Free Universities and Systemic Chains

No Compact

Sally Kornbluth does not stand alone. Last week I praised the President of MIT for being the first to reject the Trump administration’s attempt to bribe nine universities into accepting ideologically-motivated government control of their research and teaching. Now, as Alan Blinder reports in the New York Times, six more have refused to sign Trump’s so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence”: Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California, and the University of Virginia. Only the University of Texas has expressed interest in signing; Vanderbilt University has not weighed in.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

This string of defeats will not stop Trump’s minions. They’ve already approached other schools, no doubt hoping to create a bandwagon effect. For now, however, principled defenses of academic freedom have won out, supported by insight into why the societal autonomy of science is important.

In my previous post, I said the primary threats to such autonomy come from how global capitalism and the administrative state impinge on the institutions of science. Now I want to say more about the pressures these macrostructures create. First, however, we need to recognize that current authoritarian populist attacks on American universities have deeper historical roots.

Neoliberal Agenda

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leading advocates of neoliberalism (1982). Source: Reagan White House Photographs via Wikimedia Commons

My friend Creston Davis pointed this out when I began my series of posts on truth and science in early August. He emailed that the neoliberal agenda initiated in the 1970s by Ronald Reagan in the USA (and by Margaret Thatcher in the UK) accomplished “a profound ideological turn—one that reframed education as a private consumer good rather than a public right—laying the groundwork for the market-driven university and for today’s authoritarian attacks on the academy.” Creston is founding Chancellor of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, which directly challenges the neoliberal agenda: it treats education not as a commodity but as “a shared pursuit of knowledge, creativity, and truth.”

He explains that the neoliberal agenda for higher education “has operated on at least three linked fronts: (a) defunding public higher education by cutting tax-based support; (b) forcing universities to compensate for lost funding by raising tuition; and (c) generating a massive student debt crisis that now shapes the very possibilities of intellectual life.” (For more about this sorry history, see The Day the Purpose of University Changed from 2015 and What Caused the $1.6 Trillion Student Debt Crisis from 2024.)

That’s how we got to a situation where Trump can use federal research funding as a coercive bribe, and people increasingly wonder whether higher education is worth U.S. student loan debts totaling more than $1.8 trillion, according to the Education Data Initiative. As Creston writes, authoritarian populist attacks are “the culmination of decades of economic restructuring that has reshaped the academy into a debt-driven, market-oriented institution, eroding its autonomy from within even before external political assaults.”

Hypercommercialization and Performance Fetishism

Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash

This historical background helps us understand how the macrostructural systems of global digital capitalism and the administrative state put pressure on universities as centers in civil society for the pursuit of science-related education, research, and communication. Two systemic pressures pose ongoing threats to the relative independence of universities and thereby to the societal autonomy of academic work. One, stemming from how the capitalist economy operates, I call hypercommercialization. The other, stemming from how the administrative state works, I call performance fetishism.

Hypercommercialization is the tendency to treat the agents, practices, and results that are decisive for the social legitimacy of science as primarily economic commodities. Signs of this tendency include our marketing higher education for the competitive advantages it allegedly secures; restructuring universities according to narrowly construed cost/benefit ratios; and steering research toward projects that either attract corporate investments or generate new revenue streams. When left unchecked, hypercommercialization undermines the pursuit of scientific truth. It thereby destroys the social legitimacy of science in the broad sense that includes all academic disciplines.

The other systemic pressure—performance fetishism—is the tendency to subordinate all decisions about university planning, governance, and daily operations to strategic calculations with narrowly defined and measurable outcomes. This leads to an explosion of administrative positions to steer education and research toward calculable results. Indications of such calculative bureaucratization include “retooling” university curriculum and pedagogy to achieve immediate “effectiveness”; substituting administrative decision-making for deliberative faculty governance; and replacing full-time faculty with more easily managed part-time and adjunct faculty. When universities fully internalize the bureaucratic tendencies of the administrative state, the pursuit of scientific truth becomes a secondary “objective.” Or it turns into the quaint relic of a “pre-rational” past. Again, the social legitimacy of science is destroyed.

Universities are not innocent victims of systemic pressures beyond their control, however. For the systems that generate these pressures depend heavily on academic input. Moreover, universities themselves have internalized tendencies toward hypercommercialization and performance fetishism. That makes a proper interlinkage between universities and other social institutions all the more important.

Three long-term changes strike me as crucial for universities to find the requisite mixture of independence and interdependence under current macrostructural conditions: realignment, resistance, and critique. Each change would both presuppose and promote a robust pursuit of scientific truth. Let me briefly explain.

Realignment with Civil Society

First, universities need to renew and strengthen their ties with other institutions and organizations in civil society. Civil society is an informal macrostructure within which a diffuse array of institutions, organizations, and social movements foster social interaction in the arts, education, public media, social advocacy, and other fields. The primary societal principle to which it responds is the call to pursue solidarity in society. By solidarity, I mean the expectation within modern democratic societies that no individual, group, or community should be excluded from the recognition people owe each other as fellow human beings. [I give a more detailed account of civil society in Art in Public (Cambridge UP, 2011), pp. 89-203.]

Understood as a center in civil society, the university would not see its mission as either promoting a capitalist economy or advancing the agenda of the administrative state. Instead, its mission would consist in fostering a sociocultural good in the interests of society-wide solidarity. That sociocultural good is the pursuit of scientific truth.

The best way to foster this, and thereby also to resist systemic pressures, would be to align the university more decisively with community health providers, nonprofit arts organizations, public museums, noncommercial primary and secondary schools, and the like. Community-based research, service learning, and university-sponsored centers for social ethics are among the ways this alignment already takes place.

Internal Resistance

Such (re-)alignment won’t happen, however, unless universities also develop internal means to resist systemic pressures. That’s the second long-term change needed.

I can envision three means of resistance. One is to promote university-based centers for public education and deliberation about science policy. These centers would allow citizens, scholars, and students to debate the direction of scientific work and let these debates inform the decisions scholars make about their research projects. This would provide an alternative to having research agendas set by the dominant sources of funding.

A second means would be to promote critical reflection on the societal implications of academic endeavors within self-evaluations for funding, professional promotion, and program reviews. These would be self-evaluations, not external evaluations, designed to respect the integrity of academic work but not to allow the autonomy of science to function as a smoke screen for systemic business as usual.

The author and newly minted Dr. Michael DeMoor with a bust of Abraham Kuyper, founder of the VU Amsterdam, July 4, 2011

The third means of resistance, and by far the most drastic, would be to disentangle university budgets from both the corporate economy and government funding. Like several of my students, I received my PhD from the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam. When founded in 1880, the VU was set up to be free from both state and church control; hence its name. The university’s supporters would oversee its governance and help fund its operations. Today the VU remains free from church control. But it relies heavily on government funding, and with this comes a significant amount of state control. In that sense, it is no longer a “free” university, nor are most other universities around the world.

Can we imagine a future in which universities are no longer so dependent on corporate and government funding? Wouldn’t that be a key to securing their independence? Perhaps the current crisis of authoritarian attacks cracks open the doorway to a transformed economic model for higher education.

Systemic Critique

In addition to realigning with civil society and internally resisting systemic pressures, universities need to prioritize a critique of current economic and political systems. This critique would be both structural and normative.

Structurally, it would question the ways in which the capitalist economy and the administrative state have come to dominate so much of social life, including higher education. This structural critique would uncover the human suffering and environmental destruction such dominance brings and suggest alternative ways to reorganize society as a whole.

The requisite critique would also be normative. It would ask what the normative tasks of a life-giving economy and polity would be. And it would indicate how current economic and political institutions could better fulfill these tasks.

Fort du Mont Bart (Bavans, France). Photo by Thomas Bresson, via Wikimedia Commons

If universities care about the pursuit of scientific truth, then they’ll have to stand up to the very macrostructural systems that make their existence possible. The point of doing this is not to bite the hands that feed them. Rather, the point is to envision the transformation of these systems, and of universities as well, in the direction of greater fidelity to societal principles such as solidarity, resourcefulness, and justice and toward a life-giving disclosure of society. By fostering the pursuit of scientific truth in the direction of truth as a whole, universities would promote what I call a differential transformation of society. [See chapter 13 in my book Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2016), pp. 252-276.]

There’s no guarantee that authoritarian populists won’t win out in the end. But resisting them requires more than simply upholding academic privileges and institutional self-interests. It requires a fulsome embrace of the truth and freedom and solidarity that inspire legitimate and important academic work.

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