A Reply

Radical anachronism?

On April 18, 2024, Columbia University’s president authorized the New York Police Department to enter campus, dismantle the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and remove its occupants. Four days later, more than 100 faculty members from Barnard and Columbia conducted a protest, which they billed as a “Rally to Support our Students and Reclaim our University.” There, members of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) condemned the arrest of students, defended their right to freedom of assembly, and demanded that their suspensions be lifted immediately.

What rendered this protest unconventional was the appearance of faculty participants in full academic regalia. Consisting of a robe, a hood, and a cap, this garb is a relic of the earliest European universities that was transplanted to the American colonies and, until the Civil War, worn daily by faculty. By the late nineteenth century, this costume was mostly reserved for official rituals, like commencement, that celebrate the academy’s unique purpose, commend those who contribute to its accomplishment, and congratulate the newly degreed. At Low Plaza, however, this garb was worn at an improvised demonstration called by faculty whose purpose was to affirm their solidarity with students by dissociating themselves from the presidents who hold authority over both. What work does this regalia do, we might wonder, when incorporated within a protest called to castigate those who are entitled to speak on behalf of the university but, according to those assembled on April 22, have betrayed its true end?

Formally, when worn by faculty, academic regalia signifies its wearer’s completion of the requirements for an advanced academic degree, that achievement’s certification by those who were once one’s teachers but are now colleagues, and, finally, admission into a community of scholars that transcends the boundaries of any specific college or university. Cap and gown thus affirm a silent but very real claim to authority that is grounded in a faculty member’s esoteric knowledge; and it is this authority that the faculty of Columbia and Barnard asserted when they declared that these universities must now be “reclaimed” from those whose actions have demonstrated that they understand neither education nor the conditions of its possibility.

What these faculty wore thereby signified but also amplified their condemnation of the April 17 testimony offered by Columbia’s President Shafik before the House Education & Workforce Committee: “We are shocked at her failure to mount any defense of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs” (Barnard and Columbia Chapters 2024). Still more egregiously, Shafik’s decision to call in the NYPD one day later “disrupted our ability to teach and our students’ ability to learn far more than any protest has” (Barnard Members of the AAUP 2024). By word and deed, Shafik has thus demonstrated that she is not qualified to lead what medieval Europe called a universitas magistrorum et scholarium, i.e., a corporate body composed of teachers and students united by their shared love of learning.

It is Shafik’s betrayal of this universitas that Columbia’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences effectively affirmed when, in May, its members voted in favor of a no confidence motion. That resolution notwithstanding, Shafik was clearly authorized to do what she had done one month prior. That authority was delegated to her, in her capacity as president, by a board of trustees that derives its powers from the 1754 charter that afforded Columbia its legal status as a corporation whose sole members are those who hold seats on that board. To that board the charter grants “full power and authority to make all ordinances and by-laws which to them shall seem expedient for carrying into effect the designs of their institution” and, furthermore, it authorizes its members to select a president who, as the board’s chief executive officer, is to preside over what the charter calls the college’s “government” (Columbia University 1854). That officer’s foremost obligation, bluntly put, is not to do the faculty’s bidding but to do what the statutes adopted by this board command.

What happened at Columbia and Barnard last spring may therefore be read as a symptom of an abiding conflict between two different corporate bodies, each claiming authority to determine how the university should best accomplish the educational end prescribed by Columbia’s charter (Kaufman-Osborn 2025). In the last analysis, the faculty is poorly positioned to win these contests, as was made clear when, over the unanimous objection of the University Senate’s executive committee, Shafik summoned the NYPD to dismantle the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. That defeat, however, should not cause us to lose sight of the fundamental questions posed by the faculty of Columbia and Barnard when they transformed a medieval relic originally designed to keep bodies warm into a visible symbol of their challenge to the boards and presidents of these universities.

Why, for example, does the American university vest final legal authority in the hands of those who take no part in the teaching and learning that is the academy’s essential purpose? Why should we be convinced that a corporate form that locates boards atop a universitas composed of educators and the educated facilitates that end’s accomplishment? If we are not persuaded that it does, what constitution of power might better articulate the claim to authority implicit within the regalia worn by faculty on April 22? It is to these questions that The Autocratic Academy offers a partial response.

How my interlocutors dress me for school

To explore these questions, I ask about the origins and historical development of what William Metzger and Richard Hofstadter, in The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, label “the great anomaly of American higher education” (416): the academy’s constitution in the form of a corporation that concentrates its powers of governance within boards that are “external” insofar as their members are not employees of the universities they rule and “lay” insofar as no expertise in matters educational is required as a condition of appointment to them. Within this order, I argue, faculties enjoy neither the autonomy nor the capacity for self-governance that, together, enable free inquiry and hence education to flourish.

To remedy this mismatch between the university’s purpose and an autocratic corporate formation antithetical to its realization, I offer what David Ciepley calls a “member corporation” (2017a). The fundamental difference between a member corporation and its autocratic counterpart turns on how the power of rule is organized in each. In the latter, the powers of governance that accompany incorporation are granted exclusively to boards whose members are neither selected by nor accountable to those who are thereby and necessarily positioned as subjects. Within this form’s opposite, a corporation’s members are those who exercise the powers of governance not over others but over themselves, whether in assembly or via the representatives they choose and may remove, and they do so by making the enforceable rules by which they are collectively bound. Here, rule by those without is replaced by self-governance within, and that is why the eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone characterized member corporations as “little republics” (468).

My interlocutors are quite right to suggest that the argument I advance in The Autocratic Academy turns on this model’s adequacy and so they are equally correct to focus their attention on it. Professor Banerjee, for example, argues that the imaginary creature I sketch in my epilogue, the member corporation I name Commonwealth University, is “best understood as a call to reconstitute the universitas scholarium of medieval Europe.” If there is something new in my argument, he maintains, it is to be found in my “call to return to something old:” “The first step toward returning university control to scholars is claiming corporate status and rights, as ancient universities did long ago.” Banerjee thereby encourages me to embrace my inner reactionary; and, when I dress the part, in full regalia, I will proudly affirm that we scholars constitute the autonomous and self-governing academic corporation whose integrity has now been violated by Shafik and those to whom she reports.

Not unlike Banerjee, Professor Barkan suggests that my argument is best understood as a narrative that charts “the decline of universities from member corporations into proprietary corporations,” and so my brief on behalf of the former assumes the form of a lament: The robes worn by the faculty who gathered at Low Plaza on April 22, he contends, “symbolized the abrogation of the ancient rights of corporate members to govern their collective institutions.” Unlike Banerjee, however, Barkan offers a corrective to any unqualified call to restore the medieval university. The historical record shows that disciplinary technologies were deeply etched into Europe’s earliest universities, including those constituted as member corporations, and this was perhaps most emphatically apparent in the interrogation of those suspected of heresy. To affirm that autocratic and member corporations are different in kind is, therefore, to hide the dirty linen that tarnishes my idealization of the latter.

Barkan grants that this difficulty is partly offset by my presentation of these two models as something akin to Weberian ideal types. The fact remains, however, that the invidious and categorical distinction I draw between the autocratic academy and its democratic antithesis is likely to deflect attention from power’s insidious operation within the halls of Commonwealth University: “Scholars are not cops,” he concludes, but we nonetheless “know that our institutions involve their own practices of discipline and policing.” Had the faculty who gathered on April 22 acknowledged these practices, they would have worn cap and gown but also carried the mace that signifies power’s capacity to secure the university’s autonomy from threats without but also to compel the recalcitrant within.

Lastly, Professor Sitze poses a question about the corporation constituted as a “little republic” whose answer may render incoherent the conception of membership on which my argument depends. On the one hand, Sitze commends The Autocratic Academy because its account of the fights that erupted within certain colonial colleges about how best to organize the power of rule “demonstrate[s] that the member corporation is not a nostalgic fantasy but a real and viable mode of university governance.” On the other hand, he reminds us that early American colleges, including those fleetingly constituted as member corporations, construed their collective identity in relation to a divinely ordained universe that rendered their self-disciplining faculties contributors to a sacred whole. Should we express any doubts on this score, Sitze will be quick to remind us that the robes now worn by academics were first worn by clerics.

The account of Commonwealth University I offer in the epilogue, however, appears to be thoroughly secularized insofar as it dispenses with any theological grounding and hence the unity this celestial underpinning supplied. If I understand correctly, the question this absence poses for Sitze goes something like this: If the corporate form necessarily concerns “the relation between parts and wholes, pluralities and unities,” and if God is no longer available to ensure that the corporation is something more than a mere aggregation of disenchanted and self-interested individuals, what can possibly provide the glue that will bind the academy’s members within a body politic dedicated to the collective good that is education?

That we may no longer have a good answer to this question is indicated, Sitze seems to imply, by the contemporary university’s constitution in autocratic form. The order this rule guarantees is ultimately grounded in nothing but the power of command exercised by those who wield the university’s mace and pay no heed to the faculty’s gowns. The regalia on display at the April 22 demonstration is therefore rather sad, for today that dress gestures wistfully toward a bygone era when the power of rule was transmuted by theological means into legitimate authority. What that authority’s absence entails becomes apparent when the university’s rulers bare their fists, as did Shafik when she ordered the encampment’s demolition. More often, though, order is manufactured not by the spiked club but by the banal operation of administrative rationality whose end appears to be nothing other than its own expansion and so in time its subsumption of the unique forms of practice once betokened by the term universitas.

When desire is denied

I find considerable merit in the questions posed by my generous interlocutors; and, in retrospect, I wish I had anticipated several of them while writing The Autocratic Academy. It’s too late for that and so, here, I offer an amendment to my initial account of how best to assess the member corporation’s value. Although this claim is not entirely absent from the book, I now want to argue that the idea of the member corporation should be evaluated first and foremost through reference to its capacity to help us imagine but also to hope for a university that is unlike the autocratic formation we confront today. One of the book’s early reviews suggested that the epilogue’s rudimentary account of Commonwealth University and the principles on which it is built may be read as an attempt to animate “a pedagogy of desire.” The Autocratic Academy, Joel Schlosser proposed, “does not just critique the present condition of higher education in the United States; through its stories of resistance and its vision of an alternative, it gives readers something else to want” (134).

If we are to come to want something else, we must first appreciate what we now lack or, better, what we are now denied. To indicate what that is, consider this: Today, we often refer to ourselves as faculty “members.” If truth be told, however, this term is an anachronism that hearkens back to an era that, pace Banerjee, perhaps never was; according to Barkan, was never all that great anyhow; and, on Sitze’s account, depended on a higher power who has now fled the scene. Under these circumstances, the gowns we wear once or twice a year engender an illusion of special dignity that is undercut by our everyday situation as defrocked wage earners, and that status mocks our self-identification as professors on a mission.

To clarify this unhappy situation, think of the harbinger of things to come that is public higher education within the Sunshine State. What we find there is an aggressive effort to reduce its faculty “members” to the role of clerks whose sole job is to do the bidding of the state. To see why this representation is not hyperbolic, recall one of Florida’s more notorious recent enactments aimed at cinching the servility of its professors. Enacted in 2022 and disingenuously titled the Individual Freedom Act, what is more commonly known as Stop WOKE is part and parcel of the reactionary backlash against contemporary scholarship that demonstrates the structural underpinnings of white supremacy as well as the contingency of heteronormative gender identities. To ensure that these “subversive” teachings are barred from Florida’s classrooms, among other things, Stop WOKE prohibits any “instruction” that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” students to believe that “virtues” such as “merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist” or that anyone “is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” (Fla. Stat. § 1000.05 (2024)).

As of this writing, the US Court of Appeal for the Eleventh Circuit has upheld a preliminary injunction blocking Stop WOKE’s enforcement. No matter how the question of this statute’s constitutionality is finally resolved, for my purposes, what is most telling about this suit is the state’s response to the motion that first sought this injunction. That reply categorically dismissed the plaintiffs’ academic freedom challenge on the ground that Stop WOKE’s bans are nothing but a regulation by the state of “its own speech:” “All it [the statute] says is that state-employed teachers may not espouse in the classroom the concepts prohibited by the Act, while they are on the State clock, in exchange for a State paycheck . . . The in-class instruction offered by state-employed educators,” this brief concludes, “is pure government speech, not the speech of the educators themselves” (Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors, No. 4:22-cv-00304-MW-MAF, September 22, 2022, at 2, 11).

The identity of faculty “members” within Florida’s public universities is thereby wholly engulfed by their status as employees, and the signatures they affix to employment contracts signifies nothing but their consent to do the bidding of their employers. There is, on this account, no legally significant difference between a professor working in a public university and a clerk employed by a state agency (for example, Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles). As is true of those agencies, Florida’s public universities are “subordinate organs of the State” (Pernell, at 18) and its instructors are so many compliant mouthpieces of a ventriloquist in Tallahassee. In no meaningful sense can these faculty be called members, for the “whole” to which they belong is but an aggregation of monads held together by nothing more than a desire to get paid and to avoid termination. Those so situated may still wear robes to commencement, but that attire will be stripped of its capacity to symbolize membership within the universitas toward which the faculty of Columbia and Barnard alluded. Worn in Florida, that costume will become a mere accessory that, to most onlookers, will appear quaint, unintelligible, or silly.

When desire comes alive

But what if Florida’s faculty were to be persuaded by the argument advanced by The Autocratic Academy and, on that basis, were to wear their academic regalia differently (and perhaps daily?)? What if they were to emulate the faculty of Columbia and Barnard on April 22 by fashioning that dress into a critique of Florida’s external lay boards but also a governor who aims to render these boards accomplices of his right-wing agenda? What if, moreover, Florida’s faculty were to affix to the lapels of their gowns oversized buttons reading “AAUP,” thereby repudiating Florida’s campaign to render them nothing but employees while simultaneously affirming their standing as members of a trans-institutional profession whose duties exceed those specified in their individual job descriptions? And, finally, what if faculty so adorned were to declare that they now understand what the AAUP did not when it was first founded: The autocratic organization of rule left unchallenged by the AAUP in its canonical 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure cannot coexist with the free inquiry that is the sine qua non of education’s possibility and, therefore, the University of Florida must now be reconstituted as the Universitas of Florida?

Were Florida’s faculty to do all this, I would suggest that the object of their collective desire be imagined as a corporation of the sort I call Commonwealth University. This, I realize, will prove a steep climb because the epithet “corporatization,” as deployed today, serves as shorthand for everything we now think wrong about the contemporary American university. In fact, however, this epithet is itself wrongheaded because it effectively identifies the corporate form with its specifically neoliberal variant. According to that conception, the corporation is an exclusively economic entity and, specifically, a site where self-interested suppliers of key factors of production, including capital, labor, materials, and services, enter into voluntary contractual relations with one other in order to maximize the personal gain of each; and it this characterization that informs our condemnation of the academy’s “corporatization.”

In fact, however, the neoliberal corporation is a contingent historical artifact that now threatens to exhaust our understanding of what a corporation is, thereby occluding our appreciation of the diverse forms it has assumed since it was first anticipated in ancient Roman law, consolidated by churches, guilds, and municipalities in medieval Europe, and, once transported across the Atlantic, informed the American colonists’ call for independence and later the Constitution’s construction of the new nation as a body politic in the form of an exceedingly large republic (Ciepley 2017b).

At bottom, a corporation is a particular way of gathering, organizing, amplifying, and extending through time the power of human and nonhuman assets. Unlike civil society’s unincorporated voluntary associations, what distinguishes a corporation is the fact that it is always and necessarily a creature of law; and what the law summons into being is a juridical entity composed of but irreducible to the natural persons subject to its jurisdiction. Via this act of creation, whether by means of a charter, an enabling act, or certification by a secretary of state, a corporation is granted certain powers, including the power to sue (and be sued), to enter into contracts, to hold, buy, and sell property, etc.

For my purposes, the most significant power delegated to corporations is the power to govern their own affairs and hence the authority to adopt, adjudicate, and enforce the laws that regulate those affairs. This, too, is one of the features that distinguishes corporations from voluntary associations, for the latter are not authorized by law to exercise comparable powers over its members; and it this power that explains why, even today, a corporation is often referred to as a “body politic.” That label signals a corporation’s authorization to practice self-rule, and that in turn explains why any representation of corporations as nothing but administrative arms of the state is wrong or, more precisely, true of only a small subset. For most, the state’s delegation of certain powers to corporations does not establish a principal-agent relationship, that is, one that renders the latter nothing but an instrument for accomplishing the purposes of the former. Rather, the powers exercised by corporations are delegated by the state; but, once conferred, these juridical entities enjoy considerable operational independence from their creator, and that autonomy is most perfectly realized in a corporation’s authority, so long as it does not act illegally, to rule its own affairs.

When a corporation qua body politic is organized in specifically autocratic form, its head is severed from that body, and that head is then placed beyond the reach of those who cannot and should not be named members because they are nothing but subjects ruled by others. To call for this juridical entity’s reconstitution in the form of a membership corporation is to argue, among other things, in favor of the faculty’s appropriation of the governance powers whose enjoyment they are now denied. That project may be considered a backward-looking recovery of expropriated powers, as Banerjee suggests, but it is perhaps better construed as an anticipatory claim to constitute the academy anew in the form of a self-governing republic. On this latter account, the academic regalia worn by faculty on April 22 signaled a refusal to accept continued usurpation of the power to rule by those who do not qualify as members of the universitas and, moreover, a demand to appropriate and enjoy that power.

To some, to articulate this desire in the form of a call to incorporate will seem counterintuitive at best. But that response is also predicated on a conception of the corporation that is a historically contingent and contestable artifact. Today, we are inclined to think of this juridical entity as an “it.” Prior to the twentieth century, however, it was not uncommon to speak of this or that corporation using the plural pronoun “they” (Ireland 1996, 45). Use of that pronoun, which now sounds odd, is suggestive because it invites us to think of corporations as entities that merge multiple parties into a legally distinct artifact but is not abstracted from them. On this account, the corporation is not reducible to any of these persons, or even all of them in the aggregate, but, instead, is composed of them in their interrelated capacity as members. This mode of belonging is quite different from that which we signify when we say that we are employed by any given corporation, including those that are specifically academic. This latter preposition suggests an alienated object that has assumed a thing-like identity whereas the former anticipates a bond of mutual affiliation among those whose exercise of power is the means of accomplishing the end they share. That purpose is symbolized by the outfit its members don but, contra Sitze, its realization does not require absorption within something that, because sacred, must never be sullied by human hands.

Contra Barkan, to call for the academy’s reconstitution as a member corporation is neither to imagine nor to wish that it become an edenic site from which power has been expelled. Indeed, were the incorporated academy to become a home of happy harmony, that would indicate that faculty are no longer engaging in the critical inquiry that may not be specified in their employment contracts but is most certainly their job. What this reconstitution of rule does mean, though, is that conflict within Commonwealth University will no longer be structurally organized by the economically mediated form of domination that is the commodification of academic labor and whose paradigmatic expression is the power to hire and fire. Nor will the resolution of disputes be structurally organized in accordance with the legally mandated hierarchical chain of command that the AAUP failed to contest in 1915 and that is now approaching perfection in Florida.

Is this vision of the incorporated universitas a utopian fantasy? Better, I propose, to regard it as an object of desire that can never be fully sated because, were that to happen, free inquiry’s restless itch would come to an end. What that object anticipates is an academy whose members are not subject to autocratic rule because they govern themselves, a college in which none are subject to imperious employers because all are equal in their capacity as scholars, and a university in which the love of learning that binds teacher and student is no longer imperiled by a configuration of power antagonistic to its very possibility.

Timothy Kaufman-Osborn is professor emeritus at Whitman College where he taught for nearly four decades. Kaufman-Osborn has published work on the death penalty, feminist theory, American pragmatism and, most recently, the governance of US colleges and universities. He served two terms as president of the Western Political Science Association and now sits on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

Works Cited

• Barnard and Columbia Chapters. 2024. Joint Statement by the American Association of University Professors. April 19. https://philosophy.columbia.edu/sites/philosophy.columbia.edu/files/content/Joint%20Statement%20by%20the%20Barnard%20and%20Columbia%20Chapters%20on%20the%20events%20of%20April%2017th%20and%2018th.pdf.
• Barnard Members of the AAUP. 2024. Letter to Leslie Grinage. April 22. https://docs.google.com/document/d/12PtqgRmflmJAwODeTKbqxrxEl16aKrQcScc39RmXPas/edit?tab=t.0.
• Blackstone, William. 1893. Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books. Philadelphia.
• Ciepley, David. 2017a. “Member Corporations, Property Corporations, and Constitutional Rights.” Law and Ethics of Human Rights 11, no. 1: 31–60.
• Ciepley, David. 2017b. “Is the U.S. Government a Corporation? The Corporate Origins of Modern Constitutionalism.” American Political Science Review 111, no 2: 418–35.
• Columbia University. 1854. The Original Charter of Columbia College. New York.
• Hofstadter, Richard and Walter Metzger. 1955. The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States. Columbia University Press.
• Ireland, Paddy. 1996. “Capitalism without the Capitalist: The Joint Stock Company Share and the Emergence of the Modern Doctrine of Separate Corporate Personality.” Journal of Legal History 17, no. 1: 41–73.
• Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy. 2025. “Why Columbia University Dismantled the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” Theory & Event 28, no. 2: 217–237.
• Schlosser, Joel Alden. 2024. “Review of The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule Within America’s Universities, by Timothy V. Kaufman-Oborn.” American Political Thought 13, no. 1: 129–35.