Professor Hoff & Harvard

 

Professor James Dennis Hoff pens a piece over at Left Voice entitled Trump’s Attacks on Harvard Are About State Power — Not Antisemitism. His main claim is at least partly right.

Though the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, is using Title VI civil rights legislation to justify a crackdown on universities like Harvard, it’s clear that these attacks are not really about antisemitism or bias; they are about punishing the movement for Palestine and the Left and asserting more direct ideological control of academia.

It is true that the crackdown on academe is not primarily about antisemitism, but antisemitism surely plays a role. Thugs who falsely claim to be "pro-Palestinian" are illegally occupying campus grounds and vandalizing buildings while carrying Hamas flags and shouting Hamas slogans--slogans that explicitly call for the extermination of the world's Jews. This is intolerable, especially when the thugs are in significant portion foreign students.

But Professor Hoff is surely correct that the major focus is something else. He describes Trump as "Bonapartist," a term which confused me. In 2017 Left Voice posted a piece entitled Trump: A Weak Bonapartist Government, which I found unhelpful. ChatGPT is more useful. It replied (excerpted)

The bourgeoisie is too weak or divided to rule directly, and the working class is too immature or disorganized to take power—so the state acts as a kind of arbiter.

Bonapartism arises during periods of class stalemate, like after a revolution has been defeated or stalled.

Trotsky described it as "the rule of the sword"—a regime where the military or a strongman rules in place of clear class dominance.

I think authoritarian is a reasonably good synonym, and Professor Hoff uses that word elsewhere in his article. It is a common accusation made against Trump by Progressive Democrats, including Professor Hoff.

So is President Trump acting like an authoritarian? I think not--as a comparison with Ron DeSantis illustrates.

Mr. DeSantis took over the New College of Florida in a very authoritarian manner. He fired the board of trustees and replaced them with his own appointees. The trustees, in turn, fired the school president, again replacing her with someone congenial to Mr. DeSantis. Many faculty were let go, or more commonly, chose to leave. The result was a fairly complete transformation from a left-wing to a right-wing institution. Whether you approve of that or not, there is no question that Mr. DeSantis went about it in a very authoritarian way.

Trump is not doing that. He has made no attempt to fire either the president or the board of trustees from either Columbia or Harvard. Instead, he is treating them as he might any other federal contractor, eg, Lockheed-Martin. All such contractors must obey federal regulations in order to keep their contracts, and these days such regulations strongly forbid such items as DEI. Do DEI, says Trump, and you forfeit your federal money.

So I don't think Trump is trying to take over Columbia or Harvard in any way like DeSantis conquered Florida's New College. That's not the goal.

What is Trump's goal? I can't read Trump's mind any better than Professor Hoff, but I can imagine two possible reasons. They're not mutually exclusive.

The first is to fulfill the promise of The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. This claims that higher education (along with education, generally) is not among the Constitution's enumerated powers given to Congress. According to this strand of Conservative and Libertarian thought, both the Higher Education Act (1965) and the formation of the Department of Education (1979) were (and are) not constitutional. The goal, therefore, is to end all federal aid to colleges & universities (along with K-12 education), and return both the responsibility and the authority to the states.

In this sense the goal is not to defund the universities, but only to eliminate federal funding. State funding for higher ed is up to the individual states, and not part of Trump's agenda. It does seem that Trump is dead serious about ending all federal funding. We'll have to see what the courts have to say about this.

I happen to agree with the Heritage Foundation here; I think federal grants to higher ed are, indeed, unconstitutional, especially given the large sums awarded to Harvard and Columbia. But perhaps Trump is not all that inspired by constitutional legalities, then there is another reason why he might go after the Ivies.

Trump is first and foremost a political animal. He is methodically attacking the Democrats at their weakest points, eg, men playing on women's sports teams, DEI, deporting MS-13 gangsters, etc. All of these issues poll very well for the GOP, and skepticism about the huge amounts of money given to places like Harvard is equally popular.

Dissing the elite, Ivy League schools is a political plus. More, they have way too much money, hire too many people, and seem to spend money on completely frivolous things. In Trump's mind all higher education is is a Democratic Party patronage machine--similar to Tammany Hall. If you want to kneecap your political opponents, shutting down their access to patronage jobs is surely a good way to do it.

And hence the diligent efforts to defund the universities. It makes sense.

The first bit of evidence is the relentless growth of the sector--and that despite much lower enrollments since the pandemic. Too many people work in academe. These are mostly patronage jobs given to folks who almost unanimously vote for Democrats.

Second, too many people are going to graduate school. This is most obvious in the humanities--where freshly-minted PhDs are competing for very low-paid adjunct positions. Certainly Professor Hoff is aware of the dearth of tenure-track jobs in English departments all across the country.

Students enroll in English graduate programs because 1) they like literature, and 2) the grad programs are heavily subsidized by the government, and hence they can attend school for free and receive a small stipend for doing so. As the old saw goes, if you subsidize something, you get too much of it--and these are mostly patronage jobs. This problem exists not just in humanities disciplines, but also in the sciences. A baccalaureate degree in biology is worth almost nothing on the job market, and a chemistry degree is not far behind.

Third, Professor Hoff touts the research chops of the major universities. He writes, 

Even at the height of the student protest movements in the 1960s, the federal government continued to expand investments in research and higher education mostly without strings attached. And why not? Research universities not only helped to train a caste of highly competent business leaders and worker-managers, (not to mention less prestigious skilled workers) but produced some of the most profitable and deadly technological innovations of the century, helping the U.S. to develop and maintain its economic and military dominance over the globe for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

This may have been true in the 1960s, but it is much less true today. As noted, we have far too many "business leaders and worker-managers." Academic research has also lost its mojo: we're paying for quantity rather than quality, and much of the research done today is published just to let PhD students graduate. We could cut the research budget by half and not impinge on scientific progress at all.

Beyond which, scientific research is also not among the enumerated powers of Congress. So apart from that narrowly tailored to defense needs, it probably shouldn't be paid for by the feds. Note that the federal government didn't fund research at scale until after WWII--the power grid, the electric motor, the automobile, the polio vaccine, the airplane, and much else besides were all invented without the feds spending a single dime.

In short, I think Trump is right. Whatever his reasons, federal funding for schools like Harvard and Columbia needs to be zeroed out. 

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the Economic Crisis
• Malik Miah Defends Harvard
• The Professors Congress: The International Situation

Tariffs!

AI generated cartoon representing tariffs

The article is by Jason Koslowski, and it appears in Left Voice under the title Notes from a Wall Street Sewer: Tariff Edition. Mr. Koslowski identifies himself as "a contingent college teacher and union organizer who lives in Philadelphia." In other words, he works for peanuts, having to share his salary with the zillion other PhDs out there seeking a career in academia.

I assume he teaches English given the quality of writing, which is good. 

He gets the most important fact correct: Tariffs are "a tax on imported things." The reason for tariffs is supposedly to make foreign goods more expensive for American consumers, and thereby encouraging us to buy domestically. Or, alternatively, to incentivize the producer to manufacture their products in the US. In principle, tariffs should lower the trade deficit.

He remarks, correctly, that this usually doesn't work, writing "...this plan did not work in 2016. Also, pretty much every expert everywhere says it’s not going to work this time."

I don't blame Mr. Koslowski for taking Trump's justification for tariffs at face value. But in this case I think he's mistaken. I think Trump understands that tariffs won't likely reduce the trade deficit. What he really wants to do is raise taxes. And tariffs, especially disguised as repatriating factories to the US, is a politically acceptable way to raise taxes.

In other words, tariffs are--first and foremost--a tax increase. That's entirely the point. The uncertainty arises when one asks Who is gonna pay the taxes? This turns out not to be an easy question to answer.

The obvious answer, which both our contingent college teacher and "experts" suggest isn't likely, is that American consumers will pay the taxes. But here's the rub: when confronted with a tax increase, people adjust their behavior to avoid paying the taxes. American consumers are no exception: they can substitute the foreign products with American products, or they can decide they don't need as much of the tariffed goods after all. Eg, if Mexican avocados are tariffed, then perhaps our affection for guacamole will be lessened. This option, if it happens, would reduce the trade deficit.

Or it could happen that the foreign producers desperately need the revenue, and so they reduce their prices sufficiently to maintain market share. I think Chinese manufacturers may fall into this category--the Chinese need the US dollar reserve currency in order to buy food and oil from abroad, regardless of whether they end up taking a loss in Yuan terms. This is called mercantilism. In this case it is Chinese producers (both workers & capitalists) who pay the tax. There will be no net decrease in the trade deficit.

A third option is that--because, eg, Americans by fewer Canadian products--that Canadians just simply don't have enough money to buy American products. The result is that the Canadian dollar will decline in value compared to the US dollar. This is good for the Canadian manufacturer because of the favorable exchange rate their products sold in the US are no more expensive than they were before the tariffs were imposed. But Canadian consumers are still worse off--they still won't be able to afford that vacation in Florida. In this case there might be an increase in the trade deficit (Canadians sell just as much, but buy less), and it is the Canadian consumer who ends up paying the tax.

Finally, it's possible that Walmart generates sufficiently high margin on, eg, Mexican avocados that they can just pay the tariff as extra overhead. In this case the Walmart shareholder (and eventually, employees) are paying the tariff tax. This will also have no effect on the trade deficit.

None of these options are mutually exclusive, and it's likely that they will all apply to some degree. Of this we can be certain: every option reduces trade and therefore reduces wealth. As such tariffs are bad for the economy. But that's true for any tax increase--all taxes are bad for the economy. The only advantage of tariffs is that they're politically more palatable.

Of course it gets even more complicated. Mr. Koslowski mentions that other countries will levy retaliatory tariffs, ie, raising taxes even more! And it spirals down from there. But I think this problem is somewhat limited because: 1) the US runs a large trade deficit with the rest of the world, so other countries need to sell to the US a lot more than the US needs to buy from them. So the US will win this kind of war. And 2) the US depends less on foreign trade than almost any country on earth, so it's relatively immune from retaliatory tariffs.

In short, apart from being a tax increase, the effects of tariffs are near impossible to forecast. There are just too many options, followed by options in response to prior options, to know how this is gonna proceed. Anybody who predicts a supply shortage/inflation/higher price for Americans/a recession, or any other disaster may be right, but they're most likely wrong. I predict that Trump's tariffs won't have a huge effect on the American economy. People will respond by minimizing their tax bill, and eventually not much tax will actually be collected.

Mr. Koslowski damages his credibility with his cartoon-like description of the US economy. He writes

I think we should see the tariffs as part of a magic trick Trump is trying to pull off. That trick is to hold together an unstable — that’s the key word — class alliance. To get elected, he had to win over very different sections of the different classes in society. 

First sector of this support: large chunks of the ruling class, the “big bourgeoisie,” the very rich, majority shareholders and big CEOs of big companies. ...

He won a lot of them over. Trump’s selling his party as the most pro-business of the two parties. (Elections are lovers’ quarrels between segments of our masters.) He’s offering massive tax breaks for the rich, again. He’s deregulating the economy, he’s slashing protections on the environment — all this is great for profits.

One part of his appeal to the ruling rich: break the backs of the workers. 

His premise is that there is a fight-to-the-death between bosses and workers. I've discussed this in many previous blog posts, and it's not true. While they have some things to fight over, for the most part bosses and workers have a common purpose: sell as much to consumers as possible.

He asserts that the "big bourgeoisie" have a common interest--namely they're for tariffs. Many of them (in industries like agriculture, auto manufacturing, retailers, etc.) are very much against tariffs. Others (such as tech firms) don't care because they don't export material goods. I don't think there are many big businesses who actually think tariffs work in their favor.

The biggest supporters of tariffs are in fact the unions. Many union members were present at Trump's "Liberation Day" announcement. UAW head Shawn Fain is a strong supporter. And no wonder--tariffs allow unionized workers to collect a rent on top of the market wage--eg, a salary increase roughly equal to the tariff.

Mr. Koslowski's only evidence that Trump is anti-worker is "...he's attacking the National Labor Relations Board." This is small potatoes--the NLRB plays a bit role in the American economy. Indeed, the whole idea of collective bargaining is so last century--supply chains and consumer choices are too diffuse for a strike against any one company to have much significance. Much more impactful are unions as lobbying and political organizations, and it is in precisely that role that Trump is trying to reach out to them. A new tariff will strengthen the union far more than any collective bargaining agreement.

Personally, I'm on the side of Mr. Koslowski's cartoonish bourgeoisie: I think tariffs are on net a bad thing for the economy. They're a tax increase. But politically they make a lot of sense, and for Donald Trump they look to be a winning issue.

Further Reading:

• The General Strike Fizzles
• Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain
• Tradable vs. Non-Tradable Goods