Universities on Fire wins a book award

For the past several years I’d focused much of my research capacity on forecasting how the climate crisis might impact higher education, and what academics might do in response.  That work appeared in many blog posts, presentations, meetings, Future Trends Forum sessions, and my 2023 book, Universities on Fire.

Today I’m delighted to announce that this work has received some splendid recognition.  The American Association of Colleges and Universities is a 109-year-old organization devoted to liberal education, with more than 1,000 campuses as members.  AAC&U has just chosen Universities on Fire for its Frederic W. Ness Book Award.  The award goes to books which make “outstanding contributions to the understanding and improvement of liberal education.”

Ness-Book-Award-Winner UoF-2024-Final

I am both humbled and ecstatic to learn of this. As someone who has worked in liberal education for decades, this is a signal honor, a career highlight. This award also feels like a validation of years of work on climate change. It’s especially delightful coming from a group I’ve followed and worked with for decades.

More important than my own self and career, by choosing to give the Ness award to Universities on Fire the AAC&U indicates that climate change should be a major concern for colleges and universities.  It connects global warming to liberal education by virtue of the award’s emphasis “on liberal education as an evolving tradition,” as well as by signaling climate as “an issue or topic in postsecondary education that is discussed substantially in relation to liberal education.”

This is how they describe climate change as the very point of this year’s award:

“Among an exceptionally strong pool of nominees, Universities on Fire stood out because of how effectively and constructively it speaks to the urgency of the moment—its subject matter, interdisciplinarity, creativity, continual grounding in learning, and focus on the future,” said [Lynn] Pasquerella [president of AAC&U].

I’m so glad they recognized the interdisciplinary nature of the topic.  I raised the idea that responding to climate change might be the new liberal arts.

AAC&U has long been a leader in encouraging higher education to address a series of key topics.  The organization created the high impact learning practices (HIP) model, which helped institutions implement those teaching and student support ideas.   Similarly, AAC&U advanced the concept of liberal education preparing students for active civic life, as well as supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion . They also introduced eportfolios to campus assessment and curricular strategies. My hope is that the group now adds climate thought and action to that list of major, good ideas… and that colleges and universities are inspired to think and act accordingly.

I’m deeply grateful to AAC&U for this award and excited about what comes next.

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Academia in the storms’ path: the new hurricane season

What might the climate crisis mean for higher education’s future?

I’m writing this post very much in the present, as parts of the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean are reeling from multiple, literally extraordinary hurricanes.  Helene trashed several American states, which haven’t fully recovered.  Milton is storming into Florida now, where debris left over from Helene adds potential projectile threats to the looming disaster. Disaster piles on disaster.

The speed and devastation of these hurricanes is historically unusual.  Milton’s size and speeds grew beyond all expectations.  Indeed, some have considered opening up a new hurricane category – 6 – to describe it.

And that’s not all.  As climate change hero Bill McKibben observes,

Bill McKibben on Twitter, "For the first time ever recorded, October finds three hurricanes spinning simultaneously in the Atlantic. Hot new world"

For the first time ever recorded, October finds three hurricanes spinning simultaneously in the Atlantic. Hot new world

(Meanwhile, the least cold bit of Antarctica saw vegetation grow fourteen times over the past generation.  “Hot new world” indeed.  Global weirding, my preferred term, again.)

When it comes to higher education, Hurricane Helene hit a series of colleges and universities in North Carolina (among other things and people), causing all kinds of damages: downed trees, broken buildings, cut power lines, roads washed out or blocked, cell phone service out.  Sample announcements from administrations include:

“Road conditions vary and many roads in the area are treacherous or impassible,” a message from Appalachian State officials said. “Please limit travel and use extreme caution if you are traveling on foot or by vehicle.” None of the residence halls were “structurally compromised,” but the university is asking students to conserve water.

….

“Significant tree damage has occurred and parts of campus are inaccessible. Everyone is safe. Cell and internet coverage is nonexistent at this point.”

From one university: “UNC Asheville has been without electricity, running water, and internet since Friday.”  Recovery is under way.

What colleges and universities are in Milton’s path?  Here’s a quick Google Maps check:

Hurrican Milton Tampa colleges and universities

I have more climate change and higher ed research to share, in addition to a big announcement next week, but I want to focus today on the devastation and suffering we’re seeing – and experiencing – right now, and what they signify for what’s to come.

How are these colleges and universities planning and acting for the enormous stress just starting to hit?  Are other academic institutions preparing to assist the Tampa area, such as by hosting refugees, supporting faculty/staff/students in traveling to the zone to assist, providing academic resources, and so on?  How well prepared are the relevant people, departments, and offices?

Remember that this situation of worsening storms is not just the new normal.  Things will get weirder, more dangerous, and worse, and not just in the Yucatan and the American southeast.  How are academics thinking about these rising storms?  What are colleges and universities doing as the climate crisis ratchets up?

Please be safe, readers in the storms’ paths.

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A climate fiction syllabus

Climate fiction is literature in any medium which explores how climate change might transform the world, and how humans respond.  It’s a powerful and, I think, essential genre for our century.

I’m writing about climate fiction* today because an educator and colleague asked me to.  Joshua Kim is Director of Online Programs and Strategy at Dartmouth College. He’s also an Inside Higher Ed columnist who is – by far – their writer most keenly focused on climate change.  He’s been a terrific supporter of my Universities on Fire book.  Last week he posted about what his ideal climate fiction class syllabus might look like.  I had to follow suit.

I’m thinking of a college class, either undergraduate or graduate. A high school class could sample this.  What follows is too much, most likely, so anyone trying to use it would really have to carve out what they can best use.

Each entry has some introduction, along with why I include it in this class.  I tried to pick materials which each offer something different from the others: small scale and huge, satire and grimness, historical fiction and future-oriented stories.  There’s some sense of a sequence here, starting with groundwork, then some more accessible texts, then building up in scale and out into variations.  I linked to Wikipedia pages for each title, where available, and otherwise to authors.

I don’t include any nonfiction explainers about climate change.  Fortunately those are plentiful, many freely available.

All of the readings are novels or novellas. I haven’t to a short story anthology that I’d recommend as a whole yet.  Maybe I should start assembling one.

One caution to consider: such a class will represent a major emotional stress for some participants.  I say this as someone who has taught literature of war. It might trigger students, along with any support staff and, of course, the instructor(s). Reading after reading depicting epic human suffering may take a toll. I have tried to include works with optimism and hope as best as I could.

I’ll start with books, then move on to other media.

1: Novels

  • Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (2016). This is a series of essays, so it’s nonfiction, and a fine grounding for any examination of the fiction.  Ghosh makes the case that several centuries of mainstream literature have taught us that humanity has completely tamed nature, and this helps explain why we’re so wrongfooted by global warming.  He asks good questions about what climate fiction might do and look like.
Midjourney imagines a university class studying climate fiction

Midjourney imagines a university class studying climate fiction

  • T. C. Boyle, Blue Skies (2023). The novel traces a family as they try to wrap their lives around escalating natural disasters. It has a narrow focus on a handful of characters.  It also has the author’s wry satirical gaze.  That combination of attitude and scale might make it a good first reading.
  • Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (2012). The setting is Appalachia, as an unusual butterfly migration upends a poor family. The focus on rural, lower socio-economic status characters stands out from a lot of climate fiction.
  • Monica Byrne, The Actual Star (2021). A fascinating, criminally underappreciated work of science fiction, this novel manages to include history, utopia, and myth through an usual combination of settings: a thousand years in the past, the present, and a thousand years hence. I recommend this as an example of how far imaginative fiction can go under the climate fiction aegis.
  • Paulo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (2015).   A thriller taking place in a lethally drought-stricken American southwest, so a good example of blending those two genres.  It’s very smart, builds a depressingly realistic world, and is rich with local details.  (We read it for our online bookclub.). Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock (2021), a geoengineering thriller, might be an alternative here.
  • Stephen Markely, The Deluge (2023). This sprawling work is something close to a social novel, tracing a lot of characters across American society, from poor outcasts to the White House.  It’s very political in many ways, including the story of crafting an ambitious climate change law.
  • Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (2020). Another sprawling novel, here Robinson portrays humanity struggling to grapple with the crisis – and actually getting it more or less right.  Important and inspiring for its positive vision. (Here’s our online book club reading.)
  • Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild Built (2021). Another work of speculative fiction, this story takes place on another world where people have managed to reorder a good life after a climate-crisis-ish disaster.  It’s an example of the solarpunk idea, an attempt to imagine the best possible world in light of global warming.  It’s also very soothing and kind. And short.  (As an exercise I like to ask people to Google image search for “solarpunk” as a discussion starter.)
  • Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus (2015). This imagines southern California and points inland after climate change has inflicted horrendous droughts on the region. We follow several characters as they plunge into the resulting deserts. I picked this because the prose becomes lyrical in ways I find unusual in the genre. It also engages with religion.
  • Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003).  This apocalyptic novel is about climate change and a series of other crises which bring down humanity, including disease, genetic engineering, consumerism, and more.  It depicts an increasingly dystopian society.  I think it’s interesting for our class to consider texts which include climate change this way, as one powerful element but not the total one.  (I also admire the sequels, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam,) For this purpose we could also use Octavia Butler’s powerful The Parable of the Sower (1993), which traces a society breaking down under climate change and other problems.  A heroine starts building a movement to survive.

2: Film and tv

The most important text here is, by far, the astonishingly underseen Extrapolations (Apple TV; 2023).  The series consists of linked stories, one per episode, which imagine decades hence as the world largely fails to cope with climate change. Each story differs from the others in terms of tone, genre, and location, offering a political thriller, a heist, a Jewish community story, a science (marine biology) story, and so on.  It’s uneven, with the first and last episodes being the weakest, I think, but well worth watching and discussing. (my notes on episodes 1-3 then 4-8)

The best known movie isn’t about climate change, except by way of allegory.  Don’t Look Up (Netflix; 2021) is a dark satire about a comet threatening the Earth, and the many bad ways we might respond: willful ignorance, bad technology, distraction.  It’s easy to read as a cautionary tale about climate.

Franny Armstrong‘s The Age of Stupid (Dogwoof; 2009) is actually about climate change directly.  A satirical mockumentary, it concerns a survivor in the future who explains to us why humanity failed to address climate change.

I’m not sure about Bong Joon-ho‘s Snowpiercer (2013).  It’s a terrific film about bitter survival, but is based on the opposite of global warming.  Should we include it as an exploration of geoengineering gone wrong?  Perhaps.

3: Extra materials

There’s so much more to recommend, depending on where such a class wanted to go.

  • There are many interesting antecedents to consider, especially in terms of ecological fiction.  The 1960s and 1970s saw many of these.  Perhaps the most powerful is John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972), which shows humanity struggling with environmental disasters and failing to grasp them in the end.  J.G. Ballard‘s quartet of destroyed world novels (The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, The Crystal World) offer by contrast surreal visions of humanity in grim transitions.
  • I said I wouldn’t include nonfiction, but did begin with Ghosh, and now want to leave with Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). This is an enormously complex and challenging collection of essays and stories which push the boundaries of what we think about climate change and our responses.  Haraway teases out new implications for the language we use, how we think about science in global warming, and much more.  A key theme is rethinking human reproduction.  It actually includes nominal fiction, with a story imagining a new human-animal world.  It’s very rich and also funny.

I’ll stop there for now.  There are books I haven’t read, which I’d like to, which might work for this syllabus, like Ian McEwan’s SolarI’d like to find more non-American and non-European titles, and am looking forward to Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Alistair Mackay’s It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way. I’m not sure if the great Richard Powers’ recent novels The Overstory or Bewilderment count as climate fiction.  I need to restart Claire North’s Notes from the Burning Age.

I’d like to do another post about short stories, which also involves reading more, like the Grist Imagine 2200 and Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors collections.

(many thanks to many friends, including Krista Hiser’s fine online reading group)

*Please don’t say cli-fi. It sounds awful and has all the trivializing downsides of “sci-fi.”

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Academic closures, mergers, and cuts: August-September 2024 edition

How are American colleges and universities responding to institutional pressures?

Today I’ll share exemplary stories from the past two months.  I’ve been blogging this theme for months now (March 1March 20March 28AprilMayJune, July), partly as evidence for some points in the book I’m writing.  This post will follow the same structure as the others, starting with campus closures, followed by mergers, staff cuts, and looming financial problems. At the end are some brief observations.

1 Closing colleges and universities

Let’s start with a big picture observation. The total number of American higher education institutions shrank by 2%, “from 5,918 in 2022–23 to 5,819 in 2023–24,” according to federal data.  In terms of absolute numbers, “[t]he number of Title IV institutions in the U.S. and other jurisdictions decreased from 5,918 in 2022–23 to 5,819 in 2023–24.”

Now, down to cases. The University of the Arts (Philadelphia: private), which announced it would close this summer after failing to find a merger partner, filed for bankruptcy.  The Higher Ed Dive article notes several legal actions by former staff seeking to get paid.

2 Mergers

Lackawanna College (Pennsylvania: private) and Peirce College (Philadelphia: private) announced they would merge their institutions by next summer.  Interestingly, both colleges say they’re financially healthy.  Yet note this: “Under the agreement, Lackawanna is set to absorb Peirce’s revenue and balance sheet, officials told Higher Ed Dive.”

Speaking of Pennsylvania, Gannon University (two campuses in Pennsylvania, one in Florida: Catholic) and Ursuline College (Ohio: Catholic) announced they would enter a “strategic partnership.”

Why merge?  The official statement describes reasons of ambition mixed with decline:

Gannon has been exploring expansion opportunities; Ursuline College has been looking to partner with a larger institution; and the Ursuline Sisters wanted to find a partner who would preserve their legacy as the number of Sisters has declined.

Further:

The move, which is contingent on the successful completion of due diligence, will create an institution with about 6,000 students, 1,300 employees, and campuses in three states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Once complete, it will be the largest Catholic university system in the region.

The combination has this imbalance: “Gannon would replace the Ursuline Sisters as the sole member of the Ursuline College Corp., according to an FAQ page devoted to the combination. Gannon would also take ownership of Ursuline’s assets and liabilities.”  Signal Cleveland notes the announcement doesn’t use the word “merger.”

3 Campuses cutting programs and jobs

Western Illinois University (public university) announced personnel cuts.  “57 faculty… and 32 staff positions will be eliminated, affecting a range of departments and roles.”  Additional cuts are in the works, including not filling vacant positions (“including two vice president positions”) and many departmental budget restrictions.  One list of the ended positions includes quite a few in the humanities, along with eight librarians.  Faculty and staff protested.

Why such cuts?  Financial pressures, and an eye to reducing operations overall.  According to WIU’s president, “In order to address financial stability, we must recognize that our institution, like so many others across the country, must be the right size and the right shape to serve this number of students.”  A local newspaper adds:

WIU has found itself struggling with a shrinking student body, the fallout of the 2015-17 budget impasse and state appropriations that haven’t kept pace with inflation. Now, the university is trying to shrink its budget deficit and escape a cash crunch.

Emerson College (private) will lay off ten staff due to declining enrollment. Additionally, “[t]o further realize savings, the college developed plans for voluntary faculty buyouts and will reduce faculty searches, freeze and delay selected staff searches, strengthen hiring controls, defer capital projects, and reduce operational expenditures.” The reason? Declining enrollment.

Wittenberg University (Ohio: private, Lutheran, liberal arts) will lay off around 40 faculty and staff members. That’s a huge proportion of the university’s workforce, which has around 100-110 (Wikipedia) instructors.  The University will also end a set of programs: “five majors and their corresponding minors from its offerings: music, music education, German, Spanish and East Asian studies. The university is also cutting a minor in Chinese.”  Additionally, “the men’s and women’s tennis program, as well as women’s bowling, will end after the 2024-25 season.”

One earlier plan would have cut even more:

A plan, put forward by the university’s president, Michael L. Frandsen, and its board in late July, proposed eliminating 60 percent of full-time faculty and about a quarter of noninstructional staff, and relying more heavily on online course-sharing to teach students.

Why make such cuts?  The attentive reader will have surmised the answer, but let’s give Higher Ed Dive the opportunity to explain in some detail:

Wittenberg posted a $13.7 million total operating deficit for the fiscal year ending June 2023, more than double the previous year’s $5.7 million shortfall, per its latest financials. The university carries $38.2 million in debt stemming bonds issued in 2016.

For fiscal 2023, Wittenberg saw its tuition and fees revenue decline to $15.3 million, down by about $1.7 million compared to the year before. Meanwhile, its total operating expenses increased by $2.8 million, to $59.6 million.

That drop in tuition revenue follows a long-running decline in enrollment. Between 2017 and 2022, the university’s fall headcount fell about 31% to 1,299 students, according to federal data.

Wittenberg is exploring outsourcing some teaching and other campus functions online.  David Staley argues that this suggests a shift away from relationship-rich education.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (public, research) is considering laying off 32 tenured professors by closing one program.  That program served two campuses which had merged with UW-Milwaukee, but:

The College of General Studies was created to support two-year degrees at UWM’s Waukesha and Washington County campuses when they merged with UWM in 2018. However, the Washington County campus has closed and the other is slated to shut down by the end of the next academic year.

As states the official proposal.

Enrollment is at the heart of it, and the trends are clear. From 2010 to 2023, CGS saw a 65% decline in students without a corresponding reduction in staff. We see no evidence this trend will reverse, consistent with national and state data and similar institutions.  UWM lacks the student demand for the liberal arts associate degree and cannot justify additional investment in it.

Can the rest of UWM rehire those faculty members?  That official page thinks not: “After a decade of enrollment declines and budget cuts, the main campus also cannot simply absorb dozens of faculty positions.”

Meanwhile, across the country, Stanford University (!) (California: private research university) fired nearly two dozen creative writing instructors.  Apparently the decision to do so came from their tenured colleagues. Reasons include neither enrollment nor financial problems, given that Stanford is extremely exclusive and wealthy.

4 Budget crises, programs cut, not laying off people yet

The California State University system (23 campuses) is developing cuts to address a budget shortfall.  So far this is taking the form of fewer and larger classes.  The financial problem is several hundred million dollars, apparently, which raises the possibility of staff cuts to come.

Drexel University (Philadelphia: private university) is considering staff cuts, after deciding on other cost-cutting measures, like voluntary early retirements and not filling open positions.  The reason?  A 15% enrollment decline yielding a $22 million budget hole on top of a $63 million deficit, according to the local Inquirer. The FAFSA debacle may have played a role as well.

Naropa University (Colorado: private, Buddhist) is going to sell its main campus.  According to an official email, the goal is fundraising: “the campus is an asset Naropa can leverage to ensure the long-term financial health and sustainability of the university.”  Further, Naropa is focusing more on online learning: “With over 40% of students (and a significant portion of staff and faculty) now operating primarily in hybrid and virtual spaces, we are redefining the very essence of what it means to be a community…”


What can we observe about these cuts?

I note that the queen sacrifice (giving up tenure-track faculty as a winning gambit) continues to be in play, notably with Western Illinois.

On a related note: the humanities tend to bear the brunt of such cuts, although they are not the sole victims.  This Chronicle column concurs.

I used the word “merger” to describe two cases, but note that in both one party absorbed the other’s liabilities.  Are these better thought of as acquisitions?

Inside Higher Ed ran an advice column about how a faculty or staff member can best protect themselves against such job cuts. We might see more efforts along these lines, including coaching and consulting services.

Final note: Wittenberg is in the same Springfield, Ohio that’s the center of the Trump “immigrants eating pets” story. They are enduring all kinds of stresses and threats from that campaign nonsense. They already shifted classes online in response to the most disturbing calls. I wish them well, and fear the experience might cause them additional grief during the next financial year.

(thanks to Lisa Hinchliffe, Peter Shea, Karen Bellnier, Steven Volk, Glen McGee)

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What would a second Trump administration mean for higher education? Summing up Project 2025

What happens to higher education if Trump wins November’s election?

We’ve been exploring this question over the past year, including months of reading, analysis, reflection, and conversation about Project 2025 might mean for higher education.  Today I’d like to sum up what we found.

The book, Mandate for Leadership, addresses academia directly on multiple levels.  I’ll break them down here.  The implications for the broader society within which colleges and universities exist – that’s a subject for another post.

I’ve organized the various ideas and threads into several headers: the Department of Education, higher education economics, international education and research, research supported and opposed, military connections, sex education, and anti-intellectualism.

Higher education and the Department of Education Many accounts of Project 2025’s educational impact draw attention to its attack on the Department of Education, which makes sense, since this is where the document focuses its academic attention. to begin with, Mandate for Leadership wants to break up the DoE and distribute its functions to other federal units.  For example, the work the Office for Postsecondary Education (OPE) does would move to the Department of Labor, while “programs deemed important to our national security interests [shift] to the Department of State.” (327).

It would revise the student loan system to a degree. “Federal loans would be assigned directly to the Treasury Department, which would manage collections and defaults.” (327-330) Income-based repayment schemes would continue, but with restrictions. (337-8) Project 2025 would end the Biden team’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, along with “time-based and occupation-based student loan forgiveness” plans. (361) More ambitiously, the new government could just privatize loans. (353)

The chapter’s author also calls for “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” in the department or through its successor units. (322) This might also proceed via changes to one law, as a new secretary would “[w]ork with Congress to amend Title IX to include due process requirements; define “sex” under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth; and strengthen protections for faith-based educational institutions, programs, and activities.” (333) This culture war move could have another legal feature, given the call to amend FERPA in order to make it easier for college students to sue the government for privacy violations, in response to school support of transgender and nonbinary students. (344-346)

The obverse of these moves is having the new DoE or its replacements “promulgat[ing] a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics.”  Additionally, the government would “require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests,” although it’s unclear what that would mean in practice. (356)

This section’s author, Lindsay Burke, also wants the next administration to change its relationship with post-secondary accreditors.  She supports Florida’s new policy of requiring public universities to cycle through accrediting agencies. (332) Burke also wants to encourage new accreditors to start up. (355) Her chapter further calls for a new administration to prevent accreditation agencies from advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work on campuses. (352)

The economics of higher education The Department of Education chapter would see a revamped Department of Education or its successors “[r]equir[ing]… ‘skin in the game’ from colleges to help hold them accountable for loan repayment.” (341) I can’t see how this would work in detail.  Her new federal administration would also reduce funding to academic research by cutting reimbursement for indirect costs. (355)

That section also wants to reduce the labor market’s demand for post-secondary degrees.  Under the header “Minimize bachelor’s degree requirements” we find: The President should issue an executive order stating that a college degree shall not be required for any federal job unless the requirements of the job specifically demand it.” (357). Later on in the book, the Department of Labor section section also calls on Congress to end college degree requirements for federal positions. (597) That chapter wants to boost apprenticeships, mostly likely in competition with college and university study. (594-5)

International research and education. Cutting down immigration is a major Project 2025 theme, and the book does connect this to academia.  It calls out international students like so:

ICE should end its current cozy deference to educational institutions and remove security risks from the program. This requires working with the Department of State to eliminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations. (141)

First, this would impact many would-be students’ careers.  Second, implementing such a policy would likely depress international student interest.

Project 2025 consistently focuses on China as America’s enemy, and this means it wants United States higher education to decouple from that adversary or else face consequences. For example, the introduction warns that “[u]niversities taking money from the CCP should lose their accreditation, charters, and eligibility for federal funds.”  Later in the text is some language about the government and universities supporting American but not Chinese research and development. (100) Another section sees “research institutions and academia” playing a role in Cold War 2.0:

Corporate America, technology companies, research institutions, and academia must be willing, educated partners in this generational fight to protect our national security interests, economic interests, national sovereignty, and intellectual property as well as the broader rules-based order—all while avoiding the tendency to cave to the left-wing activists and investors who ignore the China threat and increasingly dominate the corporate world. (emphases added; 218)

Later on, the Department of Justice discussion offers this recommendation:

key goals for the China Initiative that included development of an enforcement strategy concerning researchers in labs and universities who were being coopted into stealing critical U.S. technologies, identification of opportunities to address supply-chain threats more effectively, and education of colleges and universities about potential threats from Chinese influence efforts on campus. (556)

This seems to describe increased DoJ scrutiny over colleges and universities.  I’m not sure what “education… about potential threats” means, although I suspect it might include pressure on academics.

The Department of Commerce section wants to “[t]ighten… the definition of ‘fundamental research’ to address exploitation of the open U.S. university system by authoritarian governments through funding, students and researchers, and recruitment” (673) More succinctly, that chapter calls for strategic decoupling from China (670, 674). We can imagine a new federal administration – along with, perhaps, state governments, businesses, nonprofits, and foundations – asking academia to play its role in that great separation.  One of the trade policy chapters broods about how “more than 300,000 Communist Chinese nationals attend U.S. universities” and it’s hard not to see this as a call for reducing that number. (785)

That chapter’s author, Peter Navarro, condemns one leading American university for allegedly enabling Chinese power:

Huawei, well-known within the American intelligence community as an instrument of Chinese military espionage, has partnered with the University of California–Berkeley on research that focuses on artificial intelligence and related areas such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, all of which have important future military applications.28 In this way, UC–Berkeley, whether unwittingly or wittingly, helps to boost Communist China’s capabilities and quest for military dominance. (785-6)

I can’t help but read this as a call for federal scrutiny of academic international partnerships, with sanctions in the wings.

Project 2025 looks at other regions of the globe and wants higher education to help.  For example, the State Department chapter calls on American campuses to assist its African policy: “The U.S. should support capable African military and security operations through the State Department and other federal agencies responsible for granting foreign military education, training, and security assistance.” (187)

Other federal units come in for transformation which impacts colleges and universities. One chapter calls for “reinstituti[ng] the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board.” (Wikipedia; 218) The USAID chapter would cut some post-secondary support, based on the argument that “[w]e must admit that USAID’s investments in the education sector, for example, serve no other purpose than to subsidize corrupt, incompetent, and hostile regimes.” (275)

Support for and opposition to research Project 2025 consistently calls for research and development, at least in certain fields.  The Department of Energy chapter enthusiastically promotes science.  That chapter also tends to pair research with security, so we might infer increased security requirements for academic energy work.  Alternative energy and decarbonization research would likely not receive federal support from McNamee’s departments, as he might see them as a “threat to the grid.” (373)

The document also calls for transparency many times, which might benefit academics as it could (should it occur) give greater access to more documentation. One passage actually uses the language of open source code: “True transparency will be a defining characteristic of a conservative EPA. This will be reflected in all agency work, including the establishment of opensource [sic] science, to build not only transparency and awareness among the public, but also trust.” (417)

On the flip side, Project 2025 opposes climate research throughout. For a sample of the intensity of this belief,

Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs. (419)

That passage exists in the Environmental Protection Agency chapter, and fits into its author’s desire to cut back the EPA in general, but particularly to end its support for academic research.  There are specific examples, such as “[r]epeal[ing] Inflation Reduction Act programs providing grants for environmental science activities” (440). This is also where we see a sign of Project 2025’s desire to get more political appointees into federal positions.  There would be “a Science Adviser reporting directly to the Administrator in addition to a substantial investment (no fewer than six senior political appointees) charged with overseeing and reforming EPA research and science activities.” (436)  That would have further negative effects on academic work.

Later on, the Department of Transportation chapter calls for shutting down the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Why?  NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” (675) Faculty, staff, and students who rely on NOAA would lose out.

Military and civilian higher education There are many connections here, reflecting a view that all of academia can contribute in an instrumental way to American military and foreign policy goals, while also being reformed by a new administration. For example, the text calls for reforming post-secondary military education, asking a new government to “[a]udit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination, eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.” (104)

There’s also an idea for creating a new military academy, a Space Force Academy:

to attract top aero–astro students, engineers, and scientists and develop astronauts. The academy could be attached initially to a large existing research university like the California Institute of Technology or MIT, share faculty and funding, and eventually be built separately to be on par with the other service academies. (119)

Related to this, a later discussion calls for the creation of a new academic institution dedicated to financial warfare:

Treasury should examine creating a school of financial warfare jointly with DOD. If the U.S. is to rely on financial weapons, tools, and strategies to prosecute international defensive and offensive objectives, it must create a specially trained group of experts dedicated to the study, training, testing, and preparedness of these deterrents. (704)

Earlier in the book there’s some discussion of reforming the Pentagon’s purchasing systems calls for spreading some Defense Acquisition University (DAU) functions to “include accreditation of non-DOD institutions” – i.e., potentially some civilian institutions. (98)

Project 2025 would reverse certain Biden- and Obama-era human rights provisions for military academies’ faculty, staff, and students.  It calls for “individuals… with gender dysphoria [to] be expelled from military service…” (103)

Sex education, research, support for student life All of this appears under threat.  Here’s the relevant passage from the introduction, a shocking response to pornography: “Educators and public librarians who purvey [pornography] should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”  (5) This seems aimed at K-12 schools, where so much culture war battling has occurred, but we shouldn’t assume higher education would escape.  Remember that it’s a common strategy for critics to label sex education and research materials as porn.

Anti-intellectualism Project 2025 respects knowledge and skills insofar as they assist with making a new administration succeed, but is at the same time very skeptical of their role in broader society, when formally recognized. It wants universities to develop new technologies, but not to advance DEI.  For a clear sense of what I’m talking about, here’s the introduction’s take on credentials:

Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity. (10)

One could respond that most of the book’s authors possess intellectual sophistication and/or advanced degrees and/or financial success, but that’s part of the conservative populist paradigm.


Summing up, Project 2025 presents multiple challenges, threats, and dangers to American higher education.  Proposed policies strike at academic teaching, research, finances, autonomy, and some of the most vulnerable in our community.  It outlines routes for expanded governmental surveillance of and action upon colleges and universities, not to mention other parts of the academic ecosystem, such as accreditors and public research entities.

Keep in mind that Project 2025 isn’t necessarily a total guide to a potential Trump administration.  The candidate has denounced it and led the publication of another platform.  I’d like to explore that document next.  We should also track Trump’s various pronouncements, such as his consistent desire to deport millions of people. For that alone we should expect a major impact on higher education.

Yet Project 2025 draws deeply on Republican politicians and office holders, not to mention conservative thinking. It seems fair to expect a new administration to try realizing at least a chunk of it, if not more.

What do you think of this sketch of a potential Trump administration?

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Finishing our reading of Project 2025

How might a likely second Trump administration impact higher education?  How can academics plan for and anticipate that major event, should it occur?

This week we conclude our reading of Project 2025, a key document in understanding the near- and medium-term future of American politics.  This is an online, open, and distributed reading and anyone can participate. Here’s a post explaining how it works.  You can find all of our Project 2025 posts here.

In today’s post I’ll summarize this week’s reading, which includes “Independent Regulatory Agencies” and a conclusion entitled “Onward!” All of this occurs on pages 825-887.    I’ll draw out the bits which bear directly on higher education. Next I’ll add some reflections and then several discussion questions.  At the end I’ll share some more resources.  Please join in with comments below.

Summary overview

With this section the book continues addressing federal economic agencies and functions. The chapters are some of the briefest in the whole text.

Project 2025 coverTo start, David R. Burton wants a new president to reform the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), with one aim being to “reduce unnecessary regulatory impediments to capital formation.” (830) That seems to mean cutting back a lot of regulations. He would also end progressive social justice policies:

Offices at financial regulators that promote racist policies (usually in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) should be abolished, and regulations that require appointments on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation should be eliminated. (830)

Next, Robert Bowes tackles the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), accusing it of being “a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation” (837) and wanting its abolition (839).

Following that brief chapter, Brendan Carr analyzes the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  Carr wants to rein in tech companies’ content moderation actions, notably by interpreting section 230 to block companies from censoring content. (849) He would also encourage age limits on social media access and having Silicon Valley firms contribute to the Universal Service Fund. Carr additionally wants to expand FCC actions against China, including banning Tiktok and adding more Chinese entities to the Covered List. (851-3)

Hans A. von Spakovsky assesses the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and I’m having a hard time summarizing this.  There’s a lot of language about FEC commissioners not going after people for not violating laws, which makes me think it’s throat-clearing or some careful maneuvering to protect either January 6 rioters and their ilk. More concretely, von Spakovsky would raise election campaign donation maxima. (866)

Next, Adam Candeub turns to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The author would reduce antitrust actions in many ways.(872-3) He thinks badly of DEI efforts conducted by the FTC, finding that they “serve… to launder corporate reputation and perhaps obtain favorable treatment from government actors.” (873) Candeub would use the FTC to after social media firms for contracted badly with minors. (875-6) Yet his conclusion waffles, pointing out a variety of opinions without settling on one:

Conservative approaches to antitrust and consumer protection continue to trust markets, not government, to give people what they want and provide the prosperity and material resources Americans need for flourishing, productive, and meaningful lives. At the same time, conservatives cannot be blind to certain developments in the American economy that appear to make government–private sector collusion more likely, threaten vital democratic institutions, such as free speech, and threaten the happiness and mental well-being of many Americans, particularly children. Many, but not all, conservatives believe that these developments may warrant the FTC’s making a careful recalibration of certain aspects of antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.

At last, Edwin J. Feulner concludes Project 2025 by hailing its predecessors, proudly proclaiming how presidents Reagan and Trump implemented majorities of their respective Heritage plans.

What do these final chapters mean for higher education?

None address academia directly this time.  They do offer some potential secondary effects. If my intuition about the FEC is right, then we might see more chaotic elections, which impact academics and everyone. Negative effects of various decisions on marginalized populations hit students, faculty, and staff.  Changing policies concerning technology giants might alter academic work with YouTube, Facebook, Tiktok, etc.

Reflections

I continue to be interested in a conservative document which calls for reducing government size, while also wanting to increase government power in certain areas.  For example, David Burton wants to absorb two nonprofit, non-federal organizations, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), into the federal SEC. (830)

These final chapters continue the book’s generally pro-technology view.  One example is Brendan Carr’s call for the FCC to support a greater American space presence. (855)

Questions

  1. How would the policy changes expressed in this week’s chapters impact your professional and personal lives?
  2. Do you see Trump as likely to attempt what this week’s reading describes?
  3. How might the world change if these global policies take effect?
  4. If you oppose what these chapters call for, what opposition strategy and tactics would best resist it?

Resources

…and with that, congratulate yourselves on having read the full nearly 900 pages of Project 2025!  If I have time, and if there’s interest, I might follow up next week with reflections on our months of study.

Please do comment in the boxes below this post.  If you’d prefer to share your reactions on other platforms, tag me or otherwise let me know about those comments so I can include them in our next post.  If you want to respond but are worried about what people could make of your reactions, feel free to contact me here without the web knowing.

Comment away!  And thanks to everyone who read, responded, thought with, and otherwise contributed this week, including Owain and Elena.

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Some questions I’d ask at tonight’s presidential debate

Tonight is the first and so far only scheduled debate between the two major party candidates for the American presidency. I can’t watch it live, as I’ll be teaching. Hopefully I can listen to a recording as I walk, train, and drive back home.

On a lark, I came up with these questions which I’d ask if I had the opportunity. I’m not a politician nor a journalist, so my questions are a bit different from what those professionals would ask. I came up with them as a futurist and educator, reflecting my concerns in those areas.  I’m not interested in playing gotcha, but honestly am curious what Trump and Harris would say in response.

I also generated these based on my experience with Vermont’s town hall meetings (actual town halls, not the awful tv simulacra), where we had freedom to directly question officials from our interests.  It’s not a total set of questions aimed at fully understanding both candidates, so much as an expression of some topics I’m thinking of now.

Most of these questions aim at both candidates.  I’ll list them first, then add a few for Trump and Harris individually.

Wikipedia page on 2024 United States presidential debates

For both candidates

  1. It seems that the world is experiencing multiple, interconnected crises across continents and aspects of global civilization, a situation some of us refer to as the “polycrisis.” What is your grand strategy for leading your administration, the nation, and the world through the unfolding polycrisis?
  2. The past three presidents and the foreign policy establishment have declared China to be America’s most threatening competitor, both economically and geopolitically. Do you agree?  If so, what is your strategy for countering that nation? Would you pursue economic decoupling? How would you keep competition from turning into armed conflict?
  3. Humanity is in the grip of a sustained demographic transition, whereby childbirth rates plummet and the over-65 population expands. What is your plan for leading America through this historical transformation? For example, would you use policies to encourage childbearing? Would you encourage some forms of immigration, as immigrants tend to be younger? Or would you lead America towards having a smaller, older population?
  4. Researchers have established that wealth and income inequality have escalated since the early 1980s. How might your administration address this macroeconomic trend, if at all?
  5. Artificial intelligence has, according to some, the potential to upend much of civilization, from the labor market to cultural expression, politics to human behavior.  How would you lead America in grappling with this technology?
  6. Decades after the Apollo missions took humanity to the moon, a new space  race has taken off.  China, NASA, the European Union, other nations, and a burgeoning private sector are competing in the exploration of space, from rocket launches to the rest of the solar system.  What is your strategy for space?  What partnerships and competition to you envision?
  7. American higher education is in many ways the envy of the world, thanks to our successes in research, teaching, and institutional diversity. Yet the sector is now experiencing a range of problems.  How would you help develop and support American colleges and universities?
  8. The COVID experience transformed our nation and the world.  As we anticipate the next pandemics and epidemics, what lessons would you apply from the COVID story to better prepare us for the next biological disaster?
  9. Speaking of biology, how would you direct the federal government to respond to developments in biotechnology?

For Donald Trump

  • In the past you’ve described climate change as a hoax. In recent interviews you have described your climate strategy solely as one focused on clean air and water – laudable and essential goals, but not to the point. Would you wind down American climate commitments, or is there anything else you might consider on the global warming front?  (Follow up) Would you use the government and the bully pulpit to block climate action from state governments, companies, nonprofits, or individuals?
  • You’ve disavowed Project 2025. Are there particular policies or plans in that effort that you object to?
  • Do you now consider yourself the actual victor of the 2020 election, and think the election was stolen from you?

For Kamala Harris

  • Will you continue president Biden’s student loan forgiveness initiative, or would you alter that effort in some way?
  • Your background as a prosecutor is key to your career and identity. What are your plans for addressing legal issues as president?  I’m especially curious about the decriminalization of various substances and drugs, the movement of undocumented people across national borders, and copyright in the digital age.

I have others in mind, but that’s enough for now. Perhaps the interviewers will ask versions or fragments of some of these questions.

Now, off to classes.

 

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Reading Project 2025, part 8: redoing the economy and what it means for higher education

How might a likely second Trump administration impact higher education?  How can academics plan for and anticipate that major event, should it occur?

This week we continue our reading of Project 2025, a key document in understanding the near- and medium-term future of American politics.  This is an online, open, and distributed reading and anyone can participate. Here’s a post explaining how it works.  You can find all of our Project 2025 posts here.

In today’s post I’ll summarize this week’s reading, concluding the section on “The Economy,” all on pages 717-823.    I’ll draw out the bits which bear directly on higher education. Next I’ll add some reflections and then several discussion questions.

Please join in with comments below, or elsewhere across social media (just let me know where, so I can include them in the next post).

Summary overview

With this section the book continues to work through the federal government’s economic agencies and functions. Our reading takes us in a series of short chapters from the Export–Import Bank of the United States, a federal export credit agency (ECA), to the Federal Reserve system, the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the general, even vexed question of trade policy.

Project 2025 coverWe start with Veronique de Rugy, who calls for a new administration to abolish EXIM.  She charges the entity with playing business favorites under the guise of industrial policy, as well as failing to achieve net economic gains for the nation.  In addition, de Rugy finds EXIM having very little impact on American exports (“on average, 98 percent of exports are not backed by EXIM financing”, 720) and criticizes it for not doing enough to compete against China.

In response, Jennifer Hazelton argues that the Chinese economic threat is enormous, driven by that nation’s very well supported ECAs. Other countries, including US allies, have doubled down on their export assisting programs in order to compete, and America should follow suit by enhancing EXIM, “a powerful tool in America’s asymmetrical warfare toolbox.” (727)

After EXIM, Project 2025 moves on to the Federal Reserve, which Paul Winfree thinks has experienced mission creep.  While the Fed’s initial charter was to stabilize the American currency, its remit later grew to be “responsible for maintaining full employment, stable prices, and long-term interest rates.” (733) It should also cut back its lender of last resort function and reduce its financial holdings.  Winfree contemplates returning the nation’s banking system to earlier historical practices, such as pre-Civil War “free banking” and going back on the gold standard.  He would also remove the Fed’s work on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics.  Interestingly, Winfree warns against any federal entity advocating for a central digital currency. (741)

Next up is the Small Business Administration (SBA), which Karen Kerrigan criticizes for too often committing “waste, fraud, and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars.” (746) Kerrigan also sees SBA as skewing its offerings to “‘disproportionately impacted,’ politically favored, or geographically situated small businesses and entrepreneurs,” plus targets chosen for inclusivity reasons. (749) The author wants intensive review of COVID-era loaning to detect and punish fraud.  She would also have the SBA reduce disaster support to businesses and individuals, in favor of their going to the private sector for insurance. (750)

Project 2025 moves on to explore questions of trade policy through another split pair of chapters.  Peter Navarro contributes a chapter calling for what he calls “fair trade,” or a mix of increased tariffs and financial decoupling, especially aimed at China. He criticizes the World Trade Organization, charging its most favored nation (MFN) policy with exploiting Americans unfairly.  He duns China for

continued economic aggression, which begins with mercantilist and protectionist trade policy tools such as tariffs, nontariff barriers, dumping, counterfeiting and piracy, and currency manipulation. However, Communist China’s economic aggression also extends to an intricate set of industrial policies and technology transfer–forcing policies that have dramatically skewed the international trading arena.

Navarro continues by slamming outsourcing for costing Americans jobs. (767) In response he wants Congress to pass a bill proposed but not passed in the Trump years, the United States Reciprocal Trade Act (USRTA), which would give the president authority to raise tariffs on nations which levy high tariffs on American goods. He offers results of two simulations runs to model how such a law might play out, and finds both growing American jobs. Navarro focuses on China as a threat to American security and the economy, and concludes the only policy response worth doing is to decouple the two nations’ economies in detail. (787-790) He concludes by listing the political appointees most important to staff in a new administration. (794-5)

In response to this call for “fair trade,” Kent Lassman makes the case for free trade, arguing that increased global trade would improve every nation’s economy, including America’s.  Lassman also wants progressive policies removed from trade: “attempts to use trade policy to advance whole-of-government initiatives on climate, equity, and other issues will fail for the same reason that a hammer cannot turn a screw: It is the wrong tool for the job.” (796) Lassman’s main argument is for a conservative administration and Congress to reduce tariffs and to increase trade relations with friendly nations, including through using “fast-track” Trade Promotion Authority rules. (800ff) Interestingly, this chapter calls for a successor to the WTO (which “may be mortally wounded”) “that is open only to liberal democracies” – i.e., excluding China.

Against China, Lassman doesn’t advocate any economic action.  Instead, he wants a new government to:

Strengthen diplomatic pressure (in concert with allies) against Beijing’s abuses. Encourage cultural and intellectual engagement with the Chinese people, remembering that blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll helped to win the Cold War… So did images of fashion and prosperity in American movies and television shows like Dallas.

What does all of this mean for higher education?

This week’s reading doesn’t do much with academia.  There is one exception, however. Peter Navarro sees Chinese students and researchers studying or otherwise working in American universities and other institutions as a security and economic threat. “Every year, more than 300,000 Communist Chinese nationals attend U.S. universities.”  More,

Huawei, well-known within the American intelligence community as an instrument of Chinese military espionage, has partnered with the University of California–Berkeley on research that focuses on artificial intelligence and related areas such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, all of which have important future military applications.28 In this way, UC–Berkeley, whether unwittingly or wittingly, helps to boost Communist China’s capabilities and quest for military dominance. (785-6)

It’s also worth noting that the impacts of such policies on the American economy would have downstream effects on colleges and universities in terms of how campuses respond to recessions or economic growth, how state governments respond through budgeting for public universities, and how donors and other supporters react via their gifts and assistance.  Further, any changes to the economy obviously impact the job market academic graduates enter, which entails changes to how campuses prepare students for that world.

Reflections

It’s interesting to see Project 2025 change its unitary approach with this week’s readings, which feature two pairs of enthusiastically contradictory chapters. I infer this represents an ability for Heritage and Trump veterans to come to a consensus on the Export-Import Bank and, more significantly, on trade policy.

Otherwise, these chapters follow the book’s practice of expressing consistent themes: opposing DEI, shrinking some government functions, the greatness of private enterprise, and competing with China (Navarro seemingly can’t write “China” without adding the “Communist” prefix).

The book so far has touched on various forms of conservative populism. In this week’s reading there were several examples, as when the Federal Reserve chapter charged that institution with making “a transfer to Wall Street at the expense of the American public.” (735) More significant, I think, is Navarro’s critique of offshoring as costing domestic jobs. He also sees “multinational corporations and big-box retailers” as villains for opposing one tariff-like tax. (782-3)

Technology has been a prominent concern throughout the book, usually cast in a positive light, but appears more ambivalently here.  For example, Kerrigan wants to increase funding for small business technological improvement (750, 755) but Winfree warns against creating a central digital currency (noted above).

I’m interested in how COVID haunts Project 2025. This week’s chapters often mention federal programs which supported businesses during the pandemic, and often (but not always) approve.  Navarro notes the brutal impact the coronavirus had on America’s economy.

Questions

  1. Does the split over trade policy offer any advantage to opponents?
  2. How would the policy changes expressed in this week’s chapters impact your professional and personal lives?
  3. Do you see Trump as likely to attempt what this week’s reading describes?
  4. How might the world change if these global policies take effect?
  5. If you oppose what these three chapters call for, what opposition strategy and tactics would best resist it?
  6. Having read this far, what do you anticipate from the end of the book?

…and that’s it for this week’s reading.  For next Monday, September 16, we’ll wade into “Independent Regulatory Agencies” followed by the final section, entitled “Onward!”  That’s all on pages 825-887, and with that will end our entire reading.  I might add a post summing up our study to date.

Please do comment in the boxes below this post.  If you’d prefer to share your reactions on other platforms, tag me or otherwise let me know about those comments so I can include them in our next post.  If you want to respond but are worried about what people could make of your reactions, feel free to contact me here without the web knowing.

Comment away!  And on to the final tranche of Project 2025.

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Reading Project 2025, part 7: rethinking government and the economy

How might a likely second Trump administration impact higher education?  How can academics plan for and anticipate that major event, should it occur?

This week we continue our reading of Project 2025, a key document in understanding the near- and medium-term future of American politics.  This is an online, open, and distributed reading and anyone can participate. Here’s a post explaining how it works.  You can find all of our Project 2025 posts here.

In today’s post I’ll summarize this week’s reading, concluding the big “The General Welfare” section at last, then diving into “The Economy,” all found on pages 619-715.    I’ll draw out the bits which bear directly on higher education. Next I’ll add some reflections and then several discussion questions.  At the end I’ll add some more resources.

Please join in with comments below. In last week’s blog post comments Glen McGee offers a detailed, AI-assisted critique of one chapter’s labor regulations.  sibyledu observes that a returned president Trump wouldn’t have to authorize each item on the Project 2025 agenda; instead, the plan has so much detail that newly appointed subordinates can put their respective parts of the manifesto into action on their own, without Trump’s involvement.

There was more commentary on last week’s reading on Facebook.  Joey Lusk calls the drive to end anti-misinformation work as “telling on yourself.”  Ian Rowcliffe notes that Project 2025 might influence or inspire European Union legislation and policy. Jeff DeMarco and Earl Miller cautioned us to not take Project 2025 so seriously, as Trump has repeatedly disowned any connection with it.  Also on Facebook, I loved this comment from Olgy Aleu Gary:

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you analyze Project 2025? One section at a time, especially with the help of Bryan Alexander of The Futures Trends Forum.

Thank you.  Onward!

Summary overview

Project 2025 coverDiana Furchtgott-Roth begins this section by analyzing the Department of Transportation (DoT), where she was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology during the Trump administration. She considers the DoT to have become too large and, interestingly, too focused on grant making. Furchtgott-Roth wants the DoT to expand its public-private partnership work. Along those lines she wants to reduce governmental scrutiny of new technologies for transportation and roll back Biden and Obama administration aviation controls.

Other topics addressed in this chapter include climate change, a cause for which the author finds the Biden administration to have overreached, leading her to call for relaxing car mileage regulations.  As per many other chapters in the book, this one calls for the department to support and make more use of new technologies. It also wants to reduce support for mass transit, especially rail. (635-6)

Our second chapter is by Brooks D. Tucker and it covers the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  Tucker sees the Trump administration as having returned the VA to veteran-centric posture, but that the Obama and Biden teams veered away from that direction.  He additionally charges the Biden administration with pursuing equity and inclusion issues which “will affect only a small minority of the veterans who use the VA.” (642). Tucker calls for the VA to cut back on “abortion services and gender reassignment surgery” (644) as well as to increase its use of new technologies.  The DefeatProject2025 website sees Tucker as calling overall for benefit reductions.

The next chapters deal with the economically-focused parts of the federal government. Thomas F. Gilman begins by analyzing the Department of Commerce and urging the “consolidation, elimination, or privatization that examines the efficiency, effectiveness, and underlying philosophy of each individual component.”  Beyond cutting back, Gilman has two other themes, to “reverse the precipitous economic decline sparked by the Biden Administration and to counter Communist China.” To support these efforts Gilman calls for strengthening enforcement of trade agreements, supporting allies in trade deals, “strategic decoupling from China,” cutting back a range of environmental regulations, and more aggressively enforcing intellectual property rules.

Next, William L. Walton, Stephen Moore, and David R. Burton tackle the U.S. Treasury Department, beginning by calling for a slimmer staff and support for smaller government.  They urge Congress to change federal taxes, both for individuals (“a simple two-rate individual tax system of 15 percent and 30 percent that eliminates most deductions, credits and exclusions”) and businesses (“[t]he corporate income tax rate should be reduced to 18 percent”).  The authors would like a national sales tax or something close to it.  The website 25andme considers this as likely to result in “[m]illions of low- and middle-class households would likely face significantly higher taxes.”  They also want changes to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), including adding more presidential appointments and undoing the Biden administration’s push to double the number of agents.  They would privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

On the global stage, this chapter calls for the US to withdraw from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Authors want Treasury to scrutinize Chinese investments within the United States, as well as American investments which might strengthen China’s ability to compete with the US.

Walton et al follow previous chapters’ critique of the Biden administration’s equity focus. They deem Treasury support for racial minorities to be “racist policymaking” and want to end all such measures, wanting to fire any employee who “participat[ed] in any critical race theory or DEI initiative.”  Similarly, the authors abhor Biden-era climate action, calling for “[t]he next Administration [to] eliminate the Climate Hub Office and withdraw from climate change agreements that are inimical to the prosperity of the United States.”

What do these chapters mean for higher education?

Academic work on climate change would take a hit.  Furchtgott-Roth calls for a major climate science cut: “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” (664, also 674) Why?  NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” (675) Faculty, staff, and students who rely on NOAA would lose out.

International collaboration and study would also suffer in one way. Gilman blames academia for improving one strategic adversary’s technology capacities: “technology transfer on a massive scale has occurred because of adversaries’ exploitation of the U.S.’s open economy and education system through both commercial transactions and university and government research programs” (671).  In response, a new administration should “[t]ighten… the definition of ‘fundamental research’ to address exploitation of the open U.S. university system by authoritarian governments through funding, students and researchers, and recruitment” (673). In other words, academic research and teaching would fall under closer government scrutiny and, presumably, the threat of sanctions.

Moreover, the Treasury discussion calls for the creation of a new academic unit:

Treasury should examine creating a school of financial warfare jointly with DOD. If the U.S. is to rely on financial weapons, tools, and strategies to prosecute international defensive and offensive objectives, it must create a specially trained group of experts dedicated to the study, training, testing, and preparedness of these deterrents. (704)

There are no further details about such a financial war school. I can imagine some academics engaging with it in various ways: university professors becoming faculty or administration, undergraduates heading to FinWar.edu for graduate school, research partnerships, internships, etc.  Business and economics departments would be foremost here.

Reflections

As we’ve seen in our reading so far, Project 2025 is well edited to maintain consistent themes. This week’s chapters continue such persistent lines of thought as reducing federal spending, leaning into new technologies, undoing Biden-era equity measures, ditto for climate change, opposing China on multiple levels, and having loyal people ready to put into leadership roles (for example, “identifying a fully vetted roster of candidates to assume all key positions at VA well ahead of formal nominations”, 652).

Leaning into new tech is partly to improve governmental operations as well as to increase American technological capacities, as when Gilman asks for a new administration to do more with commercial space work. (677) The Treasury authors celebrate technology in one area: “history shows that economic growth and technological/scientific advance through human ingenuity are by far the best ways to prevent and mitigate extreme weather events.” (709)

On a personal level, I find reaching 700+ pages of this to be… draining and depressing. I can see so much human and natural wreckage occurring should a second Trump administration implement these recommendations.  Some of that hits my family, friends, and close colleagues. I try to write these posts with a sense of dispassionate analysis and inquiry, but at times it’s hard to do so.

Questions

  1. How would the policy changes expressed in this week’s chapters impact your professional and personal lives?
  2. Do you see Trump as likely to attempt what this week’s reading describes?
  3. How might the world change if these global policies take effect?
  4. If you oppose what these three chapters call for, what opposition strategy and tactics would best resist it?
  5. Having read this far, what do you anticipate from the rest of the book?

Resources

  • Defeat Project 2025 has some good resources, including biographies of contributors and quick summaries of issues.

…and that’s it for this week’s reading.  For next Monday, September 9, we’ll read further into “The Economy,” pages 717-823.

Please do comment in the boxes below this post.  If you’d prefer to share your reactions on other platforms, tag me or otherwise let me know about those comments so I can include them in our next post.  If you want to respond but are worried about what people could make of your reactions, feel free to contact me here without the web knowing.

Comment away!  And on to the next tranche of Project 2025.  A hearty thanks to all readers and commentators.

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Starting my technology and innovation seminar at Georgetown

Greetings from the start of fall 2024, when the academic year lurches into high gear.  I’m teaching two classes this term, and recently posted about one.  Today I’d like to describe the other, my technology and innovation seminar, which just kicked off on Thursday.

In this required class, Learning, Design, and Technology students immerse themselves in multiple ways of thinking about and doing both technology and innovation.  We explore those topics through history, imagination, sociology, economics, social justice, critical theory, philosophy, gender studies, and business.

It’s a class I know well, having first taught it in 2019.  I love almost everything about it: the topics, the approaches we take, students’ questioning and learning. I like tweaking it each time.

The mechanics of the class are much the same as they have been.  Each live session is a mix of discussion, my presentations (brief), and student presentations (each on a technology of interest to them).  Students write a short analysis of one tech or innovation early on, framed by Roger’s innovation theory, then start working on a major project analyzing one tech or innovation for education, which they can present as a scholarly paper, a podcast, a video, a game, a Miro board, or other format if I approve of it.  They have to assemble and annotate a scholarly sources bibliography as well.

This time we’re not playing a game, mostly because the logistics are daunting with a larger class.  I’ve also cut out end-of-term presentations, which look a lot of time and which students seemed to great with much dread and little benefit. I’m expanding our use of a keywords wiki Google Doc, with the students having access to it from the start, adding to it as we go, and hopefully having the whole list of terms filled out and familiar to all in December.   I continue to use discussion board threads, and have once again revised the questions I pose there.

I’m emphasizing two themes this term: AI and climate change. Students will read about AI, use various forms of it in and beyond class, then discuss its implications for their work. I’ll bring climate change in at opportune times; still considering some potential readings.

I do have some open spots on the syllabus, as you’ll see below.  For non-US and non-European perspectives I’m not sure what to focus on. I’d love for a good Chinese reading or sources for Africa. For AI I have a set of readings, but need more.  And for the future of technology I have all kinds of ideas, and am now torn between the Weinersmiths’ Soonish (which our online book club read in 2018) and Ray Kurzweil’s new book, The Singularity is Nearer.  Happy to hear your thoughts, and yes, one option is to get students doing the finding and selecting.

Here’s the syllabus as it stands now:
Thursday, August 29, 2024 – Introductions

Readings:

Exercises:

  • Introducing ourselves by technologies
  • Exploration of technology keywords  
  • Signing up for tech presentations
  • Questions to consider about a technology:

Untitled Diagram.jpg

 

Thursday, September 5, 2024 – Histories of technology, I

  • Reading: How We Got To Now, part 1: to p. 124
  • Introduction to printing press as transformative technology

Thursday, September 12, 2024 – Histories of technology, II

  • Reading: How We Got To Now, part 2: to the end.

Student tech presentations:

Thursday, September 19, 2024 – Imagining Innovation

Readings:

Student tech presentations:

Thursday, September 26, 2024 – How innovations spread, I

  • Readings: Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition: 1-52; 72-3; 87-218  (chapter 1; chapter 2 through the Miracle Rice story, the STOP AIDS story, and from “Opinion Leaders” on; chapters 3-5)

Student tech presentation

Monday, September 30 – analysis of one innovation due

Thursday, October 3, 2024 – How innovations spread, II

Readings:

Student tech presentations

Thursday, October 10, 2024 – Justice and innovation, I

Readings:

Student tech presentations

Thursday, October 17, 2024 – Justice and innovation, II

Reading:

  • Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 97-end.
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (one copy)

Student tech presentations

Thursday, October 24, 2024 – Beyond America and Europe

Reading: TBA

Student tech presentation

Thursday, October 31, 2024 – Critiquing technology

Student tech presentations 

Monday, November 4– annotated bibliography due

Thursday, November 7, 2024 – AI, I

Readings and exercises

Student presentations

Thursday, November 14, 2024 – AI, II

Readings: TBA

exercises

Student tech presentation

Thursday, November 21, 2024 – technology and innovation futures, I

Readings: TBA

Student tech presentation

Thursday, November 28, 2024 – fall recess

Thursday, December 5, 2024 – technology and innovation futures, II

Readings: TBA

Review our keywords

Friday, December 13 – final project due

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