Academia: Enthusiasms! Enthusiasms!

Thursday's Child Only Has Far to Go If He Tells Trump To Go Jump In a Lake

Psssssst. Hey, buddy. Hey.

I have got a deal for you. Saving it for you. I saw you and thought, there’s a smart guy. There’s a guy who would know a great deal when he hears it. Let me tell you about it.

Here’s the thing. You like money, right? I got money. I’m sitting on bags and bags of money. Crazy amounts of it. Need to get some out the door just so I have room for more money. I can give you a bunch of it, and I barely need anything in return.

I just need you to give me complete control over your life. I mean, hey, I’m not gonna live your life for you, right? That’s still your problem. But I’m gonna tell you what to do, you’re gonna go do things, then you tell me about how it went. I’m gonna think about it when I hear, and if it’s not the way I wanted it, well, you’ll do what I tell you. Like, if you have someone you’re married to and I don’t like the look of them, you gotta divorce them. If I don’t like your kids, take ‘em to the orphanage or their great-aunt or something. I don’t care where, just as long as they’re gone. If you like making art or reading books and I don’t like it, you’ll stop. It’s up to you to do the things—I’m busy, I got other people to talk to—but if you want that money, you’ll do it.

Here’s the other thing. The people who don’t take the money? I might have to kill them. Or at least take money from them. So you can see what a deal this is! You get money this way! The other way, hey, you bet you gonna bend the knee anyway, cause you can’t stand once I break your kneecaps and rob you blind. So come on, we’re both busy people, am I right? Just sign here and watch the cash roll in.

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During the last Presidential campaign, President Trump occasionally identified with Al Capone. I strongly suspect that the Capone resonating in the swirling chaos-space that is his mind and memory was Robert DeNiro’s version of Capone in The Untouchables.

Specifically:

I’m gonna tell you something. Somebody messes with me, I’m gonna mess with with him. Somebody steals from me, I’m gonna say you stole. Not talk to him for spitting on the sidewalk. Understand? Now, I have done nothing to harm these people but they are angered with me, so what do they do, doctor up some income tax, for which they have no case. To speak to me like me, no, to harass a peaceful man. I pray to god if I ever had a grievance I’d have a little more self respect. One more thing, you have an all out prize fight, you wait until the fight is over, one guy is left standing. And that’s how you know who won.

And:

You fuck, you got nuthin’! You’re nuthin’ but talk and a badge. You’re here because you got *nuthin’*. You got nuthin’ in court, you don’t got the bookkeeper, you got nuthing! Nuthing!

Plus:

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So when you hear somebody offering you that deal, and you know the guy making the offer identifies with a character who is the villain, a parasitic gangster who is proud of corrupting the government and mocking justice, are you going to go for the deal if you have any prospects for telling him to go to hell?

You’re going to sign over control over every detail of your life, accept that you’ll have to betray the people you’ve chosen to be with and value, lose your values and self-respect, just to get some money that will likely be yanked from you anyway after you’ve put the collar on and agreed to servitude? What are you going to do with that money if you don’t have any mission, if you don’t have any values, if you have to betray people when you’re told to. When you’re likely to get whacked by a baseball bat the day that something goes wrong for the gangster, your new boss? You’re not even buying your own future.

You would think that smart people, the kind of people who pride themselves on never falling for a phishing email or a scam call, the kind of people who are educated leaders of education institutions, would know better. And yet, would I bet on them knowing better, now that the Trump Administration has made precisely this offer to universities and colleges? Has very precisely offered funding in return for surrendering any vestige of institutional autonomy to Trump’s inner circle?

No, I would not take the bet.

I expect that some of those presidents and vice-presidents and trustees are going to take a pen in hand and sign on the dotted line. A few of them will even act like it was their idea. A few of them will swagger into meetings in the weeks after signing telling the faculty that academic freedom is an outmoded idea, that disciplines like history and anthropology and literary studies are really just too political and best we do without them, that what we need in this country is more loyalty to the President and to Jesus (in that order) and more respect for Western tradition (without any of that annoying history to confuse us about what that is, exactly). And holding the paper with the deal on it in their pockets, they’ll smile for once when the faculty and the students and the alumni and maybe even some of the staff pipe up and object, and they’ll yell—as if they’re the ones holding the baseball bat—that the next person who talks back is fired, tenure or no tenure. The leaders who’ve been day-dreaming of that moment will be the ones who sign first, because they’re not quite smart enough to see that the only person who is going to get told what to do is them, and the only person who is going to get blamed when some disobedient professor mentions colonialism or slavery in a survey course is the president, the vice-president, the trustee. The mob boss is too busy to go after the peons directly. That’s the job of his university flunkies. “I get nowhere unless the team wins.” The employees are just getting fired, the students are just getting expelled. The president is going to be the one getting a baseball bat to the head.

It’s a dumb thing to sign even for the self-interested. It’s a dumb thing to sign even if academia, like American corporations, is showing that the fruits of neoliberalism are a complete inability to engage in collective action even when it is desperately and obviously beneficial. Public university leaders in red states have the merest smidgen of an excuse for at least pretending to consider the offer, because they’re under direct political control of state governments that already hate the university as an idea and an institution. Private universities have no business getting within a million miles of signing. If they have trustees who insist, it’s time to get rid of those trustees on the grounds that they are in breach of fiduciary duty.

It may be that private universities that have been dependent on federal funds to sustain major scientific research and medical schools are going to have to completely restructure their budgets and give up a sizeable percentage of the work they’ve been doing along those lines. That’s hard. That is what you need leadership to coordinate: a reduction in scale, a change in focus, while retaining your values and your mission as much as possible. Money from a gangster will not buy you a way out of that hard work. Roll up your sleeves and get to it. Tell the gangster to go bother someone stupid enough to listen.

Knowing as I do that what seems obvious to me will not be obvious to some of the people in charge, I am drawn back once again to one of the great mysteries of the last three decades, which is: how did these people end up as leaders of these organizations? It’s almost as mysterious as the fact that in all versions of Star Trek, any serving officer who geta appointed to the rank of admiral in Starfleet instantly turns evil, stupid, or evil and stupid. We seem to have been selecting for something in appointing leaders within academia that substracts both common sense and something like an ethical compass at the moment that people move up into leadership, often from people who seemed to have both attributes before that happened. I don’t think it’s a universal consequence of having power or authority. I don’t think it’s about money or being driven more by self-interest. It’s something in the architecture of our organizations, in the design of civic institutions generally.

That subtraction was one thing when universities, non-profits, law firms, churches, think tanks and so on were operating more or less on their own. Occasionally the leaders who had that absence of common sense, ethics and some form of empathetic connection with their organization proved lethal when the surrounding circumstances were inimical enough. Mostly the organizations lumbered on, missing opportunities and falling short of potentialities, but surviving. But now? It’s another thing altogether. Now it’s like having a general who keeps calling out artillery bombardments on his own trenches, an admiral who blows a hole in the bottom of his own boat.

Somehow we’re going to need to fix whatever it is that strips people in civic leadership of their best attributes when they step into those roles. There’s something wrong in the “fitness landscape” we’ve allowed to take hold in our organizations—something that isolates rather than connects, some other imperative that drives people to bad assessments and dangerous decisions, something that keeps people with responsibilities for the whole organization from touching grass.

I would be glad to lose my bet, happy to see all the presidents and trustees know better than to sign, because it would be a sign that what has been broken is being repaired. I am afraid that what has been broken is now going to break more than just the people who make it into the leadership, and that becomes more likely for every signature that the gangsters can get.