Note to readers: This blog is about AI and higher education, including the social and political contexts in which we teachers, students, and administrators make decisions about technology. Without the freedom to ask questions and argue our evidence, our institutions will no longer be capable of creating and disseminating knowledge about AI or anything else.
Higher education is but a sideshow to the Trump regime’s actions this week, which included a command performance meant to drive professional soldiers out of the military, an ICE raid in Chicago that violently disregarded the safety and rights of non-citizens and citizens alike, and another air strike against boats off the shores of another nation. With those stark acts contradicting the laws and norms governing the U.S., worries about academic freedom can seem almost beside the point.
Given the scope of what’s happening, and the stakes, how much could it matter if a few professors get fired or if a few universities find some way to keep the money flowing for critical scientific research? It feels like time to hunker down, just get through the next few years.
Yet the defunding of science and destruction of freedom on campuses are all of a piece, an effort to preempt college campuses as sites where resistance and coordination will happen. The election next year and in 2028 will soon take center stage, and the regime needs to establish some means of control. Destroying resistance and demanding obedience from university leaders is both a strategy and a chaotic diversion. It plays out with campus police ordered to arrest “outside agitators” who include our students and teachers, with university presidents being ordered by the White House to protect “our right” to re-elect the President. When it gets worse, we won’t have to ask “how did this happen?” Columbia University has shown the way.
Timothy Burke in
explains the terms of the deal offered to the nine institutions and why it is “very precisely” an offer for money “in return for surrendering any vestige of institutional autonomy to Trump’s inner circle.”Chad Orzel in
responds by calling Burke’s argument for refusing these carrots “a lovely sentiment,” illuminating what I fear is a common hope for the prospects for compromise. Orzel believes those who say that institutions should refuse the deal don’t “understand the centrality of money to the modern practice of STEM.” Orzel writes “Refusing federal funds isn’t just “hard” or even “hard”, it’s existential.”Indeed. I’ve used Thorstein Veblen’s term “trained incapacity” to describe this way of thinking. When Orzel argues we should “thread the needle between currying favor and bold defiance and find a way to sustain as much funding” as possible, he makes perfect sense—if it were 2024. Arguing it today misunderstands our circumstances. There is no trade-off here, no actual compromise possible. The threat is existential, but it is not to the funding of science; it is that science itself will be no longer possible.
Since the 1940s, the U.S. has had a system in which the federal government gives universities massive amounts of funding and the world receives rewards in terms of useful knowledge. That system is gone, and in its place a system of patronage is emerging that will be used to reward the regime’s allies and punish its enemies. Knowledge is now what people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., J.D. Vance, and their newly empowered political functionaries say it is. Anyone looking to preserve science through compromise with autocrats and kleptocrats is deluding themselves.
Orzel became one of my favorite bloggers about higher education because of his clear-eyed view of topics that befuddle most academics. That he cannot make out the writing on the walls is worrisome. If the presidents and board members who are examining the deal listen to scientists like Orzel… If they decide, based on their outdated model of fiduciary responsibility1, to make some sort of deal… If Harvard is not playing the long game, but holding out for more carrots or false guarantees, then we are lost.
Orzel invokes C. P. Snow’s two cultures to explain “a pretty comprehensive failure on the other side of campus to understand the centrality of money to the modern practice of STEM.” That would be a fair observation in 2024. But this is no longer a misunderstanding among scholars, merely a matter of social scientists and humanists fighting for their professional practices and autonomy versus scientists doing critical work of advancing science. Historians like Burke and Jon Zimmerman are not warning about how difficult it will be to teach or conduct research in their culture; they are warning that the entire enterprise, the work we do in both cultures, is no longer possible.
The freedom to say gender is a complex social and biological phenomenon, that generating electricity using wind and solar is superior to burning fossil fuels, and that the starvation and bombing of civilians is a war crime are disappearing. More unfreedom follows, especially if the nine institutions accept the deal, or if Harvard cuts a deal.
I’ll stop here and invite you to read A Rotten Compact by Brendan Cantwell. It is an excellent and brief analysis of the deal.
I urge you to support the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
Most important, I urge to rally support among your colleagues. Speak clearly to your president, provost, and other leaders about why they must hold firm against the temptation to negotiate with autocrats and kleptocrats.
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Fiduciary duty is often misunderstood to mean financial responsibility, but the true meaning of the phrase has to do with trust and responsibility.
I had missed your use of the term "Trained incapacity" in this context. It's perfect, unfortunately. Fucking hell.
It's existential to "compromise" with this stuff, also. But I suppose we have learned not to see it.