I am honored and excited by the opportunity to comment on this important book by Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023). To begin, I note that I am awed by its empirical and theoretical scope. The author tells a historical story about divergent paths that long ago were taken in developing and enacting the corporate model of the academic university. He does so not only to illustrate what could have developed differently but also to implore his readers to follow previous leads toward enacting a less autocratic, more republican “member-corporation” model of university organization, relationships, and practices.

I am enticed by Kaufman-Osborn’s utopian vision of what a “commonwealth university” might look like. His critique of capitalist production processes and commodified relations, his account of employer domination and a desire for employee control, and his analysis of the failures of liberalism and neoliberalism to offer antidotes or alternatives are sophisticated and sound. Moreover, I generally believe in democratic republican forms—especially in worker-governed workplaces—at every level and form of production. I fully recognize that racial and gendered hierarchies are embedded in and undermine most formally democratic institutional contexts in racial capitalist orders (like the United States); however, I remain hopeful that democratic ideals and processes are among the best resources for advancing justice. For someone who is grounded in political theory and committed to democratic socialism, this book speaks to my heart and mind.

In my view, the brilliant promise of Kaufman-Osborn’s book—as opposed to many other Leftist calls for action rooted in abstract and imported theoretical sources—lies in offering an alternative model grounded in American history that might inform practical appeals in courts of law, public opinion, policy forums, and faculty networks. The author provides an analysis of the present that can be used by political scientists as well progressive movement activists to understand institutional and political change. As such, the book constitutes a potentially resonant narrative and scholarly resource as well as a call for action. That said, I am still trying to figure out where the book leaves us, including for those of us sympathetic to Kaufman-Osborn’s analysis, shared values, and admittedly utopian aspirations.

The unanswered question in this ambitious book is how we as faculty members might generate support and commitment from colleagues and potential allies for implementing Kaufman-Osborn’s vision in changing inherited autocratic arrangements. I ask this informed by several decades of futile efforts to organize faculty colleagues for even modest changes in institutional organization at my university. This included a two-day event in the 1990s, which drew hundreds of participants, to explore how to challenge what we then labeled the top-down neoliberal corporate model of university governance. Despite considerable enthusiasm for fundamental transformation in our shared working conditions, little resulted from this event. Ongoing efforts to mobilize support on my campus for faculty unionization during recent decades similarly have had little success, including not least among political science colleagues. In light of this experience, I was eager to see Kaufman-Osborn’s analysis of the prospects for transformative faculty action in the university context.

Chapter 8, which discusses the origins of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the development of the “Shared Governance….Placebo,” provides an analysis that helped me to reflect on my own experiences in attempting to organize faculty members. For example, Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 172–73) notes that populist forces in the academy more than a century ago embraced a democratic, anti-capitalist campaign “for the academy’s emancipation from plutocratic control.” He describes how the early AAUP radicals could have chosen to affiliate with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and American Federation of Labor, as John Dewey urged. However, the AAUP instead embraced a myth of professionalism that distinguished academic faculty from the situation of wage earners in profit-driven industries who embraced unions to improve their lot. Thus was born the “accommodationist” strategy grounded in the “holy trinity” of academic freedom, tenure, and “shared governance.” This choice, Kaufman-Osborn seems to imply, was a contingent political gamble that made sense at the time. However, it ultimately became normalized as a universal commitment to norms around professionalism, thereby locking in capitalist forms of hierarchical employment relations in universities. Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 19) brilliantly and subtly demonstrates how this ethos of professionalism has been further buttressed by neoliberalism. These were critical claims that we advanced in less clear terms at the conference I helped to organize in the 1990s as the dynamics of neoliberalism were beginning to become more palpable. I wish this book had been available at that time to sharpen our understanding of the political limitations of attempting to respond to the corporatization of higher education without addressing the university’s inherited corporate structure.

At that midpoint in his book, therefore, I wondered whether Kaufman-Osborn might address the radical possibilities of faculty unionization as a means for organizational change in the current era. He does, but only in a footnote at the end of the book, where he expresses “ambivalence toward unionization” (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 294)—which is a prudent assessment that I share. However, his view—like that of many scholars on the political left—leans toward deep skepticism, without drawing out how even flawed organizations also might contain radical potential. First, this deep skepticism seems to contradict at least some of what he wrote previously regarding John Dewey. Second, I think he is overly dismissive. Unions, like universities, also developed to some extent out of associations in the earliest eras of capitalist development and primitive accumulation. As a consequence, these early associational experiences left a radical legacy at odds with later capitalist relations that is still apparent today. Moreover, whereas many unions fit Kaufman-Osborn’s image of bureaucratic accommodation to capitalism—especially as typified in what we call “business unions”—union activism also has generated some of the most vital critiques of capitalist ownership, manager–employee relationships, commodification, and a property-based legal and political system in our history. Many union leaders, movements, and campaigns have critically challenged the pillars of racial capitalism and have exemplified alternative democratic visions and relations in the process. After all, most unions are organized far more democratically than business and property corporations (Madland et. al 2020). Although I cannot make the case in this article, Marx and Engels generally took a similarly ambivalent yet contingently optimistic position, at once critical to the point of dismissiveness and yet often still supportive and hopeful—especially regarding union activism in the late 1800s (e.g., Eidlin Reference Eidlin, Vidal, Rotta, Smith and Prew2019). In the twentieth century, many union radicals in the United States—including A. Philip Randolph, Harry Bridges, and Aileen Hernandez—joined anti-capitalist, overtly pro-socialist aims to democratic struggles for racial justice and eventually for gender justice (Ahlquist and Levi Reference Ahlquist and Levi2014; McCann Reference McCann, Rogers and Turner2020). These campaigns did not win support from all or even most unions, to be sure, but their impact on many workers’ associations and radical activists is undeniable.

My question for the author, therefore, again concerns where we might find the associational roots and legal standing for radical challenge. I am profoundly skeptical that universities will become more democratic, ever—although faculty members are to blame no less than management. My own efforts to mobilize faculty support around specific issues, as well as the general goal of unionization, exposed how deeply embedded most faculty members are in capitalist ideology, motivations, aspirations, and practices—even if the content of their scholarship suggests otherwise. The Autocratic Academy explains how this has happened. Neoliberal ideology runs deep for many, not only for academics who specialize in modeling the dynamics of a market-based political economy. The quest for unequal status and salaries is evident even among many who claim to be the most progressive and inclusionary exemplars. “We are not workers aspiring to politicize the university; we are apolitical professionals,” I heard endlessly from colleagues who dismissed the possibilities of faculty activism. The ideologies and institutional logics of capitalism and meritocracy are deeply rooted in what people bring to academic life, even before they become faculty members resigned to passivity as employees.

Conversely, the only instances I have observed in the academic context that are even remotely close to exemplifying the utopian potential for republican university governance were built by unions, which brought together faculty members, graduate students, staff, and students, as well as outside progressive labor allies. For example, despite aversion by most faculty members at the University of Washington (Seattle), The United Faculty of Washington State mobilized substantial support at four campuses around alliances with AFT and the National Education Association to assert both campus- and state-wide power to change in public higher education on various issues beyond (but including) wages. To be sure, these moments of transformative action often are episodic and short-lived, as different waves of students and faculty members enter and leave, but momentum continues to build. In short, although faculty unions are no panacea and often add institutional structures that sustain bureaucratic hierarchy, union organizing and activism sometimes can be transformative. It is worth noting that today, defiant worker activism through and around unions is resurgent across the nation. I highlight in particular that the recent (2022) alliance forged between the 44,000-member AAUP and the 1.7-million-member AFT could be significant at a national level. Whereas its official public statement reprised standard AAUP rhetoric of “academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance,” it also emphasized contributions to “American democracy.” Might this be an opportunity and resource for collaborative action that goes in a new, bolder direction toward the republican and socialist vision that Kaufman-Osborn offers?

I offer no reliable or proven solution to the dilemma. Kaufman-Osborn provides a compelling historical narrative that could become a useful resource in struggles for change. However, although he offers a glimpse into moments of past protest against autocracy, I wonder how he imagines where, when, and how change happens in the current context. Yes, “What’s past is prologue,” but to what future?