Paris on March 22, 2004   

The Coalition for Action in Higher Ed has organized a Day of Action on Thursday, April 17^th.  I’m speaking with Tim Kaufman-Osborn and Amy C. Ofner on a panel called, “Who Rules the Academy (and How To Fight Back)?” at 10 am Pacific. 

 

I’m going to argue that this is the best time to make the full ask for the university we actually want, not some triangulated dilution in the style of 1995 through about 2015, when Bernie Sanders made free college a national issue. It’s the best time because the insufferable right, wildly wrong about education, isn’t negotiating now but just hitting us in the face.  

 

Tim recently posted a piece in this space, and his book The Autocratic Academy argues for the democratization of higher ed. Join us if you can. I will post my talk on the blog later on and also the other two if they're willing.

 

Here I want to point out, as we start the 13^th week of the reign of Trump II, how fluid the political situation has already become. Fighting will be the opposite of futile. It will be essential and, over time, successful.

 

First, well, yes, the U.S. has now fulfilled its potential as a police state. M. Gessen is right about this.  Black Lives Matter--not to mention the 1950-1960s civil rights movement--long ago identified the practices that have now been systematized and turned into summary deportations of alleged gang members to a US-subsidized supermax “terrorist” prison in El Salvador, unannounced summary visa cancellations for noncitizen student critics of Israel and for non citizen students with no known contact with protests. Universities have not come together to object to this abuse of the student visa system. Nor are they openly opposing an escalation of tech-based spying and policing—or the low-tech version, like asking the University of California for the electronic details of all signatories of two letters (which the University submitted).  This harassment of critics of Israel, international students, and the university sector will continue.

 

But second, Trump’s aura of power has entered premature decline.  The best polling evidence I’ve seen are charts from John Burn-Murdoch which I’ve excerpted. 

All Republicans continue to support his draconian and frequently illegal immigration policy, but he’s losing non-MAGA Republicans on everything else. Burn-Murdoch noted,

The speed and scale of the American public’s souring on Trump’s economic agenda are stunning. [Just] before the tariff chaos, 63 per cent of Americans had a negative view of the government’s economic policy, comfortably the highest figure since records began almost 50 years ago.

 

As a result, third, Trumplash is well underway. The mass mobilizations are building. Hands Off and other national protests have been getting a lot of coverage abroad.  This will increase as Trumpian destruction moves deeper and deeper into the society and around the world. Trump has created simply enormous opposition to himself, of a range of types that will be hard to deal with all at once. The emerging consensus, even in the New York Times mainstream, is that “capitulation is doomed.”

 

Fourth, Big Capital has caught up with the rest of us in recognizing that Trump is an uncontrolled menace. $50-million-a-year executives, financiers, and the business press that didn’t mind his genocidal plan to turn Gaza into a Palestinian-free beach resort are enraged at his idiotic and destructive tariffs, two words now being applied routinely by the commentariat.  “Crazy” and “stupid” are routine descriptions.  I watched James Surowiecki lose his mind on X when he realized how badly Trump’s people had calculated their country-by-country tariffs  (here and here; see also the strangely accurate Saturday Night Live version.  

 

The FT  finance columnist, Robert Armstrong, who has icewater in his veins, shredded the tariff illogic in one paragraph and then wrote, 

 

Anyone with firmly held false beliefs will have regular, unpleasant run-ins with reality. They change course, only to drive right back into the same ditch. Trump won’t get what he wants from his tariff policy, so he will keep changing it, leaving markets scrambling to catch up. The tactics will zigzag as the fundamental strategic error remains.

 

Trump’s tariff calculation is just one example of the un-priceable chaos that markets find themselves in. 

 

True to Armstrong’s predication on April 4^th, Trump did a carve-out on his multiply-hiked China tariffs for smartphones and other products where his 145% tariffs was goring the oxen owned by the tech moguls who’d lined up behind him at his inauguration. 

 

A bit more on corporate disillusion: Armstrong is also right that this heightens rather than purges the contradictions. An angry Nouriel Roubini exclaimed, “Expensive IPhones 📱 and other high end consumer electronics purchased mostly by the well-off/affluent are exempted; but the 80% of good Chinese cheap consumer goods purchased by his left-behind blue collar base at Dollar Stores, Walmart, Costco, and other low price retailers are slapped with a 145% tariff. . . . This 145% tariff is the most regressive tax in US history that shafts the working class that he pretends to want to help while leading to almost no reshoring ever of jobs on goods we stopped producing in the US in the 1960s nor of the tech goods we want to reshore.”  

 

Confirming that latter point, Apple CEO Tim Cook was filmed somewhere explaining why Apple manufacturing will stay in China: 

There’s an impression that companies come to China because of low labor costs.  I’m not sure what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. The reason [companies come to China] is because of the skill—the quantity of skill in one location. And the type of skill it is. The products we do require really advanced tooling, the precision that you have to have in tooling, and working with the materials that we do, are state-of-the-art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. Now in the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.  It’s that vocational expertise—it’s very deep here.

 

The mainstream business world is now belatedly focused on containing (without defeating) Trump. He faces a business class that went from supine endorsement to red alert in about a week.

 

Fifth, after much initial waffling between respectful engagement and obsequious appeasement, governments have become clear about Trump’s one-trick mafia method. It was nicely summarized by Pascal Lamy, former head of the World Trade Organization and ex-EU trade commissioner. 

Referring to Trump’s tactics, Lamy said it was best to respond robustly in a way the US president understood: “I think Mr. Trump learned to do business in the New York mafia-influenced real estate market and that his tactics are based on extortion – you hit and keep hitting for as long as you do not get a good price for stopping. Showing your muscle, it seems to me, is the way to transact with him and his people.”

Some people are figuring out the “good price for stopping.”  It can be the withholding of personal attacks coming from inside Trump House. The pro-tariff Trumper mogul (and Harvard ex-president Claudine Gay terminator) Bill Ackman tweeted on April 7^th to his 1.7 million followers:  

 

I just figured out why @howardlutnick is indifferent to the stock market and the economy crashing. He and Cantor are long bonds. He profits when our economy implodes. 

 

It’s a bad idea to pick a Secretary of Commerce whose firm is levered long fixed income. It’s an irreconcilable conflict of interest.

 

Nine hours later he tweeted an apology: “It was unfair of me to lash out at @howardlutnick. I don’t think he is pursuing his self interest. I am sure he is doing the best he can for the country while representing the President as Commerce Secretary” blah, blah, blah.  But message sent in the first tweet.  Message apparently received about a potential cost of internal division that Trump didn’t want to pay, not negated by the ritual apology.   

 

Meanwhile, other governments are preparing not only negotiations but further retaliation. In Europe, they’re finally gathering resources for a fight to protect a longer process of decoupling.    Germany is abandoning its cherished “debt brake” and the UK its restrictive “fiscal rules.” Trump is the best thing since Covid for European public spending and capacity building. 

 

Sixth, and in contrast, the Democratic opposition now consists of Bernie Sanders (a non-member) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their Fighting Oligarchy tour plus Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) recording daily video critiques of Trump on X.  

 

More power to them, but their party has disappeared.  Kamala Harris has announced, “I’m not going anywhere,” which is literally true, and Gavin Newsom is focused on his podcast guests, particularly the election deniers helping him get in touch with his inner broligarch.  Party elders like James Carville are giving terrible advice, in this case, to do nothing, at which the party excels. Rising stars like Gretchen Whitmer are dooming themselves by accepting Trump’s framing on tariffs or whatever. 

(Dan Pfeiffer pointed out that “the better argument here is that he is a chaotic clown stumbling about the world stage, hurting American families by raising prices for no reason” [28’52”].) 

The American one-party Republican state is a big problem for organizing, and organizers obviously need to be much more aggressive in this bad environment.

Seventh, in spite of the #Hands Off and other movements amongst academic and government workers among many others, university boards and senior managers are not speaking out for universities, students, academic freedom, or education. There are a handful of exceptions that prove the rule—Michael Roth, Christopher Eisgruber, Danielle R. Holley, and Patricia McGuire, the presidents of Wesleyan, Princeton, Mt. Holyoke and Trinity Washington respectively. Nor are universities releasing data estimating Trump’s catastrophic research cuts--which demobilizes faculty, staff, and students--or banding together to denounce education’s enemies, including the irreparable harm of deportations, threatened as well as real. 

 

However, eighth, unions and faculty associations are speaking out, first by trying to activate their administrations and second by proposing their own schemes. 

 

Faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst wrote a proposal for the 60 universities under investigation by the Trump administration to “unite in a coordinated, proactive defense,” with 11 policy items for their proposed Task Force. 

 

The Rutgers University Senate passed a “Resolution to Establish a Mutual Defense Compact for the Universities of the Big Ten Academic Alliance in Defense of Academic Freedom, Institutional Integrity, and the Research Enterprise.”  

 

University of Minnesota faculty asked its administration to take a much stronger stand in protected students under summary deportation orders.  

 

News of dozens of cancelled visas of University of California students has lead to a joint faculty-union “call upon UC to immediately address Student Visa Revocations.”  

 

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has been fully engaged on multiple fronts. For example, they wrote a 13-page letter to college and university general counsels offices on April 2^nd advising them that they are not legally obligated to “provide the personally identifiable information of students and faculty” to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.  

 

Ninth and last, there are inspiring student examples of still fighting for your original principles. There's the principle of full academic freedom to advocate for justice in Palestine without being deported, and there are the Columbia University students who chained themselves to a Columbia gate to protest the failure of Columbia to release information about the targeting and ICE arrest of Mahmoud Khalil.  

Amy Goodman interviewed some of the students for Democracy Now. 

 

SHEA: My name is Shea. I’m a junior at Columbia College. ...

AMY GOODMAN: You’re wearing a keffiyeh and a yarmulke.

SHEA: Yes. That’s standard for me.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you willing to be expelled?

SHEA: If the university decides that that is what should happen to me for doing this, then that is on them. I would love to not be expelled, but I think that my peers would also have loved to not be expelled. I think Mahmoud would love to not be in detention right now. This is — I obviously worked very hard to get here. So did Mahmoud. So did everyone else who has been facing consequences. And, like, while I obviously would prefer to, you know, not get expelled, this is bigger than me. This is about something much more important. And it ultimately is in the hands of the university. If they want to expel me for standing up for my friend, for other students, then that is their choice.

 

This kind of unflinching opposition needs support and national coordination into student-staff-faculty alliances--and alliances between university and government workers. It display the primal ingredient of meaningful victories down the road.

 

Syracuse University on March 31, 2016

THE WAY OF THE DOOFUS WARRIOR (THAT MUST BE DEFEATED)

'Yesterday we looked at how a doofus and blowhard, awash in derp, can nonetheless have a tactical genius that allows him to defeat all enemies again and again. I focused on an analogy I’m familiar with: increased mobility as a key to victory for Northern Civil War generals. But something funny happened in response to this post. ... A number of readers wrote in and said they agreed with the Sherman analogy but that a much tighter conceptual framework comes from a highly influential American military theorist who died almost 20 years ago, Colonel John Richard Boyd.

 

'Boyd is known for something called OODA loops. We’ll get to the specifics in a second. But he argued that all military action is defined by patterns of getting information, deciding how to act on it and then acting. Whoever completes those loops faster dominates and wins. The same also applies if you can get inside the other player’s decision loop and disrupt them.

...

'[Reader 1 wrote]: "Boyd’s concept of the OODA Loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) suggests that whoever controls the tempo controls the fight. In the case of active conflict, like a political campaign, if you can get through OODA loops faster than your opponent, you can change the context in ways that make their responses to your prior moves irrelevant and ineffective.

 [Reader 2 wrote]]: "Your description of Trump’s behavior, and my own shared observation of it, suggests that he is doing this deliberately."

 

"'Trump does seem to have realized that, paradoxically, the 24 hour news cycle and the “Internet Time” phenomena that demands instant responses to other candidate’s statements and acts, has paradoxically led to the accretion of ever greater layers of buffering and vetting to prevent a candidate from losing a news cycle, or several news cycles, to a gaffe that have both created an absolute minimum response time that can be exploited by dispensing with those protections and attenuated the effectiveness of the response when it comes because the fear of the gaffe exceeds the desire to exploit the opportunity. The result is exactly the kind of Luntzified keyword marble-mouthed double talking zinger durp that people (on both sides) have come to loathe. What Trump has realized is that he can get inside the other candidates’ OODA loops by just working without a net and firing off one tweet and one unfiltered message after another so that the other guys are responding to what he said three tweet cycles ago. But perhaps more importantly, he’s realized he can get away with what the other campaigns would deem disasterous “gaffes” by getting inside the press corps’ OODA loop, which he does by firing gaffe after gaffe after gaffe in n such machine-gun like rapid succession that the MSM never has a chance to focus on one and turn it into something like, say Romney’s “49%” or Obama’s “bitter clingers” gaffes (square quote omitted) because by the time they report it, he’s already belted out a half dozen more on that topic and fired off three other salvos on three other topics.''"

[Understanding this can help opponents keep Trump from running circles around them.]

 

SOURCE: Josh Marshall, Talking Points (August 28, 2015). 

 

GEORGETOWN LAW DEAN WILLIAM M. TREANOR TO INTERIM US ATTORNY EDWARD R. MARTIN, JR.

 

'Your letter challenges Georgetown’s ability to define our mission as an educational institution. It inquires about Georgetown Law’s curriculum and classroom teaching, asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion is part of the curriculum, and asserts that your office will not hire individuals from schools where you find the curriculum “unacceptable.” The First Amendment, however, guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it. The Supreme Court has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.

 

'This is a bedrock principle of constitutional law – recognized not only by the courts, but

by the administration in which you serve. The Department of Education confirmed last week that it cannot restrict First Amendment rights and that it is statutorily prohibited from “exercising control over the content of school curricula.” Your letter informs me that your office will deny our students and graduates government employment opportunities until you, as Interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, approve of our curriculum. Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution.

 

'Georgetown Law has one of the preeminent faculties in the country, fostering groundbreaking scholarship, educating students in a wide variety of perspectives, and thriving on the robust exchange of ideas. Georgetown Law faculty have educated world leaders, members of Congress, and Justice Department officials, from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. We pride ourselves on providing an excellent graduate and professional education, built upon the Catholic and Jesuit tradition. Georgetown-educated attorneys have, for decades, served this country capably and selflessly in offices such as yours, and we have confidence that tradition will continue. We look forward to your confirming that any Georgetown-affiliated candidates for employment with your office will receive full and fair consideration.'

 

SOURCE:  Pdf link to Treanor letter

 

NATION'S LARGEST TEACHERS' UNION SUES EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OVER DEI THREATS

 

'The nation’s largest teachers’ union is asking a federal court to halt the U.S. Department of Education’s enforcement of a directive that threatens to pull federal funding from schools that have race-based programming, arguing that it violates constitutional rights and laws that prohibit the federal government from interfering with curricula.

 

'The lawsuit, which the NEA filed along with its New Hampshire affiliate and the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday in federal court in New Hampshire, is the second to challenge the department’s Feb. 14 directive that came in the form of a “dear colleague” letter to school and college leaders. 

'The American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association sued the department over the letter on Feb. 25, similarly arguing that the memo infringes upon the Constitution’s First and Fifth amendments.

 

'“The letter is really intended to chill educators in this broad way, and it’s just not acceptable,” said Sarah Hinger, deputy director of the ACLU’s racial justice program.

 

'In addition to challenging the dear colleague letter and a follow-up “frequently asked questions” document to clarify it, the lawsuit asks a judge to find that the Education Department’s recently launched “End DEI” portal to be unlawful. The portal asks member of the public to submit reports of DEI in schools, similar to tip lines that states have set up to solicit reports of critical race theory being taught.

…

'The letter has caused confusion. Legal experts are arguing that it can’t undo existing civil rights laws, but they worry educators may comply anyway to avoid investigations from the department. The follow-up, nine-page, FAQ document seeking to further explain its limitations did not dispel concerns over its alleged constitutional infringements, according to the lawsuit from the teachers’ union and the ACLU.

 

'Instead, the letter, along with the FAQs and the “End DEI” portal, “radically resets … longstanding positions on civil rights laws that guarantee equality and inclusion,” and presumes districts are acting unlawfully, the complaint says.'

SOURCE: Brooke Schultz, Ed Week (March 5, 2025)

 

MESA BOARD STATEMENT ON THE REPRESSION OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN THE UNITED STATES

 

'First and foremost, the MESA Board of Directors demands that the government immediately end its repressive campaign against American colleges and universities. We call on all branches of the federal government as well as elected officials and civil servants working at all levels to reject this brazen undermining of fundamental protections enshrined in the Constitution, including due process.

 

'The MESA Board of Directors also calls on lawmakers to recognize the threat these policies represent to higher education in general, and to the specific campuses based in their constituencies in particular. Lawmakers have a critical role to play in ensuring transparency, accountability, and the constitutionality of any and all policies.

 

'The MESA Board of Directors urges university and college administrations to affirmatively defend the autonomy of higher education and the rights of all members of their campus to engage in lawful, First Amendment-protected activity. We also call on university and college administrators to protect and support vulnerable members of our campus communities. Leaders in higher education must recognize that voluntary cooperation — beyond what is legally compulsory — with repressive efforts targeting individual members of our campuses or those abrogating the autonomy of higher education will compromise the safety of campus communities and render all universities more vulnerable to governmental overreach and censorship. Anticipatory obedience is neither a defense against repression nor a viable strategy to avert risk. Rather, it is an invitation to greater repression that endangers students, faculty, and staff, and compromises the integrity of institutions of higher education in a democratic society.

 

'Lastly, we recognize that all of these events, and the climate of fear they have produced, are deeply traumatic to our members. The MESA Board of Directors is determined to face this new threat level and act as a resource in solidarity with our membership in defense of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and institutional autonomy. We will support our members in their efforts to mobilize their own campus communities.'

 

SOURCE: MESA Board Statement on the repression of academic freedom in the United States

 

 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: A TITLE VI DEMAND LETTER THAT ITSELF VIOLATES TITLE VI (AND THE CONSTITUTION)

 

By Kate Andrias, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Jamal Greene, Olatunde Johnson, Jeremy Kessler, Gillian Metzger, and David Pozen

 

'On Thursday, the president of Columbia University received a remarkable letter from the General Services Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education. The letter states that the university must meet numerous requirements by March 20, 2025, “as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.” These requirements include changes to student disciplinary policies and procedures; changes to rules on university governance, campus security, and campus life; placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department “under academic receivership”; and “comprehensive” reform of admissions to various schools within the university.

As scholars of constitutional law, administrative law, and antidiscrimination law who teach at Columbia, we feel compelled to point out some of the most glaring legal problems with this letter. 

• Title VI Standards. As the basis for the funding cutoff, the letter cites the university’s failure to protect students and faculty from “antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The letter offers no explanation of the alleged violations, no mention of a completed investigation, and no account of how Columbia has been deliberately indifferent to ongoing antisemitic discrimination or harassment on its campus—perhaps because any such account would be implausible at this time. There is therefore no apparent statutory basis for a funding cutoff.
• Title VI Procedures. Prior to a funding cutoff, Title VI requires “an express finding on the record, after opportunity for hearing,” of any failure to comply with the statute, as well as “a full written report” submitted to House and Senate committees at least 30 days before the cutoff takes effect. In defiance of these requirements (among others), the agencies are purporting to immediately freeze federal funds and to impose preconditions that the university must satisfy in advance of “negotiations.” The statute does not allow this approach.
• Title VI Remedies. Even if proper notice had been given, a hearing had occurred, and a statutory violation had been found, Title VI does not permit blanket funding removals. Rather, it requires that any removal be “limited in its effect to the particular program, or part thereof, in which noncompliance has been so found.” There has been no allegation—much less a finding—of noncompliance in the many parts of Columbia from which funding has been cut, including from urgent medical and scientific research. Moreover, any permissible remedy would have to be tailored to addressing unlawful discrimination. The agencies’ demands exhibit no such tailoring and, on the contrary, effectively tell Columbia to rewrite its policies on free speech, student discipline, public safety, undergraduate admissions, and more. Indeed, the remedies demanded in the letter not only far exceed the power of the agencies under Title VI; they also raise serious constitutional concerns.
• Academic Freedom and the First Amendment. The federal government enjoys broad discretion to provide funds to private institutions, including universities. The Supreme Court has made clear, however, that the government “may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected … freedom of speech even if he has no entitlement to that benefit.” Simply put, funding conditions may not impose unconstitutional burdens on First Amendment rights. Many of the agencies’ demands risk compromising academic freedom, which the Supreme Court has recognized as “a special concern of the First Amendment.” The Court has emphasized the importance of academic freedom at universities in particular, stating that “[t]he essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident.” In light of these core First Amendment principles, Title VI has never been understood to allow agencies to insist that a university restructure academic departments or abolish internal governance bodies, for example, as a condition of receiving federal funds.
• Unconstitutional Vagueness. The Supreme Court has further emphasized that “[b]road prophylactic rules in the area of free expression are suspect” and that “[p]recision of regulation must be the touchstone in an area so closely touching our most precious freedoms.” Yet for several of the agencies’ demands implicating freedom of expression, it is unclear what the university must do to comply. For example, the letter offers no details as to what “federal law” or “policy” the university’s admissions practices contravene, and it offers no guidance as to why the university’s existing “time, place, and manner” rules are inadequate. The vagueness of the agencies’ demands compounds the threat to academic freedom and rule by law.
• Due Process. A withdrawal of federal funding without adequate procedural safeguards likely violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment as well as Title VI. The Supreme Court has stated that, in determining what constitutes adequate process, this clause requires an assessment of “the private interest that will be affected by the official action”; “the risk of an erroneous deprivation of such interest through the procedures used”; “the probable value, if any, of additional or substitute procedural safeguards”; and “the Government’s interest, including the function involved and the fiscal and administrative burdens that the additional or substitute procedural requirement would entail.” The fact that Congress established the statutory procedures described above speaks to its own assessment of these factors. In any event, immediate withdrawal of funds without reference to a completed investigation—and in the absence of an opportunity for an administrative hearing or voluntary compliance with legitimate Title VI requirements—is not consistent with the Fifth Amendment.

'This is a preliminary analysis. We do not mean to suggest that it is an exhaustive list of problems with the demand letter, nor do we mean to elevate our concerns about this matter over concerns about other recent actions taken by the executive branch. We focus on the legal infirmities of the letter’s Title-VI-related demands because they have received relatively little attention to date. While we are in no position to dictate the university’s response, we hope that this analysis helps show how these demands threaten not only Columbia’s funding for critical academic research but also fundamental legal principles and the mission of colleges and universities across the country.'

 

SOURCE: David Pozen, Balkinization March 15, 2025

 

 

FACULTY REPONSE TO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA NO LONGER REQUIRING DIVERSITY STATEMENTS FROM JOB APPLICANTS

 

'President Drake’s announcement is a slap in the face to all of the faculty, students, and staff who have dedicated themselves to making the UC an inclusive and diverse community. Getting rid of diversity statements and freezing jobs is not “adjusting” to new circumstances, it is willfully complying with Trump’s racist and xenophobic assaults on higher education. These concessions will not protect the UC from Trump’s wrath, just as it didn’t protect Columbia nor any of the other institutions who have fallen in the crosshairs of the administration’s dismantlement of the country’s democratic institutions.

 

'Drake’s statements will only lead to more fierce attacks on faculty rights—attacks that have not just been coming from Trump, but from the UC Regents and the Office of the President. At least two UC Regents have stated on record that they want unilateral power over UC hiring decisions (largely in response to the outbreak of protests this past year) and have claimed that “shared governance is not working,” without any evidence to substantiate their accusations. Not only are the Regents actively pursuing a hostile restructuring of the UC system based on their own economic interests, their seeming jubilation over the opportunity to exploit Trump’s attacks on climate change, medical research, as well as data-driven intellectual and scientific inquiry signifies that UC leaders are more compelled by greed than by the needs of California residents. 

 

'On hiring freeze:

'The hiring freeze is far less a product of recent attacks by the federal government, than one facet  of a longer process to erode faculty’s civil rights and academic freedom. The UC leaderships’ use of students tuition as a piggy bank for capital investment rather than improving their learning spaces and our working spaces is a mockery to what the UC stands for and means to California residents. 

 

'UC capacity to fight back (and response to Steven Cheung (head of Academic Senate this year) who pretty much conceded to Drake too:

 

'I disagree with my colleague and Academic Senate chair that the UC is not powerful enough to fight back against these attacks. The UC is a pillar of the U.S. higher education system and a crucial line for social and economic mobility for a huge swatch of the state of California. In Fall 2023, the UC’s undergraduate admissions was composed of nearly 200,000 students, 83% of whom were California residents. Conceding to an autocratic leader has never advanced a society’s democratic principles. What we need to see are not concessions to a president that was fundamentally rejected by Californians, but we also need leadership that address the understand these attacks as an existential to democratic institutions and those who commit their lives to making the UCs a world class institution for higher education. 

 

'What we, as faculty students and workers, are demanding is the UC leadership to have a backbone and refuse to comply with the Trump administration’s violations of our academic freedom, civil rights, and constitutional protections of our first and fourth amendment rights. We are ready to do whatever it takes to defend our democratic institutions. What we need now is for UC leadership to take the same risks we’ve seen thousands of students, faculty, staff, and workers around the country make in response to Trump’s assault on higher ed.'

 

SOURCE: CUCFA list

 

 

A MESSAGE TO MY COLLEAGUES AT ELITE UNIVERSITIES: YOU MUST CHOOSE, STOCKWELLISM OR SOLIDARITY

 

'It’s amazing to me—though it shouldn’t be—that at a moment when anyone and everyone who teaches or works or studies at an educational institution is under threat, that a professor at Columbia would formulate the threat in the New York Times in this particular way:

 

'“Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.”'

 

'I don’t doubt that Stockwell sees his lifeworld in this way and that it would in fact be threatened in the way he says it will be. Without the millions and millions in federal funding that he and his colleagues luxuriate in, he would be sent plummeting into that netherworld, where high school and community college instructors reside, of “just teaching some classes”—and where, of course, many, many instructors at Columbia University also reside.

'I’m not going to knock this knucklehead for seeing his lifeworld as it is, and stating it so forthrightly to the New York Times.

'I am going to knock him for his utter lack of political sense:  

• not simply his full-frontal embrace of elitism and privilege, in the nation’s most important newspaper; 
• not simply his full-frontal embrace of elitism and privilege as a way, it seems, of trying to explain why the rest of us, inside or outside of academia, should care about protecting his elitism and privilege; 

'But also his utter failure to see that, whatever his path to glory and ascent has been in these past two decades, the only way forward, for him and his colleagues, in the coming months and years will be: 

•  to start seeing all of academe as a workplace;
•  to start seeing all of his fellow creatures in academe as co-workers, as sources of solidarity;
• and to start seeing all of the activities that go on in “just some classes” and offices and hallways and heating plants and cafeterias and so on, as not just real work with equal value to the work he does in his laboratory, but as real power.' 

SOURCE: Corey Robin, blog (March 20, 2025)

 

 

November 20, 2015, Lincoln Cathedral  

 

Is AI Plateauing? 

“If this were just a few hedged anonymous reports about “less improvement,” I honestly wouldn’t give it too much credence. But traditional funders and boosters like Marc Andreessen are also saying the models are reaching a “ceiling,” and now one of the great proponents of the scaling hypothesis (the idea that AI capabilities scale with how big they are and the amount of data they’re fed) is agreeing. Ilya Sutskever was always the quiet scientific brains behind OpenAI, not Sam Altman, so what he recently told Reuters should be given significant weight:

‘Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training—the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures—have plateaued.’

“[Though it’s bad that AI cost increases exponentially], I think people focusing on price or the domain-specificity of improvements are missing the even bigger picture about this new supposed scaling law. For what I’m noticing is that the field of AI research appears to be reverting to what the mostly-stuck AI of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on: search.

 

“I don’t mean searching the web, rather, I mean examples like when this summer Google DeepMind released their state-of-the-art math AI able to handle mathematical Olympiad problems. It's a hybrid, very different than a leading generalist LLM. How does it work? It just considers a huge number of possibilities.

‘When presented with a problem, AlphaProof generates solution candidates and then proves or disproves them by searching over possible proof steps…. The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found.’

“This sort of move makes sense, because search was the main advantage for AIs against humans for a very long time . . .”

 

“Continued improvements are going to happen, but if the post-GPT-4 gains in AI came mainly from adding first better prompts (chain-of-thought prompting) and now more recently the addition of search to the process (either over many potential outputs or over the model’s parameters itself) this is different than actually constructing baseline-smarter artificial neural networks. It indicates to me a return to the 70s, 80s, and 90s in AI.”

 

SOURCE: Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective

 

EPISTEMIC COLLAPSE

 

"I do think there is an information story to be told here, but I also think, and I promise I'll address it, but I also think that people who vote for Trump, many of them often understand themselves to be voting for his spirit and not for specifics, right? And they are voting for the spirit of resentment, they are voting for the spirit of sort of anti-establishment thinking, they are voting for the spirit of having somebody punish their enemies, right? And that spirit, that vibe of Trumpist dominance, gratification and like fun resentment, right?

 

“That is an emotional register that can contain a ton of contradictions, right? So you can be pro-abortion rights, at least in your state, and be pro-Trump at the same time, because it is perfectly possible to favor abortion access for you and also fucking hate a lot of other people and want to see them punished, right? And that is, I think, a continuous theme you see in Trump supporters.

 

“If you ask them about Trump policies, often they will say, well, I don't support that, but they do support the animating feature behind those policies, the sort of spirit of sadistic, jeering, fuck you. That's what they really like, they enjoy the anger. But I do also think, to your point, that there's an information ecosystem problem, right?

 

“Like this information ecosystem is dog shit. It is impossible to get reliable information. The media has lost its credibility, but it's also just lost its monopoly on the audiences.

 

“People don't trust the most credible sources to be telling them the truth, but they're also not really listening to those sources anymore. So they're listening to a lot of fucking --d“

 

“Podcasts.”

 

“A lot of goddamn podcasters”

 

“Fuck them. I hate those guys.”

 

“They're listening to podcasters. They're watching influencers who do front-facing videos on TikTok and Instagram reels. They're getting a lot of information sort of ambiently from what they see posted by their connections or what their friends who saw something posted online say to them over burgers.

 

There's this ambient disinformation and a corrosion of the information environment and the reliability of information that has led to, I think, a really profound epistemic collapse that is completely impervious to the style of politics that involves facts and policy mattering.”

 

SOURCE: Moira In Bed With The Right Podcast: Episode 42 Nov 19, 2024

 

 SOURCE: KAL, The Economist, November 14, 2024

UNIVERSITIES DOING TRUMP’S WORK FOR HIM

 

“The contradiction between liberalism’s substantive ends and its formal means is not a new problem. One could argue—I would—that virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.

 

“In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers: student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical, self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.”

 

SOURCE: Gabriel Winant, Dissent (November 7, 2024)

 

 

IT’S THE RACE AND CLASS COMBINATION, STUPID

 

"There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also shows that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters agreed with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, a recent survey found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

 

"Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

 

"In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

 

"But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

 

"[I]n this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters."

 

SOURCE, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hammer and Hope (Fall 2024).

 

THEFT OF ENJOYMENT

 

“Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way subjects of a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national myths. What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment; s/he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way it organizes its enjoyment: precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to it—the smell of their food, their ‘noisy’ songs and dances, their strange manners, their attitude to work (in the racist perspective, the ‘other’ is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour; and it is quite amusing to note the ease with which one passes from reproaching the other with a refusal to work, to reproaching him for the theft of work). The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other, and at the same time threatened by it; this is also the case with castration, which, according to Freud, is experienced as something that ‘really cannot happen’, but we are nonetheless horrified by its prospect. The ground of incompatibility between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of their symbolic identifications. What categorically resists universalization is rather the particular structure of their relationship towards enjoyment:

 

‘Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys. . .The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus-Phi, the matheme of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own.’ (Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Extimité)

 

“What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack (‘castration’) is original; enjoyment constitutes itself as ‘stolen’, or, to quote Hegel’s precise formulation from his Science of Logic, it ‘only comes to be through being left behind. Yugoslavia today is a case-study of such a paradox, in which we are witness to a detailed network of ‘decantations’ and ‘thefts’ of enjoyment.’”

 

SOURCE: Slavoj Žižek, New Left Review (Sept/Oct 1990)