The New York Times has yet another article on the Trump Administration’s attacks on higher education. As a former academic, I feel bad for higher education, but as an activist right now, I feel fine. Here’s my unapologetic comment in the comments section of the article:

When campus activists called for divestment, we were mocked. Now, as Defense Dept contracts are being canceled at those very universities, invoking our activism as a pretext, it’s our turn to mock. Don’t expect sympathy. It’s not forthcoming. You wanted us in jail. We want you broke. May the antagonist with the greatest moral endurance win.

My comment elicited a rejoinder from someone named Al Orin from New York City:

Let me get this straight. You attended university, presumably as a student in order to take academic courses and expand your intellect. But somehow or other, rather than focusing on your studies, you became a campus “activist“ calling for divestment, those protest have led to canceled university contracts, which in turn is leading to the slowing or cessation of vital scientific and medical research that can save and improve lives. And yet somehow this sad cycle that you claim to have started has given you a reason “to mock” universities that you now want to go “broke”? May I suggest that you undertake a re-think of what is the entire point of a university both to its students and to society at large.

Yes, Al, by all means–let’s get things straight.

First, I’m not a student, but a former academic with a doctorate, 26 years in the field, along with decades of experience in academic publishing, and years of experience in both coaching for and interviewing during the college admissions process. So maybe dial back the condescension, and get back to me when you know what I know, and have done what I’ve done.

But suppose that I was a student. I don’t know what planet you’ve inhabited for the last six or seven decades, but no one today attends university simply to “take academic courses and expand your intellect.” There are a multiplicity of reasons for going, because there are a multiplicity of activities on offer besides academics at the average university–athletics, the arts, religious activity, community service, networking, internships, pre-professional training, and yes, activism.

Activism is just the application of moral and political knowledge to specific circumstances. Done properly, it “expands the intellect” as rigorously as any other kind of work. So there’s no “rather than” there: “taking academic courses” versus activism is as false a dichotomy as taking academic courses and getting a job. Read some Aristotle–or Francis Bacon, or Locke, or Marx, or the American Pragmatists, or Ida Wells, or Martin Luther King Jr or Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz–and the insight might finally dawn on you. Or just sit in your trusty armchair and think about it for awhile. Eventually, whatever you think of will have to be translated into that dreaded thing, action. 

As for pure conceptual analysis, this leaves something to be desired:

those protest[s] have led to canceled university contracts, which in turn is leading to the slowing or cessation of vital scientific and medical research that can save and improve lives

Just to get the causality straight: the protests led the Trump Administration to cancel the contracts via false beliefs that they formed. We didn’t cancel the contracts, and we didn’t form the false beliefs about ourselves. A person who wants to get things straight might want to start with the basics like: who did what. It’s not our fault that our protest was misconstrued by a bunch of bad faith actors, and not our fault that people like you did nothing to set anyone straight about what they were really about. And it’s easy to see why. People unwilling to get simple facts right now were equally unwilling to get simple facts right then. But how is that our problem to remedy rather than yours?

That said, maybe try explaining why we should not feel gratified that Defense Dept contracts are being canceled. What are those contracts doing in higher education in the first place? Who signed them, and for what? The same universities that otherwise brag about their commitment to truth and knowledge arrogantly refuse to say. 

We wanted divestment from the military. As I’ve argued here before, we had no intentions of disrupting the operations of the universities, and no sense that divestment would disrupt them. Well, it turns out that the universities’ investment in the military was a lot bigger than they ever let on. And now they’re losing all that money that they were so opaque about in the first place.

Sorry to gloat, but that’s a victory–an unexpected victory by unintended means, but still a victory. But if you’re so eager to restore that funding, maybe you can explain why universities, which describe themselves as Ivory Tower sanctuaries for the institutionally neutral discovery and dissemination of knowledge, are so reliant on military contracts that they can’t function without them. How is it that activism is incompatible with “expanding the intellect,” but the pursuit of mass industrialized killing is so perfect an exemplification of it?

I can answer that question well enough. It isn’t. That’s why we engaged in activism in the first place. We engaged in it to bring universities closer to the institutions of learning and culture they ought to be, and farther from the industrial killing machines they’ve so insouciantly become.

As for slowing legitimate research, that’s tragic and regrettable, but I guess it’s collateral damage. I hope that last phrase sounds familiar, because right now, the people who snoozed their way through the wholesale destruction of Gaza, along with its healthcare system, are lecturing us about how terrible it is for medical research to be slowed by indiscriminate budget cuts.

I know all about the benefits of medical research. I was a front-line hospital worker during COVID, cleaning COVID-positive rooms when the vaccine was yet to be developed. I was the one walking straight into those infected rooms to disinfect them, making sure my PPE was on right, praying that medical researchers would come up with a vaccine before the virus got me. And thankfully, they did. So I don’t need to hear lectures about the wonders of medical science. I was, you could say, a medical activist. I put medical knowledge into practice with my body, putting my physical health on the line to kill pathogens and save lives. That’s a lot more than can be said of the glib, sedentary people now criticizing us.

But recall that the justification for the destruction of Gaza, including its health care system, was that its destruction was “acceptable collateral damage” in the holy quest to destroy Hamas. Well, I regard slowing legitimate research as collateral damage in the holy quest to decouple higher education from complicity in military affairs. It would be a great exercise to “get straight” on which of our views has better and which has worse effects on the world, all things considered. But I’m pretty confident mine does.

“May I suggest that you undertake a re-think of what is the entire point of a university both to its students and to society at large.” You may. But I have. At a bare minimum, higher education requires autonomy from State and military. At a bare minimum, institutions of higher education must refuse complicity or direct responsibility in evil, and refuse to suborn the unwitting entanglement of students, faculty, and staff in such evils (see parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of my series on this). Nothing in your comment engages with that blatantly obvious fact–a fact as obvious now as it was sixty or seventy years ago when activists did their best to point it out to a largely obtuse and oblivious world.

Higher education is not a mere means to the demands of the State or the military. It’s not a mere means to the commission of genocide or ethnic cleansing. It’s not a mere means to aggression, conquest, occupation, expulsions, and torture chambers. But that’s what it’s become, and one way or another–whether people like you like it or not–we’re going to stop it. If we have to march on campus, we will. If we have to take over campus buildings, we will. If we have to chain ourselves to fences, we will. If we have to sit here and gloat as university budgets get cut to pieces by the Trump Administration, we will.

What we’re not going to do is stop. Not for termination, not for deportation, not for intimidation, not for imprisonment. Get that into your fucking heads now: we won’t stop until they stop. We won’t stop until they stop turning higher education into a one-stop shopping mall for the “defense” industries. If you want to get straight on anything, get straight on that. What started last spring is not going to stop.