From TPM Reader CA …
Thank you very much for the piece on universities. The connection you draw between social authority and public goods is exactly right. Indeed, their status of tax-exempt non-profits depends on a version of this bargain. But I would add to your analysis a problem that I think exists as a condition of possibility for the war being waged by the Trump administration. This is the twofold shift that took place c. 1980, regarding who pays for education and who benefits from research.
Regarding “who pays,” a view arose in those years that education is of value because of its contribution to lifetime earnings. Universities collaborated in spreading this view because it served their purposes. The argument can be extended almost indefinitely, justifying vast increases in the number of students. What industry doesn’t want more demand? And the argument was useful in the political project of extending “access.” But this claim about the good produced by education made possible a shift in who pays: if education is a private good, then it is the beneficiary who should pay. This chain of reasoning led to the declines in income from state appropriations and the increase in student debt that we see today.
Regarding who benefits from research: in 1980 the US passed two bills that completely transformed who profited from the licensing of any discoveries made during federally funded research. Before the Bayh-Dole act, it had been the People of the United States. After that, it was researchers and potentially universities. (The story is naturally more complicated than this.)
Without going into details, the result of these two transformations was the deep implication of research universities in the neoliberal economy: universities are now perceived by many as saddling most students with debt while creating vast private wealth for a few (and quite possibly for themselves — though universities have turned out to be hilariously bad at profiting from research, so in many respects they have reaped only the ills and none of the goods that they imagined).
I join you in wishing universities would do more to fight back. It’s perhaps worth pointing out that the size of university’s endowment is not a straightforward predictor of its vulnerability to Trumpets attacks: one should ask what percentage of its revenue derives from federal grants and contracts; what percentage of revenue derives from endowment payout; etc. Nonetheless, in broad strokes universities could be doing much much more than they are — and they need to collaborate.
My own view is that their current, very strange silences incur substantial moral and strategic risk.
One silence concerns the projects that have already lost federal funding, the students whose visas have already been cancelled, and the postdoctoral fellows who professional careers are being harmed by loss of funding to their positions. The surface level of university communications at my own university (the University of Chicago) advertises research success — it’s broadcasting normality — in a fashion that ignores real harm to individuals and to research. That makes it hard to figure out what harms we would not be wiling to paper over.
This is what I am terming a moral risk.
The second silence concerns the threats to Northwestern, among others. Of course, one can imagine sector-wide responses. But where were Princeton and Yale when Columbia was attacked? Why did MIT not speak up when Harvard was attacked? Is there not a possibility, when we are silent about our peers and neighbors, that we are assenting to attack as an ordinary course of events?
That’s what I term a strategic risk.
The two come together in a totally bizarre way when one looks at websites. Earlier this week I visited the websites of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Penn, and Princeton and … there’s nothing that suggests we’re not in 2024. The dissonance between that content and what every literate person in the world knows is, I suspect, not helpful.
