I mentioned this in the Brexit thread as I think it is really extraordinary. Part of it is clearly Trump and, I think, in particular the targeting of foreign students and staff which I think is simply to send a message and discipline/warn off dissent.
But I think there are broader worrying trends here. The summer update from Bryan Alexander - an update of a regular string of similar news:
QuoteAcademic closures, mergers, cuts: a summer 2025 update
Posted on July 8, 2025 by Bryan Alexander
Greetings from early July. I'm back home in northern Virginia where the heat is blazing and the humidity sopping. Weather.com thinks it "feels like 102° F" and I agree. The cats also agree, because they retreated elegantly inside to air conditioning after a brief outside stroll.
I wrote "back home" because my wife and I spent last week celebrating our 32nd anniversary in Canada (here's one snapshot). Afterwards I was hoping to get back into the swing of things, blogging, Substacking, vlogging various topics already under way, but things have been advancing at such a manic pace that I have to leap in in a hurry.
Case in point: after blogging about campus closures, cuts, and mergers last month more closures and cuts (albeit no mergers) have appeared in just the past few weeks. In this post you'll see a list of these, with links to supporting news stories and official documents. Alas, this has become a tradition on this site. (From last year: March 1, March 20, March 28, April, May, June, July, September, November. From this year: February, June.) My book on peak higher education is now in the editing process; hopefully by the time it appears the topic won't be simply historical.
Today we'll touch on one closure, then focus on cuts, with a few reflections at the end.
1. Closing colleges and universities
In Michigan Siena Heights University (Catholic) will close after the upcoming academic year. The reasons: "the financial situation, operational challenges, and long-term sustainability," according to the official statement. A local account concurs, "citing rising costs and stiffer competition for new students."
The official website doesn't reflect this on its front page.
2. Program and staffing cuts
Also in Michigan, Concordia University (Lutheran) is shutting down most of its Ann Arbor campus programs. A much smaller set of offerings is what's next:
Quote Starting June 2025, the private Lutheran institution will offer just nine programs — all in medical-related fields — on its physical campus. That's down from 53 campus programs the university currently lists on its website. It will offer another seven online programs, mostly in education fields, which is down from more than 60 currently.
Also nearby, Michigan State University (public, research) announced its intention to cut faculty and staff positions this year. The drivers: inflation boosting costs, especially in health care; Trump administration research funding cuts; possible state support cuts; potential international student reduction.
Brown University (research; Rhode Island) is planning to cut an unspecified number of staff this summer. Furthermore, "[a]dditional measures include scaling back capital spending and adjusting graduate admissions levels after limiting budget growth for doctoral programs earlier this year." The reasons here are financial, but based on the Trump administration's cuts to federal research funding, not enrollment problems.
The Indiana Commission for Higher Education announced shutting down a huge sweep of academic programs across that state's public universities. More than 400 degrees will end, with 75 ended outright and 333 "merged or consolidated" with other programs. The whole list is staggering. There's a lot of detail in that Indiana plan, from defining student minima to establishing various options for campuses, appealing closures to timelines for revving up new degrees. It's unclear how many faculty and/or staff cuts will follow.
Columbia College Chicago (private, arts focused) laid off twenty full-time professors. The school is facing enrollment declines and financial problems. Nearly all of these faculty member are – were – tenure track, which makes this another example of the queen sacrifice.
University of California-Santa Cruz (public, research) is terminating its German and Persian language programs, laying off their instructors. This sounds part of a broader effort to cut costs against a deficit, a deficit caused by "rising labor costs and constrained student enrollment growth," according to officials.
Boston University (private, research) announced it would lay off 120 staff members as part of a budget-cutting strategy. BU will also close 120 open staff positions and "around 20 positions will undergo a change in schedule" (I'm not sure what that means – shift from full time to part?). The reasons: Trump administration cuts and uncertainty, plus the longstanding issues of "rising inflation, changing demographics, declining graduate enrollment, and the need to adapt to new technologies."
The president of Temple University (public, research, Pennsylvania) discussed job cuts as part of a 5% budget cut. Reasons include lower enrollment which led to "a structural deficit [for which] university reserves were used to cover expenses."
Champlain College (Vermont) is closing some low-enrolling majors. The avowed goal is to
"design a new 'career-focused' curriculum for the fall of 2026 'that is focused on and driven by employer needs and student interests.'"
QuoteThe accounting program, for instance, saw its enrollment decline from 60 students in 2015 to 20 in February 2024, according to documents from the school's Academic Affairs Committee. The law program, similarly, had little student interest, Hernandez said, and had only three students apply in the fall of 2023, while the data analytics program had only two applications.
At the same time the school is facing serious challenges. Enrollment has sunk from 4,778 students in 2016 to 3,200 last year. The college ran deficits in some reason years and a federal audit criticized the amount of debt it carries. This year "the college's bond rating was lowered, and its outlook downgraded to 'negative' by S&P Global Ratings."
A small but symbolic cut is under way at Albright College (private, liberal arts, Pennsylvania), whose president decided to sell their art college at auction. "It includes pieces by Karel Appel, Romare Bearden, Robert Colescott, Bridget Riley, Leon Golub, Jasper Johns, Jacob Lawrence, Marisol, Gordon Parks, Jesús Rafael Soto and Frederick Eversley, among others."
Why do this? according to the administration, it was a question of relative value:
Quote"We needed to stop the bleeding," says James Gaddy, vice-president for administration at Albright, noting that over the past two years the college has experienced shortfalls of $20m. Calling himself and the college's president Debra Townsley, both of whom were hired last year, "turn-around specialists", Gaddy claimed that Albright's 2,300-object art collection was "not core to our mission" as an educational institution and was costing the college more than the art is worth.
"The value of the artworks is not extraordinary," he says, estimating the total value of the pieces consigned to Pook & Pook at $200,000, but claimed that the cost of maintaining the collection was high and that the cost of staffing the art gallery where the objects were displayed and (mostly) stored was "more than half a million dollars" a year.
3 Budget crises, programs cut, not laying off people yet
Cornell University is preparing staff cuts in the wake of Trump administration research funding reductions.
The University of Minnesota's administration agreed to a 7.5% cut across its units, along with a tuition increase. The president cited frozen state support and rising costs.
New York University (NYU) announced a 3% budget cut. So far this is about "emphasizing cuts to such functions as travel, events, meals, and additional other-than-personal-service (OTPS) items." NYU will keep on not hiring new administrators and is encouraging some administrators and tenured professors to retire.
Yale University paused ten ongoing construction projects because of concerns about cuts to federal monies.
Many of these stories reflect trends I've been observing for a while. Declining enrollment is a major problem for most institutions. The strategy of cutting jobs to balance a budget remains one at least some leaders find useful. The humanities tend to suffer more cuts than others (scroll down the Indiana pdf for a sample). Depending on the state, state governments can increase budget problems or alter academic program offerings.
The second Trump administration's campaign against higher education is drawing blood, as we can see from universities citing the federal research cuts in their budgets and personnel decisions. Note that this is before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's provisions take hold, from capping student aid to increasing endowment taxes. And this is also before whatever decrease will appear with international student enrollment this fall. (Here's my video series on Trump vs higher ed; new episode is in the pipeline.)
Note the number of elite institutions in today's post. In the past I've been told that the closures, mergers, and cuts primarily hit low-ranked and marginal institutions, which was sometimes true. But now we're seeing top tier universities enacting budget cuts, thanks to the Trump administration.
Let me close by reminding everyone that these are human stories. Program cuts hurt students' course of student. Budget cuts impact instructors and staff of all kinds. When we see the statistics pile up we can lose sight of the personal reality. My heart goes out to everyone injured by these institutional moves.
Finally, I'd like to invite anyone with information on a college or university's plans to close, merge, or cut to share them with me, either as comments on this post, as notes on social media, or by contacting me privately here. I write these posts based largely on public, open intelligence (news reports, investigations, roundups) but also through tips, since higher education sometimes has issues with transparency. We need better information on these events.
(thanks to Will Emerson, Karl Hakkarainen, Kristen Nyht, Cristián Opazo, Peter Shea, Jason Siko, George Station, Nancy Smyth, Ed Webb, and Andrew Zubiri for supplying links and feedback)
To add to that this email, which did the rounds from a University of Chicago Classicist:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GyP73eUXYAYZaIb?format=jpg&name=small)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GyP73eVWIAAcleT?format=jpg&name=small)
I post that letter not because it's particularly unusual but precisely because it's not. I've seen similar from numerous institutions - it just happens to be the most recent. I also note the suggestion that academic leaders are invoking Trump as an excuse to do what they were already planning as I see that come up a lot (and I think the eight updates before the election provide some evidence of this).
There do seem to be trends. Falling enrollment and rising costs (both of degrees and for institutions) - I believe that college admission is declining now and appears to have peaked in 2010. The humanities and foreign (or ancient) languages seem particularly vulnerable - from what I've read some of the most venerable institutions for language learning are basically shutting down. There seems to be a giddy/unhinged enthusiasm for AI from leadership. It seems to me that they're also doubling down on the "utility" of education: whether that's market-responsive or a political utility.
(I fully get the critique that there's no such thing as de-politicised knowledge or art for art's sake - I think that critique is true. But we need to simultaneously realise that and behave as if it's not. Not in the US where it's nakedly political, but a bit like acknowledging the deeply political nature of the legal system while also recognising the social benefit in pretending it's not.)
I've no doubt there's real structural challenges and Trump is challenging (if focused, as on his cabinet appointments, on the Ivies). But even looking at Trump, it makes me wonder what the point is of those massive multi-billion endowments and fund managers, and for profit spin offs? If they are not to insulate the independence of these elite institutions, then hat are they for? And that seems to me the wider problem is that there's a deep crisis of self-confidence across the entire sector where it feels like none of them (or none of the leaders) have any clear sense what they as individual institutions or higher education is for.
(Apologies for the slightly puckish title :blush:)
Probably doesn't help that new grads now have the same unemployment rate as non-grads.
While I have no doubt that Trump's policies have an effect, I would imagine that the cost is also a driving factor for lower enrollment numbers (I'm guessing young people are less willing to take out student loans these days)?
Further to Syt comment on enrolment numbers Canadian universities are hurting because of lower foreign student numbers due to policy changes, I can only imagine US ones are facing similar problems.
In Canada it is the colleges not the universities that are suffering from the drop in student visas. And mainly in Ontario, where there were a number of degree mills.
The research universities have suffered less because people go there for the academics not the short cut to citizenship.
MERGE TEH THREADS
And there is also a lack of people going into trades. Like almost everything else Social media is to blame.
Makes too many young people think they can be successful being their own boss.
Quote from: Grey Fox on August 18, 2025, 09:36:41 AMAnd there is also a lack of people going into trades. Like almost everything else Social media is to blame.
Makes too many young people think they can be successful being their own boss.
Start your own business!!! Even though you don't know shit about fuck and have zero skills.
Yes and the social media ad system is making getting some revenue extremely easy. It totally gives all false idea of the world.
Quote from: Grey Fox on August 18, 2025, 09:36:41 AMAnd there is also a lack of people going into trades. Like almost everything else Social media is to blame.
Makes too many young people think they can be successful being their own boss.
I wouldn't blame social media for this. In the UK Thatcher is to blame. I believe in America it tracks back some way too.
If anything social media is perhaps helping it with giving good visibility and a respectable image of trades.
^_^
You have to admire his commitment to the bit.
Quote from: Valmy on August 18, 2025, 01:07:02 PMYou have to admire his commitment to the bit.
Imagine if thatcher retire to be a car saleswoman :ph34r:
Quote from: HVC on August 18, 2025, 01:17:55 PMQuote from: Valmy on August 18, 2025, 01:07:02 PMYou have to admire his commitment to the bit.
Imagine if thatcher retire to be a car saleswoman :ph34r:
:lol:
It's not "a bit". A lot of the UKs problems really do track back to the smash and grab period.
It's well observed that the 1982 Industrial Training Act (amongst other things...) had a dire impact on the amount of tradesmen qualifying - make it so it's no longer mandatory to train apprentices and companies will decide not to do that, who'd have thought.
Quote from: Josquius on August 18, 2025, 02:28:21 PMIt's not "a bit". A lot of the UKs problems really do track back to the smash and grab period.
It's well observed that the 1982 Industrial Training Act (amongst other things...) had a dire impact on the amount of tradesmen qualifying - make it so it's no longer mandatory to train apprentices and companies will decide not to do that, who'd have thought.
Our apprenticeship model changed in the same way shortly after that, with similar consequences.
Quote from: Zoupa on August 17, 2025, 09:13:28 PMProbably doesn't help that new grads now have the same unemployment rate as non-grads.
Interesting gender split on this recently flagged in the FT:
(https://preview.redd.it/unemployment-is-climbing-among-young-graduate-men-but-v0-hn0xfs86ktdf1.jpeg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=4b21c8c926cc4609ac6502c7f88c14dd7f53064d)
Still a difference in the UK (about 3% for graduate and 5-6% for non-graduates). But the "graduate premium" is shrinking. In part this is because the minimum wage has significantly increased in recent years while productivity hasn't grown much which means there's basically been wage compression. It's one of the reasons I think the government's perhaps not thought through the impact of increasing payroll taxes and being keen on AI.
QuoteIn Canada it is the colleges not the universities that are suffering from the drop in student visas. And mainly in Ontario, where there were a number of degree mills.
Yeah similar issues in the UK of some fairly shady "universities" that seem to basically just be degree mills to get visas (at which point many disappear into the grey economy). It was something I didn't think was an issue when Theresa May banged on about it as Home Secretary but I've read a few reports recently from higher education people and I think it has been a serious issue.
In the UK the problem is slightly different on foreign students (for the legit universities) in particular universities fees from domestic students are capped. Those fees are unlikely to increase. Under the coalition the cap was tripled and the system became a lot more painful and regressive (this was also in part driven by statistical agencies counting the cost of those loans a bit more accurately). But it's basically a significant graduate tax (9%) which kicks in fairly low - and while wage growth is above inflation so is the cost of rent. Add in the cost of inflation (and wage growth) for universities and they've had an effective 30% cut in their income. So about a third are in deficit ad there have been course closures and redundancies - again particularly hitting the arts and humanities. The UK's most prestigious creative writing course has basically been shut down, for example. (I'd just add here - this has a huge knock on effect for local economies as setting up/expanding universities has been basically almost the only effective regional regeneration policy in the last 40-50 years).
This means universities have turned to foreign students. This is kind of fine for the prestigious research universities. So UCL, for example, only gets about 10% of its income from home students - 90% is from international students and research grants. While for a less prestigious university, such as Brighton who have had serious redundancies, over 50% of their income is from home students. This has led to those prestigious research universities focusing on expanding international recruitment - so UCL went from 9,000 international students in 2010 to about 25,000 in 2020 (pre-covid). At the same time, the number of home students have fallen. I think this is a big A-level result week story below (I suspect the Daily Telegraph looking for a pretty 18 year old girl with great A levels etc). However home students haven't reduced that much so that expansion in international students has increase the overall student body and reduced access to facilities, space and housing - plus a shift towards short-term teaching contracts with young academics.
It's unsustainable - but there's not any clear policy solution. Fee increases are unlikely to be politically possible (and, due to the statistical changes would actually count as a cost for the Treasury). Direct taxpayer funding for universities was the situation before fees and there was consistent underfunding, plus hard caps on the number of students (still the situation in Scotland which didn't adopt tuition fees) because direct funding had to compete with (and lose to) other funding priorities like the NHS, schools, pensions etc. There's similar issues with a graduate tax - part of the reason tuition fees helped fund a huge expansion in higher education is because it was hypothecated to universities. Any graduate tax would go into the giant revenue stream at HMT and, again, probably end up on pensions and the NHS. A cap would be politically difficult, economically self harming and the expansion of universities has been driven by rising demand from parents and students that doesn't feel likely to abate any time soon (on that, I'd note that apparently sharp-elbowed middle class parents are absolutely dominating the degree-apprenticeship programs where students earn while they learn).
And universities have league tables etc but are effectively unregulated (far less regulated than school exams in our national curriculum). So the competition side doesn't work effectively and one way we've seen that, rather depressingly is wage inflation - the number of firsts has gone from about 16% in 2010 to 38% in 2020. At the same time student satisfaction has fallen. They think they're not getting value for money, they're not getting good quality teaching or decent contact hours (even when I was at university in the 2000s the History students started protesting over the lack of contact hours as by third year I think they were down to two contact hours a week).
At the same time teaching and research has been subject to a lot more regulation and demands from funders in the last few decades. So amid all of that there's been a 60% increase in the number of senior managers and non-academic professionals.
As I say it all feels unsustainable and becoming more and more acute each year but without any clear obvious answer. As is often the case where I think I end up is that fees are going to stay and do have a beneficial purpose (hypothecated funding) but we should make repayment progressive again - but they're not going to increase (and we should make grants and bursaries more available). International students are broadly good but there probably needs to be regulation both on the degree mills (which are often "branches" of real universities) plus, I think, a degree of protection for home students (I'm also not sure it's great to have our higher education sector a downturn in China away from collapse). And I think there needs to be some form of cap and central planning of places aiming to both keep universities viable and maintain broad curriculums, even if that means universities can't expand as much as they'd like. I'd also look at lifting the, I think, over-regulation of teaching and research and the demands of the research funding bodies - fewer KPIs and administrators to monitor the KPIs etc.
But that's not going to be popular - and I doubt it'll happen. But I think we are probably close to some universities hitting real financial crisis. And I think some of those factors echo the situation in the US we're just a few years behind.
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 17, 2025, 08:07:31 PM(Apologies for the slightly puckish title :blush:)
It's been closing for, what? 40 years now, you'd think it would be pretty near shut now at this point. ;)
Bloom's book came out about shortly before I attended college. Some of the criticisms, (e.g. students confusing their taste in music with rebellion), were just. I have no basis to compare his criticism of how the university had changed, but, as his solution (return to the foundational works of Western Civilization) was identical to the one proposed in the preface of 1952's "Great Books of the Western World", I'm skeptical.
(And obviously it didn't inspire me to go get a liberal arts degree focusing great books.)
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 17, 2025, 08:07:31 PMTo add to that this email, which did the rounds from a University of Chicago Classicist:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GyP73eUXYAYZaIb?format=jpg&name=small)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GyP73eVWIAAcleT?format=jpg&name=small)
Mehercule, nihilne sanctum est?
I'm surprised to see that out of the University of Chicago, as they're well known for academic subjects (I don't believe that they even have an engineering department.) It reminds me of something my brother's ex-mother-in-law told me. She was a dean at UC Davis during the graduate assistant
slave revolt strike. She's a chemical engineer (and her deanship was somehow tied into the college of engineering) and their graduate students didn't strike since there's enough hard money in engineering to pay the graduate students a living wage. There isn't in many other fields, so one has to be independently wealthy or be able to rely on your parents. This limits the sort of student who can get an advanced degree outside something like STEM or business or something that will likely lead to a high paying career (such as law.)
Quote from: Josquius on August 18, 2025, 12:59:27 PMQuote from: Grey Fox on August 18, 2025, 09:36:41 AMAnd there is also a lack of people going into trades. Like almost everything else Social media is to blame.
Makes too many young people think they can be successful being their own boss.
I wouldn't blame social media for this. In the UK Thatcher is to blame. I believe in America it tracks back some way too.
If anything social media is perhaps helping it with giving good visibility and a respectable image of trades.
They are not going into trades because of social media. They are trying to be influencers that do trades.
Reagan is to blame.
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 17, 2025, 08:07:31 PM(Apologies for the slightly puckish title :blush:)
I thought it well put - highlights the extraordinary cultural shift on the right, from defending traditional high scholarship and humanities against the perceived evils of intellectual shallowness and callow sophistry to championing crude careerism and anti-intellectualism.
Bloom's critique was mostly misguided and oddly idiosyncratic. He either truly didn't understand or willfully misconstrued his academic opponents, and - speaking as someone who was around college age at the time - his commentary on students was basically a fancified academic rant of "get of my lawn." It did generate real interest at the time, and a clear left-right divide, but some of the more thoughtful reviewers and commentators pointed out that the partisan lean was not really so clear. The zeitgeist that Bloom reacted to was not so much the echoes of the 60s era hippy protestors, but the shift on the mainstream right from the Establishment GOP of foundations and think tanks to the ultra-materialist Reaganite GOP. From the era of Buckley and God and Man at Yale to the era of Bret Easton Ellis. Decades later, it's not surprising that Bloom's book can be read more as an indictment of the American political right than as a supporting tract.
Yeah - although I slightly wonder if thinking it through it's actually more on point.
Yes there was a "get off my lawn" element to the students section but I also remember it being basically that students of that generation were empty. They did not have the content morally and ethically to experience the thrill Bloom experienced when confronting a "great books" education. And I wonder if that's more on point looking at a lot of the right around Trump now. I regularly think of Ross Douthat's line during Trump's first campaign that if you didn't like the Religious Right, just wait until you meet the post-Religious Right. I'm not so sure the attack on an emptiness is so far off the mark? (And again an attack on the zeitgeist of that time - we can say many things about hippies, they were broadly believers in things.)
I also slightly wonder if part of the crisis in the US is exactly as you say on the right. But also how that interacts with what's gone on in the left. If the right aren't going to defend traditional high scholarship and (a particular vision of) the humanities, it's also not something that I think the American left's particularly invested in defending in recent years for a variety of reasons. It's perhaps why those programs are so exposed when there's political pressure on one side (including from donors), financial pressure, AI and falling enrollment. The "traditional" humanities academy is maybe lacking any defenders or people able to push back against administrators shuttering whole schools and areas of study?
I'd obviously have a lot to say, but don't have much time now as I prepare for the semester :(
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 19, 2025, 08:02:42 PMYes there was a "get off my lawn" element to the students section but I also remember it being basically that students of that generation were empty. They did not have the content morally and ethically to experience the thrill Bloom experienced when confronting a "great books" education.
Bloom had been a professor at Yale, which had then (and now and since WW2 I think) a 2-year special course "package" focused on great books. There was strong demand. The Dean of Students around the era Closing was written was a politically conservative professor of classics and the father of two very prominent neo-cons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Kagan.
During my own college years -- early 1990s -- so around this time period, while postmodern theory was really big, there was more interest among the student body in talking about the classics and modern philosophy (modern as in Machiavelli/Bodin/Descartes --> Marx/Mill etc). I say this as someone more academically focused in history and economics. And of course even those interested in postmodern theory were also engaging in the "great books" as one needed to be familiar with those ideas to understand postmodern criticism.
Basically, Bloom was full of shit. Sure he could find shallow students; there always has been and always will be plenty of those to go around in every time and place. Indeed, they fill the pages of the Socratic dialogues. Something you'd think a prominent translator of the Republic would have noticed.
That's probably very fair - especially as I don't have any doubt that Bloom was deeply elitist so I think his view was probably always that only a very few would reach any heights he envisaged.
I think my read is slightly different in that I think Bloom's view and story is also the very important, interesting, mid-century American Jewish story of intellectual excitement and joy (and, generally, depth). Incidentally I think there is a UK equivalent which is explicitly/solely class-based. For Bloom it's Chicago, for many others it was City College of New York.
But I think of his description of students not having enough prejudices when they start - and I don't think he means that in a simple "they're not racist/anti-semitic/homophobic enough". I think he means that they were no longer arriving with relatively fully-formed world view that would be challenged (perhaps destroyed) and liberated through education. Which, I think, is at least in part a common theme in the stories by those American Jews who wrote about their intellectual expriences in the early/mid-20th century. So it's not so much that they're just shallow but that there was nothing internally (like religious faith or inherited tradition - or the socialist movement and Stalinist/Trot fights of the 20s and 30s) for them to grapple with and confront and emerge out of in some way (perhaps that strengthened, or utterly transformed). While the prejudice-less engage with the "great books" but they are just one more piece of a consumerist life and there's no real "openness" because its not one by vacating a space of prejudice into knowledge, it was just always empty so you can perhaps flick through things.
So on the contrast of the right then and now, I think there is something to that when you look at, say, JD Vance, or Blake Masters, or Josh Hawley (I think all Ivy grads) or, for that matter, the sort of stoicism quote/Marcus Aurelius vapidity of the online right and Silicon Valley. To be completely honest I also recognise a fair bit of myself in that critique too, I'm not comparing myself with people who've done more like Vance.
Although I have to be honest I always find the whole "great books" debate a bit weird. I think possibly just because our system is less free in terms of students picking options. So here you apply for and study a subject (and there'll be choices within that). But also I'm not aware of any equivalent to something like "Western Civ" courses in the US.
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on August 19, 2025, 11:12:35 PMThe Dean of Students around the era Closing was written was a politically conservative professor of classics and the father of two very prominent neo-cons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Kagan.
Heh. I watched a lot of his lectures as part of Yale's open courses back in the day.
Quote from: Grey Fox on August 18, 2025, 12:27:13 PMYes and the social media ad system is making getting some revenue extremely easy. It totally gives all false idea of the world.
Even incredibly successful top 1% Youtubers seem to struggle to have a middle class lifestyle and that is only sustainable so long as they can keep the show rolling. And no benefits, no vacation, no retirement it is a total gig economy job. Only the truly blessed 0.001% are truly getting massive wealth.
And how many young kids actually have something interesting enough to say to sustain a youtube channel that successful for that long? You really need skills, expertise, life experiences, and that kind of thing (and/or massive charisma and good looks) to stand out in the pool of slop.
Granted I really only know about youtube, but I presume other social media is similar.
It's the perfect VC dream economic model. Get massive amounts of free labour that generates constant revenues for the owning class, while only a pittance goes to even the successful content generators except the top 0.00001% (who often get the revenue from leveraging their fame in other areas, rather directly from the content).
And that's before we go into how level the playing field is to become successful.
It's the pro athlete business model extended to another sphere of life.
It's not a great idea.
I think fandom of teams but also the online Messi v Ronaldo GOAT stuff is actually useful in a lot of what's going on in the world or at least western societies.
Jacob is right; it's more than that.
True old school traditional media like the big broadcast networks were great for advertising seeking to reach broad audiences but weren't as good for market segmentation. That's why live sports were so desirable for advertisers, they allowed the beer companies etc. to target a specific demo; it's also why print continued to flourish in the era of broadcast TV.
Cable TV allowed more demo targeting but there were practical limits of overall bandwidth plus the cost of licensing and cable infrastructure.
Youtube is a microtargeting dream because is segments audiences into true enthusiasts for every imaginable niche and interest. And the content is generated at no fixed cost to the platform other than the cost of setting up the service and maintaining the servers, which can be spread across the entire platform. No worries about recruiting, hiring, providing space and equipment, or even editing your content creators.
On the University of Chicago decision:
QuoteIf the University of Chicago Won't Defend the Humanities, Who Will?
Why it matters that the University of Chicago is pausing admissions to doctoral programs in literature, the arts, and languages
By Tyler Austin Harper
August 26, 2025
Updated at 9:30 a.m. ET on September 2, 2025
The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was lit, COVID-19 was still a mysterious respiratory illness in Wuhan, and I was a Ph.D. candidate in a dying field: comparative literature. I was getting ready to Zoom interview for a tenure-track job near Boston that I almost certainly wouldn't get (and didn't). Sardined with me in a Greenwich Village coffee shop in December 2019, one of my faculty mentors talked me through, for the thousandth time, the questions I should expect the hiring committee to ask me and dispensed advice about how I should answer them. Then we walked back to his office, lined in handsome foreign-language editions of various novels and works of philosophy, where I would sit for the interview. There, he offered a final piece of wisdom: "Don't be nervous. It's just Harvard," he said, grinning. "It's not like it's Chicago."
A joke, but not entirely. For as long as I can remember, and certainly much longer than that, the University of Chicago has been widely viewed as the destination for humanities students and scholars. Some other elite schools might have the coveted Ivy League branding, or a few more famous faculty members, or a couple more dollars to tack onto the salaries of its professors and graduate students. But perhaps nowhere is the study of literature, philosophy, the arts, and languages more valued, their spirit more authentically preserved, their frontiers more doggedly pursued, than at Chicago. The university has had several household names on its humanities faculty, including the firebrand critic Allan Bloom, the novelist Saul Bellow, and the ethicist Martha Nussbaum, as well as scholars who may be less well known to the general public but whose work has been deeply influential in their fields, including the brilliant literary critic Sianne Ngai and Fred Donner, the pathbreaking and Guggenheim-winning historian of early Islam. In short, Chicago is a place for scholars' scholars. At least, that's the reputation. And Chicago's reputation is no doubt why, when the university announced recently that it was reducing Ph.D. admissions for seven departments—among them art history and English language and literature—and outright freezing admissions to others, including classics, the decision was met, in some quarters, with fury and disbelief. "Chicago!" as one stunned academic friend put it in a text to me.
In an August 12 email to faculty, Deborah Nelson, Chicago's arts and humanities dean, said that the changes were necessitated by "this moment of uncertainty" and "evolving fiscal realities." These bits of bureaucratese appear to be allusions to both the Trump administration's war on higher education and Chicago's homegrown financial troubles, which include an eye-popping $6.3 billion in debt and a bad bet on crypto. "To be anything but cautious at this moment," the dean's email continued, "would be irresponsible."
Chicago's social-sciences division has also announced doctoral-admissions pauses, primarily in humanistic-leaning programs such as anthropology and social thought, where towering figures including the philosopher Hannah Arendt once taught. What's happening at Chicago is a particular gut-punch to the humanities, not just at the university itself, but nationally and even globally. The school is, as the classics professor Catherine Kearns put it in a message to me, "a singular center for the pursuit of humanistic knowledge and intellectual growth." Of the nearly 30 Chicago humanities professors I spoke with for this article, many emphasized that the stakes are much higher than the fate of prospective graduate students or the professors who might teach them. Chicago has long helped to keep alive tiny fields and esoteric areas of humanistic study, particularly in the languages. Without the university's support, and the continued training of graduate students who can keep these bodies of knowledge going, entire spheres of human learning might eventually blink out.
Of course, some might view these comments as self-serving complaints. But the primary fears of the people I spoke with were not about their own careers or futures, but instead about their fields—about knowledge that, once lost, cannot be easily regained. "If you allow a field to die, there's a loss to something like humanity," Clifford Ando, a Chicago classicist who has been outspoken about the administration's maneuvers, told me. "There's also a real practical risk that a field simply cannot be re-created just because you have books." I heard this sentiment echoed over and over. "If we stop producing people who are trained or educated to help undergraduates understand the most important things thought or written or painted in human history," the renowned philosopher Robert Pippin said, "we might not be able to recover that." Elaine Hadley, an emerita professor of English, told me, "Part of what we do is we're conservators, keeping a body of knowledge going. We want to innovate and we want to think new things about it, and, you know, we want to make it relevant to the present day, but we're also trying to keep this knowledge alive."
These responses emphasize the cultural costs of shrinking the number of people trained in humanities fields, rather than focusing on the question of whether universities should be calibrating the production of Ph.D.s to the academic job market. No one I spoke to was insensitive to the pressures their grad students face when confronting the vanishing opportunities for tenure-track employment. But the professors also seemed reluctant to define the success of a program by how many professors it creates—after all, most humanities PhD students at Chicago do not pay tuition and receive stipends to cover their living costs, and getting paid to learn and read is not the worst fate.
These faculty perspectives also stood in stark contrast with the reigning image of elite higher educators in right-wing media outlets: that humanities professors are "woke" activists whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of "the youth." Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw—and defended—their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off coarse appeals to economic utility.
Depending on whom I asked, the move to scale back humanities doctoral programs is either a prudent acknowledgment of the cratered job market for tenure-track professorships and a wise attempt to protect the university's humanities division from looming financial and political risks, or it is a cynical effort, under cover of the Trump administration's assaults, to transfer resources away from "impractical," unprofitable, and largely jobless fields (such as, say, comparative literature) and toward areas that the university's senior leadership seems to care about (such as, say, STEM and "innovation"). One faculty member I spoke with mentioned a consulting firm that was brought on to help Chicago as it considers changes to its humanities division, including possibly consolidating the departments from 15 down to eight. Many professors worried that the move to impose uneven changes—reducing admissions in some while halting them in others—may be an attempt to create circumstances that will ultimately make it easier to dissolve the paused programs. "Let no good crisis go unleveraged," Holly Shissler, an associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies department, said with a dark laugh. "You engineer a situation in which there are no students, and then you turn around and say, 'Why are we supporting all these departments and faculty when they have no students?'"
When I emailed Nelson and asked whether the changes were part of a plan to kill off the paused departments, she said, "A one-year pause is exactly that—a discrete decision that applies merely to a single admissions cycle." She seemed to acknowledge, however, that a divisional reorganization could happen. "My goal is to sustain the full scope of our faculty's research and teaching," she said. "To do so, we must be open to new ideas and structures." She added, "There's no magic number of departments in the arts and humanities." In the meantime, Chicago's humanities professors appear largely determined to resist being evaluated in terms of expediency. In a meeting with Nelson a few days after the announcement, 14 out of 15 chairs in the humanities division told the dean that she should pause enrollment in all of their departments or none of them. Targeting some and not others was unacceptable, they argued, because it sent the message that some fields matter and others do not.
The department chairs' wager seems to be that acting as a unified bloc will make reorganizing the division and cutting programs more difficult, even if the division-wide pause causes short-term pain for the next academic year. As anyone who has served on a faculty anywhere can tell you, this degree of cross-department solidarity and willingness to sacrifice for less-favored colleagues is remarkable, and even moving. Last Wednesday afternoon, the dean announced that the chairs had gotten their wish: With the exception of philosophy and music composition (owing to previous pauses in those programs), doctoral admissions will be frozen across the humanities for the 2026–27 academic year.
It's a bittersweet victory, of course, one that will result in fewer doctoral students in the short term and is not guaranteed to strengthen the division in the long term. And it does not settle the most pressing question raised by all this turmoil. If even Chicago is not willing to support and protect American arts and letters, who will? One Chicago administrator, in an attempt to defend the university's admissions pauses, pointed out that other prestigious peer institutions were expected to make similar announcements about their Ph.D. admissions in the coming weeks, and noted that Harvard is cutting nearly $2 million from its own humanities division. I would like to think that my (and others') alarm about the future of the humanities is overblown. But the evidence doesn't give me much hope.
The subheading of this article originally incorrectly stated that philosophy was one of the University of Chicago doctoral programs whose graduate admissions were paused.
Tyler Austin Harper
Tyler Austin Harper is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Harper was previously an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College, where he taught courses on literature, film, and the history of science. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Jacobin, and other outlets. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from NYU and is a co-host of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye.
Good on the rest of the department chairs.
Again I'm just struck by wondering what the leaders of universities and higher education think they're for?
Leo Strauss was also UChi. Once a real center of conservative intellectual thought.
Yeah absolutely - there's a fantastic Know Your Enemy episode on Bloom and many on Strauss. But also with Bloom and Bellow - my understanding is that they met and became friends in mid-life when both were working at the Committee of Social Thought.
And that's also a sort of high minded, inter-disciplinary enterprise that a is unique to a university. You look at the current faculty and it's a fascinating list - which must be fantastic for students. But in the past you Bellow, Coetzee, T.S. Eliot, Bloom, Arendt, Hayek etc - and I just think that is such a principled purpose a university that you might gain something from novelists and poets and philosophers and historians and economist in conversation.
It's not economically or politically directly useful, it is absolutely elitist - and it's exactly what these institutions are supposed to be for.
I find there something quite sad in seeing this happen to American higher education especially as my understanding is that so much of its strength is ultimately derived from the destruction of the incredible intellectual and academic institutions of Central/German speaking Europe. And now it, in its turn, is being destroyed.
Quote from: Sheilbh on September 04, 2025, 02:03:06 PMAgain I'm just struck by wondering what the leaders of universities and higher education think they're for?
Making money.
I blame David F. Swensen for this turn in our Universities' priorities.
The humanities are the cheapest departments in all universities. No labs, no costly infrastructure. Their closures are entirely ideologically motivated.
Quote from: Valmy on September 04, 2025, 07:39:52 PMQuote from: Sheilbh on September 04, 2025, 02:03:06 PMAgain I'm just struck by wondering what the leaders of universities and higher education think they're for?
Making money.
I blame David F. Swensen for this turn in our Universities' priorities.
And football?
Quote from: Syt on September 04, 2025, 11:30:47 PMQuote from: Valmy on September 04, 2025, 07:39:52 PMQuote from: Sheilbh on September 04, 2025, 02:03:06 PMAgain I'm just struck by wondering what the leaders of universities and higher education think they're for?
Making money.
I blame David F. Swensen for this turn in our Universities' priorities.
And football?
Aren't most college football teams cash positive?
Quote from: HVC on September 04, 2025, 11:56:03 PMAren't most college football teams cash positive?
No. Only something like 20% of P4 football teams earn more than they cost. The majority of schools charge students an additional fee to cover the difference.
Quote from: Syt on September 04, 2025, 11:30:47 PMQuote from: Valmy on September 04, 2025, 07:39:52 PMQuote from: Sheilbh on September 04, 2025, 02:03:06 PMAgain I'm just struck by wondering what the leaders of universities and higher education think they're for?
Making money.
I blame David F. Swensen for this turn in our Universities' priorities.
And football?
As weird and corrupt College Football is, I don't think it actually impacts academics that much.
Quote from: grumbler on September 05, 2025, 06:57:23 AMQuote from: HVC on September 04, 2025, 11:56:03 PMAren't most college football teams cash positive?
No. Only something like 20% of P4 football teams earn more than they cost. The majority of schools charge students an additional fee to cover the difference.
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification :)
Quote from: Valmy on September 04, 2025, 07:39:52 PMQuote from: Sheilbh on September 04, 2025, 02:03:06 PMAgain I'm just struck by wondering what the leaders of universities and higher education think they're for?
Making money.
I blame David F. Swensen for this turn in our Universities' priorities.
I have seen this claimed of universities (and other non-profits) before, but I don't understand it. To me, the point of making money as an organization is to channel its profits to actual people who either own a stake in it or otherwise can derive outsized compensation from it. I know the latter happens at non-profits, but it seems to me that, legally, the ability to redistribute money from a non-profit outside its stated goals is very limited. I'm probably missing something, but what is the point of "making money" as a goal if the money then either just sits in an investment account doing nothing other than making more money, or gets distributed for one of the university's chartered purposes?
Quote from: HVC on September 05, 2025, 08:34:08 AMQuote from: grumbler on September 05, 2025, 06:57:23 AMQuote from: HVC on September 04, 2025, 11:56:03 PMAren't most college football teams cash positive?
No. Only something like 20% of P4 football teams earn more than they cost. The majority of schools charge students an additional fee to cover the difference.
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification :)
Actually, now that I think about it, the rough stat I gave is probably for athletic departments overall, not for football specifically. I don't know to what extent football specifically "pays for itself." TV deals with conferences are not generally just about football.
Quote from: Oexmelin on September 04, 2025, 08:10:54 PMThe humanities are the cheapest departments in all universities. No labs, no costly infrastructure. Their closures are entirely ideologically motivated.
Yeah and I don't even think a simple left/right ideology (though there is absolutely a war on higher education by Trump). I think there's sort of an ideology of utility/economy in higher education that I find despicable and anti-education (and anti-humanities in particular). That courses of study and research are judged by the utility (to the economy or to politics etc) and also that the purpose is to provide the skills of the "modern economy" which is at worst deeply sinister and at best a massive subsidy to employers (I think this comes up a lot in the AI conversation).
See also the reckless embrace of AI by many university leaders.
I don't think they have an idea of what they're there for. As I say I think there's almost a crisis of confidence/identity in the leadership class of these institutions. Frankly it feels very "Davos man": higher education is to provide inputs into TED Talks and transferable skills in a globalised economy.
QuoteI have seen this claimed of universities (and other non-profits) before, but I don't understand it. To me, the point of making money as an organization is to channel its profits to actual people who either own a stake in it or otherwise can derive outsized compensation from it. I know the latter happens at non-profits, but it seems to me that, legally, the ability to redistribute money from a non-profit outside its stated goals is very limited. I'm probably missing something, but what is the point of "making money" as a goal if the money then either just sits in an investment account doing nothing other than making more money, or gets distributed for one of the university's chartered purposes?
And on this - I know I bang on about them because I think it's a disgrace. But what is the point of Columbia's multi-billion property and medical services empire if not to preserve their independence as a place of learning, study and higher education?
I find the way their leaders have responded to Trump absolutely craven - but also with such unseemly speed that it almost feels like it was a relief.
Quote from: Sheilbh on September 05, 2025, 11:07:26 AMAnd on this - I know I bang on about them because I think it's a disgrace. But what is the point of Columbia's multi-billion property and medical services empire if not to preserve their independence as a place of learning, study and higher education?
I find the way their leaders have responded to Trump absolutely craven - but also with such unseemly speed that it almost feels like it was a relief.
I don't know as many of the details on this as I should, but from what I have read part of the issue is that endowments are often earmarked for specific purposes. So, if the cut funding wasn't being used for those purposes it becomes difficult to shuffle money around to cover it in such a way that the endowment could be used. In other words, money in university budgets and endowments isn't as fungible as people think it is.
That said, I agree with you and I think there may be more at work here. I wonder how much Columbia worries that their alumni boosters are actually MAGA and MAGA-adjacent, such that taking such a stand threatens not only the funding from the federal government but also from their alumni network. Some of the top administrators may even be in the MAGA-sympathetic group themselves. It would help explain the seeming relief you mentioned.
It's not academia per se, but I view the apparently ongoing attack on Wikipedia by the reactionary right (American and otherwise) as part of the same trend.
Which - and I'm repeating myself - I view as a deliberate, well-funded, and incredibly effective propaganda effort that is paying off. The reactionary right and its funding oligarchs are winning the culture wars and the political wars because they have overall goals and a set of coherent strategies and tactics that they're executing.
The response, meanwhile seems to primarily be focusing on individual incidents in isolation and wondering (with regret and concern) why they're winning.
Quote from: Baron von Schtinkenbutt on September 05, 2025, 12:00:07 PMI wonder how much Columbia worries that their alumni boosters are actually MAGA and MAGA-adjacent, such that taking such a stand threatens not only the funding from the federal government but also from their alumni network. Some of the top administrators may even be in the MAGA-sympathetic group themselves. It would help explain the seeming relief you mentioned.
Yes, that is a key issue that often gets overlooked.
I think the key to the successes the reactionary right have had is that they're unified in purpose and messaging. It helps that the message is somewhat incoherent, and that they have been able to exploit the selective hearing and memory of many in their target audience.
In contrast, it sometimes seems that the only unity of purpose and messaging amongst the opposition is, "these guys are dangerous and must be stopped". Once you get past that, you see squabbling over how to do it and resistance breaks down.
The reactionary right either seems to avoid such squabbles, or successfully marginalizes the dissenters if they don't come around. It's easier to do as a reactionary rather than a progressive, because there's no real idealism behind being a reactionary so compromising your principles, as much as one has them, isn't a big deal.
Yes, and I think the unifier of the reactionary right is fear of what will happen to them if they step out of line with whatever the great leader is thinking at the time.
Quote from: Jacob on September 05, 2025, 01:09:30 PMIt's not academia per se, but I view the apparently ongoing attack on Wikipedia by the reactionary right (American and otherwise) as part of the same trend.
Which - and I'm repeating myself - I view as a deliberate, well-funded, and incredibly effective propaganda effort that is paying off. The reactionary right and its funding oligarchs are winning the culture wars and the political wars because they have overall goals and a set of coherent strategies and tactics that they're executing.
The response, meanwhile seems to primarily be focusing on individual incidents in isolation and wondering (with regret and concern) why they're winning.
To return slightly to academia I think there's been a long-standing conservative culture war against it, particularly in respect of the humanities and theory - see Allan Bloom.
But I think a large part of the vulnerability now is not directly because of that - or rather that other shifts and ideologies so undermined the foundations that it made academia vulnerable at this moment.
I mention in my earlier post about utility and "Davos man" because I do think that's a really important point of where it starts. That the value of universities and higher education is understood through their economic output. Whether that is through the research they provide, the regeneration in an area or the skilled workers they train. They are cogs within a globalised capitalist economy to be celebrated for the role they provide in keeping that economy going. I think that attitude is across the political spectrum and becomes really pervasive in the last 20-30 years. I think it is as much a part of the liberal centre (which is perhaps where it starts) as anywhere else. Many of the people rejecting it were deeply conservative in the sense that Atlantic piece suggests. Bloom himself was a translator of Plato and absolutely rejected the sort of "utility" idea of education - I think would talk about it in terms of "truth" and "excellence".
Which is, I think, where a left-wing utility and challenge to universities emerges, particularly in the humanities. As the humanities is less directly tied to the economy it is less able to demonstrate economic utility (with the exception of producing lawyers - dubious value), I think instead you tend to get an argument that they are useful politically. Fund or study the humanities and you will have the tools to understand what's going on politically and socially - and there may be some truth to that in some limited areas. But practically that's not the purpose of the humanities and you'll be funding say, an article on the Aztecs in Ulysses (a genuine recent article in James Joyce Quarterly I am desperate to read :lol:). I think that perhaps particularly crystallises in recent years where there are things that people feel a need to understand (I think particularly BLM and Trump), and are then perhaps disillusioned when the humanities are capable of expanding your knowledge but not solving anything ("poetry makes nothing happen"). I also think running in parallel is a growing left (and correct) disillusion with those ideas of capital-t Truth and excellence, which a conservative defender of academia could make in an uncomplicated way, as they are undoubtedly elitist.
I think the combination of those two trends means that a lot of academia lacks the tools and vocaubulary and self confidence to defend itself and their purpose because it is elitist, marginally useful politically and uneconomic. And because the right's attack comes in a far more anti-intellectual form. It is not the Allan Bloom and the attack is not in favour of capital-t Truth and Plato-to-NATO western canon stuff. And also to be really blunt I think an awful lot of the attack on academia is simply because they can and it is a space in which they can send a message - particularly on dissent and pro-Palestinian views.
I'd add to VM's point that even when endowments are not tied up into specific things, there is also a very healthy structure for the funding of academia in service of the conservative movement in the US. If you are bright and on the right you will be talent spotted, space will be found for you in an "institution" or a "school" of varying levels of academic ability and credibility somewhere. So in their assault on higher education they aren't going to hurt themselves and academia that absolutely has a political utility for them will survive because it is already insulated even within the same institutions. They have their Patrick Deneens and Adrian Vermeules and law review writers with an unusual interest in Carl Schmitt - and their funding isn't necessarily from the general pile/common good.
QuoteI think the key to the successes the reactionary right have had is that they're unified in purpose and messaging. It helps that the message is somewhat incoherent, and that they have been able to exploit the selective hearing and memory of many in their target audience.
In contrast, it sometimes seems that the only unity of purpose and messaging amongst the opposition is, "these guys are dangerous and must be stopped". Once you get past that, you see squabbling over how to do it and resistance breaks down.
The reactionary right either seems to avoid such squabbles, or successfully marginalizes the dissenters if they don't come around. It's easier to do as a reactionary rather than a progressive, because there's no real idealism behind being a reactionary so compromising your principles, as much as one has them, isn't a big deal.
Yes but I think you could also frame that in the opposite way - so I sort of feel like a real strength of the American right is the extent to which very different sets of opinions are able to bury the hatchet around a common political cause. But it sort of means you do have Hayek and Friedman if that's your thing, or Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom (perhaps not anymore), or in modern times possibly Vermeule and "common good constitutionalism". If you're bright and right-wing there are lots of different schools and mentors you can sort of attach yourself too (and what you're doing is sort of the gourmet cooking end of what will end up on Truth Social once it's been through the process) but they can all sit under the same flag.
While I think the rest of academia is not there to serve a political cause. They're genuinely doing independent study that does not necessarily serve a political end - and there isn't a left/liberal equivalent of all the intellectual infrastructure of the conservative movement. So, despite the conservative fear, there isn't really a "liberal academia" in the same way as there is a conservative one on the right. And at the same time I feel like the band of academics who get picked up within official Democrat and "respectable" policy circles seems a lot narrower and excludes lots of academia that might well be more liberal or on the left intellectually (and useful to think with) because it's not on the right page/fully aligned politically.
Isn't that kind of saying the same thing, Sheilbh?
There's a coherent (if broad and multi-faceted) intellectual and political movement on the right, which includes academics.
On the other hand there are a bunch of intellectuals, politicians, and academics that are left aligned, but they are not all coherent.
The left represents the free market of ideas, and that free market is losing because it is being out-organized, out-bought, and out-bullied by the oligarch funded right.
Yeah I agree. I just think you can emphasise it slightly differently. I don't think the incoherence is just in the messaging. I think my read would be that the right isn't coherent intellectually at all - there are contradictory intellectual strands that don't work together on an intellectual level at all. But they are united on a political project (I also think there's more unity from a perspective of "aesthetics" which I think might matter too). Those contradictory strands are helpful at a time when things are a little bit in flux and Trump is leading the right as he doesn't really have many (any?) fixed beliefs and everyone's rowing in behind the power project. And bluntly, if you have to pivot several times a day, the intellectual incoherence - or diversity - helps.
Within academia I don't think there is a "left" or "liberal" academia in any meaningful sense. I don't think it's that politically coherent. From the outside I think while the liberal/left side especially in the US maybe isn't more intellectually coherent, but has a narrower intellectual bandwidth. I think there's a bundle of ideas and they very often seem to go together. I think there's something to the Ganz argument that they exercised discipline by removing their cranks which is great when everything's going well but is a limit when the existing system hits a crisis because you've got rid of the people thinking and working outside of it. But as I say I don't think there's any political unity.
Possibly a mutual incuriousity plays a role here. I feel like, unlike the right, the institutions of liberal/left politics aren't interested in ideas, which I'd slightly distinguish from "expertise" (or perhaps don't feel they need to organise them because they're on the right side anyway) - and I think the academics/intellectuals on that side aren't as interested in buttressing power/don't have the organisation. And I don't think this used to be the case I think at the time Buckley was writing for example, I think there as more of a connection between academia to organised politics - I'm not sure why it shifted. Possibly the rise of the New Left and sixties starting a long march through the institutions which disconnected that world from practical politics at exactly the point the right were creating their own counter-insitutions?
Although I'm not sure on the free market side of things - I think even if it's small-p politics resources and success in academia is more political than that even if you don't have donors with their own intellectual agenda. And I think fashion/the desire to be current matters in academia as much as anywhere else (at least, perhaps, to the funders who aren't right-wing foundations doling out grants).
The free market of ideas has always been a pretty lousy metaphor, precisely because it never was a free market, and ideas aren't transacted. You don't buy a ready made product.
I am just going to illustrate Sheilbh's point with a personal anecdote. At the beginning of Trumpism, I suggested to my colleagues in my Early Modern history workshop that we should organize public-facing events which directly engaged with current-affairs topics. It was met with strong pushbacks: the best way to fight Trumpism, I was told, was to promote knowledge for knowledge's sake.
I said I agreed, in principle. Such an idea could hold, when all the cultural sphere around us subscribed to the idea, promoted it, and thus, we could find strong backers elsewhere. But now, we lived in a world where our own colleagues in STEM thought we were useless (it had been demonstrated at an Arts and Science meeting a few weeks before). We needed to find ways to articulate anew the humanist project - except, humanist project now is now so exploded, so atomized, it's really hard to find common ground - and the humanities themselves really suck at feeling a sense of emergency. It's one of the strength of the humanities, a sort of timelessness, but it makes us terrible at answering a political crisis. What remained were the sort of milquetoast petition of principles about « critical thinking skills », which has little political purchase, because people aren't able to see the connection between analyzing silent film, or thinking about 16th century Senegambia and applicability. Ours is a culture obsessed with outputs, and utility - even when there is undoubtedly an appetite for all things cultural.
For humanists, humanities had become a truism. Something we never felt the need to defend, because the existence of the institution was the project, and to defend it was to admit it could be questioned.
We never organized those public facing events.
To a large extent, the problems of the Democratic Party are the same as those of academia. They are creatures of institutions, attached to the replication of these institutions, which serve each individual professor / aides well, but do not lend themselves well to building collective fights. People have confused a position of comfort with a position of principle, and without having to actually defend their institutions, abandoned the battlefield.