reaching the opt-outs

Posted on April 28, 2025 by Peter

In today’s New York Times, Rob Flaherty, who was Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager, argues that Democrats lose “opt-out voters,” people who distrust all politicians and all traditional media and who obtain their politically relevant information from other sources, such as online influencers or real-life contacts who follow the influencers. These “opt-outs” may start out looking for tips on health or nutrition or relationships or gaming (not politics), but they find their way to right-wing propaganda.

I can support some of these generalizations with data from the 2020 American National Election Study. (I don’t think 2024 data are available yet). For example:

61.5% of strong Republicans and 5.5% of strong Democrats expressed no trust in the media.
26% of strong Republcans and 8% of strong Democrats fully agreed that “Much of what people hear in schools and media are lies by those in power.”
6% of strong Republicans and 30% of strong Democrats trusted experts much more than ordinary people for public policy.
Of those who said they did not follow the 2020 campaign using any source listed on the survey, 57% said they intended to vote for Trump; 27% for Biden.

It would be possible to overstate this problem. If most Americans only got information from unreliable influencers, then Trump’s approval rating would not have declined across most of the population in 100 days, before his tariffs and cuts had directly affected many people. If influencers had persuaded everyone to hate civil servants and researchers, then DOGE’s personnel cuts would not be as unpopular as they are. Evidently, many non-Democrats are seeing hard news. Nevertheless, Flaherty’s diagnosis is important.

His recommendation is to build an alternative media environment that carries people from “culture” (their interests in regular things like health or relationships) to liberal political ideas.

I doubt this approach is realistic, and it creates more of conflict or even contradiction for the institutionalist center-left than it does for the MAGA right (or, indeed, for the radical left). Basically, it asks liberals who believe in institutions to use anti-institutionalist means, which looks hypocritical and may prove impossible.

Here is an alternative: People have reasons to trust big, impersonal systems only when the human representatives of those systems relate to them well. For example, I trust the mainstream scientific views of vaccines and climate change not because I understand all the science, but because human beings who represent science as an institution–my own k12 and college teachers, doctors and nurses, and now my academic colleagues–have generally earned my trust. They relate to me with respect, as a fellow citizen.

Actually, not even scientists understand the science, because the necessary knowledge exceeds any person’s capacity (and much of it is built into instruments and software and datasets that each user must simply trust). But some of us have confidence in the whole process because we have benefitted from most of the moments when it has touched us directly.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens calls this process “re-embedding”: contacts between abstract systems and ordinary people via professionals who represent the systems. To be honest, I have never read a significant amount of Giddens, but I take his vocabulary from a relevant article by Mills and St Clair (2025).

The employees who are points of contact between abstract systems and regular people include teachers and professors (and educational administrators), doctors and nurses, lawyers and police officers, local elected officials, and reporters.

Americans have widely differing experiences with these professionals and varying grounds for trust. If you are at risk of being stopped and harassed by the police on account of your race, you do not have a reason to trust the criminal justice system. If your doctor dismisses your concerns, or you can’t even afford to see one, then you have less reason to trust the health sciences. If you can’t get into college, can’t afford the tuition, or experience contempt for your home culture in a college classroom, then our trust in academia is bound to fall. If your kids’ k12 school is failing–or if it seems driven by standardized curricula and tests and there’s no way for parents to engage–then you have reasons to be skeptical of schools.

For center-left institutionalists, I don’t think there’s any shortcut. In an environment where it pays to attract outrage by attacking abstract systems, we must make these systems as accountable, caring, and interactive as possible so that people will have reasons to trust them more.

The goal is for people’s “influencers” to be their own kids’ teachers, their doctors, and the reporters for their local newspaper (among others). This requires not just encouraging them to trust people who often have more education, power, and income than they do, but also making these professionals more consistently trustworthy.

Source: Mills, M. Anthony, and Price St. Clair. “The Strange New Politics of Science.” Issues in Science and Technology 41, no. 3 (Spring 2025): 40–48. https://doi.org/10.58875/NDTQ1755. See also to restore trust in schools and media, engage people in civic life; my own trust in institutions; it’s no accident that people distrust institutions (2017); and many other posts.

remarks on partisanship

Posted on April 25, 2025 by Peter

(Columbus) These are my notes for a talk today at Ohio State University on the assigned topic of “civic partisanship”:

If “partisanship” means active membership in a political party, then it is desirable. Parties can be worthy components of our civil society, especially when parties are internally diverse and meaningfully organized at the local and state levels. However, participation in party organizations is very rare today. Parties have become labels for entrepreneurial politicians, and sometimes for voters, rather than organizations that do anything at the local, state, or national level.

For example, in my state of Massachusetts, which is heavily Democratic, the state Democratic Party has 6 employees and an annual budget of $7 million in an election year. In her uncompetitive reelection race the same year, one candidate, Elizabeth Warren, spent $28 million. Most people who volunteer in politics will work for candidates, not a party.

If a political party is not an organization but a label that people attribute to themselves and others, then partisanship is at least somewhat problematic. It discourages deliberation and cooperation with people who hold a different party label.

First, partisanship can encourage hostility. Affective polarization means disliking people of the opposite party. It has risen symmetrically for Democrats and Republicans to alarming levels. In 2020, the ANES asked people to rate the parties on a 10-point scale. Giving the other party a zero score suggests that one is affectively polarized. By that standard, just eight percent of Democrats and five percent of Republicans were affectively polarized in 1978. These rates rose steadily in both parties during the 2000s, reaching 48% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats in 2020. That year, more than half of Republicans over the age of 60 rated Democrats at zero.

Note that youth were not especially polarized compared to older people. About 38% of people under 30 who identified as Republicans or Democrats rated the opposite party at zero. So if affective polarization is a problem, it is not especially a youth problem, and it’s hard to see K12 or college education as the main solution.

Second, even if it’s not hostile, partisanship can replace independent thinking about issues. There is no a priori reason that beliefs about Ukraine, vaccination, tariffs, abortion, and immigration should cluster in two ways, labeled Democratic and Republican. People should combine these issues in diverse ways. But there is evidence that many people put their beliefs together in packages based on cues from party elites.

That would be OK if it represented a valid division of labor. We could imagine that responsible and accountable professional leaders think carefully about issues and propose combinations of beliefs to busy citizens, who benefit from the professionals’ guidance. However, the influence of party leaders is problematic if they are self-interested and unaccountable, which is how I would broadly characterize elites today. Besides, in a two-party system, the choice of elites is badly constrained.

Third, when partisan labels are associated with left and right, this encourages a mental model in which everyone can be located on a spectrum. The very idea of polarization presumes that the left and right are located far apart or are moving further apart. This is a metaphor, not a fact, and it is misleading. People actually hold many beliefs that are more or less connected to each other with reasons. For example, I support Ukraine because I oppose authoritarianism. That is a pair of connected beliefs. Combinations of beliefs and reasons form networks. In any given group, individuals’ networks prove diverse when you map them. I have found that people who identify with the same party and leaders have unique networks.

When we think of people as polarized, we erase their individual thinking, which, in turn, discourages deliberation. There can be a vicious cycle in which we describe people as polarized, ignoring their uniqueness, which encourages them to become less individual and critical.

These points imply that we should teach students to appreciate actual parties but to be suspicious of partisan labels as heuristics. I also want to raise one other issue related to partisanship and civic education.

We have a civic religion in the USA, whose scripture is the Constitution. It is often used as the outline for studying government and politics. But the US Constitution does not mention parties, and its authors saw parties as grave threats to republican government. In a curriculum shaped by the text of the Constitution, political parties belong under the First Amendment as associations. This is misleading because they are integral to the political system.

What’s more, parties may be fatal to a constitution that establishes a presidential republic. In 1990, Juan Linz observed that every presidential republic except the USA had failed because the president sooner or later came into conflict with the legislature and was either defeated or became an authoritarian. One explanation of the survival of the US Constitution is that our two parties long encompassed opposing factions, notably white supremacist southern Democrats and progressive northern Democrats. Therefore, presidents were able to govern like prime ministers, assembling majority coalitions in Congress. That option ended during the Clinton Administration, when the parties sorted. Arguably, the Linzian nightmare has since played out.

94% of the time that the government has been shut down because of a conflict between the president and Congress has occurred since 1995. Three out of four presidential impeachments have taken place since then, but they have had no consequences for the president. Presidents of both parties have governed via executive order. Most recently, Trump has signed fewer laws but issued more consequential executive orders than any predecessor in the first 100 days.

If Linz’ theory is playing out, then it is political miseducation to teach students that the Constitution is an excellent design that, among other things, allows parties to flourish as voluntary associations. Perhaps the Constitution is, after all, a suicide pact. Students should at least be able to wrestle with that possibility. That would mean, not so much criticizing partisan attitudes or habits of thinking, but critically assessing a constitutional order that cannot handle parties as we know them.

summative questions after a semester of 20th century political philosophy

Posted on April 22, 2025 by Peter

I’ve been discussing these texts all semester with a very intense and dedicated group of students. In our final discussions, we are considering the following questions (or as many as we have time for):

What are the roles of reasoning and/or deliberation (Mill, Dewey, Arendt, Habermas), as opposed to unconscious emotions and/or interests (Freud, Adorno) in modern politics?
How do complex mass societies manage information, and how should they? Options include bureaucracies (Weber), free speech (Mill), price signals (Hayek), organic intellectuals (Gramsci), corporate propaganda (Horkheimer & Adorno), small-scale politics (Arendt), surveillance (Foucault), or institutions of civil society (Dewey, Habermas).
What causal factors are important in history? E.g., class struggle (Marx, Gramsci), Darwinian selection among ideas and institutions (Hayek, Weber, Foucault), intentional deliberation and learning (Mill, Dewey), great men (Mussolini), or conflicts among enemies (Schmitt, Mussolini, perhaps Fanon).
What is the potential of direct democratic self-rule as understood by Marx (in “The Civil War in France”), Luxemburg, duBois, Dewey, Arendt, or Fanon? What are its likely limitations, according to Schmitt, or Weber, or Habermas? How does decentralized democracy compare to market decentralization (Hayek)?
How should we think about positive and negative liberty (Berlin) in the light of other accounts of freedom by, e.g., DuBois, Foucault, or de Beauvoir?
What defines “liberalism” and how does it look from the perspective of a class revolutionary (Gramsci), a Black American thinker (DuBois), a revolutionary colonial subject (Fanon), or a woman (de Beauvoir)?
In 1945, Arendt wrote, “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” What, if anything, does evil mean in the context of earthly politics? Should we talk about evil?
What can political thinkers contribute? E.g., a prophetic voice (Marx, Benjamin, possibly Dewey, possibly de Beauvoir), detached analysis (Weber, early Foucault, perhaps Horkheimer and Adorno), or concrete involvements in public life (Dewey, Gramsci, DuBois, Fanon, late Foucault).
Are the questions of the 21^st century different from those of the 20^th?

This is beautiful, scolds the mind

Posted on April 21, 2025 by Peter

This is beautiful, scolds the mind,
Seeing the mind wandering.
It ransacks its lexicon to find
Other words, pondering
Lovely, rare, or perhaps sublime
As sounds with which to hold the mind
That skitters anxiously through time
And which the things in view remind
Of other things undone, unfixed.
Disapproving, the mind regards
Itself distracted, not transfixed.
The whole it had glimpsed: now in shards.
The mind a problem for the mind,
A solid door has shut behind.

envisioning a new model for higher education

Posted on April 18, 2025 by Peter

Harvard is prominent in the news because of its battle with the Trump Administration. The model that Harvard epitomizes is worth fighting for, but fragile. While defending it, we should also be thinking about radical alternatives.

Harvard spends more than $6 billion per year, drawing its revenue from philanthropy (45%), tuition, including executive education (21%), research grants (16%), and an “other” category (18%) that includes clinical fees and intellectual property.

Harvard spends very large sums on scientific research and depends on the federal government and wealthy donors for a majority of its budget. It’s largely an illusion that philanthropy provides financial aid. With an endowment of $2.1 million per student, Harvard could charge zero tuition for all. Instead–and, I think, understandably–it charges a high sticker price for those who are able to pay, offers steep discounts for others, and uses a large proportion of its net revenue for research.

The advantages are whatever benefits society obtains from the research. The vulnerability is the university’s dependence on national politicians and the donors who dominate its board of trustees. From an outsider’s perspective, another drawback is that the university rejects an extraordinary proportion of the people who might want to study or work there. Its exclusiveness makes it a rewarding political target.

Such universities also face internal conflicts when federal grants or endowment funds are threatened, because their funding models vary drastically within the institution. For example, the Harvard Divinity School is really financed by endowment returns, obtaining few grants and little tuition revenue. The much larger Harvard Medical School gets a majority of its funds from grants or clinical revenues and only 27% from endowment. The Law School relies on tuition for 43% of its revenue, as compared to 10% in the Medical School. If the trustees stop donating, the market falls, or the federal government suspends all grants, the repercussions will be very uneven. At Columbia, internal conflicts between STEM programs and the liberal arts contributed to its weak response to the Trump administration.

Of course, the Harvard model is not relevant across academia. Wesleyan, which has been courageously opposing the Trump Administration, received a total of $11 million in government and private grants in 2024, representing four percent of its revenues. Wesleyan does not generate the kind of labor- and capital-intensive research that Harvard produces, so it is much less vulnerable.

Most US college students attend public institutions that are not research-intensive or endowed, where tuition really dominates revenue. If Trump’s assault on higher education succeeds, it will cause massive damage on some campuses and have little effect on others.

Traditionally, one way that Americans have responded to crises is by creating new types of colleges–from Calvinist beacons in the 1600s, to Black institutions in Reconstruction, to the California public system after WWII (and many other examples). However, I have shown that the rate at which new institutions are launched has fallen to an all-time low. And, despite the prevalence of several different basic models, the degree of similarity across categories of universities is striking. Each research-intensive university operates largely like all the others.

Here is an alternative that we might consider today:

A new institution would be a cooperative owned and run by its employees, with considerable involvement by students.

The college would incorporate as a nonprofit but only accept donations into its general fund (no earmarks), and its governing board would be elected by its employees plus some student representatives. Employees and students could accept grants and contracts, but there would be no sponsored research office, so the college would be ineligible for most federal grants.

It would minimize costs. It would not provide housing or many services to students outside of the classroom. (As a result, it would be less appropriate for students who have various kinds of needs.) Faculty, staff, and students would do a lot of the management by rotating on committees.

The base tuition price might be set at $12,000, with a faculty/student ratio of 15:1, producing about $180,000 per instructor, which would be divided between instructors’ salaries, benefits, and additional staff (such as accountants, facilities workers, an IT department, etc.). Financial aid would, for the most part, consist of salaries for student workers who would provide essential support. So more financial aid would equal lower staff costs.

The location would have to be urban or suburban, because this would be a commuter school. It could be located in an underserved city, perhaps one of the cities that ring Appalachia. Or, for symbolic reasons–and because there are educational advantages to studying in Washington–it could take residence in the Nation’s Capital.

This design is meant to maximize autonomy and accessibility and serve as a refuge if the existing models succumb to political pressure.

affective partisanship and young people

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Peter

Affective partnership means disliking people who belong to a competing party. This attitude can be defensible in certain circumstances, but it certainly poses an obstacle to regular democratic processes.

To measure it, I use the American National Election Study’s “partisan thermometer” question, which asks people to rate members of the other party from 0-10.

The graph below shows the proportions of Democrats and Republicans who rate the other party at zero. These proportions have risen rapidly and basically symmetrically, although in 2020, Republicans were somewhat more hostile to Democrats than vice-versa. (Data from 2024 are not yet available.)

The bar graph with this post adds detail about young adults from the 2020 election. That year, young Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to rate each other at zero. Democrats’ levels of affective polarization did not change with age, but older Republicans were more polarized than younger ones. Indeed, a majority of Republicans over 60 rated Democrats at zero that year, and older Republicans accounted for the difference between the parties that is evident in the line graph.

In short, if affective polarization is a problem, it is not particularly a youth problem, which means that solutions cannot depend on civic education alone.

Reading Arendt in Palo Alto

Posted on April 14, 2025 by Peter

During a recent week at Stanford, I reread selections from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (ON) and The Human Condition (HC) to prepare for upcoming seminar sessions. My somewhat grim thoughts were evidently informed by the national news. I share them here without casting aspersions on my gracious Stanford hosts, who bear no responsibility for what I describe and are working on solutions.

I can imagine telling Arendt that Silicon Valley has become the capital of a certain kind of power, explaining how it reaches through Elon Musk to control the US government and the US military and through Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to dominate the global public sphere. I imagine showing her Sand Hill Road, the completely prosaic—although nicely landscaped—suburban highway where venture capitalists meet in undistinguished office parks to decide the flow of billions. This is Arendt’s nightmare.

For her, there should be a public domain in which diverse people convene for the “speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing” that constitutes politics (OR 24).

Politics enables a particular kind of equality: the equal standing to debate and influence collective decisions. Politics also enables a specific kind of freedom, because a person who decides with others what to do together is neither a boss nor a subordinate but a free actor.

Politics allows us to be–and to be recognized–as genuine individuals, having our own perspectives on topics that also matter to others (HC 41). And politics defeats death because it is where we concern ourselves with making a common world that can outlast us. “It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us” (HC 55).

Politics excludes force against fellow citizens. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence” (HC 26). Speech is not persuasive unless the recipient is free to accept or reject it, and force destroys that freedom. By the same token, force prevents the one who uses it from being genuinely persuasive, which is a sign of rationality.

Musk’s DOGE efforts are clear examples of force. But I also think about when Zuckerberg decided to try to improve the schools of Newark, NJ. He had derived his vast wealth from developing a platform on which people live their private lives in the view of algorithms that nudge them to buy goods. He allocated some of this wealth to a reform project in Newark, discovered that people were ungrateful and that his plan didn’t work, and retreated in a huff because he didn’t receive the praise or impact that he expected to buy.

From Arendt’s perspective, each teenager in Newark was exactly Zuckerberg’s equal, worthy to look him in the eye and say what they they should do together. This would constitute what she calls “action.” However, Zuckerberg showed himself incapable of such equality and therefore devoid of genuine freedom.

Musk, Zuckerberg, and other tech billionaires understand themselves as deservedly powerful and receive adulation from millions. But, says Arendt, “The popular belief in ‘strong men’ … is either sheer superstition … or is a conscious despair of all action, political and non-political, coupled with the utopian hope that it may be possible to treat men as one treats other ‘material'” (HC 188).

There is no public space on Sand Hill Road. Palo Alto has a city hall, but it is not where Silicon Valley is governed. And the laborers “who with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life” (Aristotle) are carefully hidden away (HC 72).

Arendt describes how economic activity has eclipsed politics in modern times. Descriptions of private life in the form of lyric poetry and novels have flourished–today, thousands of fine novels are available on the Kindle store–a development “coinciding with a no less striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture” (HC 39). In her day, corporations still built quite impressive urban headquarters, like Rockefeller Center, which continued the tradition of the Medici Palace or a Rothschild estate. But Sand Hill Road is a perfect example of wealth refusing to create anything of public value. Unless you are invited to a meeting there, you just drive by.

Arendt acknowledges that people need private property to afford political participation and to develop individual perspectives. We each need a dwelling and objects (such as, perhaps, books or mementos) that are protected from outsiders: “a tangible. worldly place of one’s own” (HC 70). But we do not need wealth. Arendt decries the “present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole” (HC 61). For example, to own a great deal of stock is not to have property (the basis of individuality) but to be part of a mass society that renders your behavior statistically predictable, like a natural phenomenon (HC43). All those Teslas that cruise silently around Palo Alto are metaphors for wealth that is not truly private property.

Much of the wealth of Silicon Valley comes from digital media through which we live our private lives in the view of algorithms that assess us statistically and influence our behavior. For Arendt, “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow” (HC 71). She is against socialist and communist efforts to expropriate property, but she also believes that privacy can be invaded by society in other ways (HC72). She expresses this concern vaguely, but nothing epitomizes it better than a corporate social media platform that becomes the space for ostensibly private life.

Artificial Intelligence represents the latest wave of innovation in Silicon Valley, producing software that appears to speak in the first-person singular but actually aggregates billions of people’s previous thought. Arendt’s words are eerie: “Without the accompaniment of speech .., action would not only lose its revelatory power, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would be incomprehensible” (HC 178).

The result is a kind of death: “A life without speech and without action … is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (HC 176).

CIRCLE report: How Does Gen Z Really Feel about Democracy?

Posted on April 9, 2025 by Peter

My colleagues at CIRCLE have issued a report with Protect Democracy that is based on a nationally representative sample of citizens between 18 and 29 that they conducted soon after last fall’s election.* At the heart of the study is a categorization of young American citizens into three groups. In the words of the report, these groups are characterized by:

Passive Appreciation: The majority of youth (63%) value the basic values and practices of democracy, but they are relatively disengaged from civic action and may be passive in the face of current threats to democracy.

Dismissive Detachment: Nearly a third of young people express lower support for core democratic principles; they are “checked out” of a democracy that has not served them well or met their needs.

Hostile Dissatisfaction: A small (7%) but significant number of young people believe in the principles of our system of government, but are extremely dissatisfied with our democracy as it exists today, and they are willing to consider political violence in order to achieve change.

The first group is relatively likely to be conservative (or perhaps less likely to be on the left) and less likely to be queer. Members of this group not very involved with civic actions like volunteering and protesting.

Those who exhibit “dismissive detachment” tend to have less education and are more likely to be people of color. They “are less likely to value the basic principles of democracy such as free and fair elections, the protection of civil rights, and bipartisan cooperation.” They are more hostile to people who disagree with them and feel less efficacious in politics. They have the lowest media literacy and other civic skills.

People in the “hostile dissatisfaction” group are more likely to be on the left and more likely to be queer. “Youth with this profile do tend to value the principles and rights of our democracy, scoring slightly above average in those areas. But they have very low confidence in democracy as they are experiencing it today.” They express strongly negative views of people with the opposite political ideology, which could be labeled “affective polarization.” They are the most engaged in political action and also the most favorable to violence.

You can read the whole report here. It offers important insights for anyone who provides civic engagement and civic learning to young people in this moment.

*Apau, D., Suzuki, S., Medina, A., Booth, R.B. (March, 2025). How Does Gen Z Feel About
Democracy? Insights from Three profiles of Youth and Democracy. CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) & Protect Democracy.

Gen Z and rebuilding the federal workforce

Posted on April 3, 2025 by Peter

In The Nation, Sena Chang reports that young people who might have sought (or already had) federal jobs are looking elsewhere. That is bad for the government and for young adults, who will miss opportunities to develop skills and networks. Chang quotes University of Michigan Prof. Robin Jacob, who says, “I think it is quite likely that we will see a decline in youth participation and representation in the federal government and in government more generally over the next several years.”

That’s true, but I also want to look forward. Chang quotes me: “Levine believes that restoring the civil service may fall to the next generation. ‘At some point, the executive branch will have to be rebuilt with hundreds of thousands of new workers, many of whom will be young,’ he said. ‘Rebuilding the government is going to be the opportunity and the calling of Generation Z.’”

I know this is optimistic in the sense that it presumes a relatively good scenario–a successor to Trump who is a Democrat or a more conventional Republican and who wants to rebuild the civil service. That outcome is by no means guaranteed. But it is very possible. We must contemplate the relatively good scenarios as well as the worst ones.

Whatever he wants to accomplish, one thing that Trump achieves by talking about 2024 as the last time you’ll have to vote–or when he hints at running again in 2028–is to discourage opponents from planning for a recovery. If we apply frameworks of democratic decline or collapse, whether drawn from the 1930s or from recent examples around the world, we can convince ourselves that the end of democracy is inevitable. But Brownlee & Miao (2022) find that governments that have slid into authoritarianism fairly often move back to democracy. More generally, history is not inevitable; it depends on us.

A profound struggle over the nature of America is underway. That struggle is not over and is not lost. One ingredient of success is envisioning the consequences of victory. Gen Z has a particular role to play.

how to engage our universities in this crisis

Posted on March 31, 2025 by Peter

I write after the Trump Administration has abducted our beloved student Rumeyza Öztürk (please read the profile of her by her department) for contributing a well-reasoned op-ed to our campus discussion.

Many of us are familiar with a framework in which the university is a powerful institution with resources and discretion. For example, it decides whom to admit to the middle (or upper) class and what to teach them along the way. A university may be complicit with other institutions, investing in South Africa in the 1980s or fossil fuels today. It is an “it”–potentially a target of our pressure–not a “we” whose actions reflect us.

Naturally, then, the activist’s toolkit prominently includes tactics like insisting that the institution speak on the issues of the day, occupying the administration building, or demanding that the college divest from certain companies or industries.

Some of this script has become almost automatic, and I hear it right now. But the traditional framework and toolkit do not necessarily apply when the federal government is making college students and employees and the institutions themselves into targets and victims.

Christopher Rufo has disclosed his goal of putting “universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets …. in a way that puts them in an existential terror.” Before we occupy administration buildings, we might want to think about whether Rufo would be glad to hear about that extra pressure. Indeed, the eerie quiet on many campuses probably reflects a realization that the usual toolkit won’t work.

A university is not the enemy. It is not alien to us. To a considerable extent, it is a victim, and resistance should be directed at those who bully it. We should also recognize genuine limitations that confront administrators and other official representatives of universities.

First, they must negotiate with–and litigate against–a hostile federal government. When you negotiate or litigate, you don’t disclose your strengths and weaknesses or your strategy.

Second, the administration can target colleges one by one and pick on any that are especially bold. As my friend Archon Fung says, “If you’re just considering Harvard University or Columbia University all by itself, maybe it is organizationally rational to try to get the best deal that you can … But that might be quite bad for higher education as a whole.” The most effective actors may not be individual institutions but coalitions (like the Mutual Academic Defense Compact proposed for Big Ten Academic Alliance) or independent actors like the ACLU.

Third, administrative positions are not tenured. Of course, resigning can be the right thing to do. But the problem is not that individuals may lose their jobs; it is rather that an institution can be held responsible for what each administrator says.

These are reasons to give each university’s administration a bit of grace. On the other hand, their business is our business. As members of a university community, we have the right and obligation to debate what it should do and to express our views about that question.

Although universities are not democracies, they must have public spheres. As Hannah Arendt writes, tyrants “all have in common the banishment of the citizens from the public realm and the insistence that they mind their private business while only the ruler should attend to public affairs” (The Human Condition, p. 221). According to Eric Calvin and Calvin Woodward, Trump recently “marveled” that universities are “bending and saying ‘Sir, thank you very much, we appreciate it.’” That “sir” is yet another indication that we are renouncing republican virtues of self-respect and honesty as we slide into tyranny. It is like the sudden doffing of hats to aristocrats that marked the end of the Florentine republic.

So what does it mean to make the the business of the university our business? For one thing, we must discuss how it should respond to existential threats.

I am just back from a quick visit to Columbia University, and I suspect that Maya Sulkin’s article entitled “Columbia President Says One Thing to Trump Admin—and Another in Private” gives a pretty good flavor of the way things have played out there. President Armstrong, who resigned on the day I visited, negotiated a deal with the Trump Administration and then reportedly tried to manage “the depth of the faculty’s frustration” with the arrangement by telling them that she would not fully comply with it. This is not exactly an accountable and public process.

Much is happening under the surface. In the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Belkin writes, “Columbia University is fighting two wars at once. One rages publicly against President Trump, whose administration in recent days ordered the arrest of a student protester and canceled federal funds to the Ivy League school over allegations of antisemitism. The second conflict simmers behind the scenes: a faculty civil war that pits medical doctors and engineers against political scientists and humanities scholars.”

This conflict began last year, when Columbia’s STEM professional school faculty were (in general) more likely to oppose the anti-Israel protests than liberal-arts faculty were. The conflict has intensified now that the Trump administration is holding Columbia’s STEM funds hostage in return for actions against the protesters and their faculty allies. Such intramural conflicts will intensify when any university must make deep cuts as a result of federal actions.

Looking beyond Columbia, Ian Bogost reports that he’s “spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.” It would come, basically, in the form of drastic cuts in federal grants, overhead funds, and financial aid that would destroy the current business model.

As they say in community organizing, power corrupts, but so does powerlessness. It is a mark of powerlessness to be satisfied with expressing the opinion that a university should refuse the Trump administration’s demands. Are you sure that would be the right thing to do? Do you know the costs and risks? Do you have the information that you would need to decide? Should you have the information, or would secrecy better serve the university’s interests in negotiations? Meanwhile, what are you doing to weaken the government’s side in the conflict?

As Columbia’s crisis unfolded, I would have wanted to know: How likely would the university be to prevail in our actual federal courts if it refused to comply? Would a First Amendment (or statute-based) lawsuit win? Further, what else could the Trump Administration do if the university fought back in court? For instance, revoke all visas of foreign-citizen students and employees? Cancel the university’s nonprofit status so that it would have to pay corporate taxes? How likely would the university be to prevail in lawsuits against those actions?

Next, what would happen financially if the university lost its federal funding? Columbia has an endowment worth more than $14 billion, but most of that is permanently earmarked for specific purposes; it can’t be used to replace canceled federal contracts. How much is available for flexible purposes? Could the university borrow against the endowment, and on what terms?

What would it look like to fire the employees who had been covered by federal funds, versus retaining many of those people and cutting others? How would the internal politics of the university play out if the budget were dramatically cut? Would the STEM fields or the liberal arts prevail? Would the university cut early-stage faculty without tenure or could it compel senior faculty to retire? On the other hand, could the institution gain–for example, reputationally–if it went into full revolt?

I suspect these questions are quite hard. I am sympathetic to many current campus leaders–although not all, because some appear to be cowards. But their business is our business, and we need to shoulder it.

As we respond, we must acknowledge the full extent of the threat and contemplate radical responses, including restructuring our institutions to survive. But we must not yield to fatalism. Ian Bogost’s fine article might suggest–although he doesn’t say so explicitly–that the DOGE cuts (and more that will come) are permanent. On the contrary, Trump’s actions can be reversed. His successor would not even need congressional approval, because support for higher education is already required by federal law. And colleges have powerful constituencies distributed across the country.

In short, the battle is joined, but it is by no means lost. The antagonist is not in your campus administration’s building but in the White House. Individual universities may make good or bad choices; so can each of us. A robust debate is essential; consensus is impossible and probably undesirable. We must be citizens, not spectators; sober but not demoralized; realistic and also idealistic as we struggle to make our institutions better than they were before.

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