"Can We Still Govern?" asks Don Moynihan
Highlighting some individual work of one of the CDAF fellows.
The Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is structured as a centralizing entity that brings individual fellows under a larger umbrella where they can collaborate and amplify the impact of their teaching, scholarship, writing, and activism on the broader issue of protecting academic freedom.
You can see an example of this collaboration in our first post here at “Academic Freedom on the Line,” where fellows offer additional commentary on the CDAF mission statement.
Introducing Academic Freedom on the Line
Welcome to the weekly newsletter published by fellows affiliated with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF).
Part of what this collaborative structure allows CDAF to do is quickly produce materials that respond to real-time threats to academic freedom. These include our Executive Power Watch series, which breaks down the meaning, consequences, and ways to resist executive orders that threaten the democratic operation of educational institutions. We also have Action Reports, which offer guidance on dealing with challenges that individual campuses may be facing by collecting the wisdom of experience from others who have already faced these challenges.
The ability to engage in these collaborations has been invaluable, but most of the work of CDAF fellow happens in their “day jobs.”1
This week, I want to highlight the work of CDAF fellow
who is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, co-director of the Better Government Lab, and also a budding Substack superstar with his newsletter.Don’s work focuses on the intersection of government and policy, and how bureaucracies - like educational institutions - make it possible for important work, like research and teaching, to come to life in ways that widely distribute the benefits to the broader public.
The Trump administration's assault on higher education is not just an attack on academic freedom but an attempt to destroy the capacity of these institutions to do their work. Don frequently goes under the hood to bust certain myths that are not only put forward by the administration but which may be broadly held by those who do not necessarily support these attacks.
A recent example from his newsletter takes on the question of “Are universities too dependent on federal support?”
In this post, co-authored with Pamela Herd, Don challenges the framing of a New York Times article showing institutional “dependence” on federal money by arguing that we should be thinking of these works as partnerships, saying, “viewing universities as ‘dependent’ fundamentally misunderstands what federal research funding does, which is to fuel a knowledge-based economy.”
Rather than seeing institutions as “cash addicts” that need reining in, we should be acknowledging the ways that universities do things that private companies cannot or do not do. The Trump administration's actions are not a rebalancing of where research dollars go any more than the tariff policy is truly going to do anything for American manufacturing. The cuts, like those to the NIH, are purely destructive to a public good that will be impossible to replace.
Don has numerous other posts that directly address attacks on academic freedom and how those attacks are, at heart, an assault on a broader public good, including a guest post from an anonymous NIH staffer who outlines the devastation of the NIH budget.
He also recently offered a warning on how the attacks on international students go beyond subjecting those students to scrutiny and penalizing institutions that enroll them, and extend to what we should see as a larger project of subjecting groups disfavored by the Trump administration to a system of surveillance and punishment.
Not to brag, but I was reading Don’s newsletter before we both became CDAF fellows because he was a great explainer of the bureaucratic machinery working away underneath the surface. He’s increased both my knowledge of and respect for the people who work in government.
His defense of the work of teaching and research in higher education is inspiring, and I’m pleased to be able to introduce him to more folks and honored to call him a colleague in the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
We’ve previously highlighted the work of CDAF fellow Demetri Morgan, who recently launched the Center for Strategic and Inclusive Governance, which is working to help make institutional leadership better informed and more responsive to the needs of the higher ed mission. We also did a recent Q&A with CDAF fellow Eve Darian-Smith on her new book, Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why it Matters.
Don’s work to make these systems and dynamics accessible and understandable is partly so impressive because they’re inherently hostile to analysis - confusion is at the heart of ‘effective’ administrative burden.