Academic freedom, independence, and the business model of academia


From the time I started college at 18 until the time I retired at 69, I have been continuously in academia. Most of that time, I was a faculty member at a private university. For ten of those years, I was also Associate Dean for Research at my medical school.

Once you’re on the inside, you understand that universities are only nominally run by faculty. Money is what makes universities run, and for private universities it comes from (a) tuition, (b) philanthropy and (c) grants.* Accordingly, the university board of trustees** cares most about tuition-paying students, pleasing big donors and getting and maintaining federal subsidies.

No surprise that university presidents, when forced to choose between academic freedom and funding, choose to follow the money. The only surprise for me in reading this letter from Columbia University faculty responding to Trump Administration extortion is its quaint expectation that Columbia’s president will defy the Trump blackmail and stand up for the faculty.

“In the last year and a half, Columbia University has taken numerous actions to suppress student activism protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, apparently to appease some of its donors and outside pressure groups. More recently, it failed to speak up vigorously on behalf of former graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States seized by ICE agents inside university housing and facing deportation. And while President Armstrong declared herself “heartbroken” about recent ICE raids on students’ dorm rooms, your administration has done nothing to protect other students seized or threatened by ICE. Meanwhile, it has continued to comply with the administration’s diktat by expelling and suspending student protestors. Columbia’s actions, and its failure to stand on principle and defend its students, its faculty and academic freedom, have only emboldened the Trump administration to escalate its assault, culminating in its 13 March 2025 letter.”

 

I saw online that Columbia is close to reaching an agreement (read: capitulating) with the Trump Administration.

The scales long ago fell from my eyes. Universities may be non-profits, but they are businesses. Ivy League universities in particular have to compete with other prestigious institutions for students, faculty, philanthropy and grant funding. In that market, academic freedom will always run a poor second.

 

*at universities with medical schools, money can also come from the margin on the practice; many med schools have a “deans tax” on the practice that is used for things like faculty recruiting

**who are often alumni and wealthy businessmen donors

https://www.juancole.com/2025/03/university-ultimatum-independence.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two sides

Image
  Yes, there are two sides to every question. In most cases, there is a correct side and a wrong side. In the case of Kamala Harris, the correct side is that she was born a US citizen. The wrong side is that her parents had to be citizens or permanent residents for her to be a citizen. President Trump pretended to be unsure about this, just as he pretended for five years that Barack Obama is not a citizen. In the case of the Harris noncitizen claim, it is backed by the racist C laremont Institute: "The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of D...
Read more

Who chooses?

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more