The Point: Universities Are Caving to Trump – Employees Must Fight Back
3/6/2025
This week’s Point is written by Steve Striffler, a professor in Labor Studies.
The fact that universities are under a broad attack from the Trump administration is abundantly clear. And, although the jury is still out, it is becoming impossible to ignore that university administrations are thus far unwilling to put up much of a fight. Most are remaining eerily quiet, no doubt fearful that speaking out will put a target on their institution’s back.
The problem with a strategy of silence is twofold. First, it seems to assume that if we weather the attack for a bit everything will go back to normal. There isn’t, however, any reason to think the assault will slow down in the absence of resistance, in part because universities – science, education, reason, empirically-based knowledge, etc. -- are a real threat to Trump and what he represents. That is precisely why he is coming for us. Just returning to some version of normalcy will be a fight in itself. If the Trump administration continues in the same direction we will reach a point where certain sectors of academia will be sufficiently debilitated that it will be hard to recover. We need to fight back now.
Second, quietly working back channels, or depending on the courts and Congress (seriously?), without also working to reframe the narrative about higher education in the public sphere, is a giant mistake – a narrative that at the very least reminds people all of what universities provide, from life-saving cures and new technologies to jobs and economic growth (not to mention teaching people to think critically!). Thus far, university administrators seem unwilling to engage the public – effectively ceding valuable ground to the right without a fight.
Unfortunately, it is not simply that university administrations are remaining quiet. In concert with reductions in state funding, they have been making us weaker and more vulnerable to the kinds of attacks we’ve seen from enemies of higher education for the past decade or so. Even hiring more adjuncts -- a class of faculty without protections, job security, or decent pay -- has made faculty more vulnerable while creating institutions with less capacity to fight back. If Trump is making university Presidents cower in fear, how can we expect an increasingly precarious faculty to lead the fight?
More than this, after university administrations have demonstrated how little it takes to get them to cave in the face of right-wing pressure campaigns around campus protests, academic freedom, and DEI initiatives, we should hardly be surprised that they are now ill-equipped to mount a defense of scientific research or much of anything else. And worse yet, many Administrators actually support parts of this agenda.
We have, of course, witnessed a version of all this here at UMass Boston, none of which will be rehashed here. Two quick points. First, to expect our Administration to fight for employees and students on this campus is unrealistic. We have to fight for ourselves. Second, although many of the bread-and-butter issues that our union is now struggling for at the bargaining table may seem disconnected from Trump’s attack on higher ed, anything we can do to strengthen the faculty, staff, and students on this campus puts us in a better position to fight back.
This past week the UMB administration proposed raising the per course pay of Associate Lecturers from $5500 to $5600 (a raise that will pay for about 3 weeks of parking on campus!!). It also rejected the vast majority of the union’s other proposals for strengthening the faculty and librarians at UMass Boston. $5600 per course, or $44,800 for teaching a full-time load of 8 classes per year, is disgraceful. It’s not only horrible for the faculty who have to work under those conditions. It is bad for the health of UMass Boston at a time when higher education is on the front lines of an ongoing assault from the Trump Administration. That is why faculty, staff, and students need to stand up and fight back.