At the close of a year that felt particularly brutal, another professor and I found ourselves lingering together, wrapped in our vivid and rather ridiculous academic attire, alongside a long row of similarly robed colleagues who’d spent time in various semi‑administrative posts. She’s a superb colleague—a few years my senior, kind yet wry, patient with the pretensions of institutional life, and endowed with a slow‑burn talent for steadiness in the face of them. When I say we’re “colleagues,” I mean it in the best sense: people who know one another through work and, in that peculiar little circle, discover a genuine, almost relief‑rich, irony‑laced enjoyment in each other’s company. I’d just learned she would be stepping into retirement, effective essentially right after the ceremonial procession we were about to walk through, and I found myself both congratulating and envying her.
But then, contemplating the year’s mounting wretchedness, another question rose up in me. “When this godawful job is behind me,” I asked, “and I can return to teaching and writing—will I still feel sick at heart most days? Will I feel less desperate?”
She answered then, and her reply has echoed in my waking hours ever since, as the stark failure to do the two things I’ve always cared about in this gig—safeguarding the labor of my excellent colleagues, and preserving the mission’s integrity that labor upholds—sharpened into a painfully clear picture.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, and flashed me a sideways grin. “You’ve been at this a while. You can’t unsee it.”
*
Despite the flashy, almost zoological range of appearances thematically sprinkled across the landscape, austerity bureaucrats are, in truth, a fairly recognizable breed. Their stylistic betrayals and tonal quirks quickly collapse into one shared mandate: the forceful reframing of ruin as a form of rescue. That, essentially, is the governing grammar. That, in short, is the game.
Not that this mandate speaks with a single, uniform voice. Not long ago, “innovation”—and its companion line, “disruption”—was the preferred phrasing for how major structural cutbacks strutted themselves forward as a techno‑visionary leap toward a supposedly noble future, just beyond the horizon of current closures and layoffs. There’s still a trace of that in certain windowless conference rooms filled with weary consultants who mutter “resilience” to one another. Today you’re more likely to hear talk of “outcomes,” “rightsizing,” “strategic planning,” or—perhaps the crown jewel of the moment—“metrics.”
Dear heaven, the worship of “metrics” among the managerial class! What could possibly outshine it? Is it possible that your tiny unit continues to attend to its mission, succeeding at hard, unglamorous labor in the face of years of relentless retrenchment and ever more fanatical labor discipline? Not according to these newly minted metrics! It’s an endlessly renewable trick, a clumsy alchemy designed to turn less (funding, resources, long‑term commitments) into more (labor).
Nobody who has ever skimmed the executive suite’s horizon will have difficulty recognizing the vibe of these joyless exchanges. It’s a familiar scene in higher education.
I have to be blunt here: Our critics are really fucking stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy.
So I read with great relish, and with a sliver of unease, David Hollingshead’s provocative essay, “Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong.” Hollingshead dives headfirst into the more and less ridiculous interpretations of humanities scholarship from its detractors—grumpy editorialists, nitwit champions of some ever‑brief “common sense,” sun‑bleached lawmakers, Atlantic writers. The payoff, for me, is this:
I have to be blunt here: Our critics are really fucking stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy. We need to stop treating their trolling as legitimate debate, and we need to stop apologizing for our work.
As a proudly credentialed humanist critic, and as someone who has long believed that (as I put it a decade ago) “our enemies, no matter how much power they wield over us, are clownish and laughable and vile,” I can do nothing but cheer in response to this stirring call to arms.
There is a wrinkle, though. I was struck by the absence of two words from the piece, in any form. They are “labor” and “union.” That omission doesn’t diminish the piece’s force or its truth about our adversaries or the enduring value of our work. Yet, when we examine the conditions under which that work happens, under the institutions that do—and do not—nurture it, the picture shifts in telling, and occasionally discouraging, ways for the humanities.
It is austerity—the blighting redirection of every dime and dollar toward ultra-elite profit and cascadingly away from literally anything else—that fixes all our horizons.
Put another way: the sustained decimation of higher education, while among the purest expressions of a vital public service you could imagine, has drawn in a cohort of humanists—some not its authors, some among its fiercest critics. Yet any grand project relies on an army of functionaries, embedded within the mission, who bring varying degrees of enthusiasm, ambivalence, or—even where appropriate—existential worry. Scan the upper administrative echelons of any major institution. You will not find them populated only by feral economists, BigTech overlords, or archetypes of sociopathic ambition. Neither field nor discipline reliably predicts one’s stance toward the hard, brutal, ever‑expanding reality of austerity.
And it is austerity that sets the bar. It is austerity—the blighting redirection of every dime and dollar toward ultra‑elite profit and cascadingly away from literally anything else—that fixes all our horizons. We are, in other words, faced with a problem that isn’t simply about people or intentions or even intellect; it is, in a classical sense, a matter of structural conflict. The managerial classes are not the originators of a decades‑long, nationwide divestment drive—they were here long before the current vogue for DOGE‑era austerity—and they aren’t usually the Senators or billionaires either. What they are is a segment of the labor force hired to rationalize that divestment, to manage it, to make it appear orderly and inevitable. That is the game.
I know friends who would say that the problem lies with their own boss, their own CFO, their own vice‑provost. Who’s to argue with that? But as a trusted colleague keeps reminding us, they describe what modern institutions inherently are. It may be true, as the old saying would have it, that the institution will never love you back. And it may be that strapped institutions, like troubled families, each have their own version of misery. But the larger and nearer point is that, for all their differences in tone, the managerial ranks do what they do and speak the way they speak because they inhabit a position tied to the very premises of austerity—an in‑built, non‑negotiable framework. The job isn’t to rebuke the governing idea that less can be more, or that slow fiscal starvation can be compatible with renewal, but to manage its execution with as little trouble as possible.
Recognize this, take it to heart, and you’ll see that all the tics and habits of the managerial world—its compliance fetish, its reflex to defer to bureaucratic form over proven practice, its ritual of “assessment,” its credulity toward whatever new tech fix happens to glitter, most glaringly in the current AI frenzy—will suddenly acquire in you a stark clarity. Beyond and beneath the bustle of busybody management there lies a deeper, more troubling incapacity: an inability to conjure a coherent, humane, future‑oriented vision for the institution, one that isn’t just a patched‑together tableau of consultancy speak, corporate triumphalism, and a chatbot’s rhythm.
If your job sits under the sharp gaze of upper management, you don’t need me to tell you that these are precisely the signature habits of a whole executive subculture. How could you miss it when every day brings a new spreadsheet, a new metric, a fresh, dreary jab in the gut? My friend was right: after enough exposure, you can’t unsee it.
Then again, you might not even need the job to sense the broader reality. Take a breath and consider the current political climate—its narrowed horizons and stifling stalemate. Then look at how neatly all of this aligns with the capture of a political party—the ostensibly “progressive” one—by unwavering technocrats: a faith in bureaucratic adjustment, in precise, incremental refinement, and in a method of governance that treats austerity as a steady, almost genteel practice. “Grim shit” was one observer’s succinct verdict, and who could gainsay that?
*
We should be clear, though. The point isn’t that a cadre of villainous personalities reigns over this sterile machine, the familiar caricature of mustachioed villains that Hollingshead and I have referenced. If you’re lucky, your upper administrative ranks aren’t populated by the doped‑up podcasters or the “do‑your‑own‑research” zealots. In truth, it isn’t hard to spot real virtues tucked into this discouraging panorama. Look closely and you’ll notice a layer of people who are genuinely striving to make the best of a bad situation for their colleagues; to limit the scale of disaster; to keep some lights on and preserve as much of the mission as possible for a time when constraints might ease; to curb the human costs as much as can be managed. I understand that these are complicated relations to austerity, and they aren’t the worst imaginable outcomes.
This is why…we need unions more urgently now, inside this moment of accelerated dismantling, than perhaps at any other time since the ‘50s.
What unions are not—again, I insist, as a matter of structure—is a repudiation of austerity. They are not a perpetual refusal to admit that the present collapse might, in the fullness of time, yield better collective horizons. How could they be? It’s as if one asks the knife to serve as a ladle.
Here, then, is the case: THIS IS WHY WE NEED UNIONS. This is why, contrary to the fevered rants of Chambers of Commerce and the red‑baiting chatter of talk shows (and, as it turns out, Inside Higher Ed!), we require unions now more than perhaps any time since the 1950s. They perform the usual good work of any union—ensuring safe working conditions as the truest measure of mission integrity; reducing job precarity; insisting on best practices; and carrying a collective spirit that makes a vast mission feel possible again. They also stand up against fascist threats with a fierceness that is often absent in other administrative chambers (where, admittedly, the instinct has sometimes been to prioritize student protests against genocide). Bless them for that.
Yet unions like mine, and organizations like the AAUP, also become forums in which we can name the living fact of antagonism. The union doesn’t declare a particular executive villain; it articulates a fundamental truth: although the managerial ranks may at times align with some of our aims, they are also, by necessity, adversaries. They sit in a specific, institutionally defined position within a struggle over what counts as the common good.
We go to the union to protect our labor and that of our colleagues, and to preserve the best of our mission from being winnowed down into something cheapened and unrecognizable.
*
Small wonder that many of the labor force—from professors at most private colleges to others—remain unable to unionize. The union is, after all, how we secure a seat at the governance table, how we institutionalize—and legally affirm—the friction between workers and management. Management, with its spiraling compliance rituals and its inexorable push toward self‑serving bureaucratization, tends not to welcome this, and it’s not hard to see why. They resemble the current crop of stern, worried stewards who, facing the sober reality of a revived fascism, fret over the threat of “socialism.”
But unions do something else as well, something truly indispensable. At this grim and dangerous moment in our national decline, they may be the chief vehicle through which a lived, collective standpoint can be voiced with clarity and influence—that austerity itself is the crisis. You do not solve massive divestment by chasing the latest tech‑driven fix or yarat the next prize; you must stand together, defend labor, and, when necessary, mobilize through work actions to halt the march toward further ruin. Humanists are adept at speaking up, but they aren’t the only ones who do so.
But back to the bleak mood. Let me be blunt: for several years I have worn something like management’s hat—a kind of caretaker’s crown. The short version is that, as the “Head” of my unit (a clunkier, more bureaucratic title than “chair”), I am outside the union. Of all the miseries that role brings, being excluded from the union may be the worst.
As the years have piled up, that axiom has begun to taste increasingly like ashes in my mouth. It’s exhausting to defend the work of colleagues you deeply admire while also tending to the daily, sometimes ridiculous, compliance tasks that management requires. It’s not only because those tasks are tedious or because solidarity with colleagues demands constant abrasion with the administration. It’s because those tasks place you in a conflict of moves that is both existential and systemic, a tension that no amount of sub‑managerial skill can fully resolve. I once told a friend that it feels like moving from room to room, each filled with people entitled to look at me and say, “Dude, do better.”
And so, in my darkest hours, I try to imagine a different talk, with a different retired colleague. This one is a figure of considerable renown who—over many years—taught me a great deal. For years I used to tease him, because when we met at airports, he was forever in the business class line, while I—quite simply—tended to wait in the coach queue, among the ordinary folk.
“And you!” I’d holler. “A socialist! Among all those one‑percent creeps.”
One evening—after a day spent marching alongside colleagues on picket lines during what proved to be a powerful faculty strike—we revisited that bad joke over drinks at a neighborhood red‑sauce joint. In his spare way, he laid it out: “That’s exactly your problem,” he said. “You think everything is about your feelings, about whether people are likable. You need to learn: it’s not personal. All of this”—a sweeping motion toward our placards, our fired‑up colleagues, all that collective energy—“it’s not about you.”
It’s painful to admit how long I treated that as a punchline. I think of it now, on the bleakest days, and it speaks to me with far more force than it ever did before.
