The War on Higher Ed
Elite American universities are surrending at an astonishing pace.
The latest salvo:
NYT (“Leaders of Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies Center Will Leave“):
Two of the leaders of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the director and associate director, will be leaving their positions, according to two professors with direct knowledge of the moves.
The department had been under criticism from alumni that it had an anti-Israel bias, and the university more broadly has been under intense pressure from the federal government to address accusations of antisemitism on campus.
The director, Cemal Kafadar, a professor of Turkish studies, and the associate director, Rosie Bsheer, a historian of the Middle East, did not respond to messages seeking comment on Friday.
The news was first reported by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. A spokesman for the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, James Chisholm, declined to comment, saying only that the matter was a personnel matter.
David Cutler, the interim dean of Social Science, announced in an email on Wednesday obtained by The New York Times that Dr. Kafadar would be stepping down from his post at the end of the academic year.
Dr. Cutler did not respond to a message late Friday.
Faculty members who have spoken with both professors say each believe they were forced out of their posts.
Harvard has been under a microscope over its response to accusations of antisemitism on campus. The university has also been under pressure from Republicans to be more welcoming to conservative viewpoints.
On Tuesday, Hopi Hoekstra, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which houses the Middle East center, sent a letter to all center heads asking what changes they would make in furtherance of intellectual diversity, according to an email obtained by The Times.
Dr. Hoekstra asked that the center heads be prepared to discuss, among other things, the degree to which their programs and seminars met “goals of diversity of and exposure to different ideas, perspectives and topics.” The email also asked the center leaders how they promoted “respectful dialogue across controversial topics” and the changes they would make.
This is a moment of precariousness for international students and scholars who study the Middle East. Last week, under pressure from the Trump administration, Columbia University agreed to a list of demands, including placing its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department, along with its Center for Palestine Studies, under the review of an administrator.
On Friday evening, Columbia announced that it was replacing its current president for the second time in less than a year, amid controversy over how it had agreed to those demands.
The executive committee of Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors condemned “the abrupt termination” of the center’s leaders in a statement.
“In the context of recent events, the decision appears to be a shameful attempt to escape punishment from the Trump administration for engaging in academic discussions about topics the president disfavors,” the statement said. “These firings cede the university’s decision-making authority to bullies and bad-faith actors committed to silencing speech with which they disagree.”
Asli Bali, the president of the Middle East Studies Association, said in an interview late Friday that Columbia’s decision to bend to the Trump administration could be a “death knell” for Middle East programs.
“Now their universities are on notice that the government is looking for a settlement that includes abridging the autonomy of centers and departments devoted to the study of the Middle East,” Professor Bali said.
She added: “I’ve never seen anything comparable to this. This is totally unprecedented.”
I’m not enough of an historian of academia to know whether this is truly “unprecedented,” but I certainly don’t remember this kind of thing in the three decades plus that I’ve been paying attention. But we’ve seen a lot of it since the start of the second Trump administration.
While I wholeheartedly agree with Ezra Klein that the Ivies and other universities with massive endowments should show more spine in standing up for academic freedom, I’m at least somewhat sympathetic to their dilemma.
A few days back, Dan Drezner offered several explanation, which he notes are not necessarily excuses.
Speed. While the Trump administration’s actions are not entirely surprising, their rapidity has been shocking — so shocking that some university leaders have seemed overly slow or cautious in response.1 An argument could be made that this is inherent to universities as organizations. In Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow described universities as “loosely coupled” systems in which a catastrophe in one unit would take a while to affect other units. That applies to decision-making as well. As previously noted, university presidents have to contend with the most entitled interest groups in existence. Expecting them to act quickly even in the current crisis is expecting them to exercise muscles that have never been used. Precarity. Remember that an awful lot of university presidents — heck, an awful lot of university administrators, period — are interim at the moment. They lack leadership training. Furthermore, a lot of big university donors are sympathetic to the Trump administration’s actions. The New York Times’ Ginia Bellafante recently observed that, “in the current environment, the grievances of those donors — against diversity initiatives and unruly agitators — stand in precise alignment with the agenda in Washington.” This set of circumstances will often push university leadership towards more risk-averse strategies. In the current moment that means not saying or doing all that much. The logic would be that getting attacked is one thing; getting attacked after speaking out invites recriminations from some stakeholders — especially if the attacks in turn trigger mass layoffs. Collective action. An individual professor can write and publish a statement of protest in a matter of minutes or hours. Even an individual university president can write or say something in relatively short order. Getting an assemblage of faculty to agree to anything requires consultations that can make the Congress of Vienna seem like a simple lunch order. Combine this with the speed of the Trump administration’s actions and you get a bunch of actors that seem to be reacting way too slowly. Recent history. I’ve been writing about the War on College for well over a decade now. The past few years have been particularly trying for universities, and they have not always put their best foot forward in response. Clearly one reason that Trump believes he can eviscerate a key pillar of American influence with minimal consequences is that Republicans have stopped trusting higher education. Unfortunately, university leaders are not bringing a lot of goodwill to the public sphere at the current moment.
He closed, “My hope is that eventually university leaders will soon begin to appreciate the existential threat that the Trump administration represents. But it is going to take some time.”
Writing at Crooked Timber, University of Amsterdam political scientist Eric Schliesser condemned Columbia’s capitulation:
The last sentence of the unsigned letter expresses commitment to the university’s mission, “while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.” While I am no critic of judicious use of hypocrisy, this passage is also a nice example of what has come to be known as ‘performative contradiction.’ If government officials get to dictate to you that certain departments must be put into receivership, and you then go and promise to rejig the curriculum (for ‘balance’), perhaps you should not claim ‘institutional integrity’ or present yourself as a guardian of ‘academic freedom?’
[…]
Support for medical research has been the one political constant in my adult life. Regular readers know I have been seeing a catastrophe coming for a decade now, but I was truly surprised that NIH funding was the instrument of choice to put the squeeze on the research universities and expose their political vulnerability.
That Columbia University was politically isolated became clear during an interview with Senator Schumer (the minority leader) in the New York Times a week ago. Schumer is also from New York City. He basically said that the University had it coming and should not expect help from him; he only objected to the manner President Trump acted “indiscriminately, without looking at its effect.”
In my view this collapse in social support that made even the rich, private modern research university vulnerable is the effect of quite a few self-incurred wounds I have noted (recall here) and won’t repeat, and, non-trivially and more importantly, the effect of a clever long-term campaign that by appealing to and emphasizing purportedly liberal commitments (freedom of speech, toleration, and anti-discrimination) cleaved the natural coalition supporting universities (as is evident from the Schumer interview). The enemies of liberal society managed to confuse university leadership themselves who have been, by and large, unable to think and speak clearly about the nature of academic freedom and its relationship to a wider political society and who have been inept at political speech. This is no surprise since they have been elevated for their fundraising and managerial skills. The cleavage strategy paid off after October 7.
His co-blogger, University of Queensland economist John Quiggin, sees dire consequences:
Taken in the broader context of the Trump dictatorship, this means the end of international research collaboration involving the US. That will be a huge blow to global research of all kinds. Faced with this prospect, I would have expected our response to start with denial, before working through the other stages of grief.
[…]
Research funding is only the first stage in the story. As Trump closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become intellectually indefensible, if not physically impossible. In my own field of economics, the central role in the job market played by American meetings will need to end. The central role of US journals will last a bit longer, but can’t be tolerated indefinitely.
In the longer term. Trump is setting out to destroy US universities as centres of intellectual inquiry. That will take a while, and the US will continue to be central in many fields of research for some time to come. But the eagerness of university managers to collaborate with the regime means that time may be short.
The axe is already falling on biomedical research and climate science among other fields. Work in these topics will have to move elsewhere, as will researchers who value their independence. Is such a shift financially and technically feasible, given the resources of what’s left of the free world? On an initial analysis, it’s a task comparable in cost and difficulty to taking responsibility for our own defence.
[…]
Finally, there’s the humanities and social sciences, including economics. These fields have never flourished under dictatorship, as can be seen by comparing China’s near-invisibility in these fields with its leading position in many fields of technological research. They will, inevitably, wither on the vine if Trump’s dictatorship is sustained long enough. But there is a lot of ruin in an academic discipline. We can hope that Trump’s winter will be short relative to the lengthy time-scales of the academic world, and that when it passes, there will be a new spring.
A poll this week (“75% of US scientists who answered Nature poll consider leaving“) seems to show that those scholars are not being alarmist.
The massive changes in US research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers. More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll — three-quarters of the total respondents — are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation.
The trend was particularly pronounced among early-career researchers. Of the 690 postgraduate researchers who responded, 548 were considering leaving; 255 of 340 PhD students said the same.Trump’s administration has slashed research funding and halted broad swathes of federally funded science, under a government-wide cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk. Tens of thousands of federal employees, including many scientists, have been fired and rehired following a court order, with threats of more mass firings to come. Immigration crackdowns and battles over academic freedom have left researchers reeling as uncertainty and disruption permeate all aspects of the US research enterprise.
Nature asked readers whether these changes were causing them to consider leaving the United States. Responses were solicited earlier this month on the journal’s website, on social media and in the Nature Briefing e-mail newsletter. Roughly 1,650 people completed the survey.
Many respondents were looking to move to countries where they already had collaborators, friends, family or familiarity with the language. “Anywhere that supports science,” wrote one respondent. Some who had moved to the United States for work planned to return to their country of origin.
Sampling methodology quibbles aside, this is certainly concerning. The United States has been the epicenter of scholarship globally for generations. The best students from around the world come here for higher education and the best scholars have disproportionately gravitated here. There’s a reason the United States is home to so many Nobel laurettes, many of whom were not born here.
Schliesser and other critics are certainly right that feckless leadership at so many elite institutions helped put higher ed in the crosshairs. But we’re in danger of losing a fundamental cornerstone of what has made us the world’s leading power for over a century.
Academics are not fighters, except in nasty in-group squabbles.
Trump’s power comes from the uneducated, the stupid, and the cruel. Of course he hates education.
You’re in higher education, Dr. Joyner. What are you doing to resist? Why would your colleagues be doing more?
@Michael Reynolds:
The real problem is that academics are middle class, and like the rest of us are trapped by the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense (“everybody’s got a mortgage”)
I’m getting a little sick and tired of everyone calling these places “elite” universities. It’s literally just college – the place you go to write essays, learn courses, and occasionally party in homes with so-so alcohol. We’re so busy studying and prepping for exams to be snooty about other students. Besides, half the people using these labels have probably gone to college themselves and often seem ashamed of their credentials – probably as a way to appear more “Average Joe” than their degrees suggest.
Sigh, this is what I get for attending a college best known for Freud visiting us. You graduate with permanent psychoanalysis brain XD
@Michael Reynolds: “Academics are not fighters, except in nasty in-group squabbles.”
I understand that you hate academics almost as much as you hate our students, but at least be aware that the people who are kneeling down in front of Trump at these universities are decidedly not academics. They are university administrators, who tend to hate academics almost as much as you do. These are corporate-president wannabees whose essential functions are raising money and keeping rich alums happy, along with doing their best to minimize tenured faculty and bring in minimum-wage adjuncts to do the actual teaching.
For the explanation of this, see Paul Campos at LGM earlier this week,
Kaufman-Osborn goes on at some length and detail to explain why boards and administrators are such chicken spit establishment sellouts, happy to throw the faculty and students under the bus.
The absurdity of faculty politics is a popular meme precisely because they have no power.
A real change is coming to campus regardless of Trump. Sure universities will keep the credentialing beloved so many. But in the “copy of the professors” majors, AI is going to kill them as computers can regurgitate better than a disinterested student. Oh, there will still be the tiny number of students who have real interest, but that same desire to know will also mean they do not need to participate in the “transmissionism” notion on which lectures are based. In any case, uni departments need lots of victims to keep them up, not just a handful of real students.
–Econtalk podcast with economist Ed Leamer, April 13, 2020
–Econtalk podcast, 2019
@Michael Reynolds and @Stormy Dragon: Universities are increasingly run by professional fundraisers. At least the Ivies still tend to elevate accomplished scholars to their presidencies. Even so, their main job is to expand the endowment, get rich people to contribute to capitol funds, and to bring in grant money.
Academics themselves, at least once tenured, are typically pretty robust in standing up to power, at least in terms of publication and the like. Those of us who aren’t tenured—and especially those who can be fired by the President and his henchmen—are in a more precarious position.
I have become convinced that push back on Trump and the far right will not come from anybody or any institution that has power, money, influence, or anything else to lose. The resistance will come from people who have very little to lose.
I am beyond enraged at our academic elites. Columbia has $15B in endowments. They could just say “screw you”. They get legal letters from the Government? They all have law schools. Put those professors to work. Heck, make it student projects. They would love to get that actual experience.
I remember the Columbia head saying she was “heartbroken” at the kidnapping on her campus. Who gives a crap whether she’s “heartbroken”? Screw her and her feelings. Unless she actually does something, she is useless.
@wr: @gVOR10: One of the things I learned during my stint at the administrative level was that BoTs don’t understand what they are supposedly overseeing. And if you stop and pay attention to who sits on Boards in most places, you will find a bunch of people who are ostensibly in control of entities they do not understand.
Also, too many upper admin types (Presidents, Chancellors, VPs, etc.) are not academics.
And to @wr’s point, a lot of them actually do not like academics and see them as a necessary evil.
And look, the issue is not that people aren’t fighters.
The problem is that this is a massive collective action problem and we, as a society, aren’t fully equipped.
And to directly note to comments like that of @Michael Reynolds, if the Democratic Party and Big Law are both having a hard time trying to figure out how to combat what this administration is doing, what the ever loving fuck do you expect individual academics to do?
And my frustration is less about defending academics, as it is that I find finger pointing about how certain people aren’t fighting enough to be annoying.
And look, a lot of academics tried to tell everyone what kind of threat Trump represented. That not enough people listened is kind of the fault of the people who didn’t listen.
As a former academic, I have seen first-hand how arrogant and non-functioning some faculty members can be. Entitlement among students was not something I saw as much as I saw students who didn’t bother with going to class, or wanted to know, “Why do I need to learn about finite state machines? What has it got to do with programming?”
Of course, some of them came back after a year working to tell me, “Finite-state machines are EVERYWHERE!!!” To which I just smiled and nodded.
We live in a country, perhaps it is the world, I don’t know, where expertise has always been suspect, and now the internet lets people become “experts” without those know-it-all professors who pretend that spending their entire professional lives entitles them to claim they know more about it than you do. How dare they!
I don’t want to be one-sided. This is a complicated mess of a situation. Sometimes the powers that be are wrong.
I do endorse the “Chesterton fence” sort of conservatism. If you’re going to tear something down, I think it’s best if you understand what it was there to do first. Of course, “just-so” explanations that presuppose malice and greed are popular, and they are accurate sometimes.
This is another problem that the internet has given us, which we have yet to solve. But perhaps it’s the same problem: We have created the world’s greatest propaganda engine, and given free rein to the worst actors in the world to use it. That’s what has put us here.
@Steven L. Taylor:
100% this. And frankly the fighters on most social issues are vilified by large swaths of the population.
Especially because the people often asking others to fight tend to talk about how they, themselves, are not in a position to do so.
@wr: @Steven L. Taylor:
Oh come now, I don’t hate academics. I just don’t hold them in as high regard as they hold themselves.
I don’t go in for praise inflation. Most people doing most things are, ‘fine.’ Some people are, ‘pretty good.’ A few are, ‘really good, even excellent.’ And that’s my adjectival limit. (I would describe myself as ‘pretty good’ at my job.). I don’t go for, ‘awesome,’ or ‘amazing’ or ‘genius’ – unless I’m forced to write a blurb. I don’t hate or even dislike academics, they’re fine, and many are ‘pretty good.’ A few are ‘really good.’
But they aren’t fighters. If academics were fighters we’d be seeing mass resignations. Same with the lawyers who populate our legal system and seem all-too-quick to bend the knee. I used to think I was too cynical about humans, but boy, I wasn’t close to grasping just how many people are ready to submit. Lindsay Graham isn’t an outlier, he’s the norm.
The Simpsons, as was so often the case, had a clearer picture of humanity.
@JKB:
Do yourself a favor — fire up the Old ChatGPT or maybe some LLM built to avoid woke bias or whatever, and then have a conversation with it on something you are very, very knowledgeable. The love life of von Mises, perhaps.
I think you will find that the AI is complete garbage.
They’re great for doing things that don’t need to be done well. Do you need an artist’s statement for a grant application? It’s great at that. Do you have customers that you must provide customer service for, but you don’t care if they are helped? Amazing at that.
A lot of people have bet big on AI, and they’re determined to declare success despite the results.
And the result is the guy at the end of the bar who is a little tipsy and thinks he knows everything. Except less assertive.
@Michael Reynolds: What is it that you think mass resignations by professors would accomplish?
@Michael Reynolds:
I assume that, as a professional writer, the irony is intentional?
@James Joyner: Well, it would be a very effective way of taking away what little power they currently have, so there’s that!
Boom!
Take that, Trump! We are now unemployed and no one has any reason at all to pay us any attention!!
Powerrrrrrrrrr!!!
@Steven L. Taylor:
Like management see workers generally.
@gVOR10: Indeed. The amazing thing at universities is that the faculty are not only just the workers, but largely the machines needed to make the products.
The degree to which many in upper admin don’t really understand this is amazing.
@James Joyner:
And this is why I don’t understand why the research universities are not taking a stand here. Drastic reductions in government-funded research grants are an existential threat to most of what goes on at a major research university. The undergrad colleges have a totally different business model and raison-d’etre, but an administration that doesn’t see a need for federally-funded science or social science by definition does not see a need for universities. Or their faculty, or their grad students.
I get the feeling the university administrators and boards don’t quite get this.
There are students getting snatched off the streets for having written critical editorials.
I am not even sure what standing up to the administration could look like.
It seems to me that the issue is money. Trump, Musk and all of his recent govt hirees dont have to worry about losing income whenever they go out and do something illegal they know will get challenged in court. As if they weren’t rich enough already now the govt will bear the costs of the suits they cause. For the people at universities, the law firms Trump is going after and others, you risk big time financial hits by opposing what the govt, really Trump/Musk, is telling you what to do.
If the choice is shut down the DEI program, which likely aunt sincere anyway, and get rid of a couple of professors vs losing hundreds of jobs a lot of people are going to fold. Yup, you can go to court and maybe 2-3 years later when the case and all of the appeals are over you win but those hundreds(thousands) of people have had their lives and careers hit hard. Having run a business for a long time I am happy to say that we walked away from numerous opportunities to expand or make a lot more money because we didnt deem them ethical or the way we thought medicine should be practiced. We were lucky that our network admin never forced us into the position of making the choice of income or compromising on care. I know a lot fo my guys were very loss averse and when the majority of our people were young I think they would have gone for the income saving approach.
Steve
@wr:
As a former minimum-wage adjunct*, THANK YOU!
*In fact, relative to the total hours worked as an adjunct in a “writing” discipline, working at Mickey D’s paid more than teaching. I eventually started turning down summer work because working at the auto pier prepping Hyundais for shipment to dealers paid more (but wasn’t available as a job during the winter–who knew minimum wage jobs were seasonal, too?).
@JKB: You keep citing these two pieces of evidence every time you launch this intellectual SS Minnow on it’s current “three-hour tour.” Are these the only two guys you can find who agree with your position?
ETA: Backtracking to your comment, congratulations on finding an Ezra Pound quip that fits your worldview. Will this be a continuing addition to this rant or will you try to find other Modernist poets who said similar things?
@Steven L. Taylor:
I find myself very much in sympathy with you. We don’t have a professor problem. We have an administrator problem.
But how did this occur? I think it’s the inexorable behavior of organizations.
@Michael Reynolds: Now it is all lawyers have no backbone as well as all academics…b/c of the actions of a few (out of how many tens of thousands in the country). Hopefully more can be as brave and fearless and follow the path you are leading the way on
@Steven L. Taylor:
He doesn’t. All of these types of assaults on the ramparts are mostly in service to his ongoing assault on the ramparts of organized religion.
He’s really sort of a secular Jerry Falwell that way. Same song, different verse.
Lots of different ways to “fight” and to do so effectively, not merely performatively (though we should not be too quick to dismiss performance).
People – including those in academia – have different skills, preferences, platforms, etc. Comparative advantage and all that.
As a person in academia, I am privy to many of the different ways such people are choosing to “fight.” And not “fight.”
Eg, a few of the professional societies I belong to are doing (and have been doing) extensive work on Capitol Hill.
Is it splashy? No.
Has it reversed or stopped all the bad stuff that’s happening? Clearly not.
Has it been effective? Yes – in some cases.
Is there more work, ahem “fighting”, to do? Clearly yes.
Beware of WYSIATI.
@Gustopher: Just a couple of days ago, I was reading an interview where Bill Gates was saying that doctors and teachers and such will mostly be replaced by AI machines over the next decade or so. Should I count you among the skeptics? Is AI taking over another fusion power thing in that we’ll become perpetually 10 years away from the big singularity breakthrough?
ETA: Link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-says-ai-replace-155228777.html
@Just nutha ignint cracker: My most pessimistic view is that AI will replace doctors, despite being complete garbage. Because no one wants to pay doctors, and healthcare is often one of those fields where it just needs to be done, it doesn’t need to be done correctly.
At my most optimistic as far as replacing doctors goes, I can see AI being used in conjunction with RNs, providing care slightly better than a standard Zoomcare visit — so slightly worse than going to a vet, but still getting basic care out to more people.
And far better than a layperson searching WebMD.
Is that optimistic or pessimistic?
The current batch of LLMs is surprisingly likely to diagnose someone with a disease that doesn’t exist. Or exists in science fiction. Sir, the reason you are having headaches is that you are going through Ponn Farr, and the solution is simple… MPREG.
I don’t think you’re going to get anyone to admit that they’ve spent billions of dollars on a completely useless tech, though, so they are going to inflict it on healthcare whether it works or not. Way before 10 years from now.
Insurance companies will require it. “Before approving you for a liver transplant, we require 10 sessions with an AI psychologist so you can try to become accustomed to the idea of impermanence.”
@Connor: As I was referencing above, a lot of the problem is that universities are ultimately run by boards of trustees who know very little about education. And in the case of publics, these are political appointees who are often more interested in football than they are in bio labs.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I wish the Florida appointments were more interested in football than exerting political control over curricula.
They gutted a public liberal arts college that took a unique approach to education—exactly the kind of program favored in the Econlib lecture quoted by JKB.
Of course, that post kicked off with a quote from a fascist. Not sure if his eye twitched when he typed it out. But my guess is, no.
@Kurtz:
A fair point.
@Kurtz: bold of you to assume he knew who Pound was outside of this quote.
@Kurtz: DeSantis is not a product of the university system in Florida (in his case, Yale and Harvard Law) and has no loyalty to the institutions of higher education and their mission. And he has followers who ape his behavior.