Todd Wolfson is the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). He is a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. He has held leadership roles in Rutgers AAUP-AFT and served as its president and vice president. Wolfson is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University.
It’s been a rough first year for you and the AAUP. What’s the broader context of the recent and significant attacks on higher education from the Trump administration?
Higher education used to be one of the most respected and trusted sectors in U.S. society, post-World War II. In the ‘60s, public universities were heavily subsidized, allowing access to a broad range of students. And, of course, the ‘60s were a time of serious resistance, including the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the Berkeley Free Speech movement. The powers that be saw that as a threat to a class-stratified society. So, they started talking publicly about defunding higher education.
The federal divestment led to an increase in part-time contract instructors, massive student debt, skyrocketing tuition, and a massive bureaucratic class that stripped shared governance and undermined academic freedom and tenure. In many ways, this hollowed out higher education. Fast forward to 2020- 2022, we see authoritarians putting higher education under the microscope to push culture wars — it became one of their key targets.
It’s important to note that the defunding set up the current authoritarian attack, so they are intertwined.
Tell us the most important challenges you are currently facing.
Sure, this is obviously the greatest assault on higher education in the history of this country. It far outpaces what happened under McCarthyism. The McCarthy era really targeted individual faculty for their ties to communism. What the Trump administration is doing is attacking the sector and institutions writ large to undermine their autonomy. That never happened under McCarthyism.
The Trump administration wants to control our institutions ideologically. Columbia’s settlement, Brown and Penn’s settlements — they all show that they weren’t entirely about claims to end antisemitism on campus related to campus protests (and I’m Jewish and I don’t see it, and they haven’t proved it). But more importantly, it’s an attempt to control ideologically how those institutions research and train young people. That’s a threat to the future of our democracy.
There are two other attacks to mark. First, the attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which is also an attack on the history of racism and slavery in this country. They want to act as if that didn’t happen. Let me give you an example of a research project that gets cancelled under DEI: Researchers who want to understand why the U.S. has high infant mortality rates in urban America are coded as DEI researchers and that money is stripped. To me, that’s crazy town.
Finally, the defunding of our biomedical infrastructure is like biting your nose off to spite your face. We are all going to get sick and need a doctor, and we’re going to want that doctor to have the best research on how to fight cancer, Alzheimer’s or diabetes. And now they won’t.
The AAUP has court cases against the federal government about deportation orders, attacks on DEI, and cuts to biomedical research. But you’ve said that the key to any pushback is organizing.
Yes, our position is that the courts aren’t going to save us from the Trump regime, but it is a tool to slow them down while we organize and build up power. Our power is in our members. There’s been a recognition that there wasn’t enough of a unified force defending higher education before the Trump elections. So several of us came together and established Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), which includes about 100 local higher education unions. This was important because we don’t have a single sectoral union that represents all faculty. We are spread across a dozen parent unions.
As we built HELU, we also wanted to start to move the unions into an alliance that supports locals. All the national union presidents have signed on to a vision of the future of the sector, which includes free education, an end to precarious contract labour, and an end to student debt. But it only works if it’s organized at the base. Our members must stand up; they are the ones who are going to have to fight Trump.
For too long, we’ve been broken up by our job categories: tenure track faculty in one union, contingent faculty over here in a different union, graduate workers over there, professional staff, hospitality, etc. What that has done is aided and abetted the boss. They split us in our contract campaigns and pit us against each other. We think it’s time to build a union movement that sees us all together as one while simultaneously acknowledging that we’re differently situated.
In doing that, you have to face the largest contradictions in higher ed. For example, when I was president of the Rutgers faculty union, the largest contradiction we faced was the employer’s reliance on cheap teaching labour — short-term contracts, contingency. So we had to take on that addiction. In our last contract, all 10,000 academic workers went on strike, with the main issue being job conditions for the most contingent. It wasn’t easy, but we ended up winning major concessions around pay for grad students, adjuncts and full-time non-tenure.
If we are going to transform the university and build a collective model, we must go after those contradictions. We’re not going to be able to snap our fingers and have one big union. It’s more of an ethic we want to move towards.
Do you have any advice to offer Canadian unionists?
I think one of our biggest mistakes was allowing our enemies on the far right to frame the debates. The only people talking about higher education for five to seven years were the right. That really seeped into the American consciousness. I would guess that you are not there yet in Canada, but I would get out in front with a campaign that revalorizes higher education as critical to Canada.
