I’ve heard from a number of you in response to my posts about the fate of universities in the Trump era. I’ve published a couple of these responses below and I’ll post more. They are fascinating and illuminating replies. Most are generally supportive. A few are in the category of “Dude, you have no idea what you’re talking about.” But there are a number which I would put in the category of, “I agree. The universities have to fight. But I’m not sure you get how big a bloodbath we’re talking about.”
I wanted to expand on those earlier posts. And much of this will be meant to address that last category of responses.
I haven’t been directly involved in university life for a couple decades. So there are lots of details I don’t know, and plenty of things I didn’t learn during my time as a grad student and TA. But I think I do get the broad outlines. I know that what we’re talking about is full of risks, probable damage and levels of damage that are existential. So let me expand on what I’ve said by distilling points I’ve made in most of these email exchanges with readers over the last several days. To be clear, this isn’t meant as any sort of manifesto: just a distillation of what I think and some additional detail that expands on those earlier posts.
Most of what I said in these exchanges came down to five points.
First: I’m not saying that universities or colleges should give up their grants or the various funds and subsidies higher education gets from the federal government. I’m also not saying that they should start drawing down their endowments (that is, those that even have endowments in any meaningful way) to become independent of the federal government.
But what I think this means is running through all the possible contingencies, thinking through what’s possible and for how long. An option may not be likely. It may not be total. And it may not be permanent. Those are all spectrums of possibility. But you can’t get into a battle if all of those possibilities are ruled out in advance as impossible to handle or accept. That’s like going into a boxing match and ruling out getting punched. It’s simply not possible.
This especially goes for universities with big endowments. As many of you have pointed out, major university endowments aren’t just big savings accounts. Different tranches of funds are contractually obligated for different things. But there are ways to be creative with leveraging what are often massive sums of money. And now is the time to be creative.
In many ways, universities and colleges are in comparable positions to states led by Democrats. Once we think through all the sources of funds a renegade president has the power but not the lawful authority to block, if unrestrained by the courts, the basic function of states becomes almost impossible: the federal government can control all Medicare and Medicaid funds to doctors and hospitals, all Social Security funds to residents of the states, road funds, everything. Again, it’s a matter of contingency planning: what can be managed and for how long?
The point isn’t foreswearing these things now. Certainly the modern research university as we understand it today is simply not possible without substantial federal funding. Virtually all liberal arts colleges can’t exist as currently constituted without the federal guarantee of student loans. But the same is true for states. They can’t survive unless the great majority of the funds they pay in federal taxes are not re-spent into the states as grants, programs, checks to program recipients. I’m not assuming these as new realities going forward. It’s a matter of thinking through in advance what’s possible and for how long and what the plan is for taking real risks and taking real hits.
In a Times opinion column today, M. Gessen proposes something very different, essentially sloughing off the entire panoply of federal grants, subsidies, big donors and their money, everything, and creating open mass universities. This is categorically different from what I’m envisioning. We may eventually get there. Entities like they propose should exist too. But what I propose here is not upending but preserving the modern American university and the broader ecosystem of higher education, with research budgets that make it the envy of the world and a magnet for scholars and students throughout the world, a place where the federal government backstops student loans and subsidizes higher education. Yes, the system is in need of many reforms. But that’s like discussing remodeling when the house is literally on fire.
Second: Universities and colleges absolutely need to be banding together now into collaborative agreements and pacts. It’s the simplest point. If each institution faces the federal government one on one, it’s impossible. There has to be a united front. And we’re beginning to see the beginnings of this.
Two additional points on this front. Research universities and small liberal arts colleges are very different things, with different missions, very different sources of funding and very different amounts of wealth. Public and private institutions of both sorts are very different. But we must see all of these institutions as part of an integrated and mutually interdependent ecosystem of higher education in the United States. That’s the reality of the situation and no united defense is possible without seeing American higher education in those terms, regardless of whether pacts might band together different classes of institutions.
Finally, I’ve heard from many of you that most institutions don’t have any endowments to speak of, certainly nothing that allows any meaningful drawing down. So what about those schools? My response to this is that this isn’t a matter of being myopically focused on the tiny number of prestigious universities which have endowments in the tens of billions of dollars. The point is precisely that those institutions have more capacity to fight and should. The Harvards and Princetons and Stanfords have always been recognized as the leaders of American higher education and now is time to lead.
Third: This, like every other dimension of the struggle against American autocracy, is fundamentally a battle over public opinion. And higher education must dramatically rethink their engagement — and re-engage — with public opinion. On the face of it, it seems almost absurd. What’s the mass constituency for wealthy, fancy institutions that, by design, traffic in unpopular or marginal ideas and bestow their greatest benefits on a future elite? That’s certainly the White House’s theory of the case: targeting wealthy Ivy League institutions strongly coded as “elite.” But this is a great failure of imagination. As one of our emailers noted today, the irony of all of this is that MAGA is mainly mad at the humanities but they’re taking it out on the sciences. As I have argued about the biomedical research community housed in NIH, everything needs to be taken out of the language of grants and peer review and the rest. There is a big mass constituency for cures to diseases. And quite a lot of this money goes to just that. Say so. Make it a direct and unabashed appeal.
What’s more, research universities are often connected to academic research hospitals and/or university hospitals, which anchor the health care systems of whole regions. The university town is often shaded a deep, lusty blue. But the surrounding areas which rely on its resources and hospitals are often quite red. I note this as only one example. Universities also manage a great deal of national security adjacent technologies. There are many examples. This kind of messaging is way outside of the modern university’s comfort zone. But if you’re only dealing in private channels with federal authorities you might as well not even be fighting.
Fourth: Creative litigation. It’s just one tool. But it’s an important one. And the most effective examples are often from litigants who themselves aren’t easily the subject of retaliation.
Fifth: A point I heard made again and again in my email exchanges is, what are the limits? What sacrifices or concessions are manageable and which aren’t? Again, these decisions aren’t up to me, obviously. I’m just trying to propose a way to think about it.
This is like one of the 15-round heavyweight fights I used to watch with my dad back in the 1970s. It’s a slog. Your goal is to win but it almost certainly won’t be by a knock out. You’re going to punch a lot and you’re going to get hit a lot. And sometimes you’ll take some punches to wear your opponent out or to shepherd your own strength. It’s not a purity thing. It’s a survival and winning thing. As long as you’re fighting, that’s all fine.