Paris on September 1, 2016    

By Sean L. Malloy, Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), University of California, Merced

In early August 2025, the Trump administration extended its shakedown of higher education, which had previously focused on elite private universities such as Harvard and Columbia, to target the University of California (UC), the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. Beginning with UCLA, the administration froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding and demanded a $1 billion ransom along with other changes, including an end to gender-affirming care.  In response, the UC has launched a glitzy PR campaign enlisting alumni (including UCLA grad and Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to make the case for the university while urging Californians to “Stand Up for the UC.”  

 

Serpentine, Hyde Park London May 18, 2025   

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

 

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

 

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

 

One is that human teachers are inherently inefficient.  “Baumol’s cost disease” is often trotted out, in which productivity can’t rise in services as it does in manufacturing because it’s harder to get rid of people (Baumol famously noted that a quartet needs 4 musicians, not 3).  

 

Another theory is that U.S. college instructors are pampered elites with tenure and above-market salaries and benefits. Efficiency requires that their pay, benefits, and protections be dramatically cut. 

 

The cure for both is the same: automate teaching (digitalized extension courses and course management services in the 2000s, MOOCs in the 2010s, “AI” in the 2020s) while for the remaining humans sing “Yippie Ki Yay! Adios! Sayonara! Auf Wiedersehen! Au Revoir!” to faculty autonomy so you can treat professors like any other waged employee.  That’ll fix things.

 

There are better theories.  A third says service costs rise because the “standard of care” rises, which is a good thing. This was Baumol’s real point. Rivalry does increase costs, meaning marketization can raise rather than lower costs: If UCLA has a dedicated Learning Center than UCI will eventually have a dedicated Learning Center. 

 

But intrinsic improvements raise costs to match quality of service, not just a commercial rivalry. When a dentist uses a microscope rather than a magnifying glass during a root canal procedure, it reduces the patient’s pain while also shortening recovery time. So all dentists who perform root canals will need to shift to microscopes sooner rather than later. 

 

The same happens in every kind of classroom and laboratory space at universities: In the 1990s and early 2000s, every campus building needed to be hardwired for the internet. Then every campus building needed to be converted to wireless. The same goes today for lab and studio equipment. Employers like to complain that college grads aren’t ready for plug-n-play into their available jobs, but were that possible or desirable, a prerequisite would be cutting-edge hardware and software that no one is funding public universities to buy. Advanced mathematical and language skills are best taught in small tutorials, but students can’t afford this high-quality attention out of pocket.  The outcome of 2025 college should be smarter graduates as they face an unstable post-AI economy, but that will take budgetary increases coming from an intensity of budgetary campaigning and then on-campus budget intelligence that doesn’t exist today. 

 

A fourth theory, compatible with the third, is that instructional costs are heavily influenced by a university’s accounting practices.  Central administrations have the power to retain a chosen portion of revenues generated by any unit on campus.  Students bring tuition and state funds to their major and all the courses they take. But these funds arrive on campus not through students but through the chancellor or president and their budget offices, and are distributed according to formulae those officers create.

 

To take a dramatic example, Middlesex University in London closed its famous department in continental philosophy on the basis of an alleged chronic deficit that turned out to be induced by a central administration’s tax on the department—a tax of 55% on the department’s revenues. (That unit, the highly-ranked and more importantly, the intellectually distinctive Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), is now being pushed out of its subsequent home, Kingston University.)  

 

A second example is yesterday’s guest post from the Australian National University. Senior managers construct financial requirements independently of analyses of teaching and research aims—and of their quality and socio-intellectual effects-- that take place in departments and academic disciplines. The financial requirements become academic ones.  Finance thus controls academic freedom, and non- or ex-academics decide root possibilities for academics.  

 

In theory, there could be collaboration. Finance and academics could enjoy their division of labor in the context of iterative dialogue and shared authority over decisions. Genuine shared authority would allow a dean of humanities or a chair of Political Science to reject their budget and restart negotiations without getting fired from their post.  The distinctive skills of professional staff—with budgeting, for example—would work in complementarity with the faculty’s deep substantive academic expertise.  

 

In my experience, this never happens. Budgets are formed in isolation from the academic world of the campus, and then imposed upon it. 

 

The rule of academic finance has been TINA, Thatcher’s framework of There Is No Alternative.  Sure, this doesn’t work as advertised, TINA says, and it’s hurting you and what you do, but There Is No Alternative.  End of discussion.  

 

This keeps happening even though, for decades now, complex and top-down budget architectures regularly generate austerity, poverty, shortfalls, layoffs, closures, or at a minimum a general stagnation in quality of service in particular units on campus. 

 

There’s tragic irony here. The university is the place where professionals seemed to have won some (limited) self-determination in society, but then they lost it. 

 

There was no golden age, especially for women and faculty of color. But votes of no confidence used to matter, even if the senate’s Committee for Planning and Budget never really decided anything.  But the professoriat, that class “between labor and capital” named by Barbara and John Ehrenreich as the “professional-managerial class,” didn’t do the institutional confrontation and political-economy reconstruction that would have led to real power.  The professionals’ focus was too narrow, too internal, too self-interested, too white-male, too intellectually ethnocentric), and also too passive, too disconnected from the social movement world’s active engagements with power that would have enabled the proverbial march through the institutions.  “They,” the tenure track faculty, assumed they were doing well without budget power and political unpleasantness. 

 

The PMC deal was steadily withdrawn for the professional majority starting decades ago—right as many more people of color and women were entering the academy. Professors lost their management allies (and most of their professional staff allies, who saw which side controlled money, power and their employment). Yet professorial strategies haven’t shifted from the personal side-deal to collective organization. 

 

This is a historical realignment of the place of knowledge workers in Western societies that Trumpism another other trends is making post-knowledge societies.  Knowledge workers, especially academics, need to study, analyze, decide, oraganize, and fight like they never have before, not even in unions.

 

More narrowly, nothing will change about the budgeting I’m in the midst of discussing unless the professoriat breaks with this past and becomes fully engaged with their own institutions.  That will mean both collaboration and confrontation for which they have little training, but which can indeed be learned.  

UC Santa Barbara on April 11, 2014   

by Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, delivered April 17, 2025

Introduction

            Today, I want to offer four propositions about the situation we confront today. Woven together, these propositions hint at a broader argument that I won’t be able to develop now but will be happy to expand on later. My hope is that these remarks will provide a useful context for those offered by Amy and Chris.

Proposition #1: The threat posed to US colleges and universities today is quite literally an existential threat.

To some, this claim may sound hyperbolic; it is not. A coordinated right wing assault on higher education has been underway for a half century now, and its origins can be traced back at least as far as Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. More recently, this campaign has assumed more aggressive form as multiple state legislatures have amplified the precarity of the instructional workforce; eliminated programs that challenge racialized, gendered, and other forms of inequality; imposed gag orders on what faculty can and cannot say in the classroom; and much more. The state of Florida is the prototype of this campaign to employ governmental power to secure control over higher education; but, as we all know, this assault has now spread to states throughout the nation. 

What we have seen in the second Trump administration is an emboldened deployment of the federal government’s power to advance this right wing project. The exemplar here is Columbia where, after impounding $400 million in funding, the federal government demanded that Columbia overhaul its admissions system; adopt an expansive definition of what counts as antisemitism; empower Columbia’s security officers to arrest so-called “agitators;” place specific academic departments under external control; and much more. On March 21, as we also all know, Columbia’s board of trustees and president acceded to most of these imperatives; and, in my view, that surrender is the act that identifies the American academy’s situation at this moment in time.

The larger lesson we should draw from this abbreviated history is this: The political right seeks to strip the American academy of its autonomy and hence its capacity for self-governance by rendering colleges and universities subject to state control on behalf of authoritarian ends. This is what Florida’s attorneys clearly told us when, in defending the law colloquially known as Stop WOKE, they declared that the university is merely an administrative unit of the state and its instructional employees are, and I quote, that unit’s “mouthpieces.” Should this construction come to prevail, what we call “academic freedom” will no longer exist, and what we call “universities” will no longer be worthy of that name. That, in short, is what I mean when I contend that the contemporary threat to higher education is indeed existential in nature.

Proposition #2: We cannot assume that those who rule US colleges and universities will defend the cause of higher education against this existential threat.

As evidence for this proposition, I would cite the failure of all but a very few university presidents and governing boards to fight back against this threat. This deplorable fact cannot be explained merely by citing the cowardice of the academy’s rulers. There is, I believe, a deeper structural cause at work here. We like to think of our universities as central to the vitality of a democracy and hence as sources of resistance to creeping authoritarianism. But that article of faith proves problematic when we recognize that America’s colleges and universities are themselves legally organized as autocracies. And, if that is so, then their structure of rule does more to replicate than to repudiate the authoritarian order that now seeks to reduce institutions of higher education to the status of compliant subjects. 

To see the point, in your mind’s eye, conjure up a picture of the typical organizational chart of any American college or university or, alternatively, take a look at the charter, the constitution, or the enabling statute that dictates how the power to rule is distributed at the institution that now employs each of us. What one finds at the top of these hierarchically structured entities are governing boards, whether called trustees, regents, or whatever. The academy’s fundamental powers of governance are located by law within these bodies; and those powers include the authority to appoint as well as to remove the presidents whose foremost duty is to do the bidding of their superiors. Beneath these boards and presidents we find everyone else, whether designated as faculty or staff. 

What renders the legal form of the American academy essentially autocratic is the structural exclusion of those subject to its rulers from any legally guaranteed title to participate in the exercise of rule. In our capacity as employees, in other words, we are defined by our lack of any enforceable right to make the rules by which we are governed or to select and hold accountable those who monopolize that authority. True, we may sometimes pass resolutions of no confidence in these rulers, but, because those resolutions have no binding force, in the last analysis, they testify not to our collective power but to our status as subordinates whose fate is ultimately determined by others. 

Proposition #3: As we seek to contest the academy’s incorporation within an authoritarian regime, we need to think carefully about the tools available to us for that purpose.

Think, for example, of the idea of shared governance. At those colleges and universities where shared governance has not already been gutted, appeals framed in this vernacular can sometimes provide faculty a voice, as is the case, for example, in faculty senates. But the fact remains that the power exercised by these representative bodies is always subject to constriction or even abolition, whether by governing boards and/or, in public institutions, by state legislatures. To grant this is not to suggest that we should abandon entirely appeals framed in the language of shared governance. But it is to say that these appeals will remain inadequate as vehicles of faculty empowerment so long as the legal form of the American academy remains essentially autocratic.

For a second tool of resistance, think of unionization and collective bargaining. True, unions can push for better working conditions, higher wages, and due process protections against the worst excesses of arbitrary rule. Equally if not more important, unions can organize faculty struggles to withhold the form of power that the university cannot do without: the power of our labor. That said, it remains true that unions operate within the confines of an essentially antidemocratic institutional structure; and, for that reason, unionization is a strategic tool that can accomplish many things but not everything. 

In the last analysis, each of these two tactics—shared governance and unionization—represent strategies of accommodation insofar as they accept as a given the academy’s autocratic legal structure. That structure is a contingent relic of colonial America that was first adopted not to ensure realization of the academy’s educational mission, but, instead, to guarantee the ongoing control of our earliest colleges by political, economic, and clerical elites. Until we question this anachronism, our universities will continue to be ruled by governing boards whose members are unequipped as well as indisposed to safeguard the distinctive work of the academy. To plead with these bodies or their chief executive appointees to save us from the likes of Ron de Santis and Donald Trump is not to affirm the cause of self-governance. Rather, it is to acknowledge our dependence on those who enjoy the powers we are denied.

Proposition #4: Our choice of strategies today must be informed by an ideal of what we believe the American academy should be and must become if it is to sustain the fragile good we call free inquiry.

Because today’s onslaught against US higher education is so aggressive, I worry that we will lapse into a defensive crouch where our only aim is to safeguard what we have not yet lost; and I worry that we may seek to defend institutionalized arrangements that are deeply problematic, whether that be higher education’s current dependence on federal and state funding or the ways we now seek to accomplish the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yes, of course, we must do what we can to resist governmental encroachments on higher education, but we must also nurture our collective capacity to imagine a very different university than the one we inhabit today.

As we consider possible futures, I would suggest that our inquiry be informed by two principles that must be realized if free inquiry is in fact to remain free. First, the American academy must be sufficiently autonomous to ward off intruders who would betray its proper end; and, second, the American academy must be self-governing in the sense that those who do its work must enjoy the capacity to determine how the university’s end is to be accomplished. Autonomy and self-governance, in my view, are the watchwords that should inform our strategies and struggles in the days to come; and that is especially so since, today, these are precisely the two conditions that the right wing assault on US higher education now seeks to eliminate.

Let me close with this: In 1913, a scholar whose name we do not know declared that it is self-contradictory and indeed dangerous to believe that a nation can remain democratic if its universities are organized autocratically. In response, another scholar asked how the American academy might be reconstituted as a “democracy of scholars serving the larger democracy of which it is a part.” That, I submit, is not a bad way to frame our task today.

Oxford, Ohio on April 28, 2016

by Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn

 

Dear colleague (Take #1)

    “Dear Colleague.” So begins the letter sent by the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) to colleges and universities on February 14, 2025. This communication, however, is anything but collegial if, as Merriam-Webster tells us, this term includes as one of its meanings: “marked by power or authority vested equally in each of a number of colleagues.” Ostensibly written “to clarify the nondiscrimination obligations of schools and other entities that receive federal financial assistance,” this letter’s salutation implies that what follows is so much legal counsel offered by one partner to another in the common cause that is education. In fact, however, this “guidance” quickly turns into an ominous bundle of accusations, imperatives, and threats directed against what JD Vance has labeled an “enemy” who must now be defeated.

    “In recent years,” the letter opens, “American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students.” Colleges and universities thereby stand accused of embracing “repugnant race-based preferences” and, indeed, of perpetuating forms of “segregation” that are “a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history.” To reproduce this ugly past under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is to traffic in a “smuggling” operation that reproduces forms of bias prohibited by Title VI of the Civil Right Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. 

This accusation quickly morphs into an imperative as the DoE announces that it “will vigorously enforce the law” against anyone who refuses to comply with its dictates; and that declaration soon becomes a threat as the letter’s recipients are warned that any institution that dares to disobey may find itself stripped of all federal funding. Those who are initially identified as “colleagues” are, by letter’s end, redefined as recalcitrant subjects whose conformity to federal law can only be secured by means of punishment, whether anticipated or actually inflicted.

Buried in a footnote, the February 14 letter concedes that it “does not have the force and effect of law and does not bind the public or create new legal standards.” This disclaimer, however, is belied by the letter’s coercive intent. What this document seeks is the reconstitution of colleges and universities as sites of ideological indoctrination committed to, among other things, the rescue of white supremacy, the reconsolidation of heterosexist gender identities, and a specious doctrine of meritocracy that will do no more than camouflage kleptocratic rule. Accomplishment of these ends demands higher education’s capture within a larger authoritarian regime that can have no place for colleges and universities dedicated to critical inquiry or the academic freedom that is its indispensable condition. That done, those addressed by the DoE as “colleagues” will in fact be so many subordinates.

 

Dear colleagues (Take #2)

  

          “Dear Colleagues.” So opens the March 10 communication sent by Harvard’s president and other senior executives officers to all who are this university’s employees. Composed in response to unspecified but “rapidly shifting federal policies,” which we must assume includes those announced in the DoE’s February 14 imperative, this letter imposes a freeze on all staff and faculty hiring. This order, its recipients are told, is effective immediately and will remain in place indefinitely. 

            What is the sense of the term “colleague” in this letter’s salutation? “We are enormously grateful,” effuses President Garber, “for your dedication and commitment as we work collectively to advance our mission.” Those who perform this work, it appears, are those indicated by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) when it defines a colleague as “a person who is employed in the same workplace or organization: a co-worker.” But this characterization of Harvard’s employees as partners in a shared endeavor presupposes and at the same time obfuscates the hierarchical structure of rule that authorizes some to issue this imperative and, by implication, denies this same prerogative to those whose foremost obligation is to obey. To concede this is to acknowledge that America’s colleges and universities are themselves legally organized as autocracies and for that reason replicate rather than repudiate the authoritarian regime within which they are now being subsumed. 

The basic legal structure of the American academy, as I have explained elsewhere, is an accident that emerges out of circumstances specific to the pre-Revolutionary era, most notably the absence of an established body of scholars who might undertake the work of institutional governance, as was true at Cambridge and Oxford. That lack enabled local elites, chiefly clerical and political, to maintain control over America’s earliest colleges; and it is the obdurate legacy of this colonial relic that we now find depicted in the hierarchical organization charts of U.S. institutions of higher education.

These diagrams demonstrate what Walter Metzger and Richard Hofstadter once labeled “the great anomaly of American higher education.” Whether specified in a charter, enabling statute, or state constitution, this peculiarity consists of the law’s location of the university’s powers of rule within incorporated boards that are conventionally dubbed “external” insofar as their members are not employees of the universities they govern and “lay” insofar as expertise in matters academic is neither required nor expected as a condition of appointment. These bodies in turn are authorized to appoint a chief executive whose principal duty is to implement board directives and oversee the academy’s everyday operation. Beneath this officer, we find everyone else, whether designated as staff or faculty (although each of these groups is internally stratified by, for example, the demarcations between deans and associate deans, tenure-track faculty and contingent instructors, directors and administrative assistants, etc.).

What renders this constitutional form autocratic is the disenfranchisement of those who are subject to these boards’ rule from any legally guaranteed title to participate in that power. These are the persons we classify as employees, and this economistic designation is itself an indicator of their lack of any political authority to make the rules by which they are governed or to select and hold accountable those who do so. This is so not because boards or their chief executive officers are wannabe despots, but because most American colleges and universities are structured as a specific kind of corporation. For legal purposes, each of these boards is the corporation that is any given college or university, and it is to these bodies that the law grants the power to rule over its designated jurisdiction. Those who are not members of these corporations are those who, by the law’s mandate, collectively comprise the ruled. 

True, certain categories of employees (for example, the faculty) may sometimes be permitted to play a role in the academy’s governance, but that opportunity is delegated and so may always be revised or even revoked by its rulers. That, to illustrate, is precisely what happened last year when the University of Kentucky’s governing board unilaterally stripped the faculty senate of its authority over the academic program and replaced that body with one whose role is entirely advisory. Should that university’s president call the members of this faculty “colleagues,” that will veil their situation as subjects whose power is held and exercised at the pleasure of monocratic others. To extend this label to contingent instructors and staff members who are at-will employees is to create a condescending veneer of equality that is mocked by the American academy’s antidemocratic legal form. Here, too, we find rulers and subjects but none who are rightly called “colleagues.”

 

Dear colleagues (Take #3)

When we weave together these two “dear colleague” letters, we see why Adam Sitze is right to label the American academy’s current situation “autocracy squared.” This is arguably the worst of all possible worlds, for here the autocratic academy ruled by external boards becomes a pawn of purposes dictated by those beyond, whether that be the Federal executive, state legislatures, plutocratic donors, and/or foundations that are no friends of the academy. Perhaps, therefore, now is the time to ask how U.S. colleges and universities might be reconstituted in democratic form, thereby rendering those who do its work not so many subjects in the guise of employees but, rather, “co-workers” in whom power is “vested equally” and who, for that reason, are in fact entitled to consider themselves colleagues. 

How that might be done is intimated by this definition of a college, which is also taken from the OED: “an independent self-governing corporation” established “for purposes of study or instruction.” What this sense suggests is the possibility of fashioning the American academy in the form of what state statutory codes typically call member corporations. California’s nonprofit incorporation statute, to illustrate, invites the creation of juridical entities whose members are defined as those who have the right to vote for as well as to remove directors, to adopt or amend their articles of incorporation and bylaws, and, more generally, to exercise the additional powers conventionally afforded by law to incorporated bodies (for example, to determine the disposition of capital assets).

The fundamental difference between member corporations and their autocratic counterparts turns on how the power of rule is organized within each. In the latter, the authority to rule is legally monopolized by these boards and delegated downward through the formal chain of command depicted in standard organization charts. In a member corporation, this chart is turned upside down. Ultimate authority resides not within a head severed from the subjects it rules but, instead, within a body whose members may (or may not) choose to delegate authority upward. That authority, however, can always be recovered by the incorporated body politic that is its source as well as the ground of its legitimacy; and it is for this reason that the 18^thcentury jurist William Blackstone was right to label this legal form a “little republic.”

Within this corporate form, the power of rule is exercised by its members over themselves; and they may do so either directly in assembly or indirectly via selection of the representatives they authorize to exercise a corporation’s powers on their behalf. These representatives may be organized within senates; but, unlike those within the autocratic university, these are not advisory bodies whose role is restricted to offering counsel to those who need not heed it. Instead, these senates are true legislatures whose officers may adopt, amend, or eliminate the statutes of a collegial enterprise whose members are so many citizens of a university organized as a self-governing corporation. 

 

Becoming colleagues

Not long ago, Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky published an op-ed titled “Harvard Must Take a Stand for Democracy.” There, they called on Harvard’s president to “give a high-profile speech defending democracy and condemning the administration’s assault on it.” To which Austin Sarat responded: “As professors continue to press college presidents to go beyond trying to protect the interests of their own places and take up the defense of democracy and the rule of law, faculty members, speaking through their own governing bodies, should also do so. They should pass and publicize their own statements and resolutions.” Were we scholars to do that, Sarat concludes, “our defense of democracy will be rooted, as it should be, in the democratic practices of faculty self-governance itself.”

Perhaps, though, Sarat does not go far enough insofar as he fails to ask whether faculty self-governance can in fact be realized within a legal form that renders their participation in institutional rule forever vulnerable to constriction and even elimination. Today, beset by a U.S. president that castigates us as foes, we find ourselves in a defensive crouch; and, from that posture, too often, we appeal to our institutional rulers to speak up against and save us from the autocrat without. That strategy, Sarat might have said but does not, will only leave us more dependent on the beneficence of autocrats within. Instead, let us dare to imagine an academy whose members, without equivocation, can address one another as “dear colleagues.”

 

 

 

Columbia President Shafik's capitulation to, and then collaboration with, the House Republican Show Hearings marked a turning point in the development of the New McCarthyism in the United States.  Her decision to suspend encamped students and declare them in "trespass" and to then call in the NYPD in violation of, at least the spirit of Columbia's governing documents has unleashed a remarkable number of copycat Presidents.  Presidents at Emory, University of Florida,  Indiana University, University of Texas, Humboldt Polytechnic, and Yale and Connecticut to name only a few, have suspended student protesters, called in police (in some cases including snipers), and struck poses of campus emergency--all in response to what have been overwhelmingly peaceful protests in support of Palestinian rights.  

Of course, as President Shafik quickly learned, if she had hoped to appease the right-wing critics of the protests and of higher education she was sorely mistaken.  Her naming names and revealing confidential information about investigations at the hearing only provided new openings for the Right to intensify pressure as she effectively conceded their claims that her campus was in crisis.  Who could be surprised when House Speaker Mike Johnson, himself under pressure from his own right wing, decided to make Columbia a photo op in order to call for Shafik's resignation, while Senators Hawley and Cotton called for the National Guard to be mobilized to break up the encampments.

The evident failure of President Shafik's strategy to appease the House Republicans and the ongoing imitation of her actions make manifest the politically precarious state of higher education today.  In thinking about this situation I'd suggest that three points are crucial:

1. Shafik's strategy, and those of her epigones, was doomed from the start because the right wing focus on anti-Semitism was never a good faith effort.  That there have been anti-Semitic statements and actions seems clear, but these have been isolated and on the margins.  That Republicans who didn't condemn Charlottesville and who promote the Great Replacement Theory have suddenly become concerned about the safety of Jewish students beggars belief.  Instead, this specific effort to smear campuses is a continuation of the Right's prior campaigns to limit the teaching of subjects critical of current and historical structures of class, gender and race.  There is little movement needed for Florida to go from limiting discussion of sexuality and race while attacking academic freedom and faculty authority, to suspending anti-Zionist student organizations, to reinstating requirements to teach anti-communism as if that remains a pressing issue.  It's true that there is nothing new with attempting to insist that anti-Zionism is by definition anti-Semitism.  But that conflation has always been about limiting knowledge and political debate at least as much as it has been about protecting Jews.

2. The fact that Shafik's turn to police has been imitated so widely should give us pause about treating her as a special case.  It is true that she is a classic example of a university president whose experience is not as an academic.  But that excuse cannot be made for so many other presidents.  Instead, the reliance on force marks both the structural separation of senior management from the everyday life of campuses--especially their everyday intellectual and academic life--as well as the overweening power of donors and, in the case of public universities, governors and state legislators.  Governing Boards have become much more active and much more closely tied to wealthy and intrusive donors given the relative decline in public funding support for higher education.  These are all outcomes of the long-term spread of managerialism in higher education.  But this need not be written in stone.  As the cases of Brown,  Northwestern, and Wesleyan demonstrate, it is possible for Presidents to choose an alternative path.  But they have to recognize the academic nature of their institutions to do so.

3.  Indeed, the fact that there have been alternative approaches to the encampments suggests what college and university leaders need to do if they want to preserve the autonomy and nature of their institutions.  One of the failures of President Shafik, as well as her predecessors from Harvard and Penn, was her failure to use her time to challenge the premise of the hearings.  I recognize that to do so would be extremely difficult.  The whole thing was a show trial.  But President Shafik could have used her time to defend her institution and the nature of higher education, to explain the nature of academic inquiry, to insist on the importance of the intellectual autonomy of universities from political interference.  She did none of those things.  Instead, she violated some of the most important traditions of academic freedom we have.

Date: November 23, 2021 

To: Susannah Scott, Academic Senate Chair, UCSB 

Henry Yang, Chancellor, UCSB 

Cc: Michael V. Drake, UC President 

Cecilia Estolano, Chair, UC Board of Regents 

Robert Horwitz, Chair, UC Academic Senate 

From: Concerned UCSB Senate Faculty 

Re: The planning of Munger Hall at UCSB 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To elaborate:

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

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

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

We have two options to move forward: 

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

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

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

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

Sincerely, Concerned UCSB Senate Faculty, including, 

Constance Penley 

Swati Chattopadhyay 

Laurie Monahan 

Eileen Boris 

Dominique Jullien 

Bishnupriya Ghosh 

Lisa Hajjar 

Jeffrey Stopple 

Bassam Bamieh 

John Majewski Richard Wittman 

Ann Bermingham 

Michael Curtin 

Ann Jensen Adams 

Omer Egecioglu 

Mark A. Meadow 

Harold Marcuse 

Catherine L. Albanese 

Heather Badamo 

Sabine Frühstück 

William Robinson 

Barbara Herr Harthorn 

Herbert M. Cole 

David White 

Steven Gaulin 

Bhaskar Sarkar 

Kip Fulbeck 

Barbara A. Holdrege 

William Elison 

Kate McDonald 

Christina Vagt 

Juan E. Campo 

Arpit Gupta 

Julie Carlson 

Elisabeth Weber 

Stephan Miescher 

Jenni Sorkin 

Janet Walker 

Kevin B. Anderson 

Nancy Gallagher 

Aazam Feiz 

Hilary Bernstein 

Wolf Kittler 

John S. W. Park 

Silvia Bermudez 

Sara Pankenier Weld 

Marko Peljhan 

Jorge Castillo 

Jill Levine 

Evelyn Reder 

Kim Yasuda 

Erika Rappaport 

James Frew 

Janet Afary 

Fabio Rambelli 

Amr El Abbadi 

Giuliana Perrone 

Salim Yaqub 

Elena Aronova 

Cristina Venegas 

Stuart Tyson Smith 

Phill Conrad 

Volker M. Welter 

Adrienne Edgar 

Joseph Blankholm 

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi 

Catherine Nesci 

John W. I. Lee 

Sylvester O. Ogbechie 

Daniel Masterson 

Grace Chang 

Daniel Reeve 

Enda Duffy 

Roberta L. Rudnick 

Leroy Laverman 

Walid Afifi 

Iman Djouini 

Cherrie Moraga 

Dorota Dutsch 

Mark Maslan 

Charmaine Chua 

Roberto Strongman 

Amrah Salomón J. 

Ralph Armbruster Sandoval 

Carlos J. Garcia-Cervera 

Darren Long 

Sharon Tettegah 

Aashish Mehta 

Kaustav Banerjee 

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia 

Helen Morales 

Casey Walsh 

Terrance Wooten 

Birge Huisgen-Zimmermann 

Felice Blake 

Juan Cobo Betancourt 

Mario Garcia 

Scott Marcus 

Ingrid Banks 

Jody Enders 

Nelson Lichtenstein 

France Winddance Twine 

Lisa Jevbratt 

Ellen McCracken 

Juan Pablo Lupi 

Gisela Kommerell 

Edwina Barvosa 

Jeremy Douglass 

Valentina L. Padula 

Mayfair Yang 

Harvey Molotch 

Sven Spieker 

After UC president Janet Napolitano announced her resignation, effective August 2020, the prospect of searching awoke a quotient of dread. "The Regents will pick," one Senate elder told me.  "They won't listen to us. They don't care what we think."  The idea here is that a small group of uber-regents will pop out another person whose remoteness from educational functions and faculty they will deem a virtue.  This has become a national trend: secretive searches that look for a chief executive who will preside over the university rather than develop it from within, and reflect the interests of the governing board ahead of those of the university's multiple constituencies.  Examples include presidential searches in South Carolina and Colorado this past spring.  The conflict is also present at UC (see this post for national as well as local background). 

But the UC Regents do have a formal search process.  Called Regents Policy 7101, it requires a number of steps.

The first is that the Board Chair forms a Special Committee comprised of six Regents and other ex officio members (paragraph 1).  The membership of the new Special Committee is posted here.

The Chair of the Special Committee then "consults with the full Board of Regents at the beginning of the search for the purpose of reviewing the relevancy of the criteria to be considered and approved by the Board of Regents and discussing potential candidates (paragraph 4). During the search, "all Regents will be invited to all meetings with all constituencies."  The Regents then make the final appointment, although Policy 7101 does not specify whether the full Board votes or how that vote proceeds.

The important features here are (1) the Board retains exclusive decision rights over the selection of the president and (2) every member of the Board has equal access to the meetings that constitute the search.  The Policy protects the rights of regents whom the Chair does not appoint to the Special Committee--the process is not to be controlled by the Board Chair's Special Committee or a small group of allied Regents--and affirms the Board's sovereignty over the search.

But there is also (3): in between the beginning and the end of the Policy comes a potentially huge and dynamic systemwide consultation process conjured in luxuriant description.

B. The Chair of the Special Committee will invite the Academic Council to appoint an Academic Advisory Committee, composed of not more than thirteen members, including the Chair of the Academic Council and at least one representative of each of the ten campuses, to assist the Special Committee in screening candidates.

C. The Special Committee will consult broadly with constituent groups of the University, including the Academic Advisory Committee appointed by the Academic Council, Chancellors, Laboratory Directors, Vice Presidents, students, staff, and alumni. To facilitate consultation, there shall be appointed advisory committees, each with no more than twelve members, of students, staff, and alumni. The student advisory committee shall be appointed by the Presidents of the graduate and undergraduate student associations and shall include at least one student from each campus. The staff advisory committee shall be appointed by the Chair of the Council of UC Staff Assemblies and shall include at least one staff member from each campus. The alumni advisory committee shall be appointed by the President of the Alumni Associations of the University of California and shall include at least one alumna or alumnus from each campus. Such consultation will be for the purpose of (1) reviewing the relevancy of the criteria approved by the Board of Regents and (2) presenting the nominee or nominees to members of the groups at the conclusion of the search.

In classic UC style, the executive decision making body has parallel advisory groups that allows the appearance of consultation but which it can also ignore.  Hence the pessimism of some Senate elders. On the other hand, the advisory committees have a power of self-constitution and also activity.  The only stated rule is a cap on the number of members. The named advisory committees are:

• Academic Advisory Committee
• Student Advisory Committee
• Staff Advisory Committee
• Alumni Advisory Committee

The Policy puts no limitations on the activities of the committees.  How do these Advisory Committees (ACs) actually influence the Special Committee and the overall Board?

The standard theory is prestige: find the most prominent or trusted insider from each campus and create what management theorist Clayton Christensen likes to call a "heavyweight team."  In the case of the Academic Advisory Committee (AcAC), prestige theory assumes that the regents recognize academic (or senate service-based) prestige and would honor it by adapting their views.  Each heavyweight would be recognized as speaking authoritatively for the (leadership of the) particular campus.

Here's the problem: I know of no evidence that the last three presidential searches have worked this way; the evidence I do have suggests the opposite.  Business culture does not respect academic culture, the class gaps between professors and most regents are too wide, and the key feature of Christensen's heavyweights--decision rights--is stripped from the ACs. 

If this isn't enough to undermine AC leverage, there's also the structural weakness of the committee.  With the AcAC, each campus gets one person to represent its ladder faculty; this committee has a maximum of 13 people for a systemwide ladder faculty of over 11,000 (pdf p 94).   This faculty is divided among 10 campuses, between campuses and medical centers, across all the disciplines, which have diverse needs, and across racial groups, which also have diverse needs.  The idea of one person representing hundreds or thousands of their colleagues makes no epistemological (or political) sense.  It is also a recipe for an incoherent voice coming out of the AcAC, which Senate handpicking of membership can ease only at the price of lost diversity of views.

But the UC advisory committees could affect the presidential search, by using their committees to prompt campus discussions about the presidential search in the context of the immediate future of UC.  All of the Advisory Committees could set up a series of events in which they talk with their constituents on each of 10 campuses.  They listen to hopes and fears, gather ideas about leadership needs, hash them over, and then transmit the resulting comments, recommendations, or demands to the Special Committee.  One faculty member suggested a "UC Day" in which town halls happen across the UC system at the same time. The ACs would have to identify a deadline that would fall before the Special Committee's long-listing and short-listing of candidates such that it (and the Board overall) could fully consider the input.  Each committee could do its work in about 6 weeks--2 campus visits a week (if not all done at once), plus a week to debate, formulate, and forward recommendations.  The scope of the issue is limited and the reports should be short.

Another benefit of using the ACs as a public fulcrum: town halls and other public events would be newsworthy.  Whatever they think of professors, unions, and students, governing boards do care about institutional reputation, media coverage, and what they hear back from VIPs as a result of that.  They also care about the public debates and collective movements that shape public opinion and apply political pressure.  A recent example is the issue of food insecurity and student homelessness.  For years, the Board were told UC financial aid took care of low-income students and they took no action to mitigate student poverty.  Then, sometime after Bernie Sanders put free college on the political map in late 2015, the media started covering student hunger and homelessness.  The UC Regents responded by forming a Special Committee on Basic Needs in late 2018.  The actual results have a long way to go, but the point is that governing boards do respond to public discourse, eventually, academic discourses included.

In short, though UC governance has a top-down 19th century structure, the Regents are most likely listen to faculty, students, alums, and staff under three conditions: their Advisory Committees (A) represent a real constituency brought together by a consultation process that (B) speaks publicly about its views of the University in a way that (C) publicly (re)frames the University's needs for its next president.  The idea is to create an interest, a buzz, an excitement, a university-wide discussion over what we do and don't need, and, more importantly, to construct a constituency which then builds discourses that have an institutional and political existence.  There are no guarantees, but the wager is that the state's media would cover a process in which a university system holds a discussion about its current goals and consequent leadership needs on all ten campuses.   The process would upgrade the level of public discussion about California higher ed both inside and outside the University.

This process would also help locate potential presidents with one vital skill, which is gathering exactly this kind of information from their own institutional grassroots.  This might seem irrelevant to the president's main job of political lobbying, but it is not. Recent history shows that a president without deep knowledge of the university's daily life simply cannot make the statewide case for the University's public benefit and fiscal needs.  UC's advisory committees could set an example of the creation of this kind of profound, inspiring knowledge that the University needs in its next president. 

I do hope the current Academic Senate leadership, Chair Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Vice Chair Mary Gauvain, rapidly set up a systemwide faculty fact-finding and deliberative process via the Academic Advisory Committee, details TBD. UC needs a new president with deep understanding of the University's issues, people, and potential, and the ability to learn directly from them.

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