Fiddling while Rome burns

I left Venezuela in 2013—just months after Hugo Chávez’s death, at a time when many still hoped that his absence might bring real political change. Those of us who had grown up watching the country’s institutions buckle under the weight of Chavismo knew better. Chávez was never just a man; Chavismo was a structure, a strategy, a political theology—a multi-headed doctrine that seeped into virtually every corner of public life. Nicolás Maduro’s rise to power didn’t interrupt that logic; it confirmed that the forces behind it would far outlive the founder. And now, in 2026, after a dramatic U.S. military intervention that removed Maduro from power and transferred him to the United States for prosecution, promises of transformation evaporate quickly. The old Chavista networks and functionaries remain in charge, ushering in what looks like yet another round of what Latin Americans know all too well: intervention framed as liberation—U.S.-backed regimes sugar-coated with civilian makeup, dressed up in the language of “transition,” and national sovereignty reshaped for private interests.

My education was shaped by the version of Venezuela that preceded all of this—however flawed, still committed to the idea of education as a public good. Since the 1870s, when free and compulsory education was first codified, public schooling has been woven into the country’s social fabric, and later constitutions reaffirmed free access to education as a universal right. I attended public universities for both my undergraduate degree and my first master’s, in a country where paying for school was often seen as suspect, even shameful—as if you had to buy what should have been earned. When I moved to the United States—first to the New School, then to Columbia—I brought that background with me. And I began to watch with growing unease as the very logic I had fled began to reappear, in a slightly altered form.

I have long argued that Chavismo and Trumpismo (yes, with that final “o”) share not just a style, but a structure: charismatic populism, institutional hollowing, the vilification of dissent, and the capture of public discourse for private power. Saying this has earned me animosity from across the political spectrum—Trumpista friends who hear it as slander, and Chavista friends who hear it as betrayal. But as post-Marxist thinkers like Chantal Mouffe have long argued, the old left–right spectrum often obscures more than it reveals. It no longer maps cleanly onto the global political realignments we’re living through—realignments that increasingly bypass democratic norms in favor of blunt force and spectacle. Just as Chavismo systematically dismantled what had once been a relatively robust system of public education in Venezuela, Trumpismo is now doing the same in the United States.

These assaults are real, grave, and perilous. I had already graduated and moved to teach in Barcelona before the most recent eruption of the Israel–Palestine conflict, but I have seen firsthand how conflicts like these can fracture academic life when universities become proxy battlefields for warring factions. I’m not advocating naïve dialogue or some sentimental, easy plea for peace; I know what conflict looks like up close. During my own time at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, students (me included) and police clashed repeatedly on campus, with tear gas, rubber bullets, Molotov cocktails, and barricades in the streets and courtyards of the university itself. Student unrest in Venezuela has long been met with force from security services and the National Guard, leaving crowds of students injured or dead, and institutions under siege. These are the kinds of confrontations that teach you just how fragile civic life can be when institutions meant to cultivate critical thought are instead pulled into political violence. And yet, even as public outrage rightly erupts over these flashpoints, another form of failure unfolds more quietly, often within and across universities worldwide: a failure that rarely makes headlines but threatens the very purpose of higher education.

I became acutely aware of this quieter failure while performing one of academia’s darker rituals: peer review. There’s no compensation, no recognition, no institutional reward. And yet we do it, out of some murky sense of obligation—to contribute, to uphold standards, to ensure that work of real merit makes it through the gate. We become, in theory, the gatekeepers of knowledge-in-the-making. You’d think that would bring some sense of purpose, but it doesn’t. What I found, again and again, was a stack of papers that were careful, precise, and exquisitely irrelevant—written for an audience of three, preoccupied with ever finer disputes over what some obscure medieval commentator might have meant when glossing a forgotten passage from Aristotle’s Generation of Animals. They were intellectually competent, even virtuosic. But there was very little, almost nothing at stake.

True, this kind of work teaches us to read, and to read carefully. When “TLDR” has become a standard reply to anything longer than a paragraph, the ability to follow a sentence to its source, to track the movement of an argument across time, is no small thing. Those who still know how to linger over a sentence, to trace an argument to its source, are preserving a vital capacity now on the brink of extinction. But delicacy alone, I fear, will not meet the demands of this moment.

A few months ago, after I sent my former advisor at Columbia, Mark C. Taylor, a paper of mine that’s soon to be published—a close reading of a medieval text—he replied with a pointed comment: “Too much scholarship is fiddling while Rome is burning.” He had offered generous, detailed feedback—he liked the piece, he said—but closed with this warning. Don’t let your work drift into the cheap theatrics of flat dissemination, but don’t keep it sealed off in the ivory tower either. The remark landed. At the time, I had been sitting with a familiar unease: the sense that I was contributing to a system more invested in refinement than relevance. His warning didn’t dismiss the value of what I’d written—it put pressure on it. The kind of pressure good thinking needs. In saying so, Taylor was reminding me of something he used to emphasize in the classroom: a distinction, drawn from Heidegger, between scholarship and thinking. The difference is blunt but useful. Scholarship gathers, organizes, and preserves knowledge. Thinking questions the grounds on which knowledge rests. One accumulates; the other interrupts. One sustains tradition; the other questions it.

And yet—as Arendt famously argued—to question tradition is not to abandon it. It is the only way to preserve it with integrity. Arendt understood tradition not as fixed inheritance or evocative return, but as a fragile thread that must be actively re-woven in each generation. This is the sense in which I mean “tradition” here—especially the tradition of higher education itself. What I am defending is not a conservative ideal of continuity for its own sake. It is the possibility that institutions like the university can continue to serve a public good—if, and only if, we protect their capacity to think.

Thinking interrupts scholarship not to negate the past but to reanimate it—to reshape, attune, and carry it forward in light of the present. And this is exactly what authoritarian movements refuse to allow. Whether in the language of “Make America Great Again” or the fantasy of a “Quinta República,” Trumpismo and Chavismo do not engage tradition. They disfigure it. They summon the fantasy of a golden age to shut down critique, replacing memory with nostalgia for something that never happened, and inheritance with dogma.

Thinking is not the enemy of tradition—it is its most demanding ally. It preserves by probing, interrupts by clarifying, and carries forward not by repetition but by responsibility. Scholarship and thinking need one another. Their interdependence recalls Kant’s insight: intuitions without concepts are blind; concepts without intuitions are empty. So too, scholarship without thinking can grow inert, while thinking without scholarship has nothing to grasp. But they do not thrive under the same institutional pressures. And when scholarship becomes untethered from the world that makes it necessary, it risks becoming a form of elegant evasion.

This is not to say that universities have grown hostile to thinking. On the contrary, many of the most urgent, searching minds I know still work within them. But the conditions under which they now operate are increasingly shaped by pressures from without. Whether Chavista or Trumpista—those strange political twins—the result is the same: intellectual autonomy is eroded. Budget shortfalls, bureaucratic interference, and ideological demands are calculated pressures designed to dull the university’s purpose—to turn a space meant for orientation and critique into one of repetition, compliance, or silence. What gets privileged instead is visibility, performance, institutional survival—rankings.

This is why the crisis in higher education cannot be reduced to internal debates about curricula or governance alone. It is also a crisis of purpose. We are living through ecological collapse, rising authoritarianism, digital disorientation, cultural fragmentation, and the corrosion of language itself. These are not problems that can be solved by method alone. They require forms of thinking willing to risk misunderstanding, and speak from positions that may not be institutionally rewarded—but remain morally indispensable.

This is where the humanities still matter—as a reservoir of intellectual practices that resist reduction to utility. The humanities train attention, judgment, interpretation, and the ability to hold tension without resolution. They teach us how to think in conditions of uncertainty—when no framework is given, no outcome guaranteed, and no optimization possible. Under algorithmic acceleration and political coercion, these are conditions of survival.

Some institutions, perhaps unintentionally, are still protecting space for this kind of work. As Ian Bogost recently observed in The Atlantic, small liberal-arts colleges may be among the accidental survivors of the war on higher education. By design or by luck, their limited dependence on federal research funding, absence of graduate programs, and tightly woven academic communities make them less exposed to the pressures distorting larger universities. Bogost describes campuses where students and faculty are confronting the disorientations of generative AI not with panic or opportunism, but with shared deliberation—asking what kind of language, learning, and responsibility they want to preserve. These are places where disagreement still happens face to face and thought remains a communal effort rather than a professional performance. Perhaps these are the conditions under which a different intellectual life might still be possible—one that values meaning over metrics and responsibility over reputation.

What I find missing in much of the work I review is not rigor but urgency. It’s the sense that the questions being asked are not only answerable (most things are, eventually) but necessary. And again, this is not to say we shouldn’t care about eleventh-century frescoes tucked inside a forgotten Romanesque hermitage in the Catalan Pyrenees. We should. I do. But we also need to say why they matter now—how they might illuminate this world, not just the one that produced them.

The deeper question, then, is not whether the university can survive the pressures now bearing down on it—from austerity and censorship to culture wars and algorithmic displacement. The question is whether we still believe that thinking matters—not as credentialing, not as content, but as a shared practice of orientation in a disoriented world. Serious thinking exceeds disciplinary comfort zones, speaks in registers that may not be rewarded, and reaches toward something more than professional coherence.

The stakes could not be higher. If the Enlightenment sought to guide humanity out of its “self-incurred immaturity,” we now stand at the edge of a quick slide into self-incurred destruction. The forces hollowing our institutions are active. And in their midst, we need work that can still make contact across the fragile distance between intellect and responsibility.

Taylor’s warning was not offhand. If the world is burning, the task is not to play the lyre while writing a history of fire. It is, first and foremost, to help put the fire out—and ask what futures might still be possible in the aftermath, and what kind of thinking might help bring them into being.