On Utopias, Imperial Decline, and Monterey, California

Some of our treasured utopias will be washed away with imperial decline. But we can remember what made them magical as we imagine a new, post-imperialist world.

The Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) in Monterey, California just announced it’ll be more or less shutting down in 2027. Amid a blizzard of bad news befalling us in recent times, this leaves me with a distinct melancholy.

I have friends who make a living teaching at MIIS, so it’s personal in that way. But also no physical place has ever stirred my soul or mind like Monterey, and MIIS has always been an ambient part of Monterey as long as I’ve known it.

The reasons for its closure are bound up with some of the political and geopolitical themes in this newsletter, which I’ll explain below. But the announced closure of this special place really vivifies something I’ve known analytically for some time: That the reality of imperial decline will have among its casualties many of our personal utopias; places with sense memories imprinted on them, symbols and sites with meaning that we feel ought to be preserved.

Things we value will be shattered. That’s happening to many of us now. We don’t have to like it. But we can cope, I hope, by understanding why some things are ending, and bringing forward into a new world what we found valuable in the old.

Awakening in Monterey

In a recent conversation on The Bang-Bang Podcast, I’d mentioned that Monterey played an outsized role in my coming of age.

I ran away to join the military when I was 17, and the first place the Air Force sent me after basic training was the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. For a year and a half, my full-time job was to study Korean, iron my uniforms, and do PT at Soldiers Field overlooking Monterey Bay three times per week. Pretty sweet.

Life in Monterey was a dramatic departure from anything I’d ever known.

Its year-round coastal climate suited me much better than my sweat-covered existence growing up in the humidity of Central Florida. The air was potpourri, laced with flowers, cinnamon rolls, and the sea. In contrast with the big box stores back home, Monterey was rich with historical charm, a mix of Spanish colonial architecture and Queen Anne-style homes everywhere. It was the first time I’d heard Sinatra, the Rat Pack, Mozart. And the food! Not only was Monterey my first run-in with fine dining; it was also my first experience with street food, farmer’s markets, coffee, and tea.

I relay all this because Monterey is a universe that, while common to some of us, was wholly unfamiliar to me. If you grew up solidly middle class or with family money, you probably take for granted a lot of smaller fineries that someone without would find revelatory. It had never occurred to me that people who claim to be citizens of the same country could live so differently. And prior to the Air Force putting me there, I had no idea that regular-ass people could live this good—eating organic food, sipping chai, taking long walks on the wharf in chunky cable-knit sweaters, and watching movies in an old historical state theater.

Golden State Theatre on Alvarado Street.

The Monterey lifestyle offered a tranquility and comfort that was conducive to a life of the mind. The Defense Language Institute (DLI) was the first place I’d ever been where I didn’t feel like I was just trying to survive.

One day, my dorm-mate brought home a bunch of paperwork from a place called Monterey Peninsula College (MPC). He said that studying at DLI gave you college credits (true), and you could transfer them to MPC to accelerate completion of an associate’s degree. And with an associate’s degree, you could transfer into a university where people get bachelor’s and master’s degrees. What!? Sounded like an escape from the poverty trap I once feared I was destined for.

So I took a taxi over to the MPC campus, nervously enrolled in chemistry and something else (I can’t recall what), and just like that, I was officially a college student doing night classes. The beginning of a life-transforming journey.

MIIS figures into this utopia because it’s an aspirational place for students of DLI and the nearby Naval Postgraduate School (where I have a few friends). Also its open campus is a visible presence in Monterey.

DLI sits at the top of a very steep hill in Monterey and MIIS is nestled in the bosom of downtown, at the bottom of that hill. Being without a car my entire time there, I would walk the 20 minutes or so down Franklin Street. every. single. day. Do anything daily for a year and a half and it’ll never leave you. Along the way, I’d walk through the MIIS campus, a cosmopolitan graduate school that stood as a celebration of knowledge and internationalism. The UN-like collection of national flags adorning several MIIS buildings added to the whole Monterey vibe. It also served as a persistent reminder that there was an entire world out there that needed to be navigated. Being in Monterey made you feel like you were escaping into the world. The existence of MIIS itself signaled that it was virtuous to think, read, learn.

There was a special alchemy that came from being among buildings with historical significance, experiencing what can only be described as the good life, while also being nudged toward the pursuit of knowledge and awareness of a larger world. Because I was a lowly enlisted airman, MIIS was right in front of me but also far from my immediate grasp.

Decades later, as a scholar, I would speak at a conference hosted by MIIS. Coincidentally, I would also end up friends with several MIIS faculty. And in 2020, I even snagged an appointment as a visiting scholar and was supposed to be in-residence for six months…canceled, tragically, because of the pandemic.

Whenever I visit the US, I always make a point to stop in Monterey, checking in, of course, with my friends at MIIS.

The Price of Imperialist Sin

So you understand why it would be so gutting to learn that MIIS is being murdered. It’s crucial to put such a thing in context. Why is this happening?

A Victim of Neoliberalism

From one perspective, this was actually supposed to happen 20 years ago, just after I had graduated from DLI.

MIIS at that time had been running persistent budget deficits. With no clear path to fiscal sustainability, the institution was rumored to be closing imminently. But in 2005, Middlebury College in Vermont saved the institution by merging with it. MIIS—which up to that point had been called the Monterey Institute of International Studies—has since been the “Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey,” making MIIS a West Coast expression of its ambitions to be a “global” university.

But the reason why MIIS was in need of a bailout back in ’05 was that it was an early victim of the trend plaguing higher education everywhere—the neoliberalization of universities.

In the neoliberal era, what university wasn’t run by a management consulting dipshit (I can say that because I once was one) who treats it like a private equity asset? At school after school, university leadership would either strip a university for parts (selling off its assets), or accumulate debt, which the university must then pay interest on at the expense of future budgets. The only way out of asset-stripping or debt-saddling—and every non-Ivy League university did both of these methods—was counting on student enrollment growth.

My buddy Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at MIIS, showing me around campus. Here he’s showing me where John Steinbeck once lived, in a building that the campus now owns.

But student growth depended on expectations of students graduating into an economy with decent employment prospects. In a highly financialized, increasingly speculation-based economy—an economy where the capitalist world-system itself has been facing a prolonged crisis of stagnation—that expectation was lost. Since 2008, the struggle for gainful employment after college has become a defining characteristic of what it means to be a Millennial. So you weren’t going to grow the ranks of college students if the economy itself wasn’t absorbing new talent.

And that’s why MIIS is getting dealt a death blow now. Its mothership, Middlebury College, has also been subject to neoliberalization. The main campus announced in April that it was facing a $14.1 million operating deficit, $8.7 million of which, it claimed, was from MIIS. So the new president at Middlebury, confusing his role with that of a vulture capitalist, made a snap call to shutter MIIS to help close its own fiscal gap—a gap that is the result of unrealistic student projections and bad management.

Both Middlebury and MIIS are expensive schools facing the same fiscal pressures as most universities. But the unique structural challenge for MIIS is that Monterey itself is expensive as fuck. Paradise is a tough place to live as a student if you don’t come from money. And even if you happen to already be local to Monterey but are working class, there are much cheaper schools nearby (like CSU Monterey Bay). MIIS’s advantage and disadvantage is that it’s a highly specialized place to study language, translation, and niche international topics. But it makes no sense for a niche school to wager on mass enrollments.

MIIS As The Enemy of Fascists

But MIIS—and to some extent Monterey—are also inherently antagonists in MAGA’s ongoing counter-revolution.

Part of Monterey’s cultural richness derives from its Mexican and Spanish-imperial heritage. The working class and service sector in the greater Monterey area is heavily immigrant, agricultural, and ethnically Mexican-American—all categories that are targeted by Trump’s secret police. I’ve seen more Instagram videos than I care to of brown folks getting terrorized across California’s Central Coast, disrupting labor supply in everything from strawberry harvesting to kitchen work.

The bourgie farmer’s markets held every week on Alvarado Street—a ritual of good vibes and better eats—are still going on, but I’m told the crowd has noticeably thinned, and gotten less brown.

MAGA’s bid for a white nationalist social democracy comes at the expense of Monterey’s working class and its actually existing multiethnic civic identity. And the price that workers pay for MAGA’s project in turn depresses the local economy, which in turn makes Monterey (and let’s be real, America on the whole) a less attractive place to study.

MIIS, like Monterey itself, is a MAGA target in at least two ways. One is that, institutionally, MIIS is a foot soldier for what MAGA sees as “globalism.” They prepare students for careers in government and at intergovernmental organizations, making MIIS a small but mighty site for the social reproduction of the liberal technocratic class that MAGA views as its enemy. Its inherently internationalist mission is hard to reconcile with a project of white nationalism at home and imperialism abroad.

The “problem” of MIIS’s globalist-aligned branding is compounded by the fact that AI adoption is going most aggressively after translation jobs—MIIS’s bread-and-butter. And the mass imposition of AI on our lives is not some inexorable force. It owes everything to the fact that surplus concentrations of capital in the tech world had nowhere else of promise to invest given the world’s post-2008 crisis of stagnation. AI became the unicorn toward which to direct all speculative surpluses precisely because it was marketed as sellable to the national security state based on unfalsifiable claims about the future of war and the supposed need to “out-compete” other states in AI on national security grounds. AI has no buyer…but Uncle Sam. So the permanent war economy and the unfolding AI nightmare are causally related in a way that makes MIIS have to eat it.

The other way that MIIS is on the wrong side of fascism shares DNA with MAGA’s war on higher education generally. Foreign student enrollments have been a major part of MIIS. The Trump administration, by contrast, has been heavily restricting foreign student visas. And even when foreign students can come study, they must endure a culture of fear about what they are and are not free to do or say; they live with the continuous possibility that they could get swept up in an ICE raid. Easier to study abroad elsewhere.

I’m not saying that Trump’s MAGA project is why Middlebury College’s president has decided to close down MIIS’s degree programs. But if you’re a money-grubbing exec at a university with a giant fiscal hole, you’re looking at the political environment and not seeing very many reasons to expect student enrollment growth…which, again, is the only alternative to debt accumulation or asset-stripping if you have management consultant-brain.

Beating the Nostalgia Trap

2024, Fisherman’s Wharf, Monterey. 24 hours before I realized I had a bad case of pneumonia.

Substack is telling me that this post is already “too long for email,” so I’ll need to wrap it up.

If America is a self-destructive project, Monterey will not be exempt from the process of implosion. We should expect that Monterey—a place that I love—would be besieged by the reactionary political forces of a sick society. That’s what’s happening now. Ours is a society that has enjoyed the imperial mode of living, always at others’ expense. Monterey’s wealth—literally and in other ways—derives from that. I couldn’t always see that, but I can now.

I guess the crucial thing is that there’s no reason why the specialness of Monterey must be limited to a small enclave on the California coast. Places of inclusion, opportunity, and enough bourgeois comforts to let a man dream can be made anywhere. And they can be made more durable if they’re built on the bedrock of a post-imperialist mode of living.

2024. Fisherman’s Wharf at dawn. Monterey.