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When the right-wing Heritage Foundation released its Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise—better known as Project 2025—in 2023, its authors laid out a comprehensive framework for undercutting democratic governance. Moreover, its authors made no secret of their antipathy to both public education and trade unions, putting the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act in their crosshairs. They also made it clear that they support the elimination of the Department of Labor Women’s Bureau which works to ensure workplace safety and increase opportunities for female job advancement. 

And then there’s education, pre-K through college. The Heritage authors put forward an agenda that includes broadscale book bans and curricular limitations on classes in African American, Latinx, LGBTQ+, Feminist, Ethnic, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. In addition, they support the cancellation of the federal student loan program; the revocation of Title IX policies meant to protect students from sex-based harassment, discrimination and violence; and an end to faculty tenure.

But resistance to these potentially devastating incursions on human and civil rights is growing, and unions, including the 110-year-old American Association of University Professors (AAUP), are strategizing, organizing and fighting back in the streets and in courtrooms and statehouses across the country. 

Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader spoke to Mia McIver, executive director of the AAUP, and Rotua Lumbantobing, the group’s vice president, early in the second month of the Trump-Vance administration. Among the topics covered: Building union power in repressive periods and building support for public education as a common good.

Eleanor J. Bader: The AAUP is organizing a one-day action on April 17. What’s planned?

Mia McIver: This action will build on several previous Days of Action. On Feb. 19, the AAUP was a lead organizer of a Labor for Higher Education event that brought 10,000 people to protests on college campuses and sites of power across the country. We’re working with the Federal Unionists Network to protect all public sector workers and participated with them on a protest that took place on Feb. 25. Multiple labor leaders united to demand that the government protect our health, protect our research and protect our jobs. The April 17 Day of Action is the next phase and we’re working with AAUP chapters in all 50 states to organize large, local actions. 

We have faith in higher education and know that a university education can transform individual lives. We also know that a university can transform communities and can serve as a community anchor. The attacks coming from DOGE and the administration are putting lives at risk. When research is canceled it has real implications for human life. 

Likewise, changes in how public education is offered. Right now, 48 percent of the higher education workforce is female, up from 27 percent in 1987. Unfortunately, these faculty members are heavily represented in contingent positions, without job protections or benefits. The undermining of tenure has increased faculty precarity and helped adjunct and full-time instructors see their own economic and social vulnerability.  

We will highlight the ways these issues intersect on April 17 and will oppose all cutbacks and rollbacks.

Bader: How are you building for it?

Rotua Lumbantobing: We’re starting by building a stronger, more militant, AAUP. Todd Wolfson, Danielle Aubert and I were elected to lead the AAUP in June 2024, and our mission is to transform the organization into a fighting force. We’re currently in a period of political crisis and we’ve been holding frequent, regular meetings for members and chapter leaders. We see that our members are agitated. They’re angry and ready to act.

Historically, AAUP has functioned more as a professional organization than a union. In the current period, we’re working to recruit new members so that we can win better job security and higher wages for everyone. 

In the past, campus administrations successfully weakened our ability to mobilize by using divide-and-conquer tactics: Part-time versus full-time professors; tenured versus untenured; STEM versus the liberal arts. But no more. Colleges tend to be organized hierarchically. We recognize that to build solidarity we need to talk to each other and understand each others’ struggles. We’re organizing training classes with a focus on building cross-campus solidarity. 

Our training partner is Skills to Win which is based at the Berkeley Labor Center and our Organize Every Campus initiative involves training the rank-and-file to build strong campus chapters. We believe that to move forward we need to be ready to answer the attacks on us—whether book bans, the elimination of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, the assault on tenure or management refusal to negotiate a contract—with increased militancy. We’re using the crisis provoked by DOGE, the administration and the right wing to build power for labor. 

McIver: The Organize Every Campus campaign is training our members in concrete skills: How to have one-on-one pro-union conversations with people on their campuses; how to identify and recruit emerging leaders; how to zero in on issues that are deeply felt and unifying for faculty and staff. We’re also going beyond this and are partnering with the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, a joint project of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and Democratic Socialists of America, to support widespread organizing for dignity, respect and workplace safety. 

We want our members to act like labor leaders, and whether they are part of collective bargaining units or not, to understand the need to coalesce and see the link between issues like book bans. DEI elimination, universal school vouchers and the attacks on higher education and safety net programs.

Bader: What other organizing tactics is the AAUP using to build power and maximize resistance?

McIver: There are many. We joined Democracy Forward in filing a lawsuit against Trump’s Executive Order curtailing DEI programs and won a temporary restraining order that stays the measure. We’re also working on other legal challenges to the executive overreach we’ve seen since Jan. 20. Although we know that lawyers can’t save us, we’re fighting on all cylinders, including litigation.

Bader: The right continually refers to higher education as elitist and Project 2025 recommends ending the college degree requirement for many federal jobs. How is the AAUP refuting this stereotype and defending the value of college completion? 

Lumbantobing: The vast majority of Americans who attend college attend public programs, not elite institutions. But the right never acknowledges this since it does not fit into the narrative they’re promoting. 

The challenge is to change the narrative. 

Academics do not work in an ivory tower and we do not indoctrinate our students. Instead, higher education prepares people to think for themselves. We need to do a better job of engaging the public so that they know what we do and why it matters.

McIver: The AAUP leadership and membership have come out strongly against Chris Rufo, the man who came up with the fictitious bogeyman of Critical Race Theory; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis whose state leads the nation in book bans; as well as Trump-Vance-Musk and Project 2025. The right knows that universities are pillars of civil society which is why they want to control them. What they’re doing is censorship and the AAUP is standing up for free inquiry and free speech. 

We want people to know what we do as educators and researchers. This means rebuilding the public’s faith in higher education and confidence that a degree has meaning and value. The idea of education as a “common good” has been chipped at for years. We believe that higher education needs to be accessible and affordable so that it can fulfill this mission and function as the public good it was meant to be.

Bader: Are K-12 and higher education unions working together on this and other issues?

McIver: Yes. higher education has a lot to learn from K-12 unions regarding best practices for protecting tenure. On the other hand, K-12 unions have a lot to learn from higher education about defending academic freedom. 

Lumbantobing: We have to learn from history. We know that the Red and Lavender Scares of the 1940s and 1950s cost the jobs of many teachers suspected of being communists, socialists or queers. 

Today’s challenges are similar and different. Our current enemies are Chris Rufo, Ron DeSantis, Texas governor Greg Abbott, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, the GOP and right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation. They are well-organized and deep-pocketed. 

We have to keep this in focus. Alliances between different groups can be difficult and messy but we need to align with other unions, community-based organizations and faith-based groups if we want to build power and fight back effectively. 

I like the word alliances. Alliances give us a way to pool our resources even if we don’t have much. Alliances allow us to disagree with one another without forgetting who we’re fighting and why.  

Bader: Are student-faculty alliances being developed?   

Lumbantobing: Absolutely. I often take a few minutes of class time to inform my students about things that are going on on campus and in the world. I teach at Western Connecticut State University, and our governor has proposed budget cuts across the university system. If he succeeds, it will devastate students and damage the state’s long-term future. I told my students about the governor’s proposal and gave them the dates when public testimony could be offered. 

In addition, AAUP chapter leaders in many places have gone to student government meetings on their campuses to keep everyone informed. The union always encourages faculty to share information with students. 

Graduate students, in particular, have responded to cutbacks and job insecurity by forming grad union chapters on dozens of campuses; similarly, there are now efforts to organize undergraduate workers in several places. 

Our interests as workers overlap.

Look, this is going to be a long fight. We need everyone on board. This is why we’re developing a multi-pronged approach and building alliances with students, other unions and the public. This is the only way to stop the anti-worker and anti-union policies that are being promoted by Trump and his administration.

[Eleanor J. Bader is a freelance journalist from Brooklyn, N.Y., who writes for Truthout, Lilith, the LA Review of Books, RainTaxi, The Indypendent, New Pages, and The Progressive. She tweets at @eleanorjbader1 .]