Wayne State, Detroit on April 12, 2019  

This is the corrected text of a talk I gave online to the Wayne State University conference, “Public Budgets, Public Good,” on April 30, 2026.  Many thanks to the audience, whose questions about theory and practice were excellent. Thanks also to the sponsors: Labor@Wayne, AAUP, HELU, and Public Good U. I’m still sorry I wasn’t there in person.

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I’ve always seen the university as a force for the general development of society, having been influence by a tradition that includes Humboldt & Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Du Bois, John Dewey, CJR James, and many thinkers since.   This has made it easier to grasp the fact that the university’s largest effects are a combination of non-monetary and public.  These public effects have been rendered “dark matter” by the political and business worlds, which have steered people exclusively toward the private pecuniary effect of the B.A. wage increment over high school. College presidents and other officials have simply echoed them.  This is overbearingly true in the US and the UK, and amounts to a mass miseducation about education. But it is also true elsewhere, and apparently in China.

 

East Village on October 31, 2022   

Looks like it.  

There’s some good stuff in Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic article, “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” but the piece unravels into a tool of the thing people actually hate about the humanities, which is not its implications for social justice but its civil wars. It blames the increasingly desperate struggles of the academic humanities not on right-wing enemies but on liberal humanists—a woke Mellon Foundation and its president Elizabeth Alexander.

I was one of the people that Harper interviewed for this article.  (Here, “Harper” always refers to the author, Tyler Austin Harper). He was fun to talk with, is a serious person, and worked hard on this piece, all of which I respect.  When we spoke, I emphasized our terrible money problems, which I argued tower over our manageable and ordinary methodological debates.  

 

I said that the real issue is our lack of the funding to produce and disseminate our knowledge at the scale that would get the kind of social attention allotted to medicine and computer science. We may think this is intrinsic to their topics and status but it is mainly the result of their vast organizational labor, labor of a kind that the humanities establishment, Mellon included, refuses to try. 

 

Harper cites my Public Humanities piece on funding—“Humanities Decline in Darkness”-- for a statistic in which federal humanities funding rounds to zero. But you have to get to his third-to-last paragraph before he makes his best causal claim about the current situation: 

The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch . . . 

 

I would have finished that last sentence by writing, “and so we don’t build the data and resource infrastructure that would make our needs visible to politicians and the public.”  But that’s not where Harper goes.

 

Harper’s other most effective moment comes from Phillip Brian Harper, the Mellon program director for higher learning: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change. It’s not to serve in perpetuity as the piggy bank for research.” Mellon, he said, was never supposed to be a panacea for the humanities.

 

 

Great, but who will do the shaking of university management? Mellon? Phil Harper says its role is to catalyze. On this topic, it’s not.  

 

He is of course right that the situation is completely appalling. To repeat, even though sociocultural knowledge is essential to solving any of the world’s epic problems, the rich universities listed below spend almost none of their institutional funds for R&D on non-STEM fields.

 

Figure 1. Institutional Expenditues on R&D, Selected Universities

 

SOURCE: NSF Higher Education R&D Survey (HERD) FY2024, Tables 14, 23, 29.

Yes, these figures likely exclude individual faculty research funds via outside grants, named chairs, and other department-managed funds.  But as indicators of institutional investment in humanities infrastructure, they are shocking. Universities’ own refusal to fund humanities research is also one cause of our society’s inability to deal with its core problems.

 

Yet Harper comes not to bury funding failure but to chastise social justice. The fault for him lies not in Trump’s destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities or 40 years of right-wing culture wars, but in Mellon’s interest in a better society.

 

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Harper makes two main claims. The first is that “classical” and “social justice” scholarship aren’t complementary approaches but rivals. They compete bitterly for scarce and dwindling funds. 

 

The solution to this is obviously an alliance between rivals to fight for massively better funding for all, at least ten times more funding than socio-cultural scholarship has today.  

 

But Harper diverts attention from funding with his second argument: “social justice” research is a betrayal of humanities scholarship, a kind of negation of it. This increase in “the decidedly sublunary work of furnishing political propaganda” makes Harper wonder whether the academic humanities are worth saving at all.  And Mellon, he writes, has shifted to funding this political propaganda since the arrival of Elizabeth Alexander as president.

 

Let’s try to understand this claim. Harper’s evidence for a policy shift is a Foundation announcement dated June 30, 2020. Mellon declared a new focus on “just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.” Board chair Kathryn A. Hall explained that “our reinvigorated mission and strategic direction . . . not only builds on our historic commitment to the arts and humanities, but rightly emphasizes a desire to make the ‘beauty, transcendence, and freedom’ found there accessible and empowering to all members of society.”  

 

The new direction assumes the complementarity of what we might call “basic” and “applied” humanities research, and not that applied research—addressing social questions—debases basic scholarship.  Complementarity—with awareness of different modes, aims, and questions--is assumed in every STEM field and social science of which I’m aware, so Harper has a special burden to show that the humanities are unlike all other forms of academic research in this way.

 

Alexander confirms complementarity in the announcement by adding, “We are a problem-solving foundation looking to address historical inequities in the fields we fund.” This also expresses reflexivity about Mellon’s own role in knowledge creation, which includes a past of supporting the kind of epistemic biases and limits that need constant correction in every field.

 

The new Mellon direction also seemed to aim at the democratization of humanities knowledge—at taking the results of humanities research outside of a small elite while also learning from communities about their existing knowledges and practices.

 

Harper presumably approves of problem-solving, and he definitely opposes the perpetuation of historical inequities which he agrees exist.  He sounds fine with humanities for the people, which is the official policy of the state humanities councils and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) whose origin story he affirms. He writes,

[U]nder Alexander, the foundation deserves credit for working to create a more economically just landscape within higher education. Before Alexander’s arrival, Mellon tended to disburse lavish funding to institutions that were already rich. Now, as part of Mellon’s commitment to equity, it is making a conscious effort to provide funding to public and less selective institutions. It has also increased funding for university-led prison education programs

 

All true, good, and important.  So what is so bad about Mellon’s new direction?  

 

Nothing, actually. (Its inaction on overall funding is a separate question to which I’ll return)  But to save what must have been the original idea for the story, Harper spends most of the piece making the false argument that “applied” humanities scholarship (not his term) is political propaganda.

 

How does he show this?  First there’s his prior, the false legacy dualism in criticism and some related humanities fields in which the criticism of texts and historical materials (basic) is denatured and corrupted by engaging in criticism of society (applied). It’s this dualism that turns “social justice” into “political propaganda” that ruins scholarship. 

 

This dualism may encourage him to search his anecdotes for polarity. For example, he spoke with a scholar who “confessed that . . .he had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant. I suspect that this may not be a rare occurrence.”  Harper’s assumed incompatibility between the first and more race-focused version of this scholar’s work makes this a problem rather than progress. 

 

Second is Harper’s assumption that it’s bad to get steered or shaped by a call’s language or a program officers. There seems to be a tacit idealization of “classical” humanities scholarship as pre-social and not in any good way developed by thinking about problems it might solve, or by being asked to change emphases in a proposal by an agency official.  

 

I see this as a humanities provincialism about sponsored research, which always involves calls, program officers, public pressures, institutional forces and so on.  This is not epistemically less valid than idealized autonomous scholarship. Remember actor-network theory and dozens of related ways of discussing the collaborative nature of thinking.  So the scholar who “reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race” likely improved his project. Program officers at NIH, NSF, and other STEM agencies do this advising routinely.  Agency shaping can be good or bad. 

Harper doesn’t have the evidence to rule out good shaping in that more-race-oriented project or the others. (Gabriella Coleman’s valuable commentary on Harper, “The Exposé that Wasn’t,” is really good on this point.)

 

So it’s not that “social justice” aims are inherently anti-intellectual and ruin scholarship. Better knowledge in many areas can come from working like Pasteur rather than like Einstein, to reference a classic study of the (complicated) relation between basic and applied research.  And it’s also not true that agency shaping is bad per se.   

 

So Harper falls back on a third way of making his claim that woke Mellon is ruining the humanities. That is to scorn sample program language as self-evidently non-scholarly.

Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice.

I assume Harper means this program, run by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).  Awarded titles include the following: 

 

·      The Dam, the Road, the Port: The Transformation of the Brazilian Northeast during the Long Twentieth-Century

·      State of Mine(Mind): Affective Geographies of California's Rural North

·      Urban Tropics: Dwelling under South and Southeast Asian Urban Microclimates

·      Uneasy Intimacies: Seeing Irei and Aesthetic Ambiguity Through Fukunosuke Kusumi's Art

·      Black Anti-settler Placemaking: Cooperation Jackson's Eco-villages from Mississippi to Vermont

·      Fiber Optics: Henequén Classification and its Consequences

·      Troubled Waters : Natural Disaster, Space, and the State in Precolonial Panjab (1707-1849)

 

Check these and the others out for yourself.  They all analyze major issues and strike me as likely to make original contributions to knowledge.  I don’t at all see Harper’s justification for assimilating all the projects to “identity” and “justice” studies. To do this, he needs to stereotype everyone on the basis of the appearance of words like “settler,” “queer,” “colonial” etc. I don’t even see how they’re all applied rather than basic research. He offers no evidence (just the legacy assumption) that these are not intensely scholarly, deeply intellectual projects.

 

At breakfast before drafting this post, I read an interesting review of The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture by Susanna Berger (Princeton University Press, 2025).  “Central to The Deformation,” the reviewer writes, “is the question of how religious elites wielded anamorphosis as a means of gatekeeping the divine.”  I love this kind of stuff. But is a book about the relations among perspective in drawing, theology, and institutional power in 17^th century Europe clearly epistemically “classical”—pure, basic research-- and thus intellectually superior to work on “Affective Geographies of California's Rural North”?  The answer is no. Mellon / ACLS funded research simply cannot and should not be delegitimated with superficial separating of the sheep from the goats.

 

The same goes for Harper’s disdain for a grant to Colorado College.

In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.

Harper doesn’t actually know what the conference organizers did and did not consider, but in any case, “how to dismantle systems of oppression” is one of the ‘permanent problems” of human beings. It is also a running theme of literature, history, and philosophy for thousands of years.  One might find the Colorado College formulations a bit plodding and yet not try to discredit the program through a false distinction between intellectual work and its social contributions.

 

I can imagine Harper doing a different kind of research that leads to a different article about the humanities.  He would go to Colorado College, interview the students, staff, and faculty involved in the program, and sit in on its courses for a few weeks while also visiting classes that aren’t part of the program.  He could then compare and contrast and identify the actual cognitive and other effects of the program on the participants. We would all learn something about what actually happens through humanities funding on college campuses to (and by) students and their teachers—for better and worse.  This is the real void in public understanding, and Harper’s dismissal of a program on the basis of its terminology doesn’t help fill it in.

 

So, Mellon’s new direction is less elitist. It puts greater emphasis on “applied” over “basic” research (“Pasteur’s Quadrant”) while insisting on their complementarity (and equal intellectuality). It funds some research on white supremacy and overcoming it--along with funding many other things, and really this funding is a drop in the bucket of overall social need for knowledge about racial nationalism, the authoritarian personality, etc.  Mellon program directors shape applications, as they always have.  They may now fund a higher proportion of outreach and communication programs compared to applied or basic research, but Harper doesn’t get into this important issue.  Finally, Mellon is the last big national funder in research-starved humanities field.  Only the last of these strikes me as a scandal.

 

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Daylight does appear when Harper takes the other side of his own argument. 

It is hard to argue that the tens of millions of dollars that Mellon is putting toward internships for working-class kids at public colleges and universities would be better spent financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France. But this calculus also says something about the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods—programs for humanities undergrads, resources for Ph.D. students, traditional humanities research, support for emerging fields and endowment-poor universities—against one another.

Yes, absolutely: we must address with the intent of solving “the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods against one another.”  We must at the same time argue for “financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France.” But it isn’t Elizabeth Alexander or Mellon that set up the zero-sum game. This happens when critics pit different kinds of humanities scholarship against each other.  

 

Mellon et al. didn’t set up the zero-sum funding game.  But what are they doing about fixing it? 

 

I’d trace some of Harper’s completely valid distress about the system to having grown up in this barren funding world where one’s work is always losing out to someone else’s.  The real issue with the humanities’ national leadership isn’t that they politicize scholarship, but that they don’t fight openly and systematically to fund a great deal more of it.  

 

This gets us back to Phil Harper’s statement: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change.”

 

But Mellon is not doing that. 

 

I can find reports galore about the crisis in STEM funding—everything from the cuts to indirect cost recovery to the losses of whole areas of research (like racial disparity in public health outcomes that NIH had funded for years) and of scientific personnel. I can find nothing from the humanities associations about their research funding problems.  

 

NEH has been gutted, yet MLA, which did indeed help sue the government over NEH, has joined NHA, AHA, APA et al. in neither collecting data to show the funding problem nor developing a systematic plan for building such funding. 

 

Similarly, the ACLS’s Strategic Framework 2025-2030 doesn’t have a sentence about tracking humanities research funding or expanding it. I see all these great scholars on the board. What are they doing?  What are we actually doing?  Why isn’t something like Figure 1 above on Mellon’s website as part of a large, structural analysis, rather than on the blog of an obscure professor? Universities need to be “taken by the collar.” But who will take the humanities agencies by the collar?

 

None of the solutions are really so abstract anymore.  People here and there have sketched out plans. I outlined one version in a long discussion paper for the MLA Executive Council in 2022, and ended my presidential address in January 2023 with a sketch of the steps we need to take, somewhat expanded in the print version (“Criticism After This Crisis”).  Also in 2022, a sub-committee of the Executive Council developed a reporting structure on cuts (or growth) across the country, planning to use the Association’s large, elected Delegate Assembly to feed information to headquarters for analysis and reporting. The Association never set this up. 

 

Two years went by, and the MLA then set up a panel explicitly about funding at the Convention in January 2025. 

 

Figure 2. MLA Convention Program 2023, Panel 139

 

The panel was an excellent (re)start on the topic, and the panelists had a good planning meeting afterwards.  We outlined NEH, Mellon, MLA, ACLS working together on research data, reporting, development. Then Trump took office and started his attacks. My colleagues bailed on the plan, which as far as I know, is dead.

 

With some discipline, we can replace our historic humanities pastime, discrediting each other’s research, with the project of building a material base for all of it.  If we can’t show basic mutual respect for divergent (and radical) research within the profession, then we are doomed.  But actually we can do this, and many, many of us already are.

 

I again invite both Harpers and everyone else into the effort of building the material base. 

 

London on April 18, 2015   

This is the talk I gave at the National Day of Action for Higher Education on April 17. My co-panelists and I, Tim Kaufman-Osborn and Amy Offner, each had 12 minutes.  To keep it short I organized it as a set of propositions.

 

1. The first necessary step has been taken –university  lawfare against the Trump Administration.

 

This recognizes that the Trump regime are not reformers of higher ed, but are its destroyers. This increasingly obvious fact has a hard implication, which is that the Trump administration is an enemy to be defeated, not a counterparty to be bargained with.

 

An organization that saw this immediately has been the AAUP, which rapidly went to court, and I can’t overstate how impressed I am by both the national organization and by so many individual chapters— AAUP Penn, Rutgers, it partner CUCFA at the University of California, multiple unions, and many other faculty and staff organizations.  You all have done great work at getting inside the high-speed operating loop of the Trump people, and being appropriately adversarial. There’s a real chance that we will win on many fronts, if we keep fighting hammer and tongs.

 

2. Higher ed must work with Democrats but must not be led by them.  

 

The reason is that the Democratic party has repeatedly failed to articulate the purposes and the political economy of higher education. The result is that Democrats see themselves as the natural party of education—they get the votes of most college graduates—while misselling what higher ed is and therefore not convincing the wider electorate of its value.

 

For example, the most painful chart I’ve recently seen is from the Democratic pollster David Shor via Ezra Klein.

 

 

Amazingly, the allegedly Democratic issues of education and student debt are actually in a toss-up with the Republicans.  Voters don’t really know whether the Republicans who want to eliminate the Dept of Education that administers financial aid including Pell Grants, or that wants to give student loans back to private banks, are better or worse for education than Democrats. This is an obvious disaster for Democrats, and for higher ed.

 

Voters are confused in part because mainstream Democrats have no strongly anti-Republican positions on college. Most Democratic politicians aren’t really for free college—that’s Bernie Sanders still out there on his own. Democrats aren’t really for debt cancellation.  Democrats aren’t really for full public funding of regional colleges so working-class people get really high quality degrees. Democrats are for college as job training—just like Republicans are. Democrats have one idea about college, which is that it’s tuition-based vocational training, with some means testing, but high net costs are okay.  This is Gov. Newsom in California, Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate.  They sell us out as job training and they still can’t get non-college voters. 

 

Democrats are bad on advancing strong higher education for the basic reason that they don’t listen to educators.  Educators need to lead ourselves.

 

3. Anti-intellectualism is always pervasive in America—and yet it is not popular in America. 

 

The Democrats aren’t convincing people to vote big for great public colleges not because college is too intellectual, but because the Democratic version isn’t intellectual enough. Republicans are the enemies of popular thinking, everyday study, affordable intellectuality. But as I’ve just suggested, so are tag-along job-fixated mainstream Democrats.  Governor Newsom had the professional college-hater Charlie Kirk on his podcast in March, and when Kirk mocked students who “go to Cal to go study North African lesbian poetry,” the Democratic education governor chuckled right along with him: “Well, I don’t know every single damn course,” the governor explained. “It should be like, no way.”  Meanwhile, the proverbial jobs of the future require more education, not less, across all disciplines, especially in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, including in North African lesbian poetry.  The Democrats are screwing up even their vocational issue without offering an alternative.

 

4. Higher ed’s own story – freed from the Democratic party-- must center on popular intellectuality. On popular thinking, thinking as popular, thinking for all.  College has a core role in this sense: college helps you think so you can have the life you want.  

 

College doesn’t help you adapt to “this modern world” by learning to use AI so it can think for you. College doesn’t mainly help you meet important people and make new friends. College doesn’t mainly give you practical workplace skills.  College helps you think so you can have the life you want.  You may think that’s a weak bumper sticker—it sure needs work-- but it’s a hell of a lot better than the college bumper stickers that political parties or university presidents are selling right now (“study a higher-wage major”)! 

 

We must stress as part of this re-narration the non-pecuniary benefits and the public benefits of learning as much as everyone already stresses the private benefits.  And yet the re-narration of college has to start with helping everyone of all backgrounds, working class, immigrant, racialized, boringly middle class, queer, everybody, build the personal life you want, not the life mapped out for you by your family, your neighborhood, your background, but the one gradually imagined and then given to you by you. Here’s why we don’t ban books but why we read them. College helps you think so you can have the life you want.

 

The next two items are a package. I’m going to raise a tricky issue and sound elitist, though I will argue that my claims are anti-elitist. 

 

5.  Higher education is being crushed both by propaganda-based Republican hate and by its twin, a widespread knowledge crisis among US voters.  

 

That last chart, David Shor’s, shows this aspect as well as the weakness of the Democratic storyline: many if not a majority of American voters are profoundly mistaken, wrong, misguided, or ignorant about political and social realities and causal connections, including education.

 

The data show that Republicans, on most of their powerhouse (lower right quadrant) issues, perform worse that they say they will on the basis of their wrong ideas —Republican presidents oversee lower growth than Democratic presidents and higher debt growth in relation to inflation; inflation was twice as high under Biden as under Trump 1, but that is not the general pattern. Or lower-left quandrant issues (less urgent, Republican advantage)—AI is a Republican issue because they will completely deregulate it and then it will work better? How is trade going? Unemployment: there’s the same scatter in the overall trend. Voters rate Republians as good as Democrats on civil Liberties even as Republicans favor summary deportations, arbitrary cancellations of student visas, etc. -- it’s as though most respondents aren’t sure about the meaning of the term. Drug addiction—voters prefer the party that kills any and all public health programs? Democrats are tied on voting rights with a Republican party obsessed with voter suppression for 25 years.  

 

Another chart on the knowledge issue: We have evidence that the misinformed voter voted Trump, and the “get the right answer” crowd voted Harris. (I discussed this chart in “Politics of Thinking”).

 

 

 So first, Democrats have a lot of weak positions that don’t resonate with voters.  (They were bad at taking inflation seriously, and Harris did drop the anti-corporate policies that are actually popular with voters.) But second, many, many voters also can’t correctly describe reality and then pick the policy and the candidate that correlates with the outcome they want.  Hence the term knowledge crisis, a phenomenon that is being exploited politically.

 

6. Higher education has to present itself as the solution to American wrongness. 

 

This is going to involve a few things.  I’ve mentioned one—redefining college as the key to the thinking that helps people have the lives they want. 

 

Another is the creation of an ethical framework around the duty to know. Nobody has the right to not bother to figure out whether a president really can engage in summary deportations and maybe not follow court orders to fix bad deportation mistakes. Shrugging about this, and staying confused or unsure, is an unethical position, as much for bystanders as for government agents of the policy. Tens of millions of people are indeed not bothering to think about this kind of Trumpian tyranny, or about the destruction of US university finances and of academic freedom.  Not thinking is a major reason why illegal, unjust, and destructive things keep happening. Voters have no right not to think about them.  We’re going to need a broader cultural change that both inspires and demands serious popular thinking about public issues.

 

Educators must figure out encouraging ways to take a stand on this, and must do this at a time when we have been largely brainwashed into thinking that it is elitist to expect US voters to be intelligent and to take responsibility for their mistakes. This is not elitist—it is a matter of survival. People know this in their personal lives, and every successful activist has known that it’s not elitist to know things. Authors of slave narratives knew things, Malcolm X knew things, your favorite auto mechanic knows things, indigenous leaders know things, your really good plumber knows things, all your sports heroes know things, all the activists we admire were successful because their action, their pursuit of power, was suffused in knowing things. And then these knowers didn’t back down from fights, but instead sought fights. The AAUP knows things. We know things. The only way to escape the Deplorables Taboo, in which college types and professionals offer a double standard of no intellectual accountability for “regular Americans,” is to embrace the conflict, create the conflict that needs to be created, hate the ignorance but love the knower, win the conflict on the basis of knowledge.

 

I’m suggesting that the university, collectively, must frame an existential duty to know. Zuckerberg has the duty to know how his products damage thinking, politics, and mental health. Bezos has the duty to know that the Donald Trump who would outlaw trans people and refugees would also kill trade with tariffs. A small majority of voters doesn’t get to be wrong again and again and then get all mad and hostile when people point that out –they do do this anger-based deflection, but they have no right, and in contrast they do have a duty to know—about the real consequences of how they think.  Universities, professors, students, everyone, have to lay out a large national narrative about this duty to know.

 

 

7. make the full ask for all of the  material conditions that will allow popular intellectuality to spread. We are twenty-five years into the student debt crisis and the public university funding crisis, and we do know what these are: 

A.    free public college.  The goal is Debt-free for all and free tuition is the most efficient means.

B.    Student debt cancellation. 

C.     Programs enabling full inclusion and radical diversity: full and defiant support for anti-discrimination measures leading to racial equality within colleges and universities. 

D.    Tenure-track jobs for all instructors who want them.

E.     Tenure for staff—by which I mean the replacement of “at will” with “just cause” employment for the staff of our colleges and universities 

F.     The full support of research costs for all fields – arts, social sciences, and humanities as much as STEM—at all types of colleges very much including community colleges. (Trump’s cuts to indirect cost recovery rates and deletion of many STEM grants could zero out institutional funding for the humanities and arts. This must not be allowed to happen.)

G.    Full academic freedom, which includes the financial means to allow bottom up, faculty-controlled collaborative design, not dictated by austerity and consultants, of new era college curricula that fit current conditions.  

H.    The democratization of university governance to allow the previous elements to be created over time—which will involve abolishing  governing boards, perhaps by converting them into powerless figureheads something like the Danish monarchy   

 

Yes I do have the budget slides to show how to pay for all this. But aluckily for you I’m out of time.

 

The fight for higher ed--the fight for the knowledge and for thinking—is on the front line of this battle for knowledge, justice, and democracy as indivisible issues.  And we need to think of all contingencies. So

 

8. Plan for the building the underground university. 

Columbia University on November 1, 2022

I learned of Columbia University’s surrender to Trump’s extortion using $400 million in federal research funds towards the end of a dinner in London.  We had a couple of good friends over, one American and the other Turkish, both have lived and worked in the UK for many years.  

We’d been joking about how we were all in the same situation now, the “oriental” and the American despots pacing their twin quarter-decks, ranting and illegally harpooning their enemies, while their crews tried to stay out of sight.  The analogy didn’t quite work, since Turkish students have been in the streets protesting president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s arrest of his strongest opponent, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul. But it diverted us for a few minutes.

 

 But reality sank in again. The American remarked that she saw the failure of Trump’s opposition as permanent. U.S. democracy was effectively over.

 

The people of the United States have grown up assuming that their institutions were set in stone, she said. That they could never crumble. No one could take them over.  Now look.  They don’t know what to do. They aren’t doing anything.

 

They are figuring it out now, I said.  People are scrambling to reassess. Trump is taking their government apart. They’re yelling at their congresspeople in town halls.  People are suing him right and left, which have blocked a lot of what he’s tried. When they get more of a grip they’ll start to fight.

 

They are years behind, the American pointed out. The right organized. They funded their institutes. They wrote a plan. They published the plan. The plan told everybody what they were going to do.  He got inaugurated and they are doing the plan.  The response of the Democrats is to let him do it.  

 

The lawsuits are working, I said. I noticed the other two seeing me flail.  Everything Trump is doing is either illegal or implemented illegally.  There’s a lot of resistance.

 

Yes, and so? She replied. Trump’s army of lackeys will appeal to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court will give Trump whatever he wants. End of story.

 

He doesn’t control all the judges, or the lawyers.  Federal workers are protesting.  There’s a lot of resistance out there and it’s starting to build, I exclaimed.  You’re not being sufficiently dialectical! We laughed at that.

 

I was getting a bit upset, not because my friend was wrong to prject total defeat for the Trump opposition but because my confidence in the opposition rang hollow in my own ears. 

 

I was expressing a confidence in the fighting will of the professional managerial class (PMC)—experts like judges and university managers—for which I knew perfectly well there is no historical evidence.  In my youth I had written a whole book about the cultural genesis of their submissive individualism.  

 

And there I was saying well, the existing PMC will take despotism lying down but the emerging PMC will fight! I was saying, to restate Bertolt Brecht’s line, “Would it not be simpler if the people dissolved the PMC and elected another?”   

 

Time to take a quick trip to the loo, where I saw that Michael Meranze had sent me the Wall Street Journalstory about Columbia’s capitulation.  Back downstairs, I said, Ok, just to prove your point, and read them the headline.  No laughter this time, just reckless eyeballing that said, of course. 

 

This is another one of those “shocked but not surprised” moments because it is a self-destructive capitulation that will encourage further Trumpian attacks on the sector while voiding academia’s rallying principles.  It follows a formula for academic mismanagement:

 

1. An outside power threatens a university with financial or legal pain and punishment. This can be a state legislature, a set of wealthy donors, a private-sector lobby, the federal government, an extramural funder, etc.

 

2. The threat has legal or financial flaws that potentially weaken its prospects, and professional experts and/or activists expose them.  Seeing the flaws requires practice experience and also generally the professional expertise of lawyers, international relations specialists, economists, critical race theorists, and the like. Not coincidentally, such people are found on university faculties, and thus some faculty members of the threatened university bring their scholarship to bear.  In effect, the professional half of the PMC offers knowledge-based authority to the managerial half. 

 

In this case, a group of Columbia law faculty devastated Trump’s procedure in relation to Title VI requirements.  A national group of legal experts did the same.  And an M joined the P in PMC: Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, approached the very threshold of calling for collective university solidary in confronting the Trump administration’s attacks: “Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”  

 

Also, the journalists Matthew Haag and Katherine Rosman detached the original $400 million figure from any basis in federal funding (opaquely related to the $988,670,000 that Columbia received in federal funds in FY 2023, Table 22). In the early 1990s, when Trump was facing bankruptcy, he tried to get Columbia to buy his former freight-yards property on the Upper West Side. He kept moving his asking price, and finally put it at … $400 million.  Columbia’s commercial property consultants told them its market value was $65-$90 million, meaning Trump was asking 5 times market. When Columbia tried to appease Trump by saying they’d pay the top of that range or $90 million, Trump stormed out of the meeting five minutes after it began. The sale never happened, but Trump seems not to have forgotten his price.

 

Similarly, student newspapers have been calling for their administrators to do meaningful battle against Trumpian repression. Obedience won’t save Columbia or any other university, the Harvard Crimson observed. The Daily Princetonian summarized the attacks on universities, scholars, and peaceful protesters before praising Eisbruber’s statement and then demanding that he walk the talk.)

 

3. The professorial knowledge appears as a power that creates a will to act against the threat. It inspires expectation—among faculty, staff, students, and parts of the public, including some journalists reporting on the situation and politicians looking on. The expectation is that this time senior management will stand up against the threat. They will refuse the blackmail, take Trump’s agencies to court, and organize other university administrators into a united front.

 

4. The senior managers ignore the professional expertise and submit to the threat. The opposition is defeated from within, by its institutional superiors. This degrades the conditions of opposition to all phony, predatory threats and the cycle promises to repeat. 

 

There are many infuriating aspects of this decision. They start with a total lack of common sense about dealing with bullies that any ten-year-old schoolkid could explain.  At the New York Times, Troy Closson reports, 

'It was not immediately clear whether the university’s actions would be sufficient to reclaim the $400 million in federal money. A spokeswoman for the Education Department, one of three federal agencies named in the letter, did not immediately respond on Friday to a request for comment, including to questions about the potential restoration of federal funding. . . . The Trump administration has told the university that meeting its demands was “a precondition for formal negotiations” over a continued financial relationship and that the White House may call for other “immediate and long-term structural reforms.”

You owe the bully obedience; the bully owes you nothing.'

 

Infuriating aspects continue with the gall of presidents to submit in the name of the very people who opposed submission and gave valid reasons for their opposition.

 

 As in most such cases, the surrender by the university managers brings bad concrete outcomes. In this case, it’s adherence to a wrong, repressive definition of antisemitism, more policing, intervention in admissions procedures, and a government-dictated supervision of a racialized academic department.  The Columbia administration has accepted the Trumpian premise that ethnic-type studies need if not total elimination then a firm hand as a permanent assembly of little brown brothers. This is an insult to higher education in general. 

 

Just as bad, the surrender converts the threat’s lie to truth.  The Columbia letter defines the campus that in reality most criminalized its anti-war movement and most militarized its response as indeed the hotbed of “Discrimination, Harassment, and Antisemitism” that the Trump regime falsely said it was.  

 

I’ve often criticized the petty versions of this. The annual thanks that University of California presidents give the governor for substandard funding have played a key role in suppressing opposition to cuts and impoverishing California’s public universities.  Columbia’s administration has now solidified the false premises of Trump’s campaign for authoritarian control over political speech and academic freedom. The next victims, the University of Pennsylvania and the others on Trump’s hit list, will have a much harder time establishing the public basis of their refusal.

 

What an unforced disaster.  I continue to believe in the potential power of the P in PMC. The professional critiques were superb and empowering.  However, I spent two decades trying to form P-M alliances via UC’s Academic Senate, and the power gulf kept getting wider and the M-accountability weaker.  

 

The P has lost an undeclared civil war to the Ms and are going to have to claw power back from them. Trumpism is an opportunity to do this. Professionals, including professors, can discover that power only by fighting not just Trumpian tyranny but its lesser forms embodied in academic managerialism. A vote of no confidence by the Columbia faculty would be start. But it will need to continue with a gradual but extensive development of professional self-determination via new forms of self-governance in academic units, and co-governance of the finance of the institution itself as a determinant of the existence of academic freedom.  It will require levels of confrontation of an intensity normally found, in the U.S., only in civil rights movements. 

 

Columbia’s Folly will inspire a new era!  There I go again.  Yes, well, it's up to us.

Ephesus, Türkiye on August 23, 2005

The subtitle to this post was originally “Five Ways to Counter It”—the Trumpian war, that is. But in the meantime, I’ve had disturbing exchanges with some senior humanities officials and colleagues that suggest that they will take no particular action at this time. 

 

The general strategy I was suggesting to one group was lawfare. I asked, why not start collaborative litigation to seek a temporary restraining order to stop the Department of Education from closing the International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) office and laying off all staff on March 21st. 

 

IFLE supervises the Title VI programs that are required by statute since their creation through the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958.   The lawsuits against the NIH reduction in indirect costs haveblocked that policy for the time being. NIH grants are nonetheless in a state of “utter and complete chaos,” but the complaints behind the TRO have brought illegality to light in a way that will help this and other litigation. I suggested that the MLA, Mellon, AHA, ACLS et al. collaborate on a lawsuit against the Department of Education aiming at a TRO on the closure in the hope of keeping the office.  

 

Some professors responded positively. The lead in the group of officials suggested that I buzz off.  As far as I know, no substitute plan is in place.

 

At around that time, Trump forced National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) chair Shelley C. Lowe (Navajo) out of the job. Lowe was the first indigenous person to hold that position.

 

I spent that same day at an AI summit at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. While chatting with an administrator from an Ivy League university, I learned that their office is starting to think about how to fight an anticipated move from the senior administration to eliminate the campus-wide writing requirement. “In today’s world, students need to learn to use AI,” especially to replace writing at work—you are already hearing the lines they expect.

 

The default humanities trajectory has been clear for some time: to furnish service departments, those which offer skills but aren’t expected to produce research knowledge because they aren’t seen as disciplines that create academic knowledge. They hire non-tenure track instructors and help spread adjunctification.  This humanities fate doesn’t rest on knowledge reality: of course humanities knowledge is generated in abundance and variety. The trend rests on academic down-classification of qualitative knowledge in general and fields without research funding in particular. It has been fueled by a decades-long hate campaign known as the cultural wars.

 

The humanities establishment has long responded to this familiar trend by letting it happen.  The strategy has been to live quietly off trickle-down from STEM disciplines which in turn lived off the positive reputation of technology and of higher education as a whole.  The latter too were eroding, and by 2017 Trump had renewed the Bush II administration’s attacks on science, gradually expanding to the whole university sector. These escalated again while Trumpism was out of the White House from 2021 through 2024.

 

I joined the MLA Executive Council as 2^nd Vice President in 2020, and began then to ask to develop a systematic response to the discipline’s research funding crisis as a root cause of its employment crisis. Five years later the Association is no closer to having a response.

 

Of course, the passivity party is not irrational. As M. Gessen put it, 

The tension is between surviving right now and, plainly, being able to exist in the future. For most universities, the best tactic is probably to try to stay under the radar. This means being careful with language (D.E.I., etc.) on their websites, hoping that they don’t have particularly noticeable protests or especially outspoken students or faculty members . . .  This would probably allow most universities to continue functioning, substantially as they have been, for a couple of years. 

 

This stance makes traditional sense. But it’s not going to work.  Gessen continues.

 

But in the end — and by the end I mean in two, three, four years — federal funding cuts to financial aid and research and the White House’s meddling in the politics and policies of education will be devastating for all institutions of higher learning.       

 

This is particularly the case for the humanities. Their research funding is devastated going in, as a matter of national policy that NEH et al. have in effect endorsed with a policy of silence. (See for example, “The Humanities Decline in Darkness.”) So addressing the current condition requires a radical break with establishment humanities tradition.

 

It’s a bit like the problem with the Democrats, as Rana Foroohar reminded me this morning.

 

I[I]f you believe that unfettered markets fail to provide key public goods, then you have to think genuine economic populism — not the fake Maga kind — will be the winning formula for the Democrats. But that means rich liberals must think beyond their own interests.

 

This tension is painfully evident right now in the failure of the party to fight against Trump’s tax cuts which, if the Democrats ever regain power, will place suffocating fiscal and budgetary constraints on their ability to get anything done. They didn’t speak out strongly enough in 2017, either, because wealthy donors like tax cuts.

 

The small number of people who decide national humanities policy are not wealthy donors. But they break towards Chuck Schumer rather than AOC.  

 

There’s also a Democratic Party-style split between the national leadership and the humanities rank-and-file across the country.  During the 2010s, I spoke about higher education, funding, and the humanities at dozens of universities. I learned that the rank and file everywhere want much better support structures from their administrations, their states, and the federal government.  But generally they cannot even get data from senior managers about their actual situation, much less start a discussion about how to get what they need.

 

Time has now run out. The Trump regime is systematically degrading universities starting with the most prestigious and undermining STEM disciplines starting with the most powerful. As they cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the budgets of the country’s most prominent research universities, crushing the humanities is an afterthought.  Yet crushing remains the default outcome. Trump’s core social strategy is dehumanization as a justification for any despotic and/or illegal measure, even as humanities scholarship rests on the terms Trumpism negates.  These disciplines need plans, resources, and serious countermeasures, and they need to come from their national organizations. 

 

The wait-it-out strategy was never good, but had surface plausibility during the 40-year-old Neoliberal Bargain.  Trumpism has now negated the bargain in its entirety and brought that period to an end.

 

The Bargain was bipartisan: the Reagan-Bush-Trump 1.0 lineage would tee off against government, bureaucracy, liberalism and the liberal arts and sciences, to the delight and fury of their base, while letting the Clinton-Obama-Biden lineage hang on to a (privatized and marketized) version of these things, to the resignation and complacency of theirs.  

 

The Bargain began to crumble with Obama’s mishandling of the Global Financial Crisis. He bailed out Wall Street not Main Street, igniting both Occupy and the Tea Parties. The latter was an opening for Trump’s rise in 2015-16. Trump converted the Tea Party to MAGA by embracing and harnessing its negative revolutionary energy, meeting it with his own. (For one of the root of vengeance, see Capitalism: A Love Story 1’10” to 1’13.30”). 

 

Trump found a familiar channel in US politics, diverting hatred from Wall Street and big business onto brown and Black migrants—and citizens.  Behind it all, he explained, lay liberalism and their endless explaining and their rules and their do-nothing government.  Trump 2025 promised to go after all of it—the incoherent vagueness of the mission was the promise of its totality.  The MAGA base still wants destruction. They will not brake the havoc they’ve been wanting for fifteen years, even when it comes for their Medicare.  It’s the end of the cycle.  

 

The mainstream media too now grasps the “authoritarian endgame.” That endgame is the destruction of the Neoliberal Bargain, followed by Trump’s dominance of the “sultanistic oligarchy” that he seeks to replaces our current “civil” version. MAGA 2025 targets all of the powers of (diverse) society over business and the wealthy. The powers of the Democratic party inhere in study, analysis, research, and reporting, and he is gutting these deliberately.  

 

Thus he and his people are destroying knowledge and knowledge workers, knowledge agencies (the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Consumer Financial Protection, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Bureau . . ), knowledge careers, knowledge structures. In other words, it’s all-out war on Richard Florida’s “creative class” from the Clinton era. 

 

The Trump regime is firing and humiliating scientists who work for the Forest Service or a national lab or who come up with better ways to forecast tornado trajectories or who are paid at a university on a federal grant. The regime is doing the same to data analysts and managers in the Department of Education who maintain statistics about, for example, racial disparities in college attainment.  

 

The regime is doing the same to the people who managed the near-beer equity programs we lump under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, whose job was to prevent racism both overt and covert, sexual harassment and abuse, and other forms of identity-based tyrannies in the workplace that still require constant vigilance.

 

There are multiple payoffs, financial in particular, but also psychological.  The destruction of knowledge work and workers is the liberation of what Mark Zuckerberg called “male energy” from the chains of mutual respect. The powerful should be able to do whatever they want, especially in their companies, and be revered, certainly uncriticized, for what they do, both in the company and in national discourse. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s interview with Ross Douthat convinced many people that top tech executives viewed the social values of big tech’s employees as a de facto insurrection.

 

It’s hard to miss the male rage at the basic protocols of citizenship and life in common. There’s rage at unionization and union-like opining in tech companies, in which it becomes clear that workers are as or more thoughtful and often more competent than the ownership class. These employees at the very least expect massive organizations to be run with some collaboration, if not actually democratized.  In contrast, the control that several dozen top tech executives have over the global communications infrastructure—over knowledge circulation negates democratization. If you think about it, about their proprietary algorithmic control of information distribution, their surveillance, their dependence on exploited labor in the Global South and also North, then tech appears as a kind of world tyranny.  And the wholesale endorsement of Trump and Trump’s masculinist theory of power suggests a tech executive focus on retaining those absolute powers over the system that their platform ecosystems control. That control must certainly include the knowledge workers inside their companies.

 

All this flies in the face of the needs of our era. The needs are for more cooperative capabilities, more distributed intelligence, and a higher order of intelligence regarding radically divergent information and diverse peoples.  The U.S. is at a cooperative disadvantage—its political system undermines collaboration, and so does its political culture.  Big-tech culture has been making this worse, first with its social media practices and now with its most powerful men lining up literally behind Trump and grooving on his contempt for other people.  

 

Their example is profoundly dysfunctional on the level of the socio-cultural knowledge required to address climate change and everything else. It’s a disaster for it. The same is true for their blanket hostility to socio-cultural disciplines in higher education—see Bret Stephens parroting vicious dismissals that go back to Reagan, Nixon, and Agnew and later DeSantis, Trump, Rufo, Stefanik.  The same goes for rabid hostility to basic equity programs, and to minimal protections from discrimination for racialized and variously gendered people. This categorical, even pathological contempt forfeits their authority, though in our coherent conceptual world rather than our physical one. And they hate the intellectual and professional types for refusing to defer to their authority on the level of ideas.

 

In short, this is a war on both knowledge and the ability to use knowledge properly across the full spectrum of our dissimilar societies.  Its goal isn’t the reduction but the annihilation of the authority of independent knowledge of the kind associated both with public schools and with universities. Discovery, learning, and the use of knowledge all require relatively egalitarian capacities of listening, working through confusing or ambiguous or offending information, communicating endlessly across antagonisms and gaps, and more. All of it is annihilated by the despotisms of DOGE deletion of units and people, by hatred for divergent identities, by rage at the processes of study, learning, research, discussion, revision—the neutralization of this is the point.  It threatens immigrants and trans people yesterday, lawyers and climate scientists today, all professional expertise tomorrow, really most people in different ways all of the time.

 

This is an all-out war on the knowledge class and its complex network of institutions.  Knowledge practices go far beyond higher education to encompass people who work and strategize in social movements, non-profits, medical and legal clinics, farming, plumbing, manufacturing, unionizing, construction, you name it. And yet full-timers in this world of knowledge creation across the arts and sciences, whose jobs are defined by and identified wholly with it, are the special targets.

 

 In the US, Trumpism thus involves the nullification of

·      The autonomy of universities

·      The First Amendment (the Khalil arrest is one prominent example)

·      Academic Freedom itself. 

The current reach-in to core academic decisions goes beyond McCarthyism: I know of no precedent in U.S. history. The government is deleting topics of research and words that are acceptable to use about them. The General Services Administration letter to Columbia University demands that it put a specific department in receivership, change admissions policies, define antisemitism so that it can punish anti-Zionists.

 

This campaign is bigger and more dangerous than anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes. It  requires an organized, planned, funded, collaborative response. I’ll discuss lawfare and other countermeasures next time.