The Fight for Higher Education

Education as a whole, but especially higher education, is a tool through which many can gain economic mobility. The ability to think critically and question the status quo is key to agency, freedom, and the ability to enact change. To ensure equal access to opportunity, economic mobility, and intellectual freedom, education, and especially higher education, must be widely accessible, democratically run, and free from corporate and political interference. Yet despite the incalculable value that it provides, higher education finds itself under greater threat than ever.

Colleges and universities, public and private, have always been run by bosses, for bosses, whether as exclusive institutions for the landed gentry or as a means of accumulating wealth at the expense of the workers of both the present and future. Higher education has undeniable historical roots in systems of power and oppression, including slavery, land theft, militarism, and exploitation.

The increasingly corporate character of the American university in an age of privatization should therefore come as no surprise. Tuition and state funding are siphoned away from teaching and research to fund real estate transactions, “strategic initiatives,” and the salaries of countless administrators. Tuition and fees have more than doubled in the past 20 years across both public and private institutions, outpacing inflation by 40 percent. Simultaneously, career academics are being squeezed out, as institutions rely more and more on adjunct and contract faculty, in part because they are cheaper to hire and easier to fire. Students are forced to pay more and more for increasingly less valuable education, while instructors and professors have even less workplace protections, graduate student wages stagnate, and administrators and coaches continue to draw million-dollar compensation packages.

By the end of 2024, 42.7 million Americans were drowning in student loan debt. Together, this totals over $1.77 trillion, with the average student owing over $38,000 in federal loans and almost five percent of these borrowers defaulting on their loans. This disproportionately affects low-income students and students of color who have been deceived into attending private for-profit colleges and trade schools, waylaid by the promise of a better future.

The current presidential administration fears the working class having access to the economic mobility and critical thinking that higher education provides, and has not shied away from attacking it. Vice President J.D. Vance has openly called for an aggressive assault against the country's universities, directly labeling professors as the enemy. The Trump administration has withheld billions in federal research funding and informally blacklisted keywords in grant proposals, with the goal of coercing universities into censoring research and curricula in accordance with the right-wing political agenda. Research in lifesaving and critical fields, such as public health and climate change, are urgently under threat. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, which safeguard equitable access to higher education and upward mobility, are being jeopardized. By politicizing research funding, the Trump administration further weakens job protections for academic workers, making it harder for them to organize, collectively bargain, and speak out.

Marginalized communities have been, and will continue to be, disproportionately affected by this effort. This has already been seen in the abduction of numerous international students by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), revocations of student visas and SEVIS status, discriminatory grant terminations for research studies that focus on or involve marginalized groups, and threats to school accreditors who require DEI-related policies or coursework.

Universities are not innocent in this battle, as many have preemptively capitulated to Trump’s bullying, so yet again the burden of fighting the deterioration of freedom lands on the workers. Faculty senates, unions, and student organizations around the nation have called on university administrators to take precautionary measures to protect themselves from Trump’s attacks. The UE Higher Education Conference Board urged university administrations across the country to stand up and take decisive, preemptive action to protect their students by forming a Mutual Academic Defense Compact, an agreement between universities to support each other, materially and financially, in fighting back against Trump. Yet many administrations have refused to respond to the demand, instead requesting patience and understanding as they navigate “financial headwinds.”

The attack on higher education, especially publicly-funded institutions, is a blatant attack on economic mobility for the working class, aimed at villainizing the institution that can and should facilitate accessible education for all. These attacks will dramatically accelerate existing crises in higher education, including crippling student loan debt for higher education, the devaluing of post-secondary degrees, and the lack of jobs for academic workers with advanced degrees. This deterioration is unacceptable, and symbolizes a greater decline in our nation’s valuation of the working class, and what they deserve access to.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Reaffirms our union’s support for the independence of higher education and an end to political interference;
2. Reaffirms support for higher education locals in their struggles to secure better working conditions and a better life for their members;
3. Urges such locals, and all other affiliates of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America to organize new workers across higher education—including organizing at new institutions and organizing other workers at institutions with a UE presence;
4. Demands colleges and universities:
   1. Formally propose and establish a Mutual Academic Defense Compact, such as that demanded by the UE Higher Education Conference Board on April 16th, 2025;
   2. Commit in writing to actionable ways they will protect and defend the rights and protections of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and international and immigrant students and workers;
   3. Protect, preserve, and advance diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, instruction, and research;
   4. Return to democratic decision-making processes that involve input from the students and workers, such as Faculty Senate, Student Senate, and campus union leadership;
5. Demands that the federal government:
   1. Cease its politicized attacks on higher education;
   2. Restore and expand research funding, particularly that which does not have military applications;
   3. End its flagrant attacks on biomedical science and cease its deliberate dissemination of dubious “alternative medicine” over peer-reviewed science;
   4. Immediately cease its harassment of international students and workers and refrain from using a university’s right to admit international students as a political bargaining chip;
   5. Act in accordance with any and all court rulings that have deemed such attacks as unconstitutional, such as, but not limited to, reinstating grants that have been discriminatorily rescinded, releasing international students abducted by ICE, and lifting unnecessary and discriminatory travel bans;
6. Demands that state governments:
   1. Refrain from politicized interference in the functioning of public universities by appointing qualified candidates to positions of governance who commit to defending academic freedom, including but not limited to freedom of speech on campus and freedom of instruction;
   2. Increase state support for the core operations of public universities in the face of a loss of federal support;
   3. Assist colleges and universities in their fight against federal repression;
   4. Protect and defend the rights of marginalized students and workers, regardless of their country of origin, in the face of federal attacks on their constitutional freedoms.