California’s community colleges and public universities remain the best in the world, a bulwark of California’s civil society. But they still have some dumb systems that no one would ever recreate if they started from scratch, that limit their potential and the possibilities for their students. Last Thursday, I testified to the California state legislature’s Little Hoover commission about one such system: the charging of shadowy “student institutional debts” and the blocking of degree completion for students who owe them.

Before I share my testimony below on how to end these weird debts, let me first praise the bi-partisan members of the Little Hoover Commission. They themselves are a testimony to the civic power produced by the state’s public universities. Nearly every one of them cited their deep moral concern as an alumnus of the University of California, California State University, and Community College systems. And every last one of them dug into the weirdness of student institutional debts to the point that they could challenge the disappointing defenses of the status quo from college and university lobbyists. I very much look forward to the Commissions findings and report.

But, what are these weird student debts you say? I first encountered them when I coauthored the Creditor Colleges study with Jonathan Glater, Laura Hamilton, and Dalié Jimenez. Here’s how I explained them in my testimony:

Institutional debts work differently than student loans, and they tend to be more harmful. 300,000 mostly low-income California students incur these debts in an average year. These debts in turn create obstacles to student degree completion. They also reduce enrollments at community colleges and public universities, reducing tuition revenue.

Institutional student debts thus pose a problem, but also an opportunity to substantially improve degree completion and increase tuition revenue to support our higher education segments.

Here’s how this works. The largest portion of institutional debts are incurred by students when they withdraw from school in the middle of an academic term because of a health or economic hardship. Schools are required to return some of these students’ Pell grant and loan aid to the US Department of Education. They also must return Calgrant and Middle Class Scholarship aid to the state. As a result, institutional debts mostly impact low-income students that utilize these aid programs.

While they are not required to do so, most schools then place registration holds that bar further enrollment until students repay their federal aid to the school. Schools also commonly use this structure to try to recoup school-based aid awarded to students who withdraw mid-term. Such a case occurred at UCLA where the school sought to take back a $9,000 Blue and Gold grant that UCLA had used to pay itself for a students’ housing. You’ll hear from that student Stephanie later this morning.

As you’ll hear from Stephanie, students often do not know that they will incur a debt when they withdraw. Stephanie was not informed.

It is difficult to track the exact extent and circumstances in which students incur institutional debts. This is because neither the state nor the federal government require schools to publish data when this occurs. While inadequate, the data submitted by the segments to this commission is by far the most extensive data they have ever published.

But here are the estimates we produced for the Creditor Colleges report, which none of the California higher education segments have disputed:

• Around 320,000 community college students incur a total of around $100M in institutional debts annually.

• Around 34,000 CSU students incur around $58M in institutional debts.

• Around 18,000 UC students incur around $30M in institutional debts.

These are rough estimates. But they are consistent in orders of magnitude with the data just provided by the segments on the number of students with debt on the books. [84,000 at CSU. 60,000 at UC]

This is a bit less that 10% of all undergraduates at CSU and UC. It’s closer to 15% of all community college students annually.

At this scale, institutional debts are highly consequential for efforts to increase degree completion rates.

As you will hear from Stephanie, the debt imposed a hardship when her mom used high interest credit card debt to pay it so that she could complete he degree. Data from the segments, however, shows that students rarely ever repay institutional debts. This is because, like Stephanie, students often have already used their aid funds to pay for housing or other costs of attendance. So they simply do not have the money to pay the debt. And you can’t get blood from a stone.

Consistent with this, at CSU and UC campuses with full data just provided to you, just 3% of CSU students and just 1% of UC students with debts are enrolled in payment plans. At UC Merced, we ultimately write off about 75% of institutional debts as uncollectable.

Because schools place registration holds on students with institutional debts, students are barred from taking further courses towards a degree.

A carte blanche use of registration holds may be penny wise, but it’s pound foolish for schools. Enrolling a student for just one additional semester would typically bring in more tuition revenue than the amount of the institutional debt. Enrolling a student for all of their terms left towards a degree would bring in even more tuition revenue. Students can use federal loans, Pell Grants and Cal Grants to pay these tuition costs. They can’t use those funds to pay an institutional debt.

With only a fraction of students ever repaying debts, it would boost schools’ revenue to figure out a way to continue enrolling students with institutional debts.

Perhaps because of the revenue losses from enrollment holds, a growing number of schools have increased the institutional debt size threshold for which they institute registration holds. We have found 17 CSUs now allow students to register with institutional debts below $200. 9 of those CSUs allow students with debts up to $1,000 or more to continue taking courses. CSU San Bernardino and Sonoma state allow students with debts up to $4,000 to continue. Unfortunately, we are only aware of 2 UCs, UCSD and UC Merced, where students with debts up to $250 are allowed to register. UC Merced has a waiver program for much larger debts. Some community colleges also use higher thresholds, but we lack systematic data.

Overall, the data points to several legislative solutions:

1. Setting standard thresholds for the amount of institutional debt required for a registration hold. There are equity problems with the inconsistency across schools.

2. Requiring a one semester grace period for debts before implementing a registration hold. During this period, schools should be required to offer zero-interest payment options so that students like Stephanie don’t have to use high-cost credit to pay off institutional debt for re-enrollment. This will create incentives for schools to avoid mid-semester withdrawals through better support and communication for struggling students.

3. Require schools to track and report comprehensive data on institutional debts and policies for redressing associated problems.

4. Drop the requirement that schools return Calgrant and Middle Class scholarship aid for a student that withdraws mid semester for students who have not previously withdrawn mid-semester.

Again, I thank the commission for its attention to this important issue where California has an opportunity to substantially improve degree completion and increase tuition revenue to support our higher education segments. This could also provide a model for improving educational attainment and equity nationally.

References

Data and testimony from all witnesses, colleges, and universities: https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Supplemental-Information-for-3-26-26-Hearing.pdf

Martin, Andrew Colin. Financialized Administrative Burdens: Unequal Institutional Student Debts in California Public Higher Education. Master’s thesis, University of California, Merced, 2025.

Eaton, Charlie, Jonathan Glater, Laura Hamilton, and Dalié Jiménez. 2022. Creditor Colleges: Canceling Debts That Surged during COVID-19 for Low-Income Students

This reflects my research’s increasing focus on how Wall Street and Big Tech oligarchs have gained so much political and economic power in America and globally. And it will facilitate workshopping ideas for a book through this newsletter. I’ll still be thinking and writing about universities, especially with regard to their relationships to American oligarchs.

Following up on a related report, a Times investigation recently exposed that billionaire spending on elections has grown from less than 1% of all spending before Citizens United to 19% in the 2024 elections. This is what oligarchy looks like.

Back in November, I gave a talk at UMASS about the role of Wall Street and Big Tech in this transformation of political spending. This is my first effort to appraise how these two industry and social groupings of oligarchs may be different than the Koch brothers or the oil barons that preceded them.

I particularly asked: to what extent did both big tech and Wall Street turn to Trump in the 2024 election and why? Second, did increasing oligarchy in big tech and Wall Street lead supportive factions to more proactively support Trump’s authoritarian turn in 2024, rather than just supporting it, tacitly or actively, in response to Trump’s victory and adoption of authoritarian strategies. What follows is my exploration of these questions from the talk.

Some of my intellectual motivation is that Levitsky and Ziblatt have suggested that economic elites can be enablers of democratic backsliding. They suggest that this is against their own interest, because autocrats roll back the rule of law. Erosion of rule of law introduces uncertainty that can be bad for business, and allows autocrats to weaponize the law to subordinate even economic oligarchs to their own power and whims. We’ve seen evidence of this in Trump’s tariff weaponization and attacks on big law.

But I don’t think Levitsky and those engaging his work have given much attention to which elites might be most likely to become enablers and why. And investigative reporting has indicated that some economic elites encouraged or even helped develop elements of Trump’s authoritarian push in the lead up to 2024 via Project 2025 and less public initiatives. This raises questions about whether some elites may encourage, rather than just enable, democratic backsliding.

Some potential answers to these questions that I’ll sketch today: private equity, venture capital, and big tech swung to Trump in 2024 more than other wealthy elites. They did so because new oligarchs from these industries perceived threats to their wealth and power from Democratic policy makers, particularly around anti-trust.

The first empirical observation that led me towards this line of thinking is that there have been sectoral shifts in the composition of the US billionaire class towards Wall Street and Big Tech over the last 40 years. And these billionaires are wealthier than the billionaires of 40 years ago. This may not be that surprising, but I haven’t seen it well measured. And it raises the question of whether the wealth and economic projects of these new billionaire factions may be among the structural antecedents to Trump’s authoritarian turn.

I noticed this in my paper Elite Embeddedness with Albina Gibadullina. The paper is about the unusually high representation of private equity and hedge fund managers on elite university boards. Part of this is because private equity and hedge fund managers grew to be one of the largest groups of billionaires over the last 40 years. This figure recasts and supplements data from the paper to plot the change in the % of billionaires by sector:

If you view elite university boards as a field of power that connects economic and political elites, the other thing we found in our paper is that financiers join elite university boards more than even other billionaires. Building on the work of Megan Neely, Kimberly Hoang, Sebastian Mallaby we theorized that financiers are more attracted to these boards because they use elite social ties to trade in private information and make investments that outperform public markets. This also fits with political access strategies pioneered by David Rubenstein and Carlyle Group that Michael Lewis has called an “access capitalism” variety of private equity. Work by Kevin and others has similarly shown the value of financier social ties to regulators. If financiers particularly employ such socio-political ties in their economic strategies, they might have a repertoire and social ties that could be turned towards an authoritarian break like project 2025, if they wanted to.

But why would they want to? As Levitsky argues, this is at best a risky strategy. And it’s not just risky because the authoritarian may weaponize the law to assert power over you. Oligarchs may be too stupid or drunk on their own power to anticipate this. But it also seems risky that if the authoritarian putsch fails, you risk positioning yourself as an existential threat to the democratic opponents of the aspiring autocrat.

So while Wall Street has historically leaned Republican, there would be real risks to disproportionately funding the post January 6 project 2025 version of Trump and MAGA. For fractions of the tech sector, such a move away from their Democratic Party patrons at first seems even more surprising.

But that’s what appears to have happened per this chart I made of OpenSecrets data on giving to outside political groups by the top 20 firms for donations in three financial categories: private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital. I haven’t yet had time to parse this data for tech. I also haven’t done anything to look at how this compares to shifts among other wealthy individuals or industries. So this is a very initial, not rigorous first take.

Consistent with this shift, media accounts have presented evidence that key Wall Street and Big Tech billionaires did more than open their wallets. One interesting example is Venture capitalist Marc Andreesen’s organization of Signal chats with a couple hundred finance, tech, and far right intellectual elites. The chats have provided some artifacts of these elites discussing if and why they should help return Trump to power. Closer to my prior research, Andreesen, private equity billionaire Marc Rowan, and their friends have both claimed credit as architects of the Trump’s authoritarian strategy towards universities. And Trump’s anti university strategist Christopher Rufo takes credit for helping Andreesen move some big tech elites to the right through the Chatham House chats. Here is a screen shot of one of those group chats.

Wall Street, tech billionaires, and their minions from the Elon Musk cinematic universe likewise were more than ready to bring their autocratic business model to DOGE and appointments in the Trump administration.

So, we have some initial evidence of a pretty hard pro Trump turn from 2020 to 2024. And we have some initial evidence that it was proactively authoritarian, at least among some of these folks.

So, I’ll turn now to the question of why this turn happened and whether it was related to increasing oligarchy. My first step here is to ask, what is oligarchy and who are oligarchs? This is not a rhetorical question for me at this point. I am still trying to figure this out.

From my brief crash course in the literature so far, I have at least learned thatoligarchy derives from Greek for rule of the few. The second thing, I think you can get from Michels, is that to have oligarchy, youhave to have oligarchs with personal power.

There are some further common characteristics of capitalist oligarchs:

• Operate across the blurred boundaries of finance and industry (Veblen 1904, Brandeis 1914, Mills 1956)

• Extract wealth by controlling multiple enterprises or individual monopolies over entire industries (Kahn 2016; Tomaskovic-Devey 2018). One way to think about this is that corporations work for oligarchs, not the other way around. So even some CEOs of top corporations do not really fit neatly in the oligarchy category.

• Employ elite social ties and politics to defend their position (Winters 2011, Wright & Sengupta, 2013, Eaton 2022, Eaton & Gibadullina 2025)

Who, then are oligarchs past and present? Here are some examples:

· Industries: Finance / energy, utilities / media

· Old: JP Morgan / Rockefeller / Hearst, Murdoch

· New: Private equity (LBO and Venture) / Big Tech

I focus on private equity and Big tech based on some intuitions from a couple of prior and ongoing projects. One of those projects is a paper with Albina Gibadullina, Adam Goldstein, and Marie-Lou Laprise. A working paper version of this should make its way into the world in the next few months.

This project offers some insights for how we might understand private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, and big tech as playing complementary roles in building and maintaining monopolies as sources of their oligarch’s wealth and power.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has summed this up nicely as an oligarchic strategy, saying, “Competition is for losers.”

In our paper, we focus particularly on leveraged buyout funds. But we show that venture capital and private equity play complementary roles in building monopolies under private ownership, including tech monopolies. Venture startups rarely go public. Instead they get bought by private equity leveraged buyout funds. As part of the monopoly building process, we show that buyout funds also rarely take companies public through IPOs anymore. Instead, they keep companies under private ownership longer, and they exit investments by selling their portfolio companies to publicly traded competitors. This can contribute to the consolidation of market power among a dwindling number of increasingly large publicly traded corporations.

This framework updates the outdated paradigm for understanding venture capital and private equity’s role in corporate ownership and control. The old paradigm paints venture capital creating challengers to incumbents and private equity as buying and breaking up publicly traded conglomerates. In fact, for a long time, they’ve done the opposite, including around big tech.

You can see that in these tech sector varieties of the venture capital, LBO, and public M&A life cycle. In one example, Andreesen Horowitz invested in the BlueCoat cyber security firm which was later acquired in LBO buyouts by Thoma Bravo among others. BlueCoat grew through the acquisition of several competitors. Ultimately it was sold to publicly traded Symantec which was merged into Broadcom, helping create one of the ten corporations with a trillion dollars in market capitalization.

Private equity similarly grew Mindbody through rollup acquisitions of 11 different competitors. Athena health and Signify involved fewer mergers, but both started under venture and then were acquired by LBO funds. New Mountain Capital exited Signify by selling it to publicly traded CVS. I like these last three examples because they all involved using tech and platform business models in previously brick and mortar sectors.

Zooming out, this life cycle helps us understand how venture and private equity oligarchs extract their wealth from both the privately held and publicly held portions of the economy.

Through this rise of private equity, private equity and VC ownership grew from negligible in the 1990s to somewhere between 10 and 20% of all corporate net worth today. In the privately held third of the economy under corporate ownership (as opposed to public firms and unincorporated businesses) private equity and VC ownership has grown to somewhere closer between 35% and 55% of all business net worth.

Importantly for our monopoly story, buyout funds have increasingly engaged in what are known as add-on buyouts. Add-on buyouts are buyouts where a buyout fund buys a company to merge it with another portfolio firm that it already owns. This is the central transaction that private equity uses to build monopolies.

Finally, private equity has helped build publicly listed monopolies that are increasingly owned by a small number of Wall Street asset managers like BlackRock. This includes Big Tech monopolies by which “software is eating the world.” Private equity does this by selling their portfolio firms to publicly listed monopolies in merger and acquisition sales. I mentioned earlier that private equity rarely exits its investments through IPOs anymore. That might preserve a competitor to publicly traded incumbents. Instead, private equity exits through merger and acquisition sales to publicly traded competitors.

Through these new roles, private equity has contributed to declines in the number of publicly traded corporations even as publicly traded ownership has held steady as a share of all business net worth.

In sum, private equity, giant Wall Street asset managers, venture capital, and Big Tech firms have together built the monopolies that have furnished the new wealth of oligarchs. Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez have shown that the wealth of the 19 richest Americans exceeds that of their counterparts in the top 0.00001% during the Gilded Age (e.g. Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt) when measured as the share of national income. Zucman has said these new multi-billionaires engage more in politics than their predecessors because they have more to lose.

My impression from tracking statements by venture capital, private equity, and big tech – as well as investigative reporting like that on Chatham House – is that these guys turned to Trump in anger at the populist turn in some Democratic economic policy, particularly on anti-trust. But private equity and tech have also voiced other criticisms of Democrats, including complaints about Crypto regulation, AI regulation, and social policies they criticize as “woke.” And the most vocal oligarchs, are also the most extremely online – subject to the same mind warp that social media has inflicted on everyone.

So one next step for research, to paraphrase Robert Merton, is to confirm that this phenomenon is actually happening before I go further in trying to explain it. For this, I’ve been thinking about expanding the very coarse analysis of Open Secrets data I showed you, to track how patterns in political donations changed over time in my Wall Street sectors of interest and Big Tech, in comparison to changes in other sectors. I want to get more of a handle on timing and shifting political contexts going back to Citizens United, Dodd Frank, finance’s reaction to Dodd Frank, and Trump’s initial election.

And I’m interested in how these finance and big tech donation patterns may have moved in relationship to other industries with historically oligarchic structures and high market concentration. This could involve linking data or analytic coding on monopoly adjacent industries to Open Secrets data on donations by its 100 industry and 400 subindustry categories. I have said little about hedge funds today. And that’s in part because I see the hedge fund industry as less directly tied to monopoly projects in finance and big tech. So similar hedge fund movement could actually contradict some of the thesis I’ve toyed with today.

The last thing I’ve been considering is linking OpenSecrets data to the Forbes 400 billionaire lists to create a sort of analytic sample to examine political giving behavior.

If, in fact, there’s been an oligarchic turn to Trump’s democratic backsliding as a strategy for wealth defense, you might imagine the implications for what sort of political-economic shifts would be needed to restore democracy after a Trump presidency. Now that the autocratic playbook has been opened, it is hard to imagine oligarchs accepting a return to democratic norms that might threaten their wealth and power. If that is the case, it seems that a return to democracy may be difficult without curtailing oligarchical wealth and its application towards our politics.

References

· Andreessen, Marc. “Why Software Is Eating the World.” Andreessen Horowitz, August 20, 2011. https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/

· Andreessen Horowitz. 2024. “Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter with Marc & Ben.” The Ben & Marc Show, January 14, 2024.

· Andreessen Horowitz. 2024. “Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben.” The Ben & Marc Show, February 8, 2024.

· Brandeis, Louis D. 1914. Other People’s Money—and How the Bankers Use It. New York: Frederick A. Stokes.

· Eaton, Charlie, and Albina Gibadullina. 2025. Elite embeddedness: the rise of financiers on university boards as parallel social organizations. Socio-Economic Review 23 (3): 1057–1089.

· Fridman, Lex. 2025. “#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America.”Lex Fridman Podcast, January 26, 2025.

· Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2022. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

· Khan, Lina M. 2017. Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox. Yale Law Journal 126 (3): 710–805.

· Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.

· Mallaby, Sebastian. 2011. More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite. New York: Penguin Press.

· Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

· Neely, Megan Tobias. 2022. Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street. Oakland: University of California Press.

· Smith, Ben. 2025. “The Group Chats That Changed America.” Semafor, April 27, 2025.

· Thiel, Peter. 2014. Competition Is for Losers. Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014.

· Veblen, Thorstein. 1904. The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

· Winters, Jeffrey A. 2011. Oligarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

· Zucman, Gabriel. 2026. “Standing up to Trump’s Imperial Blackmail on Greenland.” Gabriel Zucman (English), January 18, 2026.

Gabriel Zucman (english)

Standing up to Trump’s Imperial Blackmail on Greenland

The idea of annexing Greenland may sound like a throwback to 19th-century imperialism. But today’s situation is unprecedented in some respects—both because of the deep economic entanglement between Europe and the United States and because of the uniquely idiosyncratic nature of today’s White House occupant…

Read more

2 months ago · 193 likes · 26 comments · Gabriel Zucman

My book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is about the relationship between financialization, inequalities in higher education, and the rise of private equity and hedge fund investors among US billionaires. The book won the Pierre Bourdieu best book award from the American Sociological Association.

My ongoing research examines how billionaires from finance and from big tech adopted more oligarchical roles in US politics.

My writing and research has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, TIME, Newsweek, and elsewhere.

My academic work has been published in American Sociological Review, Review of Financial Studies, Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Sociology of Education, Politics & Society, Research in Higher Education, Sociological Compass, and Socius.

My research uses data carpentry to digitize, link, and construct original data for measuring inequalities in the resources and activities of elites and less powerful social groups. With my collaborators at the HERE Lab, I publish code and data from this work at the Higher Ed Data Hub.

My newsletter weaves together economic sociology, political economy, data visualization, open science methodology, and my explorations of self. I do most of my thinking in the mountains, preferably while backcountry skiing.

The thing is, it’s not just Trump and MAGA that destroyed public confidence in our justice system. Matt Stoller and others have noted that the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland had possession of the Epstein Files for four years. It’s hard to say who should have been criminally investigated already. But there’s little sign that any billionaires were seriously investigated even if the files show that they had proximity to Epstein’s sex crimes.

And the rot goes deeper. Republican and Democratic corruption are not equivalent. But both Republican and Democratic politicians have written and enforced laws for decades in ways bent the knee to Wall Street and big tech. Their judicial and regulatory enforcement appointees have done the same. Their fealty didn’t just turn a blind eye to oligarchs’ abuse of power at the expense of others. They helped create oligarchs by green lighting power abuses as fair game.

American anger towards the establishment is unsurprising given the decades of double standards from both parties when it comes to justice for billionaires versus everyone else. Oligarchs have been treated with kid gloves at best when it’s come to monopoly tactics, tax avoidance, the 2008 mortgage crisis, or even targeting kids with addictive algorithms.

Elizabeth Warren had to overcome resistance within the party to create the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau even in the wake of the financial crisis. Lina Khan had to do the same to start finally chipping away at monopoly power.

Most people will only trust a future Democratic president to do the right thing with something like the Epstein Files if that president also gets the party and the federal government bring justice to oligarchs who have bent the law, or worse, at the country’s expense.

My research has been gravitating towards questions about the growing political and economic power of oligarchs from Wall Street and Big Tech. I’ve started writing a book proposal with the working title: “Axis of Oligarchy: How Wall Street and Big Tech Broke America.” I’ll write more about this soon.

Similarly, I’m pondering a new title for this newsletter. Again, I want to put oligarchy at the center. But I also want to keep ordinary people in the frame. I think this will help me keep an eye on how civil society, including universities, can build alternatives alongside and in place of the oligarchies that dominate our present.

So what title should I give the newsletter? Please reply to this email if you have ideas!

Or take a second to vote in this poll of my current brainstorm:

Or, if you don’t like this focus or any of these titles, email me or write a substack comment to tell me why.

In any case, thanks for reading and helping me figure out what exactly I’m doing.

About a year ago, I wrote an essay in the New York Times titled “$15 billion is Enough to Fight the President.”

The $15 billion referred to the size of Columbia’s endowment.

My essay detailed some of the math for how wealthy university endowments could afford to buy time for the fight.

Time to litigate.

Time for elite and public opposition to grow against Trump.

Time for the midterms to potentially break Trump’s control of Congress.

But perhaps most importantly, time to develop a strategy.

A year later, I think my argument still looks pretty good. $15 billion was enough. More importantly, $53 billion at Harvard, $36 billion at Princeton, and $40 billion at the University of California were enough – especially after we consider state funding and other revenue streams for UC.

Litigation, declining support for Trump, and even Congressional action on scientific research funding have all put universities in a stronger position to fight.

But as far as I can tell, universities as organizations have not developed much of a strategy to influence the coming inflection points that will determine their futures.

While this is unfortunate, I think it’s not surprising. The attack on universities is part of a larger rupture in the entire American and global social order, to borrow the phrase used by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in his recent speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Carney and others have argued there’s no going back to the old order, because there’s no way to trust that it will hold up after its rupture this time. Recognizing that there’s no going back is essential to what Carney calls a values based realism for confronting the world as it is.

Without further work, it can feel immobilizing to realize there is no going back. Universities as we know them can’t just exist as islands amid a ruptured larger order, or as islands in an authoritarian America with powerful backers.

To push through the shock of this realization, universities need to develop a strategy that both transforms academic and helps construct a broader new order to follow the rupture. The construction of any such order would almost certainly require the marshallings of state and economic power by forces outside of universities. Without such a restoration of constitutional democracy on some new terms, the threats to universities will remain even when Trump goes away.

The threats to universities will remain in part because America will still have a set of Wall Street and Tech billionaires who have not received sufficient attention for conceiving and advocating for Trump’s attacks on universities. They did so in collaboration with far-right activists like Christopher Rufo. But leaders from Wall Street and tech played a leading role, not a supporting one. They include people like venture capitalist Mark Andreesen and private equity billionaire Mark Rowan along with Elon Musk who you probably know. In their own words, they set their sights on universities because they view some of the policy and social ideas coming out of universities as threats to their wealth and status. Under the old order, billionaires like these had no reason to feel threatened by the ideas of academics who Bourdieu counted as part of the dominated fraction of the dominant class. In a shift, these new billionaires have adopted an oligarchic posture towards universities among others because of their perceived threats.

Making peace with these adversaries is difficult because they are not completely irrational in their perceptions of threats from academia. Academic law and people like Elizabeth Warren played central roles in developing financial regulations and consumer protections that are despised by the new oligarchs. The same is true of anti-trust reforms advanced by people like Lina Khan. Here at UC Berkeley, you have the proposed billionaire wealth tax from Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. Academic critiques of masculinity and whiteness also offend the status honor of many oligarchs. And after graduating from universities where these ideas circulate, the college educated have become the most reliable voters for the politicians who support them.

How the new billionaires got from perceived threats to oligarchic practices is something I’m still puzzling over. But Zucman has suggested that something has changed with their accumulation of unprecedented relative wealth that makes them far richer than even the oligarchs of the gilded age. And this unprecedented wealth may both motivate and enable them to act outside the bounds of a constitutional democracy.

As hubs for debate over this kind of concentrated wealth and power, universities are likely to remain under threat so long as the new billionaires and their allies feel free to act outside the bounds of the law. And as I said earlier, constructing a new order that that restores the rule of law will depend most on the actions of political and economic groupings outside of the university.

But universities also have an important role to play. Academics in free societies played key parts in constructing the liberal, social democratic, and neoliberal regimes of the last century. Social scientists, legal academics, and historians, including some I’ve mentioned, have already helped many to make sense of our current rupture. Mark Carney and his speech writers are clearly reading some of these academics.

But the contributions of universities to establishing new hegemonic ideas do not just come from the methods of social science and academic debate, they also come from how universities connect different powerful sectors and groups across the polity and economy. We do so through alumni networks, industry relationships, conferences, and as my research shows, through university boards. It’s in this connective role that universities have fallen down the most over the last year. Instead of convening leaders from across business, philanthropy, and politics to debate how to move beyond the rupture, we’ve institutionally joined those leaders in keeping our heads down and pretending everything is ok.

In his speech, Carney likened keeping our heads down to corner store owners putting workers of the world unite signs in their window to signal support for the Soviet dictatorship in Eastern Europe. Individually, universities, businesses, and civic organizations can’t take the sign down without subjecting themselves to existential threats of retribution. That’s what makes the convening power of universities so important — it provides a means of coordination for enough powerful individuals and organizations to take down their signs of support so that none can be singled out for retaliation.

It’s ironic that it was the giant financial asset manager Blackrock and Larry Fink who provided the World Economic Forum as a platform for Carney and others to challenge Trump and the rupture before global elites. Even Gavin Newsom flew to Davos deliver his own broadside against Trump to American elites. We’ve seen no comparable attempt to convene business or bi-partisan defenders of democracy by American universities.

I think a space has opened for universities to step back into this role. We bought enough time for Carney, for other thinkers, for ordinary people in Minneapolis to open up space for us to offer our convening role. This won’t produce consensus around ideas new order overnight, but the work must begin.

I had the honor of speaking this weekend at Yale to the Reimagining Elite Higher Ed student conference organized by Class Action.

The conference was inspired by a paper coauthored by my friend Mitchell Stevens, in which the authors argue, “The relationship between American colleges and universities, and the larger society has long been shaped by the academic social contract: an implicit agreement in which even nominally private institutions provide myriad services to society in exchange for public subsidy, autonomy, and prestige.

I spoke on a panel about how a new academic social contract could prioritize community needs over the financial interests that dominate universities. And I gave a related radio interview. Here are my opening remarks regarding this question and the oligarchs behind Trump’s “compacts”:

Before we unpack how universities currently prioritize financial interests over community needs, I think it’s important to clarify the position of these two groups in contention between universities and the forces behind Trump’s compacts:

1. The first are members of diverse non-elite communities, including Trump voters, whose anger at elite universities is invoked by proponents of the compacts.

2. The second are the architects of Trump’s compacts and higher ed attacks, who are themselves mostly elitely educated financiers and far right intellectuals.

These are two very different groups. They are both angry at universities, but for mostly different reasons.

I think the biggest reason non-elites are angry at elite universities is that universities produced our present class of elites. And Americans have been increasingly angry at all elites and all their institutions over the last 20 years (see this polling).

This rising anti-elite anger is multifaceted, but fueled by multiple economic catastrophes for most Americans, including the rise of student debt. It’s a recipe for disaster when you pair this with the lavish lifestyles that top universities offer the children of elites. While sending their kids to these schools, political elites from neither party have done much to help the economically displaced and stressed. But politicians have delivered big bail outs and monopolies to Wall Street and big tech. And one of the few things that unites pro Trump and anti-Trump non-elites, is that they both really dislike Wall Street and Big Tech.

So if anything, people are not angry about elites becoming diverse, they’re angry about elites all being the same in enjoying gilded prosperity while screwing everyone else. So of course you’d be pissed at the universities that produce elites.

So that’s non-elite anger at universities.

The anger of the leaders of Trump’s university agenda is very different. These people are an alliance of elitely educated intellectuals on the far right, like Christopher Rufo, and some elitely educated oligarchs from Wall Street and venture capital. The bizarre thing about the financial oligarchs, is that they’re attacking the very universities they’ve attended, donated to, and in many cases governed as trustees. Contrary to anything written in the compact, they are not worried about college affordability, student debt, huge endowments, or the working-class.

I’ll share a couple of quotes to illustrate this. One is from billionaire venture capitalist Mark Andreesen, who is a self-proclaimed architect of the Trump attack on universities. He says:

“The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists. They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities…. And… a lot of them go into government …

So by 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”… So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”

We’ve heard similar things from Ben Horowitz, Andreesen’s finance partner and until recently a Columbia University Trustee.

Marc Rowan, a private equity billionaire and chair of Wharton’s board at Penn, has been a little more subtle. For example, he’s said:

“I think we are going to see seismic changes in the standing of universities… Go back and look at who the leading universities were in Europe in the 1930s, in the 1940s. They don’t exist any more. It is not that hard to destroy a university. It just takes a period of time.”

Analytically, I don’t think any academic social contract can be forged with Andreesen, Rowan, or Rufo. Their authoritarian objective is to subordinate universities and crush speech they don’t like.

Now, this does not mean that you cannot forge a contract with communities that have supported Trump. But I think you want to prioritize Trump supporters who are at least open to the idea that universities should produce a more diverse, plural, and accountable elite that will work with them to solve their problems.

Polls show that most people on both the left and the right want more free speech on campuses, not less. And recent polls have shown that 80 percent of Americans think that racial, ethnic, and religious diversity makes the country stronger (Marist, see also this, this, and this). So there are plenty who have supported Trump who have this openness.

Politically and economically, Trump’s Wall Street allies are deeply opposed universities creating a more plural and diverse elite.

I’m hoping to write a post soon on the state of play in the political struggle over university funding. But I need to get through a few other deadlines first.

For now, I’ll just say that it’s important to think about the struggle over universities in relationship to the broader struggle over Trumps authoritarian attacks on civil liberties, immigrants, workers, and essential health and social programs. So I’m encouraged by recent federal court ruling against Trump’s cuts to NIH grants and Trump’s targeted cuts to research universities. But the growing No Kings movement and the court rulings against Trump’s military occupations of US cities are even more important. To the extent the movement slows Trump’s march in the streets, the courts, and congress — this will buy more time for universities to block congress from making Trump’s higher education cuts permanent.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this lecture’s approach to understanding the Trump assault on universities. It focuses on tensions between techno-financial elites, their professional workforce, and the elite universities that embedded the rise of both groups.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m going to do something a little risky today and explore some new ideas for me about how to understand the Trump administration’s attack universities. I’m trying to coalesce some of what I’ve learned from a flurry of conversations I’ve been fortunate to have since the publication of my Times essay. With events continuing to unfold, I’m hoping to learn more from this conversation with you all.

The overall idea I’m going to play with is that the attack on elite higher education is not an attack by non-elites. Rather, this a power struggle between rival elites, including those of us in this room who should probably be counted among the cultural elite. This perspective help us to explain the otherwise puzzling elite support for Trump’s attacks. And that in turn might help us to develop better strategies for both defending universities and for reforming them to more broadly serve society.

Before developing my hypothesis, let’s consider some facts about the attacks that I’m trying to explain. Here is a list of 6 major demands of Harvard from the Trump administration. These directly quote from the letter sent by Trump’s lawyers to Harvard on April 11^th, just over a month ago. The New York Times reported that to Penny Pritzker, the chair of Harvard’s board, “the letter read like the start of a hostile takeover.” As a private equity investor, Pritzker is very familiar with hostile takeovers. And the Trump demands to audit all Harvard admissions and hiring decisions certainly supports her view.

Since Harvard rejected these demands, the Trump administration has said it will take the following punitive actions:

• Freezing $2.2 billion in existing NIH and NSF Grants

• Banning Harvard from any future government research grants

• Revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status

• Eliminating visa eligibility for international Harvard students

6 other elite universities, including Northwestern here in Chicago, have suffered similar targeted cuts. Dozens of other elite universities are under “investigation” by the civil rights division of the US Department of Education for allegedly tolerating antisemitism. And all research universities have been targeted with cuts to NIH and NSF indirect cost funding for research.

At first it may seem surprising that some factions of US economic elites have supported or at least accepted these attacks.

Some of these elites are supporting devastating cuts to the same universities where they graduated, sent their kids, donated millions of dollars, or even served on the boards of trustees.

So what is going on here?

I’ve been thinking about 2 explanations for the Trump attacks that are not mutually exclusive.

First, Trump’s is mobilizing an anti-elitist authoritarianism that appeals to a working class that is alienated or excluded from universities.

Second, these attacks are part of a war within and between cultural and economic elites.

I’m going to mostly talk about the 2^nd explanation today. But I’ll briefly note a few hypotheses that fit with the first explanation. First, Trump alone is seeking authoritarian power by suppressing universities as hubs of dissent in a free society. Second, this primarily appeals to university resentment among Trump’s white working class base. And third, Economic elites who govern universities might go along with this because they fear punishment from Trump themselves.

I’m not putting these hypotheses out there as strawmen.

My own book explains how exclusion and exploitation results from inequalities involving endowments, student debt, and financiers running higher education.

And I highly recommend this New York Times essay last week about how from Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt. They say the US has already descended into what they call competitive authoritarianism where people, and especially elites, stop opposing the government because it will result in costly punishment. They enumerate how broadly this has happened in the last 100 days among elites in the media, finance, tech, law, and non-profits. While resistance has been disappointing particularly in some corners of higher education, elite university opposition to Trump is relatively high compared to these others other elite domains.

But on the other side of the ledger for the anti-elitist explanation, there’s less working-class demand for punishing universities than you might imagine.

Recent polls from the Washington Post, New York Times, and Data for Progress have shown the following:

77% oppose cuts to medical research funding.

70% oppose increased federal involvement in how private universities operate.

67% oppose cuts to Pell grants and student loans.

63% oppose deporting legal immigrants who have protested Israel

And when you look at cross-tabs for these surveys by education, there’s not a sharp educational divide.

To pivot to the elite power struggle explanation, even where we do see declining non-elite trust in universities, some of this may flow from idea and media work of certain elite factions.

In this formulation, Trump attacks articulate broader elite hostility towards universities

In this account, Trump mobilizes right wing cultural elites who see universities as existential threats to white masculine identity and status.

But Trump is also pushed by an emergent coalition between right wing cultural elites and economic elites who also feel that their own status and / or wealth is threatened by universities.

This perspective fits with Bourdieu’s idea of elites existing in a field of power. Bourdieu writes in The State Nobility, that “the field of power is a field of power struggles among the holders of different forms of power, a gaming space in which those agents and institutions possessing enough specific capital (economic or cultural capital in particular) to be able to occupy the dominant positions within their respective fields confront each other using strategies aimed at preserving or transforming these relations of power.”

The idea of an elite war on higher education also fits with the relational power theory developed by Rebecca Emigh and Dylan Riley in their introduction to a new edited volume on elite theory. Building on Bourdeau, Mills, and Lachmann, they see elites as restricted groups that have inordinate influence on society, but who are constituted through different types of power relations to non-elites. Unsatisfied by Bourdeau’s courser categories of economic and cultural capital, Emigh and Riley categorize power relations between elites and non-elites as involving material power, organizational power, associational power, status power, coalitional power, and ideational power.

Drawing on my own work, we might see universities as financialized fields of power. In these fields of power, varied cultural and economic elites struggle for power appropriated through universities. Financialized universities have become sites for building and transacting nearly every type of power over non-elites in the Emigh and Riley typology.

• elite families compete to get their kids admitted and corporations recruit graduates.

• Alumni give naming donations and seek trustee appointments

• Alumni networks and university boards also provide associational power and social ties to other elites

• Donations and endowment investing opportunities provide material power that underwrites faculty and administrators

• Faculty use those resources to freely pursue ideational power and amplify their research and ideas

• Endowment hoarding preserves material power at the core of these institutions

But if we view universities as fields of power, this begs the question, why should some elites attack the rules of the field?

I suppose that all is fair in love and war, so why not?

But I think we can be more specific about why this attack and why now. I see four potential reasons.

• First, right wing cultural elites have essentially seceded from universities and have been radicalized in their cable TV and social media bubbles. This may have been accelerated by the digital transition during COVID.

• Second, right wing cultural elites and some economic elites may feel growing status threats from increasing diversity among the university educated.

• These status threats may be heightened by increasingly hegemonic ideas in universities about inequality and diversity.

• Finally, finance and tech elites may see material threats from policy engaged social science (universities as liberal think tanks)

I’m going to present some initial evidence of Trump attacks as an elite counteroffensive against these perceived threats. The evidence comes from a case study I’ve started of elite political mobilization that began with secret elite signal chat groups. The largest of these chat groups was Chatham House. It was named after a British think tank that convenes confidential discussions among elites that are thought to make people feel free say things they wouldn’t say in public. The chat groups and subsequent cultural mobilization was mostly led by billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Andreeseen’s venture capital firm, A16z, is one of the largest in the world. Andreessen had historically supported democrats, including Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The chats were first reported on by Ben Smith in in Semafor on April 27, 2025.

According to Smith, a lot of what got said in the chats subsequently made its way into public discussions on Twitter and podcasts. This provides a substantial body of text recording statements by tech, financier, and right wing cultural elites.

Smith reports that around 300 elites were added to the Chatham House signal group. He has only reported the names of these 20 as participants. I’ve grouped them as Finance, Tech, and Culture elites. You can see that almost all of the finance participants are from venture capital. The tech elites are from firms with large stakes in government contracting and regulation. The cultural elites are mostly from the right with the exception of pollster David Shor and whatever we might call Larry Summers.

Chris Rufo, a Manhattan University fellow and university critic told Smith that he approached the chats as a conscious power building effort to build a coalition between tech elites and right-wing cultural elites.

Andreessen has also pointed to universities as a key target for his agenda. Andreessen has a podcast called the Ben and Marc Show with Ben Horowitz, the cofounder of his venture capital firm. Horowitz is also a Columbia Trustee Emeritus. On their interest in universities, Andreessen said in their January 12, 2024 podcast, “Both Ben and I have a lot of friends… that are trying to basically make universities better… people who are on boards or are running universities, presidents or endowment heads… alumni, professors.”

Horowitz added, “And they are universities that produce the elites… And the elites end up running a lot of things.”

At first, you might not expect great hostility towards universities from Ben and Marc. After all, Ben was a Trustee who made major donations to Columbia. Mark’s father in law, John Arrillaga, has several buildings named after him for donating hundreds of millions of dollars to Stanford.

But both the Chatham House chats and the Ben and Marc provide some suggestions that status threats may motivate hostility even among elites like Ben and Marc. Describing how the secret Chatham House chats began, Ben Smith reported in Semafor, “Two participants said Silicon Valley executives commiserated about how to handle employee demands that they, for instance, declare that “Black Lives Matter” or support policies they didn’t actually believe in around transgender rights.”

On the Ben and Marc show, Ben told listeners that when he raised concern about DEI programs and policies, “the leadership was like, shut the fuck up… you're so far outside the religion that like we can't even hear a word you're saying.”

More surprising to me is that Andreessen has claimed that finance and tech elites are economically threatened by universities. In a January 2024 podcast, he said this threat originates from universities essentially becoming left wing policy think tanks.

If that is surprising news to you, consider how Andreessen elaborates on his argument in this November 2024 interview with Joe Rogan shortly after the election. Referring to Elizabeth Warren as a sort of Harvard law professor in chief, Andreesen told Rogan, “We have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB… Elizabeth Warren's personal agency… that just gets to run and do whatever it wants… terrorize finance… The Biden administration just, like, flat out tried to kill us… tried to kill crypto and they were, they were on their way to trying to kill AI… FTC was thoroughly weaponized… The SEC can investigate you, they can subpoena you, they can prosecute you…”

[SLIDE 20]

In the last podcast interview I’ll discuss today, Andreessen his planned counter offensive with Lex Fridman in January of 2025. Months before we all began to experience this on our campuses, Andreessen told Fridman, “The population at large is going to realize the corruption in [universities] and it’s going to withdraw the funding... universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding. The big one is a federal student loan program... Number two is federal research funding... Number three is tax exemption at the operating level... number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level… if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money, and… state money… they all instantly go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild.”

I’ll conclude with a few thoughts on what is to be done if, in fact, we are facing an elite war on universities. My overall assessment is that financialization has created both vulnerabilities and resources that should be leveraged. First, as I argued in the times, endowments can be spent to keep the lights on.

Second, elite and non-elite coalitions can be built around the mutual harms from the elite war on universities. Freedom of speech and freedom from fear is at risk for all. Immigrants and judges alike have been arrested. NIH funding cuts threaten lifesaving treatments for both the rich and poor. To date, middle class and working class non-elites from diverse communities have been more bold in publicly opposing Trump than elites. This shows the potential coalitional power in elite-non-elite alliances.

Third, litigate everything in a visible and coordinated way. There is actually far more litigation by universities happening that even most of you are probably aware of. But I think we need a more public coordinated legal campaign of challenges to Trump’s illegal actions on a scale so large and intense that it paralyzes his administration and floods the media with stories of his lawlessness. Universities are not even doing press releases when they file lawsuits. This is because they do not want to be noticed and singled out by Trump or his aids. To lift up their legal resistance, I think university leaders should take a similar approach to the open letter signed by more than 500 college and university presidents, including nearly every Ivy League President and University of California Chancellor. In case you missed it, the letter declared that they would not accept “undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”

Fourth, I think that faculty and students can be more assertive in doing what we do best, learning and teaching at a bigger scale about the elite war on universities. This could produce viral media on Trump’s corruption and lawlessness for broad audiences or lay the ground work for mass assemblies on campus like those that were organized around Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.

Finally, I think this all needs to be done with an eye to Trump’s so called “Big Beautiful Bill” as the next major inflection point in the war over the university. This bill is his tax cut and spending cut package that would make his cuts to federal research funding permanent and extend the cuts to Pell grants and student loans. With Congress narrowly divided, Republicans can only lose three votes in either chamber. They already appear to be abandoning most of their cuts to Medicaid because organized opposition and protest is working. But there is currently no comparable coalition campaign to stop the cuts to federal research.

In the longer term, we need to put forward a vision for the day after. We won’t win the war if wait until it’s over to put forward this vision.

A starting point for this vision is that we shouldn’t rebuild universities with the same problems and vulnerabilities to the attacks we are facing. I have three general thoughts about how we should deleverage or over dependence on finance.

First, we should rebalance university boards to include more diverse non-elites. It may not be a coincidence that like Ben Horowitz, 46% of Columbia’s trustees are from big finance, a higher rate than for all but 5 of the top private universities. This is contrast with elite universities that have resisted Trump. Just 23% of the Harvard board and 35% of the Princeton board are from finance. Interestingly, the New York Times reported that the only board opponent of Harvard’s decision to resist is the KKR private equity manager Joe Bae who was recently appointed to the board to improve its “viewpoint diversity.”

Second, we should regulate endowments to serve the public interest. Endowment hoarding is a real problem as I could detail in the discussion. By putting forward no serious policies to address this, university leaders policy thinkers have left a vacuum for disingenuous right-wing proposals to tax endowments.

Third, we need to move from and PR to policies that expand the public benefits provided by universities. I think it is a good thing that Harvard and others have moved away from talking about themselves as exclusive places that are apart from and above everyone else. It can open space for policy change when we talk instead about universities as open to and benefiting everyone. Depending on the university, policy moves in this direction could begin with expanding undergraduate enrollment, increasing affordability, or both. Without such initiatives, any peace for universities may be short-lived.

If it feels like there are a lot of billionaires mucking around in higher education, that might be because there are. In 1989, private-equity and hedge-fund managers held 3 percent of board seats at the top 30 private universities as ranked by Times Higher Education. By 2017, they held 17 percent of trustee positions, according to a study published earlier this year in Socio-Economic Review.

The upshot is that over the last generation, the most prestigious colleges have had the means to gather extraordinary wealth. That wealth reinforces those colleges’ exclusivity, which in turn is helping to fuel resentment against higher education, argues one of the study’s co-authors, Charlie Eaton, a sociologist at the University of California at Merced. “That’s become a political vulnerability,” he said.

Many of Eaton’s findings made intuitive sense to Scott L. Bok, an investment banker who served on the University of Pennsylvania’s board for 18 years. Wall Street grew rapidly over the years that Eaton’s study covers, and investors are motivated to sit on fancy boards.

Bok, too, thinks university boards would benefit from having fewer Wall Streeters and more trustees from other fields, who might have different ideas for dealing with crises.

Eaton has been in demand as a speaker lately. When The Chronicle interviewed him, he had visited the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University the week before, and would fly to the University of Chicago the next week. It’s not just the political relevance of his research, which focuses on student loans, endowments, and inequities in higher education. Eaton is not shy about saying what he thinks faculty members and administrators should do about political efforts to reform colleges. In late March, he published an opinion essay in The New York Times, “$15 Billion Is Enough to Fight a President,” calling for the wealthiest colleges to tap their endowments to oppose the Trump administration.

Eaton published a book about the role of Wall Street in higher education, Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education, in 2022. His Socio-Economic Review paper expands on findings in the book.

The Chronicle spoke with Eaton about his latest paper and what his work can tell us about how America got to this point in its views of college. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What did you find here?

The main finding of the paper is that private-equity and hedge-fund managers have come to make up a large and disproportionate share of board members at top private universities.

There are two reasons why. One is that they graduate from elite private schools at much higher rates even than tech billionaires. Twice as many private-equity and hedge-fund billionaires have top private degrees as do tech billionaires.

The second reason is that elite ties are really valuable and important for the private-equity and hedge-fund business model, because when they’re buying companies or doing financial transactions to try to outperform the stock market, what they do is trade on private information. That doesn’t necessarily require illegal insider trading. If you’ve got knowledge of what kind of public policies might change that could affect the value of a company or an industry, or if you’ve got elite information about companies that are privately held and that don’t have much public [Securities and Exchange Commission] reporting, you can make smarter decisions about what kind of private companies to try to buy out.

So when you’re on an elite university board with other business and government elites, you learn things that are valuable for making these private-equity buyouts, and we show this. We find that investment returns go up for private-equity firms after they gain a seat on a top university board.

Wow, so serving as a college trustee can help an investment banker make more money? How do you know it’s serving on the board that causes them to earn more? Maybe richer people are more likely to be asked to serve on boards.

There are always limitations for causal inference, no matter what your research design is, but the finding is pretty robust, because it’s what we call a panel fixed-effects model. We’re finding that there’s a sequence where, if, within a firm, you get a seat on a board of trustees at a top university, after you get the seat, your returns are likely to go up more than at a firm that, over the same period of time, doesn’t get a seat.

The way that the models are done, there’s not a potential risk that it’s actually because your returns are higher that you’re then getting a board seat.

It’s also not just a correlation across firms. It’s something that’s happening within firms that gain seats. We have a data set that’s all private-equity returns that are reported by 412 firms. We checked for those firms: Did they gain a board seat at any time during the 14-year period represented in the data set?

Several dozen of the firms gained board seats and several hundred of the firms did not, and we knew when, in time, each firm gained board seats. Then we can see what happens. What’s the trend within the firm for its investment returns over time, both before and after they gain the board seat?

I know you’ve written about some of these trends before, in your book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower. What’s new in this paper?

We statistically model that the universities that became the most selective have boards where financiers particularly gain seats. And we statistically model private-equity investment returns around when a firm gains a board seat, to show that those seats do, in fact, benefit private-equity performance. In my book, I theorized it, but here, we confirmed it with data.

This is totally anecdotal, but I recently interviewed two longtime trustees at two different private colleges, who made their money on Wall Street. Both were proud and excited that their alma maters had become more selective over the time they had served.

Yeah, and it’s hard to disentangle these things. It’s pretty clear that the social prestige of being on an elite-university board is attractive, but we’re trying to unpack how much of it is just the social status that comes from being on this board, or the alumni ties, or the economic advantages that come from elite social ties.

Sometimes people think of finance and financiers as cold and calculating, when in fact, just like in most of our economic lives, social relationships play a big role in what finance does. And that can contribute to who gets to do finance, who’s the most successful in finance, and can contribute to inequalities that involve our financial system.

What are some consequences for higher education that you see arising from the trends you’ve identified here?

Because the wealthiest financiers are particularly attracted to the most prestigious university boards, that means you don’t have as many financiers going onto the boards of less selective institutions. That can contribute to financial inequalities between schools.

At the same time, because one of the things elites, and especially financiers, value is the exclusivity of their university, that creates a pressure against making elite universities more accessible and more in the public service. The exclusiveness of these universities is one of the things that’s become a political vulnerability for them, and has fueled some of the right-wing attacks on universities and on public funding for research and for student financial aid.

Bottom line, is all this good or bad for colleges?

In the extreme, it’s a bad thing for higher education if financiers are overrepresented on university boards. You know, there’s been talk about improving viewpoint diversity in higher education, including by financiers on these boards. But if we really want to have our elite universities to reflect America more, then you want to have boards composed of people from across the different corners of society, who will set the tone for the university and support the university to take some of the steps that a lot of universities have said that they want to take — to be more accessible, more affordable, and more open to all Americans.

I will only add that police should never be allowed to detain anyone for free speech, especially not for a respectful private conversation. University leaders must do better if we are to have a united front against the authoritarian assault on a free society.

Colin Holbrook expected Sunday’s graduation ceremony at the University of California at Merced to be a celebratory occasion.

An associate professor of cognitive and information sciences, Holbrook showed up to the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts’s commencement in part to support a graduating student from his lab who would be speaking at the ceremony. But before the festivities got underway, Holbrook was asked by plainclothes police officers to leave the venue.

Holbrook says his removal came after an encounter with the University of California system’s president, Michael V. Drake, in the robing room before faculty members formed a procession. The professor approached Drake, who was serving as the commencement speaker, about the system’s response to pro-Palestinian protesters. In Holbrook’s telling, Drake became visibly upset and raised his voice; shortly thereafter, police officers removed Holbrook from the procession line and asked him to leave the premises. (Drake, who has led the system since 2020, is stepping down at the end of this academic year.)

The UC-Merced Faculty Association released a statement condemning what it called an “unwarranted, drastic step” and calling on the chancellor’s office and its Academic Senate to investigate. Both Holbrook and the faculty association said they were unsure how or by whom the decision to remove Holbrook was made.

Merced said in a statement that it was “aware of an interaction that occurred” before the ceremony. “Commencement is a time of celebration and reflection for our students, families, and campus community. Out of respect for the individuals involved, we will not be commenting further at this time,” the statement read. Both Merced and the University of California system’s Office of the President declined to comment on a detailed summary of Holbrook’s account or a list of questions from The Chronicle.

Holbrook, who is being publicly identified here for the first time, shared his account of the incident with The Chronicle. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you describe the scene in the robing room on Sunday?

There had been no previous announcements that President Drake was going to be speaking at the commencement, and it was a surprise to not only myself but all the faculty who I was chatting with in the robing room when he appeared. He was then introduced by our chancellor, who gave him a nice introduction, and then President Drake made a few informal remarks. And then there was an open, somewhat informal couple of minutes, as we got ready to go line up for the faculty procession out to the commencement area.

I do appreciate that President Drake has had an important role in the history of UC-Merced and been supportive of our university. It’s a really special place that’s mission is to serve underserved students. However, as much as I appreciate those contributions, ever since the overtly repressive responses to the anti-genocide protesters across the UC system, but in particular at UCLA, every other faculty member I have spoken to about the issue or who have brought it up to me has been at the minimum, concerned, if not horrified, by the use of force against the protesters, slanderous comments about them, framing them as promoting hatred and things that are factually incorrect.

I imagine you’re referring here to an incident in spring 2024, when counterprotesters took aim at a pro-Palestinian encampment on the UCLA campus, reportedly throwing objects at the encampment and inciting violence. The UCLA student newspaper reportedat the time that campus police mostly stood back until Los Angeles police officers were brought in to stop the fighting.

I had appointments at UCLA as a postdoc and then a research scientist. So I was there for about seven years, give or take. When I saw the footage of the absolutely brutal treatment of the protesters last spring, it was very near where I used to go to work and where my lab was — I really couldn’t believe my eyes. I read about some of the statements that were made characterizing the encampments as inherently antisemitic, or as promoting terrorism or promoting hatred. These claims just aren’t true and seem to be there to promote a very deeply repressive narrative, arguably the culmination of which was the evening in late April when a horde of counterprotesters showed up. We’re talking about shooting fireworks, anti-bear spray, wielding pipes and baseball bats and things of this nature, and attacking a group of nonviolent protesters who were there to try to stop a genocide.

The way that UCLA, and then, by extension, the office of the president handled that circumstance was so deeply immoral in my view, and the view of the great consensus of faculty that I have interacted with across departments. I’m an associate professor for cognitive and information sciences. I interact with a broad array of researchers and scientists across many disciplines, and while they may not be vocal, they’re horrified by this, and deeply upset.

As far as I know, our chancellor and administration at Merced have been not engaging in the kinds of repressive acts that we saw at UCLA.

So you decided to express your concerns to Drake.

When I realized he was just a few feet away from me, next to the refreshments — I believe he was getting an orange juice — I guess it’s corny, but I do think there’s truth in the phrase “silence is complicity.” I felt really compelled to say something, but at the same time, I also was very cognizant of the need for respectful dialogue, and also wanting to maintain decorum in the setting that we’re in. I was aware that we didn’t have much time because we were about to go out to the procession.

So with all of that in mind, I decided I would — briefly and as politely as I possibly could, given that it’s a sensitive issue, to put it mildly — go introduce myself and just briefly relay that the faculty have concerns. I believe my exact words were, “Excuse me, President Drake, my name is Colin Holbrook, I’m a professor here, and I’d like a moment to share something with you, if that’s OK.” He shook my hand. He said OK.

The next words out of my mouth, I think verbatim, were, “I wanted to share that every faculty member I know is concerned about the repression of the anti-genocide protesters, especially at UCLA.” To be cordial and give them the benefit of the doubt, I was trying to ask a question, so what I was about to say was, “Is there anything that that you might be able to do, or the Office of the President might be able to do, to improve the situation?”

Obviously a challenging question. It’s a very sensitive issue. Drake has been widely criticized for this. But it was stated quietly; these words were intended for his ears only. I was intentionally being quiet and discreet. I didn’t want to call him out. I didn’t want to make a scene, and this was certainly not an act of protest. I felt ethically compelled to send the message that many people are very concerned.

How did Drake respond?

He cut me off when I said, “especially at UCLA,” and began becoming visibly angry immediately and saying things like, “That’s incredibly inappropriate for you to ask me this,” “How dare you bring this up now? This is not the time or the place,” “How can you think it’d be appropriate to talk to me this way?”

I answered, in as calm a way as I could, “I think it is appropriate to ask because the subject involves a genocide.” And as soon as I said the word genocide, he became even angrier and began raising his voice, repeating statements such as, “How dare you?” I believe he said, “How can you stand there and judge me?” I hadn’t actually mentioned anything about him directly; indirectly, I guess, he’s probably involved in the policy.

He became, I would say, very defensive and certainly very, very angry. He was waving his finger in my face, I wouldn’t say shouting, but certainly raising his voice quite a bit, and it made a giant scene. Suddenly, very awkwardly, the entire room was staring at the two of us.

What happened then?

I tried to assume a calm demeanor; I was hoping he could de-escalate and regain his composure. What I expected was a sort of political brush-off, to be honest. I expected maybe a comment along the lines of, “It’s an important issue, but this is not the time,” or even, “It’s an important issue, and I’d be happy to talk to you later.”

But this, I didn’t know what to do. To be honest, I was just kind of standing there. And then the chancellor intervened. I understand why he would do that, looking over and seeing a very upset UC president. He sort of stepped between us. I asked the chancellor if he would like to know what happened; the chancellor indicated he didn’t. But to be fair, I think in the moment, he just wanted to resolve whatever this unexpected source of upset was and proceed with the commencement.

Did things resolve after that?

I looked around, realized that the other faculty had already left to go to the procession. One of my colleagues from my department, who happened to be there, pointed towards the hallway and indicated that’s where I should go. I walked over to join my fellow faculty. We were all in regalia.

I told some colleagues what had happened briefly, and a few minutes went by. We moved on. I thought this strange episode was over. Then two plainclothes police officers came up, very big gentlemen in suits, and they followed us. It was unclear what they were there for. We haven’t had a security presence like that at previous commencements that I’m aware of.

After a few minutes, as we were walking towards the commencement stage, they stopped and asked me to step out of the line and they detained me, and I conveyed to them what had happened. I was very, very concerned. When they first approached, it did cross my mind that they might be there to arrest me or otherwise detain me for having inadvertently upset the president. I thought that was an outlandish idea, even in the current climate. A lot of people are concerned about academic freedom and free speech, especially around the issue of genocide in Gaza, but I really didn’t imagine that this was actually going to happen.

The police spoke to you then?

They informed me that I could not participate in the commencement; they asked me to take off the robes. They were very professional and polite all the time. I was treated very well by them. They moved me away from the venue. By the end of the interaction, they ultimately apologized. They struck me as a bit embarrassed by the whole episode. I was calm. I tried to maintain calm throughout this entire proceeding, but I was told that I could go about my business. I was not in any sort of trouble, so to speak. They said, “You cannot go into the venue.” And although they didn’t actually say these words, it was clear to me that if I did, I’d be arrested immediately.

Did the police officers identify themselves to you?

No, they didn’t right away. But I said, “Are you guys cops?” I really regret that I didn’t ask a more specific question, because I don’t know if they were UC-Merced campus police, or if they were police affiliated with the UC office of the president. They were wearing business suits and they had little lapel pins, which were police badges.

And you haven’t heard from either police or the university about any kind of disciplinary action since?

No, there’s been nothing like that.

What has the response from your colleagues been like?

A really, really great outpouring of support. These are precarious times. I’m a tenured professor, not to mention my demographic status. I’m a middle-aged white guy. I’m not as vulnerable as someone, say, who is here as a foreign national, but even for someone like me who is relatively secure, this whole experience was pretty upsetting and nerve-wracking. So it’s been honestly moving how many people have reached out to express their support.

I didn’t intend this to become public at all. I thought this would be a quiet moment, literally by the drinks right before we walked out, possibly slightly uncomfortable, but that’s it. I don’t know who decided to pull me from the ceremony or to involve the police in pulling me from the ceremony. All of that is unknown. Many of my colleagues at Merced are calling for an inquiry to find out what procedure was followed or how in the world such a thing could have happened.

It’s easy to imagine that people will just not ask the question, or not raise their hand in the town hall for fear that we’ve entered a new time in which this kind of speech is not welcome, and may be punished.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Well, I’m loath to speculate beyond what I know. But if I were to speculate, I would say that this was a mistake, possibly born of the brief time window in which this occurred. Think what you will of how President Drake has led the university, he’s incontrovertibly risen to a high position of power, and I don’t think you do that by flying off the handle in this way.

I don’t know who made decisions to involve the police or to have me removed or any of it, but I would like to think that, as academia in general, and my university in particular, that we can find a way to accommodate reasonable speech, even about an emotionally charged topic. I don’t think anyone in the university administration, the president’s office, or the president himself would have wanted this outcome.

I’ll never know why President Drake responded in the sort of volcanic way that he did, but it was certainly a surprise, and I think it caught everyone off guard. Persons unknown to me then made decisions, which I hope that they now see were mistakes, and that we can as a community figure out what happened and put guardrails in place so that faculty feel that they could speak. I’m optimistic that we can do better than this.

So what is private equity? I’ve been collaborating with Albina Gibadullina, Marie-Lou Laprise, and Adam Goldstein on a working paper that seeks to answer this question. This research has been supported by the Roosevelt Institute. Over the weekend, I presented this work for the first time at the retirement conference of my brilliant, generous, and often hilarious graduate mentor Neil Fligstein. Neil’s research in economic sociology is required reading for understanding the rise of shareholder value capitalism and financialization in the global economy. Our paper builds on Neil’s work to develop four metaphors for what private equity is: 1) corporate raider, 2) main street invader, 3) monopoly builder, and 4) shadow owner. As is my way, we assess these metaphors with a lot of data. Below are my remarks from the presentation along with some key slides.

Remarks

It’s an honor to present some work today that was inspired by Neil and began at convenings on political economy that Neil organized over the last couple years. In classic form, Neil brought together a great group of thinkers and encouraged us to just do our thing. So Adam and I got together with two great graduate students, Albina Gibadullina and Marie-Lou Laprise to ask the question What is Private Equity? And why does it matter for understanding political economy.

Our motivation for this study is that:

● Private equity plays an integral role in canonical accounts of shareholder value capitalism, including those developed by Neil, but these depictions are 40 years old.

● We don’t have a clear picture of how has PE’s role may have changed during the intervening decades.

● We think these changes might help explain this help explain growing corporate concentration in publicly traded firms, where we have fewer publicly traded firms even though publicly traded firms continue to make up the same share of the economy.

Our more concrete goals for the paper are to:

● Descriptive anatomy – chart change in relative balance of PE’s business models and economic roles over the last 40 years

● And do this with comprehensive data on all nearly 100,000 buyouts and PE investment exits over the last 40 years from Pitchbook supplemented with SEC data

Our overall argument that we test is that:

● First, There’s been a decline in the traditional corporate raider model as publicly-traded targets diminish. Part of the intuition is that we’ve

● Second, Private equity has an unrecognized role in spreading shareholder value to new domains via Mainstreet invasions of industries and firms where corporate ownership was once rare.

● Third, private equity helps build new structures of rent extraction and corporate control (monopoly building and permanent shadow ownership).

● I want to stress that these models can work in conjunction with each other and are not mutually exclusive.

So our first metaphorical model is that canonical corporate raider model.

Personified in people like Carl Icahn or this AI generated investor with an axe, this model involves hostile takeovers of publicly traded corporations before slicing, dicing, union busting etc. The classic applications of this model or the buyouts of TWA and RJR Nabisco 30 years ago.

Threats of these kinds of buyouts help maintain managerial focus on stock price.

Evidence on the prevalence of this model can be seen first in the volume of public to private leveraged buyouts by private equity. Second, you can see evidence of this model in private equity exiting investments through IPOs once their done slicing and dicing.

Our second model is the main street invader model.

• This is the model where private equity enters industries with closely-held “mom-and-pop” ownership or professional partnerships

• Examples of this model include buyouts of single-family home rentals, childcare services, medical/dental/veterinary practices, for-profit colleges, regional law firms and more.

• This model imports shareholder value orientation and management to firms and industries once outside the reach of shareholder value and corporate ownership.

• This can go hand-in-hand with monopoly-building as I’ll explain next

• In our data, we can first see evidence of this model in the volume of buyouts of private firms. A second place we might see evidence of this is in venture capital investment in regions and industries with few incumbent public firms.

Our third metaphorical model is monopoly builder. Here, the strategy is almost the opposite of the corporate raider model of hostile take overs and slicing and dicing firms.

This model involves rent extraction through building agglomeration and monopolization.

We see this as part of the larger trend in growing concentration, if not one of its causes.

This model can work together with the main street invader model. For example, some of our research on for-profit colleges has shown how private equity bought up main street owned regional vocational schools to build both chains and market concentration within geographies. Good example of this are EDMC which built the art institutes chain of for-profit colleges.

Evidence for this model is first the volume of what are called add-on buyouts where private equity executes buyouts of firms to merge with firms already under private equity ownership. These add-on deals are sometimes referred to as a roll up strategy. The second evidence we might see for this is through exits from private equity investments through merger sales of private equity owned firms to both private and publicly-traded monopolists rather than IPOs.

Again, this model can work hand-in-hand with main street invading where main street firms get acquired and then merged into big monopolist firms.

Our last model is long term shadow ownership.

In this model we see private equity as accountability regulatory evasion.

Under this model, private equity engages in long-term retention of firms and assets under private ownership rather than exiting quickly through taking a firm public.

Evidence for this might first be seen in increasing time that private equity own an asset before selling it to exit the investments. The second type of evidence could growth in what are known “secondary” exits where PE firms sell the asset to another PE firm or even to themselves through what are called continuation funds. Inversely, evidence here could be declines in exits through IPOs.

Before showing you evidence for the four models, I’ll show you a couple of our results describing the size of private equity in the US. This figure shows growth in private equity and venture owned assets as share of all US nonfinancial net worth. Each line is for a different data source, all of which have a similar trend. The left panel shows private equity assets as a share of net worth for all non-financial firms, including both publicly traded and privately held firms. Here we find that private equity owned assets may now make up as much as 25% of all corporate net worth. The 2^nd panel shows that private equity assets makes up an even larger of net worth in privately held firms. So this excludes from the denominator publicly traded firms, which have consistently made up around 25% of the US economy. The last panel is private equity assets as a proportion of all privately held corporate net worth. This excludes from the denominator both publicly traded firms and non-incorporated private business that make up about 40% of the economy.

So overall, we see private equity owns a growing share and very large share of the economy.

This slide shows the absolute growth of private equity buyout deals by which they acquire the growing share of the economy under their ownership. There’s been a large decline in the percent of buyout deals for which the size of buyout deals are known. So we did some fancy imputation procedures to estimate the volume of buyout deals by 5 year periods. In doing so, we find that buyout deal volume rose to $10 trillion over the last five years or about $2 trillion a year. This is larger than most media reports which omit deals with unreported deal sizes.

Onto evidence of our four models in the shifting balance between private equity buyout types. A reminder once again, For corporate raiding, we see in red that buyouts of public firms made up 14% of private equity deal volume in the 2^nd half of the 80s. Except for the period that includes the 2008 financial crisis, corporate raiding is eclipsed by the other models.

For main street invading, we see in dark green that buyouts of privately held firms have long made up a greater share of buyouts than corporate raiding deals.

In light green, we see more potential indications of main street invading together with monopoly building through growth of add-on deals. Add-on deals involve acquisitions of privately held firms that can often be main street firms or venture backed firms that invade main street. But add-on acquisitions then merge the acquired firm into a firm already owned by private equity. So they may be evidence of increased focus by private equity on monopoly building now that other strategies have been exhausted for maximizing shareholder value.

Finally in blue, we see growth in secondary buyouts where private equity exits its investments by selling firms to other private equity investors or themselves. This supports our thesis of shadow ownership where a growing share of the economy is under private equity ownership and outside the regulatory and transparency requirements of SEC reporting.

At the industry level, we particularly see the growth of add-on monopoly building in the financial sector and in healthcare. And we particularly see the growth of secondary buyouts and shadow ownership in materials and resource firms.

We also see patterns that show the importance of monopoly building and shadow ownership in private equity exits. Here we see that IPOs have collapsed. So private equity is no longer creating or reshaping publicly traded competitor firms. Instead, they continue to exit mainly through merger & acquisition sales to potentially monopolist firms. And they increasingly exit through secondary sales that could maintain long term shadow ownership.

We also see evidence of long term shadow ownership in increasing holding times for private equity investments before exit. Average time to exit was just 3 years in 1990. Its nearly 7 years today.

Finally, there are also some signs that private equity has helped construct the increasing concentration of ownership among publicly traded corporations. While private equity rarely exits investments through IPOs anymore. A substantial and increasing share of their exits are through merger and acquisition sales to publicly traded firms.

Thanks again Neil for all your inspiration and mentorship.

My next lecture will be at University of Chicago on Thursday May 15th. The Chicago talk will be shared online (details forthcoming). Reply to this if you’d like information to attend.

-Charlie

Financialization as a Double-Edged Sword for Universities

How does financialization affect the prospects for universities to overcome the new authoritarian threat. I argue that university financialization has both created both vulnerabilities and resources for universities.

But what is the threat? And what in the immediate would defeat it?

To me, the primary threat is Trump’s broader authoritarian power grab through the suppression of free speech and the rule of law. He explicitly wants to suppress the institutions that are the primary sources of dissent in a free society: independent journalism, the legal profession, and universities. And he aims to exercise his power over and above the rule of law in defiance of the courts.

This figure reports results from a New York Times Poll published last week. Note the broad public opposition to three modes of Trump’s attacks on universities:

• 54% oppose eliminating government programs enacted by congress

• 63% oppose deporting legal migrants, even those who have protested Israel,

• And 76% oppose ignoring Supreme Court rulings.

• I haven’t seen this polled, but I suspect it is also very unpopular to terminate, for example, cancer research funding to universities. [Update: this Washington Post poll shows 77% oppose cuts to medical research funding. 70% oppose increased federal involvement in how private universities operate.]

Authoritarian power is consolidated when civil society organizations, like say Columbia University or the biggest law firms, make settlements to forfeit the rights and free speech of their own members. Similarly, authoritarian power is strengthened when courts avoid making rulings that they think the authoritarian might defy.

Inversely, authoritarian power is undermined when civil society organizations like say, Harvard or the University of California, refuse to cede the rights of their members. Relatedly, Trump’s power is undermined even when his authoritarian actions are delayed by litigation, injunctions, and legal warfare.

Put another way, it becomes a liability for Trump to “flood the zone” with lawless presidential actions when every action is met with resistance and litigation that floods the media with stories about how the President is breaking the law, attacking civil liberties, and attacking your health.

And as cautious judges see broad public opposition to Trump’s defiance of their rulings, they may become more confident to issue further rulings against Trump.

Similarly, major university leaders whispered only a month ago that it was best to keep their heads down. But then came outrage from faculty and students across university communities at Columbia’s capitulation. And then, even more importantly, came Harvard’s refusal to cede its rights to Trump. And so more than 500 of these same university leaders, including every Ivy League President and UC Chancellor, signed an open letter last week saying they will not accept “undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”

So we’re seeing how successful resistance can be contagious. And this resistance is helping the broader public to see the authoritarian force behind all of Trump’s attacks on free speech and the rule of law. This same Times poll found 59% of respondents thought Trump’s 2^nd term could be described well with the word “scary.”

Ok, you say, but what about financialization?

As I said before, financialization has created both vulnerabilities and resources for universities to face Trump’s authoritarian threat:

• On the one hand, financialization has increased inequalities involving universities that fuel broad public resentment.

• On the other hand, financialization has provided elite schools with massive financial resources for university autonomy. It has also provided elite schools with embedding social ties to that connect them to powerful potential allies.

I won’t detail it today, but the rise of student debt is one financialized inequality that has fueled broad public resentment. As you can see on this slide, forgiving student debts is more popular as an executive action than any action taken by Trump.

For today, I’m only going to talk about resentment and resources involving endowments.

This figure from my book illustrates the unequal rise of endowments. It shows that private university endowments in the top 1 percent for value grew from the low billions in the 1970s to $20 billion by 2016. As you can see, growth was substantially less even in the top 1 percent of public universities and top 5 percent of private universities.

But this slide actually understates the inequality in endowment growth. Endowment inequality has been compounded by limited undergraduate enrollment growth at the wealthiest private schools. Princeton, which to its credit has played an admirable role in resisting Trump, is the most extreme case. Princeton has less than 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students. In spending the normal 5% of its endowment on university operations, Princeton now annually spends more than $180,000 per student from its endowment to support university operations every year. This is up from $10,000 inflation adjusted dollars per student in the 1970s.

In contrast, enrollment has grown substantially at public universities since the 1970s. One of my mentors, former Goldman Policy School Dean Henry Brady, has pointed out that UC Berkeley alone has enrolled more low-income students than the entire Ivy league combined. So while endowment values have grown substantially at the University of California, to over $40 billion across the system, these endowments are stretched much farther to serve nearly 300,000 students. [note, around $6,700 per student endow spend, not to mention operating a hospital system]

[SLIDE 4]

The result is this, elite endowments have become a double-edged word:

• On the one hand, they are both a symbol and a real mechanism of inequality in higher education. They fuel resentment towards toward all universities, not just wealthy private schools. This is because in the media and public imagination, all college is Harvard with its hoarded billions. Trump and J.D. Vance are self-serving and disingenuous when they say they want to tax wealthy endowments because elite schools don’t serve America. But wealthy universities have made us all vulnerable – it is not incorrect to say that elite private universities have hoarded their endowments.

• On the other hand, endowments are a major resource for university autonomy from a hostile authoritarian president. But they are only such a resource for a few schools. This is probably part of why Princeton and Harvard were the first to draw the line.

So that’s the double-edged sword of endowments.

In another related way, financialization has constructed embedding ties to elites that are both a risk and a potential resource for defending the university. Albina Gibadullina and I just published an article related to this in Socio-Economic Review. In our article, we theorize university boards as one particularly important type of parallel social organization that embeds economic elites in social ties to one another.

This figure from the paper shows that tech executives and financiers have grown their relative wealth and make up an increased share of the 400 richest Americans. These big tech and big finance oligarchs have been important supporter of Trump along with big law, which I think of as a sort of junior partner in this axis of oligarchy.

But financiers have especially taken more seats on university boards.

You can see that in the next figure.

On the left, we’ve plotted the average share of university board seats going to private equity and hedge fund managers at the top 30 private universities. On the right, we plot the average share of board seats going to all other types of financiers.

Our paper shows that financiers have come to dominate these boards for two reasons. One reason is that private equity and hedge fund billionaires are Ivy League alumni at much higher rates than other billionaires, including tech billionaires. The other reason is that the social ties and private information exchanged through university board positions are particularly valuable to private equity and hedge fund managers who invest and trade based on private information to beat public markets. Our paper shows that investment returns go up at private equity firms net of other factors after one of their partners gains a top university trustee position.

The implications are twofold for university resistance. First, many elite universities are vulnerable because their governing boards and top donors are now dominated by financial oligarchs who often support or at least accommodate Trump. It may not be a coincidence that 46% of Columbia’s trustees are from big finance, a higher rate than for all but 5 of the top private universities. In contrast, just 23% of the Harvard board and 35% of the Princeton board are from finance. Interestingly, the New York Times reported that the only board opponent of Harvard’s decision to resist is the KKR private equity manager Joe Bae who was recently appointed to the board to improve its “viewpoint diversity.”

The flip side of this vulnerability is that a financier becomes susceptible to campus community pressure when they join the board or recruit all of their analysts from a handful of elite schools. We may be seeing some of this boomerang in the reports that Trump actually wants out of his fight with Harvard.

I’ll close with a few thoughts on what is to be done.

First, I think elite schools, including UC, should leverage their endowments and their elite ties to both defend themselves and fight for the freedoms of all Americans. I think they can do this in a few ways.

The most obvious thing is you can use the endowment to keep the lights on while you we speak out assertively and litigate against cuts.

I also think endowments could be used more expansively to litigate everything. I’ve heard from some major university leaders that this is already happening behind the scenes to some extent. But I think we need a more public coordinated legal campaign of challenges to Trump’s illegal actions on a scale so large and intense that it paralyzes his administration with stories of his lawlessness. This would make Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy a liability for him rather than an asset.

I also think that students and faculty can be more assertive in doing what we do best, learning and teaching at a bigger scale about Trump’s threats and the powerful forces around him. This could produce viral media on Trump’s lawlessness for broad audiences or lay the ground work for mass assemblies on campus like those that were organized around Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.

Some of this learning and teaching could weave together a vision for both freedom of speech and freedom from the fear that most Americans reported in the New York Times poll I showed earlier. Freedom from fear is interesting as an idea that universities can uniquely speak to as both bulwarks of free speech and central providers of biomedical research and healthcare.

Threats to healthcare have been shown to generate more intense fear than any other destructive right wing policy. And we’ve seen Trump’s vulnerability to this in the turmoil this week over his “big beautiful bill”, the reconciliation package he plans to pass his to gut both universities and healthcare. To succeeds, the bill would need to hold every Republican in the House where the party has just a 2 person majority.

In the longer term, I think universities need to deleverage their financier ties and endowment hoarding. This would start with balancing university boards with more non-elites, including the UC Regents where we haven’t had a union leader or someone like Dolores Huerta on the board for over 25 years.

Deleveraging endowment hoarding would involve policy changes that reflect some of the rhetoric that elite schools have been using to rebrand themselves as serving the broader public. For this, we need a plan for the day after Trump. Damage has already been done to our institutions. When we rebuild them, we shouldn’t just recreate them with the same flaws and vulnerabilities. We should rebuild them better. Depending on the university, this could begin with expanding undergraduate enrollment, increasing affordability, or both.

Bonus figure: % of Forbes 400 members with top university BAs. Patterns are the same for MBAs.

Below are my draft slides for the talk. As a preface, I will argue that financialization has both created both vulnerabilities and resources for the defense of the university.

• On the one hand, financialization has increased inequalities involving universities that fuel broad public resentment.

• On the other hand, financialization has provided elite schools with massive resources for university autonomy. It has also provided elite schools with embedding social ties to that connect them to powerful potential allies.

My argument offers insights for leveraging financial elite ties to defend the university from Trump’s immediate. It also suggests how deleveraging financial ties in the longer run could help revitalize the universities for broad public benefit.

I want to lift up three less visible things that are important for making sense of this rapidly evolving power struggle, and for thinking about how to defend universities from Trump’s authoritarian assault:

1. Princeton’s President Christopher Eisgruber is playing a vital role forging a united front by universities.

2. The university united front likely has the backing of at least some Wall Street elites who dominate Ivy League university boards.

3. Efforts to change the narrative are clearly underway. Harvard held its fire until Trump showed his had with demands that show this is all an authoritarian power play. And Harvard has shifted its presentation of self to center its lifesaving biomedical research and healthcare services.

At the end, I’ll note some factors for whether this united front can chip away at the accommodation Trump’s authoritarianism requires from the courts, Congress, other elites, public opinion and voters.

Princeton’s Leadership of a United Front

While Harvard got the headlines, a united front of elite universities signaled that they would resist over the last 48 hours. MIT also rejected Trump’s demands. Stanford’s President spoke out in support of Harvard. And Columbia appeared to reverse course on its capitulation.

For evidence that these are collective actions, listen to or read to the full Times interview Princeton’s President Eisgruber gave last week. After writing an Atlantic essay calling for universities to resist Trump, Eisgruber told the Times: “Presidents are talking to one another about this. I chair the Board for the Association of American Universities. Board meetings occur regularly. Now, there used to be twice a year. They’re considerably more often —Every one or two weeks or so.”

For those who don’t know, the Association of American Universities (AAU) is the association of the top 71 public and private research universities in the US. I did some research for AAU on financial aid and student debt a few years ago. Even through my little project, I could see that all the top university presidents knew and talked to each other. So Princeton’s Eisgruber appears to have played an important role in forging a united front.

But Harvard joining the fray is a big deal. And not just because it’s Harvard. Harvard’s exposure to federal funding cuts is much larger than even Princeton’s. This is in part because Harvard has a medical school and operates a large hospital system, contributing to its larger biomedical research portfolio.

The president of the larger federation of all US colleges and universities also gave an interview with the Times that points to a united front. The Times reported:

“Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents many colleges and universities in Washington, said Harvard’s approach could embolden other campus leaders… He described Harvard’s response as ‘a road map for how institutions could oppose the administration on this incursion into institutional decision-making.’”

Wall Street Support for the United Front

The emerging united front of universities may also reflect broader elite resistance to the increasingly authoritarian and erratic behavior of the Trump administration. Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and Columbia are very unlikely to have mounted their resistance without the consent of the boards of trustees. And my book and recent Socio-Economic Review paper show that these boards are increasingly dominated by financiers.

In a Bluesky exchange with Beth Popp Berman in early February, I wondered out loud how financier’s university ties might influence elite support for Trump’s initial attacks on not only universities, but on democratic rule of law more broadly:

Elite university resistance to Trump signals that university ties may help to organize at least an important fraction of elites to oppose Trump’s authoritarian moves. Presidents of 4 of the Big 5 wealthiest universities – Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford – have all publicly spoken out. Yale has remained peculiarly silent as far as I can tell.

Harvard’s elite and conservatively connected legal team provides another potential indicator of elite activation against Trump’s authoritarianism. Harvard’s formal letter rejecting Trump’s demands was authored by lawyers William A. Burck and Robert K. Hur. The Times reports:

“Mr. Burck is also an outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization and represented the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in the deal it recently reached with the Trump administration… Mr. Hur, who worked in the Justice Department in Mr. Trump’s first term, was the special counsel who investigated President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s handling of classified documents and termed him ‘an elderly man with a poor memory.’”

Draw your own conclusions.

Changing the Narrative: Trump’s Authoritarian Attacks on Your Health and Personal Freedom

It appears some smart people may also be starting to help elite universities try to change the narrative around Trump’s attacks. First, Harvard held back until the Trump administration showed its hand in an April 11 letter demanding a full authoritarian takeover of Harvard by Trump designees.

Trump’s overreaching demands opened the door for Harvard to change the narrative. In an open letter rejecting Trump’s demands, Harvard President Allan Garber seized the opportunity. His letter begins:

“For three-quarters of a century, the federal government has awarded grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to help pay for work that… has led to groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields… For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation.”

Yep.

The letter ends:

“These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate... Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere. All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom.”

Indeed.

Josh Marshall also notes changes on Harvard’s website:

“The university’s webpage has been remade into essentially an advertisement for the societal/human impact of university research. The splash headline is “Research Powers Progress” followed by the tagline line: “Research at Harvard — from medicine to technology to education and business — touches countless lives, moving us closer to disease cures, next-generation technology, and a more secure future for millions of people.”

Thus far, my only idea for improving on this come from retired SEIU and healthcare reform strategist Dean Tipps: personify Trump’s authoritarianism by linking it to his widely despised friend Vladimir Putin’s playbook (more on this in a future post). And Harvard’s website and its open letter are not the vehicles for tying Trump’s attacks to Putin in the public mind.

Can a United Front Overcome Trump’s Power?

Ultimately, the success of Trump’s autocratic moves would require accommodation by the courts, Congress, other powerful elites, public opinion and voters. But even Trump’s 2-seat Republican House majority hangs by a thread. Will they continue to back Trump’s lawlessness if it threatens their mid-term election survival? This is an open question as Trump’s public approval is falling at a pace only matched historically by his own first presidency:

Trump has responded to Harvard’s resistance by doubling down, declaring he has frozen $2.2 billion in federal funds and suggesting he will also revoke Harvard’s tax status. I say claim because Trump, Musk, and their aids have been notoriously sloppy and loose with the facts about what they can do and have done.

At the same time, the Trump administration has spread itself thin by starting fights on every front at once. If nothing else, the resistance by Harvard and the Big 5 universities will reduce the administration’s limited bandwidth for punishing other universities one-by-one. Per my last post, Harvard and the Big 5 can afford to both 1) withstand Trump’s funding cuts for a period and 2) occupy the administration with costly litigation and public relations warfare. This may at least draw fire way from less elite and wealthy universities or other parts of civil society.

With Trump’s approval falling, does Harvard’s decision to fight portend that other elites, including Wall Street financiers and federal judges, will stand against authoritarian moves by Trump? Are Supreme Court justices really prepared to destroy their own alma matters in fealty to Trump? If not, Trump’s recent disregard for courts is ominous but hard to sustain if other elites and major institutions do not go along. Will Wall Street side with Trump even as he wreaks tariff chaos?

We shall see. But successful resistance can be contagious. And few organizations have more economic and social resources than Harvard to resist.

After a publishing a courageous essay in The Atlantic, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has vowed again to fight Trump. Harvard’s former President Larry Summers called for universities to hold their ground and for endowments “to be drawn down” if necessary. Former President Obama gave a fiery speech, declaring, “If…you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.” And both Harvard and Princeton have taken steps to do so by borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars through bonds effectively backed by their endowments.

While I’m happy to see Summers and Obama back up my endowment proposal, my friend Beth Popp Berman is 100% correct when she says endowments can’t fund everything that is threatened forever – especially at less wealthy schools. What they can do is buy time. Time for Trump’s economic chaos to undermine is support base. Time to litigate against cuts and unlawful detentions on campus. And most importantly, time for universities to adopt a political strategy to defend themselves and their allies from Trump’s political assault on civil society.

This approach is not in universities’ wheelhouse. As former Columbia President Lee Bollinger just told the Chronicle of Higher Ed about university presidents, “They haven’t played hardball politics.”

Having played and studied hardball politics, my view is that any successful political strategy will 1) need to change the public narrative so that more Americans see the attack on universities as an attack on themselves. This will help to 2) mobilize a coalition of allies through universities’ far-reaching social ties, and 3) put social pressure on other powerful actors who otherwise are content to sit on the sidelines.

I’m planning another post next week for how universities with medical centers might change the public narrative by working with their doctors, cancer patients and others whose lives are literally threatened by Trump’s cuts. And I’ve been invited to talk later this month with leaders of the nation’s largest healthcare workers union. If you have your own narrative ideas, send me an email!

For this post, I’m going to focus on how it is important for any narrative to be crafted with an eye to 1) many powerful potential allies that universities connect, and 2) making Trump’s attacks on universities a career ending mistake for swing-district Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections. I will also 3) provide detail how endowments can sustain universities as they and their allies do this work.

Coalition Building and Universities as Parallel Social Organizations

It’s easy to forget today that universities are powerful social organizations. They operate parallel to politics and the economy, connecting people—and especially elites—connect across geography and different domains of industry, medicine, recreation, and government. The top of these connective organizations are university boards of trustees. In the Ivy league, these boards have always been dominated by the wealthy. But over the last forty years, Ivy League boards have particularly become populated by private equity and hedge fund managers, and to a lesser extent, Silicon Valley billionaires. You can see that in this graph from my “Elite Embeddedness” article with Albina Gibadulina:

The quick capitulations of Columbia and others likely occurred in part because university presidents devote much of their work to fundraising with this class of board members. During crises like today’s, the interests and relationships of such groups can become more legible in a complex system like higher education. This class of elites have sought has sought to accommodate Trump in other domains, and many have after expressed uneasiness or outright opposition around diversity initiatives and academic freedom questions around the Gaza war.

But even Ivy League trustees are not a unitary block beholden to Trump. And the present destabilization of social systems can also open space for transformation and realignment of interests. Surely many trustees are appalled by the attacks on universities to which they have devoted their time, donations, and fundraising ties. Broader fissures are opening as we speak around Trump’s destructive economic policies. Nor are trustees the only people who connect universities to other potential elite and non-elite allies. Alumni networks maintain a rich array of ties for universities.

The task then is to craft a narrative and a coalition that mobilizes both sympathetic trustees and others with valuable resources. At my own University of California, financially the largest public university in the nation, the executive committee of our faculty senate just unanimously passed an appeal to UC’s President and Regents along these lines.

Such a coalition can help raise financial resources to buttress endowments in backstopping Trump funding cuts. A coalition could also bring together civic organizations, elected officials, and others with different resources and competencies than universities to make the public argument that attacks on universities are an attack on all of us.

An effective public campaign would bolster universities’ ability to convince just the two or three Republican congressional defectors needed block further cuts in legislation planned for later this year. Persuading these kinds of defections becomes possible if Republicans start to see cuts to universities as a potentially career ending mistake in the 2026 elections. A public campaign could also aid appeals to progressive state governors for funding to backstop public university cuts.

Holding Out to a Midterm Powershift

Trump’s attacks on universities are ultimately about power. Like other autocrats, Trump and his allies see free speech, critical debate, and the foundation of universities as a threat to their power. So they are likely to prosecute their attacks until Trump loses power or universities abandon their mission.

But the persistence of Trump’s leverage over universities is not a given. As long as free and fair elections survive in the US, elections are key inflection points in the allocation of power. This suggests a financial imperative for universities: they need sufficient resources to keep the lights on until the 2026 mid-terms and ideally until 2028.

It’s worth remembering that Republicans only have a two-seat majority in the House and a three-seat majority in the Senate. Democratic control of the House in 2026 seems very likely. And with markets upended by Trump’s tariff chaos, Democratic control of the Senate even seems within reach. To get to 50, they would have to run the table in Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, states where Democrats have won at least some elections statewide in recent years. A 51^st Democrat would need to win in Alaska, Florida, Texas or somewhere else that only crisis and a blue wave could make possible. But the chaos of Trump 2 expands the confidence interval for these kinds of scenarios.

How could a coalition help universities muster the resources to endure Republican cuts through the midterms?

Here I’ll speak to an astute question I received from one reader:

I'm curious what the basis for your confidence is that it would be so easy to "replenish endowments" from "sympathetic alumni." That's not my sense. My sense is that many donors are annoyed at universities for various reasons and they aren't keen to have their money expropriated by Washington.

To be fair, I probably overstated the ease of this task in my NYT essay. It does appear to me, however, that many middle- and upper-class alumni are hungry for ways they can support their own corners of civil society that are threatened by Trump. About 500 of them submitted comments on my NYT piece to that effect. These are not the kind of high-dollar or small-dollar fundraising appeals that universities are accustomed to making. But they are the kinds of appeals that were perfected in recent years by universities allies like Obama campaign legacy organizations.

President Obama said in his speech last week that to defend core university values, “that’s why we got this big endowment.” This is an opening. Has Columbia picked up the phone to ask for help from the former president, its most famous alumnus? Imagine how much money Columbia could raise if Obama cohosted a high-dollar event with a prominent Columbia Republican alum to fund biomedical research cut by Trump? Imagine how much Columbia could raise in small-dollar donations from digital fundraising appeals by such a duo?

This kind of jujitsu could make a fundraising opportunity out of a Trump attack on a university.

Using Endowments to Maximum Effect

Others have noted that 19^th century justifications for endowments were that they insulated universities from precisely the kinds of government attacks underway today. But my reader quoted above also noted that donors might fear their donations to universities will just be expropriated through a Trump tax increase on endowments. This is indeed a threat. But another correspondent tells me that their Ivy League institution is exploring other donor vehicles that could circumvent endowment taxes. This is good news and entirely predictable. Eight years ago, I published another NYT article about how elite endowments use offshore tax blocker corporations to avoid taxes on some of their hedge fund investment financing. Remember, university boards and their finance committees are populated by some of the wealthiest financial engineers in the world. They can figure this out if they want to.

Something governors may be able to do is to buttress the legal authority of universities to tap their endowments. I have only become more certain that wealthy schools can tap their endowments for this purpose, even without action by governors.

The most convincing evidence that universities can tap their endowments is that Larry Summers says he did it as Harvard’s President. Here are his exact words in his NYT essay:

I have no special knowledge of the techniques Summers has in mind. But tapping the endowment does not necessarily require straightforward additional expenditure of endowment assets. During the 2008 financial crisis, for example, Harvard liquidated two-thirds of a $2.9 billion stock portfolio and borrowed roughly $2.5 billion through bond issuances. These bonds were effectively backed by Harvard’s endowment. This was a smart move as the bond interest rates ranged from just 3.2% to 6.5% compared to the Harvard endowment’s 10% average rate of return over the previous 30 years. In recent weeks, Princeton and Harvard have borrowed several hundred million dollars each through such bond offerings, with Harvard saying the borrowing was explicitly for Trump funding cut contingencies.

The University of California took similar measures early in the COVID19 pandemic. UC’s Office of the President liquidated its entire $1.8 billion Blue and Gold endowment fund in 2020. This amounted to an extraordinary expenditure that effectively more than doubled spending from the endowment over a short period of “funding lapses” in Summers’ words. The Blue and Gold fund was subsequently recapitalized and has grown to $6.9 billion in value. UC’s overall systemwide endowment is valued at $29.5 billion.

These financial measures were undertaken under the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA), a version of which has been adopted by all US states to govern non-profit endowment management. I have corresponded with a few tax experts and university fundraising executives since my NYT essay. They point to constraints under these acts, but nothing that prohibits universities from spending more than the common 5% of endowment value annually. Prior to UPMIFA, some state regulations of non-profit endowments included a “rebuttable presumption of imprudence” for expenditures above 7% of the endowment. The key word was rebuttable. If states have maintained the 7% threshold since adopting UPMIFA, universities could make a case for the prudence of spending more. Endowments’ higher average annual rates of return than 7% could form part of such a case.

UPMIFAs can also be modified by friendly state governments. For example, Massachusetts removed its 7% presumption of imprudence by adopting its version of UPMIFA during the 2009 financial crisis. So Harvard and MIT face no such constraint.

UPMIFA also specifies how universities can obtain consent from donors for the modification of endowment restrictions established by the donor. One would hope that many donors would consent to release restrictions needed to defend the university from existential threats. If not, the wealthiest universities typically have billions of dollars in unrestricted endowment funds, like the University of California’s $6.9 billion Gold and Blue fund mentioned above, that they can use more easily. Harvard has more than $10 billion in unrestricted endowment assets. Columbia has almost $5 billion.

Any modification of endowment restrictions should be done with the utmost care. Another former executive at elite public and private universities reminded me that some large endowments are dedicated to funding financial aid for low-income students. I hope it’s obvious that no university should plunder financial aid to preserve even life-saving biomedical research.

Looking beyond the immediate crisis, a former Ivy League head of fundraising also suggest, “these schools should have paid more attention to raising flexible dollars, but chose not to.” This, and much more should change. As the same executive wrote to me, “Ginning up applications so one can reject more is a recipe for resentment.”

The Courts Won’t Save Us

The prospects of university’s litigation are outside my areas of expertise. But others have written that the Supreme Court majority seems intent on avoiding confrontation with Trump that could result in him defying its orders. This does not bode well for university litigation. It is likewise ominous that none of the largest US law firms have filed amicus briefs to defend Perkins Coi against Trump’s attacks.

I also agree with one reader who wrote to me that “Instituting cy pres litigation would take years.” Cy pres here refers to litigation that distributes damages in class action lawsuits to charitable organizations and benefits that are close to the purpose of the original litigation.

Nevertheless, we should remember that a majority of today’s Supreme Court justices did reject Trump’s litigation to overturn the 2020 election. That was a different political moment than our present crisis. But that is the point.

Universities should not surrender in this most dire moment of uncertainty. At the very least, they should use every resource they have hold the line as long as they can in hopes that Trump undermines himself with his own chaos.

Better still universities should partner with allies to convince Americans that Trump is threatening their own lives and health by attacking universities (more on that next week). This could shape the outcomes of the 2026 midterms in ways that might give our politicized Supreme Court pause just as they are considering legal challenges to Trump’s assault on the university.

********

If this wasn’t enough of my thoughts for you, Mother Jones just published a related extended interview with me here.

If you’re in the UC Berkeley area, I’ll be giving a talk there on Wednesday, April 30 at 2 pm. Just reply to this email for details.

But I couldn’t wait until then to share a very encouraging development. In his own NYT essay yesterday, former Harvard President and US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called on universities to use their endowments to resist Trump’s attacks. You can read the full essay here or below.

For those of you at wealthy schools, this paragraph in Summers’ essay should be especially useful for pushing your administrations’ to backstop federal funding cuts with the endowment:

Here is the full Summers essay:

If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can?

By Lawrence H. Summers

Mr. Summers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a former president of Harvard University.

The U.S. government is trying to bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission. At stake is the future of institutions that graduated most of our recent American presidents, the vast majority of Supreme Court justices and that serve as drivers of our prosperity and shapers of our social values.

The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means. Columbia University’s recent capitulation, in which it agreed to a raft of changes in an attempt to avoid losing hundreds of millions in funding, must not be emulated. Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.

As in most confrontations, the merits in this one are far from one sided. Critics of elite universities, including Harvard, where I am a professor, are right that they continue to tolerate antisemitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice, that they have elevated identity over excellence in the selection of students and faculty, that they lack diversity of perspective and that they have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order.

And universities’ insistence that they be entirely left alone by their federal funders rings hollow in light of the enthusiasm they greet micromanagement when they approve the outcome, such as threats from Washington to withhold funds unless men’s and women’s athletic budgets were equalized.

But the Trump administration is not acting in good faith in its purported antisemitism concerns, nor is it following the law in its approach to universities.

President Trump offered praise to a white-supremacist rally that included chants of “Jews will not replace us,” publicly dined with Holocaust deniers, made common cause with Germany’s Nazi-descendant AfD party and invoked tropes about wealthy Jews. The true motivation behind his attack on universities is suggested by Vice President JD Vance’s declaration that the “universities are the enemy.” Shakedown is the administration’s strategy as it has gone after law firms, federal judges, legislators who disagree with its edicts and traditionally independent arms of the government.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act appropriately allows that federal funding of universities can be made contingent on their avoiding discrimination. But as a recent statement by a group of leading law professors points out, it also protects against this power’s being used to punish critics or curtail academic freedom. Among the law’s requirements are notice periods, hearings, remedies that are narrowly tailored to specific infractions and a 30-day congressional notification before any funding is curtailed.

None of this appears to be part of the Trump administration’s approach to universities.

The White House has not confined its efforts to claims about discrimination. The administration seeks to dictate what universities do on matters ranging from student discipline to academic organization to campus policing.

Universities facing those threats should make clear they are willing to negotiate with government officials only over matters covered by statute and through the procedures laid out in the law.

They should make clear that their formidable financial endowments are not there to simply be envied or admired. Part of their function is to be drawn down in the face of emergencies, and covering federal funding lapses surely counts as one. As a former president of Harvard University, believe me when I say that ways can be found in an emergency to deploy even parts of the endowment that have been earmarked for specific use by their donors.

And to maintain the moral high ground, which universities have in large part lost, they need a much more aggressive reform agenda focused on antisemitism, celebrating excellence rather than venerating identity, pursuing truth rather than particular notions of social justice and promoting diversity of perspective as the most important dimension of diversity.

That will not happen through universities’ usual deliberative processes, which give too much power to faculty members who have political agendas. It will require strong, determined leaders backed by confident and competent trustees. I wish Harvard and other universities had reformed much more rapidly after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, so their changes did not appear to be a response to external pressure.

Institutions such as Harvard, the administration’s most recent target, have vast financial resources, great prestige and broad networks of influential alumni. If they do not or cannot resist the arbitrary application of government power, who else can? Without acts of resistance, what protects the rule of law?

I hope and trust, in the time of testing that lies ahead, universities will both reform themselves and stand up to external pressure. Their future and America’s are in the balance.

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Progressive Disclosure

I’m sharing this first newsletter with you as someone I’ve corresponded or collaborated with over the years. I’m calling it Progressive Disclosure. I’ve thought about trying this for a while. I’m finally taking the plunge to share with you an NYT op-ed that I published this week calling on wealthy universities to spend their endowments to fight Trump’s attacks. When it comes to spending their tens of billions, I ask, if not now, when? I figured I should take my own advice.

If you want to take action to encourage university leaders to fight back, you can add your signature to an open letter here. It’ been signed by thousands of academics around the country.

What will this newsletter be?

Progressive Disclosure has multiple meanings for me. The least interesting meaning is that while I’m professionally an economic sociologist, a lot of my research has progressive policy and political implications. What does progressive mean to me? I’m hoping to explore this as my thinking is shifting through my research, life experiences, and the extraordinary political upheaval of our day. How much will I disclose about myself? We’ll see. Tell me what you’d like to know.

I’m more enamored of the idea of progressive disclosure as an interactive design method — and as a method of thinking. Progressive disclosure allows a viewer or user to zoom in and the trees in vivid detail or zoom out for view of the full forest. Or to observe the forest from above or from the ground up. I’ve been engaging with this idea for a while through the data visualization work of W.E.B. Du Bois. In their beautiful book, Whitney Battle Baptiste and Britt Russert note that Du Bois used progressive disclosure by plotting multiple graphs together to visualize Black life in 1900 across multiple dimensions, including space, time, and racial boundaries. In its best applications, progressive disclosure can help us to understand the relationship between the micro-level workings of life and macro-level systems.

I’ve tried to draw on Du Bois’ approach to progressive disclosure in my own data visualization and writing. But progressive disclosure also resonates with my passion for exploring the mountains of California’s Sierra Nevadas. As a backcountry skier and runner, I am drawn to the multiple perspectives one gains when navigating through forests, climbing mountains, or sitting atop a peak.

What You Can Expect

I only plan to send you something when I think it’s worth sharing with you. I’m hoping this will be around once a month. We’ll see. I will try to confine what I write to areas where I really have expertise — economic sociology, financiers, elites, universities, open science methods, data visualization, and my own social experiences, including a dash of backcountry skiing.

I will probably combine multiple topics or pieces of news in a single newsletter so as to spare your in-box.

On that note, you may be interested in a new academic article I recently published with Albina Gibadullina: “Elite embeddedness: the rise of financiers on university boards as parallel social organizations.” Published in Socio-Economic Review, the article is a much denser companion to my op-ed from yesterday. It traces how private equity and hedge fund managers rose to dominate university boards of trustees. The blockbuster finding in the paper is that private equity funds tend to achieve higher investment returns after their partners gain a seat on a top university board. We argue that this likely occurs because other business elites on the board provide access to valuable information and relationships for private equity investing. My book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower, provides a broader historical account of this transformation. These publications may offer some insights as to why elite universities have surrendered rather than spend their endowments to defend themselves from Trump’s attacks.

I’d Love to Hear from You

If you have reactions to anything I share, I’d love to hear back from you. I think you can just hit reply. Please also feel free to send me anything you write, read, or make that you think I’d be interested in. When it’s a great fit, I may include it in the news letter. Please also let me know if there’s anything you’d like to me to devote more attention to in the newsletter.

There’s no need to pay for this newsletter. I don’t plan to do paid content. But you’re welcome to chip in to support me, especially if Trump gets the University of California to eliminate my job.

If all this isn’t a match for you, and you need to unsubscribe, I totally get it. Either way, thanks for considering whether to join this experiment with me.