Political Science In the Polycrisis

My keynote talk to an online APSA conference

A few weeks ago, I was asked to deliver a keynote at the APSA Virtual Research Meeting on “Political Science Under Pressure.” (When I said yes, I thought I’d been asked onto a panel; I quickly realized I’d signed up for a full 75-minute keynote.)

What follows is an edited transcript with selected slides. This is too long for email — my gosh, this is long — so at some point you’ll need to click through.

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I’m writing from, in some ways, the literal front lines — or at least near them — of places where political science has come under direct pressure. Today I want to do three things: say what’s happening, ask why we ended up in this series of crises, and think about whether and how we can get out.

What’s happening

Shifting baselines

If you talk to folks who’ve been around a long time, their sense of what has gone wrong will be very different from mine. We’re all seeing this crisis through our own viewpoint, so I want to start by being clear about mine.

One concept I use in my course on the politics of the end of the world comes from environmental studies: shifting baselines. Every generation has something it views as normal. If you’re in your 50s or 60s, your idea of what’s normal for U.S. academia is going to be very different from mine, or from a graduate student just starting out.

My baseline is not the 1960s or 1970s, when I’m told public budgets were large and support for higher education was high. It’s not even the 1980s or 1990s, when I was around but wasn’t involved in academia at all — I was still learning how to walk. People in the academy then thought things were pinched. Compared to now, that baseline looks generous.

My baseline starts in 2008, when I decided to go to graduate school. I remember very clearly being a TA in a course on the politics of the former Soviet Union at Georgetown, watching one of my students monitor his stock portfolio crashing in September 2008.

I had no idea then what the Great Recession would mean for academia. It was a sharp shock with long-lasting results. Even Harvard cancelled job searches mid-year and undertook other cutbacks, like eliminating cookies at faculty teas. At other institutions, the cuts were larger. That baseline tempered my optimism — for instance, the expectation that academia is cosseted or stable.

So I’m not defining today’s crisis relative to some good old days. For me, there were no good old days.

Table stakes

Before we address the current crisis, we need to acknowledge some structural conditions I won’t dwell on but want to name. The education industry has been dealing with adjunctification of its instructional faculty for decades — no longer a crisis but a structural condition. Public universities have faced declining state investment, even in true-blue states like Massachusetts. Faculty turnover has been low since the end of mandatory retirement, with concomitantly fewer opportunities for junior scholars. And there is now extraordinary competition for jobs and even graduate-school admission. The career I had — applying to PhD school with an idea of what I might like to study — doesn’t really exist anymore at competitive places. Juniors and seniors today have more research experience than I had as a second-year PhD student.

Even given that context, what is going on right now is astonishing.

A many-sided assault on U.S. higher education

U.S. higher education is experiencing a tremendous assault. Entire disciplines are in the crosshairs of state governments. In Florida, sociology has been removed as a general education course. College professors have left jobs in Texas because they dared to teach woke radicals like Plato. In Indiana, where I grew up and went to university, the state legislature has enforced almost-draconian laws about what public institutions can teach.

Everyone is affected. Nobody wants to have sympathy for the Harvards and Yales of the world — if you’re at a more workaday institution, it can be hard to empathize with the travails of wealthy ones. But our wealthier colleagues are facing genuinely serious crises, and that matters for all of us. Wealth, prestige, and reputation are no longer guarantees of safety; they paint a target on institutions’ backs.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill, the wealthiest universities are being targeted to an unprecedented degree. The bill imposes up to an 8% wealth tax on the largest endowments — not about leveling the playing field but a tax on research universities. It turns out you can get Republican Congresses to pass a wealth tax, as long as it targets universities. Endowments may be things “other universities” have (I think I can say without endangerment that Georgetown wishes it had a bigger one), but they generate positive spillovers across the sector — Harvard’s underwrites services like Dataverse. Penalizing Harvard like this doesn’t lead to a braver, more equitable future. It simply weakens institutions that, love them or hate them, are pillars of higher education.

If life is bad at the summit, it’s awful in the trenches. I put together this chart about university closures yesterday before news broke that one of my former neighboring colleges, Hampshire College, would be closing. Like Hampshire, many nonprofit institutions are simply closing. What’s happening now is much worse than during the Great Recession. The generous COVID aid Congress passed in 2020 patched over a lot of problems, but as enrollments shrink, we’re seeing an increasing number of institutions shuttering.

Adding to all this are structural changes in the research enterprise. COSSA — the Consortium of Social Science Associations — is not a group of wild-eyed radicals. And yet their evaluation of changes to the National Science Foundation describes what’s happening at NSF as potentially existential for the social and behavioral science community.

The NSF has not only formally requested the closure of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate; it is already administratively moving to dismantle it. This isn’t inside-the-Beltway gossip. It will have tangible effects on graduate education and basic-research funding in the United States, with ripple effects worldwide.

Targeting students and faculty

The assault is also specifically targeting students and faculty. Some states are ahead of the curve. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has spearheaded specific assaults on how public universities can conduct international program activities, including a Florida law that blocks Chinese students from taking part in academic research.

Chinese researchers are finding it extremely difficult to be in Florida — even though, before DeSantis’s law, they made up a substantial part of Florida’s higher education system. And Florida’s higher education system is a gem; the University of Florida is one of America’s greatest public research universities.

Imagine being cut off from one of the world’s greatest sources of talent — not because of any genuine concerns, but because Ron DeSantis wanted an issue (and the record is pretty clear on this) on which he could run as a China hawk in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. That ended badly. The law remains on the books.

In other ways familiar to anyone joining a virtual conference like this one, the U.S. role as a cornerstone of research has come under assault. Even at the level of getting visas, U.S. higher education is suffering because international visitors no longer want to come. Individual researchers are being targeted too. Just the other week, a University of Washington graduate student was questioned and removed from the United States when returning to Sea-Tac.

We’re all familiar with last year’s abuses — including the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student arrested on suspicion of being pro-Hamas because she wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper. She was eventually released, and the immigration judge who allowed her release was later fired.

Disrupting the U.S. as a preeminent global force

Other connections between U.S. academia and the world are being severed. The Cato Institute recently put out a report showing how many visas have been denied for folks who want to come study in the United States.

It might be hard to see how dramatic the shift is — your eye goes first to the orange line — but you have to look all the way at the bottom of the chart to see the 2026 projections. Visas for international students are down tremendously, and they keep going down. Visa rejection rates are also trending upward across practically every continent except South America.

This has effects beyond the United States. Coincidentally, a colleague who studies Saudi Arabia sent me tweets about a Saudi academic controversy while I was preparing this talk. They discuss recent — like, past few days — changes at King Saud University, one of the leading institutions in Saudi Arabia, which is closing entire faculties: history, geography, sociology. Defenders of the move — and Saudi Twitter is, for lack of a better expression, lit — point to the fact that leading U.S. institutions are also reducing low-enrollment programs.

What happens in the U.S., because of its traditional role as a cornerstone of international higher education, is taken as a guide to what is acceptable. The battles we fight and lose in American institutions have global effects.

This has also directly impacted graduate education and folks who wanted to come to the United States. Last year, I wrote for Slate drawing on my experience as an American at an American institution in the Global South, about how I have started advising students from the Global South not to go to the U.S. for their PhD programs. It’s not a viable path given the difficulties they could face — including potentially being deported or worse. The risks that things get worse over the next three years are large enough that it’s hard to ask anyone to make a five-to-seven-year commitment.

Meanwhile, Chinese universities are moving up the ladder. They are pursuing talent. They are welcoming talent. They have a government that’s investing. What a contrast.

I don’t mention this out of some Cold War, beat-the-Chinese instinct. Years ago, when colleagues and I talked about these dynamics, we all assumed great-power competition would lead to increased — or at least preserved — funding in U.S. institutions. Instead we’re observing the opposite. The U.S. is dismantling its institutions of higher education rather than investing in them. If even a new Cold War isn’t going to save higher-ed investment, what could?

Technological and geopolitical upheavals

We’re dealing with all of this at the same time that technological and geopolitical upheavals are reshaping our day-to-day experience.

Some political scientists have had measured takes on AI. A lot of this has focused on research. Andy Hall at Stanford has written about how incorporating LLMs into workflows might increase our ability to do good social science. He’s demonstrated that for relatively straightforward data papers, LLMs may match or exceed junior researchers.

I’m not an AI optimist, but I have no time for people who believe LLMs are at the same level they were in 2022 or 2023. If you’re not using frontier programs, you may not know just how scary good they’ve gotten — even though they can also screw up royally.

You can go too far. I’m not sure it’s fair to say AI can already do social science research better than most professors. But I do think Alexander Kustov — who has attracted a lot of vitriol online for some occasionally exaggerated takes — is generally right when he says that if you’re not paying attention to this sector, you’re not contemplating the profundity of what we need to do.

Even without AI, we’d be grappling with the second-order effects of technology on how students process the world. Reliance on AI can reduce the very skills that make it possible for someone like Andy Hall to be a productive researcher who uses AI. Going in expecting the machine to do everything means you’re getting nothing out of it.

(I transcribed this speech using AI and had Claude edit it. Did Claude replace anything I would do? No. Did it let me publish faster? Yes. Could I have let it do more? Yes — but that’s past my ethical AI use line. Suffice to say this post, this Substack altogether, wouldn’t exist without AI. If you’re not using the tools, well, I salute your commitment to an alternative lifestyle.)

There are other challenges. Before AI was a major part of our lives — three years ago — we were already dealing with something that looked like a literacy crisis, a term I do not use lightly, and an attention-span crisis to the point that even film studies majors cannot be relied upon to independently watch movies. I used to think it was hard enough to get college students to read Tom Schelling. If you can’t get them to sit through Dr. Strangelove, we have a crisis of a different order.

Put it together and we have a profound crisis.

The Challenges for Political Science

Political science faces its own problems. Thomas J. Wood put together data from APSA eJobs showing that not only have job postings declined but also that, in 2025–26, at every stage of the academic year, postings ran well below average. Political science is doing relatively better than, say, history, perhaps even sociology — but we’re facing a rapid erosion of our ability to recruit and sustain habits I’ve taken for granted since 2008.

For some of us — not just in Qatar, but in Iran, in Israel, elsewhere — the attack on academics has been far more literal. Universities on all sides of the recent war have become targets, sometimes direct ones. There have been times when my university, Georgetown in Qatar, was named as a specific target of missile attacks by the IRGC. The U.S. and Israel have carried out airstrikes on Iranian academic institutions. Sometimes you look up and see that the war has come to the skies over your head.

Look at all of this, and you begin to think: we’re in a crisis.

An era of crises

In a crisis, what we knew to be normal is no longer reliable. As a good quantitative political scientist, I sought to formalize my intuition, so I went to APSA’s statements page. Sometimes on social media people say, “What is APSA doing about this?” Often APSA has actually issued, or is about to issue, a statement on exactly that thing. I tallied, for each year back to 2003 (the earliest on the website), how many statements and letters APSA had issued. They sometimes deal with state and federal laws, with international concerns, with political scientists under threat for their lives or freedoms, with abuses of academic freedom, with the quality of democracy in the United States, Turkey, or elsewhere.

There’s a clear time trend. I broke out non-U.S. statements, and statements that were petitions for redress or congratulations. Subtracting those and looking just at U.S.-focused statements, it’s clear political science is in crisis. It’s not entirely a crisis of President Trump’s making — but the Trump era has plainly led to a new era in which APSA is putting out a lot of crisis statements. Since 2017 there has been a structural break. We’ve been living through uncharted territory, with APSA issuing in some years more statements than in entire prior five- or ten-year periods.

Fraying everywhere

If you’re a researcher or graduate student, if you’re feeling anxious or depressed, if you feel like something is just not right — you’re not alone. Dave Karpf, a political scientist at GW, put it well in his Substack . His baseline, ten years earlier than mine, was that you could still make a career as a political scientist in the academy — but every year has felt more precarious, even for someone with a good job at a solid institution:

My peers and I … ran across a crumbling bridge. We arrived at the tail end of American government treating higher education as if it were a priority worth investing in. Tenure-line professorships aren’t cheap. Once you start treating academia as a business and trying to identify cost savings, you’ll eventually decide to try to educate those student-consumers cheaper-and-worse via a more precarious workforce. … And the job itself is, well, fraying.

It’s not your imagination. The infrastructure on which our practices depend is crumbling. If you’re a journal editor or author, peer reviews are harder to get — people say no more often. (For crying out loud, I have three reviews on my desk. I swear, editors, I’m going to get to them.) Journals are under pressure from AI-enabled submissions. And as political science has become a more global discipline — a genuinely unalloyed good — there has been a rise in submissions worldwide. It is harder to get published, harder to find stability, harder to climb the rungs we know we’re supposed to climb, even as competition becomes fiercer just to reach the ladder.

There’s also been surprising resistance to investing in disciplinary public goods. Some is voluntary — perhaps a function of declining trust generally — with folks less willing to defer to or participate in organizations like ISA or APSA. It’s easy to find wedge issues and use them as an excuse to reject associations in the name of solidarity. There are also more direct assaults: state legislatures in some red states are wondering why public institutions should fund membership in or travel to conferences. We have resistance both voluntary and politically motivated, all undermining what we know as the discipline.

Even as the world crumbles around me, I’m still going to try to understand why this is happening. Ruat caelum, fiat scientia.

Why is this happening?

A collapse in confidence in higher education

So why is this happening? Part of it is simply a general collapse in confidence. Gallup put out a chart recently in an effort to suggest that confidence in higher education was rebounding.

Man — if that’s a rebound, I hate to see what Gallup thinks bad news is.

It’s not that everybody thinks we’re doing a terrible job; a plurality still finds higher education worthwhile. But there’s a lot more dissatisfaction than there used to be.

There are basically three broad stories. Part of the dissatisfaction, predictably, is concern about political agendas. Another is loss of confidence that universities are teaching what they should — that academics aren’t teaching real-world skills. If you’ve been on a campus in the last 40 years, you know this is ridiculous: the most popular majors are business, nursing, direct practical things. For all the hullabaloo about gender studies majors — and the rhetorical use those tropes have had — hardly anybody majors in those subjects. But the perception is widespread. More directly and materially, people worry that college costs too much. Defensively, we might reflexively say none of this matters, but tuition costs a lot. Exactly how is anybody supposed to pay for even a degree at a relatively inexpensive school?

Polarization and sorting

Polarization is everywhere. This used to be a contested finding, but if you’re still contesting it in 2026, I just don’t know. There’s a great article in Political Behavior from a few years ago using a conjoint experiment to show that the most important criterion for college roommate preference was political affiliation match — even more than sexual orientation, even more than religion. There’s a working paper from the Annenberg Institute — and it drives me crazy that I have to cite economists on this — showing that students are willing to pay substantially more in tuition to be at a university where peers share their politics.

Some of this points to division, but there’s also surprising consensus. Three economists (again, three economists — political scientists, we need to do a lot more research on the politics of higher education) surveyed people and compared how they viewed the proper mission of corporations and universities. They found real interest in universities taking on social missions like global understanding, free speech, and open dialogue. There was skepticism about universities engaging in political engagement — though, notably, less than for corporations.

Break it apart by ideology and there’s plenty of dissensus. Conservatives really don’t want universities involved in politics; they want universities to inculcate patriotism and traditional values. There’s the culture war being expressed. The researchers also ran an allocation experiment: people emphasized academic achievement and, surprisingly, environmental sustainability, while predictably polarizing issues like DEI emerged as flashpoints. That meshes with real-world pressures and decisions.

Ideological and interest-group politics

Higher education is also under attack because of specific interest groups and political-economic considerations. There’s a reason folks like Peter Thiel — Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, although probably we should just say oligarch — have engaged in ways to rhetorically and directly undermine universities’ position in the status hierarchy. Institutions and their independent credentialing model are seen as a threat to how capital, especially capital associated with Silicon Valley, wants society to be organized.

There are also pressures from less directly identifiable interests. High school students in the trades are getting offered pretty good jobs; the Wall Street Journal News Desk has no particular reason to undermine universities, but the dearth of skilled trades means you can do well coming out of high school. And it’s not just Peter Thiel offering alternative routes to highly paid jobs in tech — there are now market-driven opportunities for trading firms and investment banks to identify talent earlier.

And then there is the way classrooms themselves have become battlefields. This is happening on both left and right. There is a move — Austin Sarat at Amherst College terms it bluntly — to turn students into informants ratting on their instructors. Political scientists, as well as folks in sociology and other sensitive disciplines, are well aware of these risks, because we have all experienced second- or firsthand the sense that what is said in the classroom is subject to potential disciplinary action on a student’s initiative. As a result, folks in the academy report more and more self-censoring with students.

In my own newsletter, I’ve been writing about how organized interest groups — in this case, the Goldwater Institute — have specifically targeted not just political science as a discipline but individual editorial decisions at the American Political Science Review, as part of a larger political project. Right-wing groups like Goldwater have figured out how the mechanics of the academy function. And since they want to change how those mechanics function — in a weird Marxian way, the point is not to understand the world but to change it — they have begun looking for pain points and ways to change the incentives, the very economy, of political science and other disciplines, so as to advance their agendas.

Because peer-review decisions at APSR loom large in disciplinary self-governance, right-wing groups and activists are finding ways to promote ideologically driven boards of trustees, state-government employees, and state legislatures to change how the discipline functions — to remove academic freedom by changing disciplinary self-governance.

This is framed as a way to reduce waste, but the point is to provide alternative means of staffing and directing academia, an alternative well-funded path for ideologically aligned scholars (and ideologically neutral people just looking for a job in a straitened economy) to produce institutions closely aligned with their goals.

Reports like these are trial balloons — searching for ways to shape how the academy is governed. Because this is happening at the state level, there is vast scope for many dozens of U.S. states to come up with alternative ways to manage academia.

The shredding of norms

This sort of interference is a shattering of norms we have all come to view as normal. We can no longer rely on a bipartisan consensus about academic freedom, the role of academics, or the place of U.S. higher education as a strategic resource. That has gone away — even if it was only ever a truce rather than a consensus.

Initiatives like requiring syllabi to be posted online mean it’s not just folks in classrooms who can become informants; anyone motivated and with access to LLMs can run their own private DOGE initiative targeting individual scholars for what they teach. This is a startling development, and I’m not sure people have given it the attention it deserves. Even the syllabus — which we used to joke nobody reads — has become a battlefield of political contestation.

In my own research, I’ve also been studying how shifting attitudes toward higher education have led to assaults — like DeSantis’s — on the ability of U.S. institutions to participate in international exchanges. In a recent article in Foreign Policy Analysis, I looked at how Republicans and Republican publics view with favor initiatives like DeSantis’s that sunder links between the United States and countries it deems threats. Public opinion data show independents and Democrats much more likely to support international students enrolling in U.S. universities; Republicans much less. Chinese students in particular were singled out by Republicans as justifiable targets for exclusion.

Moves like DeSantis’s may still be extreme, but I would not be surprised if states like Texas — currently in the middle of a legislative session in which combating Sharia is a major priority — continued their turn away from internationalization. That turn has already included shuttering Texas A&M University in Qatar, just down the road from me, as a way of politicizing what we have all come to believe should be the province of educational self-governance.

What is to be done?

What the heck are we supposed to do? This is where my point about shifting baselines comes back with a vengeance.

We all have reflexive answers. People have called on associations to issue more statements; the associations have done so (even if people are resistant to hearing that!), but the situation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. There have been calls for institutions to resist — and in some cases, like Harvard’s resistance to specific Trump administration policies, this has worked. But it has also been inefficient and largely ineffective at reversing things, because so many pressures are being applied to so many pain points that no university or association can win every battle.

We might say internationalization can save us. But internationalization is no silver bullet. It comes with its own risks and may amount more to launching lifeboats for a few than to saving the ship. Others have suggested political scientists need to get directly involved in the fray — to bridge the gap between what we research and what we do. But if an entire political party is hostile to political science, that may not work either. If even vaccines can be politicized, it’s hard to see how a frontal assault is anything but a potential disaster. Maybe we don’t need bridges but moats.

We have to ask: do we have the leverage right now to win the kind of battles we’re being forced to fight? An honest accounting is that in some cases, yes — and in other cases we’re talking about grand structural changes where PR campaigns or individual volition cannot arrest the tide. It’s one thing to resist this or that policy; it’s impossible to win every challenge we face. That doesn’t mean victories are impossible. It does mean being clear-eyed about where the lines can be drawn, what can be defended, and what needs to be restrained until another day.

What do we want?

The bigger question is: what do we want? In a sense, we are all trying to recapture what we view as normal. Political socialization tells us that the way the world was when we were 18-year-olds represents how we view the world as it should be: Our baseline. It is natural to want to restore a world we only began to see as under threat a few — or ten — years ago. But in many ways we cannot rebuild what has been lost. Damage has been done. Entire generations of scholars have been affected. Entire generations of potential scholars are being affected: if even Harvard is cutting back on PhD admissions, imagine the strains on institutions without Harvard’s resources. If NSF is pulling back on basic research, we can’t all set up a GoFundMe and hope ANES continues as before.

The past is gone. Recovery can be only partial. No matter how much money a hypothetical Democratic Congress throws at higher ed, we can’t just restore institutions and careers, much less intenrational trust.

Accepting that the past is past might be healthy. I’m not an accelerationist, but I’m open to the critique that the baseline of a couple of years ago wasn’t all that great either. Remember: the table stakes include precarity, adjunctification, and systemic disparities. We wouldn’t even want to restore everything we could. We’d want to build something better.

So we don’t want to go back, even if going back would be preferable to where we are. While you might optimistically say one day President Trump will pass from the scene, this crisis is not just about Trump. It has deeper roots and casts longer shadows than any individual, even the president. There will be no catharsis. There will be no moment when the scales fall from everybody’s eyes and they realize, ah yes, higher education, that’s the gem of American society—whyever did we smash it? Public opinion, elite opinion, and the array of institutions we face are not going back to where they were in 2005, much less 1965.

That’s dispiriting, on top of everything else. But of course it’s dispiriting. We’re facing a structural crisis unlike anything American higher education has ever faced. What did you think the end of our institutions would look like? Vibes? Essays?

Don’t mourn. Build.

It’s natural, looking at the scale of these challenges, to wonder how we will get through.

At times like this, I think about how W. E. B. Du Bois carried out scholarship under conditions vastly less favorable than what I face now, what you face now, what the sector faces now. You can do good work. You can’t give up the faith — because if you do, you’ve already lost.

In Indigenous studies, there is the concept of survivance — offering resistance simply by surviving and continuing to persist.

I don’t want to equate what we face as relatively well-off, well-situated professionals — as grave as our challenges are, let’s be frank about our positionality — to the challenges Indigenous communities face. But I do find the concept intriguing and insightful.

What we have to do is conserve what we have, and think about a future not just in our own lifetimes but afterward. As dispiriting as everything is, we can’t mourn. We have to build. That means we need to think about what we want to build.

Some of the things we can build are immediate.

Build rapport with students. If you’re like me, you were trained as a researcher. But one of the great joys of my work — at Dickinson, at UMass, here at Georgetown in Qatar — has been connecting with students. We need to view that as a way of dispelling lazy stereotypes: both the stereotype that professors are lazy, and the lazy stereotypes about what we do all day. Rapport means demystifying our work — explaining what we do, why, and how — while sincerely sharing why craft matters, why studying matters.

View academic freedom as contested. Our core values are, it turns out, not widely shared. We sometimes appeal reflexively to the virtues of faculty self-governance, autonomy, and academic freedom as self-evident. We can no longer do that. We have to explain why these values matter — constantly, patiently, earnestly, ad nauseam. We must also behave like those values matter, weighing in on important topics responsibly and with a sense that any intervention might reverberate more broadly.

Defang objections, and recognize concerns. Everybody wants to believe what they’re doing in class is valuable. We can also be clearer, as many of us already are, about why what we do is valuable to students. It’s not that learning political theory will help you get a job — I don’t want to turn us into a workforce development program. But we need to keep, persistently and earnestly, discussing why what we do matters: through experiential learning and other transformational experiences, why studying any discipline seriously can make you better at other forms of living. I don’t want to fall prey to the idea that intoning the words “critical thinking” will save us. I mean in class: discussing why what we do matters, inviting students to reflect, then making clear how what they have done has transformed what they do.

Pursue and value distributed scholarship and evaluation. If infrastructure is a target, we need to fix the infrastructure. That means not just relying on journals — and this is not just about commercial journals. Research published in journals cannot be the only way we measure influence. Andy Hall published one of his methodological interventions on LLMs as a LinkedIn post. How are you going to talk about a major intervention — which led to hundreds of comments and got a lot of attention — if it doesn’t fit within the boxes we accept as scholarship? We can change how we measure productivity. That starts with letter writers and tenure-file reviewers, with asking whether the practices we track are convenient or actually measuring something essential. It may require associations like APSA to develop principles-based evaluation standards rather than impact-factor ones.

Emphasize conservation and independence, not just productivity. We need to think about how we’ll preserve scholarship, disseminate it, share it — and maintain (this is crucial) the rigor, openness, and commitment to dialogue that distinguish scientific communication from other forms. Not everything I write is scientific. But some of what I write that is scientific isn’t being published in peer-reviewed journals — even though that means it has a much wider reach. We should persistently emphasize our role in conserving and sharing knowledge, taking our role as independent — not even necessarily as the best researchers in the discipline. There will come a time when private-sector or government applications once again seize the leading role in knowledge production, as they did long before the sunny 20th century of U.S. higher education, just because they have money and access. We need to conserve our role as scholars and explain the benefit of independent analysts.

In 2024, a prominent politician embraced the slogan “we’re not going back.” She lost. But the slogan is accurate. We aren’t going back — to a realm of unquestioned U.S. predominance (maybe we shouldn’t even want to), or to an era in which we governed ourselves without any sense of pressure (maybe that wasn’t a great equilibrium either). Maybe we can make something out of the pressures we face.

No nostalgia for lost worlds. We need to move forward — and to think about, maybe not even a single shared vision of a future, but many futures, that capture the variety of what we value and how we can make those productive.

We’re not going back. We must move forward.