I’ve come to dislike the easy jape that the fights in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Mostly because it’s over-applied. It’s a pretty fair description of some arguments within scholarly fields that escalate and intensify. You know when there’s a sudden pile-on of people for and against a new book, article or hypothesis that the antagonistic sides are often going to seem to be only slightly different to anyone not in the relevant field. Especially in the humanities, those mobilizations are as much about controlling the inferences or future directions that might be drawn from the slight divergence or modestly stated critique found in a single work. That unfortunately is a spirit that also infests a fair amount of peer review, where you are sometimes admonished not for what you have said, but what might someday be made of what you have said.
Institutional policy is another matter, or at least it is sometimes. Certainly people can go off half-cocked about language in a memo (one reason that memos are now so often written so as to say nothing at all, which often just intensifies suspicious readings), and certainly in most universities there’s no shortage of individual faculty or staff who mistake their own very particular interests or obsessions for commonly held principles. But a lot of the time, there are real stakes in moves being made at the level of the institution, and sometimes it’s completely right to block what seems like a small move because experience accurately predicts that a small move in a certain direction is only a beginning, a trial balloon.
I am sinking into a state of profound anxiety this month, however, and wondering if I will in short order be nostalgic for the good old days where faculty across the country were trying to be vigilant about this-or-that administrative initiative and earnestly writing opinion pieces for the Chronicle of Higher Education that weighed in on some controversy on another campus.
Back in early 2017, I had a student I knew stop by office hours. He sat down and asked, “How is it that the faculty here aren’t completely freaking out about what’s going on in the world and this country in particular?” My answer was that we were freaking out but repressing our alarm. We were, as I said at the time, hoping that the institutions would constrain Trump and that crises would emerge to demonstrate the need for expertise, that the Trump Administration would turn out to be an episode rather than a turning point.
The institutions did constrain Trump, to a point, and several crises demonstrated that having a bunch of cronies and opportunists in charge made a number of situations worse. But that did not lead to his repudiation by his supporters, not even when he moved on to actively subvert the Constitution and reject democratic rule. They have followed where he has led.
Unfortunately, moreover, having grown-ups back in charge hasn’t led to particularly striking progress on the many ills that we’re facing. The long-standing weakness of middle-of-the-road incremental liberalism and technocracy has been more evident than ever. There is nothing like a vision to be found anywhere in the halls of power.
So we are looking at a serious possibility of a second Trump Administration that will come in fully prepared to rule, ready to sweep aside any institutional constraints, fully stocked with every opportunistic extremist to be found. This isn’t going to be the same Grade Z squad of people who would have failed an audition for “The Apprentice” that were in power last time. So now? I am finding it hard to keep the freaking out under wraps.
Think about what this prospect means for higher education in the United States. Texas and Florida have already spelled out the starting points. In a Trump Administration, I wouldn’t be at all shocked to see Christopher Rufo appointed either to the Department of Education or to some ad-hoc created commission or body intended for an all-out attack on higher education following the Texas and Florida initiatives of the last year.
Some of what I think is entirely plausible that could happen includes:
a) The creation of a national accreditation body controlled directly by the federal government that will use overtly ideological standards for granting or denying accreditation to private and public institutions. If the GOP doesn’t control Congress, they’ll just use an executive order to accomplish this goal. Those standards will certainly target whole fields like Black Studies, Gender Studies, etc.; whole bodies of theory and scholarship (some of them misnamed or distorted); DEI offices and anything that seems associated with DEI in administration or faculty work. STEM faculty who think they’ll be off the hook should think again—biology, neuroscience, and psychology are very nearly as likely to be targeted in various ways, and I think even engineering, computer science, and astronomy might figure in an initial wave of hostile attention that will combine populist disdain for expertise and evangelical antipathy towards science.
b) Aggressive use of the Justice Department to harass academic institutions, including attempts to roll back academic freedom. Renewal of domestic spying on campuses, building up of surveillance capabilities and compliance responsibilities, including in campus IT departments. Promotion of law enforcement interventions not just in campus protests but generally on campuses. If the Administration were to use the Insurrection Act after taking office, I would expect campuses to be particularly targeted for attention under that umbrella. Along with this, aggressive DOJ monitoring of admissions offices.
c) Dramatic restrictions of visas for foreign students, with dire revenue consequences for many institutions that depend on them. If there is a mass deportation effort, many foreign students may get swept up in it (and faculty as well), which will also likely discourage even foreign students who might qualify for a more restricted visa from studying in the US. That will also likely lead to reciprocal consequences for American students hoping to study in universities in other countries.
d) Pushing for purges in administrative leadership at many top institutions with replacement by people amenable to Trumpism. Appointments made available for stooge faculty or for politicians looking for sinecures. Surviving administrations will shift over hard to encouraging compliance with Trumpist ideological priorities.
e) More prescriptive loyalty oaths at public universities and encouragement of faculty at private universities to join affiliated groups of movements that include voluntary loyalty oaths.
f) Elimination of many sources of federal funding for research. Dismantling of the remaining holdover institutions of the Cold War such as Fulbright grants.
There won’t be much of anything to hold all of this back this time around. Legal constraints are going to be discarded or ignored even if the GOP does not control Congress, with the backstop of the Supreme Court majority providing the Administration a secure basis for doing whatever it pleases. Influential and wealthy trustees at many elite universities have already suggested that they have little interest in protecting the integrity or character of the institutions they supposedly guard. The economic damage from savaging a major contributor to national, regional and local economies isn’t going to matter to Trumpists—so much of the 2025 planning is indifferent to that kind of harm from the pursuit of social and cultural power.
So yes, I’m freaking out. And yet there is nothing I can see to do beyond freaking out. We’re stuck to a candidate and party whose response to the looming threat is feeble, in an environment already full of constraints and limitations (some of them self-inflicted), in an economy that has already relentlessly moved against professionals generally. In a moment where even people who should be standing strong alongside us are scoring cheap points or running for cover. The most we can do is vote and hope.
I think one distinctive thing about getting older, and a source of much contention about activism between students and faculty, is a disagreement about the general value of freaking out.
There seems to be an implication here that the response from the adults in the room is feeble, and that some "stronger" response would somehow defeat Trumpism. I don't think that's right. The value of institutions is that they work, and they work neutrally. That doesn't mean they work equally. For instance, there are lots of criminal counts against Trump personally, both those he's been convicted of and those he's supposed to stand trial on (if he loses the election). Those aren't brought because Democrats are "fighting hard"; they're brought because Trump is a habitual criminal. The media, however, reports uncritically on Trump and his allies' claims that the legal system is being weaponized against him, and also some incoherent rambling about Hunter Biden that I can't really decipher. I think it's pretty self-evidently right that Democrats shouldn't ACTUALLY weaponize the Justice Department against Trump (though that's what he's yelling from the rooftops that he would do to Democrats were he to be re-elected), but rather to point out that the legal system is functioning just as it is intended to, and if Trump doesn't want it to work against him, perhaps he should stop committing crimes.
But that message falls on deaf ears when Republican voters read it as lies, and loosely attentive voters read it as both sides (and also hate that Big Macs are 25% more expensive than they were three years ago, and are eating most of the 35% raise that they earned with their hard work). It seems pretty clear to me that the institutions that are failing are the mainstream media, which has forgotten how to report the truth and instead reports that opinions about the shape of the Earth differ.