Ron Daniels is the anti-democratic president Hopkins deserves

In an email to the Hopkins community on May 10, President Ronald J. Daniels wrote that, “The time for protest and disruption that violates our rules and norms must end. The encampment must be dismantled. In its stead, we must return to respectful dialogue on difficult issues that is the work of the university.”

In his many communications over the course of the encampment, which students erected on the Beach on April 29 in protest of the University’s involvement in the Israel-Hamas war on Gaza, Daniels repeated the refrain that “protest” and “dialogue” are inherently opposed. This suggests an understanding of “democracy” that is confined to the board room or the debate hall.

Not only was the encampment a space of learning and dialogue — for example, students were hosting open teach-ins and other programs — but it was also, as a form of protest, a demonstration demanding your attention. It was a form of “dialogue” that couldn't simply be tabled or dismissed by the powerful.

It is ridiculous to suggest that a student demonstration that was peacefully (and largely nondisruptively) drawing our attention to an issue is antithetical to democratic dialogue. 

Daniels knows this. He is just being intellectually dishonest. Despite his belief that universities should act as bedrocks of democracy, he has acted entirely undemocratically throughout his tenure as president, even if we take his own understanding of democracy at Hopkins — “open[ness] to dissent, eager[ness] to exchange ideas with those who may think differently, and committed to arriving at truth...through contestation, experimentation and debate" — as our definition. 

Again and again, when confronted with dissent, Daniels worked to shut it down. Rather than exchange ideas with those who think differently, he aimed to speak over them. And, rather than commit to a broader truth, he worked to undermine those who tried to contest or debate his version of the facts. 

Some of the earliest outspoken dissent of his term came almost 10 years ago when, amidst the 2015 Baltimore protests, the Black Student Union (BSU) organized a series of protests over the treatment of Black students and faculty at Hopkins. Daniels ultimately consented to an open forum on the issue. However, at the time, some students reported feeling silenced by Daniels’s tactics.

In 2016, Daniels was again confronted with unrest when Hopkins attempted to replace recently-unionized security guards by opening up bidding to include new, anti-unions companies. The BSU joined forces with the newly-reconstituted Students for a Democratic Society as well as campus labor unions (32BJ SEIU and UNITE Here Local 7) to form a Student-Labor Action Coalition. Over the next two years, this group called on Hopkins to adopt a policy of displaced worker protection, which would have stipulated that, if Hopkins changed contract companies, the new company had to hire the existing workers. Despite rallies, petitions and marches, the University did not implement the policy. Ultimately, the group managed to find more success pushing the measure through the Baltimore City Council instead; worker and student voices might still be heard in local government, if not at Hopkins.

Then, perhaps most spectacularly, Daniels steamrolled over overwhelming objections from students, faculty, staff and adjacent neighborhood associations in pursuit of the Hopkins armed private police force, which he strong armed through the state legislature through lobbying and well-timed political donations. When it became clear that he would not listen to the majority of his ‘constituents’ who opposed the police force, students led a sit-in in Garland Hall in 2019, which ultimately ended with Daniels calling in the Baltimore Police Department to arrest students.

Not even a year later, during the initial COVID-19 shock, Daniels decided to freeze University contributions to employee retirement accounts. There was no indication of if this decision was made with the consultation of employee unions and staff associations.

We see this same bad-faith orientation to dissent playing out again and again over the course of his fifteen years in office, from the disbandment of the Humanities Center (despite the strong objections of students of the department) to the insistence on continued collaboration with immigration authorities (despite public proclamations that they had cancelled contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in wake of protest). While they technically honored those cancelled contracts, they got new contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, making the move more of a PR stunt than a paradigm shift.

Indeed, two ‘exceptions’ prove the rule: Teachers and Researchers United (TRU-UE), the graduate workers union, and the Palestine Solidarity Encampment were both able to reach agreements with the administration. But, throughout the process, Daniels worked to stymie the movements, embracing a “Strategic Plan” that undermined graduate programs in the former and wielding student code of conduct hearings and the threat of legal action as a cudgel in the latter. 

That these movements resulted in agreements is certainly a testament to how powerful students can be when they are organized and work as one, but they also reflect, to no small degree, the ways Daniels’s hands were tied by external forces in these cases (labor laws for TRU-UE and a mayor uninterested in breaking up a peaceful demonstration for the encampment). 

Across Daniels’s term, regardless of how the University responded to dissent, one thing was clear: none of these decisions were made by faculty, students or staff.

Over the past decade, Daniels’s embrace of the “One University” policy has served to undermine structures of shared governance while concentrating authority in his own office — with decisions made primarily by Daniels and his “‘cabinet’“ of senior vice presidents. In addition to centralizing control over University finances and policies, these changes have resulted in tenure systems that give him greater sway over the faculty body itself.

This has meant that Daniels’s “democratic university” dismisses students’ voices, ignores workers’ concerns and undermines faculty governance. It steamrolls over opposition and administers via executive edict. 

Daniels may wax poetic about the virtues of democracy, but he does everything in his power to stifle it at Hopkins. 

One could say that a man so consistently opposed to democracy has no business running a university. And, if the University were, as Daniels idealizes in his book, primarily an institution aimed at the pursuit of truth and cultivation of citizenship, then he would certainly be poorly suited for his job. 

But, while Hopkins does indeed pursue the fruits of discovery and promote effective and ethical citizenship — and does so exceptionally well, thanks to our extraordinary faculty, graduate workers and students — these loftier goals are not all that Hopkins pursues. 

Hopkins also conducts weapons research for the U.S. government to the tune of a billion dollars a year, earning more in revenue from the U.S. Department of Defense than from student tuition. It operates a massive real estate portfolio that displaces Baltimoreans across the city. It runs a sprawling hospital system that often priorities profit over patients. 

As many scholars have noted, today’s major universities look far more like factories or hedge funds — in pursuit of uninterrupted outputs and consistent returns — than sites of higher exploration and learning.

These functions subvert the ideal of what a democratic institution of higher learning should be. Yet, they are, by every account, more important to the managers of Hopkins than anything we do in our classrooms on Homewood Campus.

This raises the question many have come to ask in recent weeks as protests demanding an end to higher education’s complicity in war and genocide have swept the country: What is the purpose of a university? 

If its purpose is for independent inquiry, the cultivation of community, the fostering of citizenship and the pursuit of discovery, then true democracy must be at the core of its governance, a task to which Ron Daniels has demonstrated time and time again that he is fundamentally ill-suited. 

But, if the purpose of the university is what our University does — in large part, exploitation, dispossession, financial speculation and militarism — then democracy is nothing but a smoke screen, and Ron Daniels is the president we deserve.

Corey Payne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Richmond. He is a three-time alum (BA ’17, MA ’19, PhD ’23). A Hopkins student from 2013-2023, he was involved in several student-led campaigns for anti-racism, workers’ rights and demilitarization.