Yesterday Columbia University gave in to blackmail by President Trump (see here the letter [HT: NYT]) in order to allow to begin negotiations over the recovery of $400 million in research funding. Its unsigned letter (here HT: Leiterreports) leaves ambiguous which potentially sensible elements they were planning to do anyway (“parts of our comprehensive strategy”) and which parts were added in light of the demands (“several additional actions.”)
The last sentence of the unsigned letter expresses commitment to the university’s mission, “while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.” While I am no critic of judicious use of hypocrisy, this passage is also a nice example of what has come to be known as ‘performative contradiction.’ If government officials get to dictate to you that certain departments must be put into receivership, and you then go and promise to rejig the curriculum (for ‘balance’), perhaps you should not claim ‘institutional integrity’ or present yourself as a guardian of ‘academic freedom?’
I want to put this episode in a wider context. But before I get there, I make two of my background commitments explicit. First, there is no essential connection between the modern research university and the values of liberal democracy other than, as (recall) Michael Polanyi noted, that they can have the same enemies. The German research university with its cosmopolitan Humboldtian ideal rose and fell in the absence of liberal democracy. The very first modern research university Stateside, Hopkins, was a private institution that was, however, shaped by Jim Crow (and racially integrated rather late in its history).
Second, liberal democracies have been half-hearted friends of the modern research university. This may be obscured by the enormous resources that have been showered on the modern research university by liberal democracy. But these funds have also caused a narrowing of academic freedom by substituting the sponsor’s interests in certain outcomes for the researcher’s judgment on what is worthy of interest. In addition, the universities have been nudged away from their Humboldtian origins, and have become instruments for other socially desirable results: employability, social mobility, an incubator for tackling social problems, sports glory, a place for public debate, etc.
Yes, as Max Weber (and his followers in STS) notes the modern state and the modern academy mutually support each other. But this mutual support, when drawn too close, also involves more than a mutual taint.
Having said that, as Michael Polanyi notes, the modern university (and the wider academy) is one of the social, partially self-governing organizations (within science, art, law, journalism, the crafts, engineering, medicine, the press, etc.) that are collectively constitutive of the possibility for an enduring liberal society. Obviously, the absence of trade-unions intimates Polanyi’s (as the Marxists would note) bourgeois slant that we need not emulate. What’s crucial for Polanyi is that he diagnoses how the independence of these self-governing organizations and liberal society more generally are at risk of sudden collapse after a period of successful intimidation of the ordinary functioning of lots of intermediaries that indirectly help partially stabilize liberal society.
Columbia’s unsigned letter followed the concessions of the managing partners of Paul, Weiss. During their fateful cost-benefit analysis acquiescing to the American President’s demands, they may well have reflected on the rule of law. Perhaps, someone with a historical sense suggested that there have been profitable law practices long before there were equal rights or Habeas Corpus was codified.
Be that as it may, that corporate lawyers feel politically friendless — despite a massive over-representation in America’s legislatures — in times of dire need is no surprise. Lawyers are not especially popular. But that Universities feel friendless and socially isolated more so. Support for medical research has been the one political constant in my adult life. Regular readers know I have been seeing a catastrophe coming for a decade now, but I was truly surprised that NIH funding was the instrument of choice to put the squeeze on the research universities and expose their political vulnerability.
That Columbia University was politically isolated became clear during an interview with Senator Schumer (the minority leader) in the New York Times a week ago. Schumer is also from New York City. He basically said that the University had it coming and should not expect help from him; he only objected to the manner President Trump acted “indiscriminately, without looking at its effect.”
In my view this collapse in social support that made even the rich, private modern research university vulnerable is the effect of quite a few self-incurred wounds I have noted (recall here) and won’t repeat, and, non-trivially and more importantly, the effect of a clever long-term campaign that by appealing to and emphasizing purportedly liberal commitments (freedom of speech, toleration, and anti-discrimination) cleaved the natural coalition supporting universities (as is evident from the Schumer interview). The enemies of liberal society managed to confuse university leadership themselves who have been, by and large, unable to think and speak clearly about the nature of academic freedom and its relationship to a wider political society and who have been inept at political speech. This is no surprise since they have been elevated for their fundraising and managerial skills. The cleavage strategy paid off after October 7.
So, one important lesson of the last year and a half is that when the chips are down an oversized endowment need not equal intellectual or social authority. Rather, it means you are a juicy target for various shakedowns in the way, in extremis, the Catholic monasteries were in the age of Henry VIII.
However, that one side has all the police and legal power and the other side not, does not mean that absent guns one is automatically powerless. A moment’s reflection on the long duration and influence of both the Catholic Church and, yes, the medieval university teaches otherwise. They drew on what I like to call ‘spiritual authority.’
The university’s distinctive spiritual authority is rooted in two features of its intrinsic mission: witnessing truth and being the institution that engages a non-trivial part of the education of an important subset of near adults. Both tasks are serious and dedication to them commands respect in most societies. There is, however, no universal template for how to engage in this mission such that spiritual authority is the effect. On my view this is something to figure out and decide upon by each university, conceived as a corporate (in the medieval sense) entity, and to be articulated in its mission and the practices that are structured by it. A private university should have more space for autonomy in these matters than public ones.
But we know what does not work: the transactional ethos and process driven decision-making now prevalent in the modern research university is orthogonal to spiritual authority. My suspicion is that these features, while necessary in moderation, generate contempt from all involved. Even the meaning of buying one’s way onto the Board of Trustees is not understood as a ‘giving back’ or an ‘act of service,’ but rather a good investment for networking and, as it turns out, exerting political influence.
The new purported salve, ‘neutral institutional speech’ unless vital interests are threatened is just as corrosive to the mission of the university. For, it turns out that in practice it is a recipe for cowed silence rather than leadership in orienting a large community to a common end. Henceforth, Columbia promises “commitment to greater institutional neutrality.” Before long we will have institutions promising the greatest maximum amount of institutional neutrality!
In a different context, a while ago, our very own Henry Farrell wrote that ““Neutrality” is one of those empty words that somehow has achieved sacred and context-free acceptance like “transparency.”” During the last year (recall here; here; and here; I explained my reasons for doubting the desirability and practicability of institutional neutrality; see also Agnes Callard here).
But at bottom on my view institutional neutrality does not show respect for the special and distinctive mission(s) of the university. In particular, and this is my political point, spiritual authority is not gained from instrumental agency (‘vital interests’); it is only possible if there is underlying fidelity toward and an intellectual courage rooted in trusting the nobility of one’s task—one can’t be neutral on witnessing truth and in the education of the young.**
This sounds pompous and fodder for comedy. Perhaps an example will help. Johan Huizinga was one of the great intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century. His scholarship (e.g., Homo Ludens; The Waning of the Middle Ages) is still read and influential a century later. His work was greatly admired among the leading scholars of Germany. For most of the time since, he would be understood as politically conservative. During the 1930s he was rector of the Leiden University. In a once famous incident (recall this post), he threw a German Nazi propagandist who tried to pass his prejudices off as scholarship off campus as incompatible with the mission of the university. Huizinga was only radical in his defense of the mission of the university as a place of disciplined speech in the service of genuine intellectual discovery. This act and later his continued outspoken rejection of Nazism cost him dearly, especially when the Germans occupied the Netherlands.
It’s a truism that modern institutions ought not demand physical courage and heroisms from us. And my example is not meant to recommend acts that exhibit lack of prudence. Each age has its own challenges and its own ways of expressing resistance. But rather that if universities are not to be instruments of raw power, we must find sources of authority that elude power. And this can’t begin without undoing some of the practices that have led us to this fateful moment.
Alas, the task of the modern university can’t be to save liberal democracy. But its self-inflicted incapacity and inability to stand up for itself — even when richly endowed and private — is a sign of the more general corruption of society. This is a failure of self-confidence and identity. So, while our own John Quiggin has already written off US universities, let me close with a suggestion.
University life and universities can inspire respect and begin to create the conditions for spiritual authority if we are willing to reclaim academic freedom by rethinking, for example, the role of sponsored research in university life.+ I used to think the negative dependency could be managed if one has different kinds of donors (the state, industry, alumni, philanthropists, etc.). But that’s not so. The University has lost its capacity for autonomy and independence relative to powerful donors and the state. There is no road to spiritual authority as long as this state of affairs continues. I don’t say this lightly because I recognize that the implication is ultimately a much smaller research university than we have grown used to. But the university can’t stand for truth when everyone assumes it can be bought or bullied.
- An earlier version of this post (before Columbia had responded to the President) appeared at DigressionsNImpressions (here).
*What’s true of the modern research university is also true of the academy in the wider sense. But this would require a different schema.
+Obviously, the pervasiveness of the transactional ethos in modern universities suggests that no single change is sufficient to return to the path of spiritual authority.
{ 28 comments }
notGoodenough 03.22.25 at 3:55 pm
In the spirit of “everything old is new again”, to make a (no doubt a highly unoriginal) suggestion one book I recall as being quite influential on my thinking as a youth was “The Ideal of the University” by Robert P Wolff (who’s critiques and observations remain, to my mind, rather pertinent).
Edward Mocarski 03.22.25 at 3:59 pm
This episode not only threatens research universities that serve to train future generations of innovators, it promises to destroy the private nonprofit university, a hallmark of American education not equaled anywhere outside the USA. One way to have avoided this would have been for the Presidents and Trustees of America’s private universities to band together and form a Trust. That would have provided a financial cushion to Columbia even though illegal. Illegal actions by the Federal Government are occurring daily. A University Trust would have placed the legal challenge on back on the Administration involving the Executive and Judicial branches! Unfortunately, the current situation seems to be a game of cat and mouse, with universities being thrown around by the claws of big government in a political effort to “get even”.
BenK 03.22.25 at 4:30 pm
I feel your pain – it comes through in your writing.
The question is one of the ‘marginal revolution,’ if you will. That idea that having many donors would make you safe is only true if you are willing to accept the loss of one or several. If you are not willing to lose any… then it just binds you as Gulliver, with many strings, along all vectors. Similarly, ‘even when’ richly endowed frames the situation exactly in reverse. Especially when richly endowed.
If you want spiritual authority, you must exhibit spiritual discipline. As for institutions not requiring physical courage… that is foolishness meant for cowards who blame their inability to sacrifice on failed institutions which should have made conviction apparently superfluous. No, in fact, the price of martyrdom and its crowns will never change.
Eric Schliesser 03.22.25 at 4:57 pm
Hi Ben (if I may?)
Thank you for your spirited response!
Yes, your first paragraph states more eloquently than I did what I have learned this past month.
Second, I totally agree with you that spiritual authority presupposes spiritual discipline (and courage). I thought I was clear on that.
I will not haggle with you over the price of martyrdom and its crowns. But not all enduring spiritual institutions require that sunk cost.
somebody who remembers tenure will be abolished in 40 state universities before at columbia 03.22.25 at 6:38 pm
this analysis is nice, but if you ever thought for a second that columbia and paul weiss were different. this should be a strong piece of evidence that they aren’t. they’re fundamentally “rich guy institutions” with no more interest in or loyalty to the welfare of the public than your average “stepson who inherited a car dealership”.
William Berry 03.22.25 at 8:35 pm
WHAT [S]omebody who remembers tenure will be abolished in 40 state universities before [it will be abolished] at [C]olumbia* SAID.
EXACTLY (except for the lack of working class invective; at which I am particularly skilled, but which would clearly violate the rules at this here elite academical weblog, and would result in my being banned).
I knew who these people were like fifty years ago. Privileged elites will sell their grandchildren before letting go of any of their privileges (one thing they’ll never do is compromise their integrity, because they never had any to start with).
*Apologies for the OCD edits (I can’t help it!).
Signed: Some formerly drunken, drug-addled working class dawg who never even graduated from SEMO “University”
JPL 03.22.25 at 10:29 pm
I just want to say, for the moment, because I want to think about these things, that your previous post on Michael Polanyi on the collapse of liberalism and the rise of fascism is relevant to the current task. Let me just, for now, highlight a few sentences from that post that seem to point the way forward.
“by undermining social cohesion the markets promoted by liberalism give rise to fascism. And (echoing a trope from Adam Smith himself) the workplace in the capitalist economy undermines cognitive proper functioning and the functioning of wider culture”
What we have now , in the Trump administration, is what you get when cranks “rule the roost”. Michael Polanyi was quite scathing about the problem of crankery in the truth-seeking process.
“Where do the would-be-elites and early cadres of fascists come from in a liberal society? In “Perils of Inconsistency,” first published in his collection The Logic of Liberty (1951), Michael Polanyi tackles this question. Echoing and anticipating themes one finds in Hayek, Polanyi thinks that the difference maker is to be found in differential uptake of certain philosophical ideas.”
Where do the ideas, that I’ll continue to call “crankish”, come from, and why do they persist in being held?
“To put this amusingly, Locke taught the virtue of hypocrisy to Anglo-Saxon political culture–one continues to pay more than lip-service to certain ideals and so prevent their popular collapse.”
“a successful public culture must do some justice to, or find a way to channel to proper public ends, the moral sensibility of the population.”
I think there does still exist a “moral sensibility of the population” that can be explicitly activated, but at the moment we seem to be experiencing a collapse of shared ideals, and that is reflected in the conflicts between the idea, accepted as “modern” by a lot of influential people, of the university as a hedge fund, tax dodge and a servant to capitalist markets, and the original conception as a safe place for pure inquiry in the context of ideals of a religious nature.
Eric Schliesser 03.22.25 at 10:46 pm
Hi JPL,
Thank you for noticing the salience of that Karl & Michael Polanyi piece. I have been musing on how to develop it. Look forward to your suggestions.
Lameen 03.23.25 at 4:24 am
I don’t say this lightly because I recognize that the implication is ultimately a much smaller research university than we have grown used to. But the university can’t stand for truth when everyone assumes it can be bought or bullied.
More specifically: the implication is ultimately a university centred on those subjects which do not require massive funding to maintain. Linguistics, politics, or mathematics can flourish under such conditions; chemistry, medicine, or particle physics, not so much. This is awkward insofar as it implies abandoning one of the main pillars of academia’s public legitimacy over the 20th century. But that may indeed be the direction we need to think, under the circumstances.
Ken_L 03.23.25 at 4:36 am
Unfortunately, the professional managers running Australian universities have been conditioned to believe their primary task is to ensure their institutions run at a profit, which means requiring every teaching and research unit to shape its activities to maximise revenue. Since revenue is easiest to extract from full fee-paying students (read, students taking professional/vocational courses, many from overseas) and government research grants which reward “industry partnerships”, the universities’ “business models” have been developed accordingly.
My understanding is that most American universities are not dissimilar. As a result, the people running the universities are the very last to have any sympathy with Eric’s argument, nor is it easy to see what social forces could remove them from their dominant positions.
oldster 03.23.25 at 8:17 pm
“The university’s distinctive spiritual authority is rooted in two features of its intrinsic mission: witnessing truth and being the institution that engages a non-trivial part of the education of an important subset of near adults.”
Related to this was a distinctive spiritual authority that attached to scholars who consciously pursued a vocation that was not oriented towards maximizing their income. There was a society-wide understanding that Professor X was a serious person who could have made millions, but chose to study beetles instead. And that brought with it a kind of nobility and prestige.
Seventy-five years ago, a businessman, a professor, a general or admiral, and a clergyman, each had their own brand of prestige and authority. The warrior, the scholar, and the priest all took seriously the idea that they had a special vocation, not defined by its income, and all enjoyed broad esteem for this reason. In the intervening decades, all of them have lost ground to the onslaught of money. There is only one social hierarchy any longer, and this is a grave problem for society.
Moz of Yarramulla 03.23.25 at 11:42 pm
I am reminded of the tribulations of Siouxsie Wiles in Auckland. She’s a biologist who gave popular science-based advice during covid and as a result became the target of cranks. The university that employed her decided that running away and hiding was the best defense of academic freedom that they could provide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siouxsie_Wiles
I’m inclined to agree with critics who attribute these and similar actions to university authorities who see their mission and thus the mission of the body they control as profit-seeking rather than truth-seeking. Whether they should be custodians of the institution rather than (share)owners might be a useful lens as well.
John Q 03.24.25 at 12:07 am
Struck by the mention of Locke and Hayek here, since I just wrote about them in a related context, seeing them as exemplars of the fact that liberal deference to property rights comes at the expense of human freedom. Both Locke, in his advocacy of slavery, and Hayek in his support for dictatorship exemplify the point that property rights can only be enforced by state power.
One of the striking features of the recent protests was the rapidity and vigour with which university owners/managers acted to defend their property rights against their students, even before Trump. As Eric says in the OP, that in turn reflects the fact that these people were chosen as corporate managers not as leaders of a community of scholars.
Underlying this is the fact that neoliberalism in both soft and hard forms has been characterised by hostility to ” social, partially self-governing organizations” with ill-defined property rights. They have been attacked on one side by calls for “markets in everything” and on the other by demands for accountability.
Moz of Yarramulla 03.24.25 at 12:53 am
Here’s a slightly different take: modern universities exist primarily to tax the reproductive process of the professional-managerial class. As such their goal is the most expensive certification that can still be obtained by large enough numbers to perpetuate the institution.
In that light the research side is effectively a marketing expense. They need to have it in order to attracted the brightest students, but the research output is incidental (and as long as fraud is not publicised it doesn’t matter).
https://ecumene.substack.com/p/c6731778-0641-43d4-8a97-3655eb97c616?ref=thebrowser.com
JPL 03.24.25 at 1:26 am
JohnQ@13:
I’m aware of the fact that you are interested in the phenomenon of property rights, but I haven’t read enough of your writings to be clear about what you mean by the expression “property rights”, in particular in contexts like, “… university owners/managers acted to defend their property rights against their students …”, and “… characterised by hostility to “social, partially self-governing organizations” with ill-defined property rights.”. These two uses of the term seem to refer to something a little more abstract and special than the use of the term in paragraph one. I’m wondering, because those two latter uses seem to be expressing an interesting key idea, if you could possibly clarify what exactly you are referring to in those two. (The movement called “Neo-liberalism” has exhibited a totalising tendency that is very unhealthy and unnecessary for economic purposes. Why must they do that?)
CityCalmDown 03.24.25 at 3:05 am
Corey Robin has also addressed this same issue on his blog.
“It’s amazing to me—though it shouldn’t be—that at a moment when anyone and everyone who teaches or works or studies at an educational institution is under threat, that a professor at Columbia would formulate the threat in the New York Times in this particular way:
“Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/trumps-battles-with-colleges-could-change-american-culture-for-a-generation.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=p&pvid=FD196715-4A05-4FAA-8A84-33E0D21A9D9B
I don’t doubt that Stockwell sees his lifeworld in this way and that it would in fact be threatened in the way he says it will be. Without the millions and millions in federal funding that he and his colleagues luxuriate in, he would be sent plummeting into that netherworld, where high school and community college instructors reside, of “just teaching some classes”—and where, of course, many, many instructors at Columbia University also reside.
I’m not going to knock this knucklehead for seeing his lifeworld as it is, and stating it so forthrightly to the New York Times.
I am going to knock him for his utter lack of political sense.”
https://coreyrobin.com/2025/03/20/a-message-to-my-colleagues-at-elite-universities-you-must-choose-stockwellism-or-solidarity/
In his anti-moral, anti-Rational mercenary nihilism, Brent R. Stockwell is idiotically taking the axe to his own head. The moral Good, “values” in bourgeois-liberal discourse, are not some frivolous life-style choice that can be put on or taken off like a sloganistic t-shirt. An upper-bourgeois mendicant going cap-in-hand to a potus who plans to abolish the entire Dept of Education is a (anti-)intellectual possessed of a violently powerful death-wish.
Do biologists still read Norbert Wiener these days? We can safely assume Stockwell has never heard of Franco Berardi.
From Franco Berardi – “The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance”:
“At a systemic level, change is taking the form of positive feedback.
In his work on cybernetics, Norbert Wiener speaks of negative feedback in order to define the output of a system when it acts to oppose changes to the input of the system, with the result that the changes are reduced and attenuated. If the overall feedback of the system is negative, then the system will tend to be stable. In the social field, for instance, we can say that the system is exhibiting negative feedback if protests and fights oblige the industry to increase salaries and reduce exploitation when social misery becomes too hard and too widespread.
In Wiener’s parlance, a system exhibits positive feedback when, on the contrary, it increases the magnitude of a perturbation in response to the perturbation itself Obviously, unintended positive feedback may be far from being “positive” in the sense of desirable. We can also speak of self-reinforcing feedback.
My impression is this: in conditions of infoacceleration and hypercomplexity, as the conscious and rational will becomes unable to check and to adjust the trends, the trends themselves become self-reinforcing up to the point of final collapse.
Look at the vicious circle: right-wing electoral victories and dictatorships of ignorance. When right-wing parties win, their first preoccupation is to impoverish public schooling and to prop up media conformism. The result of the spread of ignorance and conformism will be a new electoral victory, and so on. This is why it is difficult not
to see the future of Europe as a dark blend of techno-financial authoritarianism and aggressive populist reaction.”
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=67CC9B7B53DABAF0787CBB696A01D16D
CityCalmDown 03.24.25 at 3:10 am
Trump’s far-Right Nihilistic anti-Rationalism are the morbid death-throes terminus point of the particularly virulent form of Capitalist anti-Rationalism that has afflicted the human species throughout Capitalist history. The alt-fact mental and moral degeneracy that is Trumpite Nihilism is historically symptomatic of the terminal historical crisis of the 500 year old Capitalist World-System. (For further see e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis).
On the nature of the University and its place within a neo-liberal society and polity, Franco Berardi is worth quoting again.
From the “The Second Coming”
“It’s difficult to judge the quality of educational formation in different periods of time. However, as a teacher and as someone who has spent most of his time with students and young people, I can affirm that the average young person is today more informed than the average young person of fifty years ago – but at the same time is much less prepared to express critical views and to choose between cultural and political alternatives. Why so?
Knowledge and dogma
The reason lies in the radical change of educational criteria that resulted from the neoliberal reformation of the school system worldwide.
Europe is a good place to observe the neoliberal turn, because since 1999, after the signature of the Bologna Charter, every European country has engaged in transforming the school system in compliance with the market.
Since then, the reform of the educational system in every European country has been marked by de-financing, cuts, job losses, overall precarization of teaching, privatization, and downsizing of the non-rentable disciplinary fields (so-called humanities).
The leading principle of the reform is the assertion of the epistemological primacy of the economic sphere, and this primacy has turned into the general criterion of education.
In the transition from the bourgeois era of industrial capitalism to the digital financial era of semiocapital, mental energy becomes the main force of valorization. This implies the standardization of the procedures of teaching, resulting in the uniform formatting of the cognitive body. A remarkable consequence of this process has been and is the downsizing and de-financing of the so-called ‘humanities’.
The autonomy of universities has been the first victim of the market-oriented reformation. The concept of autonomy had a crucial place in the definition of the modern university. This concept did not only refer to the political independence of the university’s choices from the religious and political authorities, but referred also and mainly to the inherent methodology of scientific knowledge and artistic practice. Each field of knowledge was deemed to establish its own laws: conventions, aims, procedures, verification and change.
During the bourgeois era, the university was based on two pillars. The first pillar was the relation of the intellectuals and the city, the ethical and political role of reason.
The second pillar was the autonomy of research and teaching – the autonomy of the process of discovery, innovation, production and transmission of moral, scientific and technical acquisition.
The bourgeois, owner and entrepreneur, was aware that autonomy of knowledge was necessary for achieving productive results. The long process of emancipation from theocratic dogma shaped bourgeois culture and identity throughout modern times.
But the neoliberal forging of Homo oeconomicus translated every notion and every act of knowledge into economic terms, leading to the abolition of the autonomy of knowledge. The economy has progressively acquired the central place in the system of knowledge and research, re-enacting the privilege of theocracy in the Middle Ages. Every act of research, of teaching, of learning and of inventing is subjected to economic questions: is it rentable? Is it fostering capital accumulation, is it fulfilling the demands of competition?”
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=3AF0357C5B84F5D55A2FF90E6D2C149F
MisterMr 03.24.25 at 11:39 am
About the “witnessing the thruth” thingie: there is a tension between the idea of one single “truth” and the idea that there are many points of view, each with its own partial truth, but not an overall general Truth with a capital T.
So, let’s be more specific and differentiate “truth” from “reality”.
There is just one reality, and exists outside our heads. However when we think and/or comunicate about this reality, we are forced to make many abstractions, so that we end up with a “representation of reality”, or “discourse”, that obviously is not the same thing of reality, the same way a map is not the territory.
When we check these discourses VS reality, we will see that some discourses correspond to realitry (truth) whereas other don’t (false) and many correspond apprimatively.
Therefore there will be as many “truths” (true discourses) as there are points of view (there will be even more false discourses, I’m not saying that everything is true, I’m not making a “free for all” argument).
But it is impossible to have a single “Truth”, a single overarching discourse that encompasses all possible discourses, because this would imply a single acceptable point of view.
Again this doesn’t mean that “everything goes”, there will also be a lot of bullshit, “false” discourses.
The current cultural trend, reflected in DEI practices and logic, reflects this “multiple truths” (multiple points of view) logic, however it didn’t do enough to differentiate the “multiple truths/perspectives” logic from the “everything goes” logic.
So the current right-wing attack on intellectuals has a contradictory nature: on the one hand, it seems that trumpists believe that “truth” can be determined by majority rule, truth is what the strongest declare it is. On the other they whine against changing historical perspective, they are the ones who want the single, unchangable Thruth.
At the end of the day this means that they want just one point of view (the traditional one) to be deemed the acceptable one, and therefore there will be only one Truth with a capital T.
There is IMHO a difficult work to do to distinguish the concept of the multiple points of view (multiple truths) from the concept of the everything goes, that explains for example why and to what point “creationism” cannot be accepted as a “different point of view”, but other practices/beliefs are acceptable under a logic of multiculturalism or similar.
@oldster 11
I suspect that 75 years ago, in 1950, most professors, generals and admirals (clergymen a bit less) came from rich families, and that is what ,mantained that order possible.
First, I disagree with the idea that any professor could make millions if only she chose to be a businesswoman instead, people have different talents so someone who is, say, good at math is not necessarily a good businessman/woman.
Second, this situation we are in is at least in part the result of a power struggle between the owners and the PMC (managers), that the owners are currently winning by weaponising the opposition of those who are lower class but don’t feel they are part of the PMC.
So it’s not that there has been a weakening of the role of the “professor”, rather on the long term the PMC won a lot and now we are in a moment of reflux when the “owners” are rolling back stuff (1950 OTOH was a moment when the PMC started to dominate but in a world when it was still small).
MisterMr 03.24.25 at 12:12 pm
@Moz of Yarramulla 14
IMHO the guy you linked to has it completely backwards. The high cost (in terms of personal investment, not of money) is a direct consequence of internal competiton in the PMC (that is an ambiguous idea because there is the question of where do we put the line, is every person with a degree part of the PMC or are we counting only the succesful ones).
OTOH, the PMC exists because the owning class is not anymore able co control the means of production directly and personally, meaning that most small businesses have to melt or disappear and be substituted by big business, for a simple matter of efficiency (this is also a process that creates panic in the small owners class).
If it was possible to do with small persona capital the PMC would not exist to begin with.
somebody who remembers an astonishing introduction to mythology class taught at the community college that changed their entire life 03.24.25 at 5:13 pm
CityCalmDown @ #17, thank you for the link to that excellent analysis by Robin. He puts it much more calmly and kindly than I do when I characterize Columbia as a “rich guy thing”. What I mean by that is what Robin points to – there is no solidarity between this fucker at Columbia kissing trump’s feet and the “mere” public school teachers and community college professors who do the fucking work of education in the country. “Maybe this guy has a point!” he cheerfully says to the people who have a gun pointed at their families, knowing if they all get blown away he can retire to the countryside and live out his life in comfort no matter how expensive eggs get. When the trump movement came to school districts over the last ten years and demanded that teachers be fired, libraries be shuttered and classes be emptied because they were making the kids gay, did any of these columbia guys (or harvard guys or yale guys) show up with a check for a couple hundred thousand to make a new library across the street, or to pay for a teacher’s aide in a theater class that would otherwise be eliminated? Why not? They have plenty of money to make a big fucking dent in some big fucking problems if they wanted to – they just don’t want to. I promise you more lives have been changed at my local community college in the last ten years than at Columbia. Just a look at the numbers and napkin level math can prove that’s true. So where the fuck does this guy get off? Where was he the last ten years?
JPL 03.24.25 at 11:54 pm
Under the materialist onslaught (I’ll use this as a temporary cover term for a much noticed malignant trend plaguing our current noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin)), society may have lost a clear understanding of the necessary role of principles of practical reason like “academic freedom” and the “tenure system” in the university’s fundamental spiritual role of making sense of the world, and they may have to be reminded of what their significance is and what they involve as part of the whole endeavour, since under the “transactional ethos and process driven decision-making now prevalent in the modern research university [, which] is orthogonal to spiritual authority”, it may not be evident that these principles are necessary. If, e.g., Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge is read not merely as a finding about the logical structure of support for knowledge claims (the “tacit dimension”), but as a pragmatic-level exploration and critique of the skilled activities of truth-seeking, especially as practiced in the fields of pure inquiry, it can be useful for thinking about the relations between the logical, motivational and spiritual aspects of this important human endeavour, which has a home only in the university, in spite of its potential for money-making and resultant corruption. We can’t afford to lose these ideals.
“I believe that in spite of the [appalling] hazards involved, I am called upon to search for the truth and state my findings”, says Polanyi, together with all the “enthusiasts”, with “called upon” having the no doubt intended resonance with the well-known uses of that expression in the religious context.
John Q 03.25.25 at 4:24 am
JPL@15 This is far from fully worked out, but I’m pointing to a transition from
(i) the idea of the university as a community within which freedom of assemby was taken for granted and where bringing in outside authority such as city or state police was abnormal, and where leaders were, in some sense first among equals; to
(ii) the university as a corporate property owner, run by managers on behalf of the owners (trustees, or maybe the state), where it’s perfectly normal to prohibit or strictly limit protest and to call in armed force to protect property rights.
Description (i) mostly prevailed in the second half of C20, before which students were largely treated as children, with the university in loco parentis. Description (ii) has gradually replaced it this century – the 2001 terror attacks may have played a role here.
As I said, not fully worked out, but making the point that the property holdings of the elite universities are a mixed blessing as far as intellectual freedom goes.
JPL 03.25.25 at 6:54 am
Thank you so much, John. I found the interpretation intriguing. As Eric suggests, this transition probably prevented the university officials from rejecting the government demands on principle, from defending the principle of the freedom and autonomy of pure inquiry, taking the possible loss of government research funding, and rallying the public to defend a worthy cause, to demonstrate the priorities; failing because they were not used to thinking like an (old school) “enthusiast”, in Sarton’s sense, for whom questions of property are irrelevant. (Thus the need for tenure.) Sad, because the level of effectiveness of research in practical applications depends largely on what is discovered under the most rigorous standards of pure inquiry. (Sad also because some working scientists could have been shortsightedly complicit, applying pressure.)
notGoodenough 03.25.25 at 8:49 am
@ JQ and JPL, As a suggestion of something I believe to be quite relevant and of interest (though likely you already know, I recommend just on the off-chance you don’t), Wolff posited 4 “theoretical models” of Universities (with the understanding that reality is more complex, of course, but as a thought experiment): (a) The University as a Sanctuary of Scholarship; (b) The University as a Training Camp for the Professions; (c) The University as a Social Service Station; and (d) The University as an Assembly Line for Establishment Man. I’d also emphasise that much of what was written seems very in keeping with the complaints which have so regularly appeared in CT, and though I would say Wolff and I differ in certain aspects I think he provided a valuable insight from the basis of a clear and coherent analysis which accounts for much of the behaviours seen today.
KT2 03.25.25 at 11:51 pm
notGoodenough, @ JQ and JP,
The Ideal of the University
By Robert Wolff
First Published 1992
eBook Published 12 July 2017
The 2017 ebook ed says;
“In his introduction to this new edition, Wolff expands upon his original speculations to argue in substantive detail for the liberating potential of the liberal arts. Drawing upon Freud and Marcuse, Wolff proposes that literature, art, and philosophy embody a promise of gratification that engenders a negative critique of the social and cultural status quo. The rationale for the liberal arts university is society’s need for a reservoir of critical thinking that is the motor of social, economic, and political progress. Elegantly written and passionately argued; The Ideal of the University is essential reading for educators and sociologists.”
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315132587/ideal-university-robert-wolff
Wolff’s phrase “society’s need for a reservoir of critical thinking that is the motor of social, economic, and political progress.”… is imo absolutely necessary.
In Trumo Musk DOGe world, the last thing the facist dictators want is for “literature, art, and philosophy” department to be the reservoir of critical thinking.
And to comment on Eric saying “Lawyers are not especially popular. But that Universities feel friendless and socially isolated more so.”.
The law and law schools sorely need ‘literature, art, and philosophy” and a social contrac focus in equality, not equity. In Australia I have recently had the displeasure of our Ombudsman not further investigating a local council knee deep in nepotism and mayoral beneficial land rezoning. The Ombo’s Ombo Solicitor wrote the law book – $290 please – “On Equity”… zero equality, all trusts and private property which if JQ were to end in court against UQ, “On Equity ” would be q basis for the government, JQ and equality be damned. Second author will be one of the judge’s who will have to recuse himself from the case.
I’ve long thought CT is missing legal authors. The ‘law’ then is actually submissive to insurance, as every institution here is behokden to what an insurance comoany will honour, backed by law, the the detriment of remedies for the “.. negative critique of the social and cultural status quo.” Wolff. Thanks.
MFB 03.26.25 at 9:43 am
This is an excellent piece and filled with fruitful material. Ultimately, however, when the university has lost its sense of what it once was, once it has abandoned free inquiry and free speech and free assembly, once it has surrendered to the market on all important issues, there is really very little to fight for. And once the “opposition” party which was supposed to support the university has become an enemy of freedom, and once the media which was supposed to support the university has done likewise (while ostentatiously critiquing the people attacking the university, but on trivial issues) there is no prospect of such a fight succeeding.
I was in the University of Cape Town in the 1980s, and the institution managed to maintain its spirit of freedom and inquiry reasonably well at least by the standards of earlier decades, but of course it was not directly under attack from the state in the way that institutions are now. Also it had a sense of student-staff-worker solidarity which no longer exists there or, as far as I can see, anywhere else. (Such solidarity might have made it possible to resist the problems faced by US universities.)
On the other hand, the Chilean dictatorship of September 1973 just made army officers vice-chancellors of all universities. Problem solved! And maybe Pinochet’s Chile is what the US is heading towards?
engels 03.28.25 at 12:38 pm
I disagree with the idea that any professor could make millions if only she chose to be a businesswoman instead, people have different talents so someone who is, say, good at math is not necessarily a good businessman/woman
I know a few people who “made millions in business” and they all did it in more a less the same way.
1 go to “good” university (by getting good grades at school)
2 join grad scheme at megacorp X (preferably finance/law/consulting) based on 1
3 spend 20+ working way up hierarchy via credential accumulation, endless performance rankings, and arse-kissing
4 PROFIT
While these may not require exactly the talents as a modern academic career, in the wider scheme of things they do not seem to be all that different either.
Also, can someone please dig out that statistic about the percentage of MIT physics PhDs go straight to work on Wall Street?
roger gathmann 04.01.25 at 8:34 am
I like the Michael Polanyi developed dialectic, but I would like to see it matched and modified by historical instancing.
The elements in play in, say, the 60s were different. But as the Universities emerged from the McCarthy era, there were certain moments where the liberal center held – in particular, in the University of California case, which featured the same Republican reactionary approach to the “freedom”of the university and the same search for outstanding villains – which in 1970 were Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse. In between the Right’s demand that these two be fired was an oddly independent figure,
Charles Hitch. A McNamara whiz at the Pentagon, At that time, the Regents and the people around Governor Reagan were plotting, or meeting, to find reasons to fire Angela Davis. Davis had been appointed to an assistant prof’s position at the philosophy department of UCLA. The UCLA paper had pufblished an article fingering her (under an easily seen through pseudonym) as a Communist. So the Regents thought they’d make quick work of Davis. However, somebody pointed out that the University rule against hiring communists had been superceded by a recent rule that political opinions of academics were no reason for dismissal.
Still, a letter was sent to Davis asking if she was a communist. Why not?
What happened next was unexpected. Instead of the usual denial shuffle, Davis responded that, indeed, she was a Communist, and that the Communist party, to her knowledge, operated with the boundaries set for all parties. She was entitled to her first amendment rights as a Communist.
Well, this response definitely galvanized the Regents.
But an odd thing happened. The Rand-man, the McNamara functionary, turned out to be an actual believer. He wrote a protest. This is from the AAUP account of the matter:
“At this time, Davis formally requested that phi¬losophy department chair Kalish assign her to teach Philosophy 99 in the upcoming fall quarter so that she could demonstrate her competence as a teacher; it was unlikely, after all, that she would be able to make much progress on her dissertation amid the controversy over the regents’ attempt to dismiss her. Kalish granted the request and, in immediate response, the regents called an emergency meeting to prevent Davis from teaching, effectively calling for her suspension. Again, Chancellor Young and Presi¬dent Hitch opposed such action, and Hitch urged the regents, in the words of the investigating committee, “to be scrupulous in avoiding any action that might be construed as an infringement of academic due process.”6 Others present at the meeting likewise warned that any attempt by the regents to prevent Davis from teaching would elicit strong backlash from the UCLA academic senate, which had already adopted resolutions supporting Davis and condemn¬ing the regents’ invocation of the 1950 rule to fire her. A majority of the regents disregarded these objections and voted to restrict Davis from teaching during the fall quarter. Accordingly, the UCLA reg¬istrar was directed not to enroll students in Davis’s Philosophy 99 course.”
Of course, much depends, here, on the personalities. And Hitch had an additional problem in that Davis soon was on the run from the law. But he did successfully refuse to have Marcuse dismissed. This, in an institution that Reagan as governor had much influence on.
Perhaps it is the case that the sense of the integrity of the university project has been fatally weakened by, among other things, making going to college a financially onerous thing.
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