This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 24 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: We have a great guest and interesting discussion today. Todd Wolfson is a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, and for this session, he’s also the president of the American Association of University Professors, and we’re going to talk about some of the work AAUP has done and is doing. So Todd, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
Todd Wolfson: Thanks for having me, Perry. I appreciate you.
Bacon: So we’re going to talk about something that’s controversial even among my liberal friends, for lack of a better way to say that, which is, AAUP on the eve of the Michigan primary decided to endorse Abdul El-Sayed in that primary.
So talk about what made you—because it’s interesting, I think it’s clear that on higher education, the right and Republicans are in a different place than Democrats are, but I’m not sure I totally know where Haley Stevens and El-Sayed differ on higher education. So talk about why you decided to make that endorsement in that primary.
Wolfson: Yeah, I’ll say there’s a history here. I was elected in the summer of ‘24, before the Trump-Harris presidential campaign, and when I was elected, we pivoted really fast to put out a vision for higher ed, like a fully funded public system, more investment in the system. We can go down the line. I can talk about that later if you want.
And we did it, and we signed off with all the big unions that represent higher education workers, so NEA and AFT and SEIU—some faculty, some represent staff, some represent medical workers. And then we started working with the Harris campaign, because they had said they support a lot of our vision, and we were planning to actually endorse all the way back then. We didn’t get it done, ultimately, for a host of reasons.
And so fast-forward into the ‘26 cycle. We were very public that we were planning to endorse. With our membership more publicly than that, I put out plenty of statements saying that we’re—
Bacon: Endorse in primary, just to be clear—endorse in primaries.
Wolfson: Potentially endorse in primaries, and certainly endorse and engage. I can get to El-Sayed and Stevens. And so then, the thing that made the Michigan race important, I’ll say, is—there’s a couple things. One is that Abdul’s father was a president of an AAUP local in Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, which is an AAUP local that represents faculty at EMU. Abdul himself was an AAUP member, and also an AFT member, and we’re affiliated with AFT. And we started having dialogue, and we put out our vision. AAUP and AFT came out with a blueprint for higher ed. Again, I can lay out what the vision was, and we shared it with him, and he fully endorsed it.
And I’ll say there’s another piece to this, which is, another higher education organization who we work closely with, Higher Ed Labor United, had a town hall for the Democratic nominees—and this was well back before McMorrow dropped out. McMorrow and El-Sayed came. Stevens did not come.
Our local at Wayne Academic Union had a questionnaire which they gave out to all three candidates. Stevens neglected to respond to our questionnaire, which asked basic questions like, “Do you support a fully invested public system?” Et cetera, et cetera. And then our AFT Michigan affiliate—they’re not affiliated with us, but we’re in relationship with them—they also did a survey. Most of our unions in Michigan are part of AFT Michigan, and they did a poll, and it said that 80 percent of their membership supported El-Sayed, and they endorsed.
And so then we moved to endorse shortly thereafter, for this multiple set of reasons. One, he was aligned with us in our vision for higher ed. Two, his family comes out of our union. And three, both our membership and the membership at AFT Michigan had overwhelmingly supported him. And, just to keep this rolling, we plan to make multiple endorsements going into the midterms for the general. So there’s two questions to parse out here. One, should we have engaged in a primary? But then two, should we be endorsing writ large?
Bacon: Yeah, and I’m going to ask both of them. The first was the primary. So let me stick with the primary question first, because I think—OK, so I’m going to speak in more political language, and you can see how you want to respond to that.
So what I’ve seen is, my professor friends who I would describe, particularly professors who I would describe as more progressive and more leftist, are for this. The ones who I would describe as more center left are against this. I’d put Abdul more in the progressive camp. Stevens is more in the center left camp.
Is it possible that AAUP is more aligned, or you’re more aligned, with the sort of progressive camp, and that’s partly why you would want to endorse him in this race?
Wolfson: No. If a centrist Democrat came out and said publicly, Look, we want a fully invested public system. We want a public higher ed system that pushes back against overwhelming contingency of faculty workers. We want a public system, and a federal research program that fully funds NIH and NSF and is going to take care of Pell, et cetera, we would absolutely be endorsing them.
I’ll keep this as an I proposition: higher education has been defunded in the United States, the public system, over the last 60 years. It’s been a serious divestment from the federal and state governments, and it’s led to all sorts of outcomes that have been really bad for the United States, for our higher education system, for our students, and for our faculty and staff. And so we feel like we need people who are going to stand up and champion the system. I don’t care who they are, if they’re going to champion higher ed right now.
The Republicans have been hell-bent on destroying what is the greatest higher education system in the world, bar none. And so it’s time for us to stand up and fight for that system. What we said was, we need champions, people who are going to say, This is a critical issue to me, who are running for elected office, and Abdul El-Sayed said that. So no, I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t endorse a more centrist candidate who is speaking our language around higher education.
Bacon: Let me push, and we’ll ask some more questions, which is—
Wolfson: Sure.
Bacon: I would support a centrist Democrat who liked wealth taxes, who loved unions, et cetera, et cetera, who wanted to ban data centers. Those people tend not to exist, because that’s not what centrist Democrats are. And we just had a Democratic president who we had to beg and plead to forgive college debt, who seemed to be leery of defending colleges.
Is part of the issue here that centrist Democrats, like Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnists, love to demean college professors and so on? So is part of being a centrist Democrat right now trashing higher ed, and therefore is that unfortunately where we are right now? Because that’s how I perceive it.
Wolfson: I think that’s what I feel, right? Like, our truck is not with the centrists, it’s them coming after us.
And so what we’ve seen—a great academic called Stuart Hall called it the Great Moving Right Show. And as the Republicans move right on higher ed, the centrist Democrats move right with them, and have made us a problem. We are not a problem, right? They talk about faculty being leftist, and I’m thinking to myself, I represent a dude who’s dreaming about a black hole, another guy who’s training nurses, a woman who is an engineer, and the large majority of my faculty are not thinking politically. They’re building the society we all depend on.
And for Democrats not to embrace that, for Republicans not to embrace that, is ridiculous. But for Democrats not to embrace it, when it’s a central plank of the Democratic Party, education, right—it’s really bewildering to me. And yes, we feel like they are not standing up for us. And so it’s time for us to stand up for ourselves and find candidates who will stand up with us.
Bacon: A central plank of the Democratic Party is education. I think a central plank of the Democratic Party is giving K through 12 schools money. I think a central part of Democratic Party is training people for the workforce. Is training people in journalism, media affairs, sociology, classics, philosophy—giving people an actual education—is that a central plank of today’s Democratic Party?
Wolfson: If it isn’t, it needs to be, and we’re going to fight for it to be. I would say the founder of AAUP is John Dewey, famous philosopher. And John Dewey said that education is the midwife of democracy. And for me that’s key here, right?
We need, especially in a moment of what we could call Democratic backsliding—I don’t know what we want to call the Trump administration, but let’s just say that it’s a shift towards a more authoritarian form of rule—education is an antidote to that, right? It’s a critical antidote, whether it’s funding early learning, as they’re doing in New York City, so that young parents are not going broke putting their kids into daycare and to pre-K, whether it’s having the most robust, amazing K-12 system in the world, or having a fully funded public higher ed system. All of those things, in my mind, are what are going to help us crawl out of this mess, a democratic mess that we’re in.
Bacon: So I think the Democratic Party is wary of college education right now, because of this sort of education divide, where we’re seeing that the correlation is growing. If you have a higher degree, BA, and probably a PhD, you’re more likely to vote Democrat. Growing number of non-college, you vote Republican. And wherever you think, right now there are more people without a college degree than with a college degree, so there’s an electoral environment.
I guess I think education is good, so I’m nervous about this sort of drift toward basically saying we’re the party of the educated, and that’s bad. But how do you think about this sort of education polarization, quote unquote? Should they be nervous about it, and what do you think about it?
Wolfson: What I think is, there’s been this trick that’s been played on the American public over the last, a long time, but let’s just say the last five to six years. Let’s call Ron DeSantis one of the progenitors of it, which is basically that faculty are really left, right? Therefore, higher ed is bad.
But what the real problem is, if you poll, is that higher education is really expensive. Really frigging expensive. And kids are going in and they’re going into debt, their families are going into debt, they can’t afford it, and then they’re coming out the other side—but they’re making a better living when they come out the other side, for sure. Every single study says that. But there’s sticker shock.
And what I think the real problem is, is that we need a public system where kids, working-class kids, can get an education that’s accessible and affordable, and then go on to a career making more money than they would if they did not get that college degree. And we need that to be accessible to the entirety of our populace, right? And that’s the vision we have for a society, and that would be a vision where there wouldn’t be this divide.
This divide is very anti-working class. It’s saying that working-class kids don’t deserve a college education. They should be ready to make widgets the moment they get out of high school. I disagree, and I quibble with that position. That is not the future I think we want. I think we want a future, especially with AI on the march—we want a future where people are educated and can be re-educated and grow and develop over time and find careers, and then maybe new careers. And higher education is critical to that. And a public system that’s free is critical to that. And so that’s the vision we’re calling for.
And they’re saying no. It’s not the sticker shock that’s the problem. It’s that your English professor read Marx once. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the fact that in the 1960s, the University of California system and the New York City CUNY system were free. Free. And working-class kids, Black, Brown kids were all, for the first time, getting either free or highly subsidized public education, and Ronald Reagan and those with him said no to that, and they started charging fees. Ronald Reagan was the governor of California at the time. And then over that arc of time, we’ve seen higher education get so expensive, particularly the privates, but the publics follow suit. And that’s the real problem here.
And what AAUP is saying is, we need a real investment in our higher education system, an investment so that kids can go, they can get a Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of the Arts. They can become an engineer, and they can then go on without being saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and move forward in their life.
Bacon: So you touched on the issue that’s in the conversation, which is that faculty lean left. Or, I think it’s more accurate to say faculty in surveys tend to vote for Democrats over Republicans. I think that’s an accurate thing to say.
Wolfson: That’s what the surveys say, yes.
Bacon: Exactly. That’s what the surveys say. So I guess I would say, to put it—since there’s rarely a Black person who gets to talk about this subject in public. So I would say, I’m part of three groups that vote for Democrats mostly. I’m part of a family of African Americans, so at Thanksgiving there are a few Trump voters. I’ve been to Black churches. There are very few Trump voters there. I’m also a journalist. Very few Trump voters in either of those three groups.
I reject the idea that there is no ideological diversity in those groups. There is plenty of heated debate in those groups, among charter schools or public schools or private schools or other things too. There just isn’t a lot of debate about, should we revote for the party that doesn’t feel like Black people or trans people are human beings. That’s not a great question of debate here.
So I’m not sure what to do with this point about—and also, to me, when I read about, we need to have a program at universities that means hire more Republicans, they’re basically announcing, we’re going to hire fewer Black faculty, because those are related facts. And so I’m not su—but at the same time, I’m not going to reject the—I do think most journalists and most faculty tend to vote for Democrats, but I don’t think that—I think that says something about the Republican Party, not about those people. But I don’t know how you feel about what I just said. Does that seem right?
Wolfson: Look, yeah. If you read Project 2025, there’s a couple interesting things in it. One is that, yeah, of course, if you get a bachelor’s degree, you’re more likely to vote Democrat. So the more education, the more likely you are to see through a very thin veneer of, like, interest in you, which is really self-interest, which I think drives the Republican Party, at least the one that inhabits the White House right now.
Also, if you read Project 2025, they’re like—no, let’s be honest, they don’t say white, but basically the idea is, if you’re white and you get a college degree and you’re a woman, you’re likely to have 1.2 children. But if you’re white and you don’t get a college degree, you have 1.9, right? And so the white replacement stuff is here.
And so the Republicans are attacking higher ed because they don’t think it’s in the interest of their vision of a white—at least this current administration. I’m not going to say every Republican is not a white nationalist. I’m not claiming that. But the Project 2025 was an instantiation of that. And so I think their attack on higher ed is based on that.
But to pull it back, yeah, sure, maybe 70 percent of faculty vote Democrat. But as you saw with our endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed, there was, like, 90 million different people coming out of the woodwork saying what a ridiculous position we were taking, how we had undermined the integrity of the organization, blah, blah, blah. We can go on.
And so there’s a massive, like, ideological diversity within academia. Extreme ideological diversity. But yeah, people are less likely to vote for Republicans. But still—again, does it really matter if you’re voting for a Republican or Democrat if you’re teaching a kid about string theory? I really don’t understand why that matters. Or you’re teaching someone how to be a better nurse, or you’re teaching—I just—yes, sure, there are politics-proper subjects, and certainly those subjects lean to the left.
But also, there’s all these new civic centers that have popped up, one being in West Virginia, where they forced West Virginia University to have a civic, like, Republican-ish constitutional values center. One student, one student was willing to take the courses in that program. You can’t force ideological diversity either, right? It has to emerge in a productive, fertile way.
Bacon: All right, so we talked about primaries. Now the general election. I think the general election objection is different. The objection is that, A, faculty should be objective—AAUP—and also, B, you’re reinforcing this perception, because I assume your endorsements will generally be Democrats, so you’re reinforcing. I’m sure there’s some Republican somewhere who loves higher ed. Please show up.
Wolfson: Please show up, yes.
Bacon: But that said, you’re probably going to endorse Democrats, so you’re reinforcing the perception that professors are Democrats. So I think the good faith critique is, this does—people already know the faculty is for Democrats. Don’t announce it and therefore reinforce this stereotype. How do you respond to that?
Wolfson: I respond quite simply. The last couple years under Trump, but then the last fifty or sixty years, we were silent about our politics, right? And it didn’t go all that well for us.
Bacon: We being the professorate as a group, you mean, not individual professors.
Wolfson: Yeah. Yes, that’s—not individuals, but AAUP.
But let me also say this, that AFT or SEIU or any other number of unions that represent professors endorse in their name all the time.
So that’s one thing that just needs to be flagged. But just with respect to us, AAUP, we did not endorse, and it has not gone all that well for us, right? And sure, I could sit on the sideline when Vance says that professors are the enemy, and I could sit on the sideline when Trump or Russell Vought are deciding that they’re not going to allow us to get our grants for cancer research and Alzheimer’s research. I can sit on the sidelines when they’re snatching up my students because of editorials they don’t like that are being written. But it’s not working out for us.
And so to me, it’s time to try something new, which is, we are a union, we have 60,000 members, I am accountable to my members, and I want to engage politics proper to fight to build the vision for a higher education system that I think would be a foundation to a democracy. And so that’s what we’re going to do. And if we learn in ten to twenty years that things accelerated and got so much worse, then fine, well, made a mistake. We’ll have to analyze it. But I could tell you that the last fifty years tell me that sitting on the sidelines hasn’t really worked all that well for us.
Bacon: You all made your endorsement around the time when the people in my field—another field that sort of struggles with this, the right is saying we’re biased. We were having a dinner with Donald Trump on a Friday night, honoring him as a defender of journalism or something.
And so to me it was like, OK, journalism has been—the Republicans are undermining journalism. We’re still pretending as if they’re objective to it. I actually thought what you did made a lot of sense. Like, the academics are recognizing the threat to them and thinking about how to behave differently. The last fifty years have not gone well. Let’s not have another fifty years like this.
Wolfson: To me, it’s almost alien to—I can understand the argument that’s being made. But it’s almost, somebody is actually attacking you, your livelihood, your sector, and you’re not supposed to stand up and say, “No, enough. What we do is valuable. Universities and colleges are valuable. We’re going to fight so that they’re central to a democracy.” It’s alien to me.
And so it’s really hard for me to think through how that position holds water in the face of Donald Trump, Russell Vought, Chris Rufo, JD Vance, and their attack on our higher education system.
Bacon: Now, I don’t have a good sense of the story you’re experiencing. I live in Kentucky, so I see the red state story of—you’ve mentioned DeSantis. Every red state is the same story of, the Republican governors are trying to ban anybody from studying sociology, film studies, anything like that, roll back on tenure.
I went to Yale, and I’m following the various colleges and how the administrators are trying to fight, trying to defund or threaten any college. But you’re at Rutgers, so public college, blue state. So what’s the story been like there for you, and schools like that?
Wolfson: Yeah, I think even safe, relatively safe public blue state universities, when Trump first got into office, when he was, like, running around bull in a china shop and trying to knock over everything in his way, they were even scared, and they were like, Let’s just keep our heads down. Anybody who has DEI on their website, talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or critical race theory, you’re going to scrub that, right? And so—
Bacon: Not get fired, but scrub that from your website. There’s a difference between keeping your job and just, you know—
Wolfson: Yeah, you don’t get fired, but you’re going to scrub it from your website, and we’re going to keep our heads down.
And unfortunately, the thing about our universities and colleges and the leadership of them is that they have been caught in a pretty rough bind. And so I’m not happy with them, but I’m sympathetic to them. And the rough bind is this, right? You’re the president of Columbia University, and Donald Trump says to you, Look, I’m snatching $400 million out of your biomedical research infrastructure, for research you’re doing on diabetes and Alzheimer’s and X, Y, and Z, because there is antisemitism in the university—which I’m not going to substantiate, but I’m going to say it’s there.
And so you’re the president, and you’re forced into a bind, and the bind is this: do I fight for higher education as a whole, right, and protect the institutional autonomy of Columbia University? Or do I fight for the financial wellbeing of Columbia University? And so it was a hard bind they were caught in.
But unfortunately, the majority of the leadership of our universities—not the entirety, but the majority—made the choice to their fiduciary responsibility of their institution over their responsibility to higher education and democracy writ large. And so again, he caught them in a tough bind. He’s a bully. And unfortunately, though, we saw far too many kneel to that dynamic.
Bacon: You said more endorsements are coming. So I’d be curious what you mean by that, because my guess is the Democrat running in Alaska who didn’t want Kamala Harris’s endorsement may not be dying for yours either, candidly. So I’d be curious, is it governors, senators, mayors? Is it swing states?
Wolfson: Yeah, I’ll tell you what we’re looking at, a state where it’s very obvious. I think we’re mostly going to—not entirely, we may engage in state races, but we’ll mostly engage in federal races this time around, as we’re building up our muscles, learning to do this. And so there are really two criteria we’re looking at.
One is swing states where we have a lot of density and could actually maybe potentially impact a race, where the candidate is speaking some of our language. They don’t have to be perfect, but they have to speak some of our language, and they can’t denigrate higher education.
That’s one category, of either Congress or congressional races, senatorial races. And then the other set of races are going to be in probably safe districts, where the people are really coming out and making a free public system central to their vision of a democratic society. And so those would be champions, right?
People who are going to champion higher ed, talk about free public higher education as critical moving forward, an end to contingency, fully funded HBCUs, MSIs, fully funded biomedical research infrastructure. Those are the things we want. An end to student debt. And then the other half will be places where we can actually impact a race and project some power.
Bacon: Do you have two or three you’re considering you can name, or you want to stay away from that right now?
Wolfson: I’m going to stay away from it now, because I don’t want to get in front of my members.
Bacon: Of course. And does it matter if your local endorses, or is it set up that way where the locals—
Wolfson: Absolutely matters. We will not be going and stepping on our locals. We will be working with them and growing through with them. So we have locals. We, AAUP’s a pretty interesting beast, because we have 600 campuses where we have membership. And we have about 100 of them, we have collective bargaining rights. And so 100 campuses, more or less, we have collective bargaining rights, but that makes up 40 some odd thousand faculty members in AAUP.
And then on the other 500 campuses, we don’t have collective bargaining rights. We have what you would call advocacy chapters, where they don’t get to negotiate, which is spread across 500 campuses, and it’s about another 20,000 members. And our locals have been endorsing candidates for office for decades upon decades. But our advocacy chapters haven’t.
Bacon: What percentage of university faculty are in AAUP?
Wolfson: I don’t know. That’s a good question. I would say it’s probably, overall, with the unionization rates in higher ed around 20, 25 percent. And faculty are so hard to enumerate now, because so many are temporary adjunct faculty. It’s a good question, and I should know the answer to that, but I don’t. But 20 to 25 percent of overall higher ed workers are unionized.
Bacon: You’ve been hinting at, and you’ve been saying, “I’m going to talk about our vision.” So what’s your vision for higher ed? You mention HBCUs, you mention free public, but lay out, what does AAUP see as what it wants higher education to look like in the United States?
Wolfson: Yeah. Our vision overall is that a robust democracy demands a robust free public higher education system, right?
Bacon: Does that mean free for everybody? Free for most students? What does that free mean? What do you want?
Wolfson: For me, it should be a universal right. I think we would have to win over a question of means testing with some of our allies who are elected. But to me, I want it to be universal.
Bacon: Like a universal public library.
Wolfson: Yes. And I really want to go back and fix the 1.8 trillion in debt that our students owe. But really, I think for us, there’s this vision of education and higher education as a central, if not the central, pillar to a healthy and robust democracy, where people are learning, where we’re engaging in critical questions, where if you get laid off at 35 as a lawyer, because now people are having Claude write their contracts that you could go back and you could get re-educated and find a way forward, and our universities become a place to support and grow through that very difficult time, which I think is coming. And I think we should really be honest about that.
And so to me, it’s not a laundry list of, we want a free public system, we want the sort of investment through wealth taxes that enable that system. We want fully funded HBCUs and MSIs and HSIs, minority-serving institutions and Hispanic-serving institutions, and also tribal colleges and universities. But we also really want a robust research infrastructure. The great post-World War II deal in the United States that really drove our innovation was a partnership between the federal government and colleges and universities.
And the deal was that we pay the universities and colleges, we have labs, we develop those labs, but the federal government funds critical research. And it’s the reason why—we don’t have a great healthcare system, it’s not good for the majority of us, but what we do have is the greatest healthcare research and innovation, and it comes out of our colleges and universities.
Our pharmaceutical companies would not do the primary research necessary that enables the breakthroughs that come, whether it’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, or any other number of things, Ozempic. They wouldn’t do the primary research necessary, because they don’t see the primary research as a return on investment. And so we need that relationship to grow. A thick, heavily funded research infrastructure, not only for healthcare, but for all untold number of things, and a place that’s a learning society. So that’s the real vision that we have. And I really believe we’re biting off our nose to spite our face when we undermine our great public education system as a public good, whether it’s K-12 or higher education.
And so that’s a vision for the society we have, which I would counter to the vision that Trump is putting out. The vision Trump is putting out, and his administration, is one that says—what did he say, six months ago? “I can’t pay for people’s early childhood learning. But what I can pay for is more bombs.” And that’s not the society I believe in. It’s not even the United States I was born into. And the United States—I was born in the ‘70s, I’m not going to say it was some great place for equity and diversity and for the working class, et cetera.
But what I can say is, it wasn’t cruel like it is today. The cruelty wasn’t this externalized. And so I really think we want to fight for a learning society. We want to make public education free. We want debt-free pathways for people who go to private universities. And we want to build a society, rebuild in the ashes of what this president has done, in a way that’s good for all of us.
Bacon: Todd Wolfson, I’m excited about what you’re doing. Thanks for doing it. Thanks for joining me. Where can people find your thoughts and your work?
Wolfson: Go to aaup.org, please. And if you’re anywhere in higher education, please join us. Whatever campus, we want to build with you. We want to fight for your issues on your campuses, and we want to build with our students, all the students across this country, and staff, and build a system that reflects the greatness of our democracy.
Bacon: Todd, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
Wolfson: Thank you, Perry. I really appreciate it.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
