International students are being abducted and disappeared by ICE in broad daylight. Life-saving research projects across the academy are being halted or thrown into disarray by seismic cuts to federal grants. Dozens of universities are under federal investigation for their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, their allowance of trans athletes to compete in college sports, and their tolerance of constitutionally protected Palestine solidarity protests. In today’s urgent episode of Working People, we get a harrowing, on-the-ground view of the Trump administration’s all-out assault on institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors, Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and co-director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center; and Chenjerai Kumanyika, Assistant Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, AAUP Council Member, and Peabody-award winning host of Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD.

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Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, welcome, everyone, to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are taking an urgent look at the Trump administration’s all-out assault on institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. As we’ve been covering here on the show and across The Real News Network, the Trump-Musk administration’s attacks on workers, workers’ rights, and on democracy as such are, frankly, so broad, wide-ranging, and destructive that it’s hard to really sum it all up here. But colleges and universities have become a key target of Trump’s administration and a key battlefront for enacting his agenda.

The world of higher ed looks and feels a lot different today than it did when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and then an editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education just a few short years ago. International students like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts are being hunted, abducted, and disappeared by ICE for speaking out against Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians.

Hundreds of international students have had their visas and their ability to stay in the country abruptly revoked. Dozens of investigations into different universities have been launched by the administration because of their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, their allowance of trans athletes to compete in college sports, and their tolerance of constitutionally protected Palestine solidarity protests, which the administration has dangerously deemed antisemitic and grounds for denial of federal funding.

And the administration has, indeed, frozen federal funding as a means to bend universities to Trump’s will. So far, Alan Blinder reports this week at The New York Times, “Seven universities have been singled out for punitive funding cuts or have been explicitly notified that their funding is in serious jeopardy. They are: Brown University, which the Trump administration said stood to lose $510 million; Columbia, which is hoping to regain about $400 million in canceled grants and contracts after it bowed to a list of demands from the federal government; Cornell University, the target of a cut of at least $1 billion; Harvard University, which has approximately $9 billion at stake; Northwestern, which Trump administration officials said would be stripped of $790 million; The University of Pennsylvania, which saw $175 million in federal funding suspended [in response to] its approach to a transgender athlete’s participation in 2022; and Princeton University, which said ‘dozens’ of grants have been suspended. The White House indicated that $210 million was at risk.”

The battle on and over our institutions of higher education have been and will continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump administration’s agenda will be decided. And it will be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrators and boards of regents respond. It will be decided by how faculty respond, how students and grad students respond, staff, campus communities, and you in the public writ large.

We’re going to be covering that fight continuously here on Working People and at The Real News Network in the coming months and years. And we’re taking it head on in today’s episode with two guests who are on the front lines of that fight. I’m honored to have them joining us together. Returning to the podcast, we’ve got Todd Wolfson, who currently serves as president of the American Association of University Professors. Todd is associate professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and he’s the co-director of the Media Inequality and Change Center, a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School [for] Communication and Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information.

We are also joined today by Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, who serves as a council member for the AAUP. You likely already know Chenjerai’s voice. The man is a radio and podcast legend. He’s a Peabody award-winning host of Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD. He’s the co-creator, co-executive producer, and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War, and so, so much more.

Brother Todd, brother Chenj, thank you both so much for joining us on the show today. I really appreciate it. And I want to just dive right in. I want to start by asking you both to keep pulling on the thread from my introduction to the show just now. I tried to pack in as much information as I could, but really this is just scratching the surface of things. So can you both help our listeners better understand the full scope of what is actually happening across higher ed in the United States right now?

So Todd, let’s start with you, and then Chenjerai, please hop in after.

Todd Wolfson:  You did a pretty good job packing in a lot of information in the short bit, Max. And yeah, it’s like drinking from a fire hose right now. I characterize the main attacks as there’s about five streams of main frontal assaults on higher ed. One is an absolute attempt at the destruction of our biomedical research infrastructure and then our broader research infrastructure from there. And National Endowments of the Humanities just announced a 70% cancellation of all their grants.

But the biggest funding agency that’s taken the biggest hit is the NIH, which is the biggest biomedical research funding organization in the world. In the world. And at this point in 2024, they’d given out $6 billion in grants to do research on cancer and to do research on the Alzheimer’s and strokes and pediatric oncology and diabetes and all the things we all need so that when we go to the doctor they have cutting edge therapies to save the lives of ourselves and our parents. Now that $6 billion is $2.7 billion. That’s how much they’ve given out in 2025, less than half. So if we project that out, the NIH gives out $40 billion in funding for research on issues, biomedical health research, we expect something like $20 billion. So a $20 billion cut in research is what we’re looking at. And again, it’s primarily targeted at the biomedical infrastructure, but this is also National Science Foundation grants, it’s National Endowment of Humanities grants. It’s all the critical things that we need. So that’s one bucket.

The second bucket is extreme attacks on our students. You flagged it: abductions of students in broad daylight, Mahmoud Khalil, who you mentioned, I think there’s about eight or nine students now that have been abducted in broad daylight and whisked into an ICE underground prison system, usually hundreds of miles from their home, often with no charge, maybe the slightest charge of some pro-Palestinian organizing or protest work or even editorial work — Which is their right of freedom of speech, absolute right, and getting whisked off.

But those folks who they’ve abducted are just scratching the surface. Over the weekend, over this past weekend, the number is something like 600 visas were revoked across the country. We think at least a hundred of them were college, graduate, and undergraduate students. So not all of that’s hitting our colleges and universities, it’s bigger than that, but it’s probably the largest sector taking this hit, and we’re trying to figure it out.

At Rutgers, my home institution, 12 students got their visas revoked. And the folks who got their visas revoked this past weekend, they’re not on record for anything. We think it’s country of origin and connected to the Muslim ban 2.0, but we’re not even sure. So that’s a second.

And just to be clear about these attacks on our students, the goal is to outlaw protest. This is the first step in the strategy. They’re weaponizing antisemitism to go after pro-Palestinian protestors. This is a first step, and they want to see, they’re testing the water, and they want to see how far they can take this. Just yesterday they floated deporting US citizens. So they’re going to keep pushing this, and the goal is to shut us up.

The other things I’ll just flag really quickly that should be on folks’ radar as also happening, as we know, they’re also attacking universities for DEI-related grants and programs, and that’s been a massive attack. It was one of the first executive orders.

So for instance, we have a researcher who is doing research on the diversity of wheat crops, the genome in wheat crops. That research? Canceled, because the word “diversity” is in it, and they don’t want diversity, any sort of DEI. And so plant genome diversity is part of DEI now, and it’s ’cause of the Keystone Cops, and they’re doing this through keyword searches.

But it gets more serious than that. They’re also canceling research on infant mortality rates. We want to understand why there are differing infant mortality rates in urban or suburban or rural settings, in Black communities and white communities and Latinx communities. They won’t allow that research anymore. Or literacy rates, they don’t allow differing literacy rates in urban, suburban, rural communities because that’s diversity research. So there’s DEI attacks.

And then the last attack I’ll flag, and I’ll let Chenjerai come in, is the attack on our institutions writ large, and that’s the stuff that we’re seeing at Columbia and we’re seeing at all these other universities that you laid out. It’s not simply to weaponize antisemitism, to threaten cuts in the biomedical research and weaponize antisemitism. It’s bigger than that. They want to be able to control these institutions, and the first step is Columbia bowing. And so now they expect these next six to bow, and on and on from there. The goal is for them to come in and tell us what we can research, what we can teach, what our students can say and learn. So it’s a real attempt at massive control. And again, they’re looking at Hungary in Europe, and they’re getting much of their strategy here. So those are four major buckets of attacks going on. I’m sorry, get in there, Chenjerai.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  First of all, I think you laid it out real well. And also I’ll just say, much respect to you, Max, to Working People pod. I’ve been a longtime fan, real excited to be here.

So I just want to step back a little bit and talk about, we have to really look at why this is happening, and if you look at these cuts, it points to a little bit about why they’re doing this. First of all, they’re lying about what higher education is, and I think that’s really important. They want to cast higher education as a place that is only for a certain kind of elites, but that’s not true. Higher education is where so many families in America, across America, different communities, not just in rural communities, cities, where people are sending their kids because they want to have a fair shot, their family members because they want to have a fair shot. So that’s one component.

They also want to actually restrict higher education to people, imagine a certain kind of classes that they think don’t matter. But we have to understand [that] higher education is a lot of things. Higher education [is] healthcare facilities, not just places where health research is being done, but also where health workers are working, in places where people are nurses, doctors, people who are nurses’ aides and doctors’ aides. All those kinds are working at healthcare facilities that are a part of higher education. And in some communities, those are the only healthcare facilities, and they reach out into the community.

And like I said, speaking of labor, universities are places where people of all kinds of different folks work. They want you to think about this caricature of the woke student and then the woke, out of touch, elite professor. But, of course, a lot of people working in universities are contingent faculty, people who are teaching an incredible load and do not have the kind of job security that we would like them to have. You have staff, you have food facilities, cafeteria workers. So in many places, universities are public, universities are [a] huge employer for the state, a huge amount of that is happening. So they are really central.

This is not to say at all that higher education doesn’t have problems, but I think with everything with this administration — And if you look at the AAUP and some of the incredible, exciting coalitions we’ve been building around labor and higher education, we were already trying to address some of these changes that these outside agitators would like to do to control our institutions and make them places, [in some] cases with administrators being complicit with that.

So that’s just one thing. But I want to say that they’re lying about what it is, but also when you look at what they’re attacking, so for example, if you look at these cuts to the NIH, this is not some kind of austerity where they’re doing this because they want to help taxpayers. This is ideological. They want to replace public science with corporate science and they want to defund fields that they can’t control, especially ones that address systemic health disparities or things like the social determinants of health, reproductive research, things like gun violence, climate health, mental health.

Look at these cuts that happened yesterday. I think Cornell and Northwestern are not verifying everything, they’re still trying to figure out what’s going on in these cuts that happen. But you just look at it and go, some of the stuff that’s being cut is cancer research. They received stop work orders to stop cancer research. So when we say these cuts kill, it’s serious. It’s not hyperbole. And I think that that’s really important for folks to understand.

And just one other thing I’ll say is, but not only in the STEM fields. Why are they so obsessed with, for example, gender and queer studies in the humanities? Partially because they understand that when people study those fields, they expose how gender gets used as a political category to maintain state control using sexuality and kinship and labor. They understand that in the humanities, the research around race, around the real history of America, they understand that when people understand that, when people understand history, they’re like, oh, then they’re less vulnerable to some of the moves that they want to make and the ways that their policies harm people both here and abroad.

So I think disabilities. They don’t want people studying disability studies and really understand how some of these market logics harm people who are disabled or people who are chronically ill, and then what that has to mean for health infrastructure because, again, they want to reformulate this society according to what profits billionaires.

So I think that when we look at these cuts, part of our battle is that — And I think what’s happening now in an unfortunate way, is we’re seeing people come together around a real understanding of why it’s important for this research to continue, why it’s important for it to be protected from Elon Musk or people like RFK or whatever, and what higher education really is.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Todd, Chenjerai, I want to ask if you could take us even further into your lifeworld and your experience of all this chaos that’s happening in higher ed right now at the hands of the Trump administration. We were talking in that first section about the scope of this attack. I want to ask if you could tell us about the experience of the attacks. How have you both personally been processing this as it’s been unfolding in your capacities as professors, but also as representatives of and leaders of the AAUP? What are you hearing from your colleagues in the faculty? How are students responding to this, and other members of the community?

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  Well, I guess I’ll jump in. There’s so much. One thing I’ll say is that there are Todd and a number of other leaders in organizations like Higher Ed Labor United, some people in the AAUP who are not necessarily positioned in the leadership in the way that we are now, and other folks who are working in a coalition which we now have called Labor for Higher Education. So many people, and people at different AAUP locals were already in a fight about the direction higher education is going in.

As someone who just came into the academy… As a professor, I started my first appointment around 2013. What I saw was I worked at universities where the whole faculty had been casualized and didn’t have the ability to speak up. And I saw what the effects of that were. I saw they were living in fear because the way the contract structure had been set up, they had to beg for their jobs every year. They didn’t have protections, they didn’t have the benefits they needed, and in the Southern states, they had real obstacles to organizing around collective bargaining.

So I saw what that meant for people, though. I saw what that meant, for example, with the custodial workers [at the] university, they didn’t have a place they could go to appeal and push back on things that the administration might be doing with them. And then I moved through to different institutions — I was at Rutgers, for full disclosure, briefly — And I saw the opposite of what it means when you have a wall-to-wall union and what it means actually to go through those struggles and all those other kinds of things. So I just want to say that it was really interesting that so many of us were in this battle. I was still learning and getting involved with it.

When these cuts hit, what you saw was everything that we had already been talking about escalate to a whole new level, and then with these new pieces involved. And for me, it looks like talking to colleagues who were doing HIV research or cancer research, seeing them at an informal event and they’re almost in tears because their whole research infrastructure, they have to figure out if they’re going to fire people. There’s a diverse array of postdoc students [for] who not only their education but their jobs are in flux. They’re thinking about the people that they serve, and they’re in a panic state.

It is not easy to get an NEH grant or an NIH grant. You put a lot of work into doing that, and then that work sustains both the communities and some of those institutions. I’m seeing people, some of these grants, for example, are grants that function at multiple institutions, so they helped to create an infrastructure for people to do powerful, important research.

A lot of research, by the way — And this is, I think, also if you look at it, is one way people tend to think about a place like Cornell — But you gotta understand some of that research was in innovation. Some of it was even in national security stuff. So that’s the kind of stuff that I was seeing be people say, oh my God, how do I keep this work going? What do I do? Scrambling, panicking. And the idea that the Trump administration is doing this to somehow make America more competitive, to protect working-class, vulnerable people, is absurd.

And then to talk about the DEI stuff that was coming down, we’re in the discussion now about the cuts, I would say… It’s fascinating and very clarifying to watch these folks try to roll back a hundred years of civil rights progress in the most flagrant and obvious ways. There’s no way I can say it. How, as a journalist, your job usually is to try to translate something that’s not quite clear. This is so crystal clear. People see it. They see what you’re not allowed to talk about. They see who’s getting fired.

And then the final thing I’ll say is that when it comes to the issue of the free right to protest. Students who stood up on the issue of Palestine, I’ve been in meetings with colleagues who are talking about students and colleagues hiding in their apartments. People are being advised by their lawyers to hide in their apartment because they’re not sure what’s going to happen if they come out. I’m at NYU. Any time those ICE vehicles or certain kinds of police vehicles pull up, you see a wave of terror go across the [campus], snatching people off the street.

So to try to function every day in that context and do the work that we want to do, as a faculty member, I want to tell my colleagues and my students that it’s going to be OK, but the only way that we can actually make it is to organize. And it’s good ’cause we are organizing, but it’s horrifying.

Todd Wolfson:  Thank you, Chenjerai. I want to start where you left off. It doesn’t perfectly answer your question, Max, but it needs to be said here, which is the 60 to 70 years of divestment from higher ed and the fascist threats to higher ed in this moment are deeply entangled, and that’s something that needs to be clearly understood and discussed more.

Divestment started at the moment when schools like the University of California system and CUNY were free. They were free in the ’70s, in the ’60s into the early ’70s, and people of color were getting access to free higher ed for the first time — Or a highly subsidized higher ed — For the first time in this country’s history. And in the same moment, those same universities around the country were the backbone of the ’60s in the protests, whether it’s the protests against Vietnam or for the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther Party, each one of these had — The Berkeley free speech movement — Was deeply… Universities were critical to them.

So at first it was a racialized and political attack on our universities that started in the ’60s and ’70s. Reagan was governor of California, and he said, quite directly, we can’t let the working class get educated for free. That was said. And that led to divestment from our institutions, first in California — Again, Reagan was like, we got to do something about those radicals, radical hippies in Berkeley. And so they divested and they forced students to start paying for their higher ed. So that happened.

And lo and behold, the right-wing attack on higher ed led to a full-scale neoliberal corporate ideology within higher ed, where our institutions became more and more dependent on a corporate logic, a neoliberal logic to run themselves. Which meant, to Chenjerai’s point, more contingent faculty, higher tuition rates, higher and higher and higher tuition rates, $2 trillion student debt, bureaucrats running our institutions, and, importantly, mission drift. They don’t remember what the institution is for because they’re so tied to corporate America ideology. And so no longer are these institutions the bedrock of a public system, a common good system.

And so fast forward to the fascist attacks on our institution which we’re outlining right now. They had already hollowed out the core. They had already hollowed out the core. And that’s why Columbia bows the knee in one second flat. That’s why our presidents go down to Washington DC when they’re called by the Educational Workforce Committee and they cannot respond with a clear vision of what higher ed is about, and they get end run by right-wing ideologues in the Senate and in Congress.

So it’s important to flag that there’s a deeply entwined relationship between fascism, right-wing ideology, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism, which isn’t really well talked about, which is what has put us in this situation. I’m sorry, I just want to go into that. It’s got to be flagged.

Now, to your question, I have never seen a climate of fear like this in my life anywhere, anywhere in my experience. We’re getting hundreds of emails every single day from faculty, from staff, from students. I need a safe place to stay, to Chenjerai’s point, I need a safe place to stay. That’s half of our discussions right now is people need safe places to stay; I don’t know if my research project is going to be cut; I’m not going to get tenure; I’m going to have to change careers because [of] a loss of funding; I’m going to be sent home and I’m not going to be able to come back and finish my degree.

These are the kind of discussions we’re having, and it’s not like once in a while. It’s every single day, multiple times a day. The fear is palpable and it’s purposeful. It’s purposeful. They’re trying to destabilize us, they’re trying to make us fearful, and they’re trying to get us all to bow down to what is a fascist threat to our institutions. So that’s the situation we’re in.

But I’m seeing something else too, and this is what gives me a lot of hope, is that fear is turning into anger, and that anger is turning into action, and we need more of that. We need the people who are the least vulnerable, US-born citizens, people with tenure, to stand up and step into this battle full-throated, not only for ourselves but for all of us, for higher education, for democracy, but also for the vulnerable students who dared to speak out for a free Palestine and now are getting dragged away in handcuffs by ICE agents. It’s on us to do that and continue building that power.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Guys, we were just talking about how the long path to turning universities into their contemporary neoliberal corporatized versions of themselves, that all predated these attacks. And it has, as you both pointed out, made institutions of higher ed especially vulnerable to these sorts of attacks from the Trump administration.

I wanted to tug on that thread a bit more by asking about the workforce and what the campus community looks like after decades of neoliberal reforms. Because this was something that I dealt with as a graduate student and political organizer at the University of Michigan during the first Trump administration. We were trying to rally members of the campus community, and in so doing had to come up against the fact that you have students who, unlike the student activists of the 1960s, who now having to make the calculation of whether or not they could afford to get suspended or even miss a class because they are paying tens of thousands of dollars for this tuition. So that right there is already a complicating factor in the political minds of people on campus, especially students.

But you also have, Chenjerai mentioned the ways that faculty in higher ed over the past 40 years, we used to have around 75% of the faculty be tenured or tenure track and only 25% being non-tenure track and “contingent” faculty, adjuncts, lecturers, so on and so forth. That ratio is completely flipped, and the vast bulk of the teaching workforce in higher ed is made up of so-called contingent faculty, and that puts a lot more pressure on those faculty members to not get involved in political activity for fear that their paychecks and livelihoods and professional reputations will be tarnished and they’ll be out of a job.

So these are just some of the realities that one has to deal with trying to organize on a campus in the 21st century. I wanted to ask if you could, for folks listening, talk about that more and what it looks like from the faculty side. So as you all on your campuses are trying to respond to this moment, what role is the AAUP playing in that? For folks listening, could you just say what the AAUP is, but also what the difference is between, say, a tenured professor and an adjunct professor and their involvement in this fight right now?

Todd Wolfson:  So I’ll just lay out what the AAUP is real brief. So AAUP is over 100 years old. John Dewey, one of the great US scholars, was one of the founders of it. And when it was first — And this is why it’s a complicated organization — When it was first established, it was a professional association for faculty, and it probably was like that for its first 50 years. But in 1970, or about that time, it also started unionizing and building collective bargaining units. And so it has been a layered history of first a professional association, layered on top of that, a union, a national union for faculty in particular.

And so today it is both of those things, but from my vantage as the president who comes out of a strong union at Rutgers, I think, in this moment in time, it needs to act less like a professional association and more like a union. It needs to build power, it needs to organize, and it needs to fight, fight not only up against the threats we face right now with the Trump administration, but also fight to reimagine what higher education is for and about — Which I’d love to get to, but I’ll say one other thing about this and then quickly talk about faculty and then kick it to Chenjerai, which is we have 500 chapters across this country on every type of university, in community colleges, two-year institutions, at four-year publics, four-year privates, in Ivy League institutions, every type of institution. Out of those 500, about 400 of our chapters are called advocacy chapters, they don’t have collective bargaining rights, and about 100 are unions.

An important thing for your listeners to know is in private universities, faculty, tenured faculty, do not have the right to unionize, but in public universities, they do. So it’s a strange bifurcation. And so there are a few places where faculty have unions in private institutions, but almost the entirety of tenure-stream faculty that are unionized are unionized at our public institutions.

So then I’ll just say one other thing for folks to know, which is, unfortunately, AAUP used to primarily cater to tenure-stream faculty. Our leadership, we do not believe in that. We believe in everyone fights together, wall-to-wall, coast to coast. And so we’re really fighting to reframe that. It’s not just about faculty. We need to build with faculty. We need to build with our postdocs, our grad workers. We need to build with our undergrads, we need to build with our custodial staff, professional staff, tech, across the board, our medical workers. That’s the only way forward. That’s the only way we build the power necessary to fight back.

And the last thing I’ll say is that the professoriate, the faculty in this country, you flagged it, and it’s important to know, it is not what they say it is. The majority, at least the plurality of faculty, are contingent. Most of them are adjunct faculty, which means part-time. And most of them are applying for their jobs semester after semester every semester with no benefits, zero benefits. And so we have adjunct faculty that are teaching six classes in a semester at six different institutions up and down the Eastern Seaboard. So the teacher is one day in a school in upstate New York and the next day teaching in Philadelphia. That’s the situation. And they’re lucky to scrape by with 60 grand a year and no benefits.

So the story they tell about what the professoriate is and the reality of the professoriate couldn’t be more different. And it’s important to understand that when we think about our institutions today. But I’ll let Chenjerai get in there and talk a little bit more about that.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  I want to go back to something Todd says. I can’t help but make this a little historical. This is not actually not unprecedented, and it’s really important for people to understand that this is part of a historical trajectory that has to do with neoliberalism.

I was reading recently and talking, actually, with Ryann Liebenthal, incredible book called Burdened. One of the things that lays out is that in 1979, some conservatives got together at the Heritage Foundation and were like, we’re going to start to lay out a plan. And they laid out a plan, what ultimately became a series of publications called Mandate for Leadership. They launched the first one in 1980.

That did a lot of things. Mandate for Leadership was broad, it didn’t just focus on higher education. But actually the first thing you gotta understand is Project 2025 was a part in that series. So people talk about Project 2025 like it came out of nowhere. No, it was a part of things that started, and it’s not like they never had a chance to implement it. The attacks, cuts, similar types of things that were implemented that were planned out in this early ’80s version of Project 2025 were actually implemented [under the] Reagan administration.

Now, one of the many things that did was it gutted federal support for higher education, including things like student loans, and actually transformed a lot of, I would say, including student support. Because one of the things that happened during that period was that a lot of the federal grants… I think if you would’ve looked going back to the ’40s, only like 20% of the federal money that came in was targeted toward a loan structure where people would have to repay it. After the ’80s where they realized that they could actually turn student debt into a product, it became like a centerpiece. But that was just one of many ways in which you started to see this divestment of states, of the federal government from public education support.

And so yes, to your point, that has meant that all these people, that has meant that our faculty, so many of the faculty, are insecure. And I want to be clear, the reason, part of why I bring that up is that they were very intentional about the idea that people who are insecure are going to be less political. People who are in debt are going to be less political. They’re not going to be sure and they’re going to have to make very careful decisions about how they can fight, if they can fight. And some of it is even just being overloaded with work. As you try to pay back this debt, as you try to do it, you might not even have time to get your mind around it, if that sounds familiar to anybody.

And for this reason, this is one of the ways, I just want to be clear that these attacks don’t just touch people currently in the academy, they touch both the cuts to funding — I’m hearing from parents who are unsure what disciplines their folks should go into. So they’re actually trying to shape it where, at a time when we need massive amounts of doctors, we have emerging health threats that are happening. People are like, I don’t know if I want to go be a doctor because I’m seeing the funding being cut at the elite places where I would’ve done that. So it affects things [at] that level. And then the funding available affects families who have to say, am I going to be able to get that support I need? So how do we fight? So that’s more and more [why] people are being drawn into this fight in this way.

You’re seeing all these people being attacked and, in a way, they are taking a step toward building our coalition for us because I think they’re overreaching. When you hear all about all these people being affected, all these people feeling insecure, for me, that’s the coalition that we want to organize.

Now, on a note of organizing, let me say a few things. Higher education is, on the one hand, higher education is like any other kind of workplace. You have some people who are very engaged, who’ve been pulling their weight, who’ve been leading the fight, and you have some people who maybe are just focused on their jobs and haven’t yet seen themselves as organizers.

But I would say, in this situation, what we’re trying to do across workplaces, including, and what our organizations are doing, is inviting people in and saying, hey, see how these battles that you’re fighting at an individual level, at a department level, whether you’re a parent, whether you’re a community member who doesn’t want to see that medical research cut, see how this is part of a larger fight.

And where I think higher education, interestingly, isn’t a place to lead is that the way I’ve been learning from leaders like Todd, leaders from Labor for Higher Ed, HELU, even leaders at AFT, people who have a long history of organizing, labor has a set of strategies that we can use that is not the same as people coming out into the street. I was excited to see people at our days of action all over the country. I was excited to see people at the hands-off protests, hundreds of thousands of people in the street, but coming out into the street is not enough. We need a repertoire of strategies which include things that can create real leverage, things people cannot ignore.

And so, in a way, what the AAUP is leading is we’re actually showing people that repertoire of strategies. We have a legal strategy, incredible legal counsel, it has been rolling out lawsuits that are moving through the system. We know that the legal strategy by itself is not going to be the thing that does it, but it buys us time. It slows things down, and it shows people that we know how to throw a punch. And at the same time where we’re building the power that we need to take real labor action, we’re doing educations and teachings.

So in that way, what I’ve seen is that there’s times when people don’t necessarily know really what I do as a professor or they’re like, oh, you off and a professor in the books. Now I’m seeing people who are outside of the academy saying, we love the way that higher education is leading at a time when folks don’t know what to do, or maybe they don’t know what to do beyond simply coming out into the street. Which, again, I encourage. You ain’t going to hear me be one of these people talking about people… Well, I don’t know, the demands weren’t clear enough.

No, listen, this is a time, honestly, to think like an organizer, not like — I’m just going to say it — Not like a social media influencer. Social media influencers build currency because you just point out, you dunk on people. Look, if there’s somebody who voted for Trump and they see it’s wrong now and they’re like, I want to get involved in changing it ’cause I don’t like what I’m seeing, I want to welcome that person in. I’m not here to dunk on you. I don’t get nothing but dunking on you on clicks and likes. But if you join our coalition and become part of it and spread the movement to your people, we get stronger and we can fight this.

That’s what we’re trying to show people, our version of that with the way that we’re organizing. And again, I’m learning this. In a way, I’m newer to this than other people, but it’s really exciting to me to feel like there’s something we can do.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Todd, Chenj, I have so much more I want to talk to you about, but I know we only have a few more minutes here before we have to wrap up, and so I want to make them count. I wanted to, in this last 10 minutes or so, focus in on three key questions: One, if the Trump administration is not stopped, thwarted, frustrated in its efforts to remake higher education in this country, what is the end game there? What are our colleges and universities and our higher ed system going to look like if they get what they want?

The next question is, and then on top of that, the situation that people are in is needing to defend institutions that already had deep problems with them, as we’ve been talking about here. And you can’t just galvanize people by saying, we got to defend the norms and institutions that were already in place. That’s the same university system that saddled people like me with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, that we’re not exactly chomping at the bit to save that system in its current form. So what is the alternate vision? What is the future of higher education that y’all are fighting for and rallying people around?

Then the last question is how do we get there? What can folks listening do to be part of this, and why should they get involved before it’s too late?

Todd Wolfson:  Look, I think it’s really clear what the Trump administration’s goals are here. And they’ve taken this out of hundreds of years, a hundred years of history of authoritarian and fascist regimes. And one of the key sectors that these regimes always target is higher education, always. I think most recently it is Viktor Orbán in Hungary. But you can peel back our history and you’ll see it has happened before in many different moments when fascist forces are on the march.

And so the reason why higher ed is targeted is because it’s an independent formation that can offer — Not always, and imperfect — But can offer a counter political ideology, and it needs to come under control of the state because otherwise it is a danger to the state’s ability to push forward fascism, in particular, an educated populace. And so there is a real goal here at the biggest level to slow down enrollment numbers, take over the way higher education is done so that we are not a counterforce to fascism in this country. And so it is a clear path towards that. This is not the only institution that they’re going to target and go after, but it’s one of the key institutions that they will go after and target.

Labor’s another, which is why labor unions in higher ed are at such a critical crosshair. Another is college students and protests from college students, who have always led this country, have always been the mirror, showing a mirror to us and showing us what we look like and been a moral beacon for us. There are real aspects of higher ed that are really, really dangerous or threatening to a Trump administration and what they want to achieve.

And so if they get rid of higher ed or they take control of it, I think it is a step towards, it’s not the entirety of, but a critical step towards authoritarianism. We could call it fascism, we could call it postfascism, we could call it an illiberal democracy. There’s a lot of ideas going around about what exactly we’re in, and I think it’s a complex merger of a host of things, but I think wherever they’re trying to go, it means less voice, less power for all working people, and getting rid of the higher ed is a way to get there.

And so I’ll just say two other things in this short time to you, which is, one, higher ed has never been perfect. Let’s just be clear about some of its worst moments in history. Our great land grant institutions — Which are great, one of the great things about America, American higher ed system, which Lincoln dubbed the people’s colleges, or along those lines, were all based on taking off stolen land from Indigenous people. That’s clear. That happened. And those same Indigenous Native folks didn’t get to enjoy and use those universities to advance their lives. So they merely were extractive from the people who were here first. But then also post World War II, the GI program, Black people didn’t get access to it the same way white soldiers coming back did.

And so always at the heart of this institution has been racism and classism and sexism has been coded into our higher ed. So we should be clear about that. And we don’t want to build a new higher ed that replicates those problems. We need to reimagine it. But we need to reimagine it building off what we have now. We can’t just say tomorrow we want something wholly new. We have to take steps. People are getting their livelihoods from these institutions, they’re finding ways to have social mobility through these institutions, so we need to build through them.

And what our vision is is a fully funded public higher education system. Fully funded. Nobody should be going to college and coming out in debt. Nobody. And there needs to be an end to student debt. We need to end the debt that has already been accrued. That’s better for all the people who have that debt, but it’s also better for our economy writ large, for you, Max. We gotta get rid of your debt too.

And then we have to make sure that people who work on our campuses work with dignity. Right now, that is not the case. Too many people, as we already discussed, are working across six institutions, scraping together a living, and we have to end that. We have to make sure everyone who works can have long-term, dignified employment. And we have to make sure that we fully fund and increase our funding to our HBCUs, our minority-serving institutions, our Tribal colleges and universities.

And we forgot to say this, the attack on the Department of Education defunds those institutions, so that also is another line of attack that I forgot to mention. So we want more funding for those groups, and we want more funding for science, more funding for arts.

And so that’s the kind of higher ed we want to build. We want to build that higher ed as one which has shared governance so that the students and the faculty and the staff of our institutions govern our institutions, not business bureaucrats that now control them. So that’s a vision we want to put forward.

And the last thing I want to say is we have a way to get there, but the first step has got to be responding to Trump. We can’t build the vision of higher ed that we all want without first standing up to fascism.

Chenjerai said this, and my heart sings when he says this, because we’re on the same page: Protests are great — They are not going to stop fascism. They will not stop fascism. The courts are great. Thank God. They’ve done a good job for us so far in holding up some of the worst aspects of Trump’s illegal moves — They will not stop fascism. We are going to have to scale up our organizing. Higher ed is going to have to build with other sectors, federal workers, K-12 workers, healthcare workers, immigrant workers, all under attack in different ways. And we’re going to have to figure out the demands we need to make and the militancy we’re going to have to take, the militant moves we’re going to have to take to force them to stop.

And that’s going to mean risk, but there is no other way forward. And so that’s what AAUP’s committed to. That’s what Labor for Higher Ed’s committed to, and that’s where we’re trying to go, and we need other sectors to join us to get there.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  Todd really said it. I would just add two points to that. When you see what’s being cut and what’s being attacked, you’re getting a glimpse of the future of what it is. You could go to places like Hungary, you could go to a lot of places where these things are a little bit more developed and see what this looks like there, and I guarantee it’s not something that we want.

But there’s two points I want to make, which is that one of the things about worker power across sectors is that workers, when they’re in control, can say, this is what we want the institutions that we work in to do, and this is what we don’t want them to do. Workers can govern the direction of institutions. When you see Amazon workers and tech workers who are stepping up saying, we don’t want to be involved in making technology that’s supporting genocide or that’s supporting oppression or data extraction here at home. That’s worker power, workers saying, let’s get together and dictate what happens. As opposed to administrator or, I would say, billionaire executive power, which is organized around a completely different set of priorities.

And the same is true in the academy. One of the dangers is that if you look at the various org parts of labor at the university, folks are also saying, this is what we want, our universities to be on the right side of history, doing powerful and important work. We do not want them to be involved in suppression. And if you don’t like what you see at Columbia, where you see them bending the knee and then you see them actually becoming complicit, in a way teaching the Trump administration what they can do, what they’re allowed to do, that’s a consequence of not having sufficient worker power. And you’re going to see more of that. So you’re imagining not just what’s going to get removed, but now imagine that universities are really deployed as an arm of fascism in all its different formations. So that’s one thing that I think is at stake.

The second thing I would bring up is that higher education battles are so important because everything that we want to try to make this world a better place is interwoven with higher education. So if we want to defeat the urgent threat of climate change, that takes research, people who are finding the solutions, precisely the kind of research that’s being taken. So that’s not just about what’s happening at universities, it’s about the climate stakes for everybody. And most of the people that affects are not in the university, but the university research and making sure you’re having real research on that, is central to that.

When you talk about healthcare, fighting for a world where we do have healthcare for all and understanding what that healthcare needs to look like, the university is crucial for that. Todd already mentioned the NIH was responsible for almost, I think, basically all the therapies that came out that were useful in the last decade, really. So you can’t talk about healthcare without talking about it.

When you talk about labor and this emerging regime where labor protections and technology, trying to understand what is this actually going to look like. People producing real research like our colleague Veena Dubal, who’s looking at what actually is happening with these algorithms for real and how are those algorithms going to affect things as these people try to Uberize the entire planet and create a situation where people don’t have benefits and all that, that research is also being done at the university.

I just laid out three right there: Working conditions, healthcare, climate change, and we could go on. What about art? What about the things that bring us joy in life? Where people have the room outside of the corporate factory to actually explore and produce wonderful things, art and music and culture, all those things.

So to me, what’s at stake is literally that future. And as higher education workers, it’s up to us to make sure that, as Todd is saying, we want to fight for the conditions of education, that it really is working for the common good, but also we have to fight back this monster. And I’m terrified right now, I gotta say. It is OK to say you’re scared by what I’m seeing, but I’m also encouraged. And when you’re scared, you gotta lock arms with your people and walk forward anyway, and that’s what I’m seeing people stepping up and doing.

Todd Wolfson:  We have actions on April 17 throughout the country. I think over about a hundred institutions across the country are taking part in our April 17 actions. So please come out or organize your own action. It’s being driven by the Coalition for Action in Higher ed, which is a lot of amazing AAUP leaders. We will also be engaging in Mayday organizing. And then this summer we want you to come to your AAUP chapter, your UAW local, your CWA local, your AFT local, your NEA local, your SEIU local, whatever it is, however you can plug in, and then you need to reach out to us. We’re going to do a summer of training that’s going to prepare us for what needs to get done in the fall, and we need every single higher ed worker.

And one other thing, if you aren’t a member of AAUP, now is the time to become a member and join us in this fight. And if you don’t have a chapter, you need to build a chapter on your campus, and we will be there with you every step of the way. We have a campaign called Organize Every Campus, and we will help you build your campus chapter and build your power so you can fight back at the campus level while we collectively fight back at the state and national level together. So join AAUP today. If you’re already in a union, get involved in your union, and we’ll see you on the front lines.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Professors Todd Wolfson and Chenjerai Kumanyika of the American Association of University Professors, and I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People.

And if you cannot wait that long, then please go explore all the great work we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you, it really makes a difference.

I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

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Editor-in-Chief
Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days as a warehouse temp in Southern California while my family, like millions of others, struggled to stay afloat in the wake of the Great Recession. Eventually, we lost everything, including the house I grew up in. It was in the years that followed, when hope seemed irrevocably lost and help from above seemed impossibly absent, that I realized the life-saving importance of everyday workers coming together, sharing our stories, showing our scars, and reminding one another that we are not alone. Since then, from starting the podcast Working People—where I interview workers about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles—to working as Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review and now as Editor-in-Chief at The Real News Network, I have dedicated my life to lifting up the voices and honoring the humanity of our fellow workers.
 
Email: max@therealnews.com
 
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