New Haven People's Center on April 18, 2026  

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

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

UC President Mark Yudof Reviews Demands Nov 2011  

Chris here: I've criticized pervasive info failures in higher ed, from campus budget opacities to the inability of national associations in the humanities to gather data that can be used to strategize and build positions, organizations, and infrastructure.  Here's a group doing something about that.  The Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE) and the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace have launched a project called "Know Your Governing Board."  

One major element of it is a survey that they are asking campus groups across the country to fill out.  There's research involved! It will be worth it.  

UCLA Royce Hall on May 14, 2018   

By early spring of the annus horribilis 2025, the UCLA Senate had lost patience with a UCLA Administration that had locked it out of any meaningful role in major decisions.  

The new CFO, Stephen Agostini, appointed in 2024, wasn’t working with the Senate in established ways. A new chancellor, Julio Frenk, had arrived in January, was to be inaugurated on June 5^th, and seemed okay with increased opacity.  The Senate chair, Kathy Bawn, must have been worried that something much worse than shared governance could get locked in by the new administration. 

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. 

UC Santa Barbara on February 11, 2014

The necessary long-term strategy has been nicely outlined by Eric Reinhart and Craig Spencer at the Boston Review. The public is more likely to support research funding that has direct and visible public benefits, like affordable treatments, rather than today’s funding that serves as an input to Big Pharma mega-profits and maximized care rationing for patients. They are completely right to say, “The path forward cannot be simply to defend the pre-Trump status quo; we must go far beyond it.”

 

The same also goes for the short-term strategy. The courts have stayed the NIH cut of indirect costs to a flat rate of 15%.  It’s good that universities are explaining what indirect costs are and that they are real costs. The Editor-in-Chief of the Science journals, Holden Thorp, wrote a strong editorial (“A Direct Hit”) saying how these costs work and suggesting that “these cuts should be a rallying cry for higher education to come together to make the case for the American system of research and teaching.” 

 

That case, however, will have to include direct public benefits of research that cut through the monopoly profit system—Reinhart and Spencer’s point—while also explaining the necessary public funding contribution to the initial research. People don’t know why the funding should be public rather than corporate and also how much money is required. 

 

There’s now been some progress on the public funding issue.  Universities and their organizations are starting to contest the core Republican narrative about research grants. That narrative is that grants make big money for the rich universities that have them. The conclusion is that lowering the research profits at universities won’t hurt them and will increase fairness and efficiency for the taxpayer.

 

The narrative is nonsense but university managers have never properly taken it on.  They aren’t comfortable with the reality they must disclose, which is that universities lose money on sponsored research, and plenty of it.  Big science is a big loser for universities.  If you were running universities as a business you’d get rid of sponsored research. In other words, you’d do what most businesses have done.  But universities aren’t businesses, though their leaders haven’t wanted to stress this point to a misinformed public.

 

I’ve stressed at length in many places—most recently in Liner Note 15 and Inside Higher Ed – that this has been both a data and a strategic disaster. No doubt university managers have worried than disclosed research losses would encourage voters to cut research in a (neoliberal) culture in which pecuniary gain is the measure of all things.  It’s a rational fear, but a bad policy. The result has been decades of miseducating people, politicians, business executives, and their own campus scientists, leading to general confusion about how expensive research actually is and why it depends on public funding and not just on Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

 

The truth was always out there, but buried in obscurity. The Council on Governmental Relations (COGR), an association of research universities, has long published an annual report called “Finances of Research Universities.”  There they would regularly observe that much of a given university’s research expenditures comes from the university’s own “institutional funds.”  

 

For example, in 2008, COGR wrote, “According to the 2006 NSF Survey, Institutional Funds account for 19.0% of all R&D expenditures, compared to 12.0% of all R&D expenditures in 1976” (author’s files).  The real story of federal funding is that the share of total costs pushed onto universities has doubled to around 25% over the past fifty years.  

 

COGR is now getting more company.  Duke University officials have disclosed a potential loss to their NIH indirect cost recovery of $194 million, which is nearly the same as their NSF “institutional funds” disclosure (Table 22).  (Such reports encourage me to stick with my higher calculation of losses (I ran UCSFs), in contrast to than those from The New York Times’  national data base of institutional losses that relies on calculating indirect costs on every single NIH grant in 50 states.  I commend their heroic effort of public education on this key infrastructural issue even if I think they’ve come in rather low.  Dan Mitchell compiled their lower figures for UC campuses.)

 

In the past, universities have taken the hit rather than make a public issue out of it, and now in the current emergency they are now backed into a corner.  But the truth is slowly groping towards the fore. 

 

Another example: if a nerd like me reads the declarations in the lawsuit that led to the temporary stay on the NIH cuts, one can read the following from a Brown University official: 

Importantly, if NIH’s indirect cost rate is reduced to 15%, Brown cannot simply make up for the resulting gap in funding through alternative means. Brown’s full cost of research is already significantly more than what is covered by sponsored direct costs and indirect cost recovery. In the 2022 fiscal year, for example, Brown’s full cost of research was estimated at $315 million, which was $66 million more than sponsored direct costs and indirect cost recovery. Brown made approximately $37 million in additional investments, including through research incentive programs, cost-sharing, and other programs. And Brown took on $28 million in “unrecovered” indirect costs.

 

Great.  It’s paragraph 23 of one of many declarations and it goes on to say something confusing that I don’t quote here.  But it’s a lot better than nothing.

 

Meanwhile, COGR has moved into getting the word out with video animations.  The result is very good, and I encourage everyone to watch it if you need to refresh yourself on the basics. Here are two key moments.

 

Figure 1.

 

“Wrong” means the idea that Congress covers all research costs. “F & A” means “Facilities and Administration,” which have been capped at 26% for decades, regardless of actual costs. The key figure is the big number universities hand over.

 

Figure 2

 

Emptying the piggy bank is right.

 

It should go without saying that money-losing STEM research is not subsidizing the arts, humanities, and social science fields who mostly don’t have extramural funds in the first place. But apparently it doesn’t, so I’ll do a separate post on this later.

 

We can see this as too little too late, or as better late than never.  My heart says the former, since I’ve known this for 25 years, going back to a time when the country had a good chance of fixing the problem were it to have admitted its existence. But my head goes with better late than never—we now need to mad dog this issue and that means universities everywhere coming clean. 

 

Here we get to the next huge issue: the (public) university piggy bank didn’t have money in it.   Their money comes mainly from student tuition and state funding. Neither of these sources are large enough, and have been for quite a while.

 

I just watched the most recent University of California Board of Regents budget presentation (January 2025, Board, Finance and Capital Strategies Committee, 1’58” to 2’04”, discussion to 2’14”). it’s a good example of what I’m talking about. 

 

Knowing perfectly well that Trump was trouble, California Governor Gavin Newsom cut public higher ed anyway.  Here’s a UC Office of the President (UCOP) slide that sums up the breaching of the latest “Compact” that was supposed to assure reliable funding.

 

Figure 3.

 

This is some pretty dumb futzing around with the University by a state with a $230 billion budget. Newsom also insists that UC must take additional resident undergraduates even as he declines to pay anything for them.  The state has done this off and on for years.  There’s always room for more sacks of turnips on the turnip truck. 

 

The UCOP presenters noted that UC campuses have structural deficits, and the state is assuring they will increase.

 

Figure 4.

 

 

Even if the state funds what it says it will, UC has a half-billion-dollar deficit in 2025-26. And that’s before the NIH cuts were announced.

 

This confirms what campuses already know in the form of hiring freezes, grad admissions suspensions, course overcrowding, and systemic shortfalls in professional resources.  

 

And it also means that UC is not able to backfill the federal cuts with state money, not for one month, to say nothing of covering the coming cuts across the entire Trump administration.

 

The original federal research deal---1950s, 1960s—was that states would fund some of the research done at their universities because they got direct and indirect benefits.  State residents got jobs and paid state taxes, and also got skilled graduates and new knowledge. The past 30-40 years of flat or falling state funding (depending on the state) destroyed that tacit cost sharing.  

 

UC’s budget VP through most of the period 1985-2010, a shrewd and likeable guy named Larry Hershman, had decided that state legislators didn’t know what research was and had no reason to care.  So he never brought it up when lobbying for funds—it was always undergraduate education.

 

Throughout the 2000s, those of us on the Academic Senate’s Planning and Budget Committee (UCPB) literally begged Hershman on a monthly basis that he had to teach them about research. All of us classroom teachers face “don’t know and have no reason to care” in Day 1 in every course we have ever taught—it’s the proverbial “teachable moment.” Hershman always said it was hopeless and wouldn’t (and didn’t).  This meant that the state funding and student tuition cross-subsidy of research has remained the invisible part of the funding iceberg that sleeps beneath the surface. 

 

So now no one in state government seems to be in a position to understand the damage their permanent austerity budgets have done to UC teaching and research.  The Legislative Analyst Office’s new comment is a good example. Stop pretending you’re going to increase UC funding, they say to the legislature, and just don’t increase it.

 

The UC Board of Regents don’t understand either.  Their budget presentation lasted a total of 6 minutes.  The only real questions came from graduate student regent Josiah Beharry and another young person I couldn’t identify. Beharry pointed out that the university needs to rethink the compact with the governor if it’s “hurting us rather than helping us right now.” No comment from UCOP.  The other regents sat in total silence.  

 

16 minutes after the presentation began, Regent and committee chair Michael Cohen, formerly Gov Jerry Brown’s budget director, closed the session.  Cohen noted that the Board may need to look at campus budget problems more than it has in the past, but don’t forget the state has a deficit. So UC needs to focus on “long term ways to reduce our costs.”  In other words, Cohen is offering the University more cuts!  

 

The lack of engagement with decades-old campus budget problems is Board malpractice.  The refusal to deal with resulting quality problems is completely irresponsible. This is a frozen governance crisis, and UC finances won’t improve at all until faculty, staff, and students can find a way to overcome it.

 

The lowest estimate of UC’s losses to NIH cuts adds $427 million, bringing 2025-26’s shortfall to about $1 billion.  However, UCLA’s CFO told a town hall that $1 billion is the potential loss from various Trump threats just for that campus.   

 

So what is the real estimated problem? Official figures would be nice. In the meantime, here are mine.  

 

UC campuses spent $4.6 billion in federal research funds in FY2023. If we average indirect cost recovery rates at various campuses at 58% (UCSF’s NIH rate is 64%), UC campuses received something like $1.69 billion of that in the form of indirect costs [x=(4.6b/1.58)0.58].  One can easily come up with a scenario in which UC’s 2025-26 budget deficit is $2 billion.

 

Just to focus the mind, this comes on top of an existing shortfall in which campuses in FY2023 also spent $1.9 billion of their own “institutional funds” to support federally-funded research. (This and the previous paragraph are calculated from Table 22).  That has been covered with (inadequate) state funds and student tuition in the main. 

 

This all sounds crazy because it is. This is how the US funded research has been before Trump came along.  It’s not a normal we want to restore, and disclosing it is the only way to get to something better.

 

The regents can’t really see how bad the long term state trend is from Figures 3 and 4, which is what they get in meetings. UCOP sometimes has longitudinal charts in the Budget for Current Operations, but they need to be part of the live meetings where UC people and journalists sometimes attend. 

 

Here’s  the updated version of the state general fund trend (for background see The Essential Charts).

 

Figure 5. 

 

 The blue line is a benchmark, tracking growth in state per-capita income.  This measures the strength of the economy as it exists in people's pockets.  It goes up 4-5 percent a year most of the time.  If a state wanted to fund an agency in an average way, it would make that agency's revenues rise at the same rate as per-capita income. In such a case, the legislature isn't treating it as essential or special, but just letting UC or CSU or public health or transportation grow with the state.

 

The yellow line takes the per-capita income benchmark and corrects it for actual UC student growth.

 

The purple line is the California state budget (right-hand scale).  State government--health, corrections, transportation, K-12 education, etc.--has grown at around the same rate as personal income.

 

The red line tracks the state's actual general fund allocation to UC. 

 

None of this is corrected for inflation.

 

The chart shows that UCOP and the Board of Regents have failed over many years to keep UC’s state resources on par with state growth.  Regent Cohen is completely wrong to look for still more reductions.  The University has the opposite problem--lagging pretty much everything  associated with state government throughout the 21st century.  And this substandard funding when California is supposed to be a world-leading knowledge society.

Now,  when state funding is needed to fill in for some likely federal cuts, Cohen and the rest of the Board of Regents have left UC unprepared.

 

UC is certainly not alone in this.  Across the country, universities are enduring a “phony war” period like Christmastime 1914: World War I on research funding has started, mass firings are happening, agency leads are capitulating to the Trump administration, staff are furious and demoralized, review panels and grants have been blocked, and confusion has settled over the national pride and joy that is STEM research.  

 

While the cuts are still suspended, universities need to launch a massive campaign to explain public good research and its sources in public funding.  I’d like to think UC people could help show the way.

Yonsei University, Seoul on February 11, 2025

I’ll give this to Trump.  He makes more and bigger mistakes faster than any politician in US history. And his mistakes are also more angry, insulting, and destructive than those of other politicians.  He is the GOAT in these areas. But we need to see this as a weakness more than a strength.

 

I was half-way through a post refuting the Muskian project’s claim to knowledge when I saw that the Post’sPhilip Bump had written it for me.  There’s been a lot of progress in the past two weeks about the Trumpian project as knowledge destruction, particularly through Musk’s military wing. 

 

A lot of good knowledge work has been degrading Musk’s research credibility. For many people, it’s basically over. The Bump Rule is now widely in effect: “The safest approach to Musk’s rhetoric  . . . might be the one he wants to apply to government funding: reject it all as dubious until there’s reason to think it isn’t.”

 

The most famous example is that Musk’s big X announcement of widespread Social Security fraud, concealed by bureaucrats and exposed by DOGE, was based on ignorance of an old software program’s convention for dates.  A twitter swarm of experts posted about his COBAL knowledge gap.

 

 

Journalists wrote fact-checked stories. Others offered Musk advice about how to conduct actual research.  Many said that Musk should have some evidence of his claim before POTUS holds a press conference about it.

 

Journalists have been checking DOGE work in the way research colleagues would normally check work inside an academic research team before it is released.  They find low standards. “DOGE’s Only Public Ledger is Riddled with Mistakes,” the New York Times finds, having previously exposed basic mistakes with decimal points.

 

 

Bump laid out the conclusion about Muskian knowledge:

Musk isn’t very interested in the truth. His interests are in slashing government funding, undermining the political left and, where possible, both. So he kept at it, sharing numbers over the weekend that suggested the Social Security Administration had 1.5 million people aged 150 or older in its database, a subset of the nearly 21 million aged 100 or older.

 

Trumper error combined with brutality—fuelled by the stated desire to traumatize workers—depends on a multi-dimensional lack of knowledge.  It also depends on making followers think knowledge is irrelevant and opponents think knowledge completely powerless.

 

I’ll discuss some strengths of this machine before going on to say why they are vulnerable.

 

It intimidates people to watch Trumpism makes war on knowledge, civil service, skilled employees, general competence, non-corruption, constructive government itself, and of course independent expert authorities. Friday night, while firing the Black head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to replace him with a less qualified white man, and removing the first female head of the Navy, Trump also fired the senior lawyers in three military branches.     

 

It intimidates people to think about Musk’s treasure chest and the power to threaten every single elected Republican in the US with political extinction if they stray out of line. 

 

It intimidates people to think about the orc army of knowledge refusers known as MAGA.  

 

It intimidates people to think about civil service employment law being categorically voided through sheer arrogant executive belligerence. It’s designed to make people think, “no one is safe, including me.” And it does.

 

There’s Trumpism’s control of 2.5 of the 3 branches of government (it doesn’t quite command the lower courts). 

 

There’s Trump’s claim to be dictator and king, his unlimited aggression in the display of total power, his casual destruction of all relationships, and the apparent ease with which he intimidates even billionaire oligarchs through threats of retaliation.  

 

Trumpism draws power from its anger and violence, coupled with its confusion and ignorance.  Violence that cannot be addressed with facts, arguments, or other elements of reason is the most frightening kind.  Trumpism channels the political version of the culture of casual abuse, masquerading as a special vitalism, and carrying a head on a pike.

 

This nexus of threat turns wrongness itself is a power, as Bump notes about DOGE’s repeated bungling. 

The result is a weird variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which Musk and his lackeys appear to know too little about how government systems work to understand what they don’t know. Instead of then realizing the gaps in that knowledge and tempering future comments, Musk builds a defensive position around his claims, constructed of partisan tropes and attacks on his critics. It unfairly reinforces skepticism in the government. But that’s entirely the point.

 

All this is true.  Wrongess in the pursuit of power is no weakness.  It proves the power. 

 

And yet all of this is not working as well as one might expect.

 

We should take stock of the fact that the reign of (t)error is revealing the limits of Trump’s mandate. Here’s a recent Post-Ipsos poll.

 

 

Trump has famously split the country, but the result is widespread revulsion for his policies.  Non-Republicans—the country’s numerically dominant group—give him majority support on only one of these 33 policies.  Three-quarters of his policies receive 25% non-Republican support or less. 

 

That’s a base to build on. It can assume majority rejection of Trump’s policies and decline of the status of Trump’s superstar Musk.  

 

Anti-Trump lawfare continues to expand and is doing well in the courts. For example, on Friday a judge extended the injunction on the NIH cuts. (The Lawfare tracker can help you keep score.)  

 

We’re seeing wide circulation of stories of the pointless immiseration of good workers, posing the biggest public test ever to Republican claims to care about working people as more than human shields for their tax cuts and giveaways of public resources to business.

 

The core premises of Trumpism can be readily undermined, sometimes in one image, from US history’s most repressive effort to erase words referring to women and people of color to the DOGE war on government bloat that doesn’t exist.

 

 

Then there’s the sheer repetition of the unending everyday Trumpian offensive: it signals that its victories depend on lying, cheating, and stealing, including public resources and people’s careers.  

 

Concealed weakness is also the meaning of the extremely belligerent treatment of Europe in the Munich meetings, or the escalating craziness of the CPAC conference, which brought a new Nazi salute—this one from Steve Bannon—and Elon Musk wielding a chain saw like the federal government’s serial killer. 

 

It’s important for strategy to stay clear about the weakness signalled by these things. Oppositional strategy has to be clear about the hidden meanings of the show. As Trumpist spectacle requires an ever grander ritual sacrifice, Trumpism will remind more people of the end of Dr. Strangelove on a loop, and see its destructiveness as an anti-knowledge project.

 

 

 

This brings me to the position of the anti-Trump opposition. To succeed, it has to bind expertise to a new narrative project, not move away from expertise in search of affective power.  

 

I mention this because so much critical theory and social science has decided that argument and evidence are relics of our failed Enlightenment and are no longer relevant to mass politics.  To put it more subtly, though the professional-managerial class (PMC) may still prefer rationality the masses do not, and this is why the PMC backstabs social movements and is despised by everyone.  

 

William Davies’ Nervous States(2018) made a good systematic case that affect has replaced reason as the medium of politics.  On this model, we are in the period of what the philosopher Brian Massumi (2015) called “ontopower,” operating through the intuitive and the speculative, leading to pre-emption, or Deleuze’s control.  Or in Carolyn Pedwell’s terms, understanding current technological society requires that we “relinquish our persistent attachment to human-centric notions of will, agency, and intentionality” (unpublished ISRF AI Group Paper). Trump’s rise, in its dependence on affective spectacle and bullshit of every kind, seems to confirm the need to cling no longer to fact-checking, argument and evidence. 

 

Many people have pointed out that the right beats the left in the department of grand narratives and affective attachments to them. But what does this really mean about the role of expertise in the overall ensemble?

 

The historian John Ganz has taken this issue up in his important history of the U.S. right, particularly his book on the Bush I period that produced Pat Buchanan and the culture warriors that prequelled Bannon and Trump. He’s come back to this issue a lot, most recently in a post about Republican mythic politics.  But to repeat the question, what is the relation between knowledge and narrative in a leftist mythic politics?

 

I completely agree that the left needs a positive narrative about the society it wants and why it would be so much better than what we have. It has to involve pleasure and liberation, and freedom from oppression, from the shattering of hatreds, and from the depredations of contempt.  I’ve written a cumulative and positive left narrative around higher education—many many posts of the 2010s on this blog, the “recovery cycle” in The Great Mistake, etc.  Some phases of this narrative seem reformist, some more radical, and all have fallen outside the Hallin spheres  of consensus and of legitimate controversy as policed by academic administration. (I like the Hallin spheres better than the Overton window.)  This kind of narration has to be built out for the whole range of institutions and communities.

 

This can and must be done.  It overcomes the endless distraction of playing defense, of being trapped in the unending series of critiques that have to be levelled at bad ideas coming from inside the house—from university admin for example—as well as out.   To build the alternative narrative takes discipline and sustained collaboration.  Both are really hard. 

 

And yet, to ask the question again, does the new narrative achieve mythic power only when it overcomes the limitations of intentional knowledge and critique? Ganz seems to be saying yes. He invokes a passage from George Sorel, quoting Sorel as follows:

The idea of the general strike, engendered by the practice of violent strikes, entails the conception of an irrevocable overthrow. There is something terrifying in this – which will appear more and more terrifying as violence takes a greater place in the mind of the proletarians. But, in undertaking a serious, formidable and sublime work, the socialists raise themselves above our frivolous society and make themselves worthy of pointing out new roads to the world. 

 

I agree that expert analysis has to join with and become a movement for it to change society or point out the new road towards it.  But I don’t agree with the opposition between fact-checking and the sublime strike in which the latter is the source of the new mythic narrative.  Ganz elevates Musk and DOGE to the level of myth, and writes, 

 

This mythic nature of these notions makes the liberal attempts to fact-check or dispute their contents piecemeal a futile exercise. The positivistic approach of liberal pundits, as expressed most characteristically in the unimaginative vox.com mentality, is completely out of its depth when it tries to deal with the policy merits or demerits of these new right-wing myths

 

We are indeed sick of our pathetic liberalism—and its enablement of the worst projects like Israel’s annihilation of Gaza.  But that does not include Vox’s fact-checking and other earnest and learned effects to expose lies as an essential part of the defusion of violent Trumpian control. 

 

The left absolutely needs to keep and to rebuild knowledge as such. That means radical knowledge and social movement knowledge and also very much knowledge based on professional expertise—on electrical engineering and ethnic studies alike.  

 

The appeal to the imagination has to arrive on this basis of knowledge if it is to arrive from the left.  The left is not about regeneration through violence, to recall Richard Slotkin’s great title incarnating the meaning of the US as a permanent frontier.  The right is about that.  The left is about the end of that myth, to misstate the title of Greg Grandin’s excellent book analyzing and debunking. the long violence of US national history.  

 

So Musk must be fact -checked.  We know that Musk is bullshitting us in the Henry Frankfurt sense of lying in order to control of the audience, and we know this because of some experts in things like COBAL and some medical statisticians on social media and because of reporters like Makena Kelly at Wired, whose editor set up a unit dedicated to tech in government in anticipation of the need to report out on a crusade.  

 

“Imagination” in the new myth cannot skip data, analysis, argument, persuasion, or organization on the basis of all these things.  It’s where the left’s new narratives will come from.