Prior to the November 3 election, Donald Trump and GOP senators stressed
the urgency of putting Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court as soon
as possible because there was a good chance that the presidential
election would be decided there. And it still might. But it will not be a
replay of 2000, when SCOTUS ruled that the Florida recount should be
stopped and George W. Bush won the presidency by 537 votes.
Biden’s
putative Electoral College lead and his margin in each of the five
closest state races are too large to be overturned. But the 2020
presidential election might still be decided in the courts. The issue,
however, will not involve recounting or disqualifying votes, but rather
the legality of state legislatures voting to go against their state’s
popular votes in appointing their state’s electors.
Let me explain how the GOP might try to make this go down.
There
are five states with Republican-controlled legislatures in which Biden
will have won the popular vote—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin. If Trump and his allies were somehow able to persuade
any four of those five legislatures to appoint Trump rather than Biden
electors, Trump would win the Electoral College and the presidency.
Clearly this would be a stretch, but it is probably the best bet that
Trump and the Republican Party have outside of declaring martial law.
And it is an option that has widely been reported to have been floated
by Republican partisans in the weeks before November 3.
According
to Article II of the US Constitution, the authority to appoint Elctors
resides in State Legislatures: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner
as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to
the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may
be entitled in the Congress.” Since 1836, tradition and precedent have
consistently resulted in Electors being appointed according to popular
vote. Although the president is not elected by the people, Electors
historically have been, as we have seen most recently in 2016.
But
what would prevent individual legislatures in those five states from
doing otherwise? If four of these state legislatures voted to appoint
Trump rather than Biden Electors, Trump would reach the coveted 270 mark
and be re-elected by the Electoral College. Whether such rogue
appointments would withstand the legal challenge of Biden and the
Democrats would need to be decided in court. Such a move by the GOP
seems to be the most likely way for the Supreme Court to decide the 2020
presidential election as Trumpublicans had predicted.
Let me be clear: this would not be a matter of what are
called “faithless electors,” defined as those who pledged to vote for
one candidate but decide to vote otherwise. The strategy I’m sketching
out does not involve faithless electors, but rather state legislatures
appointing electors who have already pledged to vote for Trump. Three of
these five states (all but Georgia and Pennsylvania) outlaw faithless
electors. But if Biden holds his significant leads in all five of these
states, as it appears he will, Georgia and Pennsylvania would not be
sufficient to give Trump the presidency.
Nor does this strategy
involve Bill Barr’s Justice Department digging up enough evidence to
invalidate Biden’s election in court. The reason Barr recently
authorized investigations into voter fraud is the same reason that
McConnell’s Senate Republicans have been all over national news media
supporting Trump’s vague but loud claims of election fraud, and
Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo has assured reporters that there would
be a smooth transition in January to “a second Trump administration.”
Through the creation of clouds of ungrounded suspicion, Trumpublicans
seek to use print, televisual, and socially networked news media to
infuence enough elected Republican officials in these five states to
appoint Trump instead of Biden electors.
It is important to
remember that such influence does not depend on legislatures or news
media meeting legal standards of evidence. Trump’s affective politics
operate not in the legal sphere but in the mediasphere. He weaponizes
Twitter and TV to generate and intensify the shared sense among his
followers that all of them, especially Trump, have been aggrieved by
Democrats and the news media working together to stop him and them from
their rightful victory.
As Sarah Ahmed has taught us, affective
communities of hate emerge through the alignment of white supremacist
subjects with the nation (in this case their president). By intensifying
affective states of hate and fear, Trumpublicans will try to move their
legislative allies to act on their behalf. (And if you doubt whether
Republican legislatures would stoop to such measures, I encourage you to
revisit the lame-duck Republican legislation passed in North Carolina
in 2016 and Wisconin in 2018 to severely limit the powers of those
states’ newly elected Democratic governors before they were
inaugurated.)
Admittedly, the chance of something like this
succeeding remain slim. But it is not impossible. Short of invoking the
Insurrection Act and declaring martial law to prevent Biden from
assuming the presidency, persuading four of these five states to appoint
Trump electors may be the most likely way for the 2020 presidential
election to be decided in the Supreme Court, as Trump, McConnell, and
others have assured us it would be. In the highest court of the land,
law, evidence, and precedent are supposed to prevail. And if things were
to get that far, let’s hope that they will prevail, for the sake of
this nation’s democracy, and perhaps for the world.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Recipe for a Coup
Monday, November 14, 2016
Premediation as Normalization: The New York Times and "President-Elect Donald Trump"
In less than a week since the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times website counts over 300 uses of the phrase "President-Elect Donald [J.] Trump." The effect of this constant repetition of the phrase is to normalize his election, prompting a kind of affectivity of numbness and a sense of inevitability and legitimacy to him and his presidency.
There is a kind of sycophantic quality to this close attentiveness to Trump's every move, even in those cases where the Times is critical of his actions. It is the quotidian mediality of these usages, their weaving into the fabric of our media everyday, that has brought the US to this place we are now in, that have made Trump seem like a credible presidential candidate (and soon president) despite the editorial content of the Times and other media outlets.
Another way to put it, borrowing a distinction from J. L. Austin, is that these apparently constative speech acts, which seem only to describe or assert matters of fact, have a powerful performative function as well, in reiterating and legitimating the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, implicitly premediating both the vote of the Electoral College and his inauguration.
In saying this I am not making a claim that The New York Times is doing anything different from what they did when, for example, Barack Obama was elected in 2008. In fact, I am making the opposite point: that they are doing for Trump precisely what they would do for any president-elect.
By premediating a Trump presidency as if there was nothing extraordinary about it, The New York Times is in effect producing a counter-affect to the "not my president" protests that have been going on with increasing intensity since Wednesday and that will continue to intensify up to and perhaps beyond the moment when The New York Times silently and almost without notice shifts its everyday utterances from "President-elect Donald [J.] Trump" to "President Trump."
Here is a small curated sampling of those performative utterances by The New York Times.
**********************************************
Wednesday, November 9
“President-elect Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada will need to work together despite vast differences on climate change, trade and migrants.”
“U.S. President-elect Donald Trump should stay committed to the international nuclear deal with Iran, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency on Wednesday.”
“President-elect Donald Trump's victory Tuesday has prompted embattled pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli (SHKREL'-ee) to publicly debut some songs off the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album he bought for $2 million last year.”
Thursday, November 10
“President-elect Donald Trump is strongly considering naming his campaign chief Steve Bannon to serve as White House chief of staff, CNN reported on Thursday, citing a source with knowledge of the situation.”
“Advisers to president-elect Donald Trump have considered the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase for Treasury secretary, reports Kate Kelly of CNBC.”
“Aides to President-elect Donald Trump are considering Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas as a candidate for Treasury secretary, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.”
Friday, November 11
“U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is considering outgoing Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire for the post of defense secretary, the Washington Post reported on Friday, citing two sources familiar with the discussions.
“President-elect Donald J. Trump said Friday that he was likely to abandon the American effort to support ‘moderate’ opposition groups in Syria who are battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying ‘we have no idea who these people are.’”
“President-elect Donald Trump told the Wall Street Journal he is considering retaining parts of President Barack Obama's healthcare law including provisions letting parents keep adult children up to age 26 on insurance policies and barring insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.”
Saturday, November 12
“Even as President-elect Donald J. Trump vows to unify a divided nation, he faces a momentous decision over whether to make good on his oft-repeated campaign pledge to have a special prosecutor ‘lock up’ Hillary Clinton.”
“President-elect Donald Trump's policies are likely to make it harder for developing nations to obtain the growing finance they need to combat climate change, threatening one pillar of a 2015 international agreement to slow global warming.”
“President-elect Donald Trump has said he may keep some parts of his predecessor's signature health care overhaul. “
Sunday, November 13
“President-elect Donald Trump is seeking quick ways to withdraw the United States from a global accord to combat climate change, a source on his transition team said, defying broad international backing for the plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions.”
“President-elect Donald J. Trump appeared to soften some of his hardest-line campaign positions on immigration on Sunday, but he also restated his pledge to roll back abortion rights and used Twitter to lash out at his critics, leaving open the possibility that he would continue using social media in the Oval Office and radically change the way presidents speak to Americans.”
“U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has requested that a trial over a lawsuit by former students of his now-defunct Trump University be put on hold until after the presidential inauguration, according to a motion filed by his lawyer late Saturday.”
Monday. November 14
“President-elect Donald J. Trump has suggested he will end support, which some groups hope would encourage Saudi Arabia and Turkey to provide more sophisticated weapons.”
“President-elect Donald Trump is considering oil billionaire Harold Hamm and North Dakota Rep. Kevin Cramer to lead the Department of Energy.”
There is a kind of sycophantic quality to this close attentiveness to Trump's every move, even in those cases where the Times is critical of his actions. It is the quotidian mediality of these usages, their weaving into the fabric of our media everyday, that has brought the US to this place we are now in, that have made Trump seem like a credible presidential candidate (and soon president) despite the editorial content of the Times and other media outlets.
Another way to put it, borrowing a distinction from J. L. Austin, is that these apparently constative speech acts, which seem only to describe or assert matters of fact, have a powerful performative function as well, in reiterating and legitimating the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, implicitly premediating both the vote of the Electoral College and his inauguration.
In saying this I am not making a claim that The New York Times is doing anything different from what they did when, for example, Barack Obama was elected in 2008. In fact, I am making the opposite point: that they are doing for Trump precisely what they would do for any president-elect.
By premediating a Trump presidency as if there was nothing extraordinary about it, The New York Times is in effect producing a counter-affect to the "not my president" protests that have been going on with increasing intensity since Wednesday and that will continue to intensify up to and perhaps beyond the moment when The New York Times silently and almost without notice shifts its everyday utterances from "President-elect Donald [J.] Trump" to "President Trump."
**********************************************
Wednesday, November 9
“President-elect Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada will need to work together despite vast differences on climate change, trade and migrants.”
“U.S. President-elect Donald Trump should stay committed to the international nuclear deal with Iran, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency on Wednesday.”
“President-elect Donald Trump's victory Tuesday has prompted embattled pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli (SHKREL'-ee) to publicly debut some songs off the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album he bought for $2 million last year.”
Thursday, November 10
“President-elect Donald Trump is strongly considering naming his campaign chief Steve Bannon to serve as White House chief of staff, CNN reported on Thursday, citing a source with knowledge of the situation.”
“Advisers to president-elect Donald Trump have considered the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase for Treasury secretary, reports Kate Kelly of CNBC.”
“Aides to President-elect Donald Trump are considering Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas as a candidate for Treasury secretary, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.”
Friday, November 11
“U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is considering outgoing Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire for the post of defense secretary, the Washington Post reported on Friday, citing two sources familiar with the discussions.
“President-elect Donald J. Trump said Friday that he was likely to abandon the American effort to support ‘moderate’ opposition groups in Syria who are battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying ‘we have no idea who these people are.’”
“President-elect Donald Trump told the Wall Street Journal he is considering retaining parts of President Barack Obama's healthcare law including provisions letting parents keep adult children up to age 26 on insurance policies and barring insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.”
Saturday, November 12
“Even as President-elect Donald J. Trump vows to unify a divided nation, he faces a momentous decision over whether to make good on his oft-repeated campaign pledge to have a special prosecutor ‘lock up’ Hillary Clinton.”
“President-elect Donald Trump's policies are likely to make it harder for developing nations to obtain the growing finance they need to combat climate change, threatening one pillar of a 2015 international agreement to slow global warming.”
“President-elect Donald Trump has said he may keep some parts of his predecessor's signature health care overhaul. “
Sunday, November 13
“President-elect Donald Trump is seeking quick ways to withdraw the United States from a global accord to combat climate change, a source on his transition team said, defying broad international backing for the plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions.”
“President-elect Donald J. Trump appeared to soften some of his hardest-line campaign positions on immigration on Sunday, but he also restated his pledge to roll back abortion rights and used Twitter to lash out at his critics, leaving open the possibility that he would continue using social media in the Oval Office and radically change the way presidents speak to Americans.”
“U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has requested that a trial over a lawsuit by former students of his now-defunct Trump University be put on hold until after the presidential inauguration, according to a motion filed by his lawyer late Saturday.”
Monday. November 14
“President-elect Donald J. Trump has suggested he will end support, which some groups hope would encourage Saudi Arabia and Turkey to provide more sophisticated weapons.”
“President-elect Donald Trump is considering oil billionaire Harold Hamm and North Dakota Rep. Kevin Cramer to lead the Department of Energy.”
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
"Radical Mediation" (from Secret Life of Objects: Media Ecologies, São Paulo, August 3, 2015)
[NB: This is the text of the talk I gave in São Paulo on Aug 3 at The Secret Life of Objects: Media Ecologies. The middle section of the talk is crudely drawn from "Radical Mediation," which is forthcoming in the Fall 2015 Critical Inquiry.]
1. The Secret Life of Mediation
Three
Augusts ago, Erick Felinto and his collaborators staged a conference called
“The Secret Life of Objects: Materialities, Medialities, Temporalities.” A traveling circus disguised as a movable
feast, the conference featured different permutations of speakers in São Paulo,
Rio, Salvador, and Fortaleza. This year’s conference in São Paulo and Rio is
something of a sequel. The first conference was conceived and executed in
response to the rapid inflation of the theoretical bubble known as “speculative
realism” or “object-oriented ontology” (SR/OOO). “Secret Life of Objects-1” put
speculative realism in dialogue with media theory, particularly German media
theory, for the Brazilian academic public. It was no accident that Graham
Harman and Siegfried Zielinski were the only two scholars to speak in all four
cities, squaring off (though not really) in a scholarly remediation of King Kong vs. Godzilla. Other non-Brazilian speakers included Bruno
Latour, Steve Shaviro, Joachim Paech, and Sybille Krämer. I spoke in three
of the four cities as well; and as the only non-Brazilian speaker from the
first conference to be speaking at this one, I want to open my talk today by revisiting
the lecture Graham Harman gave in Rio in 2012.
Harman addressed
the conference theme by taking the secret life of objects to refer to his own position
that objects can never make contact, that all objects “withdraw” from
contact. He unfolded his argument
through a reading of Eric and Marshall McLuhan’s “Laws of Media,” reading Marshall
McLuhan’s famous slogan, “the medium is the message,” as a statement about
figure and ground. For Harman, McLuhan’s famous formulation insists that the
ground (the medium), not the figure (the message), is where the action is, unsurprisingly
echoing Harman’s claim about the withdrawn object (ground), in contrast to its
sensible or other qualities (figure). McLuhan provides Harman a way to argue
that objects are media, and that media, like objects, withdraw from contact
with either human subjects or other objects.
Throughout his
lecture, as in much of his published work, Harman spoke of different kinds of
contact, like direct, total, or partial.
I begin with his ideas about contact, particularly his claim that objects
(human or nonhuman) never come into contact with one another or can at best only
come into “partial contact,” in part because I have difficulty accepting, or
even finally understanding, what he means by direct or total contact, and why
he places so much pressure on whether contact is total or partial. Indeed contact seems to me to be the very
state of things for embodied or material humans and nonhumans. Are we ever in complete contact with every
aspect or quality or essence or being of other objects? I’m not even sure what this would mean. With
Merleau-Ponty, however, I believe that we are always immediately in contact within
and through our bodies with other animate and inanimate creatures and entities
that occupy, traverse, and make up what William James calls the pluriverse.
One problem I have
with Harman’s formulation is that he consistently treats contact (and
causation, which for him is connected logically and directly with contact) as
unidirectional. This unidirectionality
in thinking about contact and causality was evident when in answer to a
question from the audience he offered the example of touching another’s hand to
point out that one never touches the hand in its entirety, that one is never in
total contact with another’s hand.
Harman contended that it may be that one touches the epidermis, but what
of blood vessels, bones, tendons, nerves, ligaments, muscles, and so forth? First, it is not clear why one would need to
touch all of these things to be touching another person’s hand, or that the hand
is reducible to these constitutent elements. But more tellingly, the problem
with this example is that contact is seen as a fundamentally unidirectional interaction. Harman poses the question of contact in terms
of one person touching another’s hand rather than two hands (or two people)
touching one another, because he fails to think of contact going in more than
one direction at once, or to take seriously the idea that contact can be found
in the interaction, mutuality, or multidimensionality of agency and causation.
This unidirectionality
is crucial to Harman’s paradigmatic example of fire burning cotton, which he
borrows from the Occasionalists of medieval Islamic philosophy to support his
claim that objects can never come into contact. If fire burns cotton, Harman
argues, it does not come into contact with cotton’s texture or color or other
features but only with its flammability. Fire burns cotton. But why not think
of it in reverse, in terms of cotton being burned by fire? Or why describe it as fire burning cotton, as
if fire itself is an object like cotton, rather than itself an action, event,
or interaction? What if we thought of
fire burning cotton as a multidirectional event of cotton combusting, in which
case we would not be talking about two autonomous, independent objects (cotton
and fire) but rather one complex, collaborative, and transient event, the
combustion of cotton? But Harman chooses
instead to objectify fire, to insist on understanding something that is an
action, event, or interaction as one of the dramatis
personae in an object-oriented drama. This polemical use of the example of
fire burning cotton is emblematic of Harman’s argument as a whole, the way in
which humans and nonhumans, flows and relations, are either objectified and
made into autonomous entitites or dismissed as irrelevant, unreal, or
insignificant. To think instead of fire burning cotton as an event of
combustion lets us reject the idea that objects (or subjects for that matter)
are originary, are ontological starting points, but rather that they are the
outcomes of complex processes of mediation.
By mediation here I refer both to the physical-natural-organic-technological-economic
mediations that collectively generate cotton from seed, soil, water, sunlight,
and labor, and to the conceptual mediations which single out and purify cotton
or fire or an observer not only from one another but also from other objects
and entitities, events and phenomena. If we start not with objects but with mediation, we start already and immediately in the middle, with what we might
playfully want to think of as a form of mediation-oriented-ontology, or MOO.
2. Radical Mediation
Mediation has
become one of the central intellectual problems of the twenty-first century. The
question of mediation has come to the forefront in part because of
extraordinary technological acceleration in the late twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, the rampant proliferation of digital media technologies that
sometimes goes under the name of “mediatization.” Despite widespread theorizing
about media prompted by the intense mediatization of the past several decades,
John Guillory has contended “that the concept of mediation remains
undertheorized in the study of culture and only tenuously integrated into the
study of media.” Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska similarly “see mediation as
the underlying, and unaddressed, problem of the media.” Alex Galloway, Eugene
Thacker, and McKenzie Wark concur with these assessments, contending that “New
kinds of limitations and biases have made it difficult for media scholars to
take the ultimate step and consider the basic conditions of mediation.” In Excommunication Galloway, Thacker, and
Wark offer separate but complementary answers to the question of mediation: “Distracted by the tumult of concern around
what media do or how media are built,” they write in their collective
introduction, “have we not lost the central question: what is mediation?”
In
“Radical Mediation” I attempt to answer
this “central question.” I do not,
however, consider what media do or how they are built to be distractions from
the question of mediation, but rather part and parcel of it. Nor do I mean to limit the question of
mediation to what media do or how they are built, or to media themselves as
they are now conventionally understood. As I will suggest, mediation operates
not just across communication, representation, or the arts, but is a
fundamental process of human and nonhuman existence.
I
developed the concept of radical mediation, which alludes to William James’s
“radical empiricism,” in order to make related but independent arguments about
the dualistic character of mediation in the history of Western thought. I argue
that, although media and media technologies have operated and continue to
operate epistemologically as modes of knowledge production, they also function
ontologically (technically, bodily, materially) to generate and modulate
individual and collective affective moods or structures of feeling among
assemblages of humans and nonhumans. This affective mediation of collective
human and nonhuman assemblages operates independently of (and often more
efficaciously than) the production of knowledge. Like the way media operate
affectively to premediate potentialities, mediation must also be understood as
a process or event prior to, generative of, and ultimately not reducible to
particular media technologies. Mediation operates physically and materially as
an object, event, or process in the world, impacting humans and nonhumans
alike. Radical mediation participates in recent critiques of the dualism of the
Western philosophical tradition, which make up what I have elsewhere called the
nonhuman turn in twenty-first century studies. Indeed, as I suggest in the talk’s final
section, radical mediation might in some sense be understood as nonhuman
mediation.
To understand
radical mediation as affective and experiential rather than strictly visual is
to think about our immediate affective experience of mediation as that which is
felt, embodied, near—not distant from us, and thus not illuminated or pictured,
but experienced by us as living, embodied human and nonhuman creatures. Where
remediation focused largely on the visual aspects of mediation, radical
mediation would take into account the entire human sensorium. For radical
mediation, all bodies (whether human or nonhuman) are fundamentally media and
life itself a form of mediation.
As Walter Benjamin
had similarly noted about mechanical reproduction, the remediation of new
digital media has worked to bring our media devices nearer our bodily medium,
engaging us directly in what I have elsewhere characterized as the affective
life of media. The core of radical mediation is its immanence, is immediacy
itself—not the transparent immediacy that makes up half of remediation’s double
logic, but the embodied immediacy of the event of mediation. In our affective, bodily interactions with
media devices, indeed with the world of humans and nonhumans, there is no
distance or perspective from which to “see” immediacy, from which immediacy
could be made into something one could paint or draw or re-present, or
something that needed mediation. “Bodies,” writes Karen Barad apropos the
invertebrate brittlestar, “are not situated in
the world; they are part of the
world.” The same claim, I would aver, can be made for media and mediation. In
theorizing the affective embodiment of radical mediation, we should attend to
the immediate affective experience of mediation itself. But to suggest that mediation is immediate is
to swim against a strong popular current running through the history of Western
thought, one which would categorically distinguish mediation from immediacy. In
the books Remediation and Premediation, I set out to challenge this
distinction. The concept of radical
mediation further problematizes the distinction of mediation from immediacy.
Hegel’s
influential critique of immediacy to the contrary, radical mediation does not
take mediation as coming or standing between already actualized subjects,
objects, actants, or entities (or even as being within objects) but rather
treats mediation as the process, action, or event that generates or provides
the conditions for the emergence of subjects and objects, for the individuation
of entities within the world. In this sense radical mediation has affinities
with Gilbert Simondon’s concepts of individuation, transduction, and
ontogenesis. The process of individuation, whose true principle Simondon identifies
as mediation, “must be considered primordial, for it is this process that at
once brings the individual into being and determines all the distinguishing
characteristic of its development, organization and modalities.” Although
Simondon considers individuation “to form only one part of an ontogenetic
process,” he also maintains that “in a certain sense, ontogenetic development [devenir] itself can be considered as
mediation.”
In radical
mediation all connections (or contact) involve modulation, translation, or
transformation, not just linking. I
insist upon this distinction because connection could be taken to imply
experiences (or experienced relations) that preexist their mediation, whereas I
understand mediation as fundamentally what Simondon calls “transductive,” part
and parcel of, yet not reducible to, experience. For Simondon a relation is “a
way of being and not a simple connection between two terms that could be
adequately comprehended using concepts because they both enjoy what amounts to
an independent existence.” Following James, I refuse to separate mediation from
other experienced relations. Mediation does not stand between preexistent
subjects and objects,with their own “independent existence.” Nor does mediation prevent immediate experience
or relations, but on the contrary transduces or generates immediate experiences
and relations. Not only is mediation immediate, but it is also individuating,
operating through a process of becoming to generate individual subjects and
objects through what James might have meant to understand as experienced
relations, subjects and objects which are themselves remediations.
Another way to
explain radical mediation is through Charles Sanders Peirce’s thinking about
mediation in the later part of his life, particularly his conviction that
“Mediation is more than the conjunction of two dyadic relations,” but a form of
thirdness “operative in Nature.” In their later years both Peirce and James worked
towards different but not entirely incompatible metaphysical understandings of
what Barad has characterized as “agential realism,” in which relations or
mediations are seen to be more real for what they do or how they act than for
what they mean or represent. Indeed despite being primarily associated with
language and linguistics, Peirce in his later theories of biosemiosis moved
even more radically than did James towards an ontological understanding of
mediation, particularly in relation to nonhuman nature, as
non-representational. Thus for Peirce a sunflower, for example, can be
understood as a mediation, or “representamen,” of the sun: “If a sunflower, in
turning towards the sun, becomes by that very act fully capable, without
further condition, of reproducing a sunflower which turns in precisely
corresponding ways toward the sun, and of doing so with the same reproductive
power, the sunflower would become a Representamen of the sun.”
What Peirce here
calls “Representamen” he elsewhere, and increasingly in his later work, comes
to understand as mediation. But in either case each is a category of what he
calls “thirdness,” a form of thought whose most radical formulation is
operative in nonhuman nature, as for example when Peirce claims that “thought
is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of
crystals, and throughout the purely physical world.” As thirdness, mediation does not come between
preformed subjects and objects, but operates like that nonhuman process or
activity which generates honeycombs, crystalline structures, sunflowers, or
language. Peirce sees this as the same
process from which human and nonhuman signification emerges, with or without
what we conventionally understand as thought. In linking radical mediation to
Peirce’s category of “thirdness” I mean to underscore the notion that all
activity is mediation, and that for radical mediation there is no discontinuity
between human and nonhuman agency or semiosis. Although Peirce is notorious for
his terminological inconsistency, he associated mediation with thirdness as
early as 1875. As Winfried Nöth points out, from 1890 on he applies mediation
fairly consistently “to phenomena from logic to metaphysics and natural
philosophy. In evolutionary terms, thirdness is the ‘tendency to take habits’
[…]. Thirdness manifests itself in ‘generality, infinity, continuity,
diffusion, growth, and intelligence.’” In his later writings, Peirce regularly
treats Thirdness as a metaphysical category which “is operative in
Nature.”
In asserting the
radical nature of mediation I am not referring only to the way that media
theorists talk about the ubiquitous and quotidian nature of our media
everyday—phones, tablets, TVs, laptops, and gaming platforms; Facebook,
Twitter, email, Tumblr, Reddit, and Tinder; securitization, finance, surveillance,
and transaction data. Rather I am referring as well to the ubiquitous nature of
mediation itself—flowers, trees, rivers, lakes, and deserts; microbes, insects,
fish, mammals, and birds; digestion, respiration, sensation, reproduction,
circulation, and cognition; planes, trains, and automobiles; factories,
schools, and malls; nation-states, NGOs, indigenous communities, or religious
organizations; rising sea levels, increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2,
melting icecaps, intensified droughts, violent storms. Following the
groundbreaking work of Jussi Parikka and others, radical mediation also insists
upon taking account of the multiple materialities of our communication media,
their dependence upon destructive extractive industries for the minerals and
other materials from which media devices are built, their extravagant use of
electrical power with all of its attendant environmental costs, and their
proliferation and persistence as technical waste, whose ecological consequences
remain largely unknown. But in calling
attention to the costs, destruction, and waste of mediation I do not mean to
understand these materialities simply as economic or industrial supports or
infrastructure for media and mediation, but as mediations themselves no different
from the texts, photos, sounds, videos, or transaction data that circulate on
our media devices and that provide the data for corporate, technical, and
governmental surveillance.
Radical mediation
does not take mediation as a unifying or totalizing epistemological concept
that holds together disparate and heterogeneous practices, events, and
entities. Nor does it maintain ontologically that there are only disparate and
heterogeneous objects and things that do not relate to each other. Rather
radical mediation takes existence itself as a form of mediation. Because
mediation is always transformative, one of the things that is radical about
mediation is its ability dramatically to change scale, moving among smaller and
larger, simpler and more complex, briefer and more extended, assemblages or
entities. Radical mediation insists that it is mediation all the way down. Even the smallest or most basic components
are mediations, which by scaling up can be remediated into larger entities,
just as by scaling down, larger or more complex entities and events can be
remediated into smaller or less complex ones.
Such a
multi-scalar approach to mediation is essential to making sense of phenomena like
climate change, the sixth extinction, or the anthropocene, which names the
human as the dominant influence on the planet. In its recognition that humans
must now be understood as climatological or geological forces on the planet
that operate just as nonhumans would, the anthropocene demands a form of
mediation that can operate on multiple scales, independent of human will,
belief, or desires. One of the most striking legacies of the 2011 Sendai
earthquake, for example, and its dramatic impact on the Fukashima nuclear power
plant (as with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster some twenty-five years earlier) was
the reminder that the nuclear reactions produced in damaged fuel rods operate
according to their own time-scale having more to do with the half-life of uranium
than with the periodicity of the mediatic system. These reactions might be
minimized, modulated, or redirected, not by acting upon them directly as if
they were inert, passive matter, or nonhuman physical processes, but rather by
accepting the fact that their agency, trajectory, and development operate
according to their own laws, their own temporality, their own scale. Remediation (both in the environmental and in
the medialogical sense) must take these radically different scales into
account.
3. The Mediation Ecology of Ebola
Radical
mediation calls for a shift of focus from media to mediation. I want to
conclude by thinking about this shift in relation to the conference’s focus on
“media ecologies.” What would it mean to
think not of ecologies of media, but ecologies of mediation? How might this help us to move away from
thinking only about communication media and to begin thinking more broadly
about all sorts of human and nonhuman media, especially about the process of
mediation itself?
To pursue these
questions I want briefly to take as an example of mediation ecology the Ebola
outbreaks that peaked in 2014 but that are still, to a lesser and much less
visible extent, ongoing today in parts of Africa. The radical mediation of the
human body might provide a way to make sense of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, by
starting in the middle with mediation itself.
To start with mediation is not to suggest, however, that we start with
the way print, televisual, and networked news media worked together to generate
a high level of fear regarding the contagiousness of the Ebola virus particularly
through playing on American media public fears of Africa as a “dark continent”
from which danger of all sorts would be likely to arise from unprotected
contact with dark bodies. Nor do I mean that we should start with how popular
media accounts of Ebola remediated literature, film, and other narratives of
contagious epidemics in order to premediate potential medical catastrophes. As
useful, illuminating, and on point as such approaches might be, they remain
within the traditional concept of mediation as representation or communication
that I have been contesting here today.
By
starting in the middle with mediation, I mean instead to suggest that the
consequences of Ebola mediation are no different in kind and cannot be
separated from those produced by the Ebola virus itself. Ebola mediation is not
distinct in kind from the Ebola virus but a hybrid or mutant variant of the
virus, an effect and a constituent of Ebola in the same way that people
infected with the disease are also effects of Ebola. Thus in October 2014 when
several US states invoked the medically accepted 21-day incubation period of
Ebola to impose mandatory quarantines on specific individuals who had been
directly exposed to the Ebola virus, it was the mediashock generated by Ebola
mediation rather than empirical evidence of infection that brought about the
quarantine. Just as being infected can
get you put into quarantine, so can the media’s or the state’s fear of
infection. As an extension of the virus which works in tandem with its
virological elements as part of its destructiveness, Ebola mediation was far
more widely distributed than Ebola itself. More people were at risk for
quarantine as a result of the collective affectivity or mood (generated and
transmitted by media and politicians) than by the virus itself.
To
think Ebola in terms of radical mediation is also to remember that the Ebola
virus is “zoonotic,” that is, it crosses over from nonhumans to humans. In Spillover, David Quammen makes it clear
that as far as Ebola and related diseases are concerned there is no categorical
or epidemiological distinction between human and nonhuman host animals. In between outbreaks of the disease, Ebola is
thought to reside in bat colonies from which the virus can be passed on to
gorillas and humans. In transgressing the boundaries between humans and
nonhumans, Ebola acts as a form of viral mediation that “spills over” from organic
to inorganic form, from its virological contagion through the circulation of
bodily fluids to its medialogical contagion through the circulation of print,
televisual, and socially networked media. There can be no firm ontological
boundaries drawn between Ebola virus and Ebola mediation in regard to
quarantines and other political and social acts of the state. As the
overreaction of US state governments dramatized, the confinement of citizens
and contagious bodies can occur not only as a result of being physiologically infected
by the disease, but also from the viral affectivity of fear. Far more contagious than the disease itself,
premediated fear extends the means and sites of Ebola’s contagion through its
mediation by news, or by politicians. This is by no means to say that the
effects of quarantine are identical or equivalent to the effects of being
infected by Ebola, or that quarantines are necessarily a bad technique for
slowing the spread of infection. Rather
it is to say that the ontological spillover of Ebola mediation flattens the
distinctions between disease and mediation in much the same way that the virus
refuses to distinguish between human and nonhuman hosts.
While
in some sense it would not be wrong to say that the mediation of Ebola is more
socially and politically contagious than the virus itself, in thinking through
the concept of radical mediation I do not want to make a categorical
distinction between the virus and its mediation, not to treat Ebola mediation
as a representation of Ebola rather than as part of Ebola itself. It is not simply a metaphor to say that in
2014 print, televisual, and networked media caught Ebola and transmitted it to
the public. Unlike the metaphor of computer viruses, to think Ebola as radical
mediation is not meant as a metaphor. Jussi Parikka has persuasively traced the
use of the viral metaphor of (especially) AIDS to describe malicious computer
software programs, and to explore the ways in which computer viruses are
modeled on organic viruses in terms of their threat, their means of
reproduction, and their contagion. He has compellingly explained how viruses
and the viral become models for culture and technology and media, how both
kinds of virus, computer and biological, employ diagrams of contagion.
In
talking about Ebola mediation, however, I want to make a different but not
unrelated point about how Ebola itself functions as radical mediation. Mediation
is not metaphorical of Ebola, mediation is metonymous with it. Ebola mediation
is not, like metaphor would be, analogous to Ebola but, like metonomy, is
continuous with it. This metonymic continuity between virological infection in
one's body or immune system and medialogical infection can be seen most
tellingly in the way that scientific accounts employ the concept of “mediation”
to describe the operation of the Ebola virus: “The main Ebola surface
protein, encoded by the gp gene, mediates entry
of the virus into the host cell. . . . VP40 proteins interact
with the viral membrane and with each other. The membrane interaction
is mediated by the short
C-terminal domain, and the relatively large N-terminal domain is
responsible for binding VP40 proteins to each other.” Although used
similarly to its conventional historical denotation, the mediation described
here does not strictly stand between the Ebola virus and the world. Because the
virus is parasitic on its host to survive, the mediation of Ebola’s entry into
the host cell by its surface protein constitutes the very contagiousness of the
Ebola virus. The Ebola protein’s operation
in binding to a host is what guarantees its continued existence. In Ebola (and related viruses) mediation
generates its infectiousness through transforming the binding together of
proteins, genes, and a suitable host into Ebola. Without the radical mediation
of these specific proteins, Ebola would not exist.
I have only just begun to partially sketch out
here what I might tentatively call a “mediation ecology” of the 2014 Ebola
outbreak, in contradistinction to its media ecology. From its inception, media ecology has been
concerned to look at the ways in which communication media interacted to create
an ecology or environment that impacted human culture, society, or
perception. Although often concerned
with the coevolution of humans and technology, an important difference from
what I want to think of as mediation ecology is that media ecology generally
brackets out the nonhuman, organic and inorganic relations that made up
ecological science proper. Media ecology
also tends to bracket our mediation, treating media objects as already
preexisting their interactions or remediations. Media ecology focuses largely
on communication media, treating them separately from other human and nonhuman,
natural and social, entities or actants, or as related through an ecology,
through cybernetic or even autopoietic systems.
“Mediation” ecology might instead think about how various elements at
different scales are transformed or changed, through processes of mediation,
remediation, and premediation. Going
beyond the bounds of communication media that have traditionally defined media
ecology, mediation ecology might also provide another answer to the question of
the secret life of objects, and Harman’s contention that objects can never
touch. The secret life of objects is
their ongoing participation in ecologies of mediation. As this brief sketch of a mediation ecology of
Ebola can help to show, contact is not something that does or does not follow
from the existence of objects. Rather
the secret life of mediation ecology shows us that contact, mediation, and
transformation describe the very state of things in which humans and nonhumans
already find themselves and through which they have always made their way.
Friday, January 30, 2015
Public Authority: The End of Public Higher Education in Wisconsin?
[REPOSTED FROM RAGMAN's CIRCLES]
In Scott Walker’s first budget in 2011, the one that included the notorious Act 10, which outlawed the formation of, and any substantive bargaining from, public employee unions, there was a proposal to split off UW-Madison from the UW System by making Madison a “public authority.” Back in 2011 plans for this separation of Madison from the UW System went so far that Biddy Martin, then UW-Madison Chancellor, had prepared the text for a new Chapter 37, which would apply only to UW-Madison and would govern it as a public authority that preserved all of the protections for academic freedom, faculty governance, and tenure that are written in to the Wisconsin Statutes. This 2011 proposal would have left the legal status of the rest of the System unchanged under Chapter 36, which lays out the statutory authority (and guidelines) for the University of Wisconsin System, the only university system in the nation so authorized. Indeed in 2010, when I was recruited to University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies (and when Scott Walker was only a candidate for the governorship of Wisconsin), this statutory protection was held up as a point of pride for the UW System because it provided more substantive academic protections than in other states.
In 2011 resistance both by the UW System and by Republican lawmakers with UW campuses in their districts caused this plan to be dropped; instead the Republican legislature took the option behind door number 2, which was to slash funding for the System and freeze tuition, thus forcing severe budget cuts on all campuses, including Madison. Knowing that no major proposal from Scott Walker could go forward without consultation with his big-money handlers about how it would impact his future as a presidential candidate, I do not think that this public authority idea was raised lightly, or that it was dropped from Walker’s ALEC-inspired playbook simply because of initial opposition in 2011. Indeed the idea has resurfaced in 2015 in the run-up to Walker’s budget announcement on February 3, but this time in relation to the whole system, without singling out Madison. What would it mean to transform the University of Wisconsin System from a state agency to a public authority? To answer this question we need to understand what the consequences would be for the UW System, how this might serve as a model for other red states (think Kansas, for example), and how it could be leveraged to propel Walker’s campaign for the 2016 GOP nomination.
Although all of the details are not filled in, it looks like Scott Walker’s bold presidential campaign move for 2016 will be the transformation of the university system from a state agency dependent on taxpayer funding to a quasi-independent "public-benefit corporation," thus legalizing in practice what has already been happening in theory, the corporatization of the University of Wisconsin System. By granting the System autonomy and freedom to make its own administrative/business decisions and therefore, or so the neoliberalism of the ALEC playbook goes, Walker and his Republican allies will enable the System to find “efficiencies” and raise revenues that will compensate for the cuts in state funding, which according to an announcement on January 27, will return to their 1998 levels with a $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System in the upcoming biennial. In addition to these devastating cuts, the first year of which for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would be equivalent to the entire budget of the Lubar School of Business, the danger of this transformation to semi-private corporation is that System employees and faculty would lose their statutory protections (things like tenure, faculty governance, job security, and academic freedom are currently protected by state statutes) in favor of the contractual protections offered by the Board of Regents, who will now have almost complete authority over the UW System.
The problem with this change, of course, is that 16 of the 18 Regents are political appointees (appointed by the governor)—two ex-officio and 14 on staggered seven-year terms—as opposed to being elected, say, as they are (on a campus-by-campus basis) in Michigan, where I formerly taught. That means, four years into the Walker administration, that more than half of the governor-appointed Regents are Walker appointees; before the end of Scott Walker's second term all of them will be. So by the end of this next biennial budget (2017), tenure and faculty governance, as well as such decisions like the appropriate number of campuses needed for the System, will be at the whims of a board made up entirely of Scott Walker appointees.
The political brilliance of this move (make no mistake, Walker and his handlers are brilliant electoral politicians) is that if and when these protections are stripped in the next couple of years, the blame will not go to the Governor or the legislature but to the Walker-appointed Board of Regents, who will claim to have acted responsibly and in the system's interests to make changes to deal with the terrible crisis caused by the Republican tax cuts. When tuition is raised and campuses closed, it will not be the state government that did it, but those egg-headed academics and their Board of Regents. Indeed in a January 28 interview on right-wing radio, Walker premediated the possibility of Regents raising faculty workloads: "I think you were right, your comments today on Right Wisconsin, that maybe it's time for faculty and staff to start thinking about teaching more classes and doing more work. And this authority frees up the UW administration to make those sorts of requests, which I think are needed not only here but across the country."
In considering the financial situation in Wisconsin, it is important to recognize that the current budget crisis is not, as in 2008, a systematic breakdown, but the product of political decisions made by Walker and the Republican legislature in Madison. The deficit has been manufactured by $800 million in tax cuts, mainly to property owners, that the state could not afford. Unfortunately, rather than highlight this fact and suggest that the easiest way to get out of this budget crisis would be to roll back (if only temporarily) the tax cuts instituted in Walker’s first term, our University System leaders have accepted that deficit, and the reduced University funding that it has prompted, as a given, a natural fact like Lake Michigan or the North Woods. There seems to be no effort to be proactive, to try to control or at least shape the narrative to counter Walker's anticipated (and widely forecasted) budget announcement on February 3.
UW System president Ray Cross is doing little or nothing to combat the dominant narrative in the media, which is to say the Walker administration’s narrative. Locally our Chancellor's stance has mainly been to prepare to deal with the massive and devastating cuts that are coming down the pike, preparing to address the situation in more detail when the specifics become known on February 3. And even though it does not look good for UWM, there are many people in Madison who feel that they will benefit from this shift to a public authority, especially if they are given the opportunity to set their own tuition rates. Being free from the state HR and purchasing systems and being able to follow the Michigan model in raising out-of-state tuition and increasing out-of-state students, Madison should eventually do quite well financially, although like University of Michigan they will less and less serve as a public institution serving the people of their state. But in the short run, these draconian budget cuts will be impossible to accommodate without cutting hundreds of part-time and full-time faculty and staff. Indeed UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank has said explicitly that there would be no way to absorb such a dramatic revenue cut without “laying off” employees in every one of her units, particularly on the educational side of the university.
Most disturbingly, System President Cross has painted the proposal as something of a bargain or negotiation, in which the State gives the University System autonomy “in exchange” for rolling back state funding of the System to 1998 levels and providing guaranteed funding from sales tax revenue, albeit starting with a budget cut back to 1998 levels. Cross responded to the proposal to make the UW System a public authority in a document from the Office of the President released on January 26. The document is full of unsubstantiated assertions about financial benefits gained from public authority status. There appears to have been no research conducted on whether this will indeed be true, no debate or discussion among faculty, staff, and students about whether this is a change worth pursuing.
In the document Cross begins by accepting the Walker claim that these budget cuts to the system have been “dictated” by the "large state budget shortfall.” He writes: "Looking ahead, a large state budget shortfall dictates that the UW System will be receiving a sizeable funding cut. This follows significant cuts over the last three budgets as well as a continuation of the current tuition freeze for the upcoming biennium. The UW System expects a $300 million cut over the 2015‐17 biennium.” As I have noted, this shortfall doesn't "dictate" a funding cut; Walker and his allies dictate that. The current budget shortfall is a direct consequence of recent property tax cuts that the state had no way to pay for.
In welcoming the new freedoms of a public authority, Cross then glosses over the hundreds (if not thousands) of people who will lose their jobs to accommodate these cuts as posing "difficult and significant choices" that will be compensated for in the long run by making the UW System "more nimble and more responsive," demonstrating a true insensitivity to the people who make Wisconsin's universities work and the students they serve: "To manage these cuts, the UW System and its institutions will be forced to make difficult and significant choices in the short term…. In the longer term, the flexibilities granted through the authority and the consistency generated by the dedicated, sustainable funding source will help make the UW System a stronger, more nimble and more responsive higher educational system for generations to come."
His attempt to reassure system faculty, staff, and students that tenure and shared governance will be protected raises as many questions as it answers. He writes: "Shared governance and tenure--two principles that are critical to delivering a high‐quality education--will be managed by the Board of Regents through board policy rather than by the legislature through statute. This is the standard among many other state higher education systems.” Note that Cross does not say that tenure and shared governance will be “protected” but that they will be "managed" by the governor-appointed Board of Regents. This “management” by the Regents is fundamentally weaker than the current statutory protections in Wisconsin's Chapter 36. What Cross (and all UW System leaders) should be advocating for, if the move to a public authority must go through, is that the statutory protections of Chapter 36 be imported into a new Chapter 37, which will form the basis of the transformation of the UW System into a public authority. Anything less makes such protections subject to the whims of an appointed, not elected, Board of Regents, which represents a de facto power shift from the legislative to the executive branch of state government, a de facto weakening of local control. (Thanks to Aneesh Aneesh for this observation.)
Finally, it is important to note that while Wisconsin may be the first state to corporatize its university system as a public authority, it is unlikely to be the last. In a Republican Party committed to privatizing education at all levels, from K-16 and beyond, what happens in Wisconsin will be closely watched—and if successful, emulated in statehouses across the nation. The clever combination of granting “freedom” and “autonomy” to University leaders while simultaneously slashing even further the obligations of state governments to fund public higher education, will be a centerpiece of Walker’s presidential campaign and a model for Republican governors nationwide to consolidate power in their states.
To conclude, I would invoke a Biblical analogy I have used elsewhere to criticize the UW System's participation in Scott Walker's online flexible degrees. If these proposed changes succeed, Ray Cross will have sold the University of Wisconsin System's birthright to Scott Walker for less than a mess of pottage, and is likely to go down in the history of public higher education as a modern-day Esau, the System President on whose watch a once-respected public University System was reduced to a second-rate “public-benefit corporation.”
Richard Grusin
In Scott Walker’s first budget in 2011, the one that included the notorious Act 10, which outlawed the formation of, and any substantive bargaining from, public employee unions, there was a proposal to split off UW-Madison from the UW System by making Madison a “public authority.” Back in 2011 plans for this separation of Madison from the UW System went so far that Biddy Martin, then UW-Madison Chancellor, had prepared the text for a new Chapter 37, which would apply only to UW-Madison and would govern it as a public authority that preserved all of the protections for academic freedom, faculty governance, and tenure that are written in to the Wisconsin Statutes. This 2011 proposal would have left the legal status of the rest of the System unchanged under Chapter 36, which lays out the statutory authority (and guidelines) for the University of Wisconsin System, the only university system in the nation so authorized. Indeed in 2010, when I was recruited to University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies (and when Scott Walker was only a candidate for the governorship of Wisconsin), this statutory protection was held up as a point of pride for the UW System because it provided more substantive academic protections than in other states.
In 2011 resistance both by the UW System and by Republican lawmakers with UW campuses in their districts caused this plan to be dropped; instead the Republican legislature took the option behind door number 2, which was to slash funding for the System and freeze tuition, thus forcing severe budget cuts on all campuses, including Madison. Knowing that no major proposal from Scott Walker could go forward without consultation with his big-money handlers about how it would impact his future as a presidential candidate, I do not think that this public authority idea was raised lightly, or that it was dropped from Walker’s ALEC-inspired playbook simply because of initial opposition in 2011. Indeed the idea has resurfaced in 2015 in the run-up to Walker’s budget announcement on February 3, but this time in relation to the whole system, without singling out Madison. What would it mean to transform the University of Wisconsin System from a state agency to a public authority? To answer this question we need to understand what the consequences would be for the UW System, how this might serve as a model for other red states (think Kansas, for example), and how it could be leveraged to propel Walker’s campaign for the 2016 GOP nomination.
Although all of the details are not filled in, it looks like Scott Walker’s bold presidential campaign move for 2016 will be the transformation of the university system from a state agency dependent on taxpayer funding to a quasi-independent "public-benefit corporation," thus legalizing in practice what has already been happening in theory, the corporatization of the University of Wisconsin System. By granting the System autonomy and freedom to make its own administrative/business decisions and therefore, or so the neoliberalism of the ALEC playbook goes, Walker and his Republican allies will enable the System to find “efficiencies” and raise revenues that will compensate for the cuts in state funding, which according to an announcement on January 27, will return to their 1998 levels with a $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System in the upcoming biennial. In addition to these devastating cuts, the first year of which for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would be equivalent to the entire budget of the Lubar School of Business, the danger of this transformation to semi-private corporation is that System employees and faculty would lose their statutory protections (things like tenure, faculty governance, job security, and academic freedom are currently protected by state statutes) in favor of the contractual protections offered by the Board of Regents, who will now have almost complete authority over the UW System.
The problem with this change, of course, is that 16 of the 18 Regents are political appointees (appointed by the governor)—two ex-officio and 14 on staggered seven-year terms—as opposed to being elected, say, as they are (on a campus-by-campus basis) in Michigan, where I formerly taught. That means, four years into the Walker administration, that more than half of the governor-appointed Regents are Walker appointees; before the end of Scott Walker's second term all of them will be. So by the end of this next biennial budget (2017), tenure and faculty governance, as well as such decisions like the appropriate number of campuses needed for the System, will be at the whims of a board made up entirely of Scott Walker appointees.
The political brilliance of this move (make no mistake, Walker and his handlers are brilliant electoral politicians) is that if and when these protections are stripped in the next couple of years, the blame will not go to the Governor or the legislature but to the Walker-appointed Board of Regents, who will claim to have acted responsibly and in the system's interests to make changes to deal with the terrible crisis caused by the Republican tax cuts. When tuition is raised and campuses closed, it will not be the state government that did it, but those egg-headed academics and their Board of Regents. Indeed in a January 28 interview on right-wing radio, Walker premediated the possibility of Regents raising faculty workloads: "I think you were right, your comments today on Right Wisconsin, that maybe it's time for faculty and staff to start thinking about teaching more classes and doing more work. And this authority frees up the UW administration to make those sorts of requests, which I think are needed not only here but across the country."
In considering the financial situation in Wisconsin, it is important to recognize that the current budget crisis is not, as in 2008, a systematic breakdown, but the product of political decisions made by Walker and the Republican legislature in Madison. The deficit has been manufactured by $800 million in tax cuts, mainly to property owners, that the state could not afford. Unfortunately, rather than highlight this fact and suggest that the easiest way to get out of this budget crisis would be to roll back (if only temporarily) the tax cuts instituted in Walker’s first term, our University System leaders have accepted that deficit, and the reduced University funding that it has prompted, as a given, a natural fact like Lake Michigan or the North Woods. There seems to be no effort to be proactive, to try to control or at least shape the narrative to counter Walker's anticipated (and widely forecasted) budget announcement on February 3.
UW System president Ray Cross is doing little or nothing to combat the dominant narrative in the media, which is to say the Walker administration’s narrative. Locally our Chancellor's stance has mainly been to prepare to deal with the massive and devastating cuts that are coming down the pike, preparing to address the situation in more detail when the specifics become known on February 3. And even though it does not look good for UWM, there are many people in Madison who feel that they will benefit from this shift to a public authority, especially if they are given the opportunity to set their own tuition rates. Being free from the state HR and purchasing systems and being able to follow the Michigan model in raising out-of-state tuition and increasing out-of-state students, Madison should eventually do quite well financially, although like University of Michigan they will less and less serve as a public institution serving the people of their state. But in the short run, these draconian budget cuts will be impossible to accommodate without cutting hundreds of part-time and full-time faculty and staff. Indeed UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank has said explicitly that there would be no way to absorb such a dramatic revenue cut without “laying off” employees in every one of her units, particularly on the educational side of the university.
Most disturbingly, System President Cross has painted the proposal as something of a bargain or negotiation, in which the State gives the University System autonomy “in exchange” for rolling back state funding of the System to 1998 levels and providing guaranteed funding from sales tax revenue, albeit starting with a budget cut back to 1998 levels. Cross responded to the proposal to make the UW System a public authority in a document from the Office of the President released on January 26. The document is full of unsubstantiated assertions about financial benefits gained from public authority status. There appears to have been no research conducted on whether this will indeed be true, no debate or discussion among faculty, staff, and students about whether this is a change worth pursuing.
In the document Cross begins by accepting the Walker claim that these budget cuts to the system have been “dictated” by the "large state budget shortfall.” He writes: "Looking ahead, a large state budget shortfall dictates that the UW System will be receiving a sizeable funding cut. This follows significant cuts over the last three budgets as well as a continuation of the current tuition freeze for the upcoming biennium. The UW System expects a $300 million cut over the 2015‐17 biennium.” As I have noted, this shortfall doesn't "dictate" a funding cut; Walker and his allies dictate that. The current budget shortfall is a direct consequence of recent property tax cuts that the state had no way to pay for.
In welcoming the new freedoms of a public authority, Cross then glosses over the hundreds (if not thousands) of people who will lose their jobs to accommodate these cuts as posing "difficult and significant choices" that will be compensated for in the long run by making the UW System "more nimble and more responsive," demonstrating a true insensitivity to the people who make Wisconsin's universities work and the students they serve: "To manage these cuts, the UW System and its institutions will be forced to make difficult and significant choices in the short term…. In the longer term, the flexibilities granted through the authority and the consistency generated by the dedicated, sustainable funding source will help make the UW System a stronger, more nimble and more responsive higher educational system for generations to come."
His attempt to reassure system faculty, staff, and students that tenure and shared governance will be protected raises as many questions as it answers. He writes: "Shared governance and tenure--two principles that are critical to delivering a high‐quality education--will be managed by the Board of Regents through board policy rather than by the legislature through statute. This is the standard among many other state higher education systems.” Note that Cross does not say that tenure and shared governance will be “protected” but that they will be "managed" by the governor-appointed Board of Regents. This “management” by the Regents is fundamentally weaker than the current statutory protections in Wisconsin's Chapter 36. What Cross (and all UW System leaders) should be advocating for, if the move to a public authority must go through, is that the statutory protections of Chapter 36 be imported into a new Chapter 37, which will form the basis of the transformation of the UW System into a public authority. Anything less makes such protections subject to the whims of an appointed, not elected, Board of Regents, which represents a de facto power shift from the legislative to the executive branch of state government, a de facto weakening of local control. (Thanks to Aneesh Aneesh for this observation.)
Finally, it is important to note that while Wisconsin may be the first state to corporatize its university system as a public authority, it is unlikely to be the last. In a Republican Party committed to privatizing education at all levels, from K-16 and beyond, what happens in Wisconsin will be closely watched—and if successful, emulated in statehouses across the nation. The clever combination of granting “freedom” and “autonomy” to University leaders while simultaneously slashing even further the obligations of state governments to fund public higher education, will be a centerpiece of Walker’s presidential campaign and a model for Republican governors nationwide to consolidate power in their states.
To conclude, I would invoke a Biblical analogy I have used elsewhere to criticize the UW System's participation in Scott Walker's online flexible degrees. If these proposed changes succeed, Ray Cross will have sold the University of Wisconsin System's birthright to Scott Walker for less than a mess of pottage, and is likely to go down in the history of public higher education as a modern-day Esau, the System President on whose watch a once-respected public University System was reduced to a second-rate “public-benefit corporation.”
Richard Grusin