In the past few weeks, I have searched, mostly in vain, for something, anything, from the higher ed classics of my graduate school days that might provide, if not wayfinding, then transferable wisdom for coping with the End Times. (Disclosure: The Chronicle’s recent piece on how “loose coupling,” among other factors, may have contributed to their predicament gave me a five-minute sugar high.) The historians have helpfully offered the long view which is their remit, starting with Jurgen Herbst’s inimitably titled From Crisis to Crisis (1982); as existential threats go, the only precedent broadly comparable to the Trump era was the experience of entities like Yale and Penn when faced with the loss of their royal charters during the American Revolution. Closer to living memory, Ellen Schrecker, in No Ivory Tower (1986), reminds us that McCarthyism did its damage at a time “when the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming increasingly dependent on and responsive toward the federal government,” and Roger Geiger—chronicler of higher education in the 20^th century as a fundraising saga on behalf of science—concluded ominously in Research and Relevant Knowledge (1993) that the “implacable specialization” that defines university research always bore double-edged risks, especially in the humanities and social sciences, by “dissolv[ing] any reliable link between the study of human affairs and guidance for human action.” At the time, government efficiency, like Open AI and Putinism, had yet to be invented.

Rereading Clark Kerr’s “The realities of the federal grant university,” I won’t say I hoped to come upon Phase Three: Predation by Dictatorship—the classic work is long enough as it is—but as the reality of our reality-averse era closes in, one is free to dream of counterfactuals. In his second Godkin lecture, Kerr essentially framed the “common-law marriage” between Washington, D.C. and the higher-profile higher education institutions as a good problem to have, and to be fair, the spring of 1963 is not noted for its pessimism. The grandfather of the multiversity even considered the question of federal control secondary to the risk of universities becoming way-stations for research entrepreneurs whose grant collections, being PI-specific, made them an institutional flight risk, though with collegial tact, he did not name names. My curiosity piqued, I undertook my own low-tech investigation via Google Scholar, only to discover that it was not up to the task. Guiltily, I turned to ChatGPT. “What are some notable examples from the past 60 years of star researchers who moved from one academic institution to another, taking their federal research grants with them?” I queried. The chatbot cheerfully obliged with a shortlist of such major leaguers as Jennifer Doudna and Robert Putnam, offering to dig deeper for examples not only outside the sciences but, with gentle urging, from the 1960s and 70s as originally prompted (Open AI’s search algorithm understandably works backwards from the vantage of the internet’s eternal present). After less than ten minutes of effort, I had the equivalent of over twenty bullet-pointed mug shots, ranging from the vaguely familiar (William Julius Wilson) and the unexpected (Martha Nussbaum?) to the legendary (Herbert Simon! Thomas Kuhn! Kenneth Arrow!), illustrating the minor but documentable point that universities have had more than half a century to learn that federal grants, like anything else subject to human nature, should not be taken for granted—any more, I soon discovered, than the conveniently packaged findings of ChatGPT. “Where did you find information about Martha Nussbaum’s NEH and NSF grants?” I asked, trusting but verifying. “I wasn’t able to find credible records showing that Martha Nussbaum personally received NSF grants,” the bot replied, with an I-cannot-tell-a-lie candor (along with reams of qualifying data) that, for now at least, sets it apart from HAL, and that it would fall back on over and over as Wilson, Simon, Kuhn, and Arrow and others were all bumped from our Boolean-adjusted list of faithless academics plus large portfolios plus itchy feet, initially for lack of evidence, but mainly because I began asking better questions, which, if AI-assisted students ever learn anything ever again, may ironically prove the technology’s most enduring legacy.

But I can postpone facing the facts for this modest blog only so long with such digressions. The “grants terminated” section of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tracking Accountability website represents more than 50 pages of indefinitely deferred enlightenment on demand. Nearly everyone will find their alma mater or other local institution here. In the case of Emory University, whoever spent over $1.9 million on an HHS grant to study glutamatergic adaptation to stress as a mechanism for anhedonia and treatment response with ketamine only to be notified that the remaining third of the funds had been terminated has had since April 23 to deal with it. We may never know the possibilities of a “culturally adapted digital health application” for older Hispanics with diabetes: at the University of Georgia, only $1,510 of the $188,104 had been spent by April 30 when the grant was withdrawn. Although reputations may be built one day on politically and historically informed interpretations of these cuts (you would think “Plasma cells in health and disease” had been worded to dodge the radar in advance), even I know that it didn’t take a genius to deploy public domain technology in a raid of the entire awards database in search of all titles containing keywords offensive to the Trump administration and its allies: “Engaging multi-disciplinary professional opportunities for women in environmental research” (Georgia State), “The impact of transgenerational racial trauma on epigenetic modifications in mother-infant dyad during pregnancy” (Morehouse School of Medicine), “National LGBT health conference” (Emory). Perhaps saddest of all are those FAINs with only the recipient’s surname as the identifier, of which I’ve found one so far, a graduate student from a U.S. territory who, going by the numbers, was halfway through their support when it was voided this spring.

But all of this too could be dismissed as digressive: every line item in the HHS spreadsheet must tell a story, and as long as we still care, The Chronicle and Pro Publica will be there to tell it to a far larger audience. One month ago, a few weeks before I left Hungary, and a university job I loved, for the second time in as many years, a close friend and colleague of mine flew from Budapest to the United States on a J-1 visa for what was billed by the State Department as a six-week tour of the higher education system; even more amazing than his being approved for a visa at all, or the relative wokeness of the seminar content (about which I will best honor by remaining silent), is how pleasantly everything went, given that his bunkmates hailed from Malaysia, Kenya, and Ukraine, and everyone was supplied in advance with a detailed set of “What to do if you encounter ICE” tips. I can only wonder what my stateside students, with their very different USCIS statuses, will have already experienced (I recently learned from a colleague of at least one apprehension at a court hearing), or how the campus climate may have changed in the year I have been gone, and as far as statistics go, the Open Doors report for 2025 is not yet available but likely to be one for the dark ages. I am reminded how this blog came to be: not as a lumber room for the musings of an intermittently homeless international educator but as a diary of sorts for a TESOL/TEFL specialist seeking to transition into international student advising. Looking back, I suppose I should be grateful that my quest was thwarted at every turn by the guild-like culture of that profession, not so much in light of recent events (I am certain the technocratic core of the ISSS units at larger universities will survive the Trump reapings, at least at the structural level) as because, had I succeeded, I would inevitably have been rubbed the wrong way from the start by the habit of career administrators of describing themselves as “educators” in the first place—only to regret abandoning my own calling, offensively underpaid by contrast though it is, especially in this country.

There is much that I could dwell on that I’ve touched on here over the years: academic freedom (see “Sweezy at Sixty”); the free speech wars (see “Prognostications” ; “Geist Story”); the importance, for too long casually underestimated by people who should know better, of international students to U.S. higher education (this has been a recurring topic in The Higher Edition). But if the valedictory tone of this post is not already clear, it may be because I’ve had my fill of goodbyes. With any luck, my third year at the University of Szeged will not go down as my last, but if I am like most people (i.e., those who hope to quit while we’re ahead), my only regret if it was will be that I did not fight for the chance to prove that it wasn’t. In addition to my standard eight undergraduate seminars, I cautiously agreed to teach four classes in conversational English to the next generation of Hungarian university students at one of the higher-performing high schools. I have never been responsible for twelve concurrent classes in my life, but I did have the blessing (if that is the word) of my wife and daughter to return abroad on my own, even if it meant that repatriation to Trump’s America was part of the deal. It’s possible that the more students whose growth and progress and self-actualization in a second language one feels responsible for, the less mental space there is to worry about how much can be realistically achieved in a couple of semesters, even if the answer is: somewhere between more than you can ever expect to get credit for and considerably less.

“The sage and general antidote against sorrow, is employment,” writes Samuel Johnson in Rambler 47, advice (and Johnson may still be the world’s greatest advice columnist, even if he never gives it) that I, like most people probably, find easiest to follow when I find satisfaction in the work I am doing, even when it can be a slog getting there, and with the proviso that there is enough of it within biking (or in this country, driving) distance. Johnson, importantly, was not a university man, nor am I confident he would have been a very good one, in or out of the lecture hall, in any era, but Rambler 9 may be the earliest (and certainly my favorite) depiction of how every academic discipline we take for granted today likely emerged. “It is pleasing to contemplate a manufacture rising gradually from its first mean state by the successive labours of innumerable minds,” he suggests of the discoverers of glass production in all its gritty trial and error, “facilitating and prolonging the enjoyment of light, enlarging the avenues of science, and conferring the highest and most lasting pleasures; he [sic] was enabling the student to contemplate nature, and the beauty to behold herself.” (Analogously, one must imagine the pioneers of machine learning happy.) Yet Johnson, Pembroke College dropout that he was, maintained a healthy skepticism towards what we would call higher education institutions throughout his life—not to be confused with the pursuit of advanced learning itself, and not, God knows, because he was opposed to institutions in general. Johnson is a good friend to have in times like these precisely because he was agitated by social, political, and personal tensions just like we are: the Industrial Revolution was not yet fully realized, but mandatory Classical learning was approaching its twilight; against all that he abhorred about Americans and the slave trade, Boswell would argue that his friend was the victim of “imperfect or false information”; above all, the inevitability of change, his own mortality most irreconcilably. It is painful to reread his essays on the temporality of friendship (Idler 23), the futility of changing one’s geography (Rambler 6), or the inevitability of regret: “Man is seldom willing to let fall the opinion of his own dignity, or to believe that he does little only because every individual is a very little being” (Idler 88). The reason it is easy to read and reread the essays and The Life without growing tired of either is because they capture the man’s own tireless faith in the power of human speech, whether enacted on the page or in substantive dialogue with others, as an institution worth preserving. It is no accident that we associate Johnson’s name with the first English dictionary. Our spoken words alone belie what very little beings we are: based on findings in a 2007 study by Mehl, et al. that I can confirm exists, ChatGPT estimated that we may utter close to half a billion of them if we make it to age 80, all things being equal (which they are not). As for those of us who ever wrote anything worth preserving, it is as pointless to keep count as it is for the vast majority of us who did not. Johnson himself, in Idler 36, scorned the “ponderous dictator of sentences, whose notions are delivered in the lump, and are, like uncoined bullion, of more weight than use.”

Among the countless dark legacies of the Trump administration’s campaign against higher education, the assault on free speech—far in excess of anything, real or imagined, in the cancel culture chronicles—will, I think, in the long run prove the most insidious. Anyone who works with foreign-born university or university-bound students, or with non-native English speakers overseas, knows what a lengthy and labor-intensive, if deeply meaningful, process it can be to help them achieve academic proficiency in the language, overcoming barriers ranging from the purely cognitive to the stubbornly intercultural, as a prelude to their finding their voice as members of the academic community and, with sustained effort, using that voice to articulate ideas worth sharing, or to contribute to the construction of new knowledge. It is a miracle that anyone succeeds in completing the journey at all in their native tongue, to say nothing of the lingua franca of English, as Rümeysa Öztürk, Mahmoud Khalil, and Ranjani Srinivasan nearly had when ICE came for them. But speech should not have to be overtly political (read: boundary-testing, too often self-answering) to warrant protection: speech includes questions, particularly open-ended ones, and “What are the associations and mediating effects between climate and mental health and violence in informal settlements in Kenya?” and “How do chromosomal makeup and cross-sex hormone administration affect wound healing in mice?” (Columbia and Johns Hopkins, respectively, studies both defunded in March) will not answer themselves. Trees fall in other forests all the time, though, so my parting point is more mundane. As quickly as generative AI insinuated itself into the zone of proximal development, like some ponderous dictator, relief could not have come fast enough for students whose impulses for self-expression, however modest, may already have been fatally submerged, if not suppressed altogether, after years in their home countries’ education systems (and we can no longer limit ourselves only to foreign ones at this point). Universities will surely compensate for the loss, however extensive in the long run, of their international student bodies; frankly, I always had the impression that the latter’s existence, like that of applied linguists like myself, bordered on the nearly invisible anyway. What cannot be compensated for is the loss of what the last generation of students with at least one foot in a globalizing world not yet doubtful of itself, much less fully ventriloquized by the substitution of large language models, might have succeeded in discovering, making sense of, and chronicling in their own words.