US universities face a deep and prolonged crisis, and the principal drivers are familiar to us all. I have grouped these drivers in three broad categories: the authoritarian onslaught, budget constraints, and powerful forces (most prominently AI) that are changing the very character of higher education. All three are intertwined, and their impact varies (especially along the red-blue axis), but from my viewpoint—dean of social sciences in a blue state public university—it would be shortsighted to take too much solace from these differences.
In our own corner of this broader panorama, the danger signs are equally dire. For decades, scholarship in Latin American studies has developed a stance of critical independence from US national security interests; and as part of the same evolution, our Association’s Latin America-based membership has grown steadily: in the Paris (2026) Congress there were more paper submissions from Latin America than from the US and Canada. These trends are healthy for our field but put a target on our back. An inventory of Latin American studies programs in US universities would certainly confirm their general precarity in recent years. As an assistant professor at UC Davis in the 1990s, I joined a collective effort to create a Latin American studies center, and, as dean at UC Santa Barbara 30 years later, I am supporting a parallel endeavor. The contrast creates a sharp awareness of the headwinds today: the authoritarian onslaught, budget woes, and changes in disciplinary priorities are all working against us.
In this piece, I offer some brief reflections on the crisis and conclude by focusing on the more challenging part of our session’s two-part prompt: What strategic responses are available to our universities? Might inspiration for these responses come from our experiences in LASA? To address these questions, I offer a heuristic distinction between the “institution” and what I’m calling the “commons.” I contend that we need skilled and committed institutionalists who have firm commitments to hear and respond to initiatives from the commons. “Institution” is a shorthand reference to the administrative, budgetary, and policy apparatus, which together with leadership ideals, keep universities stable and resilient. Leadership ideals are crucial in this configuration; but in difficult times like the present, inspirational defense of the university’s expansive mission is often subordinated to pragmatic considerations—neatly summarized by the ubiquitous rationale, ‘we need to defend the institution.’ The “commons” refers to spaces and constituencies inside the institution that enjoy relative autonomy from institutional imperatives. In spaces of the commons, protagonists generate and exchange ideas, which at times congeal into full-fledged collective projects and episodically into powerful mobilizations for institutional change.
My approach to the deanship drew directly on a key lesson from being president of LASA: that institutions need ideas and collective agency from the commons to fulfill the expansive social purpose of higher education. This means affirming the core pillars of the liberal university—scholarly rigor, academic freedom and intellectual pluralism—and then going on to set our sights higher: expanding inward, working to align our universities more fully with the principles of democratization, transparency, and equity; and outward toward stronger bridges between academic knowledge production and community-centered aspirations for social justice. To pursue this expansive social purpose requires a delicate balancing act: attending to the institution in its current state, with the knowledge that the impetus for meeting the more expansive goals will come mainly from the commons, in ways that are likely to challenge the institution itself. Like others of my cohort (PhDs earned in the late 80s and 90s), I have been fortunate to work in an era when striking this balance—in effect, riding two horses—has been difficult, but feasible. Since the 1960s, US universities have opened space for ideas and initiatives from the commons (albeit often with reluctance) and even have allowed the occasional administrator with strong alignments with the commons to serve. The current crisis has upended these possibilities: federal and state government policies seek to sever connections to the commons, and in so doing, threaten the core pillars of the liberal university.
Although the authoritarian onslaught is the principal source of this predicament, an accompanying factor, more controversial to name, is the university’s faltering defense of its own core pillars. Until recently, liberal administrators generally tolerated protagonists of the university’s expansive social purpose, not necessarily because they agreed, but out of respect for academic freedom and intellectual pluralism. Today, courageous liberal administrators who speak out in this way are few and far between. This crumbling defense of the core pillars is evident in many realms—from DEI and critical race theory to research on climate change and environmental justice. Another telling illustration is the programs that fall under the broad category of publicly engaged scholarship. While nearly all variants of these programs are anathema to the authoritarian onslaught, harder questions come from inside the liberal establishment. Opposition to publicly engaged scholarship often comes indirectly, through arguments for “institutional neutrality,” or against the “excessive politicization” of our scholarship. By a recent count, 50 of the 187 R1 universities have now endorsed the Chicago Principles, which are broadly understood as a manifesto for institutional neutrality; the Yale report echoes this stance, as does the Vanderbilt / Wash U report on humanism and humanistic social sciences.
Although we find distinctive nuances in each of these documents, the thrust of their contents and the way they have been interpreted in follow-up analysis can be summarized in three points. First, that our universities must refrain from societal engagement and return to an imagined previous state when they stood for “disinterested scholarship.” Second, that research and pedagogy in particular fields or disciplines have abandoned their commitment to value-neutral, fact-based objectivity, which has led to a serious degradation of scholarly standards. Third, that this “politicization” has forced out alternative perspectives that do not fit with the now-dominant paradigms, leading to a collapse of “viewpoint diversity.” All three assertions will be familiar to anyone who has followed the federal and red-state government attacks on higher education, succinctly encapsulated by the writings of Chris Ruffo, and those the Manhattan Institute 10-point compact has promoted. While the compact failed to gain widespread support, the sequel has been ascendant, exemplified by these recent reports, which purport to oppose the onslaught, and argue that the best defense is to engage in internal reform. These three critiques and proposed remedies call out for scrutiny in many dimensions; publicly engaged scholarship is perhaps the most telling, in relation to LASA’s past and future.
The rise of publicly engaged scholarship has distinctive trajectories in each field and discipline in the social sciences and humanities, but the particulars all have a through-line of sustained articulation with an expression of the commons. The most emblematic is the case of the Ethnic Studies fields, which arose in concert with social movements contesting substantive exclusion from the canons of conventional disciplines, and the physical exclusion of students, staff, and faculty who hailed from these communities. An ethos of strong bridges with these racialized communities has lived on as a central feature of these fields’ theories and methods. A parallel process of transformation took place in Anthropology, as the critiques of the colonial power relations that undergirded our discipline’s founding grew stronger, and increasingly difficult to ignore. These transformations in conventional disciplines have invariably been contested and are far from unanimous; they have opened spaces for alternative practices, generating novel research outcomes and new forms of knowledge, generally characterized by a strong bridge to societal actors concerned with the topics under study. Publicly engaged scholarship is a term—one among many—that highlights the crucial character of this bridge and signifies a commitment to knowledge production dedicated to collaborative efforts to identify the roots of endemic societal problems and to explore possible remedies.
The reforms advocated by the two recent reports, framed as efforts to sheer excesses and return to our “core purpose,” in reality level a two-pronged attack on these bridges to the commons. First, the encompassing condemnation of “politicization” casts a wide net to include research methods that make explicit certain normative judgements about society, that include societal actors in the research process, and most important, that seek to generate knowledge with a broader social purpose. Second, the call for institutional neutrality and the corresponding curtailment of public engagement flies in the face of the core pillar of intellectual pluralism, which would allow scholarship on these commitments—one approach among many—to flourish. Both attacks rest on a series of flawed assertions: that publicly engaged scholarship equals politicization equals shoddy research outcomes; that “institutional neutrality” requires the affirmation of an apolitical withdrawal to the ivory tower at all levels of the university community; and most important, that “objectivity” is achieved by denial or renunciation of one’s social position as a scholar. Remarkably, all these have been contested over the past three or four decades, leading to a gradual opening of space for publicly engaged scholarship, a space that now the “reformists” are attempting to close.
There are, of course, self-inflicted wounds, which help to empower this regression. There is nothing that makes me cringe more than mediocre scholarship hiding under the cover of political righteousness; or publicly engaged scholars who refuse to subject their positions to critical scrutiny; or abandonment of the core pillar of academic freedom in the name of one cause or another. At the same time, to equate publicly engaged scholarship with reckless mediocrity is a colossal mischaracterization, which ignores the great rigor, and cumulative evolution of knowledge production in many fields of social science and humanist studies. To the contrary, I contend that for certain topics, publicly engaged scholarship yields empirical depth and theoretical insight that would be difficult to achieve through conventional methods. The crux of this debate is our interpretation of the third core pillar of the liberal university—intellectual pluralism—which now has to contend with its weaponized reframing, “viewpoint diversity.” When the Yale report exhorts us to “get back to our core mission,” their target is not engineering faculty who moonlight as tech firm entrepreneurs, or the economics faculty member who take time off to work with the Federal Reserve; but rather, the faculty and students whose scholarship is aligned with equity-centered societal change. These critiques, with derisive titles like “when faculty mistake themselves for revolutionaries,” ignore the careful attention to accountable rigor that publicly engaged scholarship generally entails.
LASA would not survive a pivot to these “reformist” positions, which would sever our strong bridge to societal concerns in Latin America. We have a well-established ethos of listening to the commons, and the resulting innovation, in balance with high standards of institutional integrity and scholarly rigor. Many of the activities prominent in my memory from the time when I was active fit that description: a task force to study violations of intellectual freedom in post-2006 Oaxaca, and another on post-genocide Guatemala; the decision to move the Congress from Boston to Montreal to counter the Bush administration’s refusal of visas for Cubans; the Diskin-Oxfam Award; the Otros Saberes project, to name a few. Responsiveness to the commons, even (or especially) when the resulting initiatives depart from established institutional logics, has kept our Association healthy and critically engaged. The increasing presence of Latin American-based scholars in LASA forms part of this pattern. We embody the founding principle of publicly engaged scholarship: accountability to the people and places that we study.
I continue to draw on these experiences in LASA to think through strategies for confronting the crisis in US universities. I conclude with three brief illustrations. First, since its founding, LASA has consistently grounded its identity as a professional association in the defense of democracy and human rights, and in opposition to the historic and contemporary US imperial designs on the region. This refusal of institutional neutrality has been a source of strength, and it has not brought about any sort of lockstep uniformity. Each position is subject to ample debate, and emerging positions have been grounded in majoritarian support for core normative and societal principles. Second, LASA has shown consistent receptivity to a wide range of methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary frames, including those that challenge conventional approaches. This openness to critique—generally emerging from the commons—has kept our Association vibrant, and attentive to generational and demographic change. The diminishing presence of some disciplines—Economics is a frequently cited illustration—is rooted more in internal disciplinary strictures than in actions that LASA has or could take. Third, and most important, LASA’s intellectual tradition stands firmly on the assertion that political engagement and scholarly rigor can be compatible, and further, that this creative fusion has yielded foundational works in our field. As a corollary, I suspect that unexamined assertions of objectivity or value-neutrality are as frequent a source of failings in scholarly rigor as the recourse to political righteousness to avoid critical scrutiny.
Finally, an admirable characteristic of LASA over the past 30 years—perhaps not a direct outgrowth of these three features, but certainly a consistent correlate—is our capacity for institutional innovation, our audacity in trying out new ideas to keep the Association vibrant, and our ability to fuse defense of our core pillars with the mandate for revenue generation. There is much to learn from these qualities, a potential silver lining in the otherwise dismal conditions of the onslaught: to successfully defend the broader social purpose of our academic and professional institutions, we need ever greater sources of intellectual and material autonomy.