Collaboration and resistance
By 
The literary scholar and cultural critic Christopher Newfield, who among many other things has published three books regarding what could be (and in fact is) called “critical university studies,” recently restarted his blog on those and related topics. This post, which I urge you to read in full, is both an analysis and call to arms:
As someone who has sought mutual understanding across disciplines on topics such as humanities research starvation and the actual (negative) revenue results of indirect cost recovery since around 2002, I’m pretty sure the current consensus won’t work. The only way forward is through candid encounters with reality, and these will involve passages through conflict and negative feelings on all sides.
So I look for a certain tone that risks conflict as it deliberately strips away the euphemisms and doctored data that underwrite what we might call the discursive hegemony of academic management.
Obviously attack isn’t the only desirable tone. But faculty solidarity will be much stronger if it can honestly work through the issues that divide it by disciplinary interests among other things.
There’s also a question of whether most tenure-track faculty want managerial power for the sake of co-governed control over their working conditions.
Real co-governance means time, study, effort, argument—and also, to be frank, an initial campaign to seizethis power. This is pretty clear from the general exclusion of faculty from strategizing about fighting Trump. The worst higher ed crisis since the 1930s has not obviously increased faculty-admin collaboration for the sake of a united front, which suggests yet again that admin will not share power voluntarily. And yet my default hypothesis is that faced with this situation, most TT faculty, perhaps 80-90%, would rather hunker down and accept some decent approximation of what they had in 2024 (say 2/3rds to 3/4th of their grants, ½ to 3/4ths of their academic freedom-based candor in classrooms or campus policy debates) than fight a two-front war with Trump and their own provost and president. That’s a big likely constituency for hunkering down out of sight of the Trump Administration’s Operation University Shakedown, and waiting for the storms to pass.
I think hunkering down is a very bad strategy: the storms are intensifying and each accommodation causes lasting damage to the public reputations of universities that don’t fight for their core values.
Newfield analyzes the recent deals, aka extortionate shakedowns, that the Trump administration has cut with several universities — Harvard, to its great credit, seems to be the only holdout so far — in the context of the current power relations between university administrations, their own faculty, and the government. He then looks at responses to recent developments from various academics. Quoting law professor David Pozen:
“Deals like Columbia’s enhance the power of presidents and their allies within targeted universities; sideline Congress, the courts, and most faculty; and sow fear and uncertainty throughout civil society. They are fundamentally inconsistent with the logic of academic freedom.”
I completely agree. Pozen in effect answers my perennial question, how will the PMC (professional-managerial class) enter history as an independent agent (and not as capital’s servant), by defining a form of administrative tyranny to which professionals, by virtue of their practice, must object.
A key insight here is that university administrators have tremendous short term structural incentives to go along to get along with these authoritarian shakedowns, because among other things game recognize game. Quoting Adam Tooze:
Calling the Trump administration’s “governance by bullying” a “departure in style, tone, and ferocity,” he concludes that Trump’s treatment of Columbia is grounded in preexisting “routine of civil lawfare” that typifies U.S. corporate and political behavior. “This mess is what produces and reproduces American power as we know it.”
Tooze never does say what he or other Columbia faculty should do now. He treats Columbia as a teachable moment about capitalist democracy, where the Deal is more or less par for the course.
I of course take Tooze’s conceptual point that administration, democracy’s monstrous double, rests on and operates with fascist / authoritarian features. This is particularly true of academic management, which disavows its status as management while exerting the top-down command and information control it invariably involves.
Precisely.
Newfield quotes John Ganz on the question of the extent to which the university shakedowns reflect the transformation of Trumpism into a species of fascism (a characterization that Tooze disputes as “absurd.”).
Surely, if Nazism is at the extreme end of the breakdown of the state, with its regular notions of law and right, into factional and clique-based power politics, and we are entering a more fierce and disturbing era of unstatehood, then one must at least say, we are heading in a fascist direction? And I don’t think the fascism thesis relies upon a naive separation of the idealized liberal rule of law and the present disorder and reign of terror. Quite the opposite. I think rather it can show how fascism is implicit in liberal democratic institutions and develops out of their internal contradictions and failures. As Mick Jagger sings, “It’s just a shot away.” This was the position of the Frankfurt School, of which [Franz] Neumann [cited by Tooze on the Nazi “unstate”] was a member.
Newfield then notes:
Ganz’s conclusion is that liberal society, though fundamentally compromised, has elements retaining a “commitment to right,” while the state retains some “integrative function.” These are presumably worth fighting for as means to some other ends.
Yet what that fight look like is beyond his scope—including the fight in universities whose current form depends on the (partially autocratized) due process of the liberal state.
He then quotes several of my recent LGM posts regarding my fight with my own university administration as examples of the function of criticism at the present time, and concludes:
[Y]our typical professoriat/ PMC thought collective has no chance of finding its own path against managerial alignment with Trumpism if it can’t name and then work though its own complicities.
As Newfield says, this is to say the least an awkward situation, especially since the last thing the vast majority of academics want to do, understandably, is stand up to the authoritarian groveling of their own administrative bosses before the enormities of the Great Trumpist Purge.
But such is the situation in which we find ourselves. The choice within the American university at this historical moment is collaboration or resistance, and that choice is not ultimately an avoidable one for anyone inside these institutions.