This is a lightly edited transcript of the November 18 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic Show, Right Now. I’m joined by the University of Iowa, professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Louise Seamster. Thanks for joining me.
Louise Seamster: Thanks for having me.
Bacon: And so, I want to talk— you write a lot about education, about a lot about policy, a lot about kind of how our society works. You’re a sociologist. So I want to talk about, first of all, we’ve had a lot of focus on what the Trump administration has done to universities and sort of focus on the university as an institution.
We’re trying to defund this part of Harvard or get rid of UVA’s program. That stuff’s all very important, but I think a lot of your work has been about students. And so can you talk about—and there’s a lot of policies that affect students, in terms of how they’re changing financial aid and so on—can you talk about how they’re trying to change the student experience, the paying-for-college experience, and maybe the kind of demographics of who’s in college?
Seamster: Yeah. I mean, all of these things are happening at once. Well, I’ll start by saying it’s hard to even track because a lot of the policies that are launched are floated and then you’re not sure which actually take place, or they’re issued in a declaration and you’re not sure what is mobilized behind it.
But as a whole, we can see that at the same time that there’s a lot of active investigations into universities and, as you said, attempts to kind of bring various universities to heel or under control of the Trump administration and exerting both present-day and future financial control over these universities.
There’s also a lot going on at the same time that you could argue is either trying to unwind Biden administration policies that were attempting to address a student debt crisis and actually make good on promises around debt forgiveness for existing programs or improve them.
That also goes against a lot of the attempts of the past couple decades about making college more affordable. What I also think is important to track is how a lot of the same narratives that people have been using up until recently are kind of getting twisted against them. So where people like me were arguing that student debt had become a crisis, that’s now getting twisted to say things like, oh, well, these schools aren’t worth it, and that people are acquiring all this debt for programs that aren’t worth it, so that we should do things like create caps on student loans that you can take out. Or I’ve seen proposed on the table that you should take those income-derived programs that already displace hope of debt forgiveness for 20 or 25 years, and what was problematic according to the Trump administration—is the debt forgiveness at the end of it.
So already very, very few people are even going to get that debt forgiveness prior to Biden’s temporary waivers and fixes. But this is saying that what was problematic was the fact that people at least had the hope of having loan forgiveness at the end. This is going to make—and it’s already making—a lot of either current or prospective students very concerned, including my own students.
They talk about their concerns with me and their uncertainty, and I don’t know what to tell them anymore about what is going to happen. A student yesterday I was talking to was expressing concern about the changes potentially to the professional degrees qualifications such that it might limit how much debt you can take out for a graduate degree, especially for programs like public health or, I believe, nursing.
So that would have… it’s all of these things together are going to negatively affect the same students who are already the most affected by the student loan crisis, which is students of color and women and people who have been targeted by colleges in a lot of different ways. And we—we should definitely be concerned about that as well.
Bacon: So in the big beautiful bill, there actually are some changes of student aid policy themselves, right? It makes it harder to take out loans and so on.
Seamster: Yes, I believe so. I will say I have not looked too deeply into those, but things like shifting the way Pell Grants work—I believe trying to name, rename Pell Grants, Trump Grants—is one of the plans on deck.
But also making it harder for people to take out loans. And then, and then we’ve also been trying to reckon with a proposal from the Department of Education to privatize or sell off the portfolio of existing student loans. And it seems, given recent announcements, the Department of Education may still be trying to get out of the business of providing federal student loans altogether.
Bacon: There was a discourse in 20 21, 20 24 that was in the Biden years, there were a couple arguments. One is too many people are going to college. And this was at times Democrats say, like what do we think about that as an argument, as a point of a comment?
Seamster: Yeah. So, so many things were going on. To one degree, the narrative about college affordability—there was a discourse that was sending people to college as the American dream and a promise that was not necessarily going to pay out the same way for different people.
And there were some people who said that no matter the cost, this is worth it. There were other people who said you shouldn’t have to do that to make it worth it. And what I think is really important is— I’m thinking of another sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s work on this—talking about the education gospel, which kind of covers up a multitude of other problems with society, where education is being made to try and cover for the fact that we have a poor labor market, that people aren’t sure of what life chances they’re going to have without college. That it becomes kind of the floor that you require, and that people are doing worse and worse without that floor.
So a lot of the gains that people have from graduating from college are only relative to people who don’t have a college degree. It’s only because of the sliding fortunes of people without a college degree. And so I have been interested in the argument…
Bacon: Kind of hints that it’s less that a college degree is a credential and more that not having a college degree— it’s almost a decredential is what she’s kind of getting at.
Seamster: Right, a negative credential basically. And so I have been among those pushing for a robust reinvestment in public higher education such that everybody who wants to go can go and major in the things they want to major in, because I think that promotes a healthy society.
And also we’re going to need teachers and nurses and doctors and engineers, and we need people who are not just chasing that one major that this year they promised is going to get them the career that can repay the investment. So I think that the push of saying too many people are attending college is coming alongside the last few decades’ opening up of universities to a more diverse student body.
And as I and others have found, that has accompanied a major shift in how we think of the provision—especially public higher education—from this collective-good model to an individual-good model that you have to pay for individually, often through loans. And so I don’t think you should have to go to college in order to do well in your career or to have a fulfilling career if you don’t want to go.
But I also think you shouldn’t be pressured to attend as a kind of do-or-die. But I also think that goes alongside, in my ideal world, everybody who wants to go and spend time reading about what’s our society, what are we doing, what do we owe to each other, can do that and spend a few years without this incurring a major cost on their lives.
And so I think sometimes this, well, it’s not for everybody push can be this conservative—like, I mean small-c conservative—type of vision of we want to keep this an elite playground and that only certain people should be allowed to have those conversations.
Bacon: I think part of what I want to make sure I understand for people is, part of it, there’s a disagreement among people who probably voted for Harris on higher education. I think it’s worth starting there because then the Trump fight on some level makes more sense.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about was, like, you were involved in writing some proposals about student debt cancellation. And I guess I remember 2022 and 23, in which lots of liberal—reading, liberal—graduates of Princeton and University of Michigan, whose parents paid for it, being very, very outraged that there was student debt cancellation.
Help me explain why student debt cancellation was worthwhile? Not just for teachers, not just for these certain jobs, but sort of for the broad public. Why was that a useful goal?
Seamster: It feels like a definite moment in time that was so far away, but I do think it’s an important predecessor to getting here because the education gospel framework was very dominant, especially in the early two thousands and mid two thousands, like the 2010s.
And as McMillan pointed out, she was very early in pointing out how predatory components of this industry—and the for-profit colleges—were taking advantage of the weak job market and pressures to improve your credentials after the Great Recession by taking in this onslaught of people who’d been forced out of the job market or otherwise vulnerable, and pointing out that their industry really feeds off of economic uncertainty.
And one thing that McMillan warned that really made me uncomfortable at the time was how higher ed had this identity as, we are not like that, we are all good, like we’re only benevolent, take on any amount of debt and come join us, because it’ll always be good for you. And she was pointing to what at the time were early trends, and I think has really blossomed into a much more developed component of the nonprofit higher-education institutions, which is coming to look more like the allegedly ‘lower ed’ colleges that they were differentiating themselves from.
So the same strategies of who they’re recruiting, of policies, of partnerships—public-private partnerships—going in a much more career-focused direction of saying, oh, we could be doing mini-credentials, we could be targeting people coming back to school and older adults, we should be doing online programs, and that a lot of this is hinging around bringing in more revenue.
So anyway, that’s a bit off of what you were asking for, but I think that there is still a group that has an older model of an older conversation about higher-ed policy that was predicated on a different group of people attending and a different model of higher education, which was more like college is always the key to economic mobility.
And where I and others came in, in the late 2010s, was in looking at the data in terms of what was showing up in terms of outcomes for assuming student loans in particular, and the racial disparities in student loans. So my group, working with Chénier, found that our first piece—we found that Black student debt had tripled in just 12 years at the household level, and that already by then a third of Black households were holding student debt, and that this was going up much faster than white households.
And we saw this as the outcome of what Tressie McMillan Cottom, and others had been pointing to as this—what we called predatory inclusion—that you got access to an institution you’d been denied previously, but on terms that negated the benefit of access.
Bacon: The terms both being the cost was going to be much higher than you expected and much higher than the white students paid a couple of generations ago. And also that the expansion was that you were supposed to foot the bill on your own, and this is the way we were going to solve racial inequality through education—right, on your back basically.
Seamster: Yes. Yeah. And then what other people were finding at the same time was that these racial debt disparities were growing over time. So the Black and white graduates leave school, with Black graduates leaving school with more debt, and then that gap is growing over time.
That was extremely concerning to us in looking at how that claim that you were just laying out then compounds inequality when we add in racial job discrimination and all the other factors that are differences in wealth in your family and your ability to pay down your debt.
And so what we were realizing was that not only was there a student debt crisis, but this was heavily racialized, and that we needed to rethink— we needed to use that data about what had transpired over the last 10 years, like after Obama federalized student loans, for instance—and to rethink, yes, that was Obama, yes, there were good intentions behind this and a lot of people thought this would work, but we needed to look at what the outcomes were from this project that had drastically driven up student loans very quickly.
Bacon: One other thing that happened in the Biden years that’s worth noting is that there’s evidence of growing education polarization, meaning college graduates are voting more Democratic, non-college are voting more Republican.
My sense is this also made the Democrats nervous about defending higher education. That was my impression: they’re worried that by defending the university, you are alienating the students who are not part of the uni—the people who are not part of the university, essentially.
Seamster: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think Democrats in general are afraid of embracing any statement made about them. They’re like, we’re not like that. And so I think that’s a part of this. And I think also then they kind of buy into that stereotype of because they’re college graduates, they must be also, be white, cosmopolitan, wealthy elites, instead of being, like, no, that’s a sign of how to be part of the working class these days often still requires some form of college education.
And it may not look like going to Harvard—it probably doesn’t. It may be that you went into the community college and that you were getting your nursing assistant’s certification. And……
Bacon: So higher education is required for a lot of jobs. And it’s not being a campus for four years at Yale, right?
Seamster: Yes. Right. And very few students are going to Yale, right? Seventy-five percent of students even now go to public universities, and community colleges are always underused in these debates. So that’s another element of how the debate that people were having was—especially about student debt cancellation—premised on this image they had in their head of a college student from maybe the nineties, who was either going to the Ivy League or a flagship, sports-focused institution like my own. But even that…
Bacon: Whose parents are middle class and whose parents probably did pay for a lot and could.
Seamster: Yeah. Who’s not working to pay their way through school, and that does not reflect the reality of the students at the public institutions I have worked at, where the White students are also working class. They’re working up to full time, often, and they are taking class overloads to try and graduate as fast as possible and minimize their debt load.
They’re living governed by this economic pressure because they’ve been told you have to do this to get a job. And then they’re also having to make decisions about their major not based on their interests, but what they think maybe kind of has a chance of getting them a job after this. So that was, I think, a big part of the disconnect in the discussion about what made student debt cancellation allegedly regressive or not.
And what we were looking at—what our analysis showed when we were working on Warren’s student debt cancellation plan—was that the people who would be most benefiting from up to $50,000 of cancellation were people who’d been to community college, people who hadn’t graduated, people with lower wealth, and people of color were more likely to have all of their debt canceled than White folks were. But that it benefited—it was very universally benefiting to a significant proportion of the 40-plus million Americans who held student debt, and think about all their families who basically hold that debt with them, would’ve benefited from this.
And I just—I will just say because I was part of that debate for so long, you put that to 2023… I feel like it was most active in 2020 or so, but 2023 was when the Supreme Court overturned Biden’s debt relief plan.
And by then I heard narry word from all those people who’d been saying student debt was regressive. Instead, the groups that were coming out to say let’s get rid of Biden’s debt relief plan were people who either said this would harm the military’s ability to recruit—which used the pressure of college debt to recruit—[or] it would harm public defenders who were reliant on underpaid lawyers needing student debt relief to continue, or even a group from Wisconsin claiming that this plan had the goal of racial equity and therefore they took issue with it.
So I thought it was really interesting that nobody out of all those groups said this is regressive. They were showing, to me, the true colors of the people pushing for the status quo, which is like: this debt is an instrument of control, and it leads people to live their lives governed by the discipline that student debt creates, and that there are a lot of people who benefit from that.
Bacon: So I wanted to lead up to the Biden part in part because I think now we entered an administration where higher education was under all these discourses and divides, that it was not like a unified Democratic stand—we love, we defend higher education. It was competing views of that.
This administration has come in with a very unified stand, which is that the current colleges are liberal and woke and annoying and full of annoying professors teaching Marxism, and also too many people are going to college, and we are going to sort of destroy all of this.
So how does that feel? Like, you’re at a college—you’re not at one of the colleges that they, as far as I can tell, they’re not doing as… these people are snobs, so they’re very obsessed with seven or eight schools, and Harvard and so on. So what’s happening—how do you feel the sort of anti-education agenda of the Trump administration?
Seamster: I’ve been thinking about this in that there’s contradictions. It is a unified stance in some ways in terms of coming after higher education as a symbol of all the things they hate.
And I think in some ways it is quite simple in that these institutions are the places of production of knowledge that would be able to help people identify and analyze and undermine their statements of what is true, right? And we are the primary places where that could happen.
And when you look at the first things that they’ve been doing—both through actions and through people self-censoring—is censoring our ability to discuss what they are doing.
Bacon: Let me be clear about this. So they are nervous about higher education for— they’re right to be nervous. Higher education is a thing authoritarians attack.
And they’re probably smart to do that on some level, although that makes sense. They do that, right, and you’re challenging their authority in a certain…
Seamster: Yeah. I don’t want to spin…
Bacon: Not defending it, I’m not praising it.
Seamster: But it is a common tactic, as you said, among authoritarian governments.
Because if the whole—if your world relies on the production of propaganda—then having an educated population, specifically, who can analyze and identify propaganda as such, that is going to be a problem. And I also think this, to me, is a plug for the humanities. As an English major, we’ve done so much dismissal of the value of a humanities major, but when you think about what texts you are reading and learning how to critically analyze and how to think about language and not just on this superficial level— I actually want to make a plug for it. It’s not just doctors and teachers that I think I’m standing up for.
But even, being able to read a novel requires… like, what are novels about? They’re often about authoritarian governments and what happens next. And for us to read history. And I spend so much time with my students just talking about history.
The administration has said that what they’re banning is faculty talking about ideology. I spend all of my time in classes just talking about historical facts—things that occurred that they had no idea had happened, or even recent past events that they weren’t tracking—because I just feel like we need to build up a bigger knowledge base for students.
And so, I think that is a major part of the intellectual project of attacking higher education, in terms of generating alternative sources of information. but I think you said that they’re obsessed with those Ivy League places. I think there’s a lot of competing elements that they both want to destroy these places, and they want to.
They know that these places confer status and that they want to control them
Bacon: And they want to destroy them. That’s what they want. To destroy them or just control them. And maybe a little bit of both.
Seamster: I think it’s both. And I think we need to understand that tension when we’re trying to say, is it really this or is it really that? It’s really both. It doesn’t all make sense put together. They are dismantling higher education, the Department of Education, at the same time that they’re weaponizing it to control universities, and it’s not just one or the other. What they do want is to transform these spaces so that they’re unrecognizable.
And I think that is already happening. And similarly to how they want these spaces of education to be more exclusive—with a student body that better represents what it used to and likely to be whiter and male and better off—but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they want the resources of all the knowledge and education to come with it.
I think there’s an element of that scamification of higher education that I was talking about, with the growth towards ‘lower ed,’ that is going to stay. That you don’t want to just eliminate these institutions. You want them to be singing your song. So, they want all of these places to be on board with saying the same statements that reflect and validate what they’ve been claiming about the world and…
Bacon: And a school like yours… I can’t tell what the University of Iowa is, which is a state school, flagship school, good school, but, like, not as expensive and elite as the sort of Dukes. So I guess—just following the news—it seems like the red states, and not just Trump, they want the professors to be nervous about talking, right?
They definitely want you to feel nervous about speaking your truth, right?
Seamster: Right. Yes.
Bacon: And do you, do you feel nervous about it? I mean you’re here, so, I mean, you’re not too nervous, but do you feel nervous?
Seamster: Well, I mean, speaking it… it helps that I, for now, I’m still allowed to speak as myself, as I am doing, and not as a representative of the university.
And this is based on my research. So there’s all the— for now we… there’s kind of some, there’s some red lines that are being crossed in places like Texas, where I’m referring, where the rules are explicitly coming for curriculum, or in places like Florida where classes are having, very, very close-grained oversight about what you can and can’t even say.
Different states are at different places in that timeline, which has been true since I worked at Tennessee in 2016. And then Iowa. So this has been happening for a long time. And so I think a lot of faculty are concerned, and yet they also really know these things are important, and they also know that what is happening in classes is not indoctrination.
And that this is not a good-faith critique—that faculty want classes to feel vibrant and intellectually engaging and have people debating one another and bringing in ideas. And the, I would say, the chilling effect is not just on faculty; it’s definitely on students as well.
One way that I work on myself to feel comfortable walking into a classroom of strangers and talk about these things that are so charged right now is I make them write a lot so I can hear what they’re thinking if they’re not willing to say it in class. And so many of them express concern or just generalized anxiety about talking, but I can tell that they are on board with the ideas and that they’re learning a lot and that they are wanting to know more.
I have so many students write, These should be required courses for everybody to take at the end of every semester. And so I know that it is important, and that there’s… we see so many examples of people anticipating in advance and changing their language. But I also know that it’s because it’s important to talk about that people are coming after this.
And I also feel like the hammer’s coming down everywhere. We wouldn’t have thought before this year that cancer research would be one of the targets.
And so this is not just about us. This is a really collective problem, and it requires solidarity across a lot of different areas. Instead of being like, oh, well, the problem is the people who teach about race like me, or the problem is just this language or environmental justice, and if we just cut that out… I really want to bring attention to the many groups who’ve been pushing back, like my professional organization, American Sociological Association, which worked with the American Federation of Teachers to sue Trump over their Dear Colleague letter back in February that was trying to negate or prevent teaching of language about race and gender and sociology generally—and they won.
So I think that when we see that this is not just about certain words or phrases that are problematic now, but that we see that this is a threat to the whole institution, that opens up new possibilities for solidarity and working together to fight these things, because we’ve seen when unions and affiliated groups are fighting, that they’re winning.
Bacon: Let me close with two questions, or two topics I’m talking about. The first is, I think Pete Buttigieg over the weekend said something—he was interviewed somewhere—something along the lines of, like, Democrats were only talking about identity issues and that turned off people, and that’s why we lost.
And so I guess I have two sort of feelings about the comment I wanted to give you. The one is, like, no, that’s actually not what happened. Did you know that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were leading the Democratic Party? Joe Biden talked about infrastructure every day, and what are you talking about?
The other was sort of, like, to sort of lean into what he’s saying and really probe it is, like, if you mean Black Lives Matter and Me Too and trying to solve the racial wealth gap are identity issues, I guess that’s true. But I don’t think those are frivolous and silly and not worth discussing.
And I think—so how do you, when you read it… I mean, I’m not quoting this right, yeah—but just in general, ‘Democrats are too woke and too into identity issues.’ How do you hear that?
Seamster: Yeah, I think, firstly, to—as a scholar of racial inequality and who’s addressed and written a lot about ideas of racial progress, for instance—is that our linear myth of how progress works is not how society works.
And instead, we often have a backlash. When we see social progress in things like recognizing that Black lives matter as this very, very basic fact, or recognizing that the racial wealth gap exists—not even saying we’re going to fix it…
Bacon: Even if we said we were going to fix it, we didn’t fix it at all.
Seamster: Just mentioning it.
Bacon: Just mentioning, yes.
Seamster: And so we are living through a period of backlash, as we have before, which is the reason why—being of historical facts—I always teach about Redemption as the period following Black Reconstruction, to say, like, look, there are periods where society moves forward and then people work on recreating all of the structures, but even more violently in a different way, with a new form of violence than previously.
And I think you can say we’re living through that now. So it makes sense that a lot of people will look at that and be like, oh, we went too far, because now look what happened. That’s why we need scholars of history to be like, that’s not how that works. I’ve known plenty of people who’ve pointed out that what we’re living through right now is a form of identity politics in terms of grievance politics around what they perceive as, like, the assertion that equality should be possible is offensive to people who have benefited so long from hoarding resources.
And so I think that there is a way to… I was also just teaching about intersectionality this past week and talking about Crenshaw’s point that identity politics, as she was framing them, were not about dividing groups and comparing them. It was about building solidarity across groups and coalition-building specifically. And I would hope that Pete Buttigieg could just realize that, like, you can be part of a very large coalition, and that identity politics is about recognizing the commonalities across different forms of problems and what you do with that together.
And it’s really not about people as individuals and their specific issues, except insofar as they become political when they’re shared together. And it’s a way to demean and devalue a really important movement. It’s also a way to try and put that behind us in the same way that, like, Susan Faludi in her book Backlash was saying that after every advance for women’s rights, people would come back and smooth all that history away and be like, yeah, that never happened—like, that went way too far, and yet it never happened, and now where we are is good.
And I’ve just been thinking about that—how often she identified people being like, oh, has feminism gone too far? And I think we’re living through the exact same thing now, where, like, one step forward is, wow, we were not ready for that.
Bacon: And I’ll close with—you had a Bluesky note, this is on January 19th, 2025. So early on, very early on, but time-stamped and proven as very prescient: “the attack on humanities/social education courses, departments, the removal of books from K–12 libraries, and the rush to AI-ified higher ed all have the same outcome. It’s different ways to neutralize knowledge, whether by erasing it or turning it into bland porridge.”
And I think it’s brilliant that you got AI in there, before AI sort of turned into what it is on some level, but I think you really got there. So what is it—why is it important for someone like Donald Trump to neutralize knowledge?
Seamster: So that then whatever he says is correct, because knowledge is about that multiplicity of ideas, and it is about being able to learn what is happening.
Like, we’re losing our ability as social scientists to even measure what is happening, and that’s not by accident. So our, like, our ability to name, to compare, to use theories to make predictions—like I was doing on January 19th—to be able to look at a system like AI and be like, what is this for? That’s the type of thing that we do as scholars, and which I think… which I really enjoy getting to teach students who may not have thought of themselves as deep thinkers, to start asking questions that they can’t answer and be really excited for them, and know that I’ve now troubled them for the rest of their lives—that they’re going to realize that there are things that we don’t know the answer to and that they might need to figure it out or live with contradictions.
Just the ability to remember what was happening last week is eroding out from under us. And so just being able to anchor ourselves to this infrastructure that we have built—as elitist and problematic as it has been—as the ability to record facts and track what’s happening and, like, stay true to our values, is going to be all the more important. And we know that because they are attacking it. We know that from the empty bookshelves—that those books mattered.
And so, yeah, I think the more that they come for this specific area is the way I know that it matters.
Bacon: They’re attacking higher education for reason.
Seamster: Yes.
Bacon: That’s a great way to end. Professor, thank you so much for joining me. Good to see you.
