The political/financial crisis of the American university in the Trump era
By 
I’ve been dealing with power outages for the past couple of days because of a bad windstorm in Boulder, so apologies for the more than usually intermittent blogging.
Christopher Newfield has written an essay that any politically conscious person with an interest in the future of American universities — this should be tautological — should read in full.
In this post I will discuss this management—faculty split, which I nominate as the most important internal trend of 2025. I’ll discuss new revelations about the fraudulent federal case against UCLA, revelations which haven’t obviously stiffened spines. I’ll then analyze the UC budget as a paradigm of top-level administrative groupthink that has lost touch with educational reality (sections 3 and 4). The final section will discuss the larger historical exhaustion of the current regime as the context in which academics will need to ponder building of the shadow or parallel university.
The Northwestern University deal was the last straw for veteran academic freedom expert John K. Wilson. He wrote,
It is common to describe these agreements as a surrender to the Trump regime, but it’s actually much worse. This isn’t capitulation; it’s collaboration. This is complicity, not compulsion.
Northwestern officials made an agreement with the Trump administration, not because they were forced to, but because they wanted to do it. . . .
Bowing down before the Trump administration only makes sense as a strategy when both sides share the same goals. These agreements allow administrators to impose tighter controls over almost every aspect of campus life.
Wilson notes that the deal defied a Northwestern faculty vote of 595 to 4 against “any capitulation on the part of Northwestern University to these or similar demands that undermine constitutional rights, democratic principles, faculty governance, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom.” He states that “the Northwestern agreement includes a long list of right-wing demands related to race, sex and politics.”
Wilson has been making patient arguments on behalf of academic freedom for thirty years. I’d say his patience has now run out.
Until administrators suffer the consequences of an alumni and campus backlash, they will continue bowing down to the Trump administration, sacrificing academic freedom every time they are forced to choose between free speech and the spigot of money.
This is true. He continues:
Students, faculty, staff and alumni need to create a subversive alternative university lurking within the shadows of the university itself. This shadow university is essential because trustees, administrators and wealthy donors ultimately control the structure of universities.
The first step is financial: encouraging alumni to cut off all donations to the university. The problem is that when progressive donors withhold money, progressive causes at the university will tend to suffer the most. So the solution is to create a shadow fund, an independent non-profit that alumni can donate to continue support for these goals. In the case of Northwestern, it could include independent funding for efforts being banned in the Trump agreement.
After offering some detail, drawn in part from AAUP-Northwestern’s president Jacqueline Stevens, he concludes, “We need shadow universities to preserve academic values and academic freedom at a time when they are under attack by government officials and campus administrators.”
There’s been quite a bit of thinking about this over the years, and that thinking’s time has come. I’ve previously pondered storefront or bootleg universities in which already-employed tenure-track faculty would teach one course a year for free while hiring otherwise-adjuncted scholars for regular pay. Figuring out how to fund this would be fun. Some colleagues in Bologna, Italy, run courses as an International Parallel University out of a bookstore.
Wilson and Stevens imagine something similar being run from or next to a major university, and perhaps integrated into it with an autonomous funding and governance structure. The autonomous governance structure could serve as practical experiment in democratized, bottom-up academic governance of a kind now purged from the country’s colleges and universities, to their intellectual and also financial detriment.
Newfield goes on to drill down into the combination of horrible politics and economic recklessness that has brought us to a state in which thinking about serious alternatives to the current structure of American universities is not only possible but essential. Cynics will dismiss the idea of genuine rebellion within these institutions against what they have become as naivete, but consider where all this hardheaded realistic neoliberal thinking has led us. Newfield’s argument that there must be some way out of this place is not utopian — or if it is it’s the sort of utopian thinking we need at this moment.