The political mood is foul in Santa Barbara, where I’ve spent the holidays visiting family and friends. For some strange reason, I don’t share it.

The bad mood is often specific to Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House. There’s a gloomy feeling of la drôle de guerre, that the current calm is about to give way to daily chaos, stealing, threats and fear.

But there’s another source of mostly unspoken gloom among academics, which stems from there being no sign of a fighting spirit about the future of their campuses.

The pro-Palestinian protests have been muted by policy restrictions and, at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere, ubiquitous police. The American Historical Association did pass a resolution opposing scholasticide in Gaza. This is important, but as a prospective starting point rather than as an existing counter-movement.

On the financial front, one progressive administrator told me that scary budget analyses don’t catapult professors into action but generally turn them off. “I do disclose our problems in the hope of generating faculty interest and even pressure,” they told me. “This seems to have the effect of increasing apathy.”

This response is a more general problem. It predates Trumpism even if Trumpism will make it worse. In her 2023 essay “The Sycophant,” Lorna Finlayson highlighted a “fundamental disposition toward conformity – detectable in the political alignment of the bulk of academic work – on display in many a departmental or union branch meeting”.

But Trumpism in the US and elsewhere has made this submissive individualism a luxury we can no longer afford. We are in the midst of a revival of what cultural theorist Stuart Hall named in 1978 “authoritarian populism”.

Hall recognised that its Thatcherite mode sought cultural hegemony as much as state power. Wherever authoritarian populism operates, it targets rival cultural producers for destruction.

It therefore threatens the autonomy of research, teaching and universities. Where it is out of power, it challenges centre-left governments – like Labour’s in the UK – to downgrade the stature and resources of universities as a precondition of negotiating on other issues.

The university “professional-managerial class” (PMC) has not responded on the basis of its own strengths. It has generally conceded that its expertise makes it unpopular, and its high standards for knowledge are at odds with democracy.

Both these concessions are false. And both give an advantage to forces of anti-knowledge that wish knowledge workers harm.

The term “PMC” was developed by authors Barbara and John Ehrenreich around the same time as Hall coined “authoritarian populism”. It referred to managers, engineers, lawyers and other professionals who were to regulate labour on behalf of capital. This was the group that sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the dominated faction of the dominant class.

In the 1960s, parts of this class rebelled against capital in the name of Black civil rights, feminism, gay liberation and opposition to military intervention and war. This alignment with labour and social movements was real, yet it remained a minority position in the overall hybrid group.

Making matters worse, after 1980 the managerial faction simply downgraded the professionals and increasingly ruled over them as though they were a separate and dangerous entity. Liberal and care-based professions – teachers, social workers, nurses – increasingly lost the right of self-management that professional status theoretically brings.

This affected university instructors as well, starting with those more focused on social reproduction (literature, arts, education) than directly on economic production (science and engineering).

To put it another way, the professional-managerial class had a civil war. The professional factions were mostly unaware of this, and they lost to the managers.

One result is that managerial overlords now go after entire professions with impunity. Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, for example, caused a public and professional backlash by suppressing the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. His justification was to blame journalism for having lost public trust.

Over at the Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong did exactly the same thing. His response to criticism was to say journalism is biased and that in the future he would attach an AI-driven “bias meter” to every article.

The feeling that this kind of autocracy can be softened with deference, submission or sycophancy is a vestige of a vanished PMC age. For those paying attention, the passing of that age was signalled by 1990s scholarship on the audit society and audit culture, authored by Michael Power, Marilyn Strathern, Susan Wright and Cris Shore, among others.

Social media injected audit into every personal interaction via view counts, follower totals, likes and the rest. Bezos, Soon-Shiong and other owners are using AI and related techniques to double down.

In 2025, we all face a set of simultaneous challenges: authoritarian political affect; climate policy backsliding in the West; resurgent racism, misogyny, transphobia and xenophobia; expanding finance; increased management of intellectual and creative production for suitability in the current order.

It would be best to face these challenges with knowledge workers functioning as a group powerful enough to be heard. And yet most of this PMC – outside of the top professionals in tech, finance, law, executive management, medicine and engineering – enters 2025 in a position of social and cultural disrepute.

The world’s various crises demand massively more research that is more engaged with everyday public needs. But they also demand a new respect for the full range of people who create knowledge and whose labours deserve to be taken seriously by society as a whole.

So how do we upgrade the status of knowledge workers? It’s easier said than done, of course. But I have a general suggestion and then three specific ones.

We can start with a lesson from history. The PMC was punished after 1980 when some of its members switched sides from capital to labour and social movements. But that minority was on the right track. Now professionals need to form a social movement for public knowledge, starting in education.

More specifically, the primary knowledge institution, the university, needs to be rebuilt financially and repositioned socially.

First, we need more research to make universities financially sustainable at a higher level of quality. Trying to practice what I preach, I have a new paper on this topic in the inaugural issue of Public Humanities, “The Humanities Decline in Darkness.”

We also need more work on the extent to which university finance serves as a funnel for subsidising private enterprise. How much of universities’ own budget precarity could be reversed by unwinding private partnerships, particularly in ed-tech?

Second, another age that’s over is that of human capital theory and its post-war promise that “learning equals earning”. We are far behind on theorising the non-economic – the intellectual – benefits of higher education. The sector will be strong if redefined away from the vocationalist language that no longer inspires confidence or fiscal support.

Other projects are equally essential – cross-racial equalisation, new inclusivity in academic culture, and others. But none of these will take root without the third project: remaking professional culture so that its members can engage, confront, even overcome management as part of their working routine.

2025 will need academic and professional staff who are ready to fight. The research will matter to the extent that they have the will and the capacity to put it into practice.

To me, these are the projects that will make this year interesting and fun. And in that spirit, happy 2025!