Columbia University Under Siege, Trump as Critical Theorist, and Restructuring Higher Education
As I was saying
Gentle readers, especially fellow academics:
It seems oddly fitting to be writing about higher education in the United States at the present moment from a medical complex, waiting. And I am trying to swear off hot takes on current events, you probably read more than enough of them. But still speaking of existentialism, I’m trying to sell books. As
says, if you don’t promote your book, who will?I have a book forthcoming: Social Thought from the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party (to copy editing with Routledge). QDP is the culmination of almost twenty years of discussions among a number of thinkers from various countries and disciplines around the question of how we, in the critical social sciences (including law), might think about contemporary life in new ways. And not incidentally, how might we consider the University, and how might we think about living an intellectual life, if being a professor is no longer an obvious answer? For an introduction to this project, at long last nearing its end, see Social Thought from the Ruins.
You are no doubt aware of the fights surrounding political unrest at Columbia University; the University’s response; and the Trump administration’s use of its financial leverage to get what the administration wants. I am not going to provide (yet another) overview here. Of course, this is not only or even most importantly about Columbia or even the Ivy Leagues. The Trump administration seeks to renegotiate the relationship between the federal government and higher education writ large. Insofar as this effort is successful, given the dependence of even so-called private or state institutions on various forms of federal support, higher education will be transformed.
Already we are seeing institutions “obey in advance.” Tenure is being withdrawn. New lines are not being opened. Research is not being funded. Speech is being stiffled by people who not so long ago were vociferously calling for free speech. Former stiflers, some of whom actually said the first amendment is a problem, have come to Jesus. Und so weiter. The New York Times convened a typically perceptive [be nice] panel on “what happened.” It Is Facing a Campaign of Annihilation: Three Columnists on Trump's War Against Academia. For its part, Columbia responds legalistically, because . . . What Should Columbia's Legal Answer to the Extortionate . . . Again, it is hard to think when the goalposts move, the rug has been pulled. How far such developments will go remains to be seen. We shall come to know.
The fight itself, however, was predictable, indeed is pretty much assumed in what follows, written some time ago. In this text, drawn from Social Thought from the Ruins, I engage Russell Berman’s call for a radical reconfiguration of the University. (Berman, a professor at Stanford, was the longtime editor of Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary. I am on their editorial board.) In fact, much of my book might be seen as an effort to articulate a response to the widely held sentiments that Berman articulates so clearly, and that Trump is attempting to realize.
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From Social Thought from the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party.
Perhaps I have too much sympathy for the devil, too much tolerance, latent affection, for the academy. In much of the country, patience for what we do in the critical social sciences and the humanities has simply run out. Maybe the experiment in democratic higher education has ended? Stanford’s Russell Berman, a Germanist and a humanist to the core, has recently suggested that even what I am calling the “People’s University” may “have outlived its historical moment.” I’m going to use Berman’s admirably clear description and forthright argument both to establish context, especially for those of you outside the University, and as a foil for what I believe to be possible.
“The chaos after October 7 has made the dysfunction of the current model clear to everyone. The dry rot throughout the structure enabled the collapse. The old university is ending; what can higher education look like in the future?” I would not go so far – Stanford stands, though Harvard has had to seek a new President – but I think Berman’s argument is very powerful. Paraphrasing, big picture:
1) The West is engaged in a great power struggle with China.
2) This struggle will be decided largely by technological superiority.
3) STEM is therefore necessary.
4) The critical social sciences and the humanities are not necessary to that struggle.
5) Instead, the critical social sciences and the humanities are dominated by ideologies (antiracism, anticolonialism, intersectionality, usw.) that are explicitly hostile to the West, that at the very least undermine patriotism, at the worst, aid the nation’s enemies.
6) For too many people, college and certainly graduate school are, as said above, engines of precarity. “The model is too expensive, and the student loan bubble hangs over the nation’s economy. We need new strategies to deliver professional qualifications more effectively and efficiently.”
Berman suggests a number of reforms that might address these problems. Essentially, the reforms involve a radical increase of supervision of academics by business and political authorities. The campus responses to the Hamas attacks indicate that professors still have too much academic freedom, despite the recent successes of HR. What people like me need, evidently, are yet sterner bosses and better accounting. Maybe. Lots of state governments and lots of people who see themselves as “on the right” see no reason to support frivolous intellectuals, and certainly not tenure. At which point one thinks about getting a real job, or a very easy job, and giving up on the academy altogether.
Berman will find plenty of agreement with the proposition that it seems silly for governments to pay for, even to provide tax breaks for, institutions that question the fundamental legitimacy of the government, and train the young to think like that? Recall Socrates. And surely it is hard to ask governments, parents, and students to pay a great deal for education that will support people like me, and an endless raft of administrators, but not enable young people to get a job, will not help them lead commodious lives, not help them carry on?
We appear to be seeing the emergence of a new articulation of Snow’s “Two Cultures,” roughly between “the sciences,” not incidentally often funded by the digital military pharma security complex, and “politics” which is presumed to be oriented against the exercise of power, especially by that same security complex. A sort of structural house divided, which of course cannot stand. And Berman does not think it will stand, that is, he does not think the reforms he suggests are likely to work. So, half of the house has to go, namely the “politics” half. Berman suggests “unbundling” the University, shutting down liberal arts colleges, and abolishing much of the critical social sciences and the humanities. Here, as elsewhere, I’m a Southerner and a German, on the wrong side of the divided house. Indeed, weirdly, I think Berman is too. He’s a humanist, a Germanist in fact. He spent his career doing what he no longer believes possible, in a milieu that he believes has become morally compromised.
Be that as it may, demolition may already have begun. Apologies for the lengthy quote, but it’s a quick way to set the stage.
Berman: “In the past, most college instruction was carried out by professors on tenure tracks, but now some 75 percent of instruction belongs to lecturers and adjuncts, with less job security, lower compensation, and no or little research expectations. This is the real end of tenure, taking place before our eyes. [And without tenure, there is no academic freedom.]
Meanwhile, greater interest in career outcomes, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, has led to a shift toward STEM majors and a concomitant denigration of traditional liberal arts education. Why not just focus on STEM and related fields, like medicine, especially if the liberal arts departments are the source of political indoctrination? Even Rachid Khalidi, a prominent promoter of Palestinianism at Columbia, concedes that it is in the college, not the professional schools, where the faculty promote activism. So is it time to close the college?
We do not need liberal arts colleges to win the technology race. We do need dedicated technology training—and we should find alternative structures for humanities learning. The obvious conclusion to draw is that the legacy university should be unbundled. Its different functions could be pulled apart, and those worth saving could be rebuilt in new structures. Most prominently: a primary function of contemporary higher education has become training in STEM, programming, CS, IT, AI, and related business practices. This could be carried out in dedicated academies. Packaging STEM together with required ideology courses is the equivalent of a cable TV offering with lots of channels the customer does not want to watch. [We do not want scientists and engineers wasting time on meaning. That’s why it’s so critical to import Indian coders on H-1B visas.]
The United States is engaged in a great power competition with China and Russia, especially involving the pursuit of technological superiority. We are at a new Sputnik moment, not (only) in a space race but in an AI race as well, to which we should respond with new educational structures. It is unproductive to embed technological learning in a comprehensive university, especially one that acts as an indoctrination center. We do not need liberal arts colleges to win the technology race. We do need dedicated technology training—and we should find alternative structures for humanities learning, whether in high schools or in options afforded by new media, such as podcasts or substacks.
One even more radical step: put all the instruction online, across all fields, and establish qualifying processes through testing as a substitute for degree conferrals. Make it free—and call it democratization. The campus experience—which most Americans do not benefit from anyhow—would disappear, but the educational mission could take place at much lower costs, i.e., a more efficient allocation of resources. Online education enhanced by AI may yet do to the traditional college what Amazon did to the old-style bookstore. [Charming. Or what the smart phone did to democracy?] The October 7 aftermath indicates that it is time to put aside childish things. We need a new model.
In sum, this year’s campus chaos has shed light on objective tendencies pointing toward a far-reaching reordering of higher education: astronomic tuitions, the student debt bubble, public disaffection, the shrinking of the tenured professoriate replaced by lecturers and adjuncts, and the seismic reorientation of student interest away from the core of liberal arts education, which at many institutions has already been eviscerated by the faculty. The traditional structure of college education seems like a relic of another age, no longer affordable and insufficient in the face of the international power struggle.
I am myself not gleeful about the end of the traditional university. . . “[i]
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Westbrook: In those years, we did not seriously consider “closing the college,” or “unbundling” higher education. Today, I am not so sure. Hundreds of small liberal arts colleges, one of the charming peculiarities of the American landscape, have in fact closed. In many more institutions, faculties have been disbanded, or simply not renewed, left to atrophy. Harvard and Stanford have issued statements (re)committing the institutions to free speech, “Look, we aren’t indoctrination summer camps, we have a policy!” It feels like little, and very late. As this is drafted, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has stopped requiring DEI statements for hiring and admissions.
I should also say that I know Russell. While we are not close, I like him. Maybe he is right. Perhaps conflict with China, demand for decent jobs, and sheer lack of patriotism will compel the U.S. and other countries to reimagine what they demand of higher education, and so require from and offer to the next generation? There is much to this effect on the internet, especially among male discontents, often coded “right.” But it’s a grim vision.
I hope and think Russell is wrong. As a practical matter, inertia is a mighty thing. To put it one way, the end of Harvard’s endowment would literally require the destruction of the Western Civilization that so many professors claim to desire. But so long as assets are recognized and earn interest, Harvard and its siblings can afford to survive. They may lose their nerve, as perhaps the Athenians ultimately did, but that is another question. One might say analogous things about Alabama football.
Politics cannot be avoided. If we are to cope with our problems, not least the military and technological issues that frame Russell’s argument, humanistic learning is absolutely essential. In admittedly small ways, I have tried to provide a humanistic perspective on security, technology, and most of all finance. (I did have big intentions.) By the same token, critical social thought, albeit reconfigured, is required to operate and humanize our political structures. Where are people to learn such wisdom? And code is endless replicable. Coders are cheap and getting cheaper, under pressure from AI, or replaced altogether. (Computer science friends tell me code is getting worse, sloppier, but lots of cheap shitty things work well enough.) Without gainsaying the importance of a livelihood, in an astonishingly affluent society, the core problems are political and spiritual, not material. I see no way the institutional constellation Russell suggests can address such problems.
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As we came to realize, the University isn’t going away, though it will change. We did not even leave, despite our disappointments. We had no place to go. Much of what follows is about how the University might be rethought (rather than “unbundled”) in order to address the demands of our day.
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Well, that frames one of the core problems addressed by Social Thought from the Ruins (it is a big book).
As I said, we shall come to know how far any of this goes. For now, institutions should fight for tenure, for their research funding, and much else besides. In some very real senses, American culture depends on what we do in schools. (I would go so far as to say that all societies are in great part defined by education, by how they teach the young to live in a time and place. That, however, is tautological.) Our universities, for all their flaws, are one of the glories of this country, justly recognized around the world, and much is worth carrying forward.
What the administration has already accomplished — and it has been in train since long before Trump was elected — might be understood not least as critique. The assumptions on which liberal education generally, the critical social sciences in particular, and most especially elite institutions rested have been made explicit, and found wanting. That which was so culturally well-settled as to not bear discussion, or seemed so in the circles I move, is now explicitly contested.
Which is not to say that such understandings cannot be defended — they may still be worth believing. For what it is worth, I still believe in reading books. In a University. Under the tutelage of someone older and wiser. But I’m old fashioned. My point is that such beliefs cannot be assumed to be socially authoritative. That genie is not going back in the bottle.
All of which raises questions about what we as a society are to do with the University? What do we expect from “education,” or an “educated person?” And in particular, what status do we accord those people who, for want of a better word, I’ll call intellectuals?
Safe travels.
— David A. Westbrook
P.S. I am trying to expedite publication of Social Thought from the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party. Watch this space.
P.P.S. A thousand thanks to my paid subscribers. If you don’t feel like or are unable to pay, would you consider forwarding, restacking, or liking this text? Thanks/cheers.
[i] Russell A. Berman, Higher Education after October 7: Drain the Swamp, Telos Press Publ’g (May 9, 2024), https://www.telospress.com/higher-education-after-october-7-drain-the-swamp/. Emphasis supplied.