New Haven People's Center on April 18, 2026  

I gave this talk at the 45^th Anniversary Conference of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University,  April 17, 2026. Many thanks to the organizers, speakers, audience, and my co-panelists.

I’m going to talk about humanities ambition in a time of diminished authority for its fields,  and I’ll say we need big increases in our ambition in response.  But I have to note that the humanities won’t get enough help from their universities, and in many cases will have to fight them.  The Trump administration’s systematic efforts to erase people of color from the American past and present has been translated on campuses as quiet acceptance, via, in particular, the deletion of DEI programs and the merging or closure of departments associated with ethnicity, sexuality, or countries and cultures MAGA America dislikes.

By Michael Meranze

In his last post, Chris made a call for increased faculty governance on budgetary matters and a proposal for how we might do it.  I want to follow up by taking up the problem of governance in a different realm: the very definition of universities.  It is here that faculty face not only an internal but an external challenge and also need to build upon recent efforts to challenge the managerial class's monopoly on definition and meaning.

If the Trumpist attack on higher education has taught us anything it is that university governance is broken.  Faculty, students, and staff can no more count on legally instituted university governors than on state legislators to protect the academic freedom or institutional autonomy of colleges and universities.  Of course, as we have been arguing on the blog, this inability of managers and boards to speak clearly and effectively against those who wish to reduce higher education to either job training or the mouthpiece of the state has been clear for years.  

Duke Women's Basketball 65-58 Virginia, Jan 16 2026

I’m in the middle of a two week residency at Duke’s Franklin Institute for the Humanities, and having a wonderful time with the discussions, which are pushing my thinking about both theory and practice. Many thanks to the people who have made the first week so fun and illuminating.  The first lecture, “The University System in the Knowledge Crisis,” is on You Tube with a nice intro by Ranjana Khanna and editing by Eric Barstow. 

 

On Friday we had a reading group on my Public Books piece, “Academics Must Seize the Means of Knowledge Production.” I do say there that university management has failed to improve or even sustain universities over the past 25 years, and that frontline people should aspire to taking direct control of daily operations. The model would be a variation of industrial democracy or academic self-management on a co-op model.  (This has in fact been the enabling illusion of university administration—that the top officials are professors doing a period of service to the institution and so, self-governance, we already have it!) Spain’s Mondragon, a large worker-owned co-op conglomerate, is so successful that positive coverage occasionally appears in the English-language press, like this New Yorker article on its portent of “an alternative future for capitalism.” Similarly, the UK has laws that make co-operative higher education feasible, and scholars like Joss Winn and Mike Neary worked on this through the 2010s.  At the same time, imagining academics seizing their universities also makes me wonder whether I’ve lost touch with reality.

 

And yet, self-governance has been a continuous issue in US higher education, a regulative ideal that rarely inspires faculty activism even as it measures the shortfalls of existing management.  Unionization remains a visible horizon, usually very distant for tenure-track faculty at research-intensive universities like Duke or UNC-Chapel Hill or the University of California. Full self-governance is well over that horizon, although faculty since the 19^th century have wanted much more direct control over academics than the governing board structure and its presidentialism have ever allowed.  On these points, universities were and are anti-democratic, and their officials have never supported any real variant of workplace democracy.  The very idea swims upstream against the torrents of autocracy that have steadily gathered force since 2000.

 

In the Duke discussion, some comments protested the infantilization of the faculty through the withholding of basic workplace information, particularly budgetary. Stories of being patronized and rebuffed by unpersuasive managers were lamentably familiar. And some questions asked about fixing that. What practical steps can staff and faculty take? Where are students in all this? 

 

In these contexts, I retreat from the event horizon of seizing the means of academic production to some “non-reformist reforms.”

 

The conversation got me to formulate a general four-step process in my mind. The content of each item needs to be filled out in any given process by the people actually involved. The work has to be collective; individuals don’t get that far fighting organizations, though they can inspire others.  Academic senates and faculty associations are meaningful platforms, if really used.

 

1. Identify the concrete issue(s), the specific problems that are damaging teaching, research, student welfare, morale, etc. One example has been the near-total absence of campus-based research funding in the humanities for the last 20 of the 30 years I taught at UCSB.  Another may be biases or other problems with the tenure and promotion process. Another might be bad administrative messaging about the use of Large Language Models in courses. 

 

2. Figure out what data, arguments, and solutions you do have, and also what you don’t.  Once you identify what’s missing, start asking the administration for it. Chasing admin isn’t the main action, however necessary: the process involves data assembly, analysis, narrative writing, arguing and persuading: it is a process of collaborative self-education, and might start as a study group.  

 

On the first examples, a campus Office of Research and perhaps some deans would have (and withhold!) information about the distribution of internal university research funds.  A center for teaching and learning or an office of information technology would have information about contracts they have been signed with LLM and other ed-tech providers that may be affecting administrative policies.  Note that this is a repetitive, iterative, frustrating, tedious, ongoing process. 

 

A great instance is the one started by some faculty at UCLA, frustrated with the failure of their administration to show why their austerity measures were required or to analyze openly where they would lead. The faculty wrote a “Resolution on Restoring Shared Governance in Campus Budget Planning,” which passed in the Legislative Assembly almost unanimously. Check out this specification of the information requirements in Point 4:

 

Provide detailed analyses and forward projections in time to inform deliberations for the 2026–27 budget cycle addressing:

a. the impact of reductions in state funding;

b. anticipated changes in federal funding across campus programs and research portfolios;

c. potential reductions in federal grants and their downstream effects on campus operations;

d. projected impacts of graduate student researcher (GSR) wage increases;

e. past and anticipated changes in campus debt service obligations;

f. costs and status of recent real estate acquisitions including expenditures needed to bring new properties into active use;

g. expenditures and commitments associated with campus-wide technology initiatives such as One IT and the integration of artificial intelligence tools;

h. recent and current agreements with external consulting firms; and

i. trends in the growth of administrative budgets relative to academic expenditure. 

 

Brilliant- I love this! After passage, the authors and their senate are faced with the grind of getting the actual info out of senior managers—and of institutionalizing the process of info circulation on which shared governance depends.  

 

Meanwhile, the chancellor and executive vice-chancellor have already written to the chair of divisional senate to say in effect, “you already have all that data so you don’t need any more.”  The gaslighting is designed to make busy faculty go away ine fear that they will endlessly waste their time.  This is the moment of danger (that is often repeated). The key is perseverance, as a version of ordinary self-management. 

 

3. Develop this linkage: problem—data—analysis—report—solutions—implementation process.  This will involve lots of work, haggling, repeated demands and refusals, difficult appraisals of the information, and arguing about what would and wouldn’t work to address the problem. Implementation is a whole siege in itself. 

 

However, this is not an all-consuming process: it can indeed be fit into the schedules of full-time faculty and staff.  But it takes a long time and requires stamina.  The UCLA Resolution was passed in December 2025.  If everyone sticks with it, and the senate can pass the project from one year’s officers to the next, they’ll have “restored shared governance in campus budget planning” possibly in 2027-28, and more likely 2028-29.  

 

It gives me no joy to state this duration.  But academic careers are far longer, and fixing chronic, grating suboptimalities is completely worth the effort.

 

This gets me back to the issue of reforms that not only fall far short of the anti-managerial revolution but may possibly not do much of anything. And why would getting full shared governance (really “co-governance,” really epistemic equality between management and academic employees on campus budget planning) count as a non-reformist reform?

 

4. Put each specific governance project into the longer narrative arc of knowledge workers getting control of their work.  For me, this involves telling the story of universities as developing the intellectual lives of the whole population, not just college elites, by undoing their capture by government and corporate vocationalism. It involves explaining why academically-led universities are better for society, for non-college people, for knowledge, for the general happiness of humanity.  Universities will never be seen for what they are, in their intellectual radiance, when neither their teacher-scholars nor their students steer the ship--nor are allowed by admin to tell the public where it’s going.

 

∞∞∞

 

I was reminded again of the drift caused by sidelined or withdrawn faculty while prepping for Friday’s discussion of “seizing the means.” Trying to get a list of required faculty powers back into my head, I searched my drive and found slides for a talk I gave at the University of Toronto.  It was organized around the American Association of University Professors’ struggle for faculty power in various arenas, now in its 111^th year.  

 

The baseline is that the quality of US universities was seen by nearly all parties as proportionate to the standing of the faculty, which I showed as a cycle. 

 

 

This depended on faculty authority in a range of arenas.

 

 

I numbered curricular control as 0 because it was basically assumed in 1915.  I recited some current cases that revealed that the faculty have made little progress in 110 years.  And in fact they have lost ground on Issue 0, control over core instruction—to ed-tech, to state legislative interference, to numbers-driven mergers and closures, to some university managers controlling course syllabi.  You know you are in trouble when a headline starts, “Plato Censored,” and names the censurers as Texas A&M officials.  Here's a summary

 

The outcome of turning even tenured faculty into employees subject to politicized control by line managers is not so great, and yet familiar.

 

 And I was interested to note that I’d boldfaced the problem of faculty members with their coherent reasons to withdraw from governance.

 

 

There was a slide on Practical Steps that faculty should take, which I’ll spare you because it overlaps with the list above. I ended with more boldface. 

 

Reframe U’s public mission via professional autonomy: Professional vision of U as skills, learning, creative capabilities, unfolding the destiny of mankind  

 

Yes, yes, hell yes!

 

And look where it would lead!

 

 

 

 

I do think this can, should, even must happen.  But the thing is, I delivered this talk in November 2014.  That was 11 years ago.  Over that time we have gotten no closer to mastery, and have enabled plenty of drift. 

 

I already felt that faculty inaction was a big part of the problem, but always try to be encouraging. My slide notes at the end read, “Hugely exciting trends now.  Mass global demand for HE.  Students who want creative capabilities and not machine learning & routine skills. Public realization that business management isn’t the answer to everything!”

 

True again. Still true. And I think now more than ever, in the spirit of lost time, and unstunted by the hostile climate, faculty need to do Steps 1 through 4 above.

 

Selling The Catalyst, UCSB on April 12, 2014   

2025 saw a shift in the hard right’s measure for the success of its decades-long attacks on universities: it moved from discrediting to subjugating the university system. It used decades-old methods in which culture wars and budget wars work together. These were now yoked under Trump II with federal coercion campaigns that extorted changes in core institutional policy through the unlawful withholding of federal funds.

 

University boards and presidents have not formulated common aims much less a joint strategy to fight the most powerful attack in higher education’s modern history, one already more destructive than McCarthyism. They have followed the mantra of corporate America: shut up, suck up, and try not to stand up.  I’ve noted that all the fighting has come from faculty groups and some professional associations.

 

Indiana University on November 3, 2025   

by Johannes Türk

Chair of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington

Indiana University, one of the great American public universities, is currently melting down with a speed and violence unprecedented in the history of higher education. It is difficult to recognize the world-class institution that was founded in the idyllic city of Bloomington in 1820 and built over decades, most decisively by the long-term president and chancellor of Indiana University, Herman B. Wells. Beloved among residents of the state of Indiana and a destination for thousands of students from across the United States and the world, the public university gained its national and global reputation in the 1950s primarily on the basis of its humanities departments and one of the country’s best music schools.

 

 

Indiana University on November 6, 2025   

Critiquing universities is one thing and rebuilding them is another. Getting from the first to the second was a constant topic at the four U.S. universities where I spoke over the course of a few weeks this past month.

I visited the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and Indiana University Bloomington. Warm thanks to my hosts and audiences in all those places, who were generous in every way. I learned enormously from comments and various extensive discussions.

 

At each university, bad things were being done to faculty and their programs. In each place, faculty were doing things back.  We talked non-stop about whether this doing-back was working and what faculty members could and should do next.

 

Tenure-track faculty are in an odd position. They are neither principals nor agents: they lack corporate power in universities. They lack legal power of the kind possessed by governing boards.  They have lost the relationship power of the old collegiality that tenure-track faculty assumed. They’re now in a world that’s familiar to non-tenure track faculty and graduate students. What next?

 

Most of those I spoke with saw the first job as defense against outside attacks. And in fact, faculty legal defense has been working well. At UCLA, joint faculty and union lawsuits have now led to a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump Administration’s pursuit of a $1.2 billion fine against UCLA that aims to extort an agreement like that the Administration imposed on Columbia University (Jaweed Kaleem has an overview). Over the summer, a group of UC faculty sued Trump’s National Institutes for Health to restore blocked research funding. This lawsuit also succeeded at getting a temporary injunction.

 

It’s worth noting that the UC Board of Regents and the Office of the President have accepted if not condoned the Trump Administration’s unlawful coercion by failing to dispute it. Faculty groups have had to fill a leadership vacuum.  Incredibly, the UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) had to sue their own Board of Regents to obtain the text of the Trump demands to which they were thinking of committing the University: this suit was also successful.  (UC then asked the California Supreme Court to overturn the lower court ruling, which they declined to do.)  UC senior managers have neither defended the University in court against unlawful attacks nor acknowledged any obligation to collaborate with the UC community. It’s remarkable that their main legal actions have been taken against their own employees.

 

During the UCLA conference that had brought me to campus, I met an author of one of two major resolutions submitted to the November meeting of the UCLA Legislative Assembly.  The “Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning” recites chapter and verse of the obligations that managers have to work with faculty bodies on planning and budget.  It calls for the belated release of comprehensive financial statements for fiscal years 2024–25 and 2025–26, including “statements of revenues, expenditures, reserves, and a clear definition and accounting of the reported deficit.” It goes on to demand four modes of data sharing and communication that include “detailed analyses and forward projections” in nine separate categories.  The Resolution itself tells a story of breached collaboration that took some real work to put together.

 

Take a look--it is impressively strong and complete.  People often cite the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as having shifted state legislatures to the right by circulating model policies that members can cut and paste into bills for their state. Faculty Senates could treat this Resolution as a model policy and adapt it for their campus. 

 

 **UPDATE

The UCLA Academic Senate has announced the results of the votes on these Resolutions: 

Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning
 
  Legislative Assembly members voted via the Academic Senate Data Management System on the Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning. The Legislative Assembly received a total of 116 votes cast: 115 Approve, 1 Oppose. This Resolution required a majority of votes cast by present members to be approved. [AIPSC (2nd ed.) 5.1]. A majority of votes cast (99%) were to Approve this Resolution.

 

Resolution on Information Technology Accountability, Transparency, and Shared Governance
 
  Legislative Assembly members voted via the Academic Senate Data Management System on the Resolution on Information Technology Accountability, Transparency, and Shared Governance. The Legislative Assembly received a total of 106 votes cast: 104 Approve, 2 Oppose. This Resolution required a majority of votes cast by present members to be approved. [AIPSC (2nd ed.) 5.1]. A majority of votes cast (98%) were to Approve this Resolution

 

These are the strongest large-group Senate votes I have ever seen.  It's as though the repression isn't working anymore, and, to quote Avery Gordon, "when the repression isn't working anymore, the trouble that results demands re-narrativization."

 

 ** END UPDATE

 

For the most part, the faculty stories were painful to hear. They were mainly about having to react to the unilateral actions of more powerful people. The people who had power over the university mainly didn’t like the university. Their views ranged from indifferent to openly hostile. The powerful people decided actions that damaged faculty without working with them in advance: in many cases damage seemed like the aim of the action. The faculty got the job of accepting the decisions and then twisting them into place.  

 

I saw good stories interrupted.  There were great early chapters.  Chapter 1: the administration commits an offense against education or Thought Itself.  Chapter 2. Faculty organize and strike back!  Chapter 3: the governing board responds by curtailing faculty and student rights. That’s terrible!  I can’t wait to see what happens in Chapter 4! 

 

But what if there is no Chapter 4?

 

I am not sure how to talk about this. I don’t mean it as a criticism of the many university faculty members working like mules to be heard at all.  But I do want to head off a doomer reading that posits the general inability of faculty to defeat their senior managers and governing boards.  Some faculty do see the ongoing power of boards and managers as proof that this or that effort completely failed, and that therefore new efforts will fail too. This view is a psy-op, not reality.

 

Indiana was the only red state on my program, and its politicians have gone full MAGA with the war on universities you’d expect. In early 2024, its legislature passed a law requiring professors to promote “intellectual diversity” to keep their tenure, adding a post-tenure review to match, along with other stuff. They’ve continued to meddle, and have empowered an autocratic president, Pamela Whitten, to do what she will irrespective of the views of the faculty council among other university groups; she’s attracted national coverage with the disturbing results.

 

In early spring 2024, the Bloomington Faculty Council proposed a vote of no confidence in Whitten (core motivations listed in the petition).  The motion passed 827 to 29. (A parallel no-confidence vote also carried against IU provost Rahul Shrivastav.)

 

Yet Whitten and Shirvastav remain in post, and the IU Board’s response to the 96.6% no-confidence vote against Whitten was to give her a $175,000 bonus in September 2024, soon followed by a $200,000 raise.  Thus concluded our Chapter 3.

 

One member of the audience at my IU lecture used the board’s big middle finger to the faculty as proof that resistance was futile—just like the actions I described in my lecture.  I asked the audience, “after you voted no-confidence and the board then gave Whitten a bonus, what did you do next?”  The president of the Bloomington Faculty Council who’d gotten the remarkable vote made a zero with his fingers.  “It was followed by nothing,” he said.

 

Well ok, I said, you didn’t lose exactly. You just stopped playing. They didn’t stop playing. That doesn’t prove faculty can’t win.  It proves you have to keep playing.

 

I was constantly impressed with how intelligent and committed academics are, including graduate students who are facing futures without proper support. We don’t appreciate that enough about ourselves. Everyone I met showed the intelligence and commitment that comes partly from the long process of building intelligence in teaching and research.  These are real powers in the face of incessant negative propaganda and disrespect.

 

Hovering over all proposed solutions was the prospect of faculty unionization.  That wasn’t because people agree that tenure-track faculty are ready to unionize—most thought they weren’t—but because the traditional alternative, collegial shared governance, has been unilaterally degraded or rejected by senior managers and boards.  A lot of tenure-track faculty are now where graduate students were a few decades go.

 

Tenure-track as well as non-tenure track faculty do now need collective bargaining rights. But faculty won’t get them or get the public on their side or be clear about what to do once they have them unless they tell their stories, and never stop telling them, and never stop acting on them. 

by Michael Meranze

This week's election, combined with the success of faculty led lawsuits against the Trump Administration's efforts to subordinate higher education, gives the lie to the idea that compliance is the only option facing university management and faculty.  

These events call into question what appears to be the strategy of the Regents and Office of the President:  keep your head down, don't make waves, and obey in advance.  The choice of UCOP not to pursue lawsuits against the Trump administration's efforts while fighting to block the release of the proposed UCLA settlement has always seemed dubious.  Now it seems incredibly short sighted.  The sudden cancellation of the President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program suggests that neither President Milliken nor Provost Newman have learned anything from recent events.

I mention this background because we're getting to the end of the systemwide review of proposed changes to faculty discipline and the establishment of a policy on expressive activities.  Comments to the Academic Senate need to be submitted by November 10 and to the Regents by November 26th.  If you have not been following this effort to change the Academic Personnel Manual (015 and 016) there are several very strong general analyses that you can find here, here, and here.  I urge everyone to read them if you haven't.  I want to make a few points in this post.

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.  

Serpentine, Hyde Park London May 18, 2025   

UC Irvine is facing major cuts to its academic core, bigger in some places than others.  UCI lecturer Trevor Griffey analyzed them as the state budget was passed by the legislature. This post started life as the introduction to my analysis, UCI Part 2, but it has taken on a life of its own. 

 

As I mentioned in Part 1, there’s a national pattern at work, which is to assume and accept an even worse austerity norm – hyponormalization—rather than taking Trump’s assault on the foundations of the knowledge system as an opportunity to confront and change the university’s contradictory political economy. 

 

The confrontation will mean critique of various theories of the costs of college instruction that shape the thinking that operates universities. These theories are mostly bad, yet they are always with us.

 

Outside Lafayette, La. on October 27, 2018

By Leslie Bary, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

I just wrote a mini-grant for $858, to cover flight and hotel for a speaker. To justify the choice of speaker and the validity of event, I composed a few hundred words, to explain to an audience out of field and possibly outside of academia why one invites speakers from other institutions to share their expertise. My speaker is a full professor and department chair at a major research institution. They are a noted scholar in our field of Latin American Studies. Their appropriateness as a speaker is not in the slightest doubt. 

In the past, the $858 would have come out of a departmental speaker budget. I would not have to spend the afternoon explaining in words of one syllable why the event was being held and who the person was, nor creating documentation to prove I really had looked up and compared flight costs. But that was how I spent a lot of time today that would otherwise have been dedicated to research and teaching. 

I have been a professor for many years and before that, I was a graduate student with a teaching role. I have written many small internal grants. Initially, it was only one every couple of years, for special activities like summer research travel. Now almost every routine activity requires a mini-grant. The five-year vita I recently prepared listed ten in a category I now call “Selected Internal Funding.” A complete list would have crowded the document, since as departmental budgets shrink, funding requests for everyday operations are needed more and more often.

I have never been turned down for a funding request. Never. I suspect the reason is that the institution funds all legitimate proposals. I repeat, these grants are for amounts that in the past department chairs or deans would have controlled and would have simply authorized. They would do this not out of corruption or favoritism, but because they were familiar with the field and could exercise good judgment about it.

When I raise this issue, some faculty say they have given up writing mini-grants and only apply for major external grants. I am also a good writer of these, but major grants, at least in my field, do not fund everyday operations. And by major grants I mean grants from national research organizations like the NEH or ACLS. I do not mean fundraising. I also lobby civic organizations to support campus projects, but such fundraising covers different kinds of activities than do research grants to the Guggenheim Foundation. 

The mini-grants address needs not covered by other mechanisms. That is why I continue to apply. I do have some better paid and wealthier colleagues who dispense with the mini-grants and support university activities with personal funds, but they are few. Others take consulting gigs to substitute for the mini-grants, pointing out that if it takes five hours to write and then administer a mini-grant for $750, and they can raise $750 in three hours’ consulting, they’ll do the consulting. 

My research office suggests that applying for mini-grants helps us to reflect and articulate our research programs to ourselves. The fact is it doesn’t. Writing a book proposal or a major external grant can do that, just as updating and reformatting a vita can help rethink a career trajectory. But explaining basic things like why we go to conferences or, as I did for one mini-grant, why professors read books, does not help me clarify my ideas. At the outside, it might help explain what I am doing to an uninformed auditor. But that kind of explanation to such a person makes a negative contribution to my scholarly life.

The formulae for the mini-grants typically imitate those of major grants in the sciences, as does the idea that everything done should be grant funded. But in these fields, people spend as much as half of their work time applying for the funds they need to do their jobs. Rather than address that impractical situation, universities now replicate it at every level. The exercise seems particularly absurd when we are asked by our university to defend our job positions, or to explain that conducting research is part of our contract with them, and we are complying. 

But what is happening here? Every time there is a new, allegedly competitive, centralized internal funding opportunity, it is presented as new funding intended to help us, yet simultaneously, money disappears from regular departmental budgets and the regular library budget. A central committee reviews all the proposals, and individual units across campus lose autonomy. The university says this reduces “siloing.” In some cases it can be fairer since there are always people involved who do not know the applicants. But overall, it seems to be about a reduction in shared governance.

That is to say that every mini-grant application is a symptom of a department without a budget and, in the case of many of mine, a library without materials. When departments do not have budgets for research and libraries do not have them for materials, and faculty instead apply for funding to a mysterious committee in Academic Affairs, that committee has taken over functions that multiple department chairs, librarians, and others would have shared in the past. This is a concentration of power in a rather faceless group. Even if there were a Senate committee administering such things, the atmosphere would be less corporate. 

I note further that Human Resources nowadays is not a department of my university, but a service we have outsourced to a corporate “partner.” People who have increasing power over us are not colleagues or university employees. I wonder when the same will happen to the committee that judges the mini-grants.

What should be happening instead? Universities should restore department budgets for routine scholarly activities that are central to university education, central for undergraduate students as much as for everyone else. This would increase the use of decentralized academic expertise, lodged in departments, which would in turn increase the efficiency of the overall system. And it would reduce the excessive administrative labor of the many, many scholars in my position.

University of Louisiana, Lafayette on October 25, 2018

Date: November 23, 2021 

To: Susannah Scott, Academic Senate Chair, UCSB 

Henry Yang, Chancellor, UCSB 

Cc: Michael V. Drake, UC President 

Cecilia Estolano, Chair, UC Board of Regents 

Robert Horwitz, Chair, UC Academic Senate 

From: Concerned UCSB Senate Faculty 

Re: The planning of Munger Hall at UCSB 

The UCSB Academic Senate Town Hall Meeting, “Faculty Questions on the Munger Hall Project,” held on November 15, 2021, intensified pervasive and significant concerns about 

(a) UCSB administration’s lack of response to fundamental questions about student well-being related to the Munger Hall project, including concerns about mental health, physical safety, security, and accessibility; 

(b) student housing options on campus and future housing projects; 

(c) building funding, planning and construction processes at UCSB; 

(d) abrogation of the right of faculty shared governance; 

(e) the impact of these decisions on UCSB’s stated commitment to social justice and equity; 

(f) UCSB administration’s failure to adequately take into account and address the opinion of experts in architectural design and rethink the design to ensure student well-being. 

To elaborate:

On the Design of Munger Hall: A broad swath of architectural design and housing experts both within and outside the university have criticized the design. Among its many problems we call particular attention to: (i) lack of natural light and ventilation—particularly the absence of openable windows; (ii) floor plan that reveals poor organization of space at the scale of the rooms, the suites, and the entire floor space at each level; (iii) inadequate thought given to student accommodation and well-being, given what we know about virus transmission, quarantine, and recovery in situations such as COVID-19; (iv) poor wayfinding and evacuation plans that would greatly endanger students in fires, earthquakes and other disasters; (v) massing and volume; (vi) environmental sustainability. 

We, the faculty, are gravely concerned by these issues, and we urge the UCSB administration, including Chancellor Yang, to address openly, explicitly and responsibly the many questions regarding the current design’s impact on the safety, security and mental well-being of the students. These fundamental questions were not answered at the November 15 Town Hall meeting and we urge the administration to answer them now. 

On Due Process: A key reason for the current state of affairs is that the usual design review process that has governed campus construction over the last 30 years was bypassed. The request-for-proposal stage of the design review process was ignored, thereby eliminating potential competition to Munger’s design. When the design review committee and its panel of architects were asked to comment, their views were not adequately taken into account. 

We have two options to move forward: 

1. Stop the plans. Begin the entire design process again following the established procedures of the design review committee. 

2. Halt the process and modify the plans. Consider the advice of a joint committee of experts on design, health and safety, drawn from both outside and inside UCSB, including Academic Senate Members and student representatives. The UCSB Academic Senate must have a say in the composition of such a panel of experts, the issues they will be asked to consider, and the way in which their recommendations would be implemented. 

We wish to send a clear message to the Chancellor, UC Office of the President, the UC Board of Regents, and the donor, that we will not accept inequitable and unsafe options for student housing. 

While we recognize the measures that must be taken to resolve the immediate housing crisis, we call on UCSB to democratically and transparently develop a long-range housing plan that ensures safety, affordability, community responsibility, and environmental sustainability for students, faculty, and staff. Not only does UCSB have a responsibility in this regard, but so do the President of the University and the UC Board of Regents. 

Sincerely, Concerned UCSB Senate Faculty, including, 

Constance Penley 

Swati Chattopadhyay 

Laurie Monahan 

Eileen Boris 

Dominique Jullien 

Bishnupriya Ghosh 

Lisa Hajjar 

Jeffrey Stopple 

Bassam Bamieh 

John Majewski Richard Wittman 

Ann Bermingham 

Michael Curtin 

Ann Jensen Adams 

Omer Egecioglu 

Mark A. Meadow 

Harold Marcuse 

Catherine L. Albanese 

Heather Badamo 

Sabine Frühstück 

William Robinson 

Barbara Herr Harthorn 

Herbert M. Cole 

David White 

Steven Gaulin 

Bhaskar Sarkar 

Kip Fulbeck 

Barbara A. Holdrege 

William Elison 

Kate McDonald 

Christina Vagt 

Juan E. Campo 

Arpit Gupta 

Julie Carlson 

Elisabeth Weber 

Stephan Miescher 

Jenni Sorkin 

Janet Walker 

Kevin B. Anderson 

Nancy Gallagher 

Aazam Feiz 

Hilary Bernstein 

Wolf Kittler 

John S. W. Park 

Silvia Bermudez 

Sara Pankenier Weld 

Marko Peljhan 

Jorge Castillo 

Jill Levine 

Evelyn Reder 

Kim Yasuda 

Erika Rappaport 

James Frew 

Janet Afary 

Fabio Rambelli 

Amr El Abbadi 

Giuliana Perrone 

Salim Yaqub 

Elena Aronova 

Cristina Venegas 

Stuart Tyson Smith 

Phill Conrad 

Volker M. Welter 

Adrienne Edgar 

Joseph Blankholm 

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi 

Catherine Nesci 

John W. I. Lee 

Sylvester O. Ogbechie 

Daniel Masterson 

Grace Chang 

Daniel Reeve 

Enda Duffy 

Roberta L. Rudnick 

Leroy Laverman 

Walid Afifi 

Iman Djouini 

Cherrie Moraga 

Dorota Dutsch 

Mark Maslan 

Charmaine Chua 

Roberto Strongman 

Amrah Salomón J. 

Ralph Armbruster Sandoval 

Carlos J. Garcia-Cervera 

Darren Long 

Sharon Tettegah 

Aashish Mehta 

Kaustav Banerjee 

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia 

Helen Morales 

Casey Walsh 

Terrance Wooten 

Birge Huisgen-Zimmermann 

Felice Blake 

Juan Cobo Betancourt 

Mario Garcia 

Scott Marcus 

Ingrid Banks 

Jody Enders 

Nelson Lichtenstein 

France Winddance Twine 

Lisa Jevbratt 

Ellen McCracken 

Juan Pablo Lupi 

Gisela Kommerell 

Edwina Barvosa 

Jeremy Douglass 

Valentina L. Padula 

Mayfair Yang 

Harvey Molotch 

Sven Spieker