Higher Education in Peril

As part of our series devoted to the pasts and futures of higher education in the United States, this conversation, hosted by LCHP Director David Myers, features Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele alongside legal scholars Ariela Gross from UCLA and Nomi Stolzenberg from USC to discuss an escalating war on universities by the Trump administration. Scheppele frames the assault as a distinctly modern autocratic strategy: not bullets, but budgets that target elite institutions to seek ideological conformity, weaken leadership, and force anticipatory compliance. Drawing on her experience living in Hungary under Viktor Orbán, she identifies an authoritarian playbook that pairs fiscal strangulation with autocratic legalism, the repurposing of law to anti-democratic ends, while leveraging accusations to mask or legitimize discriminatory and coercive governance.

Gross emphasizes how long-standing right-wing projects, especially attacks on DEI, are being accelerated through institutional bargaining (for example, over withheld scientific funding) while trading away racial and gender justice infrastructure. Stolzenberg adds a longue durée account of U.S. conservative opposition to the modern university, highlighting theological currents that cast universities as battlegrounds in a moral struggle over national identity. 

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her book, Legal Secrets,won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association as well as the Corwin Prize of the American Political Science Association.

Ariela Gross is a Distinguished Professor of Law and History at UCLA and teaches Contract Law, Constitutional Law, Enslavement and Racialization in U.S. Legal History, as well as other courses on race and legal history. Gross is the author of Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, with Alejandro de la Fuente (Cambridge UP 2020) and What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard UP 2008).

Nomi M. Stolzenberg is the Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair in Law at the USC Gould School of Law. Her research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including law and religion, law and liberalism, law and psychoanalysis, and law and literature. Stolzenberg’s scholarly publications include the frequently cited “The Profanity of Law”. With David N. Myers, she has published American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New Yo

Transcript

Narrator: 0:10

Welcome to Putting the Past to Work, the History Policy Podcast at UCLA from the Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

David Myers: 0:41

Hello, this is David Myers, Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, and host of Putting the Past to Work, the newly rebranded podcast of the Luskin Center. The Trump administration's attack on higher education is without precedent in its scale and intent. Universities are being threatened not only with massive defunding, but also external oversight of academic affairs and curricular matters. In general, the administration would like to undo the autonomy that institutions of higher education have enjoyed for decades over the course of what might be called the Golden Age. Has the golden age of higher education in the United States come to an end? What can we learn from populist attacks on universities in other settings such as Hungary? And what can be done in defense of academic freedom and the ideal of universities as generators of knowledge and opportunity? Today's episode captures a conversation from a lesson center event held last December devoted to higher education in peril. I had the opportunity to be in discussion with Professor Kim Scheppele, Lawrence S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, and one of the country's leading experts on democratic backsliding and government assaults on universities. We are joined by UCLA professor and historian Ariela Gross and USC legal theorist Nomi Stolzenberg. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is David Myers. I teach in the History Department at UCLA and direct the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, whose mission is to bring historical nuance and perspective to important questions of the present day. Last year we commenced a series of discussions devoted to the past, present, and futures of higher education in the United States. The stakes were high then, and they are much higher now, as the Trump administration has placed universities, including UCLA, in the center of its uh crosshairs. This has met a series of threats of withholding funds, of uh of imposing enormous fines, of placing external monitors on academic departments, of seeking lists of students, um, which, if implemented, would undermine the independence and autonomy of universities. Where are we today? How did we get here? And where are we headed? So, to take stock of the current moment, I'm really delighted to welcome uh Kim Lane Scheppele, who is the Lawrence Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Professor Scheppele has been one of the country's most incisive and trenchant observers of the global trend toward democratic backsliding. Drawing on many years of work on the ground in Hungary, she has come to understand the authoritarian playbook that was developed and deployed there in Hungary in the still ongoing era of Viktor Orban and in many other places around the world. Um, especially, she's called attention to the attempt to manipulate the law to advance anti-democratic ends, what is called autocratic legalism. One of the key targets of assault in the various societies uh under threat is the university. Um, and it's no surprise that uh Professor Shepley has assumed a prominent role in pushing back against the Trump administration's targeting of U.S. educational institutions through uh a loose consortium of scholars called EDU Coalition and in other ways. Um, it was our original intention to have alongside Professor Scheppele, David Kaye, professor of law at UC Irvine, and uh the prominent human rights lawyer known to many of us, who also has been an active uh uh uh uh person in uh the work of the EDU coalition. But uh alas, David was called to jury duty last night, um uh, but fortunately is now discharging his civic obligation, um, all the more important in these times of threat to legal institutions as well as institutions of higher education. But we are very pleased to have, as uh late additions, uh two scholars of law, whom I know quite well, um, who are close observers of the legal and political assault on the American University, uh uh Ariella Gross, distinguished professor of law at UCLA, and Nomi Stolzenberg, the Nathan and Lily Chappelle professor uh at the USC Gould School of Law. So, welcome Kim, welcome, Ariella, welcome, Nomi. Um, we really appreciate your uh taking time out of your busy schedules to discuss this really important question uh or series of questions that we're going to take up. Um, so let me just begin by asking for your assessment of uh of where are we today in uh the Trump administration's what would seem to be war on universities. And I wonder if you think, Kim, that's appropriate language to describe what's going on.

Kim Scheppele: 5:55

Well, they seem to be using war for everything else they're doing. So we might as well think of this also as a war on universities. Um, and just like we're seeing them abolishing the law of war everywhere, they're otherwise having wars. Um, they're also abolishing the law and the norms as we understood them about the relationship between universities and government that existed before Trump came to office. Um, and so absolutely, I think one of the ways to understand what the Trump administration is doing is just to say that their weapon has fortunately not been a bullet so far or not even raids, um, but it's been money. Um and so what the what the Trump administration has done is to target every single source of funding that universities have. And they've done it in sequence. So starting with research grants that came from the national government, continuing through the summer to the tax on endowments, also changes in the big ugly bill to uh qualifications for student financial aid and to Pell grants, and now destruction of the Department of Education and so on. They've borrowed this model from Victor Orban, who also discovered that if you go after all the ways that the national budget supports all the places that might rise up against an autocratic power grab, you can disable them really quickly, bring them to their knees, and particularly if you pick them off one at a time. So that's the war. It's money, not bullets, and the strategy is picking them off one at a time. Yep, a war.

David Myers: 7:28

Where do you think we're at? I mean, you've been observing this very closely for the last six to eight months. Where are we at in sort of the cycle of the ebbs and flows of the attack? There have been um many attacks directed at many different institutions, many attempts at legal pushback, a good number of which have been successful. How do you assess where we're at in this current moment?

Kim Scheppele: 7:49

Yeah, so I think it makes sense to put universities, and by the way, Ariela and Naomi jump into it, it's not just me. Um, but I think that it makes sense to put universities in the context of what's also happened, for example, with you know, with law firms and with media. These are vast, and so in the US, unlike in a place like Hungary, these are vast, very complex ecosystems in which some are publicly funded, some are privately funded. There's a whole range of different, I mean, it's just a very large ecosystem. So, how do you take out the whole ecosystem? You know, what you do is you you pick victims, and you pick very high-profile victims, and you go after them with the hopes that you will cow the entire sector. So it might be easier for us to see in the case of law firms, because when we're in the middle of universities, we don't see ourselves in this picture. But with law firms, the Trump administration started by bringing executive orders against many of the high-profile law firms, but many was like a dozen. And some caved and some fought back. Um, the point is that all of them, all of them, including the ones who were never targeted, have gotten out of the business of defending people who were challenging the Trump administration's executive orders and who are the victims of it. They've kept their corporate clients, you know, so every university has a handful of them. But on the on the ground level litigation that's being brought against the administration, big law is simply out. Now that's what they're trying to do to universities, right? They pick a bunch of high-profile universities, they pick them off one by one. The point of that is to make all the other universities keep their heads down, anticipate what would be necessary to comply in advance, and then cow the entire sector by picking off the top, and then especially disabling the administrations of these schools, because of course, what they've also done is to push out the leadership, you know, of these schools. So any administration, any university president that wants to keep their job is, you know, looking compliant, saying, you know, flattering the president, you know, getting rid of DEI references on university websites and doing all of that because it's gotten personal that presidents can't keep their jobs if unless they keep their heads down, right? So that's the strategy is to get rid of the is to cow everybody by picking out a few. And they're going after elite institutions across the board because the masses can get, I mean, what we're seeing now is citizen action is really rising. The leadership is absent, and that's because they targeted the high profile strata from which the leadership might have arisen. And you know, that way the bottom-up stuff has nowhere to go, right? So we've seen this. This is a kind of autocratic playbook, and universities are a big part of that. Yes.

David Myers: 10:42

Do you want to jump in?

Ariela Gross: 10:45

Yeah, um, I I guess I I agree with everything uh Kim has said, and uh, and I think law firms are a good example of a place where we saw um a lot of capitulation, um, even more so than than uh with um with universities. Um I wanna I would just highlight the piece of this that is about goals that um have been really long-term goals of the right wing movement, not only not only here, but but globally, but here they have a really long white supremacist history, right? Which is going after what they're using the umbrella term DEI, but but it's much broader than that, right? They've been um get uh completely eviscerating um federal employment, just firing, which is firing, I think, um now thousands of black women who work in the federal government. Um, and their goal and one of their key goals at university seems to be that kind of elimination of people of color from the university, both in in hiring and in admissions. And and the obeying in advance is so widespread. Um at the the the sort of best version of that is just the renaming, right? The the university leadership that wants to remain committed to civil rights policies, is trying to get away with just some creative renaming. But um, but for others, um they're kind of happy, I think, to, or many, I think, are happy to go along with um some of these changes. And even universities that that in important ways are fighting back, like Harvard being number one, right? Harvard, we're so happy that they joined an AAUP lawsuit, that they didn't accept this deal. I'm an alum and I gave to Harvard for the first time after they did that. But in all in so many other ways, whether it's shutting down all kinds, you know, the women's center on campus and all kinds of so-called DEI programming, um, firing middle the Middle Eastern studies directors, you know, they have in so many ways um already done the things that the uh Trump administration wants them to do. So I I think that uh both um uh anticipatory obedience and also trading um scientific research funding for uh for cutting back on racial and gender justice initiatives is something we're we're just beginning to see and are going to see a lot more of. The Trump administration is accepting less money in all of these deals, um, including, I think, zero in the UVA deal. Um but so the scientists on campus will be happy, or some will be happy, but they're giving in on all of the important um protections uh for equality and racial and gender justice. And so that's my, you know, the trend that I see happening.

David Myers: 14:37

So even in places where there has been a measure of institutional resistance, there has been an erosion of some of the core values that um has made the university in the United States in the 21st century what it is, um, sort of much more diverse uh intellectual and cultural space than it had been before. A really important point, especially in light of you know our many of our um efforts to bolster up institutions to resist further. And Kim, I think it's absolutely right to note that you know they're the administration is smart enough to know like what are the leading institutions? Let's say we're gonna take Harvard, a leading private, and UCLA, a leading public, knowing full well that if we get them to succumb, it's gonna be a lot easier to uh roll over others down the line. Um, so anyway, Nomi. Thoughts.

Nomi Stolzenberg: 15:35

Yeah, well, I want to sort of affirm and expand on what Ariela said about this actually being a very the culmination of long-term goals of the right of the right-wing movement, of the conservative movement in the United States. And Ariela is absolutely right to um highlight the white supremacist dimension of these long-term goals. Um uh, you know, the the attack on DEI is the culmination of a very, very, very old battle against um overcoming the the sort of racial privilege um that historically has defined the university. Um but that and and and Ariela, you've sort of ended by kind of affirming or or stressing the importance for universities to affirm the ideals of racial and gender justice, to which the American university has been committed for a very long time. So those ideals go way, way back. I think it's really fair to call them foundational ideals of the modern university and the attack on them, the the extent to which the conservative movement in America, going back a century or more, has been defined by its opposition to the university's embrace of what today we call DEI. But but that commitment to um diversifying the student body, diversifying the faculty, diversifying the curriculum goes back over a hundred years, as does the right-wing opposition to doing so. Um, and in that regard, I would add another dimension, um, which is the religious dimension of this of this really old, old battle. Um if we look at sort of the origins of the uh admissions policies that express explicitly a commitment to uh uh socioeconomic, racial, uh, ethnic diversity. Uh that was a product originally in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century of Protestant universities embracing more and more liberal modernist interpretations of what Protestantism stands for, coming to believe that it was inconsistent with their liberal Protestant ideals to limit admission to not only members of one single Protestant denomination, but to have any kind of religious exclusion. So you have universities like USC, right, founded in, I forget, the 1880s, I think, uh, but like so many American colleges and universities that were founded in that era, and that's when you had the biggest explosion, um, sort of post-civil war, founded simultaneously as a Protestant and non-denominational university, committed to uh not engaging in racial exclusion explicitly. Did they live up to those ideals? Totally not. Totally not. So I'm not making the case that those ideals were fulfilled, but they are sort of genetically explicitly part of the founding ideals of the university to which the conservative movement was opposed. And that opposition was by no means exclusively, but significantly religious in nature, theological in nature. And going to your original question, David, I think that's the origin of the warfare rhetoric. Ever since that, you know, I I cannot tell you how many pamphlets and books have been published in the last hundred years with basically the same title: The Battle for the American Soul. This is the language of theological conservatism, religious fundamentalism, which has perceived liberalism, secularism, and humanism to be theological threats to their fundamentalist version of Christianity. And that battle has been going on as we know it for a hundred years. And I think we have to see what's going on now as, in significant measure, a continuation of that battle.

David Myers: 20:53

So I appreciate, especially given that this is a center devoted to the study of history uh and its implications for today, that long durée perspective, which really you're arguing is um uh a kind of religious war, because it's a battle between a theological conservatism and uh basically a liberal Protestant vision of the secular institution of the university. Um, but in thinking of sort of that long during perspective, I'm also thinking of what's new. You rightly called attention to the fact that you know the assault on wokeness and DEI was not born in from 2.0 by any stretch of the imagination. What does seem to be new here is the focus on anti-Semitism and the weaponization of anti-Semitism. Um, and you know, the equation of anti Zionism and anti Semitism, which has a longer history to be sure, but the IHR definition that has stood at the center of so much controversy basically, you know, is a function and a product of the last 10 years. And we've seen a really rapid acceleration of the discourse around anti Zionism, anti Semitism, and the weaponization, I would say, over the last five years. That seems to be new to the game and quite different, I think, Ken than what one finds in Orban's Hungary.

Kim Scheppele: 22:10

Well Orban deploys anti-Semitism as part of every election campaign, right? And then when it gets to be too hot, he starts comes storage comes around.

Speaker 3: 22:17

Yeah. Yeah.

Kim Scheppele: 22:18

And but no, and uh Netanyahu flies in and says we all hate storage. This is not anti-Semitic, right? So that's a whole other conversation we can get into. But but also there's another thing going on here just to just to just to play off what I completely agree with what Ariela and Nomi said. Part of the of the Trump administration, it's not him of course, but his minions cleverness in the way they're waging an assault against universities, is that they're engaged in massive discrimination in the name of anti-discrimination. And so by weaponizing anti-Semitism, they make it very difficult to argue back in the language of anti-discrimination because, and also because the left has as one of its great strengths and weaknesses that every accusation is something we take seriously and we we ask ourselves maybe there's something to it right and and there is something to it. I mean antisemitism is real. So you know that's the first thing to say. But there's also another logic going on here. And again you see this over and over again among autocrats now, which is that every accusation is an admission. Right. And if you think of it that way, it makes a ton of sense out of how they work. They accuse you of what they're doing, right? So there was just an article today, for example, in the in the journal Wired, which I highly recommend to all of you because it's doing seriously good investigative work when the mainstream media so to speak are really not. And one of the things Wired uncovered is that Doge, you know, this effort to to gather all the data of the US government and use it for purposes we can only now guess at has still been going on even as the administration made this huge announcement that it was closed. Okay so think of all the accusations that the Trump people have made about the deep state. Okay it didn't exist but they've now created one okay which means if you accuse them of a deep state it's you sound like in fact at the a week before inauguration I published an article called the playground taunt and it's like you did it. No, you did it. No, you did it right and they want to get you involved in those kinds of fights. So they accuse you of doing what they're about to do. It's the best sign of exactly what they're doing that they accuse you of that. And it kind of it it distorts and it changes the way you can fight back. So that's why I think it's going to be really important, you know, both of course to not downplay the long history of anti-Semitism in the US and in US institutions. I'm at Princeton which was one of the very last universities to actually hire a Jewish faculty member. So we have these histories in all of our institutions, but it's not the only history of discrimination, right? And the fact that we focused on remedying some more than we focused on remedying others is just one of those things that means that we're a work in progress too. But I think you know if you look at the Trump administration and autocrats around the world these days every accusation is an admission is the best way to get at what they're doing.

David Myers: 25:13

Yes so could you um you know on that very point could you like help us understand both the timing and the content of the autocratic playbook? So you you spent tell us about your time in Hungary and how formative it was in shaping your understanding of democratic blacksliding and what is what is the autocratic playbook?

Kim Scheppele: 25:36

Yeah so first of all I moved to Hungary in the 1990s after the Berlin Wall came down and I did that because I was interested in how you make a democracy right everybody was was was sort of amazed at the extent and the speed with which these countries that came out from under Soviet tutelage were so eager to and really did set up what were actually robust democracies. That's not fake. And yet you know here we were you know 2010 was when Viktor Orban came to power the second time 20 years after I first met him and he came into office um with this really quite striking new way of doing autocratic capture that other people have now copied. So I went there to study the rise of democracy. I had no idea I was going to be a leading expert on the fall of democracy but I just you know you go there and you learn the language and then you stay there. What Orban pioneered and by the way I should say lest I sound like you know crazy cat lady, um Victor Orban's people were actually involved with the Heritage Foundation in writing Project 2025. So this is and Chris Rufo, since we're talking about higher ed had spent several years in Orban's English language think tank in Budapest, you know, sharpening his skills on how to destroy universities. So this is not just a you know a kind of metaphorical connection it's actually a they talk to each other and the same is true with Bolsonaro's people and now with Miley's people in Argentina also with the peace government in Poland with and actually what's interesting is that I tend to downplay the ideological content of these revolutions, not because they're not there, but because when you look at how the autocrats talk to each other the ideological divides don't matter. Viktor Orban was in a borrowed a lot of his tactics from Erdogan in Turkey who was running the first sort of overtly religiously Muslim government in Turkey since the end of the Ottoman Empire. And so it ideology doesn't matter for the guys who are engineering this it matters for their followers you know which is why I I take you know Ariel and Nomi's point that if you've got this white supremacist movement that's just been looking for a so-called savior, they're happy Trump is happy to take their support but I don't believe for a minute that you know this is the main thing he's up to he's mostly up to making money frankly I mean and however he does that he'll do that. So I think there's mixed motives so back to back to Orban. So what Orban did that he pioneered was he spent eight years out of office designing a playbook so that when he came to power day one he could blitz everything everywhere all at once. And what he did was he had a compliant parliament and a and a majority to actually pass constitutional amendments from day one, which I wasn't sure he he didn't know he was going to get but he did two things you know change the legal framework with executive orders but then by laws and weaponizing the national budget to immediately defund every source of potential opposition to his autocratic takeover so that all of the targets of the defunding spent all this time saying oh my God how can we survive and not looking at what he was doing. So when Trump came in you could see in project 2025 that they were planning the same thing which is why you know as soon as Trump was elected I was you know on the circuit trying to say to people like you've got to plan now for this and he's going to go after it's always follow the money with these guys. Right. And so that's the autocratic playbook. Now Orban took a little longer to go after universities than Trump has in I mean he did cut the budget now again this is Europe where almost all universities are public. Private universities are sort of an oddity and at the beginning Orban cut the budget of all the national universities by 40% in the first two years. So it was again a fiscal assault later when faculty kept teaching anyway even though they were fired he forced a lot of faculty into early retirement and they kept teaching anyway because again these were faculty who remembered the ones retiring in particular remembered during the Soviet time how they used to have seminars in their living rooms when they couldn't have seminars in the universities. And they kind of went back to that you know so there was there was still a muscle memory in the older generation about how you cope with authoritarian takeovers. And that's made you know Hungary is not in a model of what I call resilience exactly. On the other hand I think they do have some lessons about how we survive these kinds of assaults on universities. But the playbook is all legal and it's all financial and the ideology is there to win elections and to win supporters for the plan but the core people who do this are neither ideological nor particularly um they're how to put it they're mostly corrupt you know I I mean you look at Putin what ideology does he stand for what ideology does like I mean really Erduan given the way he's governed stand for most of these guys don't stand for anything and Trump himself doesn't you know and so the reason why I say that is just is not to deny that white supremacy supremacy isn't what's going on in the takeover of universities, but to say that these autocrats rely on coalitions of people who are all in it for their own purposes. And if you can figure out ways to pull them apart and to drive wedges between the different constituencies that support this you know autocratic takeover it's one of the few ways that we have to kind of bring them down in the end.

David Myers: 31:17

So I want to I want to pick up on that I I mean just trying to sort of um deconstruct if we can the playbook so defunding defunding money yeah discourse your very important point that they accuse you of doing what they're doing. The discursive piece is a feature the legal piece which we have uh hinted at but you've d named it um uh uh an attempt to create a counter-constitution meaning the deployment of law not the not the overturning of law not the suspension of law the over the the deployment the the the repurposing of law right um these are all some of the very important key treatment and you know about the ideology um you know I I wonder about what this where we are in the pendulous swing of history um you know as against an era in which uh the punitive ideals of liberal democracy were uh deemed virtuous we're in a different space now and some of the seeming values that are you know uniform it would seem to the various sites that we've mentioned are white Christian nationalism. So I do wonder if there isn't an ideological component there that links, you know, that that's not weak um and it's not that veiled that also should be added to at least the playbook as it operates today.

Kim Scheppele: 32:43

Well but here again the white I mean I think that the the the Christian nationalist piece of it is a piece of it. I don't think that's where the tech bros are for example um although I mean maybe I mean they'll make it really are some of them are true but I don't think that's their primary thing. I think that's their second I mean who knows I mean the pockets stuff in the pockets is stuff in the pockets. Yeah yeah but the reason why I want to downplay ideology is not to say it doesn't matter right but to say that what we're seeing we need to be open to the idea of a mix and match of different ideological pieces, right? So um in particular left and right so who would guess that a government that portrayed itself as a government of the right would start taking shares of ownerships in companies. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 33:32

Right would start this big piece today I read the piece today and was thinking exactly Victor nationalized big chunks of the Hungarian economy.

Kim Scheppele: 33:40

Is that what somebody on the right the right as we knew it does right um and so but also there's this kind of um weaponization and valorization um of um you know how to put it I mean of the ordinary person right which Trump is constantly engaged in where you know with his followers and the whole I mean he's he's appealing to um people who have less education which used to be the audience for the left but is no more I mean in other words what's happened is that if we think about the traditional constituencies for left and right parties, both in North America and in Europe, which are the two places I've worked in most exhaustively, I suppose, it used to be that the left thought of itself as appealing to you know a working class audience that was less educated with the aspiration of helping them achieve whatever it was they wanted. And it was precisely the right that was doing the elite discussion with people who were more privileged. Okay, so that's flipped now. And so I just think that we have to be open to the idea that left and right are undergoing a transition and that what we're seeing instead is a kind of realignment along a different political axis if we're thinking ideology, a different political axis in which you have what I think of as a kind of nationalist cosmopolitan axis instead, you know, and so among parties of the left there was always a nationalist wing. So just in the US, let's take Bernie Sanders you know who was kind of tone deaf on a lot of things um you know because he I mean if you're if you're interested in expanding the social safety net you can't have an open door immigration policy. It's just fiscally impossible. Right. So what happens is you split apart the folks who are believer believers in universal rights and everybody has the, you know, has basic human rights that we all ought to attend to regardless of whether they're attached to our particular country or not is one version of left. And the other version of left is you know kind of social safety net, make sure that everybody is is cared for in both a sort of economic and social sense, which you could only do in closed communities. Okay so that splits the left. On the right you've got the same split this we're not talking about education. So just stop me if I'm going off the track but you know on the right you've got the same split between the free traders and the folks who have a million passports and who want to see the world as a borderless space for themselves and the right wing nationalists who are often religious, you know, and have not believers in universal values or universal expansion of the safety net or anything of that kind. And so what you're seeing is that this this nationalist cosmopolitan split is dividing parties of the left and right everywhere in the world we're seeing traditional parties of the left and right failing. New parties are not rising up to meet their demands, you know, to meet the empty space. And this is the space so in this larger book I'm writing I try to show how it's the collapse of party systems that are the precursor to collapses of democracy. Because when you don't have organized parties that are vetting candidates it creates the space for these aspirational autocrats sometimes at the heads of social movements, sometimes they take over political parties as in the US, sometimes like with you know Chavez in Venezuela or Corea in Ecuador, they simply bust through a broken party system and come or Bolsonaro in Brazil for that matter or Macron in France to take one that hasn't gone bad yet um you know totally bad yet but wait till the next election right because what happens is sometimes you get somebody who breaks the party system and then the next election brings you the bad thing. So you're finding party systems failing everywhere and that's the precursor. So this is where so when I try to downplay ideology it's not to say that that our values don't matter. It's just to say that our values are are have to be mapped onto a new political playing field in which we don't give up our core values but we have to reorient them and sometimes look for partners in unlikely places.

Speaker 3: 37:43

So I mean we could go on on this for a very long time back to higher education but Nomi wanted to say something Ariela wanted something briefly and then we're going to go back to our conversation. Yeah.

Ariela Gross: 37:54

Yeah no I would just I I totally take your point and I also think as we're talking about the rise of authoritarian regimes right you're you're talking about particularly the leadership and and someone like Trump who I completely agree has no ideology or maybe even ideas of um whatever like cult leaders or you know um the only thing I would I just want other word I want to throw in there with I maybe slightly different than ideology is identity. And when you mention the tech rows, you know, I think it's not a a coincidence that there is this big like white South African contingent who is very connected to a white nationalist identity might not and a Christian it might not you know map on exactly to say you know Fuentes or or who you know whatever but but for him who you know who plug into that same NRM it's a very masculine identity right Silicon Valley is an incredibly misogynist place I can say after having lived in Palo Alto for many years.

David Myers: 39:12

So just throwing that okay and this is a really fascinating conversation I have my own thoughts on the the the realignment and presence or absence of ideology but um I want to turn our attention back to our main subject and ask um and Kim maybe I'll ask you to take the lead on this um briefly um what are the lessons learned from Hungary that we can bring to the work here particularly what tools and strategies are there in the domain of pushing back against assault on universities? And you mentioned new coalitions that that's one thing but specifically in the case of universities what tools and strategies do you think we should be refining now?

Kim Scheppele: 39:58

Yeah so one of the things I've seen happen elsewhere and that I also think is happening here is that universities are not unified within themselves. And there's very often on university campuses a pretty big divide between the STEM subjects and the more humanistic fields. And so I've seen this again in other places Orban did the same thing when he abolished gender studies. By the way I started the first gender studies program at Central European University in Hungary and so you know when Orban came after those programs it felt really personal. But you know so what what the strategy of the Trump administration borrowing from Orban and borrowing but they did some of this in Russia as well is to attack the humanities and social sciences by cutting the funding to the natural sciences and making as a condition of restoration of funding to the natural sciences that the humanistic fields cave in. They're pitting one part of the university against another and that's where I think it's really important to try to talk across disciplines and try to make sure that that split isn't weaponized because we all have an interest in the independence of universities and that may mean burying hatchets on some other fights in order to keep that going. So right after the all the grants got cut uh here at Princeton um I immediately started talking to my STEM colleagues. I started doing legal briefings for STEM colleagues and basically said, you know, look if we're going to try to get the grant money back, the way to do it at the beginning and I think this has been, I mean now the Cal system has been, you know, taking a slightly different strategy because it's a huge powerful and unified you know only somewhat unified university system. But at the beginning we could see that many of the universities that were hit were not going to go to bat to get the grants back for their scientists. And that was because universities could see that there were even bigger punishments coming down the road and they were afraid that if they went to court to get the grants renewed the current grants renewed that they would be disqualified from future grants. So what we did working with my Princeton colleagues and fanning out was we said, well how can we generate support for getting their grants back you know and so we went out to their disciplinary organizations. So if you'll notice like the opening salvo on getting the um NIH grants back came from the American Public Health Association. The opening salvo on on the on sort of challenging the constitutionality although we don't know I mean whether the Supreme Court's not on our camp on this but trying to challenge some of the DEI stuff came from the American Sociological Association. In the forefront of trying to get grants back on the humanity side was the American Council of Learned Societies MLA and American Historical Association. The professional associations have been able to fill in where the universities didn't um and I and that was partly an overt strategy a lot of us started doing in the early days because university leadership has got to be able to fight even other battles okay so this is so anyway so the grants front was partly a way to divide units. If you could get everybody in the act of thinking about weaponizing their professional associations to go after the current grants that was the way that we brought together the folks on the science and the humanities side at least in some of the institutions I've been working with. So we need to think about not allowing their tactics to split us. The other tactics that are coming down the road are tactics that are again everything is going to be fiscal, right? And this is why universities are caving. First of all, because the government's going after places where they've got interim presidents and where they think they have sympathetic boards. But also because every university president can look at how their university makes money and sees that every single thing on that list is now being cut So their vision is quite different than a faculty vision, where we're just thinking about, I mean, the important task of what we think is the central mission of the university. But, you know, um, anyway, so I think that to some extent, faculties and administrations also have competing interests here. And we have to make sure that the that the administration doesn't divide us either. And that may mean that faculties need to think about defending ourselves in ways that don't simply put pressure on our administrations and finding ways to think about how we get them through this as well as they have to work with us, right? So we have to look at all the ways they're dividing and conquering universities and prevent ourselves from getting divided. And then this also goes to the strategy of working across universities. So again, in places where you've got general strikes of universities, this has been pretty effective. And here I'm thinking that one of the things that's been happening in Europe that we could think of as a strategy here is that we all know it's a totally different topic, but it's the same strategy. Um, academic publishing, as we know, is a profit center for a lot of commercial companies that are making a huge amount of money off our free research and free labor, right? So European universities started joining together. Again, it's easier if you're German public universities or Dutch public universities, and they all canceled their subscriptions to the rapacious journals that were using free labor as a profit motive, and they got them all to back down and lower their prices. Okay. Now we have to think about a strategy for universities to unify when the when the administration is coming after them one by one by one. Right. And so so far, I think that's what's really been escaping us. But the Cal system has been kind of a model in this of working across campuses. Um, the um Colorado system just had a campus-wide set of faculty senates saying we have to work together and share the resources. So for network state universities, that may be a way to go. The Big Ten has been trying to do that, linking through faculty senates. So finding some strength in linking across faculties may also provide a way for administrations to find the coalition, EDU coalition.

Speaker 3: 46:18

Edu coalition, that's what we're asking. Okay. Um, are I just want to say something? And maybe Nomi will say something. Then I'm gonna pose a final question.

Ariela Gross: 46:26

Yeah, um, yeah, so I I just want to put one quick context, which is just this assault and war on universities is happening in a moment when um universities have under certainly university administration has radically shifted towards a much more corporate model and um is very far from the kind of faculty governance partnership and an academic mission, you know, uh uh um idea of the university from that time that Nomi was talking about of sort of the late 19th century, right? And and the corporate model sees faculty as um employees, not partners for the most part, and it's and it was very top-heavy in administration. And um and that it's no surface. So I have a more cynical view, probably, of why university administrations haven't been, yes, they're seeing a bigger picture than we are, but you know, I just have a more cynical, more negative view of why university administrations are not the ones leading the way here and will not be. They won't be the ones uniting across um universities, and I don't think they are in any way going to lead us out of this mess.

David Myers: 47:49

But can I just make a point up on that? Um as someone who's been at this institution for a long time, yeah. Um and I'm speaking in the presence of some esteemed former administrators, um, but I mean, the fact is, I take you know, Kim's point about the importance of overcoming both the old divides and the intrinsic hermeneutic of suspicion that with which we operate. Um, but I also have to say that at UCLA, all good innovation comes from the bottom up. So in other words, the the bottom up has to lead here. Um, but it doesn't mean that we can't build a coalition. It's don't expect the top-down level to you know push us towards greater collaboration.

Nomi Stolzenberg: 48:32

We will be happy, very happy to be surprised by um, and I'm you know, I'm always thrilled to see Michael Roth in action, and I'm always happy to be and Chris and this good. You have a great, I was just about to say you have a great president. Chris is wonderful, but it it at the University of California, I think your own example showed, right? At the University of California, it was the unions and the faculty associations, every union, staff, student, and faculty union joined the lawsuit with the University of California faculty associations, which are like our not union union because we're not actually unionized, but it was unions, and I know that that um tenured faculty have been historically very um skeptical about unionization. I always was too um in terms of faculty, but I have been absolutely convinced in this crisis that it's the unions that are going to lead the way, and that are the only way we will have the muscle and the organization to move across universities and in this sector because students, staff, and faculty is an enormous coalition, right? UCLA is the biggest employer and USC are the biggest employers in this huge city. So um, so given the weakness of faculty governance, and I'm all for trying to strengthen faculty governance, but those faculty senates in the Big Ten I I participate in, you know, trying to make that happen, they all did this, and the universities, not one of them listened. Um, so that was directed at the university administrations to say, hey, look, all the faculties think we should band together and have a compact. And the university administration said, Oh, we don't think so.

Kim Scheppele: 50:40

I wanted to ask, Kim, do you have any thoughts about how to do coalition building better in light of what Ariela said? You called for sort of overcoming the old and highly predictable divides. Ariela sort of calls attention to a problem, you know. But this is Will the President of Colorado listen to the faculty senate. So what do you think? Um no, and so this is where I think we have other allies. So one is that a lot of universities are now trying to um uh, for lack of a better word, since we started with the war, weaponize their alumni. Alumni are a big source of giving, alumni are a big source of money. It doesn't rival the corporate money that tends to get onto boards, but it's something presidents listen to. So trying to get in touch with alums and trying to get them to see. I mean, what we need to do is think about other vectors of influence. So alumni are clearly one. Um, the other thing is that what I'm worried about with the strategy of, I mean, on every campus I know of where there's an effective faculty standard, and I might say that even though I'm really in Princeton, we've been very lucky. A, we haven't been at the crosshairs, B, we have a president speaking out. C, we have a president who comes to our very occasional faculty meetings at which we have no responsibility for anything because we have no faculty governance, but he did tell us all to speak out. So we have that, okay? And I realize I'm in a really privileged position. But um, what I'm worried about is that faculty governance tends to be also sectoral, which is the STEM people are not there. So when we actually mobilize, quote, the faculty, it's very often exactly the sectors of the faculty that the Trump administration is hitting. So we have to think about building bridges within, right? Because the because the STEM faculty, frankly, are bringing in a huge source of money for the university. Like in other words, what I'm thinking of is since this is a financial war that the Trump administration is launching, we have to look at that financial picture also. And if it's just the faculty who are not bringing in giant grants and who are always, frankly, you know, we're all making demands of the central administration. That's what we do. Um, we can be easily batted aside. But if we start to mobilize with the sources that actually do account for income to the university, like the STEM faculty, for example. So, first building bridges with the STEM faculty, building bridges with alumni, for example, building bridges with other communities outside the university that are interested in higher education. Um, for example, what I've been learning now at many state, I used to teach at the University of Michigan, and this was certainly true for us, and this may be true for you as well. How many members of the California legislature are graduates of the state of the Cal system? They have no interest in having the system go down either, right? So if we start to think strategically, if I mean, again, what I learned from watching Orban was that, which is something I hate doing, I hate following the money, okay, but that's what they're doing. So that's what we have to do. And, you know, figure out what are all the sources of revenue to universities that we have some control over shaping to push back against the forces that have gone onto the boards, right? And then the other thing is to go directly after the boards, right? Which is to say, how come faculty are not represented on these boards? You know, I mean, how can you have a university being run by people who have no university, no idea what is happening at the level at which they claim to care, you know? So so this is where it seems to me the drive for getting onto boards may be more crucial than the drive for actually pressuring presidents. And, you know, not because I want to give presidents an easy time of it, but I think that presidents are right now, like nobody wants to be a university president for very good reason right now. And the question is how we help them do the job they thought they well, not all of them were necessarily hired to promote higher education, but many of them were, and most of them can't. So the question is how to leverage some other pressures so that they feel pressures that go the other way. That's what I'd suggest.

David Myers: 54:42

Yeah. Okay, so I mean, you've given us lots to think about in terms of strategy, and we should indeed all follow up with each other and begin that or continue that work of coalition building, the new coalition building. Um, I want to ask a final question uh to the the three of you. And that is um the question of again, really the first question I asked, which is where are we now? Um I often think in um more dire moments, we're very much at the end of the golden age of higher education in the United States, um, that Trump 2.0 has been an incredible force accelerator of trends that were already uh unfolding. Um and I I want to uh get your thoughts on that in light of uh a question that draws upon your experience, in particular from Hungary, which is what is uh is there a successful case of recuperation or recovery after democratic backsliding? Like what does it look like the day after uh the assault ends? Like, let's say Stephen Miller and May Malman like disappear from our world for you know for eternity. What does the day after look like? Um what values are you you you you can't go back to what was. Um and yet what tools do you have at at hand to begin building a new model? And I guess I'm thinking of this in the larger context of democratic backsliding. Like, what is the successful example of picking up the day after an Orban-like figure uh disappeared from the scene, and you now had this work of reconstruction, of recovery, of recuperation, of rebuilding ahead of you. What does that look like?

Kim Scheppele: 56:38

Okay, so here's the bad news. Um, we don't have very many successful examples in cases. I mean, no, we have many successful examples, none of which are like the present moment. So think of the big successes. Think of um Germany not immediately after the war, imperfect. Think of this of the post-Soviet states for 20 years, think of what happened in Latin America after the military dictatorships for a couple of decades, and Venezuela had a good run of 40 years. All of those were rebuildings after dictatorships. So we know we can do it. Okay, that's the good news. The bad news is that in every single case where the rebuilding was pretty successful for a while, it was because whatever caused the dictatorship completely disappeared. Either because they were completely disappeared, they're completely defeated in war, or you know, by the time I moved to Eastern Europe, three years after the fall of the wall, nobody had ever been a communist. Right? You couldn't find anybody who said they had been, or if they had been, they were only nominally because they had to be in like the whole intellectual not true in West Germany, there where there were many Nazis who populated all sorts of things. Yes, but they but again, they were everyone pretended that they weren't there in public. Okay, now they would show up, yeah, right? I mean, but officially they were defeated, and yes, they were still there. We all knew they were still there. That's why I I knew you would say on Germany. I mean, same same with the Soviet Union. I mean, the Communist Party is still going, right? It's just not ever going to win anything. But so I mean, it's not that you get rid of the people who did that, you don't. They pretend to be something else if they've totally lost, except when they're talking to each other and then they might regroup to come back. Where we've never had a successful turnaround are in situations like the one we're in, and which Brazil is in now, which Poland is in now, those are the two examples of successful cases where the autocrat was pushed out after one or two elections, and where there's been some accounting. The problem is that the supporters of that autocrat are still there. And you don't ever get to the point. I mean, if institutions are really permanently damaged, there isn't enough time between election cycles to rebuild. And so the new government coming in is just disabled. Either the institutions don't work, they're not under their control. You know, you can't have an effective state if you've still got veto players. Think about what the Supreme Court packed under Trump one did to Biden, right? Which is everything Biden would have done that would have made his administration look like a success within the four-year window was vetoed by the Supreme Court. Everything that had a longer time horizon was let to go through. That's the same thing you see in other places. And so you you might be able to switch governments in an election, but that government is so hobbled by the supporters of the other guys, you know, constantly uh harassing you, but also by the veto points that the autocratic capture succeeds in leaving behind, that we don't have any cases of somebody being of a new government being able to flip things around in time to win a second election. That's our current problem. So I am starting with a bunch of others, you know, to think about how do we do that? If we can get an electoral victory, what do you go after? How big a thing do you have to do? And how do you do that when the population is still split 50-50, right? Between people who are moderately pro-democratic with a small D and people who think that autocracy gives them what they need, you know, it's it's really a challenge. It's yeah.

David Myers: 1:00:14

It strikes me that there's a third group, which is in some sense the most disconcerting of all, and that is the indifferent. The people who, you know, are not fervent Trump supporters, yeah. And they're not out there, you know, at the No Kings demonstration, and yet they're not disturbed by what they see, you know, what by by the erosion and and destruction before they're it's just not their issue.

Kim Scheppele: 1:00:38

Exactly. And this is where to go back to where Ariela started, uh, the the racism I worry about is the are the people who were like, yeah, it would be we're really not racist, but it's not our highest priority, right? You see all these people who are willing to go along with horrific things because they're getting something, you know, and they just their priorities are that they don't fight for values, they fight to get by, right? And and so, so this is where like we're in the higher education business, right? If there aren't people thinking about how do we teach values, right? How do we think about teaching again values that can't come across as partisan? And the problem is we're not the ones who made these values partisan, frankly. You know, somebody asked me, like, how did you become an activist? And the answer is I keep saying the same thing for 40 years, right? Um, and so I mean, because I mean, I have my activist side, but my higher ed side was always straight up values that we used to think of as consensus values, right? And so we need to figure out how not to compromise those things, but how to re-enliven, you know, the fight for values so that we have a chance of getting the fight for democratic institutions, of which universities are one, right? Back again. And there's no recipe yet. We might have to be the first to do it.

David Myers: 1:02:01

Okay. Well, I want to thank Kim Ariela and Nomi for uh your um insightful observations today.

Kim Scheppele: 1:02:08

Ariela and Nomi, thank you for coming the last minute.

David Myers: 1:02:12

You made it such yes, our two uh late editions have made it such a fantastic conversation. We alas missed David, but he is uh performing his essential duty as a citizen, and we wish him the best.

Kim Scheppele: 1:02:22

And just to say something about solidarity, juries have turned out to be an incredible source of resilience as criminal law has gotten weaponized against the political opposition. Juries are the last stand, so don't give up on jury duty.

David Myers: 1:02:38

Okay, thank you so much, Kim.

Kim Scheppele: 1:02:41

Thank you.

Narrator: 1:02:50

Thank you for listening to Putting the Past to Work, the History Policy Podcast at UCLA from the Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, luskincenter.history.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Roselyn Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.