One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new monthly podcast series, produced as part of the Global Democracy Commons project, seeks to address the myriad forces seeking to foreclose public universities as spaces of critique and democratic protest across the globe.
The series explores diverse trends such as related to the defunding of higher education; its redefinition as a private not a public good; the increasing authoritarian nature of university management; the use of culture wars and discourses of civility to police classrooms; the waves of layoffs and closures of departments and programs; and the attempts to delimit academic freedom, free speech, and rights of assembly and protest.
We hope our conversations with those who work in higher education around the world will allow us to consider the degree to which the university has become the canary in the coal mine for the fate of democracy.
Episode 2
In the run up to the American election we talked to Todd Wolfson, the new President of AAUP, about how public disinvestment from higher education and the culture wars have transformed colleges in ways that make them less democratic places and imperil democracy across the country.
Listen below or on Apple Podcasts.
Podcast Transcript
Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
James Vernon: Hello, my name is James Vernon, and I am Professor of History and the Director of the Global Democracy Commons at UC Berkeley. Welcome to our new series of podcasts on democracy and the public university.
In these podcasts, we explore around how, around the world, universities are increasingly being targeted as spaces of debate, critique, and democratic protest. We hope our conversations will allow us to understand why universities have become the canary in the coal mine for the fragile state of our democracy in so many countries.
To mark the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement here at UC Berkeley, and the introduction of new restrictions on protests at the University of California and over 100 other campuses across the US, our first podcast explored the relationship of free speech and academic freedom to the fragile history of democracy in America over the past century. You can find that podcast on our website, demos.berkeley.edu, or wherever else you find your podcasts.
Today, I’m thrilled to be in conversation with Todd Wolfson. We ended the last podcast discussing the importance of unionizing for trying to prevent the political and economic conditions that are degrading the place of public universities in democratic life.
Todd has been at the forefront of that endeavor, first, by helping to establish a wall-to-wall union at Rutgers University through AAUP/AFT, and then helping to lead that union during a strike last year that successfully improved pay and conditions for all categories of workers there, but especially the lowest-paid and most vulnerable.
Earlier this year, he was elected as president of the AAUP as part of a new leadership team that is endeavoring to energize the labor organizing capacities of that organization. In his spare time, he’s an anthropologist who does his field work in digital media, a scholar of social movement, and teaches as a professor in the School of Communication and Information Studies at Rutgers, New Brunswick.
Welcome, Todd. Congratulations on the new job. And thank you so much for taking the time today.
Todd Wolfson: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Vernon: So let’s get straight into it. Last week, Hank Reichman and I discussed the new McCarthyism sweeping the land and the ways in which new restrictions on protests at universities are often gloved in the language of institutional neutrality or the language of civility and community.
We also touched on how this political attack on universities — and the broader effort to neutralize them as spaces of civic education and dissent — was related to public disinvestment and the transformation of what some people call “academic capitalism.”
So today, I’m hoping we can dwell on what you think characterize the new political and economic realities of higher education in the US and why you think that demands new forms of organizing by professors and all types of academic workers.
And perhaps, you could also tell us what your vision of the new leadership group for AAUP is and what you think makes that necessary in the conditions we work in at present.
Wolfson: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question. And I think I want to start— it sounds like where you and Hank left off.
So, I mean, our assessment, certainly my assessment, is that there are at least two forms of crisis that are deeply entwined that higher ed faces. And they’re entwined from the beginning, which is important to note.
The first is, as you noted, I don’t know if — 50 to 60 years of federal and state defunding or divestment from public higher education, starting in the 70s and accelerating. I think maybe over the last couple of years, it’s been the first time we’ve seen an actual uptick in state investment in higher ed, but it’s just a tiny bit. And it comes after decades of just pulling more and more resources away from our public institutions, so to speak.
About Rutgers, to make that point: right now, at present, the Rutgers budget is about $5.5 billion. And the state puts in about maybe between $500 and $600 million. So 10% of the budget goes to the state university. That’s it.
And so that’s got a long history. And it’s important to note about that history that it came on the heels of the ’60s. And it came at the same time that people of color were getting broad access to free or highly subsidized public higher education.
And I think the defunding actually started in California under Governor Reagan. And it was specific and focused. This is the anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. And I think Reagan and his team were very obsessed with that and obsessed with Berkeley, and specifically said that they needed to defund the UCs because of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and said things about not having an educated proletariat.
And so defunding— so in that moment, CUNY and the UCs in particular were fully subsidized, and most of the other public universities were highly subsidized. And then we see this massive divestment. But it’s important to note that that divestment that happened was not only — as I have argued in the past, but many have argued — neoliberal or economic in its engine, it was political and racialized divestment. And so I think I want to start there.
We see that divestment take place over the next 50 to 60 years, and we see all of the outcomes we both know and we all— your listeners know, which is mountains of student debt, skyrocketing tuition at public universities, as well as private, certainly. A dependence on short-term contingent contracts, particularly for teaching faculty, which has led to what people have called a justification, which is just really makes it impossible for part-time faculty to do their job because they’re working under conditions that make a lot of their work not paid — the work of writing a recommendation, for instance, et cetera.
But not just debt and contingency, but also, importantly, this new class of bureaucrats running our institutions and consequently mission drift, where our universities no longer know what they stand for.
At Rutgers, and at many schools in California as well, there’s a complete obsession with athletics. And the only part of the university that’s allowed to be completely in the red and it’s unquestionably not a problem is the athletics program. But if one of our campuses goes in the red for a minute, all freezing — all spending is frozen. But if the athletics go in the red, they’re like, OK, well, let’s just shovel another $100 million their way and hope they figure it out in the next decade.
But to come back to this bigger point, that mission drift has been a real problem for higher ed because we have leadership that no longer understand what the institution is for. So these are all the outcomes of divestment that we’ve seen, and we, and particularly, I would say, tenure-stream faculty, have not focused on or really taken on directly and also, the sector writ large.
And so that’s a critical part of the crisis we face. But then you need to overlay it with what we’ve seen over the last three, four, or five years, maybe accelerated by the genocide in Gaza and the encampments on our campuses, which is, we have seen real political repression, what you called new McCarthyism.
But it didn’t start in last year after October 7. It did not start then. It had already been operating for a couple of years before it and being driven by people like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, who had already taken over the New College of Florida and tried to turn it into his own personal place to brainwash students. And it happened—
And then the ideas that emanated out of Florida have been moving into other states like Indiana, where they have put forward legislation where you have to have equal representation on all issues, which makes no sense when you’re talking about teaching a higher ed class.
All right. These are the two problems. And I think they’re entwined. And so that’s the crisis we face. And obviously, it’s led to massive political repression on our campuses. We’re now beginning to get the word on what they are trying to do to faculty, which is there has been at least one firing, if not, multiple firings of tenure-stream faculty for political speech around Palestine over the last year. Students have borne much of the brunt of this. And so we’re in a fight, where they want to control what we teach, what we research, and what our students think and say. And that’s the moment of crisis we’re in. That’s the reality.
Vernon: That’s wonderful. And it leads perfectly to where I wanted to go next because one way of conjoining those two crises — the economic crisis of disinvestment, which, as you say, has a very deep history now, and the political crisis of political repression and the new McCarthyism on our campuses — is by talking about the changing nature of university leadership and what we might think of as the administrative class of universities.
You talk there about the swelling size of administrators on university campuses and the ways in which we are experiencing mission drift, I think, was the term that you used. I wonder whether you could say a little more about that process of what a colleague of mine here has called “administrative bloat.” And what characterizes the sort of newly authoritarian nature of so many — of university leadership on so many campuses?
Wolfson: Yeah, I would love to. And I’ll start where this began, where I became clear on that, which is at Rutgers. So I was president of Rutgers. I came into to my leadership in the summer of 2019. Six months in the pandemic hit. And it hit New Jersey pretty hard. And Rutgers has about 30,000 workers and 70,000 students. And 20 some odd thousand of those 30,000 workers are unionized, and about, say, 8,000 to 10,000 are non-union.
And because we are the biggest union, Rutgers AAUP/AFT, and we represent the tenure stream faculty, as well as the full-time, non-tenure and grad workers and some counselors and librarians, but we’re the biggest.
The administration started coming to me after the pandemic hit and said, we’re going to have to do mass layoffs. And so they started prepping for a massive attack on the workforce. And so Rutgers AAUP/AFT leadership called together all the unions that represented the workers there. And we started talking about how we would want to approach the pandemic.
And we put forward a vision that was a people-centered approach to the pandemic, which we can go into. But basically said, look, we’ll do this thing called “work sharing,” where everyone furloughs, but we’re kept whole through the CARES Act and state unemployment insurance if you commit not to laying anyone off. There’s more to it, but I’ll just gloss it there.
I was one of the lead negotiators in the process of trying to get that deal, which took— we negotiated it over like a calendar year. And the people that sat across the table from me during what was the largest health crisis in the history of the country, arguably— the people who were negotiating with me knew nothing about the university.
It was a bunch of HR bureaucrats and lawyers. And their sole concern in that discussion was not, what is the role of a public institution in the midst of a health crisis? What’s its responsibility to its students, to its employees, to the families and to the great state of New Jersey? That’s not what they were thinking about.
They were thinking about, how do we save our bottom line? How do we assess risk and not get into problems? And so that was the mindset of the folks. So there was not one academic on the other side of the table, not one for the year we negotiated with them over this. We ended up getting a deal. But that’s not the point here.
The point here is, that is — the people who run our institutions today do not come out of the faculty anymore, or rarely do, and have no real connection to research, teaching, and service, and do not see the institution — this as a core role of the institution necessarily.
They see it– Rutgers could have been making widgets for all those folks knew that I was negotiating with. And so this brings me to your question about, what is the higher ed bureaucrat, this elite bureaucratic class that runs our institution? We could connect it directly to what happened last year on our campuses, and then what they’ve done over the summer.
And what I mean by that is, they dragged a bunch of presidents down to DC. And what we saw was a failure of the leadership of our universities to articulate the role and vision of the university in the face of Elise Stefanik and these other right wing ideologues in Congress, because they no longer understand, in large measure, what the University is for. And so we didn’t see the kind of full-throated response that valorizes the university the way we needed down in DC.
And then take it forward through the summer. Fine, they want to figure out how to deal with the possible encampments that are going to spring up in 2024. Did they speak to faculty? Did they speak to students? No, certainly Rutgers didn’t. It didn’t speak to its faculty. It didn’t speak to its faculty union. It didn’t speak to its staff or staff union, didn’t speak to its students.
It spoke to risk assessment consultants. And then, like 30 or 40 universities all spoke to the same risk assessment consultants, and they all got the same package. These risk assessment consultant firms probably made billions off public taxpayer money from California and New Jersey and every other state for the same package of BS, without any consulting of the people who make up the university.
And so we got the same thing in UC and California State universities got, which is time, place, and manner restrictions, which are draconian and completely undermine the core value of the university, which is a place of critical thinking and protest like the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
And so it’s been completely hollowed out. The people who run our institutions do not care about our institutions, do not care about students or the staff and employees that make up our institutions, or the mission.
Vernon: I think that probably helps explain why we hear no efforts by university administrators to advocate for public reinvestment anymore. In part because, as you say, they’re not quite sure what the mission of universities are. But also, because they’ve given up on public reinvestment, and so much of their focus — even at public universities, where as you say, generally, around 10% of the budget now only comes from the state — so much of their effort is orientated towards generating new forms of commercial income and attracting private philanthropy. So there’s an additional pressure, then that they’re shaping their campuses around the imperatives of what’s going to be profit-driven and how not to offend donors.
And I’m wondering whether you see any of that feeding in. There’s a political defensiveness to DC and maybe to state leadership, but is there also this new embrace of institutional neutrality and trying to restrict protest on campus. Do you think it’s related to the commercial priorities now that so many university leaders seem to be mired in?
Wolfson: I think without a doubt. And I think, University of Pennsylvania is probably the prime example where the donors, even before October 7th of 2023, the donors were upset at the University of Pennsylvania because of an event called Palestine Rights that Roger Waters was invited to come to.
And they were already threatening the president, who has since stepped down, that they were going to take back their money. These are the donors who sat on the Board of Governors or the board. I don’t know if it’s a board, the equivalent of the Board of Governors there.
And then post 10/07 of 2023, it just accelerated so far that there were moments in time when the Board of Governors was saying— no, it wasn’t even the Board of Governors, the major donors to the University of Pennsylvania were saying that they wanted to put in place a set of speech codes. Donors. Donors to the University thought it was their right to put and enforce speech codes for the whole campus at the University of Pennsylvania.
So I think we see that– and I mean, that might be a bit of the extreme of what we’re seeing, but I think we’re seeing gradations of that everywhere. And so absolutely, there is a complete warping towards the needs of external forces that are funding our universities that is putting extreme pressure on our universities and colleges. Excuse me.
Vernon: So I’m thinking that if one part of the hope or of the mission of AAUP under your leadership is to re-energize the place of universities in the Democratic life of the nation, we have to start by democratizing our universities and allowing faculty and graduate students and students and everyone who works at a university to have a greater say in how those universities are run and how we conceive of the work that we do.
So I want to— if that’s the case, I want to— I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m sort of interpolating from our conversation. I want to focus on one particular area, which on my activism on this campus has struck me as more and more important. And that is trying to open up the budgets of public universities to public scrutiny. There’s a way, of course, in which public universities, especially theoretically, have budgets that are open to public scrutiny. But all of us who work in them know that they is a great deal of illegibility that is often quite deliberately maintained around questions of finance and budget.
And so whenever questions of resources come up at universities, and we know they come up very frequently, and especially in the endless austerity that we’re experiencing, it’s often the case that universities pick one set of interests against another. We can’t have an appointment here and an appointment there. We can’t reinvest in our library and have a football team. We need to raise our tuition rates because we don’t have state funding.
We can’t divest from Israel because our endowment is reliant upon— or we won’t even make public what our endowment is reliant upon. So I’m wondering whether you have any sort of thoughts about how it is that we can try and democratize the management of university budgets, or make them at least open to a little more scrutiny, not just for those of us who work, but for the taxpayers, for whom we will have to make a case for reinvesting in higher education.
Wolfson: Yeah. I mean, I could try. We’ve played with ideas, but we’ve never brought any of this is at Rutgers. But I think at national, at AAUP, I think we’d be really open to strategies that to work with campuses on different strategies.
And there is, AAUP does, in particular, have some amazing accountants that help organizations, whether they’re collective bargaining chapters of AAUP or AFT or they’re advocacy chapters doing analysis of the university’s budget.
There’s two things I’d flag here. Well, there’s three things I’d flag. First and foremost, we need to understand the budgeting models our universities use, and we need to get much more conversant in them. Rutgers uses a budgeting model called “responsibility-centered management.”
They hide behind it as a neutral budgeting system. But it’s important to note that Rutgers spent three or four years changing how the inputs and outputs of that particular budgeting model until they got the right mix and the right solution for how they had responsibility center management work at Rutgers, which means it was never neutral, and they were always playing with it in order to get the right outcome that they wanted for the university and how they developed it as a budgeting model for the university.
So first and foremost, it’s important to note that these systems they use are tilted towards their needs. But I guess, I’d say with respect to how we democratize it, there’s things that we’ve thought a lot about at Rutgers. One of them is running campaigns like they do sometimes in cities around a people’s budget, where we look at– so Rutgers has a $5.5 billion budget annually. So we do the best to look at what their budget is. And then we propose a counter budget.
And then bring in a public process, where students, staff, faculty, all talk about what their priorities are. And through that, we propose a budget that, in many ways, shows their budget for what it is.
And so I haven’t seen really— I’ve seen these campaigns run really well in urban municipalities. And the fact is that the UC budget, God knows what is it, $30 or $40 billion? I don’t even know. That’s a guess.
The Rutgers budgets, $5.5 billion. I mean, these are bigger than most municipal budgets. There’s no reason why we couldn’t be running campaigns and really working towards challenging them through offering an alternative vision of what the university is. Because we know that a budget is a political document first and foremost.
The one other thing I’d say, which is sort of connected, is that shared governance is critical to higher ed, but in many ways, it’s a myth. There are moments when it works, and those are important. And for universities and colleges that don’t have collective bargaining, it’s very important.
So advocacy chapters and CUCFA, the Council of UC Faculty Associations, I think it’s very important to have shared governance. But it’s also important to recognize that often, it’s toothless. Often. Not always, but often.
And so that then forces us to say, what’s the governance we need to imagine on our campuses? And I think it’s a time for us to start to imagine things like workers’ assemblies at the school level, at the department level, where we break down the barriers between full-time faculty, professional staff, part-time faculty, grad workers, ground staff, and we start to work together to bring up shared needs at the school level or at the building level. And then scale that up to a school-wide or university wide sort of assembly.
It would take a lot of work. I’m not saying this flippantly, it wouldn’t be easy to do. But it would be the kind of structure that would enable us to really, again, shine a light at Rutgers, the governing body is the Board of Governors. It’s the UCOP is the governing body?
Vernon: Yeah.
Wolfson: —of the UCs. So having this sort of thing at the campus level at Berkeley , and then also scaling it up, is a way to really put pressure back on the people who are running our institutions that don’t have a right to run our institutions. I mean, the people on our Board of Governors at Rutgers are people who’ve given money to the football program or to the governor or to what have you. And they don’t know anything about higher ed. So I don’t know. Those are just some thoughts.
Vernon: Yeah, no. That’s really interesting. But it raises the question, of course, of how we go about doing this. Because as we’ve been talking about this process of disinvestment leading to casualization, leading to the intensification of work on universities for all categories of workers, we’re all doing way, way more work for less than— it seems like every year, the workload increases.
So it becomes in that context, extremely difficult, often, to organize. And yet, interestingly, since the financial crisis of 2007-’08, the level of disinvestment and the erosion of tenure and casualization and intensification of work, the degradation of our benefits and our pensions, which we haven’t talked about at all, has helped lead to a massive surge of labor activism on university campuses.
But it’s also, at the same time, created an air of resignation or even just created docility amongst many of us. So I’m wondering, where we get the energy and the time, given the conditions in which we work, to try and reanimate both the democratic structures that currently exist on campuses and certainly those that should exist. How do we do that in the conditions in which we work?
Wolfson: Yeah. I think it’s a great question again, James. I mean, I’ll say this, and I don’t mean this, flippantly, But some of the most oppressed parts of our society, whether— have figured out how to organize under very difficult circumstances that are certainly at least as bad as the current university. And they figured out how to build power and fight back.
So I don’t think the conditions preclude us from doing this, I guess, is the point I want to start at. I think the real problem that we faced in our sector is that higher ed work– that as a workforce, so let’s just think about higher ed as a sector with a workforce.
As a workforce, we’re spread across 15 to 20 parent unions. And each one of those parent unions, national unions, has another workforce that’s much more important to them. So AFT or NEA have K-12, which is a priority. UAW has autoworkers. It’s a priority. CWA has communication workers. It’s a priority. AFSCME has municipal workers. It’s a priority.
And so what that’s created is a complete vacuum of leadership in the sector, and a lack of a shared vision for the future of the sector. And that’s made us very weak. And so I think the reason why we haven’t figured out how to organize— and you’re right, we have seen the greatest wave of militancy in higher ed that we’ve probably ever seen in the history of this country.
And importantly, higher ed is leading a broader labor militancy wave. It’s not a reflection of that wave. It’s a leading a wave, along with a couple other sectors. So it’s a very exciting time in our sector, but we’ve suffered from a lack of leadership.
A lack of leadership, because nobody has said, the future of the sector is ours to fight for. We must figure out how to fight for it. So you asked me like what the agenda of the new leadership of AAUP is in the earlier question. And I’d say that’s our agenda, is AAUP is the only union that is specifically for higher ed workers.
Now, it’s traditionally only been for really tenure-stream faculty, and that’s a problem. And I’m not in any way happy with that. And we need to push on that. But nonetheless, it’s the only union that’s higher ed, specifically.
And so we need to lead and we need to call in all the other workforces. We need to call on the other national unions, and we need to imagine a different vision for higher ed that counters both the 60-year divestment and the vision of the bureaucrats that run our institutions today, on one hand. But more importantly, right now, we need to counter the vision of higher ed being put forth by Ron DeSantis and JD Vance and Elise Stefanik.
And we have to re-articulate in people’s mind why higher education has been the bedrock, or a bedrock of our democracy, has been a critical engine of our economy, has been the major way people have had social mobility in a society, in a country that’s not created that much social mobility, particularly across race.
We have to articulate how it’s been an agent for social progress, for economic and racial progress, and show, through that, why it is central to the future of the country. Because right now, what’s being said about us in the national dialogue is that we’re a bunch of cultural Marxists, and we’re poisoning our children, and we’re lazy and blah blah, who knows what else. And they need to come in and control us. And the adults like Ron DeSantis need to come in and tell us what to do.
So we have to counter that. And I think that is the work necessary. And if we can do that work, both nationally, but then also articulate it at the campus, at the school, at the department level, we can begin to organize a new wave of resistance that, I think, needs to be driven by labor, but what needs to align itself to other forces, like the forces fighting over Palestine right now, faculties for justice in Palestine, students for justice in Palestine, but also student movements, et cetera.
So I think that’s the way forward, honestly. And that’s like abstract granted, but I think we need to start with some abstractions if we’re going to move into material strategy.
Vernon: That sounds great. And sign me up. I mean, there’s two ways that we could go here, and I’m conscious of the time, so I don’t want to take up too much of your time. But the issue that we haven’t talked about there are the divisions amongst those who teach at universities. And perhaps, especially the age-old divisions, the old set of craft mentality of so many university professors, feeling as though, often, that they’re not engaged in academic labor, but they are engaged in a sort of vocational educational mission that they wouldn’t be able to ally with graduate students that they work with, let alone undergraduate students that they teach.
What is it that you think has changed over the last 10, 15 years that has meant that those attitudes — we may be beginning to see those attitudes recede? They’re still deeply entrenched. But it does seem that a new generation of professors are arriving with a different set of attitudes.
Wolfson: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, my assessment is that one of the biggest blocks outside of the fact that we’re not organized on most campuses, and where we are organized, we’re organized into all these different unions. I think one of the other biggest blocks has been tenured faculty.
Tenured faculty are the most privileged part of the sector, save the new bureaucratic class, and have, I think, for the most part, really protected their own. And in many ways, as you said, haven’t really recognized themselves as part of a workforce.
I mean, sometimes, I say it and I regret it usually after, but I’ll say it again nonetheless, which is faculty see themselves as a special unicorn, and we’re not. Tenured faculty, I want to say, and articulate. We’re not.
And I think two things are happening. One is younger faculty are coming in with a very— maybe they’ve gone through a grad student unionization campaign. And they have a very different attitude.
But then a second thing that’s important is that even tenure-stream faculty have begun to feel the pressures of the attack on higher ed in new ways, whether it’s the attacks on shared governance, whether it’s attacks on tenure that we’re seeing, and whether it’s attacks on academic freedom, whether it’s new algorithmic scheduling programs that force them to be on campus four days a week when they only had to be on campus three days a week, the semester prior, or whether— any number of things have forced faculty to realize that they’re no longer outside the workforce.
And so I think those two things have created an opening, where faculty, tenured faculty, recognize and are starting to throw their lot in with the rest of the higher ed workforce. And we have to really figure out ways to encourage and pull that process together.
Because for too long, even on unionized campuses, and we could talk about how bad it is on non-union campuses, but even on unionized campuses, where we’re organized by trade — where tenured faculty have a union, adjunct faculty have a union, grad workers have a separate union, professional staff have a separate union, ground staff have a separate union on and on and on — is that management pits pieces of the workforce against each other. And often, siding most with tenured faculty at the behest of the rest of the workforce.
And so the fact that we’re starting to get hip to that and moving into a different alignment is really immeasurably important for the future of the sector. And also, we need to center the most vulnerable on our campuses, whether they’re adjunct faculty or staff or grad workers or international students or people of color or women, et cetera. And so we really need to figure out how to do that. And I think we’re in a moment where it’s a moment of possibility that hasn’t been there prior.
So there’s a real possibility to— we’re not going to be able to be wall to wall on every campus. In the UCs, you already have an amazing staff union. The AMSCME 3299 union — and you have a great union that represents contingent faculty, UC-AFT.
They’re not going to all of a sudden just meld together. But we can approach our— and you also have UAW, forgive me, representing grad workers and postdocs and researchers. All of those are great unions. They’re not going to just meld together. But what we can do is say, we’re going to take an approach that mirrors wall to wall. So we’re going to work together. We’re going to try to go into contract campaigns together. We’re going to maybe strike at the same time. All of that’s a lot of work across multiple different leadership bodies, but I think it’s the way forward.
Vernon: We began this conversation talking about the way in which the political and economic attack on universities began back in the 1970s. And you highlighted the way in which California was at the forefront of that process with Ronald Reagan.
But there’s a way, it seems to me, as though that — both of those streams have intensified since 2007, 2008. There’s been both endless austerity since that moment, which has accelerated disinvestment and led to renewed efforts to commercialize campuses.
And there’s also been a acceleration of the culture wars that place universities as these sort of abominable spaces that teach students about whatever the bogeyman is at that moment, whether it’s critical race theory, gender neutrality, climate change, or now Palestine.
So what do you think has made– why are things so bad at the moment? What is it that– Am I misthinking that things have intensified both economically and politically? Or is it just more of the same? And if it is different, do you have any sense of why that might be the case?
Wolfson: I don’t think it’s more of the same. I think like higher ed, in particular, is particularly under a serious threat at this moment, that at least— I did my undergrad, but then I was out of the academy for a number of years, but then I started my PhD studies around 2000. So I’ve been in the academy for the last 25 years, again, from my grad studies forward. And I’ve never seen a moment where higher ed was under this sort of attack. And attack is not the right word— in this sort of, facing multiple cascading crises, some of them manufactured.
And so I think it’s pretty fair to say that there’s something important and distinct about this moment. There’s others who have done more thinking about this. So I, in some ways, defer. But in my assessment, in many ways, we’re in an economic system that’s having trouble reproducing itself.
And it’s created all sorts of unbounding to the social system, which is created what Gramsci has said is “a time of monsters.” This is like a moment of serious potential barbarism in front of us. And the university is on the front line of it.
And so I think quite clearly, there is a rising tide of fascism. The rising tide of fascism is also coming out of an economic system that’s not working for all of us. And it’s pretty clear and it’s getting worse and worse for all of us.
And people are no longer bound to the elite power structures that exist. And they are looking for answers. And Ron DeSantis is offering them answers, and so is JD Vance and Donald Trump and others. And so I think that we are in a distinct moment.
And I think within this particular cycle, higher ed has become — and could increasingly become, if we look forward, the boogeyman– the boogeyman. And we could imagine a future nine months, six months from now, where we have a–
Vernon: A month from now.
Wolfson: Right. Where we have a Trump-Vance presidency, and we still have a genocide in Gaza and Lebanon. And we have encampments on our campuses and the federal government’s trying to slash funding to universities that aren’t demanding loyalty oaths from faculty around Israel or around God knows what.
And so I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility moving forward. So that’s why I think it’s really incumbent on us to get ourselves organized to figure out how to fight back. But that aside, I think to your point, that’s how I’m reading this moment, which is that there’s a moment of extreme economic distress, which has opened the door for a form of fascism, which is particularly targeted universities.
Vernon: Yeah. I mean, and it re-emphasizes something that was really important for us thinking about this podcast series, which is precisely exploring the relationship of universities to democracies around the world and the twin crises that both are experiencing.
And so it’s going to lead then to my final question, which is basically— and this is a tricky question and it’s a question I suspect that I know the answer that you’re going to give me. But what do you think holds out the most hope of trying to ensure that universities become both more democratic places and help re-energize American democracy?
We’ve got a choice. Is it a choice between the ballot box and how we vote in November? Or is it a question of organizing on our campuses? Or is it both at the same time?
Wolfson: Yeah. That’s a great question. Look, I mean, I’d say, honestly, that what happens in November matters. I mean, I’m not in love with the Democratic Party, but the Republican Party, at this moment, has said— the nominees for the Republican Party have said quite directly, that professors are the enemy.
And they want to emulate Hungary and take all universities under a nonprofit so they can control us. That’s been said by JD Vance in this election cycle. And so while I’m no fan, and I have many of the same concerns people others might have, I think that what happens in November will impact what we organize for and what terrain we’re on moving forward thereafter. And so I think we need to be clear-eyed about that.
But I don’t think what happens in November is ever going to be the answer or elections will ever be the answer for us. The answer is going to be when things are so hard for us and we’re in such dire straits, that we’re willing— or when we put out an imaginary, that we all can align with — that we’re willing to do the hard work of talking to one another and organizing with one another and moving forward, collectively.
We must change how we approach our sector. We are probably one of the weakest sectors of all of the major sectors in this country, industrial, or public sector — that’s K-12 — they’re all so much better organized than us.
And so if we believe in higher education and academy and scholarship, and if we believe in our own research or our teaching, we got to fight to preserve this. And in my mind, that means organizing. And yes, I think labor is the engine here. I think it has to be the engine to save this sector.
But I think first and foremost, we have to organize on every campus, whether we have a union or not. We need to fundamentally figure out what’s going wrong for our colleagues, whether our colleague is a faculty member or a professional staff or any other number of job titles. And we need to figure out how to redress those problems collectively in the face of repression.
And that needs to happen on every campus, in every department, and then we need to scale it up into a national movement. There needs to be a movement for the future of our sector. And the only ones that are going to do it are the workers in our sector, along with our students.
Vernon: That seems an absolutely splendid place to end. So thank you, Todd, so much for that conversation. I had a lot of fun, and I hope our listeners enjoy it as much as I have.
Wolfson: I had a great time, too. Thank you, James. These are great questions. I really appreciate doing this with you.
Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
