Michael Burawoy Starts the Seminar on November 13, 2019

Grief-stricken only begins to describe how I feel about the loss of Michael Burawoy, a force for knowledge and of mutual support on so many fronts.  

I knew him as an allied analyst and critic of universities in general and the University of California in particular.  We were both preoccupied with the plague of privatization, which is not only a shift in revenue sources but also an overturning of society and the place of knowledge in it. Michael was particularly good describing the public world as the site of intellectual autonomy and collective self-determination, two things he frequently linked.

When I left UC Santa Barbara for my current job in London, I wrote him a long note about the shift, partly in the hope that I'd see more of him because of his visits to his sister, who lives in Highgate. 

I finished that email by thanking him for his work on universities in the context of his wider social analysis and for his support for mine and others'. "The meetings you’ve hosted at Berkeley have been among the most satisfying and interesting of my time at UC. I’m very grateful for the effort you’ve put into that, and for your consistency and responsiveness."  

That sounds formal, even understated, but he was incredibly consistent and responsive. These are humble yet powerful virtues that are the opposite of celebrity and influence.  Michael knew that they build intellectual communities and have the most lasting influence on the collective creation of future knowledge. 

One thing I remember about the seminar  in this Berkeley restaurant patio (pictured above) is that his students trusted him. I almost wrote "loved him," which is likely also true.  But what I saw was a trust in him with their ideas and their personal commitments that was perhaps more than that. 

Not long after that visit, he sent me a draft chapter for a book that I don't think has yet appeared. [Correction: Thanks to Tyler Leeds for pointing me to Public Sociology (Polity 2021), chapter 15]  I'm going to circle back on this blog to some of the themes he raises here, and will be writing about Michael's work again.  This post is a down payment.

One of his themes might be summarized as: commodified knowledge loses its power over power. 

A second theme is: "Public" is the name of (and means for) collective agency.  A world of privatized institutions is always oligarchic.  

This latter point now gets more obvious to everyone with each passing day. But there is still much confusion and hesitation about "public" as the functional alternative power.

We really need Michael Burawoy to help put out the bonfire of the knowledges and rebuild society with the principles he saw very clearly.  This is such a stupefying loss.

Here are some excerpts from Michael's chapter called "Defending the Public University." This is labeled Chapter 14 in my copy, so in the middle of a much longer argument, and with a diagram that he wasn't yet satisfied with.

'One can debate the specific origins of the transformation of the University of California, but it is part of a national and indeed global trend – symptomatic of third-wave marketization that turns what was once a public good into a private commodity. If knowledge used to be bgggtttregarded as something produced and distributed for the benefit of all, it is now increasingly bought and sold by those who can afford it, so that the university becomes a revenue generating machine, transforming its internal structure, and threatening its national and international standing. For so long we thought of the public university as exempt from the forces of commodification. Yes, there were periodic crises that involved defunding, but they were always followed by restoration, albeit at a lower level. Too few were ready to acknowledge how the secular decline in funding was leading to the structural transformation of the university. 

'We can gauge this transformation of the university by asking the same questions we earlier posed for academic disciplines – Knowledge for Whom? Knowledge for What? The university is oriented externally to the commodification of knowledge, what we might call policy knowledge, in pursuit of revenue to alleviate its fiscal crisis. The commodification of knowledge reverberates through the university, repurposing professional knowledge for instrumental ends, creating a governance crisis, but also an identity crisis as critical knowledge calls into question the direction of the university. The identity crisis becomes in the public sphere a legitimation crisis – the public calls into question the value of the university as a place of teaching and research, which only deepens the fiscal crisis.'

....

The pursuit of new, private revenue streams paradoxically weakens the university's finances, Michael writes. It forces new strategies on the core of the university's purpose, teaching and research. 

'The commodification of prestige and knowledge is one strategy, the commodification of labor is another. Universities can go after the weak and the vulnerable, outsourcing low paid service work to avoid paying benefits or even minimum wages. Economic restructuring led to dramatic change in teaching as expensive tenure-track faculty have been replaced by short-term, precarious instructional labor, known variously as lecturers, adjuncts, part-time or contingent faculty. At Berkeley some 40% of student credit hours are taught by lecturers. Across higher education lecturers now outnumber tenure-track faculty by two to one whereas 50 years ago the ratio was the inverse. As the number of tenure-track positions declines, relative to the numbers of students looking for academic jobs, the oversupply of PhDs has left them competing for lowpaid, insecure teaching positions. Tenure-track faculty become a shrinking labor aristocracy with higher income and security of employment. The conditions of lecturers vary a great deal across higher education, depending on the status of the college, but everywhere their conditions of employment are vastly inferior to tenure-track faculty who are released from teaching to become increasingly focused on research. While there is no reason to believe that lecturers are inferior teachers, nonetheless as their conditions of employment deteriorate so there is a long term degradation of education.

'As commodification makes inroads into the university, it brings about changes in the administrative structure. Fiscal crisis has been accompanied by “administrative bloat”. According to the university’s figures, the number of senior and executive managers at Berkeley increased 5 fold in the 20 years from 1994 to 2014, so that they now equal the number of tenuretrack faculty that remained constant over the same period. It’s not just the numbers but also the salaries. A senate committee reported that between 2010 and 2015 salaries of Berkeley’s central administration increased by 38% whereas the income of academic units increased by 13%. While Berkeley is at the extreme, for reasons are not clear, we can find similar administrative expansion at the other University of California campuses and indeed across higher education.

'Coincident with administrative expansion has been the recruitment of executives from the financial and corporate world. For example, Berkeley’s Vice-Chancellor for Finance and Administration came from the World Bank, knowing little about the operation of universities, let alone the peculiarities of a public university like Berkeley. He recruited personnel from the world of finance to help him govern the university. He lasted for 5 years. 

'The university attracts “spiralists” who enter the university from outside, perhaps from the corporate world, develop their own signature project and then spiral on (if they are lucky), leaving the university to spiral down. In this case the Vice-Chancellor tried to promote on “online” education which proved to be a flop, and he spiraled out and down. '

...

'Sobered by a succession of disasters, the Board of Regents chose a “local” for the next Chancellor. Carol Christ had been a faculty member at Berkeley since 1970 and became Executive Vice-Chancellor before moving on to become President of Smith College. After 10 years she returned to Berkeley to retire, but was pulled back in as interim Executive Vice- Chancellor as a stop-gap measure to clean up the mess left by her predecessors. The campus breathed a sigh of relief when she was appointed Chancellor. Convinced that privatization was the only strategy going forward, she pursued it deliberately and rationally. Her first goal was to eliminate the burgeoning annual deficit by multiplying revenue streams as well as trimming expenses. With soaring rents it was increasingly difficult for students and faculty to live in Berkeley or the surrounding areas, so Christ made it her priority to set about expanding university accommodation through public-private partnerships.

'The smoother operation of the new regime throws into relief what is taken for granted – the progressive commodification of knowledge, keeping the university alive with privatization strategies, even to the point of openly repudiating support for tuition-free education. With a disastrous credit-rating, due to the fiascos of the past, the administration is forced into high-risk investments, often over opposition from faculty. The restructuring of the administration has gradually expropriated control from all campus communities – faculty, lecturers, staff, students. From the hallowed shared-governance we have entered a regime of consultative-governance – consultations after the fact – driven by market forces.'

...

 'We live in an era where the university loses its autonomy. Increasingly focused on making money to stem its fiscal crisis, it undermines collective self-government and thereby bringing on a governance crisis, it mimics the capitalist corporation. This brings many tensions to the surface. Some regions of the university are better able to exploit the market place than others. The bio-sciences and engineering supply research allied to the expanding sectors of the economy; the business and the law schools supply managers and regulators; the medical school, public policy, and social welfare supply the expertise to administer and treat precarious populations. As tuition increased so students gravitate toward those disciplines that supply the best job opportunities, whether that be a path to a professional degree or directly into the more secure regions of the labor force. The university surreptitiously pushes toward vocationalism at the expense of a broad liberal education. The number of majors in the arts and humanities falls. The university follows student demand by redistributing resources among departments on the basis of “student credit hours” and the number of degrees. In a time of shrinking budgets the competition between departments becomes palpable, no longer on the basis of scholarly distinction but on the appeal to students.

 'The capitalist university not only creates lateral inequalities between disciplines, but also in the vertical direction. As we have seen cutting costs means employing armies of poorly-paid lecturers to do the teaching abdicated by a shrinking labor aristocracy of tenure-track faculty. At a prestigious public university, Senate or “ladder” faculty create the symbolic power of the university – the number of prominent scholars, Nobel Prize Winners as well as turning out outstanding graduate students. The tenure-track faculty are pampered with diminished teaching loads and off-scale salaries in order to keep up with Ivy League universities. The capitalist university creates an entrenched two-tier system – a lower caste of dedicated teachers and an upper caste of researchers. There is virtually no mobility between the two. In the short term, the interests of the ladder faculty lie in the multiplication of lecturers, but in the long term they suffer declining numbers. Graduate students, expecting to enter the ranks of tenure-track faculty, now face two tracks into the future (Burawoy and Hanks 2018). 

'The Berkeley Faculty Association takes as its mission the defense of the public university opposing privatization, the corporatization of the university, the commodification of knowledge. In practice this means we oppose economically irrational projects (public-private ventures, retrofitting the stadium, privileging athletics, campus shared services), the degradation of education through online education, and revenue making credentials with limited content. It means we support diversity at all levels of the campus, defend shared governance, build alliances with unions of GSIs, lecturers and staff. The BFA along with other University of California faculty associations has thrown its weight behind a plan to refinance higher education from increases in state taxation. Rather than pursuing the self-destructive strategies of privatization, we support the “$66 fix” – $66 being the extra tax a median income earner in California would pay in order to reset higher education to funding levels of the year 2000. This has the support of a wide range of unions and associations involved with higher education though it has yet to win the broad support of California’s population or the political establishment that runs the state.

'Accustomed to support from the state legislature as one of California’s symbols of progress, the university has experienced slow downgrading for some fifty years. It is now one of many public agencies competing for a diminishing slice of the state budget. State funding per student has fallen steadily over the last 50 years at the same time that fees have increased. Here lies one material reason for the declining public support for the university. As student fees increase, as total costs of attendance increase at an even greater rate, and as the degree itself buys less lucrative, more precarious jobs, so many wonder whether the university education is worth the increasing cost. . . . 

'To the public the university’s claim to be in perpetual economic crisis seems bogus in the light of rising tuition but also in the light of scandals that have swirled around the university, and exploited by the media: sexual harassment by the high and mighty, bribing one’s way into the university, misuse of funds by the Office of the President, increasing numbers of out-of-state and international students displacing Californians of equal or greater scholarly merit, exorbitant salaries of administrators, abysmal conditions of service employees receiving subminimum wages. Uninterested in its “international” prestige, Governor Brown likened the university to the fast food chain, Chipotle: it should offer a low cost fixed menu of courses. The public looks at the university through a different lens than its administrators and its faculty. . . .

'As the number of students of color and students from poorer backgrounds have increased the resources available for education have diminished and costs of attendance have increased – students are getting less but paying more. In short, it is not enough to think only of access, we also need to think of what happens to students once they arrive on campus. The university needs to be accessible but also accountable, and not just to its students but also to communities outside the university. Contesting the legitimation crisis requires us to extend ourselves into the wider communities from which students come. The university cannot survive as an ivory tower. Berkeley has made efforts in this direction building programs of scholarly engagement, but they are poorly funded and marginal to the university’s overall program. 

'Sociology has a particularly important role to play: it not only speaks to the crises facing students, it also speaks to the crisis facing so many communities in California. Sociology’s mission is more than to passively educate, it is to defend society against excessive marketization, not just of labor, land and money but of knowledge itself. It has to play a critical public role in the education of its students.'

 This is the table that Michael wasn't satisfied with. I think it shows useful things.

Focus on the crises in boldface. The deep policy mistakes--and the complicities between captive university management and a Democratic party that had lost interest in public goods and systems-- weakened the university's ability to create and circulate these four kinds of knowledge. 

The governance crisis weakens professional knowledge by making it dependent on non-expert managers and donors. 

The fiscal crisis weakens policy knowledge by making the university too poor and insecure to circulate it powerfully.

The identity crisis  weakens critical knowledge through this same loss of confidence and a resulting unwillingness to fight tooth and nail in society to get its power back.

The legitimation crisis weakens public knowledge by robbing the university of the stature and general understanding required to influence dominant classes. 

These crises need to be ended and replaced with some major reconstructive work.  This is just part of Michael's work that we need to carry on.  

MLA Convention New Orleans on January 11, 2025

by Anthony Alessandrini

'On the second day, we held signs with the names of scholars martyred in Gaza and lay down together on the floor outside the hotel ballroom where the MLA’s elected delegates were walking in to hold their assembly. every name every name every name. Many delegates joined us. “MLA is Complicit in Genocide,” read a banner we had painted and brought with us, from occupied Hawaiʻi. A die in is symbolic, a mere fractional representation of the scope and the volume of loss. every name every name every name. We lay in silence as the complicit walked around us.'  – Hannah Manshel, 'What Follows Whereas: Reflections on the MLA Walk Out for Palestine' 

How do you give a form to absence? How do you draw a line around a silence, in order to articulate it? How do you hold on to refusal such that it’s no longer a matter of simply saying “no” to what’s unacceptable but “yes” to what’s necessary?

 

These are familiar question for poets, and for those of us who teach and study and write about language and literature. For organizers doing the hard-headed work of banging our heads against the walls of our ever-more unjust and complicit institutions, they take on a different quality. The group of us who have been organizing around a BDS resolution within the Modern Language Association have found ourselves moving, often surreally, between these two registers. We’re scholars of language and literature up against an organization that claims to represent us, but whose actions reveal not just its complicity with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but also its determination to silence anyone who attempts to contest this complicity.

 

For those who are new to the story, Rebecca Colesworthy’s excellent “Resigning from and to the MLA” and Chris Newfield’s earlier setting out of “The Story So Far” will get you up to speed. More recently, Hannah Manshel’s magnificent essay, from which I’ve taken my epigraph, describes the actions that MLA members took at the recent convention in New Orleans. These were intended to support our resolution and to protest our leadership’s repression, but most of all they were actions in solidarity with Palestinians resisting the hundred-year war waged upon them, with the unstinting support of our governments and institutions.

 

If we succeeded at anything—and I’m still of many minds about that—it was in turning what was meant to be a silence into an event. It was clear for months that MLA’s leadership was determined to make this all go away, with as little noise or attention as possible. They rejected our BDS resolution via a three-sentence email with no explanation and immediately removed it from the MLA website, even though it has passed through all the association’s logistical hurdles. When we tried to use an email list for elected delegates to discuss the situation, our messages were blocked. When the Executive Council finally deigned to put out an explanation, it was only accessible to members via a password, thus blocking it from a fuller public view. It was only due to unprecedented pressure from members, including nine former MLA presidents and 26 former EC members(including two current members who resigned publicly to protest the EC’s decision—something that MLA leadership has never publicly addressed, preferring instead to project a fictional sense of unanimity), that the Council finally put out a public statement—nearly two months after they had killed the resolution.

 

Silences, Secrets, and Lies

 

After two months of silence—and of attempts to silence us—what the MLA leadership finally said is objectionable in so many ways. The refusal to meaningfully acknowledge the context of the ongoing genocide being carried out by Israel and the United States—indeed, the refusal to even use the word “genocide” in a 3000+ word statement—belies the MLA’s rhetorical gestures towards social justice that form part of its mission statement, as well as its publications.

 

The cowardice of the Executive Council’s statement is clear, but it takes a bit more work to read out the deep disingenuousness of its argument. It boils down to this: the Council admits that anti-BDS laws do not prohibit an organization like the MLA from supporting the Palestinian BDS call. Moreover, the phrasing of our resolution—“we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call”—makes it very clear that this is not an official position being taken by the organization. But the EC nevertheless frets that this will not be enough, and that the laws somehow are even more powerful than those who made them claim them to be. As we put it in an earlier response: “the leadership of the world’s most powerful association of writers and teachers has decided that words no longer have any meaning when confronted by unjust laws.” 

 

Instead we are told: “the Executive Council is guided by our lawyers’ assessment, which is that these statutes have been carefully crafted to withstand any challenges that assert that they restrict free speech.” We, the members, have no clue who “our lawyers” might be, but we do have the benefit of the views of other legal experts who have spent years assessing these laws. Here, for example, is the conclusion from a report by Palestine Legal: 

 

“Federal district courts in four states have ruled that these states’ laws, all of which require contractors with the state to sign pledges that they don’t boycott Israel, are likely unconstitutional and that boycotts for Palestinian rights are protected by the First Amendment. However, in each state, the legislatures changed the laws that were challenged so that they no longer applied to the plaintiffs in order to moot the lawsuits.”

 

The actual legal precedent, in other words, runs counter to MLA leadership’s inaccurate and dishonest claims. Rather than being “crafted to withstand any challenges,” when these state laws have come under legal challenge, they have usually been tweaked to allow plaintiffs who challenge them to exercise their First Amendment right to boycott for Palestinian rights. Zoha Khalili, Senior Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal, puts it even more clearly: 

 

“The MLA Executive Council's decision to prevent the Delegate Assembly from voting on the BDS resolution is a cowardly, anti-democratic move. It is also a misguided one: Even if the MLA chooses to prioritize mercenary interests over Palestinian lives, its flawed legal analysis fails to acknowledge that the resolution is simply an endorsement of the Palestinian call for BDS and does not bind the MLA itself to engage in a boycott. A purely expressive resolution like this one is protected speech that is beyond the reach of any anti-BDS law, even under the most repressive interpretation of our constitutional rights.”

 

But even this doesn’t get at what is most damning in the Council’s too-little-too-late statement. There is also a secret revealed there, albeit buried in the faux-legalistic language: the Modern Language Association, without informing or consulting with its members, has already capitulated to these laws by signing anti-BDS clauses in order to obtain contracts. Here are their own words on this:

 

“As of now, the MLA has contracts for the current year that include clauses in which we have affirmed that our association is not supporting BDS. If the membership were to pass a resolution to the contrary, we would be unable to renew these contracts.”

 

We don’t know how many anti-BDS clauses the MLA has signed, nor for how long it has been doing so. What we do know—only because members have pushed relentlessly against the silence and censorship of our leadership—is that the MLA is, officially, an anti-BDS organization. A different way to say that is: the MLA is, officially, a genocide organization.

 

It only remains to be added that the MLA has at no point made the slightest attempt to contest these laws—unlike, for example, the AAUP, which expressed its opposition to them back in 2018. Even as these laws have provided multiple occasions for repressing the rights of MLA members, the organization that claims to represent us has remained silent. In fact, it has failed to issue even the mildest public opposition to the repression of pro-Palestine speech on campus, despite the fact that the Delegate Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed a motion calling upon MLA leadership to do exactly this in January 2024.

 

Taking Our Labor Where It Belongs

 

But to be honest, I’m tired of making these points. I’m tired of the cowardice, complicity, disingenuousness, corporate mentality, censorship, and outright lies of the leadership of the MLA—and, consequently, of the organization itself.

 

I’m saying all this to say this: given its current structure, the Modern Language Association is unreformable. That’s why, in the days leading up to the convention, those of us who organized the resolution issued a call asking supporters to pledge not to renew their MLA membership. Here’s the exact wording of the pledge:

 

“As a direct response to the MLA Executive Director and Executive Council’s refusal to forward members’ resolution calling for an endorsement of BDS, I pledge to not renew my MLA membership and to resign from any MLA governance or leadership position I hold. I refuse to be affiliated with or financially support an organization that both silences its members and is complicit in genocide.”

 

The unofficial count of those who have signed on to this pledge is over 350. That includes more than 25 elected delegates, dozens of leaders of MLA forums that organize panels at the convention, and many members of other committees, all of whom have pledged to resign. The list is growing and should continue to grow. That’s why I’m writing this.

 

There are many things I like about this pledge. One of them is its open-endedness. There isn’t an “until…” It’s a refusal. In its actions around this resolution, the MLA has failed its members. Moreover, both by virtue of what it has done and what it has been forced to reveal, it has doubled down on its complicity in genocide—a phrase that I do not use lightly.

 

It’s not up to us to tell the MLA what it needs to do to get us back. We’ve seen what it is, and we’re done with it. We’ve also seen what other organizations have done differently, and we’ll bring our labor to them. 

 

In the days since the convention, I’ve had conversations with earnest supporters of the resolution who have not found this to be such a clear-cut choice. Isn’t there a way to stay and fight? Isn’t it letting the organization off the hook by not using this opportunity to demand that it do something to stand in solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues?

 

I sympathize. One unshakable part of my own political ethos is a loathing of telling other people how they should resist. But the point I’ve been making throughout is that the MLA is not set up to be a democratic institution that serves its members. What has been revealed to us, instead, is an organization that is in essence a publishing company that does some philanthropic work on behalf of “the humanities” on the side. 

 

Matt Seybold makes this clear in two brilliant articles that address MLA leadership’s suppression of the resolution, specifically its claim that the organization’s “financial profile” require it to do so. Seybold writes: 

 

“The Executive Council is claiming it cannot allow its membership to democratically consider the BDS resolution because membership dues are not a sufficiently large revenue stream to make members the primary stakeholders in their member organization, whose other revenue streams must be protected from and for MLA members, in order to deliver to members what they actually need, which is neither democratic authority nor, apparently, reduced membership or registration fees. The more times I read this passage, the more it becomes to me: We need our publishing business to pay for our publishing business.”

 

His conclusion is one that many of us share: “So long as revenue maximization is the top priority of the MLA, it will be doing far more harm to its member scholars, and the rest of us who care about literature and language research and instruction, than any bevy of handbooks, bibliography subscriptions, and teaching collections can arbitrage.”

 

I would add: the MLA has also made it clear that revenue maximization is a greater priority than the lives of our Palestinian colleagues. How could anyone calling themselves a humanist continue to belong to such an organization? 

 

The pledge to not renew membership is a direct refusal of this logic. Like a strike, it’s a call to drop our tools and walk off the job, to stop the infernal machine functioning. And like a picket line, it works via solidarity: no one can force you to join it, but its power comes from our numbers. I have no illusions that MLA leadership will be sorry to see me go; on the contrary, they can’t wait to see the back of me. But a mass exodus accomplishes something else.

 

The argument for staying that I take most seriously comes from MLA members who have been (as I have in the past) part of the leadership of forums dedicated to Arabic literature, or Black studies, or indigenous cultures and politics. These are spaces that those who came before us had to fight for, to carve out room within the general rule of white supremacy that still dominates the MLA, and literary studies in North America more generally. Many leaders of these forums are nevertheless resigning—in some cases, whole forum leaderships are resigning en masse—but they worry, rightly, about simply ceding those spaces. It is not a step to be taken lightly.

 

I can imagine ways that these spaces, and those of us who work in these minoritized fields, can migrate into organizations that have taken a stand against genocide. The most direct parallel organization would be the American Comparative Literature Association—which endorsed BDS in 2024 and has spoken out consistentlyon political issues—but also organizations such as the American Studies Association, Middle East Studies Association, Association for Asian American Studies, African Literature Association, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, to name only a few. Many of these organizations in fact endorsed the boycott a decade ago, and somehow, the sky has not fallen upon them; most of them are in fact thriving. And this is not even to mention whatever spaces we might imagine and create together going forward; after all, many of us are game for giving our free labor to causes and groups that reflect our values and politics. To continue to do so for an organization that does not, like the MLA, is on the other hand simply acceding to our own exploitation.

 

In fact, the other side of the argument for protecting these spaces carved out within the MLA is the extent to which MLA leadership has actively co-opted the labor of scholars and students working in these disciplines, especially scholars and students from minoritized communities, while simultaneously refusing to take part in struggles to defend these fields from the ongoing right-wing public onslaught (or—let’s be honest—taking any meaningful material role in addressing structural issues like the job crisis and the related exploitation of precarious academic labor). In its statement defending the suppression of our BDS resolution, MLA leadership had the gall to celebrate the fact that “two dozen convention sessions are focusing on Palestine”—as though they deserved thanks for the labor put in overwhelmingly by those of us who proposed the resolution in the first place! 

 

In this sense, the suppression of this resolution, a clear act of anticipatory obedience (the decision to kill the resolution was made a little over a week before Trump’s election), sets a very dangerous precedent. The 26 former EC members who called upon the current EC to reverse its decision conclude their open letter with an important question for MLA leadership: 

 

We are asking you to let us, as members of the MLA community, debate on whether we wish, as a collective, to take a position. To disallow us from doing so not only erodes our trust in the MLA with regard to Palestine, but with regard to any other possibly controversial matters. Will you stand strong as the Trump administration attacks things like Critical Race Theory, for example, or queer theory, or trans literature? Surely the new administration will punish scholars in these areas and impose penalties on those who defend them. Can members trust you to stay strong?

 

The words of outgoing MLA President Dana Williams, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed following our protests at the convention in New Orleans, provide an indirect but chilling response. “The association is the membership, we want to reiterate,” Williams insisted, against all available evidence; but she also pointed to “concerns about dividing the membership over endorsing the BDS movement, noting that ‘collegiality was one of many things that we were considering.’” Collegiality, controversy, divisiveness: for decades, these have been the words used to defend the status quo of white supremacy, in literary studies and academic institutions more generally. To think that the MLA will be a meaningful ally in any anti-racist efforts to come is dangerously wishful thinking.

 

Walking Out (For Good)

 

In fact, the question of “collegiality,” in a very different sense, is what leaves me with my own unshakeable conviction that our only choice is to walk out of this complicit organization. MLA leadership has made it very clear, for decades, exactly who counts, and who does not, as part of the MLA’s “we.” In our organizing around this resolution, we returned again and again to scholasticide—not just the complete and absolutely intentional destruction of all educational infrastructure, and the wholesale murder of teachers and students, in Gaza, but the decades-long scholasticide carried out throughout Palestine. As often as possible, we have used the phrase “our Palestinian colleagues.” That is to say: what is unfolding in Palestine, and has been for decades, is happening to scholars and students who should be (and in some cases, literally are) MLA members. 

 

Speaking only for myself, I have been on two different MLA panels in which colleagues from Palestine had to participate either virtually or by having us read their papers, because Israel’s travel restrictions prevented their right to free movement. In one session, I read a paper from a Palestinian colleague who teaches at Birzeit University in Ramallah—had to read it on her behalf, because she was not allowed to travel to be with us—which was largely about the attempts by faculty to keep the semester going while the campus was being raided daily by the Israeli army. And this was six years ago. Aside from endorsing a 2019 letter to Israeli authorities regarding restrictions on international academics working in Palestinian universities that was issued by the Middle East Studies Association, the MLA has remained studiously silent. How many of our colleagues have died, been imprisoned, or, in the most basic sense, been prevented from being here with us, in conversation with us, working alongside us in this supposedly international organization, during those six years of silence? Could any self-respecting scholar of Palestinian literature or culture ever be expected to set foot in the MLA after this?

 

To put it as plainly as I can: I can’t and won’t be part of an organization that isn’t even willing to speak out against the murder of people who are, or should be, MLA members themselves. It’s more complicated than that, but then again, it really isn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kreuzberg, Berlin on November 9, 2021

THE VISON OF THE BROLIGARCHS 

'For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.

'It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.

'“It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.”

'As Harrington has noted, Trump is the perfect avatar for that worldview. He’s a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted on 34 felony counts and still won reelection, who notoriously said in reference to sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

'So, what is the “anything” that the broligarchs want to do? To understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy goes well beyond simple libertarianism. It’s not just that they want a government that won’t tread on them. They want absolutely zero limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.'

...

'[H]ere’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors.'

***

'Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said.

'And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

'All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.

'The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.

'For one thing, they valorize aggression, which is coded as male. Zuckerberg, who credits mixed martial arts and hunting wild boars with helping him rediscover his masculinity (and is sporting the makeover to prove it), recently told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is too “culturally neutered” — it should become a culture that has more “masculine energy” and that “celebrates the aggression.”

'Likewise, Andreessen wrote in his manifesto, “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.” Musk, meanwhile, has jumped on the testosterone bandwagon, amplifying the idea that only “high T alpha males” are capable of thinking for themselves; he shared a post on X that said, “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”'

SOURCE: Sigal Samuel, Vox

THE CONFEDERATE RESTORATION

'Like a clogged sewer erupting into the streets, Donald Trump returned to office on Monday, and, as promised, unleashed his filth upon the country. In a flurry of lawless, unconstitutional, racist, bigoted, violent, and, in some cases, plainly stupid executive orders and pardons, Trump set his reign of terror in motion. The future we feared has officially arrived.

'Trump’s activity is, as always, designed to keep people distracted, defensive, and demoralized. He did so much stuff in the opening hours of his junta that the media can’t process it all, and Americans can’t keep up. It will take the courts literal years to process the lawsuits against his administration based on just its first half day, and we already know that the media is a Dr. Moreau monstrosity that has the attention span of mosquitoes, the memory of goldfish, and the courage of chickens.'

---

'“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”—better known as the birthright citizenship executive order—attempts to cancel the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. Getting rid of constitutional amendments via executive order is new, and, for me at least, “the worst.”'

...

'Let’s start with the title:

'“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”

'Make no mistake: This title is a nod to the “Great Replacement” theory. The implication here is that the “meaning” of what it is to be “American” is devalued if that meaning is commingled with certain kinds of immigrant blood. To “protect” the value of being an American (for white people), non-white people who were merely born here must be excluded.'

...

'At the founding, there was no such thing as a “US” citizen; instead, citizenship flowed up from the states. You were a citizen of New York or Virginia or wherever, based on the citizenship laws of that state. That meant that the circumstances of your birth could confer citizenship to you in one state, but not another.

'Obviously, that meant the legal status of enslaved Africans varied by state. In some states, “free” Black people were citizens, while enslaved Black people were not. In some states, enslaved Black people became citizens when they moved to free states. In some states, citizen Black people became slaves when they crossed borders. In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court resolved the issue by declaring Black people everywhere, in every state, “not citizens.” That decision was so bad we fought a war over it.

'After that war, the victors wrote the 14th Amendment, which not only granted citizenship to the formerly enslaved Africans but also created this new concept, a citizen of the United States. That person enjoyed rights and privileges regardless of state lines.

'Now, as Trump and his Republicans try to undo birthright citizenship, you can understand what they’re really trying to do: they’re trying to go back to the pre–Dred Scott days, and make citizenship subject to the prevailing political predilections of the era. And remember that tying citizenships to politics can lead to open war.

'“But the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

'This is a lie. It has, literally, repeatedly been interpreted to confer citizenship universally to people born within the United States.'

...

'“Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

'This is where Trump tries to straight-up change the Constitution without passing a constitutional amendment.'

...

OR '"(2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth."

'This is the Kamala Harris provision. You see, Trump shouldn’t have been allowed to run for president because he violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment when he rose up in rebellion against the government he had previously sworn an oath to defend. But the Supreme Court decided to ignore the 14th Amendment for the purposes of seeing a white man get what he wanted. Here, Trump is saying that Harris shouldn’t have been able to run for president, because the very specific situation this section describes is the situation of Harris’s birth: She was born in the US to two parents who were here legally, but with temporary status.'

'The pettiness toward his former political rival is probably what got Trump on board, but for the broader collection of white Republicans and capitalists who support him, this provision is critical. That’s because even Republicans understand that we need immigrants in this country, not only to perform low-skilled work at exploitative wages, but also to perform highly skilled work should America still want to be a thought and innovation leader. We need immigrants for their labor and their intellectual capacity.'

'But once these people have contributed to America’s wealth, the white people running the joint would still like the option to throw them away. By preventing immigrants on temporary work or student visas from having American-citizen children, the Trump administration is essentially relegating them to permanent second-class status. It’s the “you can come here and enrich us, but you can’t be us” version of white supremacy. Unless, that is, they eventually choose to give the “gift” of citizenship to immigrants.'

'On its face, this order violates the 14th Amendment, the statutes that mirror the 14th Amendment, and the Administrative Procedures Act (which prohibits “arbitrary and capricious” laws and orders such as “don’t give birth while on a student visa or else”). I’d also argue that it could violate the Equal Protection Clause, because it focuses more on the status of the mother than on the father. And it could violate the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution if we’re in a situation where citizenship granted in a blue state is not recognized by red states.

'But I wonder when the courts will get to a discussion of these issues on the merits. Because the government and Trump judges will likely begin by arguing that nobody even has standing to sue the administration over this constitutional violation. They’ll say that an immigrant who is not pregnant has no right to sue, nor does the out-of-status person who is expecting. They’ll say that states don’t have a right to sue, because they’re not “harmed” by the order. They’ll wait until an actual baby is born, and denied documentation, and then force that literal baby to sue.

'In the meantime, the courts could allow a patently unconstitutional order to go into effect and watch as the white-wing media desperately tries to normalize it. They could watch as Trump’s goons attempt to “enforce” the order as he puts families and their American-citizen children on trains and sends them to camps, waiting for just the “right” plaintiff to emerge.

'Even if the courts do get around to “stopping” the order, Trump controls the military. He controls the State Department and the Justice Department. He controls the Social Security Administration. I don’t have a lot of belief that he will follow a court order on this, even if the courts order him to stop.'

...

'This order violates one of the fundamental principles of the United States, and people should react to it like it does.

'Unfortunately, the order upholds another, perhaps even more fundamental principle that has always animated the American experiment: the idea that this country is for white people, and nobody else. The people who believe that, and have always believed that, are the people who hope this order succeeds.

'As I keep saying, we’ve tried to do citizenship Trump’s way before. It led to war. It could again, if Trump is allowed to get away with it.'

SOURCE: Elie Mystal, The Nation

IGNORANCE UNBOUND

'No one should be surprised that Trump is pulling out of the Paris climate accord, kicking career civil servants to the curb, threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs against Canada and Mexico (but only 10 percent against China), halting civil-rights litigation, dismantling privacy safeguards, attacking anything that has to do with transgender people or racial diversity, muzzling public health agencies, ripping up environmental protections (“I’d like to see federal lands opened up for data centers”), and generally proceeding through the Project 2025 playbook. He signaled this clearly during the campaign.

'But the brazen lawlessness is another matter: declaring the 14th Amendment to the Constitution null and void by executive fiat; disparaging the Reagan-appointed judge who blocked Trump’s “blatantly unconstitutional” order; proclaiming that another executive order gives him “the right” to ignore the TikTok ban, duly enacted and upheld by the Supreme Court; asserting that his unilateral declaration of a national energy emergency “means you can do whatever you have to do”; authorizing immigration raids in churches and other houses of worship; revealing the nation’s secrets to people who haven’t been vetted; and, of course, the blanket pardoning and commutations of sentences for people who attacked police officers on Jan. 6, 2021, and orchestrated the sacking of the Capitol.'

...

'Returned, as well, is the dark talk (“vicious, violent … radical and corrupt … stumbling … catastrophic … horrible betrayals”) and the gratuitous insults, some now delivered from behind the Resolute Desk. Liz Cheney is a “crying lunatic.” Adam Schiff is “scum.” Jack Smith is “deranged.” Nancy Pelosi is “guilty as hell” for Jan. 6. After the Episcopal bishop of Washington, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, had the temerity at the National Prayer Service to urge Trump to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” Trump lashed out at the “so-called Bishop” who is “a Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” not to mention “nasty” and “boring.”

'Trump’s tired claims, about the “rigged” 2020 election and the FBI’s purported culpability for Jan. 6, have come with him back to Washington, as have his self-enrichment schemes. Asked about the several billion dollars he has amassed in recent days for the cryptocurrency “meme coins” he released, Trump, flanked by moguls Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son, responded: “Several billion? That’s peanuts for these guys.”

'And all of this is being normalized, far faster than during Trump’s first term. Stunned Democrats have yet to find their collective voice. And Republicans are bowing and scraping before Trump. '

..

'The most unwelcome feature of Trump’s return this week, more than any individual action, is his abiding ignorance, even after all these years. This is what allows unscrupulous figures such as Stephen Miller to run amok. It’s also the source of the constant chaos that is Trump’s trademark.

'This week alone, Trump botched — either out of ignorance or mendacity — claims about World Health Organization funding, the trade deficit, opioid deaths, inflation, birthright citizenship, Biden’s pardons, illegal immigration, the Jan. 6 committee and more. In a typical pronouncement, Trump alleged that no president imposed tariffs on China “until I came along.” George Washington would beg to differ.

'With such faulty inputs, it’s no wonder the outputs are defective. “With my actions today,” Trump said on Monday, “we will end the Green New Deal and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate” — neither of which actually exists. The same order promises to “safeguard” Americans’ access to inefficient appliances and plumbing fixtures. He justified his threats to retake the Panama Canal, possibly by force, by saying 38,000 Americans died building it and that “China is operating the Panama Canal.” Fewer than 6,000 Americans were believed to have died, and China does not operate the canal. The White House, justifying its order requiring full-time, in-person work by federal employees, claimed that “only 6 percent of employees currently work in person.” But the Office of Management and Budget found that half of federal workers don’t even qualify to work remotely, and the rest average three days a week in the office.

'And then there was the executive order titled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.”

'Restoring names? The order proposes to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” — even though it has been called the Gulf of Mexico since Spanish explorers mapped it — in 1519.

'Their hostile act was a grave insult to the future United States. And that is why, 506 years later, Trump is finally taking Spain for the mortal enemy it is.'

SOURCE: Dana Milibank, The Washington Post 

HELPING OUT WITH THE LOS ANGELES FIRES

'On Thursday, the L.A.-based Jimmy Kimmel joked that Trump would make the trip “to blame us for the fires in person.”

KIMMEL: “It’s the first time in history that a natural disaster will be visited by an even bigger natural disaster.”  

“I guess to survey the damage, and meet with the governor — mostly to get away from Elon for a couple of days.”  

“He is so, so ridiculous, and we have to sit around with the place on fire, hoping he gives us our own money back. Trump and his minions are planning to leverage any federal aid they might give to force us to help him round up and deport our neighbors as if we’re Eric and he’s cutting off our allowance to teach us some kind of a lesson.”  

“Which, on one hand, you might think, ‘Oh, wow, what a truly — only a despicable human being would use disaster relief money as a bargaining chip,’ but on the other hand — there is no other hand. It’s just that hand.”  

SOURCE: Trish Bendix, New York Times 

Washington, D.C. on any given day in the 21st Century

As Trump kicks off his campaign of nonstop harms, universities and humanities programs will need to look to themselves for the resources to help the people that count on them and advance the ideas, cultures, and practices we need. 

Neither universities nor humanities organizations can do this now and will need to do much better over the next few years.

This post is the final part of my talk at the New Orleans MLA Convention, "The Humanities Die in Darkness." The first part is posted here, and the underlying paper is in the first issue of Public Humanities.

The humanities' first funding scandal is that the country’s main source of basic research funding spends essentially no money on humanities scholarship. Using NSF data, of the $54 billion or so in research that the federal government funds in U.S. higher education, $69 million goes to the humanities. That is, the humanities receive 0.13% of the federal total.  This is a tiny slice of the overall federal research pie, and rounds essentially to zero.  See the figure above.

 

The second funding scandal is what happens when we move from extramural to internal or institutional funds. Of the nearly $100 billion that universities spent on research in FY2022, $25 billion came from the universities themselves. That’s a lot of research, especially outside of STEM.  In a epistemically just or epistemically neutral world, universities would try to even out external shortfalls for the humanities by increasing the humanities’ share of internal funding.  

 

But this is not what happens.  Here are some sample universities.

I’ve simplified the NSF data categories into government, corporate or foundation funding, and internal funds (“institution funds” in the NSF tables).  Watch institutional funds, the grey band. It represents the universities' own money spent on research.  Research universities take a quarter or even a third of research expenditures from their own pockets.

 

So if STEM research is profitable, and makes money, maybe all this internal money is available for the arts, humanities, social sciences, education, law, and so on?

 

In reality, no! Here’s the breakdown of internal expenditures for these universities —the grey bar of total institutional funds is broken out with a separate bar for all non-STEM expenditures next to it.

The short bars are all of non-STEM funding.  The yellow band is all humanities disciplines together.  A few elite university humanities programs do well. Princeton at 10.6% of institutional funds for humanities is the highest I’ve found. Penn, however, is under 2% -- it spends less than 2% of its own research funds on humanities research. The University of Arizona is about 2%. Iowa is about two and a half percent, Kansas back under 2 percent. 

 

Not pictured here, the University of California spent a half a percent of its total research expenditures on the arts and humanities together in 2018-19. The University of Oregon and Stanford University spent a fifth of one percent of their internal research funds on humanities research (in 2022). 

 

Clearly, interest in or respect for humanities research is not a function of whether or not you can afford it.  With a few exceptions, universities just don’t use their internal funds to compensate for extramural funding injustice towards the humanities but use these internal funds to perpetuate this injustice.

 

One way to remember this is in round numbers. 

 

Universities spend $100 billion on research (from all sources). 

 

One tenth of that goes to all non-STEM fields as a group, social sciences included.  

 

And then one-tenth of these non-STEM funds goes to humanities disciplines. There’s a tacit One Percent Rule for the humanities—some universitis are above, most are around one percent or below.

 

But where does all that other internal research money go?    

 

It goes to subsidizing STEM research, because STEM research in reality loses money for its universities. I can’t go into this here, except to say yes, you have been gaslighted about this by your own administrators. Universities use the vast majority of their internal funds to make up for the failure of external STEM research sponsors to pay the full costs of STEM research.  Bear in mind, too, that Project 2025 has a plan for the Trump administration to make this problem much, much worse (see page 355).

 

This gets us to the third scandal, which is entirely of the humanities’ own making.  I’ll cast it as a series of questions. Why are you hearing about the research funding scandals from me? Why are you looking at my homemade figures made through my individual readings of NSF survey data? Where are the large scale reports from the humanities disciplines? Where is the humanities equivalent of these very large research funding surveys and analyses that are required of the NSF by law? Where are the NEH, ACLS, MLA, AHA, APA, NHA, and Mellon reports on research underfunding, coupled with policy demands for more funding? Since this would be a large undertaking, where are the collaborations among the leading humanities associations and between them and the NSF? Where is the humanities research infrastructure to study the very damaging lack of humanities research infrastructure? 

 

The answers to these questions are the same: nowhere.  I have found no sustained institutional effort to understand the state of humanities research funding.  A key reason why we have no meaningful research funding on the scale of the profession is that we have no data and no public discourse about such funding.  

 

STEM, in contrast, has been forced to have data and discourse since the 1950s.  They have made a virtue of necessity—and also made a nonstop, militant advocacy program.  Our failure here has inflicted damage on humanities scholarship and on its public reputation. This is damage that we have never tried to define, much less systemically oppose.

  

Our main strategies for survival have been as follows: stressing teaching, expanding public engagement,  and shrinking graduate programs, which make the problem of underpowered research even worse. These false solutions are also driving students away and damaging academic employment. Students and the wider public are attracted to fields that generate visible, useful knowledge about problems in their lives. 2023’s infamous New Yorker article by Nathan Heller, “The End of the English Major?” rested on interview evidence that students follow research investments, not quasi-educational activities.  10 years ago I published a piece in the MLA journal Profession, called “The Humanities as Service Departments.”  That is where ignoring research funding has been taking us.  Students do not major in service courses.

 

The natural and social sciences work under a social contract to generate public knowledge, and so do the humanities. The equation is Research + funding=public benefits=have a future.

 

I am sorry to say that this third scandal of our own making mixes two modes. One is gaslighting—we allow ourselves to be gaslighted about university funding; we then gaslight each other about how this doesn’t really matter.  

 

The other is the practice I mentioned at the start: anticipatory obedience, a reflex on a matter of world crisis like Israel’s destruction of Gaza as well as on matters closer to home, like our own professional survival. 

 

I’ve laid out the alternative elsewhere: surveys, data, analysis, publication, dissemination, advocacy, howling into the void until the void listens. The void does eventually listen.  

 

The void needs to hear us say that extramural funding must by doubled, tripled, quadrupled until the 166,000 college and university humanities instructors have research support in the ballpark of their needs as identified in the surveys we must conduct. 

 

The void needs to hear us say that STEM disciplines must move towards full coverage of their overheads so that much more institutional funding can be used to give humanities scholars appropriate research support.  We need a 10 year plan, and we need it now!

 

My thought about 2025 has been that Trumpism is likely the end of this fifty-year political cycle and not its resurgence.  But we are the ones who have to work to make that true. It is not up to us alone, but it is also up to us.  And we need the money and the infrastructure to have the power so our research can make this difference.