This episode examines the unprecedented attacks on universities under the Trump administration. Why do these assaults go beyond culture-war battles over the humanities and diversity to target the very foundations of scholarship and scientific research? And how are internal pressures – ranging from monetization and vocationalism to the retreat from dissent – weakening universities from within? Tune in to hear why defending the autonomy of higher education is inseparable from defending democracy itself.
Our guest: Arjun Appadurai
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GLOSSARY
McCarthyism
(07:46)
McCarthyism describes a period in the early 1950s when U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led a campaign to uncover alleged communist influence within the American government. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy gained national attention by making sweeping accusations of subversion and disloyalty, often without credible evidence. His claims fueled widespread fear during the Cold War and resulted in many individuals losing jobs or reputations despite the lack of proof. The term has since come to signify the practice of making unsubstantiated charges, especially in a highly publicized or politically motivated way. McCarthy’s power declined after his aggressive methods were exposed during nationally televised hearings in 1954, when public opinion turned against him. Later that year, the U.S. Senate formally censured him, marking the collapse of his influence. Today, McCarthyism is remembered as a cautionary example of how fear and suspicion can undermine democratic institutions. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome back after the summer break to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies face around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.
This is the first episode of season 11 of Democracy in Question. In this season, the podcast will change its rhythm. It'll be a monthly one, and we'll reach you on the second Wednesday of every month. I'm pleased to welcome today as my guest, Arjun Appadurai, Professor Emeritus of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and Max Weber Global Professor at the Bard Graduate Center. A renowned cultural anthropologist, Arjun taught for many years at the University of Chicago, where he was Dean of Humanities as well. He's one of the co-founders of the Journal “Public Culture” and stepped down only last year as its editor. His most important books include the “Social Life of Things”[i], “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”[ii], “Fear of Small Numbers"[iii], “The Future is Cultural Fact”[iv] and “Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance”[v].
More recently, Arjun has been writing in the media on the crisis of democracy in general and the crisis of university autonomy in the United States in particular. Taking my cue from some of these articles, I'll ask him to explain if there's anything unique about this massive attack on higher education by the Trump administration. And I’ll ask him to address some inherent weaknesses and structural tensions within American academia, which may have made it vulnerable to these politically motivated attacks. What self-reflection on the nature and limits of dissent and political mobilization within the institutional space of universities should this ward on higher education lead to on the part of universities as institutions?
Why are there drastic cuts in US government funding for natural sciences and medical research, which surely cannot be accused of any wokism? Could this portend the privatization and outsourcing of research from universities to the private sector? And how could universities regain the trust of the society at large since public support will prove crucial in defending academic freedom?
Finally, Arjun will also address some of the legal juridical dimensions of the ongoing struggle for the future of American universities, a future in which so many of us around the world may recognize our own for better or worse. Arjun, welcome to the podcast. It's a real pleasure to have you as a guest and thank you so much for joining me today from Berlin.
Arjun Appadurai (AA): My pleasure, Shalini.
SR: Arjun, in a recent opinion piece you published in The Guardian, you made the argument that the current Trump administration is, and I quote you here, “reverse engineering the liberal guardrails of American democracy” that is dismantling the rule of law, turning law as you put it, “into an autoimmune disorder”.
One of my previous guests, Martin Krygier[vi], put it citing a legal scholar, “the rule of law is typically brought down by a thousand cuts, many of them small and often unseen. All done with the active assistance of the law”. Trumps use or other abuse of democracy to kill democracy in your account is unique in so far as democracy in the United States seemed to rest on much more robust foundations than in say, Hungary or Turkey. Still, there seems to be a great deal of convergence among all of these countries now including the United States, ruled by strong men, assisted by zealous team of experts and supporters who've successfully consolidated this type of a soft authoritarian regime. The alarming trend has been the focal point of a few earlier episodes on the podcast, but more recently, a few of my guests have focused more explicitly on its repercussions for universities.
You mentioned in your Guardian article that Trump's attacks this year on US higher education have de facto turned universities, even private universities into hostages of the federal government. So we are in the midst of an unprecedented assault on the institution of the university. And unlike in the 1950s in the United States, when during the Cold War, individual professors found themselves at the receiving end of scrutiny and harassment by government agencies and college administrators, today, it's the university as an institution which is being attacked. So I think a lot of the analogies to the McCarthy era are not quite fitting in this regard.
Academics are not being singled out today as traitors or their careers destroyed, spreading panic among the academic community as a whole. The targets seem to be now much more protesting students and faculty members who support them, as well as of course, entire fields of research, like post-colonial studies, critical race studies, or departments such as Middle East Studies at Columbia. I'd like to discuss with you the existential challenge that higher education as a whole seems to face from the Trump administration's devastating funding cuts and also its interventions in the functioning of universities.
What they seem to be interested in is not only controlling and curricular recruitment, but they seem to be wanting to control university governance. You weighed in on this crisis in several recent articles, published not only the Guardian, but also the “Chronicle of Higher Education”. Could you explain what in your view, makes the current challenges to universities in the United States unique and what kind of historical analogies would make sense?
AA: A wonderful question, Shalini, and it's certainly at the heart of what many of us are worrying about, and it has two focal points. One concerns us professionally, which is the university, and the other concerns us as citizens of democracies of various types or even world citizens with a commitment to democracy. And that appears to also be in crisis. These are not entirely isolated issues, but they are big ones, and I think they point to some differences between today's variety or varieties of illiberalism or anti-democracy and earlier ones. And you already suggested one of them in the context of the US and the McCarthyite fervor and hysterias of the 1950s, which I think are salutary to bear in mind, but I do think they are of limited analogical value. One way to begin to approach the question of what's new, what's different is by focusing on Trump because in a way he is further ahead on this path than his counterparts. If you include Orban, Putin, Xi Jinping, Modi, all of them still appear to have a place for universities in their worlds. So let me propose some thoughts about Trump's approach to universities and therefore in a way to democracy and see how far that might be a sign of things to come in other soft authoritarianism in different parts of the world.
What Trump has noticed is that universities are essentially places of security, safety, and some degree of ideological freedom for liberals. And since he's profoundly anti-liberal, illiberal, he wants to go to the source of the nurture of any idea of liberty, freedom, justice, inquiry, knowledge. These are all of course, classic Enlightenment ideals institutionalized in American universities, but Trump now wants to really go on the attack route and branch, so it's no longer this or that aspect of universities.
While it may that what he called the woke, liberal arts and humanities were the original target and they continue to be to some extent, DEI still on the radar of his administration, many people have pointed out that it's a wholesale attack now on basic research as well as in the sciences, in the policy world, in the social sciences, and also in the humanities, that amounts to a wholesale attack on research, and one of the questions no one has explored is what is the problem about research?
If the issue is the classroom and too much diversity and so on, that can be handled in other ways but why go after the production of new knowledge; that seems suicidal. One approach to the problem viewed that way is we can do it elsewhere. This is what I tried to comment on in the piece in the Chronicle. The US university, particularly as a whole system, has been outsourcing its key functions for a very long time. Including research, including teaching without this being noticed and taking on all kinds of tasks, therapeutic, legal, identitarian, which are not its task. So Trump is only carrying that to the furthest conclusion saying, you are right, there's nothing special other than your research favors liberal causes liberal people and is racist in the wrong sense, meaning against whites. But more fundamentally, he's saying, we don't need you. We can do research elsewhere. Now, personally, I think that's a big mistake. It's a very short-term approach. It can have huge damaging impact right away, and I think that is the project we need to tackle. It's not about changing this or that. It's taking the whole function and as it were, moving it elsewhere.
SR: I think you're making a very interesting point, which may not be true necessarily of universities on continental Europe but let me come back to that in a moment. What seems to me to be the case is that institutional resilience of higher education in the US has been undermined by the kinds of structural features and fissures that you point out. And in the article that you wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “The University is a Hostage”[vii], you've made that argument very clearly stating that there are inherent weaknesses within the American academe that have made it especially vulnerable to the Trumpian attacks. And if I may cite you here, you say, “including cowardly presidents, a manician evangelical worldview, students who demand the comforts of kindergarten, a psychiatry couch, and access to a huge bureaucracy to litigate their claims disciplines without discipline, the “decolonization” in inverted commas of books, speakers, faculty, administrators”.
Could you explain this mixture of features which you think have rendered the university more vulnerable, and these are all internal challenges which the institution must address. Are you seeing sufficient willingness on the part of universities to be self-reflective and getting into a reformist mode without this becoming just a response to the external challenge?
AA: Wonderful question. I began to assemble the ideas in the Chronicle essay a year ago, or perhaps more, and in that time period for people from the university world, let's even call it the liberal side of the university world, and people committed to the future of the university and people who are not in favor of the Trump ideology in any form have come a long way in conceding that we cannot simply lay the problem at the door of Trump or his minions, we must look inside. That inclination has grown notably, but there is considerable confusion about that recognition and where to exactly place it and how to turn it into a program of change or reform, which is not simply making a viable deal to make Trump go away.
What is going on is a kind of negotiating. But whether that is a genuine program of rethinking, I'm less sure because there is some sense, especially say at Harvard, that the effort is to keep the wolf out and keep doing what you're doing inside, which you believe in and which you think is very good, but make enough concessions to keep the wolf fed outside the gates. That is not, in my view, a genuine path to rethinking the question of what the function of the university is. What are the core functions? And that goes back to the list you cited, some of which are about president's responses. Others about student wishes and so on are more structural causes. So that quote combines symptoms, reactions, as well as causes.
So it's a little bit overcrowded. But I would say that certain benefits of being a privileged part of the University of the American democratic world, especially in the last hundred years or so, have distorted priorities within the universities and even within liberal arts colleges, they have slowly moved towards, for example, vocationalism. They have slowly moved towards the idea that university campuses must take care of the psychological wellbeing of all students, make them feel safe, a key word, because it's also an extremely open-ended word. What makes me feel safe may not make you feel safe. And if our ideas of safety are already in a zero-sum relationship, what approach can ever address them both.
It's a very deep problem, but again, it's a problem of taking on so many tasks which have a progressive, liberal, inclusive ring about them, that you lose track of your primary tasks: learning how to read, learning how to debate, learning how to argue with people who think otherwise than you. All that slowly tends to go out and be replaced by various ideas of propriety. And that's why I mentioned the conversation, et cetera, that books, authors, whole fields become tainted as somehow misguided, as a inadequately inclusive. So what happens is that the debate and argument and truth seeking, which is the core of liberalism, gets subordinated and sometimes sacrificed to the ideas of inclusion and pluralism, which are certainly important, but they cannot become the drivers. At the end you put debate, reason, argument, evidence aside because they may make some people unsafe, upset, angry, feel disenfranchised, et cetera. I think that's somewhere at the heart of the problem, and it of course produces also the hesitation.
Trump has no such doubt. In the case of the people who run universities, they have such a broad sense of the mission of their institutions, that they become confused about the priorities. They've allowed things to happen slowly over time, which are now all coming home to roost. So now we have very many different problems, including excessive vocational priorities in liberal arts education. We have known now explicitly for at least 10 years that the top graduates of Harvard, Princeton, et cetera, are waiting to get a job in Wall Street. This has been remarked by people like Drew Faust, an earlier president of Harvard and many others. The most privileged people who've had the cream of what we think is liberal arts education are rushing like lemmings to become hedge fund managers in droves. What is that telling us? We need to face it.
SR: You've made several points, which I would agree with you entirely on. I think you're making a very important point when you say all these extraneous factors about safety, about students not wanting to deal with curricula, which upset them, et cetera, these are much more a problem in the humanities and social sciences than for natural sciences. And yet the alarming thing about the Trump administration is that one of the most prestigious research institutions in biomedical science in the U.S., the National Institute of Health, is also a victim of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. So the difficulty for me is in a way to understand this animus against medical research. How does one really explain that his funding cuts are affecting not only the National Institute for Health, but also medical research at Harvard, for example, or other universities. How does one understand this very broad reaction against science research scholarship, which as you pointed out earlier, is a constitutive element of Enlightenment Modernity. There seems to be a resentment among Trump and his followers against this legacy, and it seems to be a constant feature of many soft authoritarian regimes. Should we see this as a play of rather mundane features, such as if you are dismantling the last vestiges of the welfare state and are going in for a large-scale privatization of all kinds of state functions, then of course, why not privatize all research because it could be turned into a source of corporate profits?
AA: Well, I think there are two issues why the wholesale attack on research of every type, including biomedical research, NIH, the virtual hobbling and smashing of a huge part of Johns Hopkins, which is arguably the most important site of both basic and applied research in medicine beyond Stanford. Hopkins is a university, but as a university it is a bigger consumer of government funding to do both groundbreaking fundamental research in the biomedical sciences and provide cutting edge clinical treatment.
What is Trump up to? I am among those that see some bizarre similarity between Trump's chaos production and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Now, obviously they could not be further apart in terms of communist ideology, but Trump in his usual uninformed, illiterate way has stumbled onto the idea that there is no real loss in producing chaos. And by unleashing this Doge people, Musk is no longer their master, these young people were exactly like the red brigades sent out to attack elders, attack universities, send people to the countryside, et cetera. Now, I'm not saying this is the basis of a deep analysis, but it's an analogy that gives us a clue to Trump's investment in the political economy of chaos.
He doesn't see it as a big problem. Now we have to ask why is that? But that is a very noteworthy difference. So you are quite right in general in Europe, when I look at Germany, where I live, or at France, or at the UK or indeed at Hungary and the central Europe in general, I see one of two things. One is an older concern, how to keep control of the hegemony machine through the ruling party. That's the overall model wherever it is. Though, of course there is contestation over who's in chat. So Macron has to worry about the French, right? But it's not a guaranteed business, but you want your people in place. It's not about wrecking the apparatus as it currently stands. The Trump model has a resemblance to Mao in the last 10 years of Mao's life during the so-called cultural revolution, but it also fits with an old and distinguished economic figure Joseph Schumpeter. It's about creative destruction. Trump thinks he has the key to creative destruction, whether of universities of basic research in a system as large as the US. It's not a very simple thing to say, let it all be private because that requires investors and capital to freely choose to go and put 50 times what they're putting into all these sectors.
Are they ready? So let me say that this is a destructive capitalist idea, which has a fantasy based on central planning as if you can just determine that you'll destroy universities, and then you'll set up your own institute somewhere, which is controlled by the party to do basic research, whatever that might be. It's a centralizing planning fantasy. Ridiculous, of course in the us, combined with an idea that you can orchestrate creative destruction. But creative destruction never comes from the state. It comes from capital and capitalists. So that this is my angle on these differences, which are noteworthy.
SR: That's a very interesting take with Schumpeter on understanding Trump through the lens of creative destruction. So the wrecking ball here, is not capital, which is the driver, but the state. But then the question would be, it doesn't necessarily have to be private capital. It can be private companies to which public funds can flow, because then you will get public-private partnerships, but then it really seriously weakens the university as the institution, which produces research, leaving it to do only teaching, and the question would be what kind of teaching it would do, but let me come to another aspect of the question as well. What in your view has been the exact impact of this kind of punitive strategy within the university? For the internal cohesion of the university as an institution and for its governance.
Do you see that divisions between the natural sciences and the humanities, for example, have deepened with the former holding the arts and social sciences responsible for attracting the ire of the government? Is there a feeling that medical research is being punished for the sins of gender studies, critical race studies, comparative literature, and what kinds of pressures do you see university administrators facing from powerful donors who would rather avoid the kind of prolonged litigation that Harvard seems to have gone in for and would prefer to make a quick deal with the authorities? Now, this is something which would also distinguish continental European universities from us ones because donors just don't play a role here.
AA: It's a great connected set of observations and questions. The main empirical thing that I can say from any source that I follow, either from colleagues or from newspapers of universities, the Crimson, the Chicago Maroon, and the Chronicle, I get the impression that there is a surprising lack of scapegoating of the humanities and social sciences by the hard sciences. I have yet to hear many people saying we should have restrained these characters sitting in English departments and philosophy departments and cultural studies who began to tell us all about race and colonialization and oppression and justice and caste and color and so on.
You see where they've brought us. I am amazed how little there is, if there is any sense of cleavage along those lines, it is on Israel-Palestine and very indirectly implying that the people who have gone too far in defense of Palestine and therefore produced, again, I go back to the unsafety, allegedly experienced by students of Jewish background as something which I feel has been massively exaggerated as a cynical point of entry for Trump and his allies who can easily be shown, have no care whatsoever for Jewish people, much less for Zionism or anything else, but it's a point of entry into these institutions.
And so that sometimes takes on a disciplinary flavor. But on the whole, I'm amazed at how little there has been of this kind of scapegoating, and I think the reason is within one month or two, Trump moved from his whole scale attack on diversity, equity, inclusion. Two medical research, all research, physics, every kind of lab, et cetera. So since everybody's against the wall, it seems not very appealing to go around blaming small departments with low funding. So they don't cost you a lot, but they also don't wanna earn you a lot. I mean, you'll see occasional observations, but you won't see people from the university at large saying, you know what, we should have changed course much earlier on these soft inquiries. And then we would've been fine in our business schools, med schools, and so on. I may I add a comment to your question that the privatization of research, let's say, need not be entirely left to the play of private investment in the advanced global capitalist markets of the US, it can be the Chinese model. We'll take a vast amount of state money and just put it in there. So we have all these available models. But you see the US is very confusing because even someone like Musk is a bizarre mix of benefiting from government funding and government regulations, government freedom from government regulations, special treatment.
There's that, and being on the open market as an investor, whether in SpaceX or Tesla or whatever. So it's a curious situation. Many people have written about a peculiar form of state capitalism that has ruled China for a long while. True. But I also think less has been said about the importance of the Chinese Communist Party in China and the key role it plays in translating Xi Jinping fought as he calls it, to very detailed policy matters and to do so in a way with minimum leakage and while maximizing how the Chinese economy plays in the global economy.
And that leads to a big topic that the distinctive Chinese strategy is belt and rope. In the US all these models are available, and I don't think they are necessarily unknown or unutilized by people like Trump who don't have a high-level intellectual interest in these different models but have an animal instinct. That's why he talks openly with such admiration of the Chinese Communist Party. He sees these guys running very big, very tight ships, which also are very wealthy, and so he's far more envious of them than he's of Macron.
SR: Soft authoritarian regimes everywhere have tried to quell dissent in society. They don't want any political opposition. They want to try to keep up the image of having formal elections being carried out as performative exercises. Not necessarily fair, but at least formal elections, which would give them formal legitimacy, but without there being dissent. The university seems to be a space which has historically been one site of dissent.
We've seen that in the US with the 1968 anti-Vietnam War movement. We're seeing that currently in Serbia against Vucic’s authoritarian regime since November 2024, which has brought all universities in the country to a standstill. The students have managed to garner extremely broad support for fresh elections, which the regime has not conceded so far.
One problem these authoritarian regimes seem to have with universities is that they are spaces for political engagement for dissent, and the other problem that they seem to have is that autonomous universities could be producers of critical knowledge. Not just in the social sciences and humanities, but even in the natural sciences, for example, on the climate issue. So of course, you are absolutely right to point out that the purported widespread antisemitism on campuses is a fig leaf. It's been exaggerated manifold to justify a vicious attack on university autonomy. But two questions arise from that. Do you think the cancel culture practiced by liberal and leftist students has unwittingly made this kind of attack easier? The self-reflecting question for us as academics and for universities would be, how do we foster greater tolerance and what, if any, should be the limits of our tolerance on campus? And the other question, which then follows, if you think that the major problem that these regimes have with universities is the critical knowledge production as well as space for dissent, then privatization of that space is a step which may take care of both of those problems
AA: Yes, this is a big and very important question. Again, there's a kind of a challenge, at least for someone like me, in thinking about the US as a kind of exemplar where things could go, or as an outlier, which because of its special history, incredible wealth and peculiarly strong democratic institutions has a different profile than, let's say, Serbia, to take a strong contrasting case where almost none of those historical or institutional resources are in play. And my impression of whether it's Serbia or in different way Poland, where the activation of women's movements, anti-abortion, et cetera, is, that in all these cases, the main traditions available are not democratic, but our, let's say, revolutionary traditions. All the way from Czechoslovakia in ‘67, or even Hungary in ‘56 or Gdansk. That the tradition available is the tradition of militant organized protest in some mixture of ecology between universities and unions and the working class. That tradition is there, but let's call it textual basis. Of constitutionalism, courts, judges, law, proceduralism in every sense is weak.
We know in central Europe, there is a strong tradition of opposition to authoritarian rule available in almost all those cases. So that becomes a resource. I return to the US to address or engage your question, which is revolves around universities as sites of dissent. And the trouble is universities and colleges the total number, as I and others have pointed out is minimum 3000 in the US, it's very large. We often lose sight of this, and that is not counting vocational colleges, community colleges, it’s liberal arts BA granting colleges and research universities or universities that give PhDs, that is already several thousand.
So it's a very big system and it is extremely multifunctional and it's become far too multifunctional. Yes, dissent is there. You have the feminist movement, and of course you have the black movement, which is of course also a massive civil society movement in civil rights universities certainly played a role in that too. But then you think there are so many other things going on in universities. They have become vocational centers. They have become pastoral centers. And let's not forget the huge gorilla in the room. They're a massive athletic machine making money through stadiums teams. And one of the biggest controversies going on the US has to do with the right of college athletes to monetize their own brands, names, et cetera, which they were not allowed to do till recently. So apart from all the things we are talking about, there's a whole sector of monetization and commerce, which has to do with entertainment and sports. Many donors give because they love their undergraduate sports teams. So the US is strange in that regard
It would be something unimaginable in continental Europe, the idea of, let's say a, football team supported by 50 wealthy Frenchmen, who will then tell Macron who to put in as university president. So, but that is Indiana. That is Michigan. It’s just a different planet. Dissent is somewhat drowned out by the fact that so much else happens on US campuses, which has to do with people between the ages of 18 and 25, let's say, or even 30, that the dissent factor becomes a smallish thing. It can be used, of course as Trump is using it, it can be weaponized. Let's assume these 3000 universities and colleges shrink. They don't disappear, but they become 500. What are American middle and upper middle-class parents going to do? Where are they going to send their kids to vocational schools, teach them to be bakers, plumbers. They are attached to the idea of the college as a central means of status, production, mutual identification, network building, and of course skills. That's the last on the list. But if you take away these institutions, where is that going to happen? So I think there are some major, let's say, counterfactual policy questions at stake. I think on the US side, maybe slightly differently in the European case.
The dissent has been somewhat dwarfed by other kinds of needs and wishes. I would say there one has to ask or consider the kind of argument that I made some while ago about democracy fatigue. That is people just don't want to wait. Deliberation is too much waiting, the liberalism of patience, procedure and time is really a very hard sell and nobody has figured out how can we, on the liberal left recapture the terrain of affect, emotion, and feeling, which seems to have gone a hundred percent over to the right. But that goes in a different direction than what your question would suggest.
SR: I want to pick up one after the other two points, made a few episodes ago. On the podcast, my colleague Michael Ignatieff[viii] talked about the paradox of the mass enlargement of access to higher education in the US but also all over continental Europe in the last 60 years, which has on the one hand provided a major vehicle for social mobility, but on the other hand has somehow created a growing division between credentialed elites and the rest of the population, many of whom have begun to have a deep mistrust. And some of them an attitude of hostility towards universities. It follows from your observation, if the entire landscape of academia shrinks, where are people going to send their children to educate themselves. The case of CEU shows that universities for their future flourishing are vitally dependent on broad societal support from people who are not direct stakeholders, but still care deeply about bastions of fearless, critical thinking and research and scholarship.
How do you think universities could regain the trust of the diversity of publics in society? A majority of the population who are taxpayers in continental Europe, they are the ones who are funding all public universities regardless of political affiliations and preferences. How could universities mobilize wide public support for their autonomy and independence in the us the most prestigious Ivy League universities are private universities. But nevertheless, if we are unable to mobilize wide public support for the autonomy of our institutions, we may have a very difficult battle ahead of us.
AA: I entirely agree with you about the broad assumption behind your question, which is the erosion of public support for all universities, whether in the US or in Europe. I think in India, China and so on, there is still a strong reliance whether for happy or unhappy reasons, on the whole funneling process through universities up to improved life. Whereas in Europe, and the US certainly, I think this, doubt or skepticism, or erosion of confidence has happened in a twin way, both to democracy and to universities. So I think first of all, we have to keep that binocular approach in mind.
And second to ask how we can reclaim something of that earlier standing, which has been eroded. Even if the reasons vary both between the US and the European continent as a whole and within the European continent.
There is a common element, which is people are not simply willing to be taxed one way or the other for what the universities are doing. I think the key word is that we need to have the courage to unpack words like autonomy. See, when I say to you as an individual donor, please give me $10 billion for my small liberal arts college, but don't come anywhere near me. Don't whisper a word about my curriculum, my recruitment, my results, that's a tough call. And the only source in the US which did that, in fact, we are now seeing is a lot like Europe, it's the state. The state was the only who said take the money, something will come out of it. In Europe that's still going on.
It's an endless source of funding, the state in one or other way. So I think we have to be able to ask questions about words like autonomy, how much autonomy do we seek, and for what. We should have the courage to ask the question. Because if we simply stick to the principle that you must support our autonomy and come back in 20 years and we'll tell you what happened. What's the answer to that? The answer is to provide some measures, indices, et cetera, of what will happen with this money and what does happen. Leave the driving to us argument, I think, has to be seriously reexamined, and that doesn't mean that we allow the Christian Democrats or Fidesz to simply send people to be the chancellors and to tell you what to do. No, it has to be that the politics of arguing for the support of universities has to shift its center of gravity. And I'll speak to Europe because US is a much more hybrid case. Some private, some public, some partnerships. In the European case, if you take away taxpayer support and therefore federal government support, I think it's fair to say that all the way from Sweden to Malta, the whole thing will vanish overnight. So given that's the case, I think it's a very good time and here is a provocation I will offer, that universities need to find a narrative of themselves, which emphasizes not so much leave us alone and we will deliver great things. We won't tell you how, when or who you have to accept our whole package as it is. I think people are no longer happy with that. I think we have to make universities first of all, more visible in the world. Who knows let's say in the Hungarian countryside, what actually happens in the higher institutions in Budapest, what happens in economics research? I'd venture to say very little. So, some visibility, that's a media issue. And then I would say some sense that the university is already deeply involved in the social fabric. So I think we need to correct the idea that we are a monastic space where great new ideas will come because people are in a club of their own. What we need is a structure in which there is some attempt to get deeper knowledge and potentially some new knowledge with new implications. Because we are living in a world of urgencies, as we all know, climate migration. These are not things going to wait a hundred years. They may not even wait 20 years. We need to pivot not necessarily to all becoming practical problem solvers. I don't mean contract research, applied research, but I mean some kind of openness to the condition in which the large Democratic majority lives, and my provocation is this. This wider tax paying public needs to see its universities as civic and civil spaces in which their own people are. Not places run by some pointy-headed others who are privileged. They have to see identify with the university in a deep way as being part of the social apparatus. Let me use an even more risky example, in the history of Central Europe, we know that with few exceptions, the church is a crucial institution, whether as a radical institution, conservative institution. Why can't the university be more like that? That it's our place, it's our priest, it's our parish, our universities are not seen that way. They're seen as remote, somewhat monastic people doing something quietly. Who knows what they do. So my direction is for us to be prepared to have a open discussion of some key words. And you used one of them, autonomy, which I do think is not something to be thrown out but is something to be reexamined.
SR: I think this is a very important point that you're making about reaching out to different publics, also constituting some of our own publics. One of the, side effects of implementing such an agenda would be also that English cannot be the only language in which we publish. Because just by doing that, you lose the connection with the national public in every society except for the US and the UK probably. And even there, I think the kind of jargon or the kind of theorizing that we do would be unintelligible to every ordinary user of the language.
So I think there is a lot of work to be done there. But I want to go back as my last question to one other point, which you touched on very briefly. As several of my podcast guests have pointed out authoritarian regimes are using the letter of the law to undermine the spirit of the rule of law by eroding democracy from within, which is what we started out with your observation about what is happening at the moment to US democracies.
Orban is of course a good example, but he's not the only one. The Republicans have managed to under Trump pack the Supreme Court with loyal judges, but also lower courts, and arbitrary rewritten laws. And in many parts of the world, even constitutions have been rewritten as part and parcel of this. Do you think courts can be expected as liberals in US are expecting them to protect universities and academic freedom in a regime that is drifting seriously towards soft authoritarian rule, and do you think we are betting on the wrong institution and if we can't bet on courts what is going to protect it?
AA: Very vital point, like many of the others that you have raised, I think you put your finger on the fact that certainly those of us who are thinking all the time about the us, even if we are located elsewhere certainly have an idea of the Supreme Court as the Deus Ex Machina. Although the evidence is constantly before us that is a very unsafe bet because we are seeing decision after decision that shows not so much that it's a fully bought and own court, but rather that it's in fact a quote that moves to the right.
And that opens a question that I have not written on, nor have I seen it much reflected on, which is the meaning of conservatism for someone like Justice Roberts and it's meaning for someone like Trump is very different, but they have a sense that they're in the same camp. So not only Roberts, but the other more obviously ideologically driven judges still somehow think Trump is our guy. And it's a mistake, I think, in regard to conservative thought in the best traditions, Burkean, et cetera. But that's a separate matter and since I'm living in Germany, I am paying renewed attention to my great intellectual icon Max Weber and I every day think that I'm living in the society, which in its early 20th century form fully informed Weber's whole sociology. That is the whole idea of rationality as a key principle of politics, of bureaucracy, of law, which then slowly erodes religion. The whole center of the way varied machine, I think still lives in Germany. On the whole, I'm grateful for it because it means you can hope for some guardrails here in Germany in general.
That heritage lives on, but it's a heritage with a double edge. And that's what I want to say about the courts. That the trouble, if you look at the US and I have a feeling that it has its European versions, whether they are more Napoleonic or they are more Prussian or whatever legally, that all of life has been massively proceduralized.
So the trouble with relying on the courts too much is not even so much that they may have become too conservative. They may go along with the authoritarian. The problem is that legal procedure underpins the economy from top to bottom, underpins all bureaucracies, which include education, finance, therefore, the trouble is, can you keep, not so much the spirit alive in the face of the letter? That's one way to put it, but I would put it differently. Can we put the dynamic, expansive, inclusive, tolerant, cosmopolitan tendencies that underlie enlightenment, legal thinking wherever it is from the day-to-day procedural which means the realm of compliance and right now they're like Siamese twins, but can we take them apart? That's my question. In a situation like the European situation and in a different way in the US situation where lawyers and law literally are everywhere, how do we take out the best of that from our point of view? That's a political question from the embedding of all kinds of other things in law. And Trump has discovered, if I may coin a phrase, how to be a legal bottom feeder. So there we are.
SR: Arjun, thank you very much for this wide ranging and fascinating conversation. As always, it's been a great pleasure talking to you
AA: Thank you, Shalini. I'll just add that it has invariably been my experience in our conversations over the last decade or more that you push me to new insights, new thoughts, and new mental risks. So I thank you for that.
SR: As Arjun has argued, the recent wave of attacks on universities by the Trump administration are in many ways historically unique, far from targeting only the critical and humanistic social sciences or programs of inclusion and diversity. These attacks are a systematic attempt at undermining the very institutional underpinnings of scholarship and of scientific research in general. Thus, it may have deeper causes than mere animus against the perceived liberal hegemony of academia. These draconian and existential threats to universities could well represent the culmination of a longer process of outsourcing and privatizing of research, which would deal a fatal blow to universities as autonomous sites of knowledge production.
Arjun therefore suggests looking at these attacks to the lens of creative destruction driven by the state, not by the market, or not by capitalism as Schumpeter thought, but serving the interests of some segments of capitalist markets as well. He somewhat provocatively invokes the analogy of Chinese state capitalism as more illuminating today, rather than the historical precedent such as the McCarthyism, as to understand what we are witnessing.
However, he also highlighted internal structural causes of the present crisis of American universities above all, the gradual retreat from engagement with controversial ideas, dissent and vigorous debate that has been replaced off by calls for vocational training, as well as superficial ideas of safety and inclusivity. While dissent does remain core legacy of university life, it has to some extent been drowned out he argued by increasing monetization and professionalization in American universities, which pander to elite sport teams, for example, and to consumer satisfaction. Universities must defend and bolster their autonomy in the face of such multiple threats, internal as well as external.
Arjun, thus made a compelling case for regaining public trust by reframing autonomy and making universities more visible and more accountable to society at large. This doesn't necessarily mean a direct pivot to practical problem solving, but it certainly entails responsiveness to the growing concerns of taxpayers, primarily for the university to be a civic and a civil space rather than a space of elite privilege.
As Arjun incessantly put it, ordinary people must be able to identify with the university in a deep way as being part of the social apparatus in which everyone has a vital stake. It's only this renewed social contract between society and institutions of higher learning that could mount a robust defense of higher education and universities as autonomous institution as well as of democracy, whose fates are tightly intertwined today.
This was the first episode of season 11. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in a month when I'll be talking about the intriguing concept of crackup capitalism. My guest will be the historian of economic ideas Quinn Slobodian, Professor at Boston University. Please go back and listen to any episode that you might have missed and do let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
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[vi] Martin Krygier on Anti-Constitutional Populism | Democracy in Question?
[vii] Appadurai, A. (2025, April 22). The university is a hostage. But there’s hope. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
[viii] Michael Ignatieff on the Contradictions of Liberal Democracy | Democracy in Question?