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@AsheeshKSi
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Assistant Professor @UMassHistory / @UMassPH "The Archive of Empire" @yalepress Info: Preorder:
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Though not "field defining," if you'd like 20% off my forthcoming book on archives, human difference, and the early modern British empire, you can order it from Tertulia using the code EMPIRE from now through August 31. You don't have to have a membership.
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Universities are like, “we foster close relationships between our faculty and our students by, for example, locking them up in the same jail cell.”
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The neoliberal university captured in a single photo. Individual empowerment discourse, pabulum about community ("our Texas"), and the coercive apparatus of the state.
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Please, everyone, remember this: the presence of police on Columbia's campus comes because of the request of the administration, in defiance of faculty governance. This is the authoritarian university in action.
According to Columbia by-laws, police are not supposed to be allowed on campus without the consent of the faculty. President Shafik does *not* have our approval for this raid; she has not even asked our approval. This promises to be a horrifying dereliction of faculty governance
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I’m a tenured Ivy League political scientist. Here’s why presenting a conference paper I wrote on the plane to 3 people at 8:30am on a Sunday is more important than paying hotel workers enough to eat.
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I think I need to write something about this very false notion. College administrators have not "lost their minds." It's not that "they don't know what they're doing." They are simply bringing the coercive practices of the neoliberal university to their logical end.
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This is a lie from the mayor. Columbia closed its campus to all non university ID holders days before, with security at every entrance checking IDs.
On MSNBC, Mayor Adams says the NYPD "had to do something" at Columbia University last night because of "outside agitators."
"We had to really move in for the safety of those children," he says.
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What, then, is the point of tenure?
Columbia Faculty know a red line has been crossed.
But they have to pay rent in NYC. They know that if they speak up or stand with the students they'll be treated just as harshly.
And that's exactly how the administrators and politicians who sent the cops to do this want it.
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Give away all your research funds and sabbaticals to the contingent faculty at Chicago in that case.
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The
@nytimes
doesn't cover academia: it covers Ivy League court intrigue and made-up things like "wokeness." The big stories in academia - adjunctification, the defunding of the humanities, etc. - never get any attention.
The NYT will publish 1,000 articles on elite discourse, on academia, on culture wars, for every one article on the material conditions of our world, the intentional destruction of the middle class by elites, child hunger and homelessness...
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I don't know if we're witnessing the beginning of the end of the neoliberal university, but we are certainly seeing its true face: pabulum about care, belonging, diversity, equity, and inclusion mixed with coercive, violent practices of control and discipline.
We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the neoliberal university, with all its bullying, pathetic lies, aggressive managerialism, and empty rhetoric. It’s some sight.
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The job is to teach - grading is bureaucratic bs. Hope that helps.
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My personal belief is that if you as a university president can't appear before your students because of your antagonistic, authoritarian behavior, you should find a new job.
INBOX: “President Shafik will not be in attendance at Columbia College's Class Day ceremony. Please note: this change is not reflected in printed programs.”
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“The annual salary for a full-time lecturer with a PhD ($65,000) is about 60 percent of the annual amount that the chancellor receives as a housing and car stipend ($108,000).”
At California State University, lecturers make less per month than the chancellor receives in housing and car allowances. The CSU faculty union wants the university to invest in high-quality teaching, not administrative bloat.
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The corporate university model needs to be wholly dismantled and universities need to be restructured around democratic practices of shared governance. It's been a disaster for curiosity-driven research and teaching, and very bad for surrounding communities.
I don’t think Columbia University will ever recover from this. This will be their legacy — a full out war on their students for peacefully protesting a U.S.-backed ethnic cleansing campaign that has systematically murdered nearly 40,000 people.
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The “care for students” era in higher ed is over. Time for the “solidarity with students” era.
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It’s interesting-when the issue was sexual harassment and assault on campus, universities strongly preferred internal disciplinary procedures. But with encamped protest, universities are immediately calling the city / state police.
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Re argument that Columbia/Barnard faculty won't do anything bc so many live in housing controlled by the university: many Columbia grad workers also live in university housing & still went on strike, so🤷& unlike many faculty, most grad workers don't have second homes upstate.
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I’ve said this before, but the big difference between industrial capital & tech capital is that the former had some appreciation for culture and the latter does not.
Most english majors lack a goal or a purpose. Why else would you major in your native language
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Have academics who insist on these sorts things ever considered how their obsessive need to police what other people do in the classroom is itself a form of carcerality?
“Features of the Carceral Syllabus” by Vincent and Dana Lloyd :
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I'm sure the Yale historians who've made a lot of money and got a lot of podcast subscribers in recent years off the democracy-is-in-danger bit will be very vocal and public in condemning administrative overreach on peaceful student protest on their own campus.
In an email just over an hour ago, Yale President Peter Salovey wrote that the morning arrest of 47 pro-divestment student protesters was because students did not heed administrators’ warnings. Salovey also described possible disciplinary action.
More:
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Proofs - it's really happening . . . coming fall 2024
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How many front page stories has
@nytimes
run about Gordon Gee’s destruction of West Virginia University or the Cal State strikes?
articles about Claudine Gay and her various "scandals" were top 5 featured stories on the New York Times homepage Dec 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 22, 25 and her firing is the now their top story. There is simply no way this is proportionate, sober or reasonable coverage
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Anytime students break out of the 'customer' role that financialized universities expect them to passively inhabit, they have to be policed - indeed, violently - back into what administrators consider their proper place.
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PhD students! You need a union! Your department isn't good enough on labor issues (indeed, it's probably bad). And your disciplinary association is a nightmare.
PhD students! You need a website! Your department website isn’t good enough. And LinkedIn is a nightmare.
Even if you’re not on the market yet, create a simple website so I can find you when I Google your name trying to offer you a job.
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Now more than ever, we see why the humanities matter. You aren’t going to get the critical analysis of institutions when everything is STEM.
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Why is it always “more people should get to go to Ivy League institutions” and not “we should tax wealthy private colleges and invest in high quality public higher education”?
How many students would it take for each Ivy League institution to increase their share of low- and moderate-income students by 5%?
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The people who run universities don't want the humanities to exist and will make up whatever metrics or rationales they need to get rid of them.
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I’m not buying the “Gay plagiarized so we have to hold her accountable” bc both Charles Ogletree and Alan Dershowitz also plagiarized and they weren’t forced to resign from their positions. Just seems like double standards. And Comaroff is still on the faculty . . .
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Zadie Smith's vile essay is merely the latest example of liberals' inability to distinguish real violence from speech.
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Occasional reminder that while elites obsess about whether Claudine Gay should still be president of Harvard, Gordon Gee is destroying public higher education in West Virginia yet remains president of WVU.
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It’s literally students, faculty, and staff vs. administration, trustees, and police for control of the future of higher ed. Democracy or fascism.
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No, I was not paid for the book. Academics do not get paid to write books for university presses. We are subsidized to do scholarship by employment, grants, fellowships etc., all things increasingly very hard to come by for historians right now.
@AsheeshKSi
You were paid for this book, right? Its coming out fall '24? I dont disagree w you, but you did just get $ to do what you are tweeting you cant get $ to do
Or am i old and whooshing sarcasm in your tweet
(In any case, the book looks great)
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Never ceases to depress me: you read someone's amazing article and then google tells you that they left the academy due to the horrid job market
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Loving the cover - and thanks for the very kind blurbs!
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Consulting firms sure making a hell of a lot of money off of universities that 'don't have the funds' to hire faculty and pay them fairly.
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This should be obvious, but measuring the worth of disciplines based on undergraduate enrollment/majors has a hugely negative distorting effect on our collective knowledge of the world.
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The
@nytimes
has 4 reporters covering Ivy League boardroom gossip that impacts the 1%, but has written only 1 story on the Cal State strike that shapes the working and learning conditions of hundreds of thousands
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Eric Hobsbawm rolling in his grave
My new book, Age of Revolutions, navigates the eras and movements across technology, economics and politics that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world.
Pre-order now.
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People in academia already know this, but for those unfamiliar: Bill in this post provides a very transparent account of how billionaires buy influence through donations at elite private universities. Meanwhile, they get out of paying taxes and public education suffers.
The
@nytimes
published a story today with the headline: "Bill Ackman's Campaign Against Harvard Followed Years of Resentment."
The premise of the story is false. I have held no resentment toward Harvard ever. And I have none now.
The story gives the impression that my
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This is not the neoliberal university betraying its principles: it is the neoliberal university telling you what they are.
Can’t make this up. At Northern Arizona University, the VP of Inclusion helped tear down the encampment tents set up by anti-genocide student protestors. 24 were arrested. Oh & the university suspended the SJP chapter.
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God bless them, but tenured Ivy League faculty do not know what a "strike" is.
Hundreds of faculty and staff across Columbia, Barnard, and Teachers College have signed onto a strike, pledging to “only do work that directly serves students” until the NYPD is removed from campus, faculty members announced in a Friday press conference.
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I hope the
@nytimes
will cover this with the same zeal with which they covered the Claudine Gay affair.
🚨BREAKING: 3,100 professors at Harvard University are forming a union as
@HAWorkers
and seeking to join
@UAW
.
This is the largest union filing of the years so far.
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Turns out the big threat to students wasn't chatgpt; it was the administration.
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I don't get why people are up in arms about the Bookforum review. It's kid glove stuff compared to the Qing dynasty bureaucracy book review.
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It can be difficult to uncover how much universities are paying outside consultants to tell them how to get rid of faculty and increase costs to students, but it's on the order of the billable hourly rate of a corporate lawyer.
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Sometimes I marvel with horror that the American historical profession spent a year and a half having a 'debate' about a made-up 'problem' ("presentism") while academic employment and research funding for historians was undergoing a total collapse.
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the humanities are in decline because you partied too much in grad school.
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There is no "elite overproduction" of PhDs in history. There's a contingent decision by universities to measure the worth of disciplines according to metrics like majors (which have indeed declined for history), rather than enrollments, which haven't, really.
I wrote about the David Austin Walsh affair, and the problem of elite overproduction in American academia:
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I am not a fan of the office of the university president, which exists to do the bidding of trustees and undermine faculty governance but what’s going is nuts. That Gordon Gee is still running WVU but Liz Magill is out at Penn tells you everything about how f’d higher ed is.
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I've learned today that
@colsonwhitehead
has withdrawn as
@UMassAmherst
's commencement speaker in response to admin calling the police on peaceful protest. Maybe UMass should change its slogan from "Be Revolutionary" to "Be Counterrevolutionary"?
Colson Whitehead, celebrated novelist, will deliver the keynote address at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Undergraduate Commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 18.
🔗 Read more about Whitehead and
#UMassAmherst
Commencement here:
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According to the ACLS, 1,100 people applied for the 60 awards from their single remaining fellowship program for general humanities research. Applications were restricted to early career untenured PhDs. Clear evidence that there isn't enough humanities research funding available.
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Remember when everyone was like “AI is the biggest threat to college students”? Turns out it was the administrators.
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Some of you do not get that this is a major crisis of the university. We are seriously looking at a massive authoritarian turn in what are already authoritarian practices of higher ed governance. It’s not a joke.
You don't have to agree with these students' protests - or even think they are acceptable - to know that deploying violent police action against them is totally unacceptable.
Universities are *for students*. Get your police off our campuses if they can't control themselves.
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I see people on here like, 'Columbia faculty don't want to be homeless so they won't say anything' - my friends, they won't be "homeless," they'll be at their pied a terre in Rhinebeck.
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The true face of the authoritarian university is being revealed in real time, for everyone to see and liberals to misinterpret. This is not university administrators "betraying their communities": this is them turning their ideological commitments into political practices.
Some tenured faculty members at
@BrownUniversity
are being threatened with vague disciplinary action after having visited the encampments. They received this email from the Dean of Faculty. I’ve confirmed at least 2, but there are at least 2 more I am hearing about beyond that.
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The vast majority of people who work in academia can be fired at will, are underpaid, and have little influence with lawmakers, so I don’t understand how they are “unelected elites.”
Democratic elected officials have definitely been less polarized than Republican ones, that's absolutely correct. But a lot of the left's power comes through unelected elite institutions: the media and academia at a bare minimum.
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You might wonder why university presidents would keep calling in police on students even though it is by now patently clear that doing so simply provokes more protests. The reason lies in the trustees who decide who gets to be the president.
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Tenured historians: we are powerless to do anything about the decline of the profession.
Also tenured historians: my tweeting will stop Trump's reelection.
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There hasn't been a single Congressional hearing on how Gordon Gee wrecked West Virginia University, the flagship public institution of a US state. Sit with the gross, classist condescension of this as we watch political elites obsess about whose feelings got hurt at the Ivies.
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The history of statecraft in the West is the history of textual criticism, marginal annotations, and archives. I literally wrote a fucking book about it! Yet you can’t get $ to research and write about this stuff any more-let alone a job.
But we have seldom taught history in the relevant way for decades. That would be history of statecraft, why wars are won or lost, what makes for effective diplomacy, etc. Instead we tend to approach politics from Kultur. Tocqueville said that is the tendency in democratic ages.
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Tfw you’re tenured at Princeton, where you get a sabbatical every 5 semesters & teach a 2:1:
Being a professor is a cake walk compared to the day-to-day exertion & exhaustion of K12 teaching.
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This is a ludicrous argument: there have been almost no jobs advertised in history departments in American universities since the 1619 Project first appeared in August 2019. Whether one supports the critiques or doesn’t is irrelevant to success on the job market.
Honest question: Is it possible for a young historian to land a job at a history department in an American university if they openly suppport critiques of the
#1619Project
made by Wood, Oakes, Guelzo, McPherson, Cawardine, Wilentz, Bynum, Carson etc.? 1/2
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Today, Oklahoma eliminated all DEI offices in the state's public colleges and universities. Here are the current headlines about higher ed on the
@nytimes
website.
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STEM is an astonishingly recent concept. It was invented in 2000-1. The institutional and ideological dominance of this particular configuration of knowledge is an 'invention of tradition' problem: sanctioned by an erroneous yet widespread belief about a deep temporal grounding.
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Propose a billion dollar NEH budget.
Now is the time for all Americans to speak up when history is being erased, books are being banned, and diversity is being attacked.
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These protests are producing some stunning images juxtaposing the rhetoric of the neoliberal university with the practices they enable. It's not a contradiction - it's the institutional logic at work.
The University of Calgary put up signs saying, "Disrupt something." They didn't add, "and when you do, we'll call in the riot police."
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“apolitical knowledge-building” isn’t a thing
Magill resigns.
@Penn
must use this moment, and the lessons that brought us to this sad place, to refocus on the university’s core mission: apolitical knowledge-building. Bowing to current pressure to erode core student and faculty rights instead may signal a point of no return.
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Sometimes all the sabbaticals and research funds at rich R1 private institutions get wasted on the wrong people.
You must go back in time: would you prefer to live the life of a slave owner, or the life of a slave?
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Why do 'liberal' states like Massachusetts and Connecticut have such deeply underfunded public higher education systems? This would be a great thing for
@nytimes
to investigate rather than Ivy League boardroom politics.
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Just sent in my final book ms. Hopefully out sometime next year. What a ride.
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Someone’s getting rich off of American universities. Just none of the people who teach in them.
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In the humanities at least, the consequences of ending tenure in FL & elsewhere won’t be a mass migration of academics to blue states, since there are no tenure track jobs to be found there either.
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Are you even a university president if you aren’t hiring consulting companies to charge you $$$ for PowerPoint presentations on how to get rid of faculty and charge students up the wazoo?
UF President Ben Sasse hired McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, on a $4.7 million contract to help develop the university’s vision for the future.
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Looking forward to seeing
@nytimes
cover the Cal State strikes with the same level of intensity they brought to Ivy League boardroom politics. /s
🚨STRIKE DAY! Thousands on historic STATE-WIDE STRIKE!
📢TELL
@thecsu
management to invest in their FACULTY & STUDENTS!
⏰Time for manageable workloads, fair pay, more mental health counselors, better parental leave, & safe campuses.
#RaisetheFloor
#SolidaritySeason
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Higher ed is the most poorly reported on sector of society. Journalists think that because they went to college, they understand how universities function. Hence, & in contrast to other industries, they don’t defer to those who work in them to shape reporting.
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A trend I’ve noticed over the past few years: there are not enough academic jobs.
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This is a profoundly irresponsible post from
@davidaxelrod
. The campus was closed to non-university affiliates two weeks ago, with police at every entrance checking IDs.
It will be interesting to learn how many of those arrested in Hamilton Hall at Columbia are actually students.
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Long before they ever get to college, young people are conditioned to believe that STEM is the only worthwhile path and humanities are a waste of time and money.
High schoolers are asking for real, hands-on experience in industries like advanced manufacturing, IT, and clean energy.
That’s what Innovation Career Pathways deliver, and why we’re expanding to over 220 programs in nearly 100 schools across Massachusetts.
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Pedagogy in the humanities is enhanced when scholars are regularly afforded time & space away from the classroom to think/research/write. They return to share new knowledge with students. Our institutions don't understand that pedagogy & research are complementary, not opposed.
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This is a bad take. There are tons of academics in prestigious positions who do all kinds of more serious academic malfeasance and get off easy. This was about improper donor meddling.
Ultimately I'm ambivalent about this outcome; resigning is a disproportionate response to the level of plagiarism committed (though maybe the only option left). However, I remain dismayed by the number of scholars who insisted that her citation practices were, essentially, fine.
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We joke about the “carceral syllabus” thing but that’s actually exactly what pedagogy twitter is like
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This is how these institutions do it. They will beat up students, faculty, and staff while proclaiming their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Then later, they talk about "healing" and "engagement" and "community."
Announcing a ‘Year of Democracy and Civic Engagement’ following a year of racialized police violence, surveillance, and the repression of student activism is nasty work.
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Faculty gave up on academic freedom when they abandoned their adjunct colleagues, turning it into an elite class privilege rather than a basic enabling condition of scholarship and teaching
The thing is maybe we should have academic freedom. Can't wrap my mind around the fact that faculty gave up on that. Please don't say you were not warned!
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When the history of this sordid era is written, there needs to be some accounting for the way the New York Times ignored the nationwide dismantling of public higher education while acting as a society paper for the Ivy League.
Today, Oklahoma eliminated all DEI offices in the state's public colleges and universities. Here are the current headlines about higher ed on the
@nytimes
website.
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What can you do with a PhD? Meet a news editor, museum president, community organizer, and others making waves with their doctorate degree.
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Isn't the reason that critical theory is dying more like: there are just no academic jobs in the humanities anymore and the academia-adjacent world of ideas also has largely collapsed, both victims of capitalism? So no resources to actually do the work anymore?
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Indeed, the very problem is that academics are NOT running universities. Boards of trustees comprised of MBAs & JDs are and that is the problem:
Asking if academics are the best people to run universities feels like part of an unfolding attack.
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There is an anti-humanities ideology driving university governance that no amount of enrollment will abate.
🚨 BREAKING 🚨 Sources say the World Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics dept. has been recommended for COMPLETE DISSOLUTION and a REDUCTION TO ZERO FACULTY.
In the last 3 years for which we have data, the WLLL dept. has made the university an average of +$871,384 per year!
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In higher ed stories you won’t read about in the
@nytimes
: if it’s about a public institution rather than a private elite one, the NYT doesn’t care. It’s an Ivy League society paper.
West Virginia University - which had a $45 million budget deficit in 2023 - paid for private jet flights of a state health secretary living in Pennsylvania to the tune of over $230,000 🧵
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Listening to WKCR. Things look like they are about to get very bad at
@Columbia
- massive numbers of police in riot gear - what an utter and complete failure of the administration. What a joke to claim you are in the business of education.
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Two recent takes on the “crisis” of the humanities, have brilliantly articulated that this is a crisis of resources & ideological bias against humanities, not enrollments, which are an effect of the former.
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'we are so proud nobody studies the humanities at our university!!'
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I understand why people would think this, but it's wrong. US college administration is structurally reactionary. It exists to diminish faculty governance, undermine academic freedom, and direct the institution toward profit-oriented, rather than knowledge-oriented goals.
@jerryiannelli
this was so silly! so much of what has happened at columbia seems like it could have been avoided if the president had ever been an administrator at one (1) american educational institution before taking the job
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Pretty extraordinary moment in American higher education. Feels like the vibes have shifted.
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In a democratic university, a faculty vote of no confidence in the president or chancellor would immediately lead to them stepping down. But these universities aren’t democracies.
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The cardinal error this profession continues to make is believing that history is declining in American universities because it is insufficiently 'publicly engaged.' But the actual reason is that history is declining bc it is not seen as a RESEARCH discipline.
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