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By C.J. Polychroniou / Truthout
The United States is on the road to a form of neofascism that, if allowed to complete its course, will have long-lasting impacts on all aspects of society. Indeed, the Trump administration is carrying out a series of policies that target the very foundations of a free and open society — including an unrelenting assault on higher education and the U.S. education system in general. Higher education in particular seeks to nurture an environment that fosters independent thought, promotes thinking skills critical for democracy, and encourages inquisitive assessment of evidence for the purpose of promoting and disseminating the truth. At least, this has been the historical mission of universities, which is why they have always been targeted by reactionary forces with the intent of transforming them into pure ideological apparatuses of the fascist state. Following this pattern, Donald Trump has sought to bend universities to his will by cutting funding and forcing them to pledge support to his administration’s initiatives for reshaping higher education by signing a Compact for Academic Excellence that basically erodes institutional independence.
How successful has Trump’s fascist takeover of higher education been so far? How are universities responding? In the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), offers insights on the battle for the soul of American higher education in the age of Trumpism. Wolfson is an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University.
C. J. Polychroniou: Trump’s reactionary agenda has spread across all aspects of U.S. society, including politics, economics, societal norms, culture, and the environment. His culture war tactics extend to reshaping higher education, which he claimed in a recent Truth Social post “has lost its way, and is now corrupting our Youth and Society with WOKE, SOCIALIST, and ANTI-AMERICAN ideology.” Now, it is not common for U.S. presidents to dictate what colleges and universities teach and whom they hire, so Trump’s assault on higher education is a clear indication that the country is descending into fascism. What sense do you make out of Trump’s crackdown on higher education, which he has tried to justify mainly as a response to antisemitism on campuses? Is it just because he perceives universities as having become too liberal or progressive? Or is there some deeper motive behind his neofascist actions?
Todd Wolfson: I would say that Trump’s attack on higher education is being driven by a couple of different ideological and material forces. First and foremost, authoritarian and fascist regimes historically have targeted various sectors of society. If we look at fascist Spain, fascist Italy, or Nazi Germany, or if we look at Victor Orbán’s Hungary and his fascist or illiberal regime, what we see are three sectors that are clearly always identified and targeted. One is the press, one is the court system, and the third is higher education. Higher ed is targeted because it’s an independent political force that has a critical role in the ideological formation of society and poses a threat to fascist or authoritarian ideology. So at one level, it’s true. This is a very old playbook that the Trump regime is using.
Another issue, in the American context, is that white voters — the Republican base — are more likely to vote Democrat if they go to college. So, in undermining college and making it so that less people attend, they are protecting their own ability to win elections. I think that’s also in play. And a corollary, and this is in Project 2025, is the desire of some aspects of white nationalists to have higher birth rates in white communities in the U.S. Project 2025 outlines how white women with a college degree are likely to have less children than white women without a college degree, so once again, this plays into their white replacement theory.
So I think all of those are reasons why the Trump administration has targeted and zeroed in on higher ed. And then there’s things like the protests on Gaza. Historically, college campuses are places where students protest and build power and force societies to look at themselves in the mirror. Great social change often comes from the leadership of young people, so they’re trying to crush dissent and campus protest, so that’s another aspect of this. There are probably many other reasons as well, but I think those are some reasons why the Trump administration has zeroed in on higher education.
It’s also important to note that this agenda has been in the works for decades. In the ’60s, Black Americans start getting broad access to free or highly subsidized public higher education, in particular the CUNY system in New York City and the University of California system were both free in the ’60s, and people of color were getting access to that free higher ed. American campuses were critical to, what we would call the long ’60s, the tumultuous ’60s, the effervescent ’60s, where we had the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Black Panther Party. These movements were anchored and organized in many ways by college kids. So that happens in the ’60s and fast forward, Ronald Reagan is running for a second term as governor in 1970 and he targets higher ed. He targets Berkeley, and his education advisor Roger A. Freeman says publicly, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”
So, Reagan runs on a campaign on clamping down on the University of California and then starts introducing fees to that system, which was free beforehand. That opens the floodgates for the divestment that takes place across the next 50 years that we’ve witnessed. So, this started in California and it started in response to who was going to college and what was happening on our college campuses. Divestment from higher ed was politicized and racialized from the beginning.
The last thing I’ll say here is that it’s not just Reagan. That’s not the only line. Lewis Powell became a Supreme Court justice in 1972, but before that he wrote the Powell memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and in that memo, he outlines why campuses are the biggest threat to a free market society and pressed for divestment, among other things. So the divestment from American higher education that has happened over the last half century was a political strategy from the right that led to a number of horrible outcomes, skyrocketing tuition, ballooning student debt, a near-complete reliance on contingent labor, and a growing army of bureaucrats that run our institutions more like businesses and less like higher education institutions. That divestment hollowed higher ed out from the core. It started from a right-wing position that has aided and embedded the fascist attacks on our institutions that we see today.
Stopping federal grants is one of the key tools that the Trump administration is using to force institutions of higher education to kneel to its ideology. Isn’t this a violation of constitutional principles since the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse? How much federal funding do so-called private colleges and universities receive to the point that it makes them so vulnerable to government threats?
I’m not sure I agree with the premise of this question. I do think the attacks on funding and biomedical research have been unconstitutional, but not in the way you outline it here, because there is a role for federal governments to play in making sure that there’s compliance with public and private institutions around core values. The Office of Civil Rights, which emerged on the heels of the civil rights movement, was put in place to make sure that racism did not take place on our campuses, and that grant programs and institutions adhered to a non-racist approach to higher education, and that there was a process in place for instances when they don’t. That is a federal government role.
When we talk about Trump going to the University of California or Harvard and threatening to freeze their money by alleging they have an antisemitism problem, I don’t know if it’s a constitutional problem in relationship to the power of the purse in Congress. It is a constitutional problem, as we’ve shown in court twice now, because it undermines our freedom of speech rights on our campuses. It’s also a problem because the Trump administration has not followed the procedures and rules of the Office of Civil Rights and title VI. So, if you want to prove that there’s an antisemitism problem and it’s connected to a grant, you have to go through a process and you have to make a case, and they haven’t done that at all, so we sued them twice.
We won twice in court with the Harvard and University of California cases. Basically, our argument was that you cannot freeze grants that are doing research on cancer because you’re making an unverified claim that there’s rampant structural antisemitism at an institution, you must prove it. They never proved it. So, the violation is with the First Amendment, but that said, it’s a terrible problem, and one that the AAUP is committed to combating and we’ve been successful.
At UCLA, the Trump administration froze a billion dollars. We sued. (The University of California was cowardly and did not sue and is still negotiating with the Trump administration.) Every union representing workers in the UC system signed on to the lawsuit. Combined, this represents over 100,000 workers, and we won that case. Now, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant money that was frozen by the Trump administration is flowing back into the university and it’s flowing because workers stood up when the administration failed to. That’s going to be a boon to the economy of California and a boon to the research infrastructure of this country. When people need to go see a doctor or have, say, Alzheimer’s therapy, it’s there because we fought to get the NIH grant that was funding the Alzheimer’s lab and doing the research that your mother needed in order to get the therapy. So we were going to fight them on every inch here.
Some universities have indeed capitulated to Trump’s fascist demands for higher education, but there are a few that are balking at the idea of surrendering their independence. Can you give us an overall assessment of the way universities are responding to the Trump administration’s war on higher education? Can you also explain why some of the nation’s most powerful universities seem to have sworn oath to a wannabe dictator?
Our universities and administrators have not covered themselves in glory during this moment. Very few have. When universities stand up, it’s usually because faculty, students, staff, unions and organizations that represent them, like the AAUP, have stood up first, and then they followed suit.
Let’s talk about the Trump administration’s “loyalty oath” compact for higher ed. Billionaire Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management Group, wrote a compact, or co-wrote it, that was the greatest threat to the autonomy of higher education in the history of this country. They then invited nine universities to join that compact. Two days after that compact became public, and we knew the nine universities that were invited, the AAUP, along with students groups like Students Rise Up, and some of our union partners, like AFT, organized meetings with members across the nine universities, and within a week, we were organizing actions and teach-ins on all nine campuses. On October 17, about two weeks after the compact was announced, we had a national day of action throughout the country and on the heels of that, universities started rejecting the compact. What’s important to emphasize here is that students, faculty, and staff, not administrators, stood up first and stood up most vehemently and forced administrators to respond to the Trump administration’s attack on our autonomy.
The Trump administration demanded that the nine initial universities sign on by November 21. By early November, we had gotten seven of the universities to publicly reject the compact because of our organizing. The last two, the University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt, just never signed on. They never publicly rejected it, but they never signed on. So, no, I don’t think there are many institutions standing up, including Harvard. But when they do, they fight back because we fought back first. Even in the case of Harvard, we sued the Trump administration over the Harvard demand letter first, and a couple days later, Harvard filed a lawsuit of their own that was joined together by the First Circuit Court. Our broad coalition of students, faculty, and staff are leading this fight. We have not seen many of these administrators or presidents fighting back, in a way we need to see them fight back.
Specifically, how is the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) challenging Trump’s assault on academic freedom?
We’re approaching his assault writ large. We’re fighting on four levels in response to Trump and I’ll explain how academic freedom fits in. The first and most important level is organizing and building power on our campuses. Nothing else matters if we do not build an army of higher ed workers aligned with students to build power at the campus level, the state level and the federal level, not only to respond to Trump’s attacks, but to also then pivot and go on the offensive and redefine higher education for this country. That’s the most fundamental: organizing and building power, and building coalitions in alliance, with alumni, workers, and other key sectors of society. That’s the first and primary area of work. The second area of work, as we already discussed, is legal. We sued the Trump administration about eight times. We’ve been very successful in court. We’re using the court strategically in order to slow the Trump administration’s assault on higher ed. The third place we’re fighting them is politically. We’re in the process of talking with our members and other higher ed workers throughout the country and plan to come out with our vision for the future of higher education in the spring of 2026.
What is emerging is a call for free, public higher ed college for all. It’s going to entail an end to student debt and skyrocketing tuition. It’s going to entail an end to contingency and demanding work with dignity on our campuses. And it’s going to entail a fully funded biomedical research infrastructure and a fully funded HBCU, minority serving institution system, and most critically to this, it will include a new academic compact between the federal government, state governments, and our universities that enshrines real academic freedom, real freedom of speech and freedom of protest on campuses, and that enshrines true shared governance between faculty, students, staff, and administrations.
What we’ve seen in this period is that we’re the only ones that can actually set direction for our institutions. Our administrators have failed so we’re going to come out with our agenda, and we’re going to make it political, and we’re going to fight to win that agenda legislatively. We’re going to fight to win that agenda by electing people to office who carry that agenda in the midterms, in 2026, and every election thereafter.
On the fourth level, we must challenge the false narrative put forth by the Trump administration on higher ed and emphasize why higher ed is critical to our society and to the future of this country. Higher education is critical to democracy, our economy, and our children’s ability to get a leg up in this world. We have to make this case to the U.S. populace.
It appears, without a doubt, that Trump’s actions have also laid bare the long-standing crisis in higher education in the United States, which is attributed to a very large degree to neoliberalism’s policy agenda. Indeed, among other things, the implementation of neoliberal practices has paved the way to systematic privatization of public education, treating students as customers, and to a highly bureaucratic form of governance marked by top-down decision making that sidelines faculty. First, do you agree with this assessment of the state of U.S. higher education today and, second, what is, in your view, its future?
Yes, I agree. I think we laid out our assessment of higher education previously so I’m not going to go back into it, but clearly, the neoliberalization and corporatization of the university is the fundamental crisis that’s taken place in higher education over the last 60 years that has aided and embedded the fascist attack on higher ed that we’re witnessing now from the Trump administration.
Higher education is a foundation of a democratic, multiracial society. That’s what we want to build, and that’s the higher education system that we are fighting for. That means to us, kids are able to go to college without being saddled with life-altering debt. Like almost every industrialized nation in the world right now, we want free public higher education. Kids should not have to go into debt to become the next teacher in our neighborhood school, or the next doctor or lawyer or any other number of important careers. We need a free public higher education system, and we need that system rooted in dignity for the workers on our campuses.
We must put an end to the degraded worker contracts and the contingency and the corporatization of the sector. We really need a higher ed system that’s not just rooted in students as customers, but is rooted in critical inquiry and the development of smart, thoughtful citizens in a democracy who can see through the lies and stand up for the kind of society we want to build. That cannot happen without a strong, vibrant, free, autonomous higher ed system. That’s the vision we are fighting for.
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C.J. Polychroniou
C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).