This pamphlet partly explains why I’ve admired Jim Chandler’s life and work for more than 50 years. The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning is a cool, lucid exposure of the current upsurge of American No Nothingism—Trumpism and MAGA—“to undermine and even eradicate” what he has spent his life enriching: “a sound curriculum in liberal education.” More, it is a pledge of allegiance to what underwrites his special vocation: the idea and the ideal of “an educated citizenry”.   

His final two paragraphs make an example of the “properly self-critical” obligation of that vocation. Recalling Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos (2015), Chandler wonders if her insider’s attack on the financialization of contemporary higher education might not be making a “truer argument” than his. Instead of promoting the virtues of “a sound curriculum in liberal education,” perhaps he ought to have been addressing Brown’s grave charge that “the market value of knowledge—its income-enhancing prospects for individuals and industry alike—is now understood as both its driving purpose and leading line of defense.” 

Brown’s worry is, like Chandler’s, a curricular worry – a focus on STEM disciplines, their computational methods and machineries, and the emergence of data as a form, even a measure, of knowledge. That is more than a curricular worry. It is also a fundamental concern for the “values” that underwrite education: “market values” v.  the moral value of an “educated citizenry” and how both are measured and pursued . . . and defended.   

But there is a problem. Jim’s pamphlet doesn’t engage that profound issue in its key practical relation: the simple strategy that underwrites Trumpism’s tactical actions. Two relatively recent current events bring the source of Trumpist power into sharp focus. 

Consider the struggle to resist ICE’s cruel enforcement tactics in Texas.  Earlier this month, Governor Abbott froze $110 million in grants to the city of Houston to coerce the city’s police to cooperate with ICE. The mayor explained why he found it difficult to push back against that demand: “The person that controls the purse strings can kind of set the rules. . . .  What good would it be for me to . . . strike back at the governor? I’m trying to get the damn money.”  

Surely nothing has been more clear that the attack on higher education was prosecuted by threatening the universities’ financial resources.  Leveraging financial vulnerabilities has been fundamental to Trumpist authoritarian moves against all targeted institutions – cultural, political, economic, legal.    Abbott is following the Trump and DOJ playbook for taking control of university self-governance. Because the faculties have long all but completely ceded governance to administrations that have increasingly focused their own governance decisions on money and financialization, mounting an effective resistance – unified and education-focused—to federal authoritarian control has been very difficult.   

The words “governance” and “faculty governance” never appear in Jim’s pamphlet, nor does he focus on the intimate connection between the management of the university’s  finances and the pursuit of its educational mission. The recent exasperated and all-too-common call to faculty and students —that they should “Shut up and study!” and “Shut up and teach!”—completely fails to grasp the transformations that have overtaken American higher education since the full flowering of the country’s imperial condition after WWII. Because university financial decisions and public policies—curricular and executive—have profound and practical educational significance, university-wide discussion, deliberation, and decision-making are fundamental needs and obligations.   

Another recent event has brought those imperatives into sharp focus: the just released Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education. It offers practical recommendations – many good ones – to address what was the committee’s overriding concern: a perceived loss of public trust in higher education. So the report explicitly makes its leading idea what has been a watchword for the moral values of a liberal education: critical self-reflection. Asking the question “where have we gone wrong?”, the report answers: we have lost the trust of the American public because we have lost our way in a “diffusion of purpose,” what it summarizes as education in “all things for all people.” 

The educational community would strongly endorse the Yale report’s leading idea and the question it poses. But perhaps not the answer it gives. Am I alone when I recoil from those thin cliches “diffusion of purpose” and “all things to all people”?   Am I alone in hearing them deliver a beguiling reprise on that call to “Shut up and study!” and “Shut up and teach!”?  

Society creates institutions of learning to instill habits of truthfulness whose common-sense spirit feeds it practical hallmarks: curiosity, diligence, thoroughness, and candor. In a word: honesty. And it expects those habits will be taken into a larger world.  But what if a very different spirit — call it No Nothingism -- is being purposely diffused through all things and all people in that larger world?  Diffused by agents who have the purpose and the power of practical social control to do that?  Educators at all levels are citizens whose particular vocation and skills are especially needed at such times as our time. 

Remember the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report of 1967? It told us that colleges and universities are “communities of scholars”.  But if they ever were just that, the phrase has since become – and was even then, I believe -- little more than a misleading, even a pious, descriptor.  Because over the past 75 years our institutions of higher education have been shaped in the image and likeness of a very different social order.  Academic communities are now altogether diverse and transnational and our institutions are serious players in the social, economic, military, and political life of the nation and the world. The American university of 1945 is worlds apart from the university we watched being reflected back to us in 2010 by The Social Network. Like his colleagues and students everywhere, Chandler’s own classroom and scholarship reacts to that historic change. So does his polemical exposure of the current No Nothing movement. 

The Yale report also called up two particular personal memories — public events that I was involved in and that had a profound effect on my life as an educator.  One happened in 1991 when I was a Visiting Professor in Berkeley, the other in 1969 in Chicago when I was an Assistant Professor at the university.  

The Gulf War had just broken out in 1991 and the Berkeley community threw itself into resistance. While the administration justified its invasion as a defense of Kuwait’s freedom, the view from Berkeley was different. America wasn’t springing to defend Kuwait from a powerful neighbor. It was moving to shore up its ability to control access to Near Eastern oil. Kuwait was a pretext.

A teach-in was called at the university and several political activists from the 60s Free Speech Movement were asked to speak to the community about what should be done. One was the poet and diplomat Peter Dale Scott. Peter and I had become friends, and during a lunch we had together a few days before the teach-in he told me he was worried about what he was going to say. “I want all of us here to ask ourselves: ‘Where have we gone wrong?  I mean us, not the government.  What’s our responsibility for what’s happening?” I told him I thought those were exactly the right questions to ask, and that few communities were more prepared to pose them than the Berkeley community. But he left our lunch worried.

The large room for the teach-in was packed. When Peter got up he posed his questions and spoke passionately for some 10 minutes about their pertinence. The war on Iraq was widely supported across America. Had he and his Berkeley community been living in a twenty-year dream of dissent?   

There was no applause when Peter sat down. Then a woman got up and said something like this. “Peter, I’ve known and worked with you for almost 30 years and I would never have expected you to betray what we stand for.” More of the same followed from others in the audience and no one signaled any approval for what Peter was saying. 

Those events flooded my mind in May 2024 when Ken Burns, addressing the Brandeis graduates, called for a “withering self-examination” by all tormented Americans. 

He clearly had most in mind those who judged that Donald Trump was toxic and treacherous, what Burns called “the opioid of opioids.”  Reading his address I thought of the withering critical question Jimmy Malone posed for Elliott Ness and his pals in The Untouchables: “What are you prepared to DO?”  Truth is only what Milman Parry in 1935 called a fine and practical thing when people make it so.

Where have we gone wrong?  The question takes me back to the winter-term student protest and sit-in at University of Chicago in early 1969. Triggered by the tenure case of Marlene Dixon, the students were protesting the university’s failure to address two pressing moral and social issues. One was national – the Vietnam war that Dixon had been vocal in denouncing. The other was local and, for the university in particular, more serious. For decades it had built a wall around itself and its southside neighbors, the black community of Woodlawn, and it manned the wall with policies that were nakedly racist and classist. The Life of the Mind meant to isolate itself from Life on the Street next door.  And when the student protest broke out, the university found that it had to protect itself from enemies within its castle. 

The university fortress had a castle keep, the Administration Building, where “the life of the mind” held command and control. Proud of its famous students and faculties, the administration had always encouraged both to “free critical inquiry”. But like the ancient prohibition against eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, there was one key exception: university public policy. When the university deliberated serious public issues, neither students, nor even directly the faculty, were involved. That is, when it studied them thoroughly with the purpose of taking practical action to deal with them, or not to deal with them at all.  

That’s why the frustrated students sat-in the administration building, not the library or the classroom buildings, and why much of the faculty—not all — supported them.  

The protest was peaceful first to last, including – to its credit — on the administration’s part. No police or military were called in. After 14 days the students called off the sit-in. But because they stood fast to the issues at stake, when disciplinary tribunals were convened, 42 students were expelled and 81 were suspended – many choosing never to return. The sit-in failed in its two goals: to have the university make a public stand against the war, and to remake itself as a neighbor in its neighborhood. 

Or did it fail? In a few years the United States called a halt to its war. And just about that time, 1974-75, the University of Chicago began committing itself to broad-ranging policies of just and productive community engagement that have continued to this day. These were the goals the protesting students were committed to and punished for: a “no matter what” commitment that measured the difference between “failing” and what Samuel Beckett would soon celebrate as “failing better.”

Those Chicago students had a deep understanding of the literally fundamental character of moral values and, most important, of what makes them fundamental.  Commitment, no matter what.  But greed, cruelty, and dishonesty can be implacable commitments too, as we all now know and see every day.  They are also moral commitments and they parade themselves in the language of religion and virtue. But they are signed negative. They pave with bad intentions a road to hell on earth.  

Who can ever forget Gordon Gekko’s shameless 1987 pledge of allegiance that “Greed is good”?  It is the invisible hand that has long been the guide, philosopher, and friend for American free enterprise.  Both Tocqueville and Veblen, two of Chandler’s key points of reference, understood that.  But they did not make nearly enough of it. Veblen even came to believe that industrial engineers would lead a revolution to overthrow “the leisure class,” not appreciating how he was himself part of it.  

Trumpism has been keen to realize that Greed is especially good at exploiting the invisible hand’s mailed fist, its fearful power to wield an economy of Fear.

It isn’t true that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.  But it’s a better truth than “Greed is Good”.  And better is better, can even be more practical, than bad.  Especially if you ask yourself the question: “What are you prepared to do about it?”

Jerome McGann is University Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia. His recent books are Byron and the Poetics of Adversity (2025) and Transubstantiations (2025). His edition of Jaime de Angulo’s Old Time Stories: A Modernist Classic of Native California will be published by University Of Chicago Press in 2026.