What are the practical means by which academic staff can get direct control over budgets and programme planning?

The current situation is that their programmes can be closed and their posts removed at will by management. UK academics, and also tenured US faculty members, find their expertise dwelling on an inferior epistemic and political plane to that of senior managers. Professors are unable to enforce, legally or financially, their professional judgement within their own departments, and even less so in more general university policy.

Recovering professorial authority: this was January’s theme, which I mainly worked on at US campuses. I spent two very interesting weeks as the resident professor at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute, and then spoke at Swarthmore College and Johns Hopkins University on my way to Santa Barbara for my mother’s 96^th birthday.  

Duke is something like a professor’s best-case scenario. It has a full range of schools, a great faculty and student body (and basketball programme!), plus a $12.3 billion (official) endowment and also another $4.5 billion in unrestricted reserves.

And yet hiring is semi-frozen, librarians have been fired, and office cleaning has been outsourced and cut back to once a month. Many academic programmes exist in an atmosphere of permanent doubt about their value. Protests are restricted in ways that compromise the university’s full commitment to academic freedom. And the upper administration makes financial decisions that affect academic programmes without prior consultation or financial explanation to academic staff. None of these problems are particular to Duke, but rather are typical across the sector.

In January, it seemed professors’ patience with this condition has run out. Duke’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has recently tripled its membership and has commissioned a third-party financial report that was presented publicly last week. Faculty members will use it to try to unravel some of the current squeeze on programmes.

Meanwhile, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is in the midst of a faculty revolt against cuts coming from a $400 million “structural deficit” that management has not explained.  A “Resolution on Restoring Shared Governance in Campus Budget Planning” passed nearly unanimously in December, requiring management reports detailing nearly a dozen specific data categories.  The campus’s Academic Senate, through its Council for Planning and Budget, has started detailed analysis of the deficit.  Faculty research is involved again in budgeting via slide shows like this:

_{Photo via Christopher Newfield}

At the very least, public budget reporting from academic staff reduces autocracy, fiscal injustice, and, if continued, the unnatural deaths of programmes. It sets a precedent and gets people thinking about why it can’t become routine. Why isn’t collaborative budgeting institutionalised rather than extended at the occasional discretion of senior managers? 

Several reasons come to mind, and most of these were discussed with colleagues across my eight campus events at those universities.

One powerful inhibitor of democratised budgeting is professorial fear of retribution. In the UK, academic staff lack tenure and seem, in practice, fireable at will. Yes there’s a union process, but it appears to offer little practical protection from retaliation for academics who express opposition to management proposals or who call for changes in budget practices or other ground rules.

Over the holiday I read the truly harrowing account of forced downsizing at the University of Leicester, Shaping for Mediocrity (2024).  Senior managers unilaterally ended the university’s most prominent programme in business and management, Critical Management Studies, and sacked its founders and leaders. The school’s academic ranking plummeted, but that didn’t seem to matter. Fear of further retaliation prevented most other academic staff from trying to offer their targeted colleagues any effective support.

A second reason why academic staff aren’t demanding (and independently doing) budgeting is their sense that they lack adequate institutional knowledge. This is the effect of decades of budgetary blackouts in the US and UK. Management presumes and asserts ownership rights over the institution’s financial data.

In the US, the AAUP started to try to change this 110 years ago, with limited and uneven success. Academic Senates have sometimes continued the effort, but knowledge is often restricted to committee members who are in turn instructed to share nothing specific with their faculty colleagues. In the UK, union access seems limited to periods in which the university has given statutory notice of risk of redundancy, and their analysts are also sworn to secrecy. Treating access to financial data as an exclusive management right, rather than part of a university’s shared deliberate processes, deprives academic staff of the sense of competence that enables meaningful participation.

Obviously few people will put time into institutional learning when the likely rewards include reproach, the silent removal of internal research funds, blockage from committee participation, and even termination.

On this second issue, part of my job is redefining retaliation as illegitimate. It needs legal testing, funded through organisations like UCU or AAUP or other unions.  On the first issue, I’ve spent many years writing books, papers, and blog posts about budgets, analysing normally hidden data while hoping to make people feel more comfortable and confident with it.

A third issue came up in discussion at Duke and Johns Hopkins. Does the academic left, with a stronger sense than many centrists and conservatives of democratic workplace rights, want to engage and change universities as institutions? Some said institutional engagement is near zero on the left, under the influence of Occupy and the other horizontalist movements of the 2010s, not to mention the aforementioned fear of personal trouble with management. Others said that may have been true at one time but it isn’t now. At Duke, the scholar Robyn Weigman has recently published an excellent piece on left’s ambivalence about institutions in Feminist Studies (“Loss, Hope: The University in Ruins, Again”), which helped my thinking in discussions there.

My sense is of an ongoing debate about necessary modes of intervention, but I’m also seeing convergence within the left on the overall issue. The Abolition University Studies (AUS) people, focused on building alternatives to universities, and the Critical University Studies (CUS) folks, focused on institutional seizure and change, are closer than ever. Here’s a photo illustration, in which Eli Meyerhoff and I (AUS and CUS) hang out in Durham and point to the intertwining chapters in this recent book.

_{Photo via Christopher Newfield}

The continuing and important differences between AUS and CUS will remain a source of new ideas.

No one can think the university through budgets alone, and I spent most of my work time in January on a fourth issue, which is the common benefit of the university seen through its intellectual life. Even the conservative aspects of university genealogy demand intellectual autonomy for both new knowledge and social value. 

I discussed Kant in a couple of talks, since he’s an original theorist of the importance of the “lower faculty”— philosophy, and later theory and criticism—for reflecting on the status of its own knowledge. This practice also meant critique of the status of knowledge of the higher faculties—law, medicine, theology—that had direct effects on 18^th century society’s three primal interests: a sound state, a sound body and mind, and happiness in the afterlife.

Over the decades, many have noted that in the lowness of the faculty of philosophy lay its intellectual freedom, grounded in freedom from direct state control. This freedom was to serve a strict duty to the laws of thinking as such, which formed its primary object. It’s worth remembering  the radical importance of thinking in human existence, as set off from the ubiquity of coercive power. Our age has seen the reassertion of the rights of coercive power over law, knowledge, and consent. In contrast, making thinking central to action as a self-reflexive and systemic activity was and is revolutionary, in Kantian and in many other domains around the world. It’s a revolution that is obviously incomplete. And it’s a revolution that remains the core function of the university.

This fourth issue broaches the question of who has authority over the university: the managerial audit sector, with legal and fiscal goals, or the educational people, with knowledge goals. The position of the lower faculty has always been, across many variations, that financial goals cannot judge knowledge goals correctly, and that, more fundamentally, financial goals often ruin them. This is Bill Readings’ “university in ruins”—still standing and operating, but aiming to satisfy legal and fiscal audit metrics that deform the pursuit of knowledge as such.

The knowledge standards of the lower faculty were later extended to what we might call the thinker’s right to the free use of knowledge—free in particular from audit culture’s economic determination, or determination by commodified applications. In his landmark 19^th century text, The Idea of the University, John Henry Cardinal Newman identified the university with “liberal” rather than “useful” learning, which has given rise to the false polarity in which liberal knowledge is allegedly useless (and in which criticism must stick with art, not society).

Newman in fact wrote, “those rather are useful, which bear fruit; those liberal, which tend to enjoyment.” Rather than pointing to an imperative to refuse psychocultural engagement and collective action, we should understand having a degree in “enjoyment” as signalling a capacity for the self-sufficient use of knowledge, that is, “use not determined by external or superior forces.” 

Newman shared with his political opposite, Karl Marx, an interest in what the latter called use-value: enjoyment was the “absence, the non-necessity, of the accumulation of additional value,” the absence of the imperative to create surplus-value. The university degree focused not on useless knowledge but on non-commodified knowledge.

Non-commodified knowledge could and did lead to use. But its development would unfold according to its own tendencies, and the purposes and understandings of those who worked on the knowledge directly. The practices of the knowledge workers involved must never be controlled by other forces such as government, corporate sponsors, philanthropists, and commodification in general. In the critique of knowledge lay the necessity of academic freedom—as something that all students and teachers learned to practice as the main operation of the university.

University studies is the means to the end of recapturing the university for public thought. The end makes budget study worth the trouble. And it’s an end that felt imminently possible, whatever the current dimness of policy discourse, during my time spent with the professors and students of those universities.