Bodrum Castle, Türkiye Sept 12, 2025   

 

 

At our friend Andrea’s birthday in Hampshire last weekend, the Man in the Lime Suit said to me above the din, “they’ve taken the spark out of everyone. Taken what’s inside people that belongs to them and makes them act.”  I nodded. The spark never does go out, but I knew exactly what he meant.

 

The spark to make one’s own things is the origin and outcome of teaching and research. It leads to a set of powers in art to show what’s not seen and to diverge from what exists. 

 

In politics, it’s to break with a nightmare of the present, and build an alternative to it, brick by brick, where you have to make most of the bricks yourself. 

 

In management, the spark enables the creation of the positive narrative of your institution’s destiny and the coordination of your people into a powerful movement towards it. (I wrote about these linked elements last time.)

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

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

 

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

 

UC Santa Barbara on March 5, 2020     

On Friday August 8, the Trump administration demanded a $1 billion "settlement" from UCLA after freezing $584 million in federal grants for vital scientific and health research. The proposed $1 billion agreement would be the largest settlement since Trump began extorting universities, and marks the first attempt of the federal government to ransom payment from a public university. These attacks have been waged under the guise of fighting antisemitism and investigating alleged Title VII violations, but we see them for what they are: an attempt to cripple public higher education in the nation’s premier public university system. 

Hyde Park, Chicago on June 25, 2017   

It’s great when you’re President of the United States and are unlawfully taking apart the national system for funding STEM research, and then some big universities step in and cut their non-STEM units instead.

 

Case in point: in July, UChicago’s Division of Arts and Humanities announced plans for a reorganization that would cut its number of departments in half, among other things.  The announcement came “just three months after UChicago Arts and the Humanities Division rebranded as a consolidated division.” In mid-August, the Division’s dean, Deborah Nelson, announced a reduction of PhD admissions for some departments and a full “pause” in others.  A week later, Nelson announced that the pause in PhD admissions would cover the entire Division, with a couple of exceptions. 

UCLA on May 14, 2018    

It’s a Friday in the 6^th grade, when you eat at the lunch truck parked outside the school gate. While standing in line, the big kid behind you grabs the five-dollar bill out of your hand. When you turn around, he smirks and says, “I’ll give you this five back if you give me a ten.”  

 

This is the genius shakedown that Trump has imposed on UCLA.  He announced the freezing of $300 million, which UCLA officials said is really $584 million.  Two days later, it was like the first Dr. Evil scene in Austin Powers.  “We hold UCLA ransom for--one BILLION dollars.”

 

Obviously, the choice can’t be to pay $1 billion to get back $584 million. The choice is to say okay, keep the $584 million, or, instead, sue to get back the $584 million that has been (unlawfully) withheld. 

 

It’s not really a choice. UC must pick door number two.

No Regrets Sunday Morning, Victoria Line   

I’ve often broached this topic, most recently in relation to the new UC Irvine plan for hyper-austerity (Liner Note 32; budget analysis in 31 and 33).   This question of professionals’ managerial authority is raised again by some faculty responses to the Columbia and Brown University deals with the Trump Administration, and to the new Trump attack on UCLA. 

 

One professor has aptly summarized the current situation as “a strange moment between critique and advocacy [in which] the two are inseparable.”  Faculty are still critiquing the responses of senior managers as lacking cooperation across the sector—Harvard is off by itself in the Ivy League in suing rather than signing with the Trump Administration. Some, like the members of the UCLA Faculty Association, continue to expose the futility of anticipatory obedience.  

Milos, Greece, on July 19, 2025   

There’s a drift towards seeing the Penn and Columbia University deals with the Trump Administration as templates for settlements across higher ed.  Secretary of Education Linda McMahon calls the Columbia Agreement a “road map for elite universities,” likely meaning Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, Princeton and even Harvard, which have all be subjected to the Administration’s unlawful funding freezes.

This would be a great way to further degrade the entire sector, and must be blocked.

 

A bit of background: When you are the weaker party as a long-term cultural cold war becomes a hot institutional war, you must create a public understanding of who you really are. It should include something like the following elements:

 

UC Irvine on May 8, 2018   

As Trump’s blunderbuss shoots the bottom out of the research boat, how will UC Irvine, the system’s middle case, stay afloat?

This is actually a national question. Trump has done a classic “heighten the contradictions” of the political economy of the US research university. 

 

This political economy has always been unstable, and three decades of reductions in per-student state funding have kept the boat rocking back and forth. Now the Trump Administration has blown holes in most sources of federal research funding. Meanwhile, state funding is mainly flat or down, and will be under renewed pressure as the provisions of Trump’s tax cut bill come into effect.

 

Dún Laoghaire Ireland on June 18, 2025

I haven’t found dissent in the standard places about Penn’s capitulation to Trump on transgender women athletes.  Maybe it’s because the deal seems to have gotten Penn’s $175 million back—those federal funds that Trump’s people had unlawfully suspended.  So let me say why it’s so bad. 

 

You may have heard that Penn president J. Larry Jameson settled with Trump’s Department of Education over the alleged Title IX violation of allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete for the Penn’s women’s team in 2021-22. This was actually Title IX compliance, since NCAA and Title IX guidance then required Penn to include trans women in women’s sports. (The Athletic has a good overview. See also Johanna Alonso at IHE.) 

 

Berlin on June 23, 2025   

This is going to be short--I’m between the 3^rd and the 4^th of my conferences in the second half of June—but have a brief comment on the Supreme Court decision about national injunctions and a research funding chart.

The headline is of course the chaos created for birthright citizenship and the 14^th Amendment by the 6-3 majority decision, written by Amy Coney Barrett.  The decision doesn’t pronounce on the (flagrant un)constitutionality of Trump’s attempted nullification of birthright citizenship through executive order, but decides whether, under the “Judiciary Act of 1789, federal

courts have equitable authority to issue universal [national] injunctions.”   The Six said no, except under special circumstances (complaints from states, class-action suits). The decision disempowers lower courts as they try to enforce the executive’s compliance with law, and will require the Supreme Court to adjudicate pretty much every national injunction, as far as I can tell. It will be easy enough to block national unjunctions under SCOTUS’s brand-new legal standard (not created to strike down national injunctions against Biden’s student debt relief). 

 

Dublin Bay on June 17, 2025   

Universities can’t fight an impeding fiscal disaster if they can’t face its size and destructive power.  Are they facing it?  Would they fight it? 

It's sometimes yes on the first question, but the public versions so far suggest not fight but capitulation.  

 

Today’s example is Minnesota--with condolences and heartfelt solidarity to everyone affected by the recent political assassinations in the Twin Cities.

The AAUP chapter at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities put together a presentation for faculty about their administration's budget announcement. They cite their administration saying, “a financial model that relies on maintaining academic programs and activities at current levels is not sustainable, nor is attempting to be great at everything.” This suggests both downsizing scale and diluting quality.

 

Battery, New York on November 2, 2022   

Trump’s opening blitzkrieg has happened, the first defenses are in place, and the colossal damage has been done.  What are the university system’s next moves?

• More lawsuits.  I was ecstatic about the May Day lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). It’s seeking to block the DOGE decimation of grants, workforce, and programs.  Plaintiffs are the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association. (See Karin Wolf’s good backgrounder.) Suing will bring more people into the battle. People are inspired into action when they see that the people running the humanities’ national institutions are in the fight. 
• Ongoing faculty and staff opposition. Special mention to the AAUP for jumping into the trenches and staying in there—they’ve been inspiring.  Overall, there has been action on many fronts.  
• Compiling cuts lists.  Great work on the NEH grants cuts. And on NSF’s. Some University of California faculty have started a survey of PIs to gather information, in part because an unknown share of terminated or suspended grants are not reported to the campus’s research offices. Some faculty have tried to get information from their own administrations through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
• Rallying administrations. There have been some great individual faculty senate statements calling for mutual defense and academic alliance (e.g. U Mass Amherst, Rutgers, Minnesota, University of California).
• Objecting to ICE’s abrogation of academic freedom.  Combinations of lawyering and academic and grassroots support have obtained releases for Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts and Mohsen Mahdawi of Columbia.  This is ongoing work.
• Bridge funding.  At Inside Higher Ed, Kathryn Palmer wrote a good piece about university research without federal funding—and its impossibility. She sampled the range of universities that are offering temporary backfill for wrongly terminated or delayed grants—Yale, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, as well as the public Universities of Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Arizona. This is a stopgap that I’ll discuss below.
• Collective Statements by Institutions.  The main one I know is “A Call for Constructive Engagement”organized by The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) with support from AAAS, with a large number of presidents signing on. Are there others? Others that commit to oppositional modes of action?
• Other stuff??? I’m not coming up with anything.

The first responses to the NIH cuts came 100 days ago.  The research funding story has moved from litigation against pernicious and illegal federal cuts to hunkering down for a long siege. Most of the lawsuits are awaiting first decisions. Trump’s people in the agencies seem to be ignoring them. 

This is a period of enormous danger, as the slowly boiling frog gets used to the very hot water and accepts its fate. All this good work is not enough.  And it needs national coordination.  These many small groups are up against the federal government.

Administrators have not created the united front that faculty groups have called for. Harvard hasn’t gotten the public backing of the entire Ivy League, for example. Instead, we see individual universities—Dartmouth for example—looking more Trump-friendly to save themselves.

As they enter the next hundred days, universities face ten-dimensional fiscal risk. 

1.     Blanket reductions of indirect cost recovery funds at NIH, the Department of Energy, and now NSF(as of May 2^nd).  There’s a Temporary Restraining Order for the NIH cuts, but as I understand it, no funds have been restored.

2.     Cancellation of existing grants (for various and mostly arbitrary and capricious reasons, starting with any mention of diversity and also including the study of climate change, attitudes towards vaccines, etc.; the Ted Cruz blueprint / hit list seems to be in use). NSF grant terminations are compiled here.   Cancellation is coupled with opaque appeals processes of unknown likely outcomes.

3.     Reduced awarding of grants (NSF awards are, by one calculation, down 50%).

4.     Freezing of awarded grants. DOGE seems to be behind this. When they will be unfrozen is unclear—if ever.

5.     Non-review of new applications.  Reviews have stopped and started in opaque and unpredictable ways.

6.     Non-allocation of funds for awarded and uncancelled grants.  Executive impounding is happening across government, very much including research agencies. 

7.     New political conditions for eligibility for grant approval. The existence of DEI programs and boycotts of Israel are to be deal-breakers, but so might any student protest of the war in Gaza or perhaps something else.

8.     Retaliatory bulk funding impounding at targeted universities.  Columbia, Penn, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Northwestern were Trump’s starter list. Harvard’s total of $2.2 billion in frozen funds is more than three times the size of its federal research allocation ($639,953,000 in FY 2023), so the Trump Administration is impounding across the full range of federal fund sources.  This includes:

9.     Cuts to student-related federal funding. These are still unknown, but may include a disorderly exit from student financial aid. The Republican House is now involved in some confusing design projectsthat could cut revenues to universities and cut their underlying student enrollment.  Student tuition as well as enrollment-based state funds (at public universities) help subsidize research (“institutional funds” are 25 cents on the research dollar, up from 10 cents in 1970), so both of these cuts mean domino effects for research.

10.  Cuts to Medicaid and other programs that form a big part of university revenues, particularly through medical centers. Medical centers generate both high revenues, especially through clinical activity, and high costs. If the revenues are cut, universities’s subsidy bill could explode.

These are ten dimensions of fiscal risk.   Bernie Sanders put out a Minority Staff Report on May 13^th called “Trump’s War on Science” which shows the budgetary and personnel damage at NIH.

 

My list omits the enormous psychological distress, the incalculable wasted effort, the massive intellectual costs, the bonfire of the knowledges.

The list also omits the general sense that researchers are in limbo, whole fields are being decimated (like education statistics), and the research funding system is now “totally broken.”  

This is to also to pass over the federal crushing of academic freedom through the government-dictated bans on a long list of research topics, terms, and approaches. I am still looking for a precedent in a Western democracy other than Nazi Germany. The Nazis may be the only one.

This is to say that a united university sector must fight hammer and tongs. And also to say that current energy level is way too low—including the energy of strategy discussions. These must go beyond stopgaps that tacitly accept the new status quo.

A leading stopgap is institutional bridge funding. At the University of Arizona, the program resulted from a faculty protest in March of its administraton’s inaction.

[F]aculty senators blasted UA administrators for not providing more updates and concrete plans on how to navigate the many executive orders and funding cuts from the Trump administration.

“The vice president for research is not doing anything, as far as we can tell,” Keith Maggert, a UA professor of molecular and cellular biology and a faculty senator, told [Senior Vice President for Research Tomás] Díaz de la Rubia in response to his report Monday to the senate on federal funding orders.

“I’m sorry to be so blunt. The (UA) president has not announced anything to help research. It’s down to the department, who is the least able to cover this,” Maggert said. 

….

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Díaz de la Rubia, who appeared to be taken aback by the blunt questions.

He said the administration is in “constant communication” with officials in Washington, D.C., and colleagues at the federal funding agencies, and repeated his advice that UA faculty and researchers keep in touch with their program managers because they are the ones with the most information.

In response, Maggert said program officers weren’t returning emails or communicating with researchers so Díaz de la Rubia’s advice didn’t get them anywhere.

“If I don’t get bridge funding, I will have to shut my lab in about two or three months,” Maggert said.

“I have graduate students that can’t be paid. I have organisms that need to be fed. I haven’t heard anything about any of these ideas or bridges that you’re talking about. So, it may be occurring in your office, but it’s not [trickling] out to the people who (have) research programs, the students that rely on them, and the staff that helps support them,” he continued.

“And so, what specifics can you give us other than broad statements that have yet to turn into action? How can the University of Arizona support the research infrastructure that it has created, that we have invested in, that our lives and careers depend on?”

The Arizona Daily Star reported that meeting on March 4^th.  It reported a new bridge program on March 7^th.  The open protests worked. 

I’m happy for Prof. Maggart and his colleagues, and pleased that he was rewarded rather than punished for speaking out.

 

However, I see three problems to bear in mind.

 

One I’ve mentioned: patches normalize the status quo.  They say, “universities can work with this. We have institutional funds that we can use to keep a lower but perhaps adequate level of research going.”

 

The second is that this “perhaps adequate level” is actually a bad level. For example, the Mellon Foundation has offered $15 million to replace cut NEH state humanities councils. This is good. But those programs had been budgeted at $65 million.  If only 1/5^th or 1/4^th of current funding is replaced, universities will lose the majority of their research activity. They cannot accept this. 

 

The third is possible internal cuts to the research not covered by bridge funding. 

 

The University of Arizona is a case in point. It spends $955 million (FY 2023) on research from all sources, of which about half, or $434.7 million, comes from the federal government (NSF Higher Education Research and Development [HERD] survey, “Data” tab, Table 22, Row 42).  To support that research, the University of Arizona spends $304.7 million of its institutional funds. This means that nearly 1/3^rd of the U of A’s research funding comes from its own pockets.  

 

The “bridge funding” package is a promise to increase the University’s institutional expenditures. (Details are not available to the general public.) Where is that additional institutional money going to come from?

 

Since (almost) every single public university income stream is under pressure or just plain inadequate or both, the most logical source of Prof. Maggart & Colleagues’ bridge funding is the $304.7 million the university already spends on research. 

 

The most likely method is a zero-sum reallocation from some fields to biology and related fields with laboratory commitments and crunches.  Non-Science & Engineering fields, with fewer facilities and personnel commitments, are likely sources.

 

Arizona spends $27.3 million of its institutional funds on all non-S&E fields, or 9% of the total (still using the most recent data from FY 2023, Table 28, Row 23).  It spends a total of $4.5 million on the humanities, (Table 58, Row 72), somewhat more on both visual arts and Education, and so on.  

 

Extramural funds (when not nullified by Trump) cannot be diverted by a university administration, but institutional funds are the university’s own money and can be. At Arizona’s institutional funds rate, it is putting around $9 million of its own funds into non-S&E fields.  It would be tempting to raid this money for the benefit of biology and chemistry labs that can’t cover their payroll or keep their organisms alive. 

 

No one would really want to do this. But there aren’t obvious alternative funding sources, and no transparency about fund flows in the American university even in normal times. 

 

Bridge funds in one field thus can mean cut funds in another.  They are not a good short-term solution, and they won’t work at all medium-term.  

 

If the main current funding idea is limited like this one, university officials need to come up with much better ideas, and fast.  

 

I think all better ideas are going to require a collaborative front among numbers of universities rather than these individual deals.  Otherwise universities will be doing much of Trump’s work for him.