Maybe it’s about undermining the organized fractions of the middle class

Following the example of Chris Newfield, who has returned to the unversity-finances-blogging fray after a hiatus, I went and looked at Rutgers’s potential losses from the initial onslaught from the current federal government.

The New York Times analysis of NIH grants has the following numbers for Rutgers’s four schools (figures in thousands of dollars):

The NYT writers note that their method probably underestimates the total size of the cut, perhaps by 20%. In that case, a reasonable ballpark for the total NIH cut for Rutgers would be $52 million. And everyone expects to see the same wrecking ball applied to NSF and other federal funding sources. After that, the dominoes will start falling in the rest of the university (or perhaps even before).

It is obviously a calamity for scientific research, for the university, and for society as a whole. But faculty members considering their university finances are usually caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, higher education underspends on research and instruction, and in general university managements have increasingly directed resources away from these core functions. In conflicts with the Rutgers administration, faculty always argue that the university could and should compensate all faculty better, especially contingent faculty. We point to significant reserves and increasing net assets—and management’s willingness to subsidize extracurriculars like athletics— as evidence that the university does not need to retrench financially from its core functions. In this case, though $52 million is a significant loss, it is not actually catastrophic for an institution with $897 $792 million in unrestricted reserves, a growing endowment, and rising enrollments.¹ At the very least, this is good evidence the university should first look outside of its academic core if it needs to reduce expenses in a hurry.

On the other hand, we know that public higher education is seriously underfunded. In New Jersey as in many other places, state appropriations received a significant bounce from COVID stimulus funding; still, 2023 state appropriations per student are still only 80% of what they were in 2001.² States have instead opted to allow public institutions to raise tuition to keep the lights on; students meet the climbing bills by taking on debt. If luck is with them, their degree pays enough in individual earnings to make up the difference, but they will see no reason why their subsequent earnings should be taxed at higher rates to pay for the next generation’s higher education. And if luck is not with them and the “degree premium” declines, they certainly won’t be eager to send more money back to the system that bilked them.³

Something similar is true for research. Grants do not cover the total research expenditure at universities. For example, according to NSF data, Rutgers’s total FY2023 research expenditures were $871,033,000. Of this, $420,287,000, or just about half, came from federal sources (these figures include the “indirect cost allocations” which have been summarily slashed at NIH). But the institution also spent $219,365,000 of “institutional funds” on research.⁴ Newfield has argued this institutional-funds expenditure can be characterized as the shortfall of grant funding for the research the university actually does. The sociologist Andrew Perrin, reviewing Newfield’s last book, disputed this argument. The details are obscure to me, but it is indisputable that the university uses significant amounts from its other funding streams to support research. Grants are not profits: they are partial contributions to supporting a research effort whose true institutional “overhead” is likely quite a bit more than any “indirect cost recovery.” Considering that the largest other revenue stream is tuition payments, the buck stops, once again, at students and their debt-supported dollars.⁵ When it comes to research, the system is “buying time,” in Wolfgang Streeck’s sense: using credit to defer a distributional conflict.

In view of this political economy, I am not so sure our protest theme should be that there is a “war on science” (Philip Cohen) or a “bonfire of the knowledges” (Newfield again). It is that, obviously: a gleeful annihilation of our social capacity for cumulative rational understanding. But we don’t understand the political problem completely if we put it in these terms. In a way, speaking of a “war on science” accepts the cover story put forth by Trumpists, that this is a conflict between cultural-professional elites and men of common sense. From this position, we are left insisting that after all credentialed elites are worth having and trying to remind people to use their common sense to figure out the value of such institutions. Listen to your teacher! Defend the Ivy League! Are these good slogans? In this frame, the conflict is indeed a “culture war” or even perhaps an authentic Kulturkampf, like Bismarck’s failed attempt to root out Catholic political and cultural influence in order to secure total hegemony.

But I don’t think it is, and not only because I don’t think we should analogize scientists to Pope Pius IX. Rather, the conflict is distributional. This new phase of the distributional conflict arrives, like the earlier phase inaugurated in the 1970s, not as a rebellion from below but as an assault from above.⁶ In Trumpian terms, the conflict is between “winners” and “losers,” with the goal being to increase one’s winnings by making as many competitors into “losers” as possible. In this point of view, any expenditure on any public good is dubious, since by definition public goods are available to “losers” as well as winners. Spending on public research and education is particularly offensive, not so much because it creates critical thinkers who are immune to authoritarianism or xenophobia or whatever—how I wish extremely online liberals would retire this sanctimonious and unconvincing argument!—but because it transfers significant resources (money, yes; also knowledge and social capital) to the broad middle classes. These include both the middle classes who pay to study at universities and those who work in research and instruction at public universities, who share a broad class position with the federal workforce that is also in Trump-Musk’s sights.⁷ So I don’t think we should be distracted by the idea of a heartland or working-class rebellion against “experts” and “knowledge.” This supposes a level of popular support for Trumpist ideology which is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain how Trumpism is currently able to do what it is doing. We need to insist, to ourselves and everyone else, that this is a revolution from above.