In an Attempt to Cause Fear and Demobilize, the Trump Administration Increases Threats on Higher Education

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 nine students now that have been abducted in broad daylight and whisked into an ICE underground prison system, often with no charge. Over the weekend, over this past weekend, some 600 visas were revoked across the country. We think at least a hundred of them were college students. 

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

They’re also attacking universities for DEI-related grants and programs, and that’s been a massive attack. And then the last attack I’ll flag is the attack on our institutions writ large, and that’s the stuff we’re seeing at Columbia and all these other universities. They want to be able to control these institutions. 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. 

Chenjerai Kumanyika: 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. They received stop work orders to stop cancer research. So when we say these cuts kill, it’s serious. It’s not hyperbole.

It’s 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 when people understand history, they’re less vulnerable to some of the moves that they want to make.

Maximillian Alvarez: 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?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: When these cuts hit, what you saw was everything that we had already been talking about escalate to a whole new level. You gotta understand some of that research was in innovation. Some of it was even in national security stuff. The idea that the Trump administration is doing this to somehow make America more competitive, to protect working-class, vulnerable people, is absurd.

To talk about the DEI stuff that was coming down, 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. 

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 okay, but the only way that we can actually make it is to organize.

Todd Wolfson: Divestment started at the moment when schools like the University of California system and CUNY were free. They were free 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. Universities were critical to them.

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. And that led to divestment from our institutions, first in California. They divested and they forced students to start paying for their higher ed.

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 to run themselves. Which meant more contingent faculty, 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 fast forward to the fascist attacks on our institution which we’re outlining right now. They had already hollowed out the core. 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 have never seen a climate of fear like this in my life. We’re getting hundreds of emails every single day from faculty, from staff, from students. ​“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 kinds of discussions we’re having, and it’s not 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.

Maximillian Alvarez: What is the future of higher education that y’all are fighting for and rallying people around?

Todd Wolfson: The reason why higher ed is targeted is because it’s an independent formation that 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 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 by building off what we have now. 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.

We can’t build the vision of higher ed that we all want without first standing up to fascism. We are going to have to scale up our organizing. Higher ed is going to have to build with other sectors, all under attack in different ways. And we’re going to have to figure out the demands we need to make and the militant moves we’re going to have to take to force them to stop.

This episode of the Working People Podcast was published April 12.