executive Council of the MLA issued a statement in protest of the violence against students and teachers.   You can find the link here.  I am also posting the Statement itself:

In January 2020, the Executive Council approved the following statement.

We condemn the physical assaults on students and teachers in India, most recently at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia University, and Aligarh Muslim University, and the continued violence against students and members of the press, the opposition, and the public, who exercise their rights of assembly and dissent in opposing the national Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). These protests question new steps that allow state discrimination against citizens purely on the basis of religion and thus contravene India's own constitutional commitment to secularism. The Indian government is advancing Hindutva (the idea that Hindus are united in a Hindu nation-state that privileges Hindus) while legitimizing discrimination against other denominations, fanning polarizing rhetoric in public discourse, and setting the stage for confrontation and violence that plays out on campuses and affects academic life. The CAA establishes expedited pathways to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Christian (but not Muslim) refugees. It also excludes a range of refugees from Myanmar, Bhutan, China, and Sri Lanka. The act, which represents an escalation of Hindu nationalism, simultaneously and exclusively casts "Muslim" states as perpetrators of violence against minorities and does not recognize Muslim groups as victims of state violence on a par with those of other religions seeking asylum and, ultimately, citizenship. The Indian government has responded to protests against the act with unprecedented violence on campuses and in the public sphere and routinely criminalizes the assembly of five or more people in order to sanction its brutality in suppressing the protests.

We urge India, a signatory and drafting member of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, to consider the declaration's basic tenets, which the passing and implementation of CAA appear to violate (in particular, articles 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14, 18, 19, 20 [1]).  We urge the government to honor the rights of assembly and dissent, to protect academic freedom, to protect teachers and students in its educational institutions against violence on campus, and to create stable conditions for open dialogue on any proposed changes in the university and on state policy, citizenship, immigration, and assembly. We urge the government to take immediate action to penalize the perpetrators of violence against students. We urge the government to give ownership of, and jurisdiction over, university curricula, research, and institutional positions to the faculty and to safeguard the basic rights of students and faculty members to pursue their educational goals without suffering violence, poverty, and the loss of life. We condemn, unequivocally, and call for the immediate cessation of sanctioned violence on campus in India and the assault on the democratic principles of equality, freedom, and the right to espouse viewpoints without fear of reprisal. 

It feels a little silly to flog Mark Lilla's misinformed and retrograde attack on "identity liberalism" while Donald J. Trump appoints wrecking crews to one federal position after another. Jefferson Sessions will wreck Justice's civil rights division. Steve Bannon will wreck basic racial neutrality in White House strategy. Betsy DeVos will wreck public education across the country (network map courtesy of Veterans Today). Mr. Trump's one constructive campaign promise, to rebuild infrastructure, is structured as a privatization play in which investors will get equity for 18 cents on the dollar, with public subsidies supplying the rest. Mr. Trump is a master of other people's money, public as well as private, and he will make the public pay.

Colleges and universities are going to have to fight to keep disruption from meaning destruction. They will need to rebuild democratic higher ed to outflank Trumpian appeals to the working classes. Here's where we come to the problem with Prof. Lilla's piece: he is recycling the late 1980s color-blind critique of multiculturalism that kept the Clinton-era Democrats from thinking clearly about race or class, and from connecting race and class as they actually are.

First, there's the backward cultural politics of this Times-powered slam of alleged Identitude. Prof. Lilla attacks Hillary Clinton for excessive mentioning of various groups of people of color, and then traces the problem to schools.

The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.

Each part of this statement is wrong: that today's progressive students are more narcissistic than conservative students or than their parents (no evidence is offered, so I'll go with my contravening 30 years of experience); that diversity is a fixation that isolates students (it actually puts them in dialogue with others); that this causes racial narcissism (it actually challenges it); that college students and staff don't care about regular Americans (the vast majority at public colleges are regular Americans).

The real problem, revealed for the umpteenth time by this presidential campaign, is not diversity but its absence. Racial and cultural segregation cause the crises of understanding in national politics, not diversity programs designed to overcome it. Ethnic and gender studies requirements often bring the first shattering of the natural narcissism of early life in segregated America. Confirming this point, Dan Berrett offered a primer on existing college diversity practices that features the related themes of pre-college segregation, college-based "group dialogue," and the overcoming of "white fragility" to create stronger cross-racial bonds. One could also look up virtually any race-conscious student support service, like my campus's Equal Opportunity Program, to see functions like "holistic counseling" focused on developing the psychological resources essential to academic success. A New York Times regular like Mark Lilla might be familiar with "Who Gets to Graduate?" Paul Tough's superb account of a particularly successful diversity-based support program at the University of Texas at Austin that elevates completion rates among at-risk students. Such programs help students deal with frequent poverty, hunger, subtle as well as overt discrimination, and unfamiliar forms of competition. I could also go on about the cognitive literature that shows the direct connection between identity-conscious instruction and a student's intellectual development. I could do the same for the way breadth requirements in the standard college curriculum aim to instill the inclusive national identity that Prof. Lilla says he wants. Diversity programs are higher ed's attempt to take the country's socially segmented and unequally educated population and maximize the share that stays in college once it gets there. His attack on diversity programs as such is an attack on a core precondition of democratic higher ed.

Of course Prof. Lilla would be offended by any suggestion that he doesn't support democratic higher education. I'm sure he supports educational democracy as an abstract concept. But his whole piece argues against a crucial means of achieving it, which is a parity among social identities so that members of every group can participate on equal footing. We don't have anything close to parity among races or any other social group. The class problem is dramatic. Here is a chart of bachelors degree attainment by age 24 for dependent students, broken out by income quartile (courtesy of a Pell Institute report).

Attainment is heavily influenced by income. The bottom half of the US population has made next to no progress in B.A. attainment over 50 years. There's a lot to say about the roots of this bipartisan failure (see for example Stage 5 of the decline cycle in The Great Mistake, or Sara Goldrick-Rab's Paying the Price), but in the end there's no excuse for policy toleration of this class bias. The obvious takeaways are, (1) working class and ex-middle class voters are right to think that the higher ed system isn't doing much for them. And (2), the de facto exclusion of lower-income students is a much bigger problem for college's reputation than are diversity programs.

Writers like Prof. Lilla have encouraged people to think that this class problem persists because the race problem is being excessively featured. In practice, this would have to mean that low-income whites aren't going to college because the government has put students of color at the head of the line. This claim also has no basis in fact. To the contrary, as college participation has increased in recent years, most of the new white students go to selective colleges with strong graduation rates, and most of the new brown and black students go to open access colleges with weak graduation rates. This was the core finding of a Georgetown University report on racial disparity in college completion. Endowed with the explicit title, "Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege," its has a graphic that summarizes the racial pattern.

Enrollment growth among students of color has largely gone to the colleges that simply don't have the per-student resources to support high levels of completion. In short, the United States does not have a class problem because it has oversolved its race problem. It has a class problem and a race problem, and we need to be able to talk about both of them, on their own terms and in their interaction.

Okay, so Prof. Lilla's guns are pointed in the wrong direction, at race-conscious higher ed rather than at segregationist and class-biased public policy. But the ideas he recycles aren't responsible for re-segregation and inequality, are they? Yes, historically they actually are. This is where we have to return to the dawn of Clintonism in the late 1980s. Prof. Lilla has just rehashed a critique of multiculturalism that, to repeat, made New Democrats incapable of dealing with either racism or the economic inequality that non-college voters are rightly upset about.

The basic stakes were whether whites were going to demand that post-1960s ethnic groups assimilate to a common culture that whites defined, or, on the other hand, move toward a polycentric society in which fundamental values would be achieved through negotiation within shared legal ground rules. For figures like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump, this wasn't even a legitimate question: of course the American core was European and all cultural groups would automatically conform. Civil rights movements famously dissented from this kind of white ethno-nationalism. Less famously, so did many educators who worked in racially diverse classrooms. For example, in 1974, Manuel Ramirez III and Alfredo Casañeda published Cultural Democracy, Bicognitive Development, and Education, in which they argued for pluralist overlap and communication rather than white-core assimilation. Writing in the Journal of Teacher Education three years later, Arturo Pacheco, in "Cultural Pluralism: A Philosophical Analysis," argued for a notion of cultural pluralism in which social groups remained independent and at the same time interdependent segments of society. The practical motivation was that students whose social worlds were not seen as legitimate by their school culture did not do well in school. In the anti-assimilationist pluralism that later came to be associated with multiculturalism, a group like Mexican Americans could retain cultural autonomy within a politically-unified nation-state. The benefit was that Americanness would no longer be defined as whiteness (though Toni Morrison just pointed out that it still is). The result would be a rough cultural equality that would allow people from every ethnic or racial group to live with others on equal footing.

Enter Clintonism, which came to power in the midst of a backlash against multicultural equality. It formed itself as a third way on racial and economic policy. It rested on liberal white nationalism. Democratic centrist godfather Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had written The Disuniting of America (1991) to demand minority-group assimilation to a culturally superior white European core. A modified position appeared in the work of the historian Gary Nash and of eduction scholar Diane Ravitch, among others, who rejected white cultural supremacism but demanded a strong common framework that generated assimilation lite. Writing a few years later, Avery Gordon and I called the Schlesinger position "cultural supremacism" and the Nash-Ravitch position "cultural unionism." The crucial compromise of the latter was that it offered flexible tolerance while still rejecting cultural parity or equality, and insisting instead on unity and shared foundations. The unionists trained their fire on calls for cultural autonomy (like Afrocentrism) that seemed to them to reject their kinder, gentler version of assimilation to an implicitly rather than aggressively white common culture.

Cultural unionism is more or less Prof. Lilla's position today. While opposing Trumpian assumptions that immigrants and racial groups must conform to a heartland white American culture, and while hiding the exact degree of assimilation required, he and his forebears are upset about diversity first and inequality much later, if ever. He ignores actually existing racial inequality in his piece, and also the university's role in ignoring class inequality. (Prof. Ravitch changed her position years ago).

Clintonism adopted this compromise formation, one that denied it was a white racial ideology. It entrenched the post-civil rights era, where the debate was always whether equal racial opportunity had gone too far. Bill Clinton came to power with a cultural politics that included trashing rapper Sister Soulja, executing the mentally disabled African American prisoner Ricky Ray Rector, and, once in office, dumping his nominee for head of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, Lani Guinier, when she was ludicrously labeled a "quota queen" by the Wall Street Journal, then ending welfare as we know it, dramatically increasing incarceration in all its racial disproportions, and so on. The Clintons sidelined Great Society and civil rights goals, which came back to haunt Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.

Clintonian centrism was anti-egalitarian on race and culture--and also on class. Its soft assimilationism or liberal white nationalism would allow civil society to decide racial outcomes. In practice, this meant market forces would decide. Here is where we get to the link between racial and class inequality. The undermining of the civil rights agenda, the embrace of post-civil rights, took the heat off an economic egalitarian agenda. A good example is the work of the Clintonite political economist Robert Reich, who informed the world in his bestselling The Work of Nations (1991) that in the knowledge economy, blue collar workers are obsolete. Only cognitive workers have tradeable skills. Prof. Reich comes very close to saying that blue-collar workers, which he described as formerly valued for their ability to do the same thing over and over, have no meaningful skills at all. Stripped of craft dignity as well as economic value, industrial blue-collar workers were turned by Clintonism into an economic loser class that would need government attention but not make a contribution to the New Economy. Clintonism offered (reduced) unemployment benefits and job retraining. The latter helped spoil the reputation of further learning by offering neither actual work nor liberal-arts style respect for the student as thinker.

Clintonism interpreted industrial blue-collar America, a big chunk of Donald J. Trump's base, as economic deplorables. Their booby prize was the kind of dumbed-down adult education that would logically render them cynical about higher ed overall. Clintonism relegated the non-college population to second class status, elevating our technology lords and ladies into a new aristocracy of STEM degrees, a tiered system recently ratified yet again by the Democrat-in-chief, Barack Obama, when, in editing the November issue of Wired, he defined global challenges such that only advanced technologists are relevant to solving them.

In short, Clintonism yoked economic and racial disparity. Its commitment to both was structural--college over non-college workers, STEM over non-STEM, market over government, liberal white nationalism over multiculturalism. There's no surprise that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama was able to break Donald J. Trump's absurd bear hug of the non-college population: 25 years later, they have no street cred to counter Mr. Trump's very direct promises to reverse deindustrialization, not with further education, but with state power.

Clintonism long ago posed a terrible challenge to colleges and universities: will colleges create and sustain deep ties to those who were being relegated to the economic ash heap, on the basis, for starters, of the old land-grant promise to provide their communities with any knowledge they needed to advance? Unfortunately for both universities and society, the answer was no. From the vantage of red-state America, they surfed the knowledge economy wave, milked the tech billionaires for donations, built stadium skyboxes for wealthy sports fans, and told the children of the non-college deplorables that they'd better get their behinds to a university, the more selective the better--that is, the more likely not to have anyone like them or their families or their whole doomed class, the better.

From the point of view of class equity, this was an epic screw-up. Dropping the public good vision of egalitarian inclusion, they raised prices, stressed return on college investment, changed and burdened the student experience, shifted expenditures to activities with possible future profits, and let the post-industrial working class play catch up--if they could somehow turn themselves into that completely different type of person known as the knowledge worker. The irony is that universities were slammed for helping students of color instead of whites when, in terms of completion and degree quality, they weren't really doing that either. The whole policy practice has been a great mistake.

The mistake was clearly identified by race-conscious thinking decades ago, and could have been avoided. In The Ethnic Myth (1989), Stephen Steinberg wrote,

If there is an iron law of ethnicity, it is that when ethnic groups are found in a hierarchy of power, wealth, and status, then conflict is inescapable. However, where there is social, economic, and political parity among the constituent groups, ethnic conflict, when it occurs, tends to be at a low level and rarely spills over into violence. (170)

In a phrase: No Equity, No Peace. And this is the Clintonist legacy that Mark Lilla's piece suppresses and that Donald J. Trump exploits.

The public university will now be fighting hardcore opponents like it hasn't seen in years. It can only do this if it drops the endless self-questioning about whether diversity is racism and whether education disrespects white people. These debates are not only a distraction--they create weakness at a fatal time. The public university can either stand for racial and economic parity as a unified project, or it can continue its decline.