Proximities: Literature, Mobility and the Politics of Displacement, by John Culbert, has recently been published in the English Association Monographs: English at the Interface series. This blog post explores the enduring crisis in the American higher education system and considers how scholarship can respond to it.
Compared to other media, academic publishing is dilatory. My new book, Proximities: Literature, Mobility, and the Politics of Displacement, has a publication date of April 2025, but I sent the final manuscript to the press in January, a few days before the American presidential inauguration. Given the warning signs, I knew Proximities would see the day in a world transformed. The book was written with the future in mind, and its index reads like snippets of talk captured by the informant next door. There are entries for DEI, deportations, and transgender. It covers detention camps, McCarthyism, and neo-fascism. I hazard some forecasts about the lack of future pandemic preparedness. The last footnote deals with states of exception. And as our tech overlords scrape through our every word and eye twitch, they may note the book’s special interest in the Gaza solidarity encampments and the well-being of our students.
American higher education is in crisis. As teachers and scholars, how do we respond to the challenges of the day, even as we try to continue our work? How can scholarship meet the rush of historic events when publication, especially book publication, is inevitably slow and belated?
In his landmark study The University in Ruins, Bill Readings illustrates this predicament with the story of a book published on the cusp of the great student revolts of 1968: Jacques Barzun’s The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going. Barzun was a professor of history at Columbia University, where protests broke out in April of that year, triggering similar actions in the US and beyond. The American University includes a preface from January 1968, to which Barzun added a postscript dated May where he avows seeing “no reason” to revise his findings in light of the student uprising.[i] For Readings, this historical irony is only confirmed by the book’s enduring success. Seemingly impervious to circumstance, The American University was reprinted in the 1990s – a full generation later, by which time neoliberalism had privatized universities and, in Readings’ assessment, “ruined” their pedagogical mission.
The secret to the endurance of Barzun’s book is that it is addressed neither to students nor professors – and certainly not to the intellectual inheritors of ’68 – but instead to future administrators. Readings notes that the subsequent rise of these university “apparatchiks” (8) was accompanied by the ascendance of the term “excellence” – an empty placeholder for previous standards of value and a symptom of the commodification of knowledge-work. We might say that it is precisely this vacuous culture of supposed “excellence” that has brought American universities within reach of authoritarian state capture in the year 2025. And here again, in a striking echo of history, Columbia stands out as the forerunner, not only of radical student action, but of a right-wing counter-revolt against education.
Columbia University students were the first to raise encampments in spring 2024 to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The school’s administration responded with brutish police action and harsh disciplinary measures. In spite of this heavy-handed approach to the protests, Columbia’s Minouche Shafik was among a group of university presidents hauled before a far-right congressional hearing that demanded stricter policing of pro-Palestinian speech. Shockingly, when faced with crude partisan invective against her own students and faculty, Shafik hardly demurred. A year later, the Trump administration began to detain and deport student activists, starting with former Columbia student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.
One can hardly imagine a greater moral failure than the criminalization of anti-genocide protests. Moreover, Columbia’s example shows that cooperation with the Trump administration is no survival strategy. Threatened with federal funding cuts – political “extortion,” as some put it – Columbia recently agreed to impose additional security measures against campus protesters and to subject a number of academic programs to external monitoring.[ii] The precedent is ominous. The Trump administration’s intent, Brian Rosenberg notes, is to “destroy” American higher education as we know it.[iii] But even as we defend ourselves against what Timothy Snyder calls incipient “state terror,” we must recognize our academic institutions’ complicity in their own undoing.[iv] History may well view our administrators’ suppression of the 2024 student protests as a decisive prelude to democratic collapse.
As if following the script of Barzun’s American University,Columbia’s president was recently supplanted by a non-academic trustee.[v] This self-destructive fate of the university of “excellence” was neatly summed up when Trump’s incoming Secretary of Education announced a “final mission” before the Department of Education’s complete dismantling, namely to promote “excellent education.”[vi] From today’s perspective, however, it is perhaps the word “efficient” that rings most ominously in Barzun’s technocratic evocation of the future university, whose administrators, he says, can best “render efficient the workings of the great machine.”[vii] The phrase brings to mind Conrad’s chilling evocation, in Heart of Darkness, of the colonizing mission: “What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency,” Marlow says, before his homage lurches toward a more menacing aim: “something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.”[viii] The key notion of efficiency appears soon after when Marlow meets victims of this unholy sacrifice: dying African conscripts who “sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest” (23).
But why invoke a hoary narrative from the age of empire? It is in the name of “efficiency” that American civic institutions are currently being dismantled, and this will have effects far and wide. In an unmistakably symbolic act, a first casualty of the purge of Washington was USAID, whose humanitarian work once reached into the world’s most deprived places. That minimum of care is now withdrawn. Malice and incivility are the order of the day. The Department of Government Efficiency’s stated premise of hunting down “waste” may be a hoax, but “efficiency” – in Conrad’s sense – does seem to be the motive. In Proximities, I argue that we cannot separate local freedoms from impeded travel and forced displacements elsewhere. This has yielded a quite different analysis than Jacques Barzun’s of the university in a time of crisis. Proximities firmly centers the Gaza solidarity encampments and argues that our students provide a vital decolonial optic for a radical reform of higher education. In the coming months we may see what resistance remains amidst the ruins.
John Culbert
[i] Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 7.
[ii] Christopher Newfield, “Liner Note 20: After Columbia’s Betrayal,” Remaking II: Long Revolution, March 22, 2025, https://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/03/liner-note-20-after-columbias-betrayal.html.
[iii] Brian Rosenberg, “Columbia Capitulated — But So Did the Rest of Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 24, 2025.
[iv] See Timothy Snyder, “State Terror,” Thinking About…, Substack, April 15, 2025, https://snyder.substack.com/p/state-terror.
[v] See Arjun Appadurai and Sheldon Pollock, “Who Actually Runs Columbia University?” The Guardian, April 1, 2025.
[vi] Linda McMahon, “Our Department’s Final Mission,” US Department of Education, March 3, 2025, https://www.ed.gov/about/news/speech/secretary-mcmahon-our-departments-final-mission.
[vii] Barzun, The American University,cited in Readings, 8.
[viii] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Pericles Lewis, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), 8.
John Culbert teaches at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Paralyses (University of Nebraska, 2010), winner of the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize in French Studies.”
English Association Monographs: English at the Interface explores English Studies at the interface with other languages, cultures, professions and disciplines from the medieval period to the present day.
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