From Tunnel Mtn, Banff on June 6, 2026

By Asheesh Kapur Siddique, Associate Professor of History, UMass Amherst

 

This is the second of the talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. Chris Nealon’s is here, my introduction to the panel is here.

Society needs the cultural knowledge that the humanities produces in its research and disseminates in its scholarship and pedagogy to make sense of the crises of the present. Chris has written about this need and convincingly argued for it, so I don’t have to. Instead, today I want to talk about politics: how do we make this happen?

                          

Society has a need for humanistic knowledge. But there is no political movement in support of the academic humanities. There is a political movement about the humanities in the US-- on the political Right and it is deeply destructive to the project of democracy. While the Right over the last decade has built institutions and invested in undermining us by stealing our resources, destroying humanities programs and departments, and sowing doubt in our scholarship, the Resistance has not responded with anything near the militancy required. We need something different.  I want to begin a discussion about what building a political movement looks like. The political structure of democracies is partisan: parties are the central vehicle through which politics happens. In the US, the ideologies of “Right” and “Left” are not exact correlates to “Republican” and “Democrat.’ These parties are, however, the only way that ideological visions get enacted in public institutions through legislation and bureaucracy.

 

My remarks will proceed in three parts. First, I will describe the political Right’s movement to supplant the academic humanities and why it is threatening to the work we do. Second, I will turn to the political Left in the United States and explain why it, in its own way, is anti-humanistic in important respects. The point of the first two parts is to argue that there is currently no meaningful political support for building the present we want. Third, and finally, I want to end on a hopeful note, by thinking about what it would take to build political support on the Left for robust publicly funded humanities research.

 

So to begin: the political Right has a project for the present and future of the humanities in higher education – the creation of parallel institutions to traditional academic departments that teach courses and sponsor research in humanities fields, though especially political and economic thought, that aligns with various center-right policy objectives. In the US, while there were early predecessors, like the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University (founded 1961; part of GMU since mid-1980s), and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (2000) at Princeton University, these are so-called ‘civic centers’ that began to proliferate around 2015, often funded by right-wing state legislatures and/or right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers. Their creation was co-extensive with a renewed assault on higher ed’s institutional autonomy.

 

These civic centers, such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida (initially funded by $3 million in taxpayer dollars by the Florida legislature), the Chase Center at Ohio State University (initially funded by $24 million in taxpayer dollars by the Ohio legislature), and the Civitas Institute (now School of Civic Leadership) at UT-Austin (funded both by the state and private donors), work within universities in the same way that tobacco and tech companies work to subvert publicly accountable, democratic knowledge structures and institutions.  As Alondra Nelson pointed out in her keynote lecture, they do this by casting doubt on the humanistic knowledge produced in universities, attacking it as “woke,” “political,” invalid, and unserious. They create parallel institutions that exist to produce politicized ideology disguised as “objective” scholarship and often cast in the rhetoric of “civics” that is squarely aimed at destroying the departments and cultures of teaching and scholarship in the humanities and the very idea of public funding for what we do.

 

Through civic centers, the right-wing is seizing on the crisis of funding and adjunctification in our universities for counter-majoritarian ends. As the historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd has written of these centers, “The right’s approach to higher education has been three-pronged: it has sought to create competing and parallel institutions, to wrest control from existing colleges, and ultimately, to defund public education entirely.”

 

None of the rhetoric is new, of course; if the ‘culture wars’ of the late 20^th century was the ‘new McCarthyism,’ this is the Red Scare 3.0 - the political right has not had a new idea about universities since Joe McCarthy. It  is the political right’s fixed vision of the future of the humanities in higher education go at least since Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967. You may know that, during a press conference in 1967 after being elected governor of California, and in the context of his push to introduce tuition into public higher ed in California, Reagan stated “we do believe that there are certain intellectual luxuries that perhaps we could do without for a year or two without hurting the cause of education.” Pressed to define these “intellectual luxuries,” Reagan pointed to only two examples: first, he referred to a course at UC Davis “where they teach you to hang the Governor in effigy.” Second, Reagan referred to “a state back in the Midwest where they discovered that a state university was offering a master's degree in the repair of band instruments, and I thought that this was sort of subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” We cannot give any concession or quarter to this continuing tradition of blanket hostility: it is completely dangerous and invalid. It is actually worse to have right-wing humanities than no humanities at all.

 

So far so retro culture war. Turning from the right’s attacks, I note that we have increasingly lost the center-left, the professional-managerial class (PMC) that once embraced what we do in public higher education.

 

As bad as the right has continued to be since 2020, I would argue that their attacks are not actually the politically worst for us: the center-left attacks have been far more damaging. Since the racist backlash to Black Lives Matter, followed by the backlash to campus protests opposing Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, the center-left has joined this campaign. Deeply influential institutions within American political liberalism like The New York Times and The Atlantic have peddled a version of the right-wing narrative aimed at casting doubt on the project of the university and indicting the humanities in particular as the source of the university’s now-dubious project. They are reshaping PMC opinion against the idea of publicly-funded humanities teaching and scholarship.

 

There is so much to say about this; I can talk more about how this is happening in the Q & A. As for higher-ed media, an event earlier this week encapsulated everything wrong with it: the Chronicle of Higher Education just re-published an essay that originally appeared at the right wing outlet Persuasion, arguing, and I am not making this up, that humanists should stop doing and publishing research because what we produce is trash. The literal title of the article is “Most Humanities Research Should Stop.” I’ll say it again: this is in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Maybe we need a panel at the next CHCI about why the media coverage of humanities research and teaching is so bad and destructive.

 

So the center-left has, in its own way, abandoned the idea of robust public support for curiosity-driven humanistic education and scholarship and has fully embraced neoliberalism. Where do they think the humanities fit in our educational landscape? The center-left has decided that the purpose of public higher education is to supply workers for the economy, not citizens to participate in democracy. The value of any public investment in public education – whether from the teaching side or the research side – must be justified in terms of “return on investment” where “return” is defined in purely monetary terms, with all the non-monetary returns rendered illegible according to neoliberal reason. According to this vision, the humanities are fine in private institutions but their role in public education is less clear. This is important: Democrats do not have any problem with, and indeed support, the teaching of the humanities in private colleges and universities.  This points to the center-left having no problem, per se, with adjunctification and contingency in humanities instruction in private institutions, and especially highly selective ones – look at the reliance on contingent faculty in core curriculum programs at UChicago and Columbia, or in History & Literature and Social Studies at Harvard; look, perhaps most egregiously, at contingent faculty in college writing programs, again, especially private ones. Do any private college or university writing programs have tenure-line appointments?

 

Whether the center-left supports research for the humanities in private colleges and universities is a more muddled question.  What is clear is that in public education, the Democrats post-Reagan have emphasized STEM above all. The Clinton administration began this with its pivot to STEM education as the focus of its priorities and public investment. Barack Obama famously quipped in 2014 that “folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” The Obama administration proposed reductions to NEH and NEA funding in 2011 and 2012. Joe Biden was better, but still, annual NEH funding even under Democratic administrations has never been anywhere near $1 billion. Prior to DOGE, the NSF spent 17.5 times more on undergraduate research than the Congressional funds available to the NEH for individual fellowships to scholars.

 

In 2022, Obama’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardonna, tweeted, “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.” Note the language here: the purpose of the public education system is to train workers for industry. Whatever industry demands, the taxpayer should supply. An echo of this came again in the context of the debate over student loan forgiveness during the Biden administration. In 2023, when the US House of Representatives voted to overturn Biden’s student debt relief program, the Democratic congresswoman and Reed College graduate Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, explained why she supported overturning the Biden student loan forgiveness program:

 

“Expansions of student debt forgiveness need to be matched dollar-for-dollar with investments in career & technical education. I can’t support the first without the other. The severe shortage of trades workers needs to be seen & treated as a national priority. It’s about respect.

I’m all for repairing what’s busted but the higher education system is totaled. College costs too much & the credentials produced get unwarranted social status, justifying more cost increases by our country’s elite. They need to snap out of it & the system needs a total overhaul.”

 

Let me underscore again that Congresswoman Perez went to Reed. She had the humanities experience we want students to have. But that experience does not seem to have led her to believe in the value of publicly-funded intellectual curiosity. There is no necessary correlation between classroom exposure to what we do and the willingness of either the college-educated public or college-educated politicians to then go out and support the university we want to build.

 

This is not because pedagogy is not important; far from it. It is because pedagogy in itself is not enough: we need politics – and we need politicians – to make political change happen. 

 

Now for a very brief part three. The construction of a robust public infrastructure for funding humanities research depends in the United States on winning political support. We don’t have that now. But I strongly believe we have a chance right now, even though things are so bad, to build this political support: the next Democratic administration will need to rebuild the federal government knowledge infrastructure, completely and totally. It’s time for us, as humanists, to lay out what we need in terms of public support.

 

We need to be talking to the administration in exile. Media is a huge part of this: the turn by center-left media outlets that influential Democrats read, like the New York Times and The Atlantic, against humanistic scholarship and teaching, is a big problem. The retreat of private funding for university-based humanities research is also a big problem, one that I have written about, but of course in electoral democracies, private foundations are not accountable to publics in the same way as state institutions are, and while we can and should say things about the retreat of private funding (and I have) we actually have an opportunity right now to articulate what a reconstructed NEH should look like and how much it should be funded. The center-right will not let this serious crisis go to waste; neither should we.

 

Stories may seem feeble compared to big data or political power.  This is a false impression. In reality, data and power operate through stories and their effects are determined by them. Your budget slides or whatever have to have the proper story.

The strongest stories in 2020 were abolitionist: abolish student debt, abolish college tuition, abolish grad student rent burden, abolish the police. Abolish the at-will firing of abolitionist scholars. These stories always get out in front of the means of achieving their goals. This is a feature not a bug. Their point is to imagine and concretize the goal itself, and rally people to figure out how to achieve it. The same goes for abolishing Covid-19. Full eradication of pestilence of all kinds is what makes people jump out of bed in the morning.

My approach is chronically materialist and institutionalist, so I chronically focus on finance and budget.  We don't have the same abolitionist power with these narratives, and generally haven't found narrative power in other forms. I'm going to look at the national budget picture here, and then, in Part 2, turn to a local university budget insurgency that should be put to use. 

The Covid relief bill arrived six month late, with fractional funding for higher ed and nothing for the states that fund it. Its support for the overall public is a shadow of the need. The failure of the federal government to meet the basic requirements of its population is a two-party creation. The Democratic contribution has been an unconvincing narrative grounded in a failed economic model.  The compromise deal emerged from moderates from both parties who share the disastrous "safety net" model of government, and who agree that government's collective action produces no real value, just remediation. The Democratic leadership had no better storyline of mass enablement or intelligence working in common, so politics is trapped in the Victorian logic of public assistance, and treats a raging pandemic with quarter measures.

The glaring example of narrative success is Ronald Reagan's hydra-headed narrative, for which the series title was, "government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem." Thousands of smaller stories fleshed out this master plot. They had a stock cast of characters that were themselves compressed political types, like "welfare queen."  The Reagan machine perfected this narrative with remarkable discipline for decades. It dismembered the New Deal, discredited the civil rights movement, and turned every public system into a remedial function, the very opposite of what created economic value and national greatness. Public education became a problem rather than an asset, and public colleges and universities did not escape.  Reagan's story was a fabrication. But it changed the course of U.S. history.

Barack Obama has been known to quote Martin Luther King quoting Theodore Parker that "though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends towards justice." It's more accurate to say, "the arc of the moral universe bends towards narrative."  

This week's example is the $900 billion relief finally passed by Congress, that is, allowed to pass by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (It is likely to survive Trump's possible veto, with still more delay.)  The deal offers important material relief, but it is also the vehicle for a Republican story, to be told in Georgia.  The story has a goal, which is to keep the Republican Senate majority by delivering both special election seats to the Republican candidates, so McConnell can remain our shadow POTUS. 

The story is this: "Republicans like Kelly and David offered a helping hand to regular Georgians struggling with the pandemic. The delay was (not because they were busy insider trading with confidential Senate public health testimony--that's fake news, but) because we had to fight Democrats who wanted to take your money to bail out failed blue states." The story has to convince a lot of voters that Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, two of the most plutocratic, anti-Black, self-dealing members of that body, really do care about them.

The secondary story is, "the moderates saved the stimulus." The press is obliging with articles about how Romney, Collins, Manchin, Warner et al. produced a "road-map" for governing under Biden. Sanders, Warren et al failed to get a deal: the future is the bi-partisan center.  Unfortunately, moderation means no money for states and one-fifth of the economic stimulus envisioned by the "liberal" Pelosi in May.

What could help people buy these stories? The lack of a radically different and compelling alternative. That lack is being constructed as I write. For example, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is NOT authoring a narrative saying this: 

Senate Republicans gave you half a CARES act for a quadrupled pandemic. Mitch McConnell gave you that fraction of a loaf. The bill is crap compared to actual need, and crap compared to what the American people deserve, and it's crap entirely because Mitch McConnell controls the Senate, not me. Let me describe the great version the Democrats wanted that will rebuild the country, and if you want it you need to get Kelly and David the heck out of the Senate.

Republican values, Schumer could explain in the LP version, dictate mistreatment of regular people, because they oppose government, which is the only way to treat everyone fairly when we all need the same thing. In reality, Schumer reframes it as an "emergency survival bill" and promises to fight again next year. But that's not a story. That's an adaptation to defeat.  

Most people in this country are in trouble--unfed, sick, evicted, unemployed, lied to, and about to be further abandoned by their bankrupt states.  In building the true and motivating story out of this one, it's worth bearing in mind how tired people are of half-measures and excuses. Take the half-stimulus check.  $1200 (the CARES Act level) may have meant that you could pay a month's rent and focus entirely on your 12 other major problems.  $600, the new version, means you can pay half your rent, and have to keep "rent" on the top of your list of 13 things while you find the other half, who knows how. If you find it, you don't thank the Democrats for fighting for a new stimulus since May: you thank yourself, for scrambling for the other half.  

People are engaged in a continuous low-level resistance to weak support. Democrats don't seem to get this, and they are walking into an ambush in Georgia.

There are countless books and papers on narratology, like Paul Waldman's on politics; there's a whole discipline that studies narrative and affective engagements-- my home field of literary criticism. One general lesson is that it's essential to critique the false story, but critique is just the start.

First, the critiques, which are widely available: David Dayen drills into details and pronounces the stimulus to be not enough. It is, after all, about a fifth of the $4.3 trillion HEROES Act the House passed in May. The one-time stimulus check is half of the CARES Act's ($600 per person); extended unemployment is cut from 16 weeks to 11; the eviction moratorium extends only to the end of January. Jessica Haberkorn describes other ornaments on the Christmas tree.  

Eric Kelderman does the drilling for the higher ed elements: colleges and universities get $25 billion of a $125 billion need. The student debt moratorium, already running through January 31st, was not extended, leaving that up in the air at least through Joe Biden's inauguration.  Since the bill has no money at all for states and local governments, they will struggle to avoid more cuts to K-12 and higher ed. By undermining government employment and spending like they did after 2010, Congress is priming the country for Great Recession 2.0.

Some good things do happen: the ridiculous FASFA form for financial aid applications is greatly simplified, some loans to HCBUs are forgiven, and the bill finally extends Pell eligibility to formerly incarcerated students. There's more--but only a drop in the money bucket. On this point, Kelderman cites Ted Mitchell, president of the higher ed advocacy group, the American Council on Education: “The money provided in this bill will provide some limited relief, which is welcome news to struggling students and institutions. . . . But it is not going to be nearly enough in the long run or even the medium term.”

These are fundamentally important critiques and need to be widely circulated.  But they don't generate an alternative story.

A true counter story would have a feature that the UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, prolific author on the Democrats' inadequate framing and narrating, calls the "truth sandwich." You set out your own view, you then critique the false or opposing view in the context of your framework, and then state your truth or vision again. 

I started to illustrate this with Schumer above, though I had it a bit backwards: Schumer should start with the glories of the House's HEROES Act, and all the problems it would solve, then blast Mitch's phony, bail out-a-Republican Senator plan, then describe the better future of Builder Biden working with strong progressive Congressional support. 

The more radical and inspiring narrative won't come from above. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were exceptions at the national level, but they too had to devote themselves to counterpunching the Washington establishment.  Sanders is in fine form denouncing McConnell's fake Covid medicine, but of course this isn't a left alternative. It's missing the compelling social philosophy that has to do to bipartisan Reaganism what Reaganism did to the Great Society and anti-racism movements.

Abolitionism reminds us yet again that narratives of a new society are going to come from us--not from above but from below.  Sanders did enormous good putting free college and student debt cancellation on the political map, but he did this by advancing concepts developed by scholars (like UCSB's Bob Samuels early on) and activists. This bottom-up process works, but it needs a fully engaged and activated base, in real numbers, to work at the required speed. 

Where is that base?  I'll turn to a current university example in Part 2.

Trump will declare victory in the presidential election this week, but he will be lying, and after a ludicrous amount of maneuvering and some high-stakes drama in our McConnell-packed Federalist Society courts, Joe Biden will assume the battered office. Trump's infantile Rightism will be out of the White House, though not off the airwaves or the streets.

A long struggle of rebuilding will (re)start next year. The function of Democrats in my lifetime has been to clean up each Republican mess (Obama did mild financial re-regulation while paying down the Bush deficit) and get the country back to the starting gate.  We've had just two Democratic presidents in the last forty years, and the Republicans treated neither of them as legitimate. There was Whitewater and impeachment for Bill, and birtherism and blockage for Barack. Joe Biden can expect the same. 

His administration will need to work on twenty issues at once, and higher education will be about 18th, if it makes the list at all. Biden has a lot of social justice to do. He will also have to deal with a model of capitalism that's at the end of its functional life.

For higher ed, there's likely to be some immediate good news in a new stimulus bill in a Democrat-majority Senate.  Last spring, colleges got $14 billion from CARES (on a $50 billion request), only $7 billion of which could go to operations.  The later House bill that the Senate ignored (the HEROES Act) had $27 billion for higher ed. The American Council on Education has estimated the base need of colleges and universities to be $120 billion (for operating losses and increased Covid costs).  Even the full amount would just get colleges and universities back to square one. But getting some large percentage of a new $120 billion would stabilize the situation for the current academic year.

On the national flashpoints of high tuition and student debt, Biden, unless there's popular pressure, will stick with damage control. (Paul Basken has a good overview.) He has campaigned on a diluted version of the Sanders-Warren positions. He proposes free community college, free 4-year college for people from families earning under $125,000, and a cap on loan repayments at 5 percent of discretionary income for 20 years, after which both balance and interest are "forgiven."  In their valuable new report on free college, Georgetown's Center for Education and the Workforce has priced Biden's plan at about $50 billion in the first year, which would be a more than 25 percent increase in government support for  higher ed.  It's a pretty good "first dollar" plan that would offer better support for poor students and students of color. Biden should actually do this, right away. (It would help him hold the Senate in 2022 . . . )

However, the university is not actually the subject of Biden's proposal. The plan is "for education beyond high school."  It is very much about workforce training for mid-skill and middle-income jobs.  Free college and debt relief are way down the webpage, requiring repeated scrolling to find.  Biden notes that his wife is a community college professor, and that there are 30 million jobs paying around $55,000 that require education beyond high school but not a college degree.  

Community colleges are great, but Biden has no vision of educational effects or transformative powers. He doesn't quite have a 1990s New Economy human capital argument about the value of complex  cognitive powers through bachelors' degrees.  Obama was the same, seeing college as workforce development, with an emphasis on the kinds of jobs New Democrats helped Republicans ship overseas.  The model is patronizing and outdated.  It will have little economic benefit. And it won't do nearly enough for today's precarious students, who need full college and not the cut-rate version.

Higher ed is clinging to its individual monetary impacts after decades of lowering it with tuition hikes and student debt, and at the moment when capitalism is facing the death of human capital as we know it. It has tried to pivot to "social mobility," but this is the same thing--private pecuniary gain--measured differently. Colleges and universities need to redefine their roles in society. The Biden Administration will offer an stage, but all the dancing and singing will have to be done by social movements and by the people in universities.

There's this problem of not yet being back in the starting gate. Colleges and universities are fairly busted up inside. Their various constituencies have been set against each other. Here are the main fractures that need to be addressed.

1. Student Debt. Present and former students have had to address this crisis with little help and much opposition from universities. The white tax-revolt backlash that started in the 1970s always required high tuition, which in turned entailed high student debt. Nothing has damaged the public status of higher ed like high tuition and high debt have done, but administrators and most faculty continue to look to tuition hikes as their main fiscal strategy. Debt Collective's Can't Pay Won't Pay has just come out, as a leading example of a movement that universities need to join if they are going to regain public credibility.

2. Funding Cuts.  This is happening again under Covid.  When all is said and done, regular public funding cuts represent the deliberate forcing into mediocrity of the popular, public side of a higher ed system so it can't increase social equality.  Cuts are a classic example of systemic racism: the halving of per-student state support in California exactly tracks the declining share of whites in UC's student population. We're facing a new round of program closures plus a number of suspended PhD programs, particularly in the social sciences and humanities.  Universities and their godawful governing boards haven't attacked this crisis systematically, made a huge fuss, named names, denounced their political enemies, and figured out how to make them lose.  Universities don't care enough, because it's the students who pick up the tab in the form of higher tuition and lowered educational quality. Colleges have supported this extractive model.

3. Social Injustice. The current funding model has made college an engine of inequality: Black and brown students are most likely to go to the colleges with the fewest resources that reliability produce the lowest graduation rates.  The same is true for first generation and working-class students. Many are now being pushed by Covid back into for-profit debt mills because these have pre-existing proficiency with fully online ed.  Governments are doing nothing. The role of highly selective colleges has become completely absurd--they function as rejection factories that are to confer special title on the survivors.  As the new wave of critiques of meritocracy shows, they are protecting stratification rather than fighting it.  Even people who don't care about racial justice hate the renewed Stanfordization of the entire college system, where exclusivity is the sign of quality.  As they embrace individual social mobility as their major social benefit, they are staked to preserve economic inequality as the backdrop.  This is a total crisis for college's social mission, and a cauldron of hatred for the sector that goes well beyond the proverbial Trump lover.

4. Dreadful Governance. There's of course UC's self-serving regents, but they are fairly typical of boards that subject universities to external forces rather than cultivating their campuses by finding them resources and supporting their independence.  An important Chronicle of Higher Education study of governing boards showed that only 1 in 5 members go through a "meaningful bipartisan check."  Republican boards try to impose their political views directly onto faculty and students, while Democratic boards try to impose permanent austerity. Neither group knows much or cares about actual research and teaching, though both are preoccupied with increasing their direct control.  Both parties reliably give Black and brown students less money than their white forebears, though they talk differently about that. In short, cultures in which authority exceeds knowledge do not thrive over time. University boards present a classic organizational problem, and the divisions among major constituencies sown by their unaccountability  has undermined the entire sector.

5. Faculty Withdrawal.  In the major conflicts of the past thirty years, most tenured faculty have been  absent. A fairly small group works on important institutional issues they know well-- police abolition, admissions equity, faculty diversification, grad student unionization, among others.  Meanwhile, the majority of tenure-track faculty are completely silent on budgeting, administrative accountability, pseud-integration, and other major policy questions. Faculty senates work hard to prevent the worst, but they are 99 percent on the defensive. The AAUP and unions have done excellent emergency work, but are generally too busy putting out fires to rebuild the garden shed, to say nothing of the actual house. Rank and file TT folks have not developed an alternative to the austerity university for colored children or fought persistently over resources.  They have not fought obsessively against the adjunctification of the majority of their own ranks. This fracturing of TT from NTT faculty, and faculty from staff and students, is at the root of higher ed's status as a political basket case.

So there are some problems. 

There are also many many signs of academic mobilization. Just to stick with faculty: there has been good organization against anti-Black racism and campus police, for a New Deal for Higher Education, development of groups like Tenure for the Common Good, not to mention union campaigns against adjunct layoffs at CUNY, Ohio University, and many other places. The disaster has galvanized a broad counter-response.

One huge thing that must happen now is the writing of new stories for higher ed. Universities desperately need narratives about who they really are and what they really do. Such narratives are usually written for them. This is the most fundamental activity today of governing boards--to capture and define the story of the university for business, society, and the university itself.

With this in mind, I was happy to find the statement that the Berkeley Faculty Association wrote a couple of weeks ago. Called The University We Are For, it insists that higher ed admin should actively endorse the campaign to re-invest in public universities, noting that the “Keep California’s Promise” Campaign (or “the $66 fix,” for the $66 it would cost the median California taxpayer annually) would restore state funding of all sectors of California public higher education to their 2000 levels." 

At a time when Black Lives Matter movements are working to challenge systemic racism, the Berkeley Faculty Association insists that public higher education should not rise in cost and fall in quality at the moment that the historically excluded are at the university gates. . . . Social justice requires a bolder approach: one that sees California public higher education as an instrument of reparations for the historically excluded; one that seeks to renew its promise now, when it is most necessary.

Their first principle thus is, "A university in which all students have a genuinely equal chance to think, study and succeed.  This requires that all be able to attend school without having to work, without financial anxiety and without incurring debt."

Free college, not work but study, fully funded, $66 a year as the median personal public cost, genius spreading widely throughout the population--that's a good start on a new narrative.  Its authorship needs to be deep and wide, coming from every community that's connected or invested in the university.  The authors need to be much more diverse than they have been until now.

Getting ready for Biden--who will be in the White House next year-- means doing much work of internal reassembly as part of a multi-year campaign for a new public university.

UPDATE NOV 4.  Still prepping for Biden: I have an analysis of the first exit poll at my other blog.

That may be my worst title ever but it's an important point.  So here we go. 

Where are university budgets near the end of our bad policy summer?  In a bad place -- a worse place than seemed likely during the weeks of activist government from mid-March to mid-May. In this post, I'll discuss the national issue, describe a flawed university budget discourse that makes universities more vulnerable, and link this to the failure of today's mainstream Democrats to accept the economic role of government.

The federal CARES Act was signed on March 27th, and sent universities $14 billion of the $46.6 billion they'd requested (with half of that going directly to students). Having gotten 1/6th of their stated need, higher ed advocates placed their hopes in a follow-up HEROES Act passed the House on May 15th, which Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, sat on throughout the summer.  Thus the nation's schools and colleges planned for fall in a state of deep uncertainty and growing dread.

This past weekend, POTUS signed executive orders (mostly "memoranda") mandating supplemental unemployment benefits at $300 rather than CARES's $600 per week, with another $100 to come from the states. He extended student loan forbearance from September 30 to the end of the year.  Even if these orders go into effect, there are no provisions for supplemental funding for education at any level, including nothing for the K-12 systems that POTUS and his Department of Education secretary have been trying to bully into opening.  If the states are forced to pay part of the federal unemployment supplement, which some say they can't, that will mean even bigger state cuts to education.

The American Council on Education has a helpful summary of the current situation:

There are technically three bills under discussion in the COVID-19 emergency aid negotiations. The first bill is the HEROES Act written by House Democrats and approved by the full House two months ago. The second is the HEALS Act, which represents the ideas of Senate Republicans and the White House. Finally, the Coronavirus Childcare and Education Relief Act (CCCERA) is legislation introduced by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Patty Murray (D-WA) that reflects Senate Democrats' ideas about education spending in response to the pandemic. . . . The bills all include emergency aid for students and institutions, but the levels of funding proposed differ greatly. ACE has estimated that institutions have a total of $46.6 billion in increased student financial need and lost revenues, and will spend at least $73.8 billion on new expenditures to reopen in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. While CCCERA provides a total of $132 billion to meet these needs, the $37 billion provided for higher education in HEROES and the $29 billion provided in HEALS fall far short. 

The federal bill that comes closest to meeting actual higher ed need--at $132 billion--has no chance of passing McConnell's Senate.

Republican control of key governing bodies has artificially induced massive state failure in suppressing SARS-CoV-2.  The U.S. has the worst Covid-19 suppression record in the wealthy world, and, by failing to build public health infrastructure (see Jeneen Interlandi's superb overview), will continue to inflict massive suffering, disparately along lines of race and class, in all of the areas where common life should offer equal treatment, including education.  The failure of public infrastructure is damaging the private economy that Republican-driven premature opening was trying to protect. Republican opposition to a new stimulus increases the odds of a new depression (see Hiltzik and Krugman for summaries). 

Operating on this familiar political landscape, it's hard for people to maintain transformative ambition.  I sketched one version at the end of April ("Our Converging Crises III"), which involved massive public spending for full Covid-19 suppression, full employment, and educational experimentation. The American self-conception is of a nation that leads the world into a better future. The reality, given our decrepit social infrastructure, is a vast majority focused entirely on getting by. 

The Real Covid Budget Crisis

The same is true in higher education. There's been no follow-up on the early burst of federal effort,  and higher ed is engaged in a new round of austerity, translated as operations cuts, layoffs, and program downsizing. The Cal State system threw in the towel early, announcing on May 12th that it would be all-online.  This was at a time when most administrations assumed Covid-19 would be well in hand by fall; Cal State's Chancellor Timothy White could see pretty clearly that they didn't have the extra billion they needed for testing, tracing, isolating, cleaning, tent classrooms, and the rest. Since then, reopening plans have gone into full reverse, including at wealthy private institutions like Princeton and Johns Hopkins whose core value is small-scale face-to-face learning.  

University of California campuses are quietly joining Cal State's closures on a case-by-case basis.  Berkeley announced all-online on July 21st.  The other semester campus, UC Merced, will open August 26th with an unspecified ratio of remote and in-person. Among quarter campuses, which start a month later, UCLA has dropped its in-person proportion from the 15-20% announced in June to 8%.  UCSB hasn't officially updated its mid-June description of fall quarter as "some face-to-face," but is heading toward basically closed. UC Irvine is keeping its students in the "most classes will start remotely" twilight zone.  All sorts of intensive planning is going on behind the scenes.  And so are planning for budget cuts when UC needs that same extra billion that Cal State needed to open safely.

Although dominated by liberal Democrats, the California state legislature put stable CSU and UC funding in the hands of Mitch McConnell at at time when he was already holding it hostage.  In the final state budget, UC will get a 5% increase over 2019-20 if and only if California gets $14 billion in federal stimulus.  If there's no stimulus, UC gets what UCOP calls an 8% cut from 2019-20.  

In addition, the permanent state budget is cut either way: the federal stimulus money will be treated as a one-time backfill on the state cut.  Even that was a bizarre combination of "augmentations totaling $212.9 million and reductions totaling $471.6 million." Rather than offering higher ed affirmation and stability during the pandemic, the legislature provided a changing combination of cuts and increases that, without an unlikely Senate backfill, gives UC and CSU a major cut.

How big a cut, actually?  The legislature reduced the state allocation for UC from $3.938 billion in 2019-20 to $3.466 billion in 2020-21.   This is a year-on-year reduction of 12.2%.  Its a Covid cut of a size that a red-state legislature could brag about.

It's worth remembering all the way back to November 2019, when The Regents requested an increase of $422.1M in overall state funding, which would have brought state general funding to $4.360B (see the slide here minus $25M for the Riverside School of Medicine).  Annual base cost increases at UC are a bit more than 5%, and since that's 5% on less than half the revenues of the core budget, which comes mostly from (long-frozen) tuition, 5% state increases put core funding further behind.  Campuses have tirelessly tried all sorts of revenue workarounds, mostly involving overenrollment coupled with non-resident student growth, but it hasn't worked. (For the resulting long-term austerity, see "Three Essential Charts"). On top of its rather brutalist history, the California legislature now proposes to cut UC by $903.5M from its November request--barring a McConnell conversion like Saul's on the road to Damascus. The is a cut of 20.7% from the Regents's November request.  

Remember too that even had that $903.5 million November increase been enacted, many campuses were projecting deficits in 2020-21 or the following year. That was not a luxury budget. To repeat: because of prior cuts by Govs. Schwarzenegger and Brown, years of tuition freezes, and sub-inflation state growth, the non-miracle state budget cut that now looks likely is a 20.7% cut from pre-Covid's home for UC semi-solvency.

This would be a disaster for UC (and CSU). And it's likely enough to be treated explicitly in plans for both budgeting and the University's political engagements.

Budget Idealism at the UC Regents

This brings is to the July 30th UC Regents meeting. The Regents have absolute authority over budgeting, revenue strategies like borrowing, as well as political advocacy. If alerted to a budgetary emergency, the Regents might be expected to instruct UCOP to mount a massive siege of Sacramento and Washington D.C., pulling in their contacts in the tech community as well as in national politics.  But UCOP's budget presentation (see the July 30 afternoon session at the bottom of this page), rather than rallying the Regents, kept the real dangers behind the curtain. And Regental behavior encouraged this concealment. 

UCOP presented the budget as in basically good shape.  Medical losses for March-June 2020 are $1.7 billon rather than the earlier projection of $2.8 billion.  UC Health VP Carrie Byington had already suggested that the med centers have learned so much about Covid treatment that they won't repeat spring's revenue losses during the current and future infection spikes. 

Undergrad enrollments are "looking very strong," in the words of associate budget VP David Alcocer (11'47"). He said the same was true of international enrollments, in spite of a very turbulent policy picture on top of Covid travel problems.  He basically claimed that enrollment targets would be hit no matter what. I'm also a bit of an optimist on enrollments because I'm a pessimist on the economy: even remote-college looks good compared to a nonexistent job market.  Polling data suggest we're both wrong, and that colleges should expect a growing enrollment melt.

The presentation noted that housing and dining revenues will be down, but UCOP did not quantify or tie these to different durations of Covid-related reductions. A bit later, UCLA chancellor Block offered some campus numbers, and in later questions a couple of Regents clarified that only single rooms will be offered in the fall, though without revenue numbers for system losses. New VP for Research and Innovation, Teresa Maldonado, gave a candid appraisal of major disruption to research, UC's distinguishing educational activity. She was particularly direct on the damage to women and early-career researchers. But this remained a matter of delayed research progress more than a fiscal crisis.

The presentation of the state budget was a delicate matter (starting around 7'40"; I'm not following UCOP slide order). Alcocer explained the numbers in the slide below (they are different from my calculations above). He noted that the final July budget has a better upside than the May Revise and a smaller potential downside. 

He then went on to explain his right-hand column. He noted that "there's a lot of uncertainty here" because the range of outcomes is nearly half a billion dollars, or 5% of the core budget (9'20").  I can attest that the uncertainty has created in campus planning a somewhat toxic mixture of paralysis, wishful thinking, gloom, and fatalism about cuts. Uncertainty is actually encouraging austerity by making the early stages seem very mild.  

But Alcocer's statement about uncertainty incurred an interruption from Chair John Pérez, who said, 

I just want to push back on the way we characterize this uncertainty. And here's why. The way this reads to me, in simple terms, is "uncertainty is bad, and smaller uncertainty is better than greater uncertainty." When in fact the final budget, in both the worst-case scenario and the best-case scenario, are better for the University, than the May Revise. . .  "Uncertainty" is inherently a bad term, so if we want to look at "range"--some other way to characterize it--because we don't want a negative connotation to the spread we see in the final budget, when in fact it serves us better than the May Revise does."

This intervention forced Alcocer to repeat what he had said two minutes before, which was that the upside was better in July than in May. It suggested to me that Pérez has no idea how uncertainty is weakening the campuses. It also suggested that he would not tolerate university officials criticizing the state legislature in even a polite and indirect way. Any campaign to get a reliably flat budget from the state (not conditioned on McConnell's conversion to St. Mitch), or an increased budget that could cover Covid costs, would never get off the drawing board under Pérez.

The misty aura of fiscal stability was punctured only by Berkeley chancellor Carol Christ, who projected a $340M deficit through fiscal 2021 (or more than ten percent of the campus's $3 billion or so in annual revenues).  She read a version of her administration's July 15th statement, and stressed the dependence of the campus on tuition and state revenues. She stated that the latter were $100M below their 2008 level even though the campus enrolls 8200 more students today.  

If the Regents had paused to take that in, they'd get a glimpse of the system's deep structural woes. Berkeley is historically wealthier per student than any campus except UCLA, so a responsible Board might wonder what its woes say about the rest of the system.  This was the only time in living memory that a Berkeley chancellor has said point blank that privatization doesn't work and thus we need good state support. Actually Christ didn't say that, but she came closer than ever before to noting that the problem isn't just Covid but a flawed business model in which the University has let state funding massively decline.

Later, as Alcocer was about to move to UCLA chancellor Block for a campus view of losses in auxiliaries, Board chair Pérez interrupted to complain about how long the budget presentations were taking.  "This was identified as a thirty minute discussion. . . . when an item is 30 minutes, the presentation is no more than half of that. We've now exceeded 35 minutes, before we've gotten a single Regent engaged in discussion." (32'30"). The obvious remedy would be to allocate more than a half-hour to analyzing what may be most important fiscal crisis in the University's history.  The time overrun was entirely due to letting three chancellors say a few words about their campus finances outside of the UCOP PowerPoint story.  Things got even more rushed after that--and even more superficial.  

In questions, terribly delayed to minute 38, Regent Makarichian performed his solo role of asking for budget numbers, and guessed at overall losses by adding some numbers in his head.  Pérez instructed CFO Brostrom to have those figures in the September meeting. I know Brostrom had versions he could have produced then, but who would dare try the Pérezian patience by pulling up another slide?  

In the meantime, UC is covering its losses with borrowing. It floated a bond for $2.8 billion in July, with $1.5 billion in "working capital" and the rest for capital projects. (UC debt has doubled in a decade from around $10 billion in 2009-10  to $24.6 billion in 2018-19). The budget discussion ended with a hopeful wait-and-see good-case scenario which, as I've said, is translated on the campuses as cuts.  

A Plausible Scenario for 2020-21

The Office of the President and the campuses are all doing projections, so I'm going to adjust some internal UC numbers to draft a plausible negative scenario.  This is not a good case, but it's not a worst-case: for example, I optimistically assume that students who can enroll do enroll, and that all are willing to pay full tuition for mostly remote instruction.  The nicer scenarios assume a return to mostly-normal after the fall term. Based on our country's failed-state approach to Covid suppression, I assume that full fall impacts last through the end of Spring 2021.  I use the governor's January budget as a base for state funding, which was $220M less than the Regents' November budget.

The assumptions:

• Tuition: full undergraduate enrollment.  Though 75% of admitted international students do not enroll, many are replaced by domestic non-resident and resident students. Waitlists and "appeal" lists are liberally used, maintaining overall totals.
• Housing is converted to singles, and dining does not return to normal, costing campuses 70% of normal revenues.
• Grad student enrollment. This falls 15%, slowing research, but it has little impact on revenues as campuses simply eliminate sections as necessary in remote courses, while canceled grad seminars free up some faculty to teach more undergraduates.
• Research continues to be affected by outbreaks made worse by shortages of tracing and isolation programs.
• Philanthropy is reduced by renewed turbulence in the markets, as is UC investment income.
• Medical center and clinical revenues recover from spring 2020 levels but don't get back to normal.
• The Republicans block higher ed stimulus funding in the Senate. Although the Democrats win back the Senate in November, President Biden wishes to govern from the center, and decides not to antagonize the 48 remaining Republicans by giving too much help to education.  Like public universities everywhere,UC goes to its lower permanent state funding base.

Here's a rough estimate of what this would look like by standard budget category.

Scenario B Budget Category	Decline $Millions	Negative % Change
2020-21 Base	39,738
Student Tuition and Fees	775	14
Auxiliary Enterprises	1165	61
Research Contracts & Grants	779	12
Philanthropy & Investment Income	555	19
Medical Centers	2279	15
Educational Activities (esp Clinical Rev)	521	12
State General Fund Appropriation	481	12
Total Losses	6555	16.6
Projected 2020-21 UC Revenues	32,823

Scenario B is a decent guess at one possible program for 2020-21: 17% revenue declines for the UC system overall, and 12% or so for the educational core.  Cuts like these would cause major damage to teaching and research, and of course prevent meaningful Covid-19 suppression.  If two things happen, first, Covid illness persists for several years, as some medical officials predict, and second, U.S. politics allows economic decline, then UC, like other universities, will be permanently downgraded.

The Governance Problem

The Republicans are obviously the biggest problem, but so are Democrats and their governing boards.  The Republican donor base sees government as a potentially victorious competitor to business and finance in economic management (through equitable tax policy and regulation but also better social infrastructure and more productive investment).  Weak government has enabled today's "plutonomy." Republican politicians logically oppose programs that will make government useful, effective, and popular and thus empower their direct rival.

But Democrats are also a problem when they reject both strong and weak Keynesianism.  In the strong version, public agencies spend massively to reconstruct society on the principle of equal treatment. This would fund a Green New Deal in which, for example, some of our tens of millions of unemployed people would be paid by the government to insulate the country's housing stock, starting with those owned by low-income people. I pointed towards this kind of spending in an April post.  Let's call it democratic-socialist Keynesianism, Sanders and AOC-style.  

There's also weak Keynesianism, a very useful combination of FDR and LBJ, in which public agencies spend massive amounts to keep an unjust and unequal status quo economy from imploding.  That would include the common-sense goal of keeping the education sector from shedding employees into a non-functional economy by giving schools and colleges stable funding. It would include the UK policy--enacted by the Conservative government--of covering 80% of the salary of laid-off employees so they can be furloughed rather than fired.  

Mainstream Democrats don't exactly oppose this kind of thing. But they don't promote it as their bread and butter. They also don't clearly expose the urgent need for it, or encourage others to expose it. At times, liberal Democrats like John Pérez actively block the creation of a budgetary need for weak Keynesian spending by preventing the open declaration of a budgetary problem. 

The current UC Board of Regents is chaired by the former Democrat Speaker of the Assembly. It includes the Democrat Lt.Governor, the husband of California's senior U.S. senator, and several former or current members of two Democratic governors' immediate offices. It also boasts several wealthy and prominent Hollywood liberals.  There is really no reason for this group not to activate itself in centrist Keynesian fashion. They would then create an urgent obligation on the part of the state to sustain its educational workforce, infrastructure, and student population, whose lives are currently set to be permanently damaged by the Covid depression. 

I don't understand the complacency that demands the current UC budgetary vagueness in which nothing is true and everything is possible, until the only possibility becomes austerity. It feels like proleptic excuse making--"we didn't fail to act, because we didn't know." I don't understand the lack of ambition, even the bare ambition to keep the rising generation whole. We can obviously do that, but it will take much clearer budget work at the level of senior management and governing boards.  It will take boards willing to support unprecedented mobilizations of political will for higher education, or at least willing not to block them,