BY SUZANNA DANUTA WALTERS

I recently received a curious email from my dean querying $300 I submitted for an Amtrak fare. While she also sent this message to my program manager, I decided to respond directly to her in the spirit of both relieving an overburdened staff member and to question the dean’s decision to micromanage small reimbursements from already established research accounts.

Now, cards on the table. I am also the program director, and my research account comes as part of a contractual obligation arranged when I took over as editor of the storied feminist journal Signs. It is not part of annual faculty funds, nor is it part of any start-up package.

But, honestly, I’m not sure that any of that information is relevant. My concern was that a dean was spending her valuable time reviewing minor reimbursements in some attempt, one could surmise, at withholding funds for use…elsewhere?

Like many around the country, I have been horrified by the attacks on universities during the second Trump term. And as a feminist scholar who has spent her career building programs in women’s and gender studies, the demonization of my field in particular makes McCarthyism (which my Communist parents lived through) seem almost quaint.

But there is another story to tell about the attacks on higher education, adjacent to the larger MAGA offensive but not wholly reducible to it. This story is also related to the AI-ification of higher ed and the “data first, think later” orientation of many of our universities. It’s neoliberalism, yes, but it’s also the active demoralization of the professoriate and the staff that has seemingly become an end in itself.

My own university is, alas, an exemplar of this story. In the past several years, the university has cut the discretionary budgets of units in my college (the College of Social Sciences and Humanities) by up to 80 percent, an unprecedented move that they now assure us will be permanent, which will effectively end our ability to create meaningful programming unless we have external endowments. One such casualty, for example, was my program’s annual women’s history month symposium, an event that filled to capacity and brought together scholars with journalists and activists on topics such as reproductive justice, gender, and the rise of the global right. At meetings for both the faculty senate and chairs council, a small group of us repeatedly asked for basic accountability: Why were these cuts this happening? Can we see the books? Repeatedly, we were denied answers and even (in the case of yours truly) denied a meeting with the provost.

But the plot indeed thickens. These cuts emerged alongside huge growth and expenditures, so while small programs such as mine were cut to the bone, Northeastern:

• Acquired two new colleges (Mills College and Marymount Manhattan), assuming massive debt from those two institutions to the tune of over $120 million and adding to a longer imperial expansion that continues to increase the number of institutional campuses;
• Constructed massive new buildings (need I point out that these are dedicated to science and engineering?) while at the same time reneging on commitments to renovate and repair older buildings that house units such as mine—we can’t even get ripped carpet and nonfunctioning AC repaired while shiny new skyscrapers pop up on the regular;
• Added to administrative bloat by creating ever more “associate vice provost” positions, most ominously the “head of global expansion” and “chief of artificial intelligence,” contributing to boggling administrative salaries (over $3 million in total compensation for our president, and $1+ million salaries for most of the rest); and
• Moved to a shared services model for staff where they are moved to different units with nary a thought to their own professional desires or commitments, a callous treatment that has provoked a mass exodus and left departments without the resources to function effectively.

This is only a partial list of the radical disconnect many of us experience at Northeastern. We are told enrollments are higher than ever, and our endowment grows by the minute; campuses are acquired like distressed assets and administrators live high off the hog, and yet it is necessary to gut the budgets of history, Africana Studies, women’s and gender studies, and many others. Odes to “community” abound, and yet staff are treated like objects: disposable and dispensable at the whim of some ill-defined administrative logic.

It is true that many universities have made cuts to both programs and staff. These practices do not, however, merely reflect the “austerity reform agenda” as scholars such as Martha McCluskey and Fabricant and Brier have argued. These budget cuts, abuse of staff, and refusal to be even remotely transparent and accountable feels more deliberate, and—dare I say—nefarious. To strip discretionary funding, displace and overwork staff, and micromanage what little freedoms we have left, while at the same time land-grabbing new campuses, building glitzy skyscrapers, and lining the pockets of an ever-expanding administration…well, the math just isn’t mathing. No wonder they won’t open the books.

Perhaps this is the opportunity they really wanted all along, to shift our universities away from a mission (however attenuated) of critical thinking and collegiality and toward the instrumentalist framing of knowledge acquisition as business acumen. In my darkest hours, which are all my hours in this moment in history, I think our liberal-ish academic leaders—like their authoritarian cousins the MAGA anti-intellectuals—relish our demoralization amid the opportunity costs of the AI-driven university of the future, where expansionism, real estate deals, and corporate connections displace not just the social sciences and humanities but critical thought itself.

As our great bard Taylor Swift notes, “I can’t pretend it’s okay when it’s not. It’s death by a thousand cuts.”

Suzanna Danuta Walters is professor of sociology and professor and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, where she also serves as editor of the feminist journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.