John Schmidt is a PhD student in geography at UCLA, where he studies finance and the energy transition.
Endowments are meant to insulate universities from politics. But far from being apolitical, the arrangement prioritizes the whims of the market, the authority of financial experts, and the preferences of donors over the concerns of students and faculty.
Unlike with other academic workers, unionization among tenure-track faculty is rare. But unions can make it easier for tenure-stream faculty to fight back against the corporatization of higher ed.