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A Socialist Perspective

By BLANCA LEÓN

Higher education in the United States is facing unprecedented attacks. The offensive of the Trump administration against academic freedom and free speech on campuses is combined with massive austerity measures carried out by both the federal government and state administrations, including those led by the Democratic Party.

The Trump administration has targeted the Department of Education with drastic cuts: more than 1300 workers have been fired so far, and more than 600 have accepted separation packages. In addition, most federal grants supporting research and education are on the line.

The remaining U.S. Department of Education sent letters to 60 colleges and universities it unilaterally declared under investigation for alleged antisemitic harassment against Jewish students on campuses who had protests against the U.S.-sponsored genocide of Palestinians. It is demanding extreme reactionary measures, such as dismissals of students, free access of the military to campus, or closure of departments in order to keep federal funding.

Columbia has been the first university directly targeted with this retaliatory blackmail because of the media prominence of the Free Palestine protests. All its federal grants, amounting to $400 million, have been suspended despite the university’s commitments to the new rules that would erase any shared governance, academic freedom, or university autonomy that is left. In addition, Johns Hopkins had to lay off 2000 employees as a result of the $800 million cuts of USAID programs. More layoffs will surely follow.

This assault is not entirely new. At the peak of the mass student unrest against the Vietnam War, Nixon’s administration debated cutting university funding as a retaliation for the campus protests. Even though the threat was never executed, more than 100 people without tenure were fired for their political activities, and states increased their efforts to criminalize campus protests. Today’s attacks are fiercer and more direct, and express the fear of the U.S. government of a potential mass student unrest that would drag the labor movement in the streets.

The conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is used this time  to criminalize the Palestinian liberation movement and to embolden an onslaught on universities, academic freedom, and civil liberties. The abduction of Columbia student activist Mahmood Khalil was only the tip of the iceberg. The pro-Israel organization Betar U.S. is compiling information on pro-Palestine activists in a so-called “deportation list” that names individuals, both those who are on visas and U.S. nationals, which it has sent to the FBI. In response, more than 1000 Jewish faculty members issued a public letter denouncing the use of “cynical claims of antisemitism to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities,” and accusing the Trump administration of using “Jews as a shield to justify a naked attack on political dissent and university independence.”

The issue of discrimination against Jews has also been weaponized to attack DEI programs, in particular the Liberated Ethnic Studies Curriculum in schools and universities, through disguised far-right Zionist organizations such as Mothers Against College Antisemitism (MACA).

California and Ohio are also gutting their state university systems, and the federal cuts are also affecting other public systems such as in Kansas and Tennessee. In California, Gov. Newsom proposed a 7.95% cut in funding for education when the state was expecting a budget deficit, which has since then been disproved. These cuts, combined with ongoing layoffs and program cuts in several campuses, could mean that the California State University (CSU) system will receive the final blow in the state’s dismantling of one of the largest public university systems in the country, serving 450,000 students. At the Feb. 22 United to Defend Public Education Conference, San Francisco State University activists argued that the governor’s cuts are a choice, not an inevitability, since the state has $27.5 bn in reserves. In the case of the mismanagement of the CSU, like most state higher education systems, there is a collusion between state politicians who defund education to fund prisons and detention centers, and the boards of administrations and trustees who hoard public funds to invest them in the stock market. The CSU, for example, has $7bn of the taxpayers’ money and student tuition invested in the stock market, and $2 bn in cash reserves. In 2024 alone, $94 million was gained in profits from those investments, and this money alone would suffice to reverse most of the ongoing campus layoffs and artificial concocted deficits to justify austerity.

Students and unions are increasingly demanding an outside and independent audit of the finances of the CSU and University of California (UC) systems, to establish full transparency. Equally important is to raise the demand to “open the books!” of  all the finances of the university to students and workers ahead of any cuts so alternative proposals can be made. For example, the growing number of high-paid administrators could be fired, starting with the total compensation of the CSU chancellor and the UC president, who earn $930,000 and $1.3 million respectively; and existing stocks and endowment returns could be either sold or reinvested in the core mission of the universities—teaching and research.

All over the country faculty are beginning to organize against these attacks despite the growing repression. The April 17 National Day of Action organized by the Coalition for Action in Higher Ed has been endorsed by HELU (Higher Education Labor United), the AAUP (the American Association of University Professors), and the FJPN (Faculty for Justice in Palestine Network). The call is for the defense of worker autonomy, the freedom to teach and learn, education as a civil right, and also for an increased wall-to-wall unionization in Higher Ed and the use of the power of the strike to defend workers rights and education.

The SFSU United to Defend Education Conference in February also endorsed the April 17 National Day of Action for Higher Education, to combine the fight against the devastating cuts with the defense of immigrants’ rights and civil liberties. The conference was sponsored by the CFA (California Faculty Association), representing 29,000 faculty, librarians, and counselors from the CSU system and UAW 4311, representing student workers; it was endorsed by student groups and FJP chapters.

In addition, the February conference raised the need to fight for “the full democratic control of our universities and schools by faculty, students and staff in collaboration with the working class communities that surround them.” This means to advance towards a bottom-up democratic model of governance where “it is the elected representatives of faculty, staff and students that choose the Presidents and Deans, and oversee the budget and financial decisions of their institution, on top of being in charge of the curriculum.”

We need independent mass action of students and workers

Many students, staff, and faculty are wondering how to respond to this multifaceted war on universities, and most importantly, how to continue organizing with the increased repression. Some still have hope that the same Democratic Party politicians who are enabling the defunding of universities and public services will provide the way out, while others count on spectacular vanguardist actions aimed at attracting the media’s attention. It is clear, however, that isolated “radical actions” without mass support will only lead to more arrests, expulsions, layoffs, and deportations. No amount of media attention will make those in power change their minds if we do not organize big numbers into collective action.

The movement needs to embrace accessible tactics that enable its own self-defense, where big numbers can feel safe and confident showing their visible support for the cause but are also demoralized or afraid. Only mass actions that unite different sectors with clear targets and messaging will slowly rebuild the confidence to fight back. In order to draw more people into action, it is important to start where people are at, with one-on-one conversations, small meetings, and social events to build relations outside of work and school and to overcome the feeling of atomization and powerlessness that some sectors are experiencing.

It is also true that any lobbying effort to pass favorable legislation remains a dead letter unless workers organize through collective action to get what they need. In 2001, for example, the CFA spent significant resources to achieve a promising piece of legislation, ACR 73, which approved a plan to fund the increase of tenure density to 75 percent, by hiring more tenure-track positions and converting lecturer faculty into tenure lines. This would have drastically increased the quality of education in the CSU, with smaller class sizes, less overworked faculty, and more advising and support for students.

The result? The tenure density of the statewide system went from 47 percent in 2001, to 44% in 2008, to 40% in 2018. This is both because the legislature never fully funded the CSU and because the existing funds were constantly misappropriated by CSU administrators—who instead hired more administrators! All the money and resources used in lobbying amounted to nothing to stop the greedy neoliberal policies and the constant mandate to decrease the cost of education.

Despite that betrayal, the union did not stop its contribution to the Democratic Party or redirect its resources toward real organizing. The first statewide strike of the CFA was only in 2023, and largely a result of a sustained rank-and-file and class-struggle insurgency led by union organizers at SFSU, CSULA, and other campuses. Yet the CFA is not alone in having promoted the failed strategy of relying on those in power for change, instead of empowering students and workers to fight for their needs. In 2024, one of the largest national education unions, the NEA, spent over $39 million on “political activities and lobbying” and another $127 million on “contributions, gifts, and grants,” to elected officials—that is, 38% of its total budget—but only 9% on member representation activities.

If the unions devoted all the money spent in lobbying to organizing rank-and-file workers for strike actions and mass movements to defend education and civil liberties, the odds of workers winning against the new attacks would be tripled or quadrupled. It is urgent that all unions start building strike funds in order to have the material means to sustain long strikes to win their demands.

This is not the first time that working people have had to organize to win and preserve their education rights. We should learn from our past successes. In 2009, there was a powerful public education movement in California in response to the austerity measures imposed by both the state legislature and the UC and CSU administrations, which included massive fee hikes, pay cuts, program cuts, and furloughs. At the time, students and workers in the UC organized mass general assemblies, with growing rallies and broad organizing meetings that culminated in strikes. At the beginning, though, activists had to take small steps: first gathering a group of activists to be transformed into organizers, which they accomplished by making class announcements, tabling, and having one-on-one conversations to involve others.

Organizing and developing a layer of experienced movement cadre, with increasingly consolidated politics, and mobilizing big numbers through rallies and marches are two different aspects of movement-building. They have a dialectical relation with each other. In order to extend the movement, UC activists organized a statewide conference in the fall of 2009 that called for a California Day of Action for public education on March 4, 2010. Dozens of education labor locals endorsed it, and tens of thousands rallied in all cities demanding funding. As a result, and to appease the growing campus unrest, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had to return $300 million back to the UC budget in October 2010. Further mass actions that fall won the reversal of the announced 81% fee hike in 2011.

Similarly, in 2018, teachers in Arizona, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky staged the Red State Revolt, with mass wildcat strike actions. They organized students and teachers, with the active involvement of the community, against pay cuts and cuts to their health-care rights and pensions. They too won significant victories, like that of the West Virginia teachers—who, after a nine-day strike, won a 5 percent pay raise for teachers and all state workers.

Mass action in those cases worked because it was able to rely on existing organizational structures—that is, networks of union organizers with experience and roots in the class—who did the patient and steady work of bottom-up democratic organizing. In order to sustain these struggles, workers need to create long-term structures that can help shape, broaden, and lead mass movements. If workers and students are organized, they can avoid getting caught off guard and unprepared to fight austerity, to support the rights of the Palestinian people, and other social issues.

The Democratic Party has often worked to demobilize mass movements and channel their energy into electoral action. One of the most glaring examples of this is the way the Democrats took the popular anger at the reversal of Roe v. Wade and tried to redirect that anger to the ballot box, by boosting the slogan “today we march, tomorrow we vote.” No amount of lobbying is going to restore the public funding we need to provide quality public education and free social services for  working people. Only sustained and organized mass action will reach that goal.

What is needed today is to impose a complete reversal of the budget priorities that Democrats and Republicans have supported for decades. Corporations and billionaires get tax breaks, while working people’s wages stagnate, and our taxes to go to finance wars, occupations, more private detention facilities and prisons, and the militarization of borders, while education, social services and the little publicly subsidized health care we have left, such as Medicare, get gutted.

To defeat the ongoing massive defunding of public education and services, we need to upend these budget priorities of profit and war. To accomplish that goal, more than lobbying and sporadic rallies are necessary. We need a powerful mass movement to defend public education and democratic rights, which builds deep roots among students, unions, and communities, and puts a credible strike action on the table. When big business politicians see protests whose marchers and leaders work every day to keep the lights on, the store shelves full, the trucks and trains moving, and the army marching, they worry about their ability to retain their class rule.

Let’s build our infrastructures of struggle now!

Past mass mobilizations have proven popular and have helped resist further cuts to higher education and to defend our rights, but the battle against the implementation of Project 2025 has only just started. The central lesson of organizing from all these episodes of struggle and wins is that, as we explained, there is no substitute for the actions of large layers of society. These have never been the result of mere spontaneous action; they had all at their core experienced organizers. Without conscious organization, movements tend to lack tactical and strategic agility and, perhaps most importantly, accountable leaderships that can ensure durable wins.

Therefore, as we struggle to build mass action, we also need to build our infrastructures of struggle, as we have begun to do with the popular and democratic conventions for Palestine in California and Connecticut in the fall of 2024, the first February Defend Public Education Conference, or the regular Student Union general assemblies at SFSU, or the ongoing CAHE national organizing meetings. Their objective is to start creating structures to coordinate student activism for the defense of our democratic rights and education.

In our campuses and schools, we need to organize a much tighter unity of our campus communities against the multifaceted onslaught. This means working to bring together faculty, all sectors of school staff, and the many communities that make up our student bodies, including the most targeted communities—immigrant and undocumented students, pro-Palestinian organizers, disabled students, and the LGBTQ community. We have to move beyond the abstract “safe spaces” and instead build an inclusive political culture that combines respect, active education against oppressive behaviors, and material support to ensure equal participation when needed (translation, childcare, etc.).

The perspective today is to continue building bases of struggle in union locals and on campuses across the state, by multiplying our conversations and organizing meetings. We need tactical flexibility to activate the ranks of unions and students. In unions it can be done through rank-and-file caucuses, department committees, and organizing bodies sponsored by the leadership. For students, it can be done by building student unions, social justice campus groups, or socialist groups. We need to be ready to feel that at times this patient organizing work seems to move at snail’s pace and still be committed to do this work through an insistent and democratic process of unifying struggles on our campuses and across the state.

Equally important is to increase the unionization of all academic employees, from student workers and graduate student teaching assistants to lecturer faculty and tenure-track faculty and researchers. The NLRB still forbids tenure-track faculty in private universities from unionizing. In the last decade, a wave of unionization of TAs and lecturer faculty has improved union density in the higher education sector, as well as the new combativity of some unions, pushed by their ranks. The last 2024 AAUP report on the state of collective bargaining points to a total of 27 percent of U.S. faculty having a union, with an increase of 4.5 percent over the past two years,

This is the long-term work that will make a difference: the democratic self-organization of the workers and students, the obligation of solidarity and unity in struggle, and the permanent process of mobilization that can increase both the number of working people in action, and their organized power to confront the assault.

Equally important is to build revolutionary socialist organizations, such as Workers Voice, that are at the service of these struggles, transmitting the knowledge of generations of organizers who are experienced in fighting and winning against the attacks of the capitalist class. More importantly, socialists provide opportunities for workers and students to get educated on the root causes of these systemic problems and the connections between struggles that appear as separate. Our ultimate goal is to grow, organize, and combine these mass movements to direct them against the capitalist system itself, by concretely building workers’ power and raising the need of a workers’ government.

Undoing the basic tenets of capitalist education

While we fight against the attacks on education, we socialists concur with those who point out that the system of public education was never great. We want to defend the education and democratic rights working people have acquired through struggle, and at the same time, build power to radically transform the education system. Capitalism has always developed systems of education with inherent class, racial, and gender bias. Its initial goals were to only provide education to the children of the white economic elite, while leaving the masses broadly uneducated. The progressive extension of the access of education to working people, and especially to women and Black and Brown communities, has been won under the pressure of intense class struggle, including a Civil War.

The development of public universities and colleges in the U.S. is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before World War II, higher education was mostly private and restricted to a tiny elite. In the 1960s, the ambitious plan to establish public higher education systems was carried out by the states. However, this promise to provide “education for the masses” in the U.S. was not the result of a generous change of heart of the ruling class. It corresponded to the need to train a more skilled workforce for the booming imperialist economy that wanted to be able to dominate the markets with advanced industrial and technological production.

In general, capitalism sees the task of education as part of the global task of social reproduction to produce and train new generations of workers. Education has never been, for the bosses, an end in itself. This means that capitalist states have provided access to education only inasmuch it accomplishes key goals: focus on skill building and training rather than critical thinking, establish permanent ranking and evaluation to socialize children into the norms of competition in the job market, absorb distorted and ideological versions of history that erase all crimes of colonialism and imperialism and all working people’s struggles of resistance, and above all, teach youth to obey the rules or be punished.

In the case of California, for example, the 1960 Master Plan of Education, which created the Community College (CC), CSU, and UC system, was devised to provide tuition-free education. In the 1990s, that promise was broken with the increased privatization of the UC through the increase of student fees, and in the last decade a similar process has begun in the CSUs. Today, for example, for a CA resident the yearly cost for attending UC Berkeley is $16,600 and $7,900 for SFSU.

The Master Plan, however, was not designed to provide the same education for all. Since the beginning it was a tiered and stratified system of class selection, where universal access was only granted for community colleges, which do not deliver degrees and focus on technical training, while only a minority could make it into the UCs. While the privatization measures must be reversed, and any future fee hikes strongly opposed, the struggle cannot be to simply “restore” the initial plan, but to rethink what a true people’s university needs to be.

The capitalist public education system is set up to reproduce a set of relations and to socialize all of us in a certain way, so we “function” better in a capitalist, racist, and sexist society. All students are “naturally” socialized in scenarios of structural scarcity (of good grades, attention, food, books, and other means), in order to foster individualism and “teach” them how to survive through competition and rivalry and take advantage from an early age of institutionalized relations of domination, such as those of gender and race.

Against this model, socialists defend a model of education that is not only fully funded and accessible to all, but that also has a radically different content and method of teaching, where knowledge and pedagogy should be developed to foster in all youth the intellectual and creative capacities and social skills to live in a community. This would be a model of education for liberation.

This means that as we struggle against the cuts, we also need to raise the need to preserve and expand the educational programs and content that teaches students the real history of class struggle and that crosses over all disciplines. We also need to explain how knowledge has been used for profit and to perpetuate exploitation and oppression. Our goal is to use education for the opposite objectives: social and political emancipation. This is why we staunchly defend academic freedom.

Socialist teachers also strive to change the social relations among their colleagues and students in the classroom and organizing spaces. Our organizing and pedagogical relations are also social and  political relations, and we should model an alternative by actively combating oppression, embracing radical equality amongst us, the right and respect of dissent, the need for cooperation and solidarity, as well as the need to respect collective decisions to be successful in our collective endeavors.

Beyond bread-and-butter issues: The combination of struggles

The war on universities is not only an economic attack on education workers, through layoffs, wage cuts, funding cuts, furloughs and deportations, and on students through the closure of schools, the cuts of academic programs, the increase of fee hikes. It is also part of the attack on civil liberties and democratic rights, as it is the right of free speech and assembly in the campuses that are targeted, and also the aspiration of the youth to establish sanctuary schools and universities, where students and teachers can protect their classmates and coworkers under attack by Trump and the far right.

This is why it was important for the April 17 call for action to present a platform that combines these struggles. The SFSU conference adopted a platform supporting the call for sanctuary universities, demanding “no ICE on campus” and  “no collaboration with ICE,” demanding “the protection of students’ rights to learn without intimidation and surveillance from campus police and state or federal law enforcement agencies,” “the development of alternatives to policing,” and “LGBTQ/trans protections and safety.”

It also calls for a staunch defense of labor rights, civil liberties and academic freedom, and anti-racist social justice, and openly opposes the ongoing “attempts to repress and defund DEI, women & gender, Indigenous, Black, Latina/Latino, and other ethnic studies programs.” Finally, it challenges the fallacy of “institutional neutrality,” especially in a time when academic freedom and funded public research are under attack—directly undercutting student learning and our rights as faculty.

We cannot afford to have small movements to defend our democratic rights divided by their issues; we need to set the foundations to eventually be able to unite them all. To build this unity, education unions must embrace the struggle for immigrant rights, affirmative action, and free speech on Palestine and trans rights. Education is not possible in a climate of fear, where campuses and schools are severely policed, where students and workers don’t know whether ICE will come tomorrow to arrest or deport them, or whether they will be harassed or assaulted for using the “wrong” bathroom.

The defense of the right of education today can only be enforced through bottom-up collective organizing. Active and organized solidarity is needed to withstand the widespread fear and assumptions that in the last instance, campus police and administration would be “legally obligated” to collaborate with ICE and DHS to detain and deport community members. Faculty and students are already holding joint “Know Your Rights” workshops and devising plans on what to do to uphold our rights when an ICE officer knocks on the door of a classroom or a dorm. They are also demanding that “DEI” programs be spared from the cuts, and trans and LBTQ protections be instituted or safeguarded.

Ultimately, we must go beyond demands for reforms and raise a program that builds a bridge towards a new revolutionary consciousness—a transitional program for an economy that meets workers’ needs and ensures our liberation. Of course, socialists are not opposed to reforms, but we don’t see them as an end in themselves. Rather, it is necessary to combine reform struggles with the fight for revolution.

In the end, the role of socialists is not only to be the best organizers of daily struggles, but to be able to connect them with the struggle for socialism. This means patiently explaining that the only viable strategy to put an end to the crisis of public education, but also the environmental crisis, is to build our own class power to get the resources we need through socialist measures, measures that put people over profit, and return the control of the economy to the working class.

Photo: San Francisco State students walked out of class and rallied to protest the Israeli incursion into Gaza in October 2023. (Neal Wong / Golden Gate Xpress)