The Counterpublic Papers vol. 9 no. 19

(I wrote the following a few weeks ago, before the hammer dropped at Michigan. Before Columbia was threatened with receivership. Hopefully it’s useful, even if we don’t have as much time as I thought we did when I wrote it.)

Since the 2025 Trump inaugural, we’ve witnessed the most vicious attack against the American university itself that we’ve seen since the 1950s. University activists have been disappeared, federal grants to universities have been cut, DEI programs have been eliminated, and at least one university has already taken the step of negotiating with the administration to save itself. If we take documents such as Project 2025 as well as the experience of universities in countries like Hungary at face value, we should assume that these actions are going to increase in scope and in intensity. Given this, we need a strategy of building a deep consensus both within the university (and its schools), across universities, and then across the country. 

Building collective power represents the best way of both contesting the administration and developing alternatives, and of doing so durably. Because of where we are situated as university employees, faculty (particularly tenured faculty) have the best opportunity to perform this task. In our role as teachers and mentors, we have access to students and alumni. In our role as the equivalent of university representatives (through faculty senates and like bodies), we have consensus forging capacity that can shape administrator behavior. Further we have access to other faculty (within our individual departments as well as within and across schools). Finally, in our role as (tenured) researchers we have employee and citizen protections that enable us to articulate objectively the causes and consequences of administration behavior.

What follows below is an attempt to apply this strategy to universities. 

Tactically, we should work to generate support among alumni, as alumni represent a significant source of university goodwill (and in their capacity as donors/future donors, resources). This can and should be done both through individual communications (individual faculty reaching out to former students), and through newsletters and the like. Alumni should both be made aware that the university is under attack and given a set of actions they can take to express support for the university and urge within/across university solidarity. These actions should include individual letters to the university president, and to the board of trustees, as well as petitions. Alumni who are members of alumni organizations should urge those organizations to draft letters and referenda that themselves urge the university president and the board of trustees/regents to express support for the university and urge within/across university solidarity. Alumni who are not members of alumni organizations should be urged to become members of said organizations in order to increase their voice. As some alumni often have contentious relationships with their alma mater, specific tactics may have to be developed to reach out to some populations.

Thoughts about black alumni more specifically. Black students are likely to be under specific threat. For them alumni need to work to create forms of mutual aid that can at worst provide black students and similar populations with emotional support and at best work to provide more material forms of aid. While the attacks on DEI are part of a much broader attack on universities, black alumni should work alongside black alumni at other universities (first similarly situated, then more broadly). Broader black alumni networks should be forged across universities, and these efforts much be lashed to efforts to protect the university more broadly. In working with other constituencies (faculty, university administrators) alumni have to convince them of two things:

1. The goal of autocrats is to end the independent university.

2. Given goal #1, universities and constituents who support universities must band together to resist administration actions. 

Black student protest has historically been a crucial part of democratizing the university. Over the short long term, protest activity must again be expanded and protected. 

Working to build consensus within the university requires a few different tactics.

University departments, particularly after the 2020 George Floyd protests, have been reluctant to pass public statements expressing political positions. But this does not preclude faculty working to generate some combination of private department statements, and private consensus. Here the equivalent of small faculty department working groups can be helpful.   

In universities with faculty senates (and similar bodies), these bodies must be urged to pass resolutions affirming the role of the university as an institution of higher learning and research, and urging the university president to forge coalitions with other universities. In many universities, faculty have only limited governance capacity, but even in these university types, resolutions can still work to generate consensus, and can also work to inform and mobilize faculty. We cannot and should not assume that all faculty members are as equally aware of what we confront, nor can we assume that all faculty members share our concerns. By getting faculty bodies across the university to pass the same resolution, we work to inform, mobilize, and head off potential attempts at collaboration.

Faculty have already begun to meet outside of departments and faculty governing bodies. As of this moment, these meetings have been virtual. While virtual meetings offer efficiency and ease, they should be supplemented as soon as possible with off campus face to face meetings. These meetings should be informal at the outset, and should themselves be supplemented with formal meetings. These informal meetings should function to develop trust and connection within and across the university, and should be extended across time—that is to say, individual attendees should be tasked with the responsibility of increasing attendance.

Some faculty have expertise in the causes and consequences of administrative behavior. Faculty here should take on the responsibility of informing broad publics, both within the general region of the university and across them. Talks at public libraries, conversations on podcasts and like forms of media, newsletters, etc, should all be used to both inform the public and enhance support for the general mission of public education. Further, as metropolitan regions are likely to be the focus of multiple administration attacks, this work can connect with broader attempts to generate resistance. 

Five final notes. 

In communicating across and within universities as well as to broader publics, care must be taken to express the broad nature of the attack against universities. The specific targets adopted by the administration (against DEI for example) have to be connected to the administration’s broad strategy of delegitimating and destabilizing the university as an institution. I make this argument primarily for empirical reasons, but for political ones as well. 

In urging administrative action, I focus on forging coalitions across universities to push against the notion that any single administrator or university has the capacity to stand up against administrative attacks. Authoritarian attacks against institutions requires institutional collaboration and solidarity, not individual heroic action. 

I focus on alumni rather than students because student protest capacity has been significantly diminished over the past several months, but also because in general our unique status as university employees makes any attempt to organize with students fraught.

I recognize that some faculty, administrators, presidents, and alumni may actively support administrative actions. The sooner we forge solidarities, more we hamstring collaborator capacity.

In writing this I have a timeline in mind. With less than one month left in the school year, with concentrated action we can and should be able to get resolutions passed in the various senates. It is possible we may be able to generate significant alumni support. And we should be able to have one mass faculty meeting.

If we can perform the work required to do these three things, we should be able to have the makings of something to build on over the summer and into the next school year.