Knowledge Under Siege

Strategic Response in the Age of Institutional Redundancy

Opt-in section of the Contraptions Newsletter devoted to backgrounders, notes, and experiments cooked up with AI assistance. Serving up elevated slop 1-2 times a week. Cooking time of this one: 2 hours. Recipe at end. If you only want my hand-crafted writing, you can unsubscribe from this section.

---

In prior centuries, the university was attacked because it stood in the way. Today, it is attacked because it no longer does.

This inversion marks a profound shift. The university is no longer necessary to dismantle in order to replace; it is already being replaced—by artificial intelligence systems that mimic expertise, by platforms that disaggregate teaching from institutions, by cultural narratives that cast intellectual authority as ideological capture. The political attack, in this new regime, is not about seizing control of the university as a site of power; it is about accelerating its symbolic collapse.

Yet paradoxically, while universities have lost much of their structural monopoly on knowledge, they have retained—and even intensified—their status as lightning rods of political anxiety. They are targeted not for what they control, but for what they represent: a cosmopolitan ideal, a liberalizing process, an enclave of autonomy. The university today is both less influential than ever and more symbolically combustible.

Within this asymmetry, institutional response has fragmented. Some resist publicly, invoking the legacy of dissent. Others withdraw inward, fortifying institutional culture against political tides. Some adapt quietly, hoping to preserve core values through strategic compliance. Still others exit entirely, building alternative platforms or migrating to international venues. These responses are often framed in moral terms—courage or cowardice, purity or pragmatism—but in practice, they are less about victory than preservation: of mission, coherence, survival.

This essay proposes that all these strategies—resistance, compliance, fortification, and bypass—are best understood not as moral positions, but as strategic responses to institutional obsolescence under political pressure.

To analyze them, we turn to a framework called Grid-First Thinking: a method that begins not with theory, but with vivid contrasting cases, and derives from them the conceptual structure—here, a 2×2 grid—needed to clarify what is at stake.

The central question is this:

When universities are attacked not to be reformed but to be rendered irrelevant, what strategies remain for those inside them to act meaningfully?

The Grid of Strategic Response

We distinguish university responses along two conceptual axes:

• Engagement with Power: Confrontational vs. Evasive

• Location of Action: Public/External vs. Internal/Institutional

These axes yield four distinct strategies:

Each quadrant names a different form of navigation—not of thriving, but of survival—within the terrain of institutional redundancy.

Public Resistance (Confrontational + External)

When truth is attacked in public, it must be defended in public. But at what cost—and to what effect?

Public resistance is the most visible and valorized strategy. It assumes that universities still possess—or can reclaim—a privileged position in the civic imagination. Faculty or administrators who adopt this stance seek to make the struggle legible in moral or constitutional terms, engaging the public sphere as a theater of ethical confrontation.

In the 2021 case of the University of Florida, faculty were barred from testifying against a state voting law. They responded not with internal negotiation, but with lawsuits, press conferences, and coordinated public messaging. The university reversed its position under pressure. This form of response rests on the presumption that public legitimacy still matters—that visibility is not only a liability, but a form of leverage.

Historically, Bertrand Russell embodied this stance, confronting nuclear proliferation in public at the cost of imprisonment. Fictionally, John Keating in Dead Poets Society models a similar mode: resistance as pedagogical performance, undone institutionally but triumphant in legacy.

Yet the contemporary university may lack the civic standing that once made this strategy effective. In a media ecosystem saturated with outrage and fragmentation, public resistance can fail to galvanize sympathy—and may instead reinforce the perception of universities as ideological provocateurs. In an age of institutional redundancy, public resistance runs the risk of raising the profile of an institution whose material relevance is already in question.

Internal Fortification (Confrontational + Internal)

Preserve what you cannot defend; cultivate what cannot be imposed.

Internal fortification rejects the premise that change must be won externally. Instead, it aims to build resilience within—through mutual aid, governance reform, and quiet clarity of mission. This strategy assumes that political conditions are temporarily hostile but not permanently totalizing, and that institutions can prepare themselves to reemerge intact.

The example of Central European University is instructive. Under siege by the Orbán regime in Hungary, it refused ideological conformity, sustained its intellectual community, and ultimately relocated to Vienna. Similarly, Black Mountain College—while not facing explicit political repression—sought to insulate itself from prevailing social conservatism by building a radical, self-contained educational model.

Fictionally, Hogwarts under the authoritarian regime of Dolores Umbridge becomes a site of quiet but coordinated resistance. Professors do not resign or protest publicly, but instead shield students, preserve knowledge, and resist implementation of state pedagogy.

This strategy assumes a long horizon. It often yields no visible success in the moment. But when the political landscape shifts, institutions that have fortified themselves often become seedbeds for cultural and intellectual renewal.

In the age of redundancy, internal fortification accepts that external legitimacy may be unrecoverable in the short term. It asks instead: what can we preserve when relevance itself is in question?

Exit or Bypass (Evasive + External)

When the center no longer holds, create new peripheries.

Some actors choose to leave. They do not resist, and they do not comply. They exit the institutional frame, building alternative platforms, pursuing international collaborations, or creating independent intellectual economies.

This strategy has become newly viable due to digital infrastructure. Jordan Peterson, following professional and political controversies, bypassed the university entirely—retaining (and expanding) his audience via YouTube, podcasts, and monetized courses. Historically, Galileo continued to write and correspond while under house arrest, sustaining scientific influence in exile. Even Socrates, in Plato’s rendering, refuses the compromise of exile or silence—choosing instead to operate on metaphysical terms beyond the city’s understanding.

Exit is tempting in conditions of obsolescence. If the university no longer serves as the site of innovation, relevance, or freedom, then why remain? This strategy thrives on autonomy—but risks fragmentation. It trades institutional authority for direct influence, often without safeguards of peer review, ethical standards, or long-term coherence.

It also does not defend the university; it circumvents it. In a moment where the institution itself is fading, bypass may be the only strategy that feels alive—but it accelerates the university’s redundancy by modeling a world in which it is no longer necessary.

Strategic Compliance (Evasive + Internal)

Adapt to survive. But what do you become in the process?

The final quadrant is defined not by confrontation, but by adaptation. Universities that pursue strategic compliance make internal adjustments to accommodate political demands—minimizing visibility, avoiding escalation, and hoping to preserve essential functions through outward conformity.

Columbia University in 2025 offers a paradigmatic case. After the Trump administration revoked hundreds of millions in funding and demanded ideological policy changes, Columbia complied: restructuring departments, tightening protest rules, and revising admissions—all without mounting a public resistance campaign. This was not acquiescence, but calculated adaptation to maintain institutional continuity.

This strategy has precedent. Soviet-era academics preserved forbidden knowledge through euphemism and indirection. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead’s scholars quietly archive banned material, preparing for futures they may never see.

Strategic compliance is often morally ambiguous. It risks normalizing repression, but it may be the only strategy that protects jobs, students, and long-term missions in real time. In an era where political power no longer wants to control universities but to starve or erase them, this strategy asks not how to win, but how to endure without capitulation of soul.

What’s Different This Time? The Conditions of Redundancy

Unlike past periods of political repression, today’s universities are not under siege because of their power—but despite, or even because of, their decline. Several shifts make this moment historically distinct:

1. AI and automation now challenge the university’s role as a knowledge gatekeeper.

2. Platformization allows intellectual work to migrate outside institutions entirely.

3. Public trust in higher education has eroded, leaving universities without a stable civic base.

4. Political actors exploit universities not to control discourse, but to generate symbolic victories in culture wars.

These changes make irrelevance, not repression, the defining threat. Strategy must now account for the possibility that the institution is no longer the primary terrain on which knowledge battles are fought—even as it remains the primary target.

Conclusion: Acting Meaningfully in the Face of Obsolescence

None of the four strategies—resistance, fortification, bypass, or compliance—offers victory. Each is a mode of preservation under symbolic siege, conditioned by the declining centrality of the university in civic, epistemic, and economic life.

The grid does not tell us which path is best. It shows us that meaningful action is still possible, even when institutional power has ebbed. The question is not whether the university will survive in its current form. It likely will not. The deeper question is whether, in its decline, it can still function as a site of truth-telling, care, and imaginative continuity.

And if it cannot—who or what will?

---

Recipe

Briefly describe the protocol we used for generating this essay and image

We used a Grid-First Thinking protocol, a structured writing method where we:

1. Selected vivid, contrasting examples of university responses to political pressure.

2. Derived two conceptual axes—Engagement with Power (Confrontational vs. Evasive) and Location of Action (External vs. Internal).

3. Populated a 2×2 grid with accurately classified real, fictional, and historical cases.

4. Built the essay section by section, maintaining a core throughline: universities are attacked not because they are powerful, but because they have become symbolically charged yet structurally redundant.

5. Reinforced that throughline visually by generating an AI image showing a crumbling university under symbolic attack, while futuristic towers labeled “AI,” “Alt-Credentialing,” and “Platforms” rise behind it.

This method clarified strategic options and ethical tensions while creating a cohesive narrative-visual synthesis.