The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 4

On Tuesday, Dec. 5, presidents from Harvard (Claudine Gay), MIT (Sally Kornbluth), and the University of Pennsylvania (Elizabeth Magill) appeared before the Republican led House Committee on Education and the Workforce to give testimony about rising antisemitism on campus and the circumstances under which their own speech codes allowed antisemitism to rise unchecked. In her questioning Rep. Elise Stefanik asked the presidents in turn whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the respective university’s codes of conduct. Each president responded in turn that the answer was context specific. The following Saturday Magill resigned. The following Wednesday, the House passed a resolution condemning the testimony.

The university has been ground zero for the culture wars for decades. My first year at Michigan coincides with the first year the university created a speech code (or maybe it's a year later)—and the two aren’t coincidentally related as both my own attendance at the university and the speech code are byproducts of anti-racist protest. But if we aren’t careful we can miss some of the other important moving parts.

So one of the more important aspects of the neoliberal turn is the way its transformed higher education. We see students and their parents increasingly bearing responsibility for college tuition with merit based scholarships largely replacing grants. Here we see the concept of “human capital” at work—by placing responsibility on parents rather than the state, we create the incentive for parents to help develop their children’s capacities, inculcating in them a certain moral responsibility for their children’s development. If you know that you’re going to want to send your child to a prominent state university, you’re going to want to do a few different things. You’re going to want to spend the resources helping develop that child’s capacity to read and study independently, you’re going to want to spend the resources helping to cultivate and develop any talent that child has, and you’re going to want to spend your resources making sure to take full advantage of the summers through summer camps and enrichment programs.

Part of the shift from scholarship to grants comes from the federal government. But a big chunk of it comes from states themselves. And over the better part of over forty years, states have significantly reduced their per student appropriations. From a 2015 report on declining state expenditures:

The effect of placing more responsibility on parents and students for college tuition is to make public universities less accessible, and then to make those universities themselves more vulnerable to two dynamics.

They become more vulnerable to state legislative attempts to shape college functions. And over the past several years we’ve seen state legislatures seek to curtail tenure. In 2016 the Wisconsin state legislature approved the elimination of tenure from state statute. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis campaigned on ending Florida’s tenure system and in 2022 Florida’s senate passed a law requiring university faculty to undergo reviews every five years. In North Carolina several similar attempts died on the vine, however early in the year the board of trustees of its flagship university passed a resolution calling for the development of a School of Civic Life and Leadership. Of this resolution William Sturkey noted:

While Sturkey also noted in his commentary that the school’s faculty was hidden, that is no longer the case.

They also become more vulnerable to private attempts to shape college functions. And while schools like MIT, Harvard, and Penn (with a combined endowment of $95 billion) are not subject to state legislatures the way public universities are, they are subject to private donors. Against North Carolina’s School of Civic Life, we can put my university’s own Agora Institute (technically the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute) and its recently announced School of Government and Policy (housed in the former Newseum).

Coming back to the House Committee hearing, I noted that Penn President Elizabeth Magill stepped down. She did so after a number of donors either threatened to stop donating to the university, or did so. After similar calls for both MIT and Harvard’s president (whom I’ve known for years) to step down both university’s boards expressed support for them (MIT’s statement, Harvard’s statement).

But note the case of Bill Ackman (the link may be blocked by an NYT paywall). The first (and key) paragraphs:

It would’ve been smart for her to listen or at least pick up the phone.

Several years ago (in January 2016) I noted the following:

I was obviously wrong about Trump’s election chances. But I wasn’t wrong about where we were. We’re past the beginning of the beginning, and the university is and will continue to be one of the central sites of contestation.

In either the next issue or the one after that, I’ll continue this line of thinking. Over the past few years I’ve been involved in an attempt to transform political science through transforming the way the discipline tackles racial politics. While this project has obvious domestic implications, I think the current conflict in the Middle East points to the international implications of such a project.

(As an aside, as a result of a tinyletter glitch these issues are a bit off schedule-wise. You received the last issue somewhere around Dec. 17 or so, when I wrote it a week earlier. But as a result of this glitch I’m able to briefly address the new criticisms over Gay’s record. I’ll begin by stating that I know Gay, and have known her since she’d first started applying for jobs—the world of political science is pretty small. As far as publishing in top-tier journals goes she may be one of the best of our generation. I think if you ran the work of every tenured political scientist through an AI scan, you’d likely find passages that weren’t appropriately cited, and I’m including myself here. In fact, I’d extend this claim to include social scientists and humanities scholars in general. We generally work alone, we don’t run our own labs, and our methods of capturing citations and quotes are good enough to capture the important work—the work that shows our ideas are our ideas. But likely not good enough to capture and acknowledge every quote. Gay isn’t guilty of anything more than the equivalent of crossing the street during a green light. This is about creating the conditions to further delegitimize the liberal university, and the populations associated with it. It isn’t a coincidence the presidents they call to the stand are women. It isn’t a coincidence that when Gay doesn’t step down, they wield this particular attack. And I expect that this attack will be followed by others.)