God Bless, The Big Ten

Learning quite a bit today:  The Big Ten Rises Up Against Trump (The New Republic). Like the article points out, Harvard is not American higher education. It may be our Rolls-Royce, but America runs on Fords and Chevrolets (Or to be more relevant: KIAs and Hondas.)

Sending people to Canada and genuflecting before the White House is not the Big Ten way. The Buckeyes, Wolverines, Hoosiers, Spartans, Boilermakers, Badgers, and the rest prefer big, fat touchdowns to the cloak-and-dagger of the global aristocracy. The whole conference, now 18 universities across 16 states, exists to dominate. And it does dominate. While the media has fixated on the Ivies, the Big Ten have lain in wait, an interstate alliance with protections from statehouses red and blue, 810,000 potential student foot soldiers, and a world-renowned talent for high-stakes strategy games. With its very own Big Ten Network, which it co-owns with Fox, the conference is now on track to make as much as $1.4 billion in untaxed revenue from media rights deals, bowl prizes, and other revenue streams this year—a staggering feat considering the annual revenue of the whole NCAA is not much more than that. If the Big Ten were a publicly traded company, its market capitalization could be up to $30 billion.

Academically, the Big Ten’s assets are even greater: $18.4 billion in annual research and 145 million library volumes, more than twice the holdings of the Ivy League. Five of the Big Ten universities—Illinois, Penn State, Ohio State, Purdue, and Wisconsin—have nuclear reactors. There are more quantum computing facilities in the Big Ten than in all of Europe.

I had no idea that Purdue had a nuclear reactor. That does make me a little uneasy, but would have made my Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary Ellen happy. They were Purdue grads.

But even more impressive is the backbone shown by lowly college professors that has been so noticeably lacking in billionaires and United Senators:

The university senate at Rutgers left no doubt about the scale of the conference. It passed a resolution that established what one of its authors memorably called an academic NATO for the Big Ten. While the compact stops short of discussing military defense, the bold document nonetheless changed the dynamics of the bowl game with Trump. Written by psychology professor Paul Boxer on the Newark campus and chemistry professor David Salas-de la Cruz at Camden, the Rutgers resolution lays out the Trump administration’s strong-arm efforts to suffocate universities. It then calls on Big Ten conference members to pool financial, legal, and PR resources to coordinate a “unified and vigorous” response to federal incursions and defend any member school facing “improper control over academic inquiry.”

“The goal of the Mutual Academic Defense Compact is threefold: protect academic freedom, defend institutional integrity, and promote the scholarly enterprise,” Boxer told me in May. He and his Big Ten colleagues, he said, are “deeply concerned on an existential level about the entire enterprise of higher education.”

In short, the compact was an aggressive power grab passing as a polite letter to the editor. We’re on watch, you say? No, Mr. President, we’re the goddamn Big Ten. You’re on watch. Boxer now speaks of his conference less in the vibey terms beloved of Ivy Plus schools—elite, illustrious, prestigious—and more as a kind of empire. The Big Ten has, he told me, “a broad public service mission, vast intellectual resources, and unyielding ethical responsibilities.” 

Indiana gets a call-out - a positive one this time!

“I’ve been at this for 42 years,” Jeffrey C. Isaac, a poli sci professor at Indiana University, told me. “I’ve been involved in other protests. But I’ve never thought this before: What if they fuck with me? What if the IRS fucks with me?” Isaac got pounded with threats for defending democracy in this magazine in 2021. “Even if all the current repression went away, we’re still talking about higher education that’s less and less interested in liberal arts,” he said. “They want to replace it with a reactionary, hyper-patriotic form of education. Nothing is ever going to be the same.”

At Purdue, one of the jewels of the Big Ten, Harry Targ, a retired poli sci professor, has been preparing for this showdown for decades. Having complained in Jacobin that universities, in spite of their noble mission, have always served “the interests of business and the capitalist state,” Targ sees Trump as the apotheosis of these interests: The rise of MAGA, he wrote in May, proves “the links between class exploitation, structural racism, and patriarchy are inseparable.” Socialism is perforce his best answer.

And there is much truth in its conclusion:

What accounts for the political restlessness in the heartland? For one, people recognize the stakes. The Pell Grant recipients, international students, and (yes) diverse student bodies of the Big Ten are, after all, different from Ivy Leaguers. They have more to gain from higher education. And they have less to lose from defying Eastern Seaboard institutions, including hedge-fund donors, Larry Summers, and even the federal government.

Yep, that is us. 

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