BY AUDREY BERLOWITZ

The inexplicable budget cuts my financially-solvent university enacted through its 2023–24 APR process both portended and was practice for our current moment. The “headwinds,” justifications for why the university had to cut twenty programs before new system-wide performance-based metrics formally went into effect, have unsurprisingly arrived. If anyone working inside the university is still invested in the fiction that budget austerity is a separate phenomenon from the right-wing political attacks underway, they have pulled the wool over their own eyes. Trump and his lackeys are using concepts such as “antisemitism” and “diversity” as pretexts for gutting university funding. As retired president of Columbia University Lee Bollinger stated in a recent interview: “We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way.…Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions.”

All senior management seems capable of passing down bad news, penning contradictory emails to faculty and students in which they tout the importance of caring for every student while erasing any mention of the values they had up until just yesterday underwritten. Bollinger warned senior-level administrators that “we must make sure that when we emerge from whatever present crisis we are in, the choices we made will not make us ashamed,” but the call for a rousing defense of the sector on the part of university leadership has gone unheeded. In faculty senate meetings at my university in North Carolina, one senses sheepishness emanating from senior leadership, rooted in a botched response to the anti-DEI crusade while they simultaneously oversee the board of governor’s mandate to begin a new APR cycle. When attacked, these technocrats can only think to manage crises through backroom deals and take refuge behind the nostrum of “institutional neutrality.”

We are witnessing the speedy break up of “a deep commitment to diversification, understood primarily in racial and gender terms.” In the name of lessening the blows of draconian changes on students and faculty, faculty may be aiding and abetting the university’s continual self-inflicting of wounds. For this reason, faculty senates and faculty assemblies as sites of shared governance are rightfully being called into question. As Matthew Boedy recently wrote: “Faculty have less and less important roles in changes on campus. And areas we have been historically in charge of aka curriculum face ongoing erasure.” But faculty also continue to uphold the illusory ethos of the faculty senate because it’s the only role they know to play. While there is nothing wrong with faculty having compassion for the difficult situation their senior leaders are in, faculty should neither work closely with nor fight senior management. Instead, deal with the consequences of the break-up. Stop participating in self-disciplinary activities all together, gum up the process in whatever small ways you can, and bypass your inefficacious “guardians” to begin direct communication with those inflicting the wounds: the board of governors and Republicans in Congress in support of the board’s exacerbation of federal wreckage.

What has stopped faculty from positioning themselves politically and engaging in explicit political action? Matthew Boedy hit the nail on the head when naming the grief of many tenured faculty who, in identifying as professionals, see politicization as betrayal. In addition, increased workloads make the rigorous work of political organizing difficult. The problem is particularly acute in non–collective bargaining states like North Carolina. Politics in our postliberal era has become saturated with fear and a growing sense of political inefficacy. Because unions are under attack, so the reasoning goes, why should we adopt union-like organizing strategies in a nonunion state?

Following Trump’s January 21 executive order, UNC leaders promptly issued a memorandum directing universities systemwide to make immediate changes to curricula to avoid potential enforcement actions under the federal executive order. Then came Trump’s menacing February 14 “Dear Colleague” letter. In response, the UNC Faculty Assembly passed a resolution against the further erosion of academic freedom, to which the board of governors offered a flip dismissal. Significantly, UNC system leaders are staying silent on the impacts of NIH cuts on faculty research. The earlier “controlled DEI demolition” has morphed into the removal of DEI gen ed requirements.

Solidarity requires an acute sense of the political. Unlike well-remunerated administrators, most faculty harbor an acute sense of losing what has mattered to university life: academic freedom, critical thinking, democratic citizenship, and care of the world. Suspicious, bewildered, exhausted, and ashamed, faculty are no longer sure if they can fulfill their traditional mandate: to teach, research, and act as good civil servants or community partners. Something larger is at stake. At this point in time the people who need faculty solidarity are not senior management but students. Instead of working internally with senior leadership to “save the university,” faculty should learn to do some serious political organizing on their own and on students’ behalf, creating campaigns that highlight the university as a common good.

We who inhabit academic spaces have reached a conjuncture where collective political risk-taking is necessary, where, aside from mourning our losses, we must try to wake up to our difficult situation and think, feel, imagine, and organize with one another. A difficult task, but we are called to become the leaders we desperately need.

Political organizing gets faculty to think about power building and strategic interventions, but the activities entailed also may allow them to tell different stories about the university. As Isabelle Stengers  teaches, it is not a matter of converting each other to the “correct kind of thinking” or even of embodying “correct politics” but rather “of repopulating the devastated desert of our imaginations.” This entails capacities to name forms of stupidity that are active, feeding “on its effects, on the manner in which it dismembers a concrete situation, in which it destroys the capacity for thinking and imagining of those who envisaged ways of doing things differently, leaving them stunned.” Beyond this naming, it is in the actual doing of the work of political organizing and everyday solidarity building that we may build new muscles for thinking, feeling and imagining the university as something new, not just as recovery of the old.

Audrey Berlowitz is a member of Higher Ed Labor United’s Contingency Task Force.