American higher education is in crisis. Changes to student loan financing, a decline in the number of international students, and a weaponized federal research apparatus are creating historic challenges for everyone. Every day, new pitfalls emerge out of Washington and state capitals across the country. Right now, for instance, the Department of Education is finalizing a rule that would limit financial aid for graduate students if the program they are enrolled in does not produce enough graduates who make enough money, threatening a large number of graduate arts programs. At stake are the jobs of thousands of people who are employed by schools across the country. Now we’re beginning to see the toll this is taking.
Layoffs have hit multiple universities. Boston University laid off more than 100 of its staff last spring, the New School laid off nearly 90 faculty and staff, the University of Maryland laid off 84 employees, and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science is looking at laying off 25 percent of its staff (thanks to a plan put together by McKinsey and Company). Most dramatically, Hampshire College announced the closure of its doors this past spring. It will unfortunately not be the last institution to fold.
Where faculty have jobs, they increasingly do not feel free to do their work. In Texas, the A&M and Tech systems have implemented prohibitions on teaching of race, sex, and gender—leading to the cancellation or modification of courses. At the University of Texas at Austin, departments have been merged, likely because of pressure caused by “anti DEI” bills, which also saw the closure of student services offices across the state of Texas. But it’s not just public universities in Republican states that face these pressures. At Harvard, the heads of the Center for Middle East Studies and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights were dismissed from their roles for running programming related to Palestine.
Facing distrust from the public, hostile lawmakers, and corporate decision-making practices, what are the students, staff, and faculty of the ivory tower to do? The solution lies in what graduate students across the country have been doing for the past few years; what workers in the U.S. have done for over a hundred years—organize a union.
Both inside and outside of higher education, there has been talk for years about what ails the system and why it has seemingly become out of touch and distrusted. A core tenet of the oft-repeated arguments is that universities have become bastions of activism, rather than places where scholarship is cultivated. The lone scholar who spends years studying Plato and Aristotle is run off campus and replaced by a purple-haired student with a sticker-laden megaphone; or so we are told. At the same time, universities are critiqued for not being engaged enough with communities, for setting kids up with degrees that will not serve them in the “real world”—the bubble of scholarly pursuit is simultaneously romanticized as a lost bygone era and source of present-day weakness.
The solution to this put forward by higher education leaders is to invest millions in viewpoint diversity or civic engagement centers, like those at Tufts University and the University of North Carolina, with the goal of bringing more conservative voices to campus. At the behest of donors and lawmakers, universities have become a battleground for the culture war.
When you dig in to the polling numbers about why universities are distrusted, it is true that a vast majority of Americans believe colleges and universities are headed in the wrong direction. Within those numbers, about 45 percent of people believe that universities do not do enough to expose students to a wide range of opinions. Meanwhile, 80 percent believe that universities are doing a poor job of keeping tuition costs affordable.
The reality is that universities have come to be operated more as businesses than as not-for-profit entities of higher education, and this has led to their having the trust that businesses are afforded. Presidents of private colleges, in particular, are paid in the millions (at public universities, so are the football coaches). Universities have amassed huge amounts of property, corporate consultants are brought in for all sorts of reasons, and tuition costs continue to skyrocket. This trend is slated to get worse as universities seek to disentangle themselves from public dollars to make them less fickle to changes in political winds.
Despite being operated like businesses, universities encourage their workers to view their pursuit of knowledge and/or labor in support of it as separate from work that would require a union: It is a privilege to be able to do scholarship or work in higher education, and therefore you don’t require a union like a coal miner or an autoworker. It is this separation of profession that encourages isolation from other working people. When graduate students across the country unionized with the United Auto Workers, they showed up on the picket line when autoworkers went on strike in 2023. Dues paid by academic workers support other industries when they are on strike, and vice versa.
I’ve seen this dynamic firsthand as a member of a graduate labor union. When workers of the local grocery store chain went on strike, in 2019, the union coordinated people to join up at the picket line. A few of us joined one rainy morning and were approached by a white guy in an NRA hat, holding a strike sign. He thanked us for being there; regardless of what he may have heard about universities, or what differences may have otherwise existed politically, here was an example of workers coming together in a material struggle.
Unions contribute to community cohesion and trust. In Rust Belt Union Blues, Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol write about how unions in Pennsylvania integrated themselves into every facet of daily life. The union hall was a place where weddings and community functions occurred; the union itself was a source of connection—where people felt united based on their shared identity as workers. As unions dwindled due to deindustrialization, so too did this broader union infrastructure, leaving people to find social identity in other group settings, some of them more reactionary. Higher-ed unions are not going to magically solve community isolation and atomization, but considering the acute need to boost community understanding and trust for this sector, in particular, academic workers can and should be part of the solution.
Organizing a union requires having hard conversations. It requires you to talk to many different people across life and work experience, political allegiances, and other divisions. They may or may not agree with the purpose of a union. Still, this dialogue exposes you to alternative viewpoints in a more visceral way than the proposed “viewpoint diversity” centers will allow. Whether or not everyone agrees from the outset, they will ultimately be a part of your union if you succeed. And to get there, you have to do the necessary work of convincing a majority of the potential beneficiaries of labor organizing that it’s a worthwhile effort—that at the end of the day, they’ll all come out ahead.
There are many tangible material benefits that unionization can provide; it creates leverage on university governance, where faculty, staff, and students may otherwise feel they have none. But unions are not a panacea—in light of broader industry-related shifts, layoffs do happen (Harvard staff who are facing cuts are unionized). It happened to the auto industry, and it can happen to higher ed. Nevertheless, organizing makes any cuts to workers much more costly to do, and it gives workers far more benefits when parting.
For people in higher education, the last year has been spent on edge watching decisions come down the pipeline that have impacted their industry and their livelihoods, with no ability to control what happens. It is a feeling of utter and complete helplessness. Universities and professional organizations have been mostly siloed in this effort, relying on conversations with members of Congress and direct negotiations with the government, or otherwise taking legal action. As the public has been galvanized by issues of war, immigration, and the economy, the destruction of America’s research and academic institutions is not a top priority for people’s attention.
This siloing also occurs on campus. Currently, the American Association of University Professors is trying to organize faculty across different fields of study. For years, it was thought that humanities faculty were the ones primarily under threat, so they currently make up more of the AAUP’s base. Now it is science faculty who are facing the chopping block and are doing so unorganized and unprepared. While humanities faculty may be aware and sympathetic, it ultimately takes members of the scientific community to provide insight on how certain policies put forward by federal agencies may impact them. You cannot be a bystander to the saving of your field; no one else will have these conversations for you.
As nonsensical and counterproductive as these cuts are to the national interest, they are no different from what a factory worker experienced during the signing of the free trade agreements of the 1980s and 1990s. Watching the government take an ax to your industry and countless communities, with little recourse available, is depressing. Organizing can help allay the bad feelings and put those who are under the boot back on the front foot. Universities may not be able to mobilize the public or build effective coalitions as institutions, but members of the university community can—and should.
Through the union, every street becomes the classroom; coalitions are built, picket lines are formed, and people come to understand each other across lines of division. This may seem overly idealistic and hopelessly naïve. There’s no doubt that the battle will be a hard one. All the same, it is a path forward with tangible steps and real benefit—if only because you’ll be fighting the fight together. Form the union today, protect your job tomorrow, build a better community next week.
