Amid Right-Wing Attacks on Education, the American Association of University Professors Organizes for Academic Freedom

By Mia McIver, Rotue Lumbantobing , Eleanor J. Bader 

March 22, 2025

Source: Ms. Magazine

Mia McIver of UCLA speaks to the press during a press conference “Unions Defend Free Speech on Campus” on Capitol Hill on May 23, 2024 in Washington, DC.,Photo by Michael A. McCoy // MS. Magazine

When the right-wing Heritage Foundation released its Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise—better known as Project 2025—in 2023, its authors laid out a comprehensive framework for undercutting democratic governance. Moreover, its authors made no secret of their antipathy to both public education and trade unions, putting the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act in their crosshairs. They also made it clear that they support the elimination of the Department of Labor Women’s Bureau which works to ensure workplace safety and increase opportunities for female job advancement. 

And then there’s education, pre-K through college. The Heritage authors put forward an agenda that includes broadscale book bans and curricular limitations on classes in African American, Latinx, LGBTQ+, Feminist, Ethnic, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. In addition, they support the cancellation of the federal student loan program; the revocation of Title IX policies meant to protect students from sex-based harassment, discrimination and violence; and an end to faculty tenure.

But resistance to these potentially devastating incursions on human and civil rights is growing, and unions, including the 110-year-old American Association of University Professors (AAUP), are strategizing, organizing and fighting back in the streets and in courtrooms and statehouses across the country. 

Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader spoke to Mia McIver, executive director of the AAUP, and Rotua Lumbantobing, the group’s vice president, early in the second month of the Trump-Vance administration. Among the topics covered: Building union power in repressive periods and building support for public education as a common good.

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Eleanor J. Bader: The AAUP is organizing a one-day action on April 17. What’s planned?

Mia McIver: This action will build on several previous Days of Action. On Feb. 19, the AAUP was a lead organizer of a Labor for Higher Education event that brought 10,000 people to protests on college campuses and sites of power across the country. We’re working with the Federal Unionists Network to protect all public sector workers and participated with them on a protest that took place on Feb. 25. Multiple labor leaders united to demand that the government protect our health, protect our research and protect our jobs. The April 17 Day of Action is the next phase and we’re working with AAUP chapters in all 50 states to organize large, local actions. 

We have faith in higher education and know that a university education can transform individual lives. We also know that a university can transform communities and can serve as a community anchor. The attacks coming from DOGE and the administration are putting lives at risk. When research is canceled it has real implications for human life. 

Likewise, changes in how public education is offered. Right now, 48 percent of the higher education workforce is female, up from 27 percent in 1987. Unfortunately, these faculty members are heavily represented in contingent positions, without job protections or benefits. The undermining of tenure has increased faculty precarity and helped adjunct and full-time instructors see their own economic and social vulnerability.  

We will highlight the ways these issues intersect on April 17 and will oppose all cutbacks and rollbacks.

Bader: How are you building for it?

Rotua Lumbantobing: We’re starting by building a stronger, more militant, AAUP. Todd Wolfson, Danielle Aubert and I were elected to lead the AAUP in June 2024, and our mission is to transform the organization into a fighting force. We’re currently in a period of political crisis and we’ve been holding frequent, regular meetings for members and chapter leaders. We see that our members are agitated. They’re angry and ready to act.

Historically, AAUP has functioned more as a professional organization than a union. In the current period, we’re working to recruit new members so that we can win better job security and higher wages for everyone. 

In the past, campus administrations successfully weakened our ability to mobilize by using divide-and-conquer tactics: Part-time versus full-time professors; tenured versus untenured; STEM versus the liberal arts. But no more. Colleges tend to be organized hierarchically. We recognize that to build solidarity we need to talk to each other and understand each others’ struggles. We’re organizing training classes with a focus on building cross-campus solidarity. 

Our training partner is Skills to Win which is based at the Berkeley Labor Center and our Organize Every Campus initiative involves training the rank-and-file to build strong campus chapters. We believe that to move forward we need to be ready to answer the attacks on us—whether book bans, the elimination of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, the assault on tenure or management refusal to negotiate a contract—with increased militancy. We’re using the crisis provoked by DOGE, the administration and the right wing to build power for labor. 

McIver: The Organize Every Campus campaign is training our members in concrete skills: How to have one-on-one pro-union conversations with people on their campuses; how to identify and recruit emerging leaders; how to zero in on issues that are deeply felt and unifying for faculty and staff. We’re also going beyond this and are partnering with the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, a joint project of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and Democratic Socialists of America, to support widespread organizing for dignity, respect and workplace safety. 

We want our members to act like labor leaders, and whether they are part of collective bargaining units or not, to understand the need to coalesce and see the link between issues like book bans. DEI elimination, universal school vouchers and the attacks on higher education and safety net programs.

Bader: What other organizing tactics is the AAUP using to build power and maximize resistance?

McIver: There are many. We joined Democracy Forward in filing a lawsuit against Trump’s Executive Order curtailing DEI programs and won a temporary restraining order that stays the measure. We’re also working on other legal challenges to the executive overreach we’ve seen since Jan. 20. Although we know that lawyers can’t save us, we’re fighting on all cylinders, including litigation.

Bader: The right continually refers to higher education as elitist and Project 2025 recommends ending the college degree requirement for many federal jobs. How is the AAUP refuting this stereotype and defending the value of college completion? 

Lumbantobing: The vast majority of Americans who attend college attend public programs, not elite institutions. But the right never acknowledges this since it does not fit into the narrative they’re promoting. 

The challenge is to change the narrative. 

Academics do not work in an ivory tower and we do not indoctrinate our students. Instead, higher education prepares people to think for themselves. We need to do a better job of engaging the public so that they know what we do and why it matters.

McIver: The AAUP leadership and membership have come out strongly against Chris Rufo, the man who came up with the fictitious bogeyman of Critical Race Theory; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis whose state leads the nation in book bans; as well as Trump-Vance-Musk and Project 2025. The right knows that universities are pillars of civil society which is why they want to control them. What they’re doing is censorship and the AAUP is standing up for free inquiry and free speech. 

We want people to know what we do as educators and researchers. This means rebuilding the public’s faith in higher education and confidence that a degree has meaning and value. The idea of education as a “common good” has been chipped at for years. We believe that higher education needs to be accessible and affordable so that it can fulfill this mission and function as the public good it was meant to be.

Bader: Are K-12 and higher education unions working together on this and other issues?

McIver: Yes. higher education has a lot to learn from K-12 unions regarding best practices for protecting tenure. On the other hand, K-12 unions have a lot to learn from higher education about defending academic freedom. 

Lumbantobing: We have to learn from history. We know that the Red and Lavender Scares of the 1940s and 1950s cost the jobs of many teachers suspected of being communists, socialists or queers. 

Today’s challenges are similar and different. Our current enemies are Chris Rufo, Ron DeSantis, Texas governor Greg Abbott, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, the GOP and right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation. They are well-organized and deep-pocketed. 

We have to keep this in focus. Alliances between different groups can be difficult and messy but we need to align with other unions, community-based organizations and faith-based groups if we want to build power and fight back effectively. 

I like the word alliances. Alliances give us a way to pool our resources even if we don’t have much. Alliances allow us to disagree with one another without forgetting who we’re fighting and why.  

Bader: Are student-faculty alliances being developed?   

Lumbantobing: Absolutely. I often take a few minutes of class time to inform my students about things that are going on on campus and in the world. I teach at Western Connecticut State University, and our governor has proposed budget cuts across the university system. If he succeeds, it will devastate students and damage the state’s long-term future. I told my students about the governor’s proposal and gave them the dates when public testimony could be offered. 

In addition, AAUP chapter leaders in many places have gone to student government meetings on their campuses to keep everyone informed. The union always encourages faculty to share information with students. 

Graduate students, in particular, have responded to cutbacks and job insecurity by forming grad union chapters on dozens of campuses; similarly, there are now efforts to organize undergraduate workers in several places. 

Our interests as workers overlap.

Look, this is going to be a long fight. We need everyone on board. This is why we’re developing a multi-pronged approach and building alliances with students, other unions and the public. This is the only way to stop the anti-worker and anti-union policies that are being promoted by Trump and his administration.

 

Elite Media Paved Way for Trump’s Targeting of Columbia 

By Ari Paul

March 22, 2025

Source: FAIR

Explaining Columbia’s capitulation, the Wall Street Journal (3/21/25) reported that “the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign against higher education started with Columbia University, both with the withholding of $400 million in funding to force major management charges (Wall Street Journal, 3/21/25) and the arrest and threatened  deportation of grad student Mahmoud Khalil, one of the student leaders of Columbia’s  movement against the genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). The Columbia administration is reportedly acquiescing to the Trump administration, which would result in a mask ban and oversight of an academic department, to keep the dollars flowing.

Trump’s focus on Columbia is no accident. Despite the fact that its administration largely agrees with Trump on the need to suppress protest against Israel, the university is a symbol of New York City, a hometown that he hates for its liberalism (City and State NY, 11/16/20). And it was a starting point for the national campus movement that began last year against US support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza (Columbia Spectator, 4/18/24; AP, 4/30/24).

And for those crimes, the new administration had to punish it severely. The New York Times editorial board (3/15/25) rightly presented the attack on higher education as part of an attack on the American democratic project: “​​Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality.”

But the response to Columbia’s protests from establishment media—including at the Times—laid the groundwork for this fascistic nightmare. Leading outlets went out of their way to say the protests were so extreme that they went beyond the bounds of free speech. They painted them as antisemitic, despite the many Jews who participated in them, following the long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (In These Times, 7/13/20; FAIR.org, 10/17/23, 11/6/23). Opinion shapers found these viewpoints too out of the mainstream for the public to hear, and wrung their hands over students’ attempts to reform US foreign policy in the Middle East.

‘Incessant valorization of victimhood’

The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/25/24) included Columbia on his list of schools that “have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.”

I previously noted (FAIR.org, 10/11/24) that New York Times columnist John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia instructor, made a name for himself defending the notion of free speech rights for the political right (even the racist right), but now wanted to insulate his students from hearing speech that came from a different political direction.

Trump’s rhetoric today largely echoes in cruder terms that of Times columnist Bret Stephens (6/25/24) last summer, who wrote of anti-genocide protesters:

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack—hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity.

In fact, in the month before Khalil’s arrest, Stephens (2/27/25) called for swift and harsh punishments against anti-genocide protesters at Barnard College, which is part of Columbia:

Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any nonstudents at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.

Stephens has been a big part of the movement against so-called cancel culture. That movement consists of journalists and professors who believe that criticism or rejection of bigoted points of views has a chilling effect on free speech. As various writers, including myself, have noted (Washington Post, 10/28/19; FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 5/20/21), this has often been a cover for simply wanting to censor speech to their left, and Stephens’ alignment with Trump here is evidence of that. The New York Times editorial board, not just Stephens, is part of that anti-progressive cohort (New York Times, 3/18/22; FAIR.org, 3/25/22).

‘Fervor that borders on the oppressive’

The Atlantic (5/5/24) identified Iddo Gefen as “a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Columbia University and the author of Jerusalem Beach,” but not as an IDF veteran who spent three years in the Israeli military’s propaganda department.

The Atlantic’s coverage of the protests was also troubling. The magazine’s Michael Powell, formerly of the New York Times, took issue with the protesters’ rhetoric (5/1/24), charging them with “a fervor that borders on the oppressive” (4/22/24).

The magazine gave space to an Israeli graduate student, Iddo Gefen (5/5/24), who complained that some “Columbia students are embracing extreme rhetoric,” and said a sign with the words “by any means necessary” was “so painful and disturbing” that Gefen “left New York for a few days.” It’s hard to imagine the Atlantic giving such editorial space to a Palestinian student triggered by Zionist anti-Palestinian chants.

The Atlantic was also unforgiving on the general topic of pro-Palestine campus protests. “Campus Protest Encampments are Unethical” (9/16/24) was the headline of an article by Conor Friedersdorf, while Judith Shulevitz (5/8/24) said that campus anti-genocide protest chants are “why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.”

‘Belligerent elite college students’

Paul Berman (Washington Post, 4/26/24) writes that Columbia student protesters “horrify me” because they fail to understand that Israel “killing immense numbers of civilians” and “imposing famine-like conditions” is not as important as “Hamas and its goal,” which is “the eradication of the Israeli state.”

The Washington Post likewise trashed the anti-genocide movement. Guest op-ed columnist Paul Berman (4/26/24) wrote that if he were in charge of Columbia, “I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors” who supported the students. He was particularly displeased with the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a chant demanding one democratic state in historic Palestine. Offering no evidence of ill will by the protesters who use the slogan, he said:

I grant that, when students chant “from the river to the sea,” some people will claim to hear nothing more than a call for human rights for Palestinians. The students, some of them, might even half-deceive themselves on this matter. But it is insulting to have to debate these points, just as it is insulting to have to debate the meaning of the Confederate flag.

The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants.

Regular Post columnist Megan McArdle (4/25/24) said that Columbia protesters would be unlikely to change US support for Israel because “20-year-olds don’t necessarily make the best ambassadors for a cause.” She added:

It’s difficult to imagine anything less likely to appeal to that voter than an unsanctioned tent city full of belligerent elite college students whose chants have at least once bordered on the antisemitic.

‘Death knell for a Jewish state’

While “defenders of the protesters dismiss manifestations of antisemitism…as unfortunate aberrations,” Max Boot (Washington Post, 5/6/24) writes. “But if you read what the protesters have written about their own movement, it’s clear that animus against Israel runs deep”—as though antisemitism and “animus against Israel” were the same thing.

Fellow Post columnist Max Boot (5/6/24) dismissed the statement of anti-genocide Columbia protesters:

The manifesto goes on to endorse “the Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees who have fled Israel since its creation in 1948. Allowing 7 million Palestinians—most of them the descendants of refugees—to move to Israel (with its 7 million Jewish and 2 million Arab residents) would be a death knell for Israel as a Jewish state. The protesters’ slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call not for a two-state solution but for a single Palestinian state—and a mass exodus of Jews.

Boot here gives away the pretense that Israel is a democracy. The idea of “one Palestine” is a democratic ideal whereby all people in historic Palestine—Jew, Muslim, Christian etc.—live with equal rights like in any normal democracy. But the idea of losing an ethnostate to egalitarianism is tantamount to “a mass exodus of Jews.”

Thirty years after the elimination of apartheid in South Africa, the white population is 87% as large as it was under white supremacy. Is there any reason to think that a smaller percentage of Jews would be willing to live in a post-apartheid Israel/Palestine without Jewish supremacy?

The New York Times, Atlantic and Washington Post fanned the flames of the right-wing pearl-clutching at the anti-genocide protests. Their writers may genuinely be aghast at Trump’s aggression toward universities now (Atlantic, 3/19/25, 3/20/25; Washington Post, 3/19/25, 3/21/25), but they might want to reflect on what they did to bring us to this point.