The UK has recently introduced (via “guidance” rather than legislation) a permanent ban on naturalisation for people who arrive in the UK via “dangerous journeys”. The power used to block their applications is the Home Secretary’s discretion to refuse citizenship to someone of “bad character”. This new policy seemingly conflicts with the UK’s commitments under the Refugee Convention. I’ve a short piece on this at the London Review of Books blog.

“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official.

I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most of its work through contractors. I’ve been a field guy, working in different locations around the world.

If you’ve been following the news at all, you probably know that Trump and Musk have decided to destroy USAID.  There’s been a firehose of disinformation and lies.  It’s pretty depressing.  

So here are a couple of true USAID stories — one political, one personal.

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Today’s post focuses on the contribution of elite higher education to the rise of Trump. This may seem in bad taste because it is also clearly targeted by MAGA, and so our impulse is to circle the wagons. But if you wish to develop a defensive posture you must understand the territory.

Here I presuppose three ideas: first, that wherever the Trump II presidency ends up, America’s constitutional and political regime will be quite different from (to simplify) the (cold war) post-Warren court era of the last half century and a bit.* Second the re-election of Trump exhibits a willingness to embrace the corruption in the Machiavellian sense that he represents. Importantly, corruption in this sense is not just about illegal and legal bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. The two are, of course, connected.

In particular, ever since I first started blogging on Trump’s ascendancy (back in 2015), I have been treating the electoral preference for Trump as a sign of mistrust between the electorate and the then political elites (which was first expressed in the Obama elections) and, more subtly, a preference for a crook who people believe will be our sonofabitch. America-First is a doctrine of zero-sum relations. And so, in particular, who gets what is related to who you know and how you navigate an opaque system (recall my post on the Madoff scandal).

By elite higher education, I mean roughly the highly selective universities and colleges (starting with the so-called “Overlap meetings”), and the schools that emulate them, that were the target of antitrust action and class-action lawsuit(s) for colluding on financial aid and price-fixing since the 1990s (see also 568 group). To be sure, some of the collusion had the noble aim to prevent scarce resources intended for poor and disadvantaged students flowing up to wealthy applicants.

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I received the email about Sandy on early on Saturday morning in the middle of a five hour visit to the Emergency Room, at a point at which it was not clear everything was going to be ok (don’t worry, it was). Still, and although his friends have all been preparing themselves for this, it was devastating. I didn’t think I’d talk about it here. But, although The NYT obit is very straightforward and accurate, it misses something that everyone who knew him will wish it had mentioned.

Sandy was already an intellectual hero of mine when I met him at a Spencer Foundation Board retreat in 2007. It’s not just that he wrote the best philosophy paper about equality in education, which as a sociologist he had no right to do, but because I had started reading his work when I committed myself to doing empirically informed political philosophy, and realised immediately that he was a sort of mirror of what I wanted to be: a normatively committed and informed social scientist who would never allow his values to guide him to empirically convenient results. We had a two hour break on the first afternoon and Sandy, who had never seen (or, I am sure, heard of) me in his life casually asked if I was busy, and would I like to take a walk with him. I managed to overcome my awe, and, well, Sandy was totally brilliant, and its not that he didn’t know that, but he seemed to be able to find whatever was most interesting in whatever you said to him so that the gap between you was irrelevant to the matter at hand. He didn’t seem to care what you status was — he talked as enthusiastically and openly with college presidents, other scholars, students, staff people, receptionists, interns. He could, and did, put anyone at their ease. I quickly saw that he was either determined not to observe, or, quite possibly, completely oblivious to, the iniquitous status hierarchies in academia: his democratic outlook was entirely authentic to him. (Now, reading what that sentence, I realise it’s exactly what I might just as well have written about my dad).

I’m an intellectual outlier in the worlds I inhabited with Sandy. Usually if we were at a workshop, conference, or meeting together (and we often were) I was the only philosopher in a room full of social scientists. But over the years I gradually observed the vast informal network of scholars who were specifically indebted to Sandy for his seemingly-effortless but vast kindness and support. You meet people and gradually realise they are connected to Sandy and when you reveal that you know him too their faces light up and they tell you some story about him that is always delightful and different. The NYT obit doesn’t really capture this. To match his intellectual brilliance and reach is unachievable for most of us. But to leave this world so aptly loved by so many is something we could all aspire to.

If one had to choose one reason for why things are not going well in academic life, the managerial, top-down style of governance that reigns in many universities would be a top candidate (with budget cuts as a close competitor). But what is a better way of running universities? For me, this is a question in which theoretical and practical-professional interests intersect.* I’ve long been a defender of workplace democracy, and since 2023, I’m on the board of a small faculty – so the question became: What does it mean for a faculty to be a democratic workplace? Especially if the official rules do not allow for, say, an election of the faculty board by the faculty members…

But the internal structures of small units are only one dimension of the problem. Another is how a university as a whole are governed. In my various jobs, and in conversations with many colleagues, I’ve seen and heard of many bad examples – but I’m looking for good ones! So, I’ll share some thoughts about university governance, to invite a discussion about what works and what doesn’t! Here is a list of ideas, loosely building on each other.

• At their core, universities should be self-governing bodies. This is how they have historically been run, and how some universities still function today. Of course, historically these self-governing bodies had most of the time been exclusionary along the usual lines of gender, class, nationality, religious affiliation, etc. But that need not be the case, and the principle of self-governance should not be thrown overboard but rather be made inclusive.

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This is a follow-up to my previous post on the end of US democracy and its implications. I argued that there is no choice but to dispense with the idea of the US as the central actor in a democratic and stable world system [1]Here I will discuss how what’s left of the democratic world can respond.
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Around a decade ago when I was fairly new to my academic job, I made an uncharacteristically politic decision to attend the annual Politics Dinner, which each year featured a lecture from an Australian politician.

That year it was my (then) least favourite politician. Christopher Pyne was then the government minister responsible for higher education under what we thought was surely the worst Prime Minister we would ever see (oh, the innocence).

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Anyone that has read chunks of Marx’s Capital will know that he often explicitly and not trivially implicitly draws on data and evidence gathered and published in reports by select committees of the British Parliament. Most of these reports he draws on were written before the great expansions of the franchise, and so are effectively produced by the propertied representatives of the propertied classes in what can be fairly called an oligarchic government. Despite the (let’s stipulate) non-trivial class biases built into this reporting structure, the ‘blue books’ or ‘parliamentary papers’ (as they were known) were sufficiently objective and informative to be useful to the great enemy of oligarchy and property.

These nineteenth century oligarchs knew what they were doing. They needed objective information to help structure their internal debates about empire and national governance, and also to shape policy. (Elite bargaining is, of course, still an important function for the publication of public statistics and forecasting.) These reports also shaped the development of the administrative state. For example, the predecessor to the UK’s national statistics office, General Register Office for England and Wales, itself was born from such a select committee report in the first half of the nineteenth century.

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The eminent sociologist Michael Burawoy died on Monday, after being hit by a car while walking near near his home. I’ve found a couple of tributes: this from Marta Soler Gallart which tells a story I didn’t know but surprises me not in the least, and this from Oleg Komlik. There’ll be loads of tributes to his remarkable intellectual contributions, and I’ll have nothing to add to them. So I’ll just say this. I didn’t know Michael that well really, but he was a very close friend of my very close friend Erik Olin Wright, so over many years I saw him briefly, and occasionally, always in the most convivial of circumstances. I discovered very quickly that I adored him and his company. He was generous and kind to treat me as an equal — he probably did that to everyone. I loved that somebody could combine a level of energy even into his seventies that I, personally, have never had, with a commitment and passion for all the right things and still give the sense of being permanently slightly amused with the world. When he and Gay Seidman were preparing the memorial volume for Erik Olin Wright, Michael was determined that I would contribute, despite being a complete outlier intellectually. I was resistant to writing a contribution (because an outlier and not thinking I had much to say), and Michael pressed me to write an essay which, in the end, I was really proud of. I realized after I’d finished it that he knew I’d produce something good, but that the reason he had pressed me was that he predicted (I’m sure correctly) that if I didn’t contribute I would regret it.

A great intellectual, yes, but I hope the tributes place that second to the fact that he was a lovely, generous, man.

One good side-effect of contemporary politics is that a more sober look at the merits and demerits of the US Founders’ legacy is possible again. (Of course, here at CrookedTimber we pride ourselves on our sobriety in such matters; it helps many of us reside in distant shores.) The current US President has contempt for reverence toward the past; and his opponents have no time for reflection.

One defect in the US Founders’ constitution is that while they are very concerned with developing mechanisms against what Machiavelli and his followers called ‘corruption’ — a word frequently used in the Federalist Papers —, but that it leaves too little room for what Machiavelli and his followers would have called ‘renewal’ (or ‘renovation’)—a word almost wholly absent from the Federalist Papers. In the Machiavellian sense, corruption is not just about illegal and legalized bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. There is a glimpse of awareness of this lacuna to be found in the historiographic debate(s) over the status of Lincoln as a so-called ‘refounder’ of the constitution, despite the fact that the US civil war conclusively indicates its failure.

Yet, as Machiavelli notes, “those [republics and religions] are best organized and have longest life that through their institutions can often renew themselves or that by some accident outside their organization come to such renewal.” Discourses on Livy (hereafter Discourses; 3.1), translated by Allan Gilbert (Chief Works, Vol. 1) p. 419. So, if you take what one may call, ‘Machiavellian social theory,’ seriously it is not an irrelevant topic.

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If, like me, you follow Ones and Tooze, you will know that Adam recently had heart surgery.

It was a big deal. Luckily, America has some of the best surgeons in the world, to whom only a small handful of Americans have access – but Adam Tooze is one of them. In the episode dedicated to the expensive American healthcare system/Adam’s heart surgery, he talks with great (and deserved) admiration about ‘his team’, the ones who will do the surgery.

We really want these surgeons to be good at what they do. The considerable advances in medicine, medical technologies and surgical techniques is what will (we trust) Save Adam’s life, as indeed they did. We want experts.

But we don’t want them to be dickheads about their expertise – meaning, we’d like them to be ‘our team’ who work with us, acknowledging our agency. And not arrogant, bossy, or taking control of our lives.

See, Adam is not only among America’s privileged (as he acknowledges), but he is also a member of the same professional class as his surgical team. As we all know, this doesn’t guarantee an absence of dickheads.

However, chances are higher that we can see other professionals as members of ‘our team’. By recognizing one another as members of the same class, encountering other members of the PMC helps confirm one’s own values and expertise.

What this also shows is that it is possible to be a niche expert but honour other people’s self-determination, our ability to make choices about our own lives.

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The other day I received an email from what might be one the few colleagues still checking into Twitter (most seem to have moved to Bluesky, as have I). The email was just a link with the subject title Did you see? I hadn’t.

Gosh, I wrote in response (which I gather they found a little understated).

My colleague was pointing to this tweet, where Adam Tooze described my fairly recently published book, Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World 1870-2008 as ‘the sort of book that changes how you see the world’.

I mean. Well. Gosh.

https://x.com/adam_tooze/status/1864041896005267954 The link is to Chartbook where Adam quotes from Claire EF Wright’s review of Virtue Capitalists in The Economic History Review.

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