It strikes me that if people are really interested in what this going to look like, they should look to what’s been happening to the humanities and social sciences for the past… decade or more?
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Oh, a lot longer than that. Predates Reagan, even.
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Oh for sure, but in the wake of the 2008 crash, it really intensified and got some serious traction due to budget constraints that many public universities were facing. For years, GSU had a hiring freeze, and when that let up, in the history department, they did not extend tenure lines, but only hired full time lecturers… There were entire history departments that ended up being cut in some places. No one I went to school with ended up with a tenure track job, I don’t think, only hired as lecturers. And of course, there has always been far less $$$ for the humanities anyway, with the National Endowment for the humanities never being as well funded as the sciences. On top of that, corporations have been stepping in for the drop in funding in STEM fields with various grants that has filled in the gap, there just isn’t nearly enough for the humanities.
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Maybe our entire society can re-imagine it’s relationship to the humanities? Isn’t THAT sort of the what’s at the heart of this problem? But hey, let’s just keep dumping time, money, talent, etc into ONE field of study, and then pretend like everything isn’t looking like nail, shall we? I mean, bro, do we even division of labor? OH, I know, let’s forget that whole making food thing, after all, computers can just MAKE us food, right? I mean, it’s in all the sci-fi books, it’s it’s inevitable, right? 
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MOST colleges and universities are engines of social mobility, not elitist institutions.
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The letter is up to thousands of signatures now.
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“I’m just protecting Jewish academics from antisemitism!” he said, while shutting down the universities.
“I’m just protecting women from trans in sport!” he said, while shutting down women’s sports.
“I’m just protecting black people from DEI discrimination!” he said, while deleting all history of black achievement.
It’s almost like he’s lying, or something.
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“Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.”
I don’t doubt that Stockwell sees his lifeworld in this way and that it would in fact be threatened in the way he says it will be. Without the millions and millions in federal funding that he and his colleagues luxuriate in, he would be sent plummeting into that netherworld, where high school and community college instructors reside, of “just teaching some classes”—and where, of course, many, many instructors at Columbia University also reside.
I’m not going to knock this knucklehead for seeing his lifeworld as it is, and stating it so forthrightly to the New York Times.
I am going to knock him for his utter lack of political sense:
a) not simply his full-frontal embrace of elitism and privilege, in the nation’s most important newspaper;
b) not simply his full-frontal embrace of elitism and privilege as a way, it seems, of trying to explain why the rest of us, inside or outside of academia, should care about protecting his elitism and privilege;
But also his utter failure to see that, whatever his path to glory and ascent has been in these past two decades, the only way forward, for him and his colleagues, in the coming months and years will be:
a) to start seeing all of academe as a workplace;
b) to start seeing all of his fellow creatures in academe as co-workers, as sources of solidarity;
c) and to start seeing all of the activities that go on in “just some classes” and offices and hallways and heating plants and cafeterias and so on, as not just real work with equal value to the work he does in his laboratory, but as real power.
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Speaking of Corey Robins’, he was on the show On the Media last weekend…
Worth the listen.
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Dear Professor Stockwell,
As a professional staff member of a major university, may I speak on behalf of university professional staff everywhere?
I hope you liked your email working and knowing where your network files were. I hope you liked being able to book classrooms, and labs, and have people look after your lab animals over the summer break. I hope you enjoyed the cleaning service, and the maintenance of the campus gardens and lawns.
Guess we’ll just stop doing all that, if it’s not important.
We know why we’re here: our job is to make sure you can do your job. But don’t you fucking dare make out that you could still do your job if we don’t. Because our ticket queues are calling you a liar.
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Langston Hughes is approved? I’m actually surprised at that.
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Right? A black, gay communist. 
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Hush! They don’t know that! It sounds like a perfectly respectable white lawyer.
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video
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