All my academic friends have been thinking 🙄 there he goes again 🙄 will appreciate this: a GOP bill in Congress to raise the tax on higher ed endowments from 1.4% to 21%. That’s a 1500% increase. You know the drill: “First they came for the life sciences, and I did not speak out — because, I mean, who even gets NIH funding?! Then they came for the LGBTQers, and I did not speak out — because, I mean, isn’t “queering” becoming increasingly rhetorical? Then they came for the STEM fields, and I did not speak out — because I only do showpiece interdisciplinary collaborations with them for internal funding purposes. Then they came for the endowment, and I said nothing because secretly I don’t have a fuckin’ clue how this place actually works financially speaking.” So faculty across the arts humanities, and (though to a lesser degree) social sciences are waiting until MAGA comes for them with, like, engraved invitations?
Update: A Google News search for search for “Endowment Tax Fairness Act” gets just three hits, from Jan 15–30.
That means a a month has gone by since anyone bothered to write about this bill — not the media, not the “experts,” not the even all those edifying bloggers… But the one that matters most: not even the vast, bloated bureacracies of “strategic” this, “legal” that, and “professional” the other thing that sit atop the machinery of people who actually research, teach, study, and create. As I’ve said with increasing urgency, academics cannot count on leaders and administrators to protect them. Most of them are even more clueless, and they’ll save their own skins first and last. It’s quite possible that in the next few years we’ll see entire universities “furloughed” and “deferred” — all except for the administrators, of course, while they email each other about scheduling meetings about how to approach the question of what to do.