If, as the 19th century British peer and advocate of liberty Lord Acton once wrote, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” then we are witnessing the truth of this maxim in the insouciance with which University of Minnesota President Rebecca Cunningham proposed the annual operating budget for 2026. 

As the Minnesota Star Tribune reported, not only are our undergraduate students confronting the double whammy of a significant rise in the cost of education with increases of 6.5% for in-state tuition on the Twin Cities and Rochester campuses and 7.5% for out-of-state Twin Cities tuition, and a reduction in instructional choices, they are also being misled about the ways the call for tightening belts and loosening wallets disguises Cunningham’s proposal to reallocate 7% of the budgets of University schools and colleges toward “administrative costs.” 

In effect, this will lead only to bloating the salaries of University administrators at the expense of the students and the core mission of the University: teaching.

That all of this is being done in the name of protecting the University from the challenges posed by uncertainties in the federal funding landscape, the fallout from President Donald Trump’s tariffs and hostility to higher education among conservatives, is perhaps the biggest irony. 

More irony accompanies the rationalization Cunningham and Gregg Goldman, executive vice president for finance and operations at the University, offered in their public response to criticisms of the proposed budget, referring to themselves as the “stewards” of the University’s future fortunes, even as they demand cutbacks to every academic program. 

It is the surest sign, at any rate, that Cunningham is determined to pursue her own version of “Trumpthink”—an updating of Orwellian doublethink for our times. 

Having been ceremoniously paraded in from that other university in the Big Ten with an “M” in its name, Cunningham is bent on exercising her power in ways that defy the actions of our university’s past presidents and Board of Regents’ policies pertaining to faculty consultation and shared governance. 

As my colleague Michael Gallope said to the Minnesota Star Tribune, the proposed budget “transfers way too much money to administrative excess — branding, marketing and the vague jargon of ‘strategic investments.’”

In Washington, Trump thumbs his nose at the laws of the land, trampling over the citizenry and its rights. Cunningham appears to be following suit here by allocating the extraordinary amount of $74 million to her own office for “discretionary” purposes, according to an AAUP University of Minnesota, Twin Cities town hall presentation. 

Untrammeled by concern for the true plight of students or the fate of our state’s flagship institution of higher education, she is proposing to push through a budget that purports to ready the University for the hard times to come. It instead reinforces her own sense of executive privilege and absolute power. 

For many years, the University’s motto has been “driven to discover,” though the reality now is that the administration is driven to cover for the displacement of education by agendas external to any form of discovery.

There have been times in which what goes on in the president’s office has elicited indifference and generated the perception that we have very little to do with it. But this cannot be one of those times. 

For it would be a mistake to think the University’s decisions about its budgetary priorities can be left to those who make us wonder whether the proverbial fox is in charge of the chicken coop.

Keya Ganguly is a professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. She teaches film, cultural studies, postcolonial studies and critical theory.