Trump and his allies have a vision for higher education. So warned Ian Gavigan, the executive director of Higher Education Labor United (a national labor formation uniting Higher Education unions across the country), on the podcast The Dig earlier this month. In Trump’s world, according to Gavigan, fewer students attend college, fewer subjects are taught, more education money is funneled into narrow career and technical education (including that offered by dubious for-profit colleges and universities), and the course content that remains is subject to ideological review overseen by MAGA lieutenants. You can say whatever you want about this vision, but you have to admit that it is, at least, a vision. It is something to fight for. It articulates, and is now enacting, a program that would bring higher education in line with the larger attempt to reshape every piece of American culture in the image of the MAGA movement.
By contrast, the supposed caretakers of higher education—from elected Democrats to college administrators at every level—have arrived late to the battlefield, and without a plan. Even a defense of the status quo that seeks to stem the tide of Trump’s higher ed transformations, Gavigan warned, remains fundamentally chained to a broken state of affairs: The path higher education was on before Trump’s reelection was neither certain nor stable. There is not much to go back to now.
For those of us working on the front lines, in classrooms, offices, and labs on campuses across America, this can all feel too daunting. It is, after all, above our pay grades to save higher education, especially when most of us are simply trying to save our own hides. At the same time, as the struggles of activists, organizers, teachers, students, community members, and rank and file workers across the industry show, we are strongest when we realize that our own efforts are our best defense.
It is in that spirit that Public Books has commissioned this higher education roundtable. We asked scholars, writers, teachers, and organizers from across the sector to share their best ideas for how to begin setting things right. Our instructions were simple: We wanted ideas that were concrete, achievable, and actionable, and in which ordinary people could take part, and which would not require a new occupant of the White House to achieve, or begin achieving.
In my perfect world, we’d be celebrating historic new investments in higher education, discharging student debt, and offering tuition-free, open-admission four-year college educations to anyone who wants them, all while welcoming international students and scholars from across the world and pumping money into advanced research to cure disease and make life on this planet more pleasant and more sustainable. We do not live in my perfect world.
Taken together, our roundtable contributors present a suite of ideas that, if enacted, just might make higher education more livable for us all.
The litany of threats to higher education is now practically too well known to bear repeating. From political controversies that threaten funding and essential research, to conflicts over campus speech more intense than any in the past half century, to fiscal crisis across the sector and a looming demographic cliff that threatens the existence of institutions large and small, challenges abound.
Into this uncertain situation has stepped a second Trump administration, this time bent on reshaping American higher education in its image. In less than a year Trump and his allies have unleashed a wave of anti-higher-education measures without precedent in modern US history. They include arrests and threatened deportations for students who express support for the Palestinian people, investigations into alleged discriminatory practices, major financial penalties targeting federal research funds, and politicized scientific cutbacks. Students, professors, and administrators alike are targets of this administration’s assault on teaching, learning, and research.
Luckily, Public Books contributors answered the call, sharing suggestions that, if acted on, would make universities a little brighter, a little fairer, and a little more humane for us all—no matter what Donald Trump tries to do. Some essays remind us that, even on unfavorable terrain, victory is still possible. As Christopher Newfield argues, the cultural victory of Trumpism has “canceled” the knowledge society and helped to eviscerate the “procedural safeguards” guaranteeing academic freedom and the continued existence of intellectual culture. Newfield calls on academics to expand the scope of their action, abandoning the (shrinking) private spaces of intellectual autonomy for control over the means of cultural production. This is a big goal, but it starts small: with a step-by-step move toward organizational control over our universities, using whatever tools are available to us, from dusty or desiccated shared governance structures to unions new and old to affinity groups and informal networks. Similarly, Jasper Cattell, an officer of the Graduate Labor Organization (GLO AFT-6516) at Brown University, reminds us that, even with Trump’s appointees in control of the National Labor Relations Board, other means are sometimes available to enforce and guarantee the right to organize and bargain collectively: “state and local institutions … can be used to defend workers’ rights.” Cattell details GLO’s campaign to enshrine grad student union rights in Rhode Island labor law, heading off, at least for grad workers in RI, a possible reversal of the 2016 Columbia NLRB decision that recognized graduate students as workers covered by federal labor law.
Other essays consider the future of college, reminding professors and administrators alike that the demographic cliff is not necessarily declinist destiny. Christian Collins, for example, points to a still-untapped market for college educational attainment: Black and Latino men, whom colleges have not done enough to recruit and retain. Right now, the college achievement gap between men and women continues to grow—worsening educational polarization between genders—and relatively lower rates of college attainment among Black and Latino men are a substantial contributing factor to that gap. “Instead of administrators asking why Black and Hispanic men aren’t choosing to attend their institution,” Collins argues, “they should be asking what socioeconomic and political forces have stripped educational opportunities away from these men and how to counter those forces.” Similarly, Stephanie Reist points out that California’s direct admissions programs, which automatically enroll some graduating high school seniors in universities in the Cal State system, have failed to stem the demographic tide afflicting these regional public universities (direct admissions programs also exist in states like Connecticut, Illinois, and Tennessee, among others); instead, Reist argues, the solution is open admissions to all, offering residents a chance to enroll at any public college or university across the state—and doing away with the tiered system that maintains prestige and exclusivity at the expense of relegating “California’s minority students … to community colleges that [receive] less funding” and from which only around ten percent transfer to four-year colleges.
Finally, contributors Jarrell Johnson and Anna Elizabeth Clark gesture toward new or neglected solidarities that the current state of higher ed now makes not only possible, but necessary. As the Trump administration has pursued examples of what they now call “illegal DEI,” Federal enforcement and university overcompliance has made many predominantly white institutions even more difficult places to navigate for Black students and other students of color. HBCUs have seen an application and enrollment boom (and some additional funding), a continuation of a trend that has emerged over the last several years. But, Johnson argues, “Black queer and trans* students often face a painful contradiction at HBCUs: embraced for being Black but pushed to the margins for their gender and sexual identities.” To truly fulfill their missions of welcoming and educating Black students—and offering them refuge from a culture of reaction at other institutions—HBCUs should reorient their cultures to practice greater inclusion, becoming, in Johnson’s words, “havens of affirmation, not exception.” Anna Elizabeth Clark, too, calls on higher education workers, teachers, and administrators to consider a new population: K–12 students and their teachers. The Common Core curriculum and other educational standards that have turned the fruits of a real education “into generic, blandly adaptable, quantifiable ‘skills’” that can be measured and demonstrated on standardized tests—and for which the competencies provided by humanistic study are not strictly necessary. To recommit to real education and prepare students for advanced college work (and to think for themselves!), Clark argues, college educators should seek out opportunities to influence secondary education, including by revamping teacher training curricula and partnering with secondary school teachers in professional and pedagogical work.
Taken together, our roundtable contributors present a suite of ideas that, if enacted, just might make higher education more livable for us all. There is no quick or easy road out of a crisis, of course, nor does any one of us have the power to change the sector with the wave a wand or the stroke of a pen. But we do have the power to organize, to advocate, and to come together with others—students, faculty, staff, community members, administrators, legislators, parents—who share a positive vision for what higher education could be, even under the shadow of a Trump administration. I hope you find an idea here that inspires you, powers your own vision for a better future on your campus, in your town or city, in your state, and reminds you that, even in dark times, a better world is still possible. 