BY HANK REICHMAN

The all-but-finalized departure of University of Michigan President Santa Ono for the same, yet even more lucrative, position at the University of Florida, where his apparent hostility to student protest (even when expressed via democratic referendum) and eagerness to abandon DEI programs made him an ideal candidate to serve Governor Ron DeSantis, avatar par excellence of the authoritarian assault on academic freedom and shared governance.  As Michigan professor Silke-Maria Weineck, one of higher ed’s most insightful and fearless faculty leaders, put it in a must-read piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, it was as if his brief tenure in Ann Arbor was but “an auditioning tape” for the loathsome Florida governor.

But Weineck’s essay is more than an account of events at Michigan.  It is, characteristically, a perceptive analysis not only of her campus but of the challenges facing the higher ed community in general and the faculty specifically as we find ourselves “navigating three distinct conflicts simultaneously.

The first is between institutions and MAGA’s vandalism of higher education, the most acute threat.  The second is between universities and a public that seems increasingly unsure what universities are good for, largely due to decades of right-wing onslaughts on education, execrably incompetent messaging from university communication offices, and, yes, a certain insularity for which we scholars ourselves are partially to blame.  The third is between university administrators and trustees or regents on one side, and the faculty and students on the other, a conflict that has played out at countless institutions, including mine.

The first antagonism is a war, and it needs to be fought with all we have — in the courts, in the media, and in the streets.  The second one is fixable — Harvard’s celebrated homepage touting its research accomplishments and their contributions to the public good is an example other universities need to follow. We also need 30-second TV ads, I think.  Imagine a spot where five or six Americans of all kinds look straight in the camera and say, “I lost my mother, my sister, my friend, my daughter, my wife to breast cancer.”  Cut to a scientist: “I was working on a breast-cancer vaccine.”  Cut to black.  Print only: “Trump and Musk canceled the research.  Call your representative and ask them to defend our universities.”  We can all think of dozens of such ads, and they need to include a defense of the humanities and the social sciences, too, no matter how much easier it is to sell medical and engineering research.

The rift between university leaders and the faculty, however, became a chasm in the context of students and others on campus protesting Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, and it opened wider still after many universities hastily abandoned DEI programs they had loudly championed for decades.  (The UM senate voted with almost 80 percent of the vote that it wanted to restore them.)  As previously honored norms of shared governance are eroding, university leaders increasingly refuse to even talk to faculty anymore, preferring to govern by decree, by badly written email, and, now, by op-ed.  This is all the more infuriating in light of the fact that the core mission of the university — a mission that is in grave danger — is research and teaching, the things we and only we do (though of course we depend on the support of staff members, without whom nothing happens and nothing works).

These paragraphs offer a fertile starting point for developing a strategic analysis of our path forward.  I agree with Professor Weineck; we are fighting three distinct, if inextricably connected, battles at once.  But I take her comments as a starting point and offer some initial caveats and comments that hopefully will help enrich and begin to build upon her insight.

The MAGA assault is certainly a war directed not only at its alleged targets — DEI excesses, campus antisemitism, “woke” ideology, etc. — but at the very foundations of the country’s higher education system.  We have no choice but to “fight with all we have.”  And, indeed, fighting we are!  But in this fight it is important to recognize that alliances will not come together spontaneously, and not only because of the deleterious effects of Weineck’s third conflict.  We need to acknowledge and mediate the fault lines that divide our sector — between faculty, governing boards, administrations and, yes, students, but also among differing institutions and diverse disciplines.  Trump’s assault on elite private (and some public) research institutions has seized center stage, but it cannot be forgotten that the war on higher education — to a significant extent a bipartisan effort — has been waged against state colleges and universities and community colleges for some time, if less dramatically (and arguably less clumsily).  If Trump seeks to use federal research funding as a cudgel to bring the Ivy League to heel, state legislatures and governors, Democrats as well as Republicans, albeit with differing priorities, have long sought to control less selective state institutions and local community colleges via budgetary constraints.  And their assaults, while less frequently or directly aimed at curriculum (at least most of the time), have also targeted faculty rights and disproportionately impacted institutions that serve minority communities (with or without DEI programs), as Chris Newfield, among others, has thoroughly documented.  If MAGA has launched a kind of frontal assault on allegedly “elite” institutions, this was well-prepared by a less flamboyant, arguably more cynical, neoliberal siege of mass public higher education.

The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities provides a good blueprint for mapping a potentially stronger alliance among governing boards, administrations, and faculty, and the 1967 Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students suggests how we might better speak to the growing unrest — and not just over the Gaza conflict — among students.  But we need also to think strategically about how the various components of the higher education ecosystem — research institutions, including medical schools and their affiliated hospitals and clinics; large public teaching institutions like Cal State and CUNY; private liberal arts colleges, including religiously affiliated ones; community colleges — are impacted (or not impacted) by government’s increasingly vigorous attacks.  What role should the federal government play in higher education?  What role should state legislatures play?  I don’t think we have enough agreement across the sector and even among the faculty on how to answer such questions much beyond a general approbation of Justice Frankfurter’s famous “four freedoms” of the university: “to determine for itself, on academic grounds, who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.”

With respect to Professor Weineck’s second conflict, I must say that I absolutely love her idea for TV ads.  Somebody, please, fund these!  Now!  That said, however, I think her formulation of the problem is too narrow.  Yes, too many Americans have lost confidence in our higher ed institutions.  And even if this is concentrated overwhelmingly among self-identified Republicans, it is real enough and there is a good deal of responsibility for it to go around.  But I think the hostility to higher education is but one aspect of a much broader — and more dangerous and, alas, deeply rooted — hostility to expertise and informed opinion in general, including a corrosive skepticism about science and even knowledge itself.  That Trump can so flippantly withhold NIH grants to universities reflects not only public suspicion of universities but of medical science itself.  The AAUP sought to address this in 2020 in the Committee A report In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education.  [Small peeve: I was disappointed that this statement did not make it into the new edition of The Redbook.]  As I’ve recently reminded readers of this blog, the Republican assault on science and technology predates MAGA.  This assault, and the assault on knowledge overall, has fed upon long-existing anti-intellectual currents in US popular culture.  Moreover, as In Defense of Knowledge argued, growing skepticism about expertise has to a great degree been a product too of the long-term defunding of public higher education.  “Cuts in funding,’ the report explained,

have led to greater reliance on private support, which has augmented the role of wealthy donors, who may seek to restrict or direct scholarship in service of ideology or interest.  They have encouraged the substitution of cheaper and more precarious contingent positions for faculty appointments with tenure.  They have widened the gap between richer and poorer institutions.  They have facilitated the rise of corporate management styles by administrators and trustees, with the consequent diminution of faculty participation in university governance.  They have stimulated a consumerist conception of education, in which colleges and universities submit to the preferences of student demand and interest.  They have spawned an “assessment movement” to measure the impact of research and teaching in entirely “objective,” quantitative terms.  They have produced “partnerships” with industry in which sponsoring corporations receive privileged access to and control of the direction of faculty research and teaching.

Undoubtedly, these developments have weakened American colleges and universities.  The faith that American higher education produces expert knowledge that benefits the entire society has diminished.  Indeed, the unequal and unfair distribution of educational opportunity may well have played a significant role in making expertise appear more like a privilege of the wealthy and an expression of their interests than a disinterested contribution to the public good.

These comments bring me to the third conflict, Weineck’s “rift between university leaders and the faculty.”  This, of course, is a conflict that readers of this blog know well and which both predates and runs deeper than its most recent manifestations in the wake of the Gaza protests and the war on DEI.  But it’s important to add to this a recognition that the division between administration and faculty has itself exacerbated divisions among the faculty, which while not rising to the level of conflict (in most instances) still may threaten our ability to act collectively.  I’m thinking of tensions between disciplines, of course, although the current assault on the sciences may well have the silver lining of helping bridge the gap between C.P. Snow’s “two cultures.”  But we simply cannot pretend that the tensions created by overreliance on and exploitation of contingent employment and the erosion of tenure have not been at the center of higher education’s crisis, in many respects a problem arguably bigger than MAGA, even if less existentially threatening in the short term.  Any “united front” among governing boards, administrators, faculty, and students must address this development head-on.  This may be a topic for another time, but let me say it now: higher education cannot be successfully defended without incorporating a vigorous defense of — indeed, an expansion of — the protections of the tenure system.

If Harvard has earned plaudits for resisting the administration’s outrageous demands and Columbia disgraced itself by seemingly acceding to them (from which they gained zilch), most of the elite universities whose grants have been threatened are quietly seeking to negotiate their way out of the crisis.  This stance has been facilitated, as Josh Marshall explains in an important post on “How Trump is Covertly Strangling Billions in Disease Cure Research,” by NIH’s refusal to issue stop–work orders on existing grants but instead, in classic Trumpian fashion, simply failing to pay the bills.  The government’s approach is clear: “create confusion about the status of grants and just have the money stop coming.”

Will this strategy work?  Marshall suggests that it might because “what you see when you look up close is that the universities simply lack the institutional muscle memory to handle a fight like this.  There’s no institutional experience and they lack institutional cohesion between administrations, boards of trustees, faculties and major donors.”

However that may be, it should be stressed that if there is a group on campus that can provide at least some of the “muscle memory” for struggle it may well be the faculty.  For some time now we have, more out of necessity than desire, been slowly building strength.  We have unionized.  We have built campus organizations and pushed disciplinary associations into action.  We have sought, with mixed success, to invigorate long-dormant institutions of shared governance.  If higher education institutions are to succeed in beating back the MAGA assault and resisting the war on science and expert knowledge, the involvement — in critical ways the leadership — of the faculty will be essential.  As Professor Weineck  concludes, “At a university, you cannot ‘stand together’ if you do not stand with the faculty, the students, and the staff, all of whom need to be heeded.”

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March.