Venice, Italy on May 8, 2026   

by Sean L. Malloy, Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), UC Merced

In September 2025, I wrote a guest post for this blog entitled “Why Should We Stand Up for the UC?” that placed much of the blame for the current federal assault against the University of California on the complicity and weakness of UC leadership, including the Regents, UCOP, and the Academic Senate.  In bowing to the false claims of antisemitism that have served as the Trump administration’s pretext for attacking American universities and unleashing police and administrative terror on anti-genocide protesters, the UC invited federal intervention while crushing the grassroots movements of students, faculty, and staff that not only stood up for the best values of humanity, but also represented the best defense against rising fascism and authoritarianism.  

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

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

 

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

 

Sacramento Faculty Lobbying on April 11, 2008 

by David Lloyd

During the encampments established and maintained by courageous students and faculty, whose ethical integrity in naming and resisting Israel’s recently resumed genocide in Gaza disgraced the complicity and collaboration of their administrations, activists held firm to the simple exhortation, “All eyes on Gaza.”  Though they aimed to disrupt business as usual at institutions that are deeply invested in Israel’s war machine, embroiled in research partnerships with the Israeli universities that design the weaponry, train the personnel, and program the genocide, and ideologically in step with the settler colonial ideology of Zionism, the students were concerned that media focus solely on their protests would distract from the atrocity unfolding with ever increasing violence across the killing fields of Gaza’s concentration camp. Even as their institutions, violating their duty to protect and foster all their students, called in heavily armed phalanxes of police at the behest of Zionist lobby groups and Republican and Democratic politicians alike, or tolerated the vicious assaults of right-wing vigilantes who recognized a natural affinity with their Zionist allies, the students continued to remind us that they were there, on their own campuses, because Israel had systematically destroyed every university and every school in Gaza in its ongoing campaign of cultural genocide that has now extended to the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Within the first months of their relentless assault on Gaza, Israel had demolished every institution of higher education in Gaza, sometimes with calculated mining of buildings, sometimes with targeted shelling and airstrikes. They murdered with deliberate intent administrators, professors, and students, even as they continue even now to destroy hospitals and target medical personnel. Their invasion aimed at the complete destruction of the capacity of Palestinians to reproduce either their biological or cultural life. Now, as Gazans have availed of the short-lived ceasefire that Israel was bound to violate sooner or later to return to the ruins of their homes, among the first things they have done is to reestablish schools and try to recreate a system of education. Education and the freedom to learn has always been a deep commitment of Palestinian society long before the land’s occupation by Zionist forces and Israel’s systematic attacks on Palestinian learning, from the theft of whole libraries and archives in the Nakba and beyond to its isolation and siege of universities on the West Bank. But here, as in so many other areas of civil society, Palestinians persist and professors in exile continue to offer classes to students in Gaza over the fragile internet connections that are intermittently available.

Capitulation

Meanwhile, in the United States, the question is whether there are any universities left, not in Gaza, but here. The hapless, often willing capitulation of university leaderships, even at the most richly endowed institutions in the world, to the inroads of the Trump administration’s “all out war” on higher education has already, within weeks of Trump’s unconstitutional executive orders, been a spectacular betrayal of their duty to protect the educational and social missions of their universities. Despite Palestinian student and protest leader Mahmoud Khalil’s appeals to Columbia’s administration for protections against doxxing and harassment, and his self-evidently well-grounded warnings that threats by Columbia faculty members against him would lead to his detention, no help was extended and the university effectively left the door open to ICE to disappear him and, subsequently, to conduct further warrantless raids on other students’ rooms—thus allowing access to law enforcement agencies that had been denied by previous administrations at the very moment when those agencies, unleashed by Trump’s fascistic sidekicks, have gone more rogue than ever before. As Khalil states in his letter from detention in Louisiana, Columbia “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.”

Chilling as Khalil’s case is, and much as it stands as a harbinger of the repression of dissent that is manifestly to come, he is right to maintain that what appears as an instance of brutal overreach by Trump’s authoritarian regime has to be seen in a longer trajectory of university capitulation to Zionist pressure and collaboration with US state interests. It is no less the case that above and beyond the intense and even eager repression of student dissent on the part of university administrations nationally since October 7, 2023, and regardless of the Trump administration’s recent amping up of the pressure on them, American universities have been engaged in a long campaign of self-destruction fueled by a malevolent combination of forces and organizations dedicated to the capture and containment of higher education at least since the late 1960s.

In the first place, the ongoing capitulation of Columbia and other institutions to Trump’s spurious investigations, which are turning the Department of Education under Linda McMahon into a ludicrous if hyperaggressive smack-down arena, have a longer and equally shameful history. To go back no further than the administration of accused accessory to war crimes, Joe Biden, his attacks on the encampments and baseless insinuation of the violent conduct and “disorder” of these orderly, disciplined and pluralistic protests scarcely differ from the rhetoric of Republican politicians and Zionist operatives. Biden’s statement in May 2024 that “People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across campus safely without fear of being attacked” established the same premise as informs the Trump DoE’s letter to Columbia that claims that the university had permitted “an unsafe or hostile work or study environment.” With regard to support for Zionism and defamation of students who oppose its genocidal program, hardly a hair separates the rhetoric of Biden from that of the Trump regime.

Executive Director of Columbia’s own Knight First Amendment Institute, Jameel Jaffer, forthrightly condemned the DoE’s letter as part of an effort to "subjugate universities to official power”. But it was the embarrassing performance of disgraced former Columbia President Minouche Shafik at Congressional hearings last April that threw the door open wide to such politically motivated inroads on the relative autonomy of higher education. Not only did she eagerly collude in Republican congressional repesentatives’ vilification of members of her faculty on the basis of statements cherry-picked without context, threatening to terminate the employment of one of them, she also permitted to pass without dissent the ignorant claim that “from the river to the sea” or “long live the intifada” are genocidal chants when a few minutes study, not to mention knowledge of her own first language, would have easily allowed her to refute such calculating stupidity.

Not that Shafik’s performance in this was any worse than her peers, the Presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, in December 2023. None seemed willing to contest the premises of the egregious opportunist Congresswoman Elise Stefanik when she absurdly “equated calls for an intifada as a call for a global Jewish genocide.” Like Shafik, UPenn’s Liz Magill’s and Harvard’s Claudine Gay’s heads soon rolled, but not for the reasons they should have. It was not any robust defense of academic freedom and first amendment rights, knowledge and research, context and nuance, but their failure to bend even further over backwards to the ignorant rantings of the congressional kangaroo court and their foot-shuffling inability to push back that left them and their comfortable, overpaid jobs vulnerable to further pressure from concerted Zionist activists, pro-Israel lobbyists, and conservative donors. 

As further university “leaders”, including the University of California’s Michael Drake, preemptively deliberate the path of no resistance, abandoning DEI programs and introducing disciplinary regulations on student protest and even curricula in advance of the arrival of a clown-cart of DoE Joint Task Force “investigators” on some 60 university campuses, one is left in the embarrassing position of having to invoke the memory of a U.S. Defense Department lawyer, Joseph Welch. Welch famously brought down Senator McCarthy after his long series of red-baiting hearings, merely by asking “Have you no decency?” But the corruption and intellectual debasement of the US universities and their leadership has descended to the point where it proves impossible for a single university president to call out the ignorance and stupidity of the politicians that harass them and whose project is by no means the protection of Jewish students, many of whom were among the encampments, but the erosion of higher education itself. That not a single one of these leaders of some of the wealthiest and most prestigious institutions in the country, supposedly the intellectual hubs of the nation, could summon the courage to defend the importance of knowledge, ethics,  and thought, or to condemn the genocide and the scholasticide ongoing at that very moment in Gaza, awareness and defiance of which were fully on display at their own students’ encampments, is both a symptom and a cause of the destruction of the university in the United States. Calculating connivance in stupidity, whether of politicians or of donors, consolidates the tropism towards intellectual vacuity and moral posturing that has long been the tendency of the corporate university's leadership. The greater the wealth and prestige, the less the ethical courage, comes to seem the basic principle of the university’s intellectual bankruptcy.

 Collaboration

Prior to around 2009 and Israel’s first all-out war on Gaza, which slaughtered around 1400 Palestinians, systematic repression of pro-Palestinian speech on US campuses was relatively rare: the general “common sense” of the university as of the US public was implicitly if not explicitly pro-Zionist, persuaded as people were that Israel was “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that the Oslo Accords had instituted a peace process from which Palestinians constantly walked away, and that—especially in the wake of 9/11 and the second Intifada, Palestinians were terrorists in any case. Grotesque racist cartoons of Arafat and other Palestinians, close kin to Nazi anti-semitic caricatures, appeared in every mainstream news outlet with mind-numbing regularity.  Understanding of Israel’s apartheid, of the reality of what passed for an “occupation”, of the conditions for Palestinian prisoners, of Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land and resources, and of the draconian slow genocide of the siege on Gaza were confined to a minority. Under such an effective news blockade, censorship and repression were unnecessary.

But the launching of public campaigns for BDS and in particular of the campaign for academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions called forth a heightened degree of censorship and repression now that the hegemony of the Zionist narrative could no longer be assured. Initial Zionist willingness to debate advocates of BDS, in the cocksure belief that, having held the dominant narrative for so long, they would easily prevail, rapidly waned as defense of Israel’s regime became increasingly fraught. Argument was displaced in short order by lawfare, a strategy that has developed and expanded in time with the brutalization of Israel’s own methods of repression and genocidal warfare. In warfare and lawfare, the failure to overcome resistance leads inevitably to retrenchment and amplification rather than recognition of the injustice of the cause. Here again, Khalil's case is exemplary: lawfare having repeatedly failed to break Palestinian solidarity in the courts, whether in cases brought against the American Studies Association for its boycott resolution in 2013 or Fordham University’s efforts to ban its SJP, the Zionist agenda is now being enacted in extralegal ways by an authoritarian state apparatus in the hope that gross violations of civil rights will produce a de facto transformation of the law, much as Israel’s violations of international law, as Noura Erakat has shown, have had the effect of producing new and brutal legal norms.

University administrations have not been shy of collaborating with the censorship and repression of Palestinian solidarity in synch with a wider political agenda that has seen the passage of House Resolutions condemning BDS, the banning of BDS by state contractors (including universities) in numerous states, and, most recently, actions like the direct interference of the Governor of New York State Kathy Hochul, who removed a job listing at CUNY’s Hunter College for a Palestinian Studies Scholar, on the grounds that the inclusion of the well-established scholarly terms and empirical or legal descriptors of Palestinian and other colonial conditions—apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism—when applied to well-documented Israeli practices constituted antisemitism. University repression has tended to proceed under the familiar mask of institutional neutrality but has not stopped short of outright censorship—as with the banning of student-led Palestine solidarity organizations (including Jewish ones)—and prosecutions. 

Although, as Palestine Legal reports, university repression has escalated markedly under Zionist pressure over the past 18 months or so, it has been so widespread since 2009 that a handful of examples will have to suffice. The rash of prosecutions of student protesters that have taken place since the breaking of the encampments by police force last spring had a forerunner in then-Chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, Michael Drake’s initiation of a disciplinary process that in 2010 led to the prosecution of the “Irvine 11”. Palestinian and Muslim students had disrupted a speech by then Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, whose invitation to campus at that moment was clearly provocative in the wake of Operation Cast Lead. The Orange County prosecutor relied on Drake’s sanctions to charge the arrested students with misdemeanors. The recent firings of Columbia Law professor Katherine Franke and Yale International Law professor Helyeh Doutaghi were notoriously preceded by that of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois in 2014. University presidents have almost univocally condemned the academic and cultural boycott despite overwhelming and well-documented evidence of the complicity of the Israeli universities with which they maintain close financial and research collaborations in Israel’s war crimes and violations of human rights.

That 100 US university presidents should have condemned the American Studies Association for its boycott resolution in 2013 came then as no surprise. Why would it have? Such are the presidents of institutions, like former UC President David Gardner, whose refusal to divest from apartheid in the 1980s fueled the student-led divestment movement that eventually brought many colleges and universities to do the right thing, which, indeed, they now celebrate on their websites. At that time, supporters of South Africa argued that “South Africa [was] freer than most African countries" and that it “was scarcely the only country in Africa systematically to violate human rights”.  Fed by a well-funded South African propaganda campaign, they questioned the readiness of black Africans for democracy and argued for “increasing all forms of contact” under the rubric of “constructive engagement.” Then, too, university administrators unleashed the police on demonstrators, dismantling the “shanty-towns” that were their encampments. 

Absent from that moment, however, was the charge of antisemitism, that has been so irresponsibly and recklessly flung at social justice activists as to have become virtually content-free. No divestment activist was ever charged with anti-Afrikanerism, though Elon Musk and Donald Trump have sought lately to appeal to the wounded feelings of white South African racists. The weaponization of antisemitism by Zionism has offered the university authorities a new instrument with which to suppress calls for divestment from Israel and corporations that support its apartheid agenda that build on the experience of anti-apartheid campaigns against South Africa. Resistance to divestment and the preservation of university investments in corporations that systematically abet Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights and assist the commission of genocide—from Hewlett Packard and Caterpillar to Boeing and Raytheon, Maersk and Chevron—is continuous with longstanding university complicity in the business of repression. Antagonism to BDS is intensified by its intersection with the rise of demands on universities to divest from fossil fuel corporations that have both accelerated and denied climate change and imperiled the future of the planet and of their students’ futures, thus exacerbating the contradictions that universities face between their putatively humanistic missions and their material as well as ideological embeddedness in a rapacious neoliberal order.

In some respects, then, the Zionist-led campaign against student activists and their faculty allies is parasitic on the longer history of efforts to subordinate the university to business interests or to those of the neoliberal corporate-state convergence. In its ever-more open embrace of fascist tendencies that has stripped away the democratic mask Israel has always sported, Zionism has seen its image in the mirror of global authoritarianism and found its real face there, to the alarm of whatever remains of that self-deluded category, the liberal Zionist. With unabashed alacrity, it has served as the leading-edge of a right-wing and corporate reclamation of the university whose aim is ultimately the destruction of an already hollowed out liberal institution. Appeals to protect the injured sensibilities of Jewish (read Zionist, since JVP and If Not Now clearly don’t count) students and faculty cynically mobilizes the last admissible remnant of the much-maligned campus DEI policies, ever caricatured and exploited by conservative media to generate a loss of faith in higher education that should have been laid at the foot of right-wing cuts.

At the same time, Zionist fear of such “woke” coalitions as that between Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movements has amplified right-wing antagonism to DEI and energized the Trump regime’s determination to abolish any vestige of anti-racism in the university. The conflation by Zionist organizations like the ADL of Palestine solidarity with antisemitism succeeds only in isolating the real struggle against actual antisemitism from genuine antiracist social movements. But the underlying aim is not to fight antisemitism but to defend an Israeli state predicated on Jewish supremacy which must make alliance with white supremacist authoritarianism to survive. The shared goal is to deradicalize our campuses at a moment when, as during the 60s, capitalism has lost its hegemony and finds that the majority of younger people lean socialist and the majority of the population favor government programs that by any other name would be social democratic, from universal healthcare to social security.

 

SUBORDINATION

Zionist organizations’ success in their campaign to shut down pro-Palestinian solidarity on our campuses accordingly finds its condition of possibility in a half-century right-wing campaign to transform the university in a direction that would subordinate it to the needs of the corporations. In 1971, Lewis Powell, later Supreme Court Justice, wrote for the American Chamber of Commerce a memorandum in which he laid out the necessity to take back the campuses and stem what he calls—in terms remarkably resonant with the language of the contemporary right—the “ideological war against the enterprise system and the values of western society” whose “disquieting voices” he found among the New Left. His portrait of the “minority” of left voices has become drearily familiar, as has his insistence on the lack of “balance”, “conspicuous by its absence on many campuses” and on the lack of “conservative or moderate” voices. Powell lays out a blueprint for taking back the American university which furnished the map for a concerted and long-drawn out right-wing campaign to regain hegemony, extending from the campuses to the media. 

Powell’s analysis and recommendations were amplified some years later by the conservative intellectual warrior Samuel Huntington (of “clash of civilizations” fame) in the Trilateral Commission report, The Crisis of Democracy of 1975, where he expressed alarm over “an excess of democracy” driven in large part by “a tremendous expansion in higher education.” Huntington expressed most clearly the anxiety shared by the Trilateral Commission that the result of the postwar expansion of higher education was “the overproduction of people with university education in relation to the jobs available for them,” leading to frustration and discontent with capitalism. The corollary of this perception was that “higher educational institutions should be induced to redesign their programs so as to be geared to the patterns of economic development and future job opportunities.”

Pursuant to Powell’s and Huntington’s logic, the following 50 years saw the steady decrease in state funding to higher education and the corresponding increase in university reliance on student fees and on wealthy and largely conservative donors to make up the shortfall, along with the increasing vocationalization of higher education. This has gone hand in hand with the shift from the notion of public education as a right (historically a right racially distributed, it must be said, primarily to white citizens) to the conception of education as a commodity in which to invest—and the corresponding transformation of the students themselves into commodities of varying value for accumulation. As Trump’s recent appointee to head the Department of Education, Linda McMahon succinctly put it, reflecting the desperately impoverished conception of education that best serves capitalist culture, “Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.”

We continue to live in the shadow of these antidemocratic definitions of the crisis of democracy and the remarkable degree to which it was blamed on the radicalization of the campuses. At the same time, we retain a similar but inverse understanding of the university and its functions. For a decade or so after the end of the 1960s, the university continued to offer shelter to critical and even radical voices and continued to present that as an essential part of its educational mission. To some extent, the relative hospitality of the university to critique stemmed from the origins of Anglo-American conceptions of the university in late Enlightenment philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt, for whom the university provided space for what Kant called the philosophical critique of the faculties—Law, Medicine, and Theology—that he saw as direct “tools of the state” (the contemporary equivalent would be the academic-military-industrial complex). They recognized that the university was, as Louis Althusser would later term it, an “ideological state apparatus”, but believed that critique could insure its openness to transformation and to the accommodation of new ideas. In some respects, Kant’s liberal idea of the university remains what we understand by a university and its meaning, an understanding that underlies the mostly under-theorized dismay on the part of faculty at the erosion of the humanities and the shrinking of the space in research or teaching for radical critique of the institution or of society. 

Through the 1980s, to a very large extent left critical thinking did exercise a considerable degree of counterhegemonic influence within the university, including antiracist as well as anticapitalist thought. In a sense, we would not be wrong to claim that within the university and through the teaching of generations of students, the left “won” the so-called culture wars as these played out in a gradual liberalization of social mores, from what the right now term “gender ideology” to the rise of social movements against globalization and of antiracist organizing, and even the emergence of a vigorous and theoretically informed Palestine solidarity movement that always understood itself in conjunction with other social movements. 

Such achievements, however, went hand in hand with a series of compromises with institutionalized modes of containment of critique. Thus “affirmative action”, attacked in courts and political initiatives, gave way first to “multiculturalism”, as the university sanitized the demands of the student divestment activists to end “apartheid on campus,” and multiculturalism, which responded to the student demand for diversification of the faculty, in turn succumbed first to the rubric of “excellence and diversity” (code for “diversity within the existing protocols of the university”), and finally to the fully bureaucratized DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. The university succeeded in successive neutralizations of efforts to transform its institutional function as an instrument of racial capitalism. The bitter irony is that the left seems forever doomed to defend institutional policies imposed by the right in effort to contain genuine desegregation and which the same right then attacks as extreme and absurd.

No less important to the assault on higher education were the fundamental historical changes in the conditions of possibility of the postwar liberal university. That university was more precisely a Cold War university: ideologically, it needed to demonstrate a link between capitalism, democracy and freedom, including the freedom to dissent that the capitalist West found essential to hold up against “totalitarian” socialism. This fact did mean that the universities furnished to a limited degree exploitable political space for a minority of radical intellectuals, and even to the more extensive class whom Powell identified as ranging “from a Herbert Marcuse, Marxist faculty member at the University of California at San Diego, and convinced socialists, to the ambivalent liberal critic who finds more to condemn than to commend.” That space, which the Cold War university could not entirely close down, enabled critical intellectual work within the university and in coalition with social movements and student organizations. Inevitably, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a still incomplete project of the neoliberal “New World Order” in its wake obviated the need to maintain that space of so-called “academic freedom” and entailed its gradual but steady erosion, until now, only remnants remain. The steady downsizing of the “critical” disciplines of the humanities and interpretive social sciences that responds to capital’s growing demand for outcomes and skill-sets to produce a docile and malleable labor force, relayed in a drumbeat of full-throated attacks on university education in the Wall Street Journal, heralded the transformation of higher education into vocational training, a tendency justified precisely by its increasing cost as a commodity that must repay the investment. 

Even as “tenured radicals,” as the right liked to call them, were extending their limited cultural hegemony in a restricted sphere of the university, conservative forces, always the better Marxists, played the economic card, militating for cuts in public support of higher education that gradually reduced both state and federal funding to a small percentage of university budgets. Consequently, if not programmatically, universities’ dependence on corporate funding or billionaire donors, who can de facto determine the educational policy of the institutions, left them vulnerable to the ideological demands of their patrons. Powell’s prescription to the Chamber of Commerce, to take back the American university, has been all but achieved. 

Contradiction

Into that space of vulnerability of the university, a product of both its internal contradictions and of external economic and political developments, Zionism has stepped, drawing in its wake the extreme right white supremacists with their hatred of wokeness, DEI, critical race theory, intellectual life, student radicals and “Marxist” faculty. It has proven as adept at leveraging the power of donors to limit expression on campuses as it has in making common cause with fundamentally antisemitic tendencies, from Christian Zionists to right-wing extremists, including openly antisemitic leaders like Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the idol of CPAC. We should recall that the fall of UPenn president, Liz Magill began not with October 7, but a few weeks before in the efforts of Zionist donors and organizations like the ADL and the American Jewish Committee to suppress the Palestine Writes festival on that campus in September 2023, on the grounds that it hosted “provocateurs willing to spread antisemitism.” For all these organizations’ protestations that they respect freedom of expression, it is clear that the aim is to suppress any critical analysis of the state of Israel that causes discomfort to Zionists, much as the Republican legislatures in Florida and other states have sought to suppress the teaching of the facts of Black enslavement, Indigenous genocide, and US structural racism on the grounds that they disturb white students. To claim, as the AJC did, that “Events that gather writers, scholars, and artists to focus on a particular culture’s experience and its art are vital parts of the university environment on American campuses” while at the same time denying Palestinians or their allies the right to name in the terms that they choose the determining factors in that cultural experience, Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide, betrays the insurmountable contradictions in which the Zionist narrative consistently founders.

As Albert Memmi long ago pointed out in his classic text on settler colonialism, The Colonizer and the Colonized, every colonialist eventually gravitates into violent authoritarianism, driven there by insuperable contradictions. “Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom”, Memmi observed. The tendency of Israeli political culture towards an ever-more extreme and genocidal racism over the last couple of decades bears out Memmi’s logic, just as his equally trenchant remark on the ways in which those fascist tendencies return to exert their influence on the “mother country”, or the states that sponsor the settler colony. The rightward turn of Zionism, which has stemmed from its inability to maintain its liberal façade once confronted with a vigorous Palestine solidarity movement capable of communicating Palestine’s “particular culture’s experience” under Israeli domination, now exerts its destructive influence on the American university, seeking the silencing, the detention, the prosecution, the dismissal of those who make its contradictions and its crimes uncomfortably public. 

The common cause that Zionist organizations have made with the fascistic Trump regime in its similarly motivated antagonism to intellectual life and genuine education is not a merely contingent or opportunistic alliance. It belongs with the very logic that has informed Zionism since its inception and that was initially openly expressed: every colonial enterprise has to eliminate both the physical presence and the cultural and intellectual life of the indigenous population. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza destroyed every one of its universities but has not broken the spirit or the creative and intellectual will of the Palestinian people. On the contrary, cultural destruction tends to rebound on the perpetrator and Zionism's deepening antagonism to intellectual debate and creative life manifests all the mediocrity and spiritual rigidification characteristic of what Memmi dubbed "the colonizer who accepts", the willing agent of racism and dehumanization. 

It remains to be seen whether the administrations and trustees of American universities will muster the courage to face down Zionist pressure to close down what remains of free inquiry and expression in the US university and resist MAGA’s inroads under the spurious cover of investigations of antisemitism. The record to date of capitulation and preemptive collaboration makes it unlikely that they will find the will to do so. That may leave us the sole alternatives either of imagining and realizing a transformation of the university and its mission radical enough to constitute its abolition or of abandoning it to sink into the ruins it has brought down upon itself.

Washington, D.C. on any given day in the 21st Century

As Trump kicks off his campaign of nonstop harms, universities and humanities programs will need to look to themselves for the resources to help the people that count on them and advance the ideas, cultures, and practices we need. 

Neither universities nor humanities organizations can do this now and will need to do much better over the next few years.

This post is the final part of my talk at the New Orleans MLA Convention, "The Humanities Die in Darkness." The first part is posted here, and the underlying paper is in the first issue of Public Humanities.

The humanities' first funding scandal is that the country’s main source of basic research funding spends essentially no money on humanities scholarship. Using NSF data, of the $54 billion or so in research that the federal government funds in U.S. higher education, $69 million goes to the humanities. That is, the humanities receive 0.13% of the federal total.  This is a tiny slice of the overall federal research pie, and rounds essentially to zero.  See the figure above.

 

The second funding scandal is what happens when we move from extramural to internal or institutional funds. Of the nearly $100 billion that universities spent on research in FY2022, $25 billion came from the universities themselves. That’s a lot of research, especially outside of STEM.  In a epistemically just or epistemically neutral world, universities would try to even out external shortfalls for the humanities by increasing the humanities’ share of internal funding.  

 

But this is not what happens.  Here are some sample universities.

I’ve simplified the NSF data categories into government, corporate or foundation funding, and internal funds (“institution funds” in the NSF tables).  Watch institutional funds, the grey band. It represents the universities' own money spent on research.  Research universities take a quarter or even a third of research expenditures from their own pockets.

 

So if STEM research is profitable, and makes money, maybe all this internal money is available for the arts, humanities, social sciences, education, law, and so on?

 

In reality, no! Here’s the breakdown of internal expenditures for these universities —the grey bar of total institutional funds is broken out with a separate bar for all non-STEM expenditures next to it.

The short bars are all of non-STEM funding.  The yellow band is all humanities disciplines together.  A few elite university humanities programs do well. Princeton at 10.6% of institutional funds for humanities is the highest I’ve found. Penn, however, is under 2% -- it spends less than 2% of its own research funds on humanities research. The University of Arizona is about 2%. Iowa is about two and a half percent, Kansas back under 2 percent. 

 

Not pictured here, the University of California spent a half a percent of its total research expenditures on the arts and humanities together in 2018-19. The University of Oregon and Stanford University spent a fifth of one percent of their internal research funds on humanities research (in 2022). 

 

Clearly, interest in or respect for humanities research is not a function of whether or not you can afford it.  With a few exceptions, universities just don’t use their internal funds to compensate for extramural funding injustice towards the humanities but use these internal funds to perpetuate this injustice.

 

One way to remember this is in round numbers. 

 

Universities spend $100 billion on research (from all sources). 

 

One tenth of that goes to all non-STEM fields as a group, social sciences included.  

 

And then one-tenth of these non-STEM funds goes to humanities disciplines. There’s a tacit One Percent Rule for the humanities—some universitis are above, most are around one percent or below.

 

But where does all that other internal research money go?    

 

It goes to subsidizing STEM research, because STEM research in reality loses money for its universities. I can’t go into this here, except to say yes, you have been gaslighted about this by your own administrators. Universities use the vast majority of their internal funds to make up for the failure of external STEM research sponsors to pay the full costs of STEM research.  Bear in mind, too, that Project 2025 has a plan for the Trump administration to make this problem much, much worse (see page 355).

 

This gets us to the third scandal, which is entirely of the humanities’ own making.  I’ll cast it as a series of questions. Why are you hearing about the research funding scandals from me? Why are you looking at my homemade figures made through my individual readings of NSF survey data? Where are the large scale reports from the humanities disciplines? Where is the humanities equivalent of these very large research funding surveys and analyses that are required of the NSF by law? Where are the NEH, ACLS, MLA, AHA, APA, NHA, and Mellon reports on research underfunding, coupled with policy demands for more funding? Since this would be a large undertaking, where are the collaborations among the leading humanities associations and between them and the NSF? Where is the humanities research infrastructure to study the very damaging lack of humanities research infrastructure? 

 

The answers to these questions are the same: nowhere.  I have found no sustained institutional effort to understand the state of humanities research funding.  A key reason why we have no meaningful research funding on the scale of the profession is that we have no data and no public discourse about such funding.  

 

STEM, in contrast, has been forced to have data and discourse since the 1950s.  They have made a virtue of necessity—and also made a nonstop, militant advocacy program.  Our failure here has inflicted damage on humanities scholarship and on its public reputation. This is damage that we have never tried to define, much less systemically oppose.

  

Our main strategies for survival have been as follows: stressing teaching, expanding public engagement,  and shrinking graduate programs, which make the problem of underpowered research even worse. These false solutions are also driving students away and damaging academic employment. Students and the wider public are attracted to fields that generate visible, useful knowledge about problems in their lives. 2023’s infamous New Yorker article by Nathan Heller, “The End of the English Major?” rested on interview evidence that students follow research investments, not quasi-educational activities.  10 years ago I published a piece in the MLA journal Profession, called “The Humanities as Service Departments.”  That is where ignoring research funding has been taking us.  Students do not major in service courses.

 

The natural and social sciences work under a social contract to generate public knowledge, and so do the humanities. The equation is Research + funding=public benefits=have a future.

 

I am sorry to say that this third scandal of our own making mixes two modes. One is gaslighting—we allow ourselves to be gaslighted about university funding; we then gaslight each other about how this doesn’t really matter.  

 

The other is the practice I mentioned at the start: anticipatory obedience, a reflex on a matter of world crisis like Israel’s destruction of Gaza as well as on matters closer to home, like our own professional survival. 

 

I’ve laid out the alternative elsewhere: surveys, data, analysis, publication, dissemination, advocacy, howling into the void until the void listens. The void does eventually listen.  

 

The void needs to hear us say that extramural funding must by doubled, tripled, quadrupled until the 166,000 college and university humanities instructors have research support in the ballpark of their needs as identified in the surveys we must conduct. 

 

The void needs to hear us say that STEM disciplines must move towards full coverage of their overheads so that much more institutional funding can be used to give humanities scholars appropriate research support.  We need a 10 year plan, and we need it now!

 

My thought about 2025 has been that Trumpism is likely the end of this fifty-year political cycle and not its resurgence.  But we are the ones who have to work to make that true. It is not up to us alone, but it is also up to us.  And we need the money and the infrastructure to have the power so our research can make this difference.

 

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.