Autocracy Squared

Since at least 1996, with the posthumous publication of Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins, a strong scholarly consensus has held that the American university has been corrupted, destroyed, and undone by corporatization, leaving in its place a hollow institution devoted to the vacuous rhetoric of “excellence” (Readings 1996). Timothy Kaufman-Osborn’s compelling book, The Autocratic Academy (hereafter AA), issues a welcome challenge to one of the key premises of this consensus. The university, AA persuasively argues, has always been a corporation. Traced to its origins in the Middle Ages, the university was a self-governing body of professors and students united by a purpose—the transmission and discovery of truth—the ongoing attainment of which exceeded the lifetime and abilities of any one of its members. This, the university’s corporate form, allowed it to integrate into itself a great diversity of professors and students across space, to enable and regulate their conduct, and to sustain over long periods of time the university’s constitutive desire. Corporate form is thus neither alien to, nor a parasite upon, nor the undoing of the university. It’s essential to and indispensable for the university. It’s the juridical framework that allowed for the institution of the intergenerational pursuit of truth in the first place.

The decisive question, it then follows, isn’t whether or not the university has been corporatized, but what kind of corporation the university ought to be. Does the university corporation in its contemporary form still allow for the existence of a self-governing intergenerational body corporate of professors and students dedicated to free inquiry? Or, to the contrary, is that corporation structured as a nexus of just-in-time contracts between precarious producers of knowledge and indebted consumers of knowledge, all overseen by an absentee landlord who legally personifies the corporate body of the university, yet takes no part in that body’s constitutive activities, teaching and research? If so, is this latter corporate form still an adequate way for the university to attain its end, the intergenerational pursuit and transmission of truth? Can it host and sustain that aim? Or is it hostile to it?

AA asks its reader to decide on this question. Its title makes its own answer clear: the norms and customs of academic freedom notwithstanding, the modern university is, legally speaking, an autocracy. Quite in contrast to its medieval origins, the university’s contemporary corporate form vests extensive, unaccountable power in its governing board, which then delegates hierarchically-arranged bundles of freedoms and responsibilities to its various subordinates (presidents, administrators, permanent faculty, temporary faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and workers). But anything delegated is always also in principle revocable. And revocation, at least according to Carl Schmitt, is exactly what happens in situations of emergency, exception, exigency, or crisis, which allow and require a body politic’s sovereign power to take measures that propose to save the body politic as a whole, even and especially if that salvation should come at the expense of its parts (Schmitt [1921] 2015, 168, 202). In the case of the body politic of a constitutional republic, that means saving the constitution as a whole at the expense of particular rights (such as habeas corpus, freedom of speech, and freedom of association). In the case of the body politic of the university, saving the institution as a whole comes at the expense of particular professors’ and students’ academic freedom, civil liberties, and workers’ rights. When modern liberal democracies enter into crisis governance, the question becomes whether cherished principles such as the separation of powers are, in fact, merely epiphenomenal—i.e., not really essential to liberal democratic order, but only the mask concealing the grinning skull of plenipotentiary state power. An analogous question holds for universities: under conditions of crisis governance, when the chips are down, the question becomes whether faculty, administrators, and governing boards really do genuinely exercise shared responsibility for institutional governance. The autocratic answer to that question is stark and simple: delegated powers are revocable, and faculty governance is a delegated power. Autocracy, once latent, thus becomes manifest.

AA’s analysis of this dynamic was already important in the spring of 2023, when AA was first published. At that point, Kaufman-Osborn’s book could be credited for having explained the way in which much university crisis governance operated under conditions of COVID-19. By the spring of 2024, AA was not just important; it was required reading. It was then that we witnessed university presidents, sometimes at the behest of powerful donors and legislators, and always with the authorization of governing boards, ordering police to arrest, remove, and suppress professors and students protesting for divestment and against Israel’s war on Gaza. In many cases, this involved gratuitous violence. In every case, as Issue 124, Frame 9 of Cultural Critique Online made clear, the spring of 2024 raised far-reaching questions about what universities are for, what university governance is, and why an institution ostensibly committed to basic principles of liberal democracy, if not also social justice, could so quickly revert to autocracy. AA, safe to say, provides answers to those questions.

After the spring of 2025, AA has become even more timely than ever before. Today American universities face the threat of the same autocratic legalism that already has asphyxiated universities in Türkiye, India, and Hungary, among others (Scheppele 2018; Ginsburg; 2022, Ignatieff 2024). This reality shatters the myth of American exceptionalism, demonstrating that neither a venerable history of academic freedom nor longstanding norms of university autonomy immunize US universities against authoritarian encroachment. In its American iteration, autocratic legalism is grounded in the allegation that the once great American university has been corrupted, destroyed, and undone by leftist ideological capture. This allegation is not new: the McCarthyist claim was that universities are hotbeds of godless communism. Nor, of course, is it scholarly: it’s better described as a pastiche of exaggerations, paranoiac hallucinations, outright lies, and moral panic held together by the glue of anecdotes, the power of algorithms, and the glee of retributive cruelty. As such, this allegation could not differ more from the scholarly consensus that claims corporatization has left the university in ruins. Whereas the latter is melancholic and issues from the self-described academic left, the former is manic and comes from the authoritarian and nationalist right. But in a true identity of opposites, both nevertheless arrive at the same conclusion: America’s universities are today institutions of rot.

This counterintuitive convergence has stark implications for the defense of the university and academic freedoms we now find ourselves called upon to mount. Because it’s a fool’s errand to defend the indefensible, or save what’s already destroyed, the internal scholarly consensus that has developed around the theme of institutional destitution leaves professors and students without strong counterarguments to the predations of that consensus’s external anti-intellectual counterpart. This dialectic couldn’t have materialized at a worse time, because for the foreseeable future, universities appear headed for a form of governance that may be called autocracy squared, in which federal and state authorities use extortive lawfare to weaponize the university’s already existing tendencies toward internal autocracy as a means to the end of imposing upon students and professors the claims of illiberal democracy (as described in Feingold and Dubal 2025).

But autocracy isn’t the only form of governance latent in the contemporary university. Nor, obviously, is it the best such form. The university’s first and most originary body corporate, the residues of which still remain with us, provides a rich constellation of juridical forms, administrative practices, scholarly discourses, educational precedents, and governmental models that, taken together, provide a wide variety of alternative futures to today’s autocracies. How indeed might reviving the desire for this corporate body allow today’s scholars to escape the deadlocks of today’s melancholias and manias? This would not of course mean a nostalgic attempt to restore intact the medieval body corporate. Quite the opposite: it would mean carefully, critically, and realistically working through that body’s loss, in order to transpose certain of its energies, discourses, practices, and theories into an account of the university that can credibly answer the question of what its purpose is today and why its freedoms remain essential to that purpose.

That’s the task this forum begins. Revisiting the history and theory of corporate law, Joshua Barkan contends that corporate form is much more historically contingent than AA acknowledges, and in particular involves forms of self-policing that go hand-in-glove with universities’ claims to autonomy. Today’s defenses of university autonomy, Barkan therefore suggests, oblige academics to take more responsibility for, and to more responsibly explicate the normative basis for, the forms of policing that govern campuses today. Arguing that that one of AA’s chief accomplishments consists in its recognition that university history is always also legal history, Michael Banerjee questions the contemporary claim that the relation of professors to the university is best understood as the relation of employees to an employer. As an alternative to the forms of centralized corporatization authorized by this claim, Banerjee points to the example of the University of California, Berkeley, whose legal history makes available an insight as counterintuitive as it is crucial: academic freedom is best enabled not by the rejection of corporate form but by its creative multiplication. My contribution, which asks Kaufman-Osborn to say more about the way that secularization poses a problem for AA’s retrieval of the university’s medieval corporate form, is then followed by Kaufman-Osborn’s eloquent response to his interlocutors. And if the universitas is a whole that only fully comes into its own by never exceeding the sum of its many parts—what then? This, we believe, is only one of the many questions these pieces together raise.