BY ANNA MCCARTHY

Academic life has never been more precarious. The Trump administration’s attack on research, on free speech, and on student activism—an attack on the core ideals of the university—builds on decades of economic and political assault on the higher education workforce. Weakening faculty governance has long been the goal of boards of trustees. From the perspective of the board, institutional endowments are first and foremost investment portfolios. The idea that endowment funds are resources accrued for the benefit of the people who are actually involved in research, teaching, and learning is at best a distant second. The managerial destruction of the university is now accelerating with the federal government’s horrifying use of ICE to weaken student protest. The present moment invites comparisons to the reactionary hysteria of the Red Scare years, when sidestepping the constitution and spreading fear seemed an acceptable means for silencing dissent. And just as with the Cold War threat of communism proved to be a specter, today’s broad-strokes charges of antisemitism, leveled against critics of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, are a phantom menace. Indeed, the antisemitism smear has become an efficient, self-piloted vehicle for enabling the Right’s authoritarian takeover of higher education. For top-level administrators, an ever-expanding nomenklatura tasked with implementing the corporate university business plan, Trump’s excesses are a dream come true—they offer a way of disciplining dissident voices while avoiding responsibility for the life-destroying results: “We need to protect all our stakeholders” or ”we have no choice but to comply.” 

So much is at stake, so much is precarious—there is so much to fear. And this is exactly why collective action is necessary. We must seek safety in numbers. On April 17, on campuses all across the United States and Puerto Rico, educators, students, and workers are coming together to take action. No single group is guiding these local responses to the crisis. They are the product of cross-sector organizing efforts on the level of the rank and file, workers and activists in higher education and beyond who have formed a coalition of organizations committed to turning solidarity into action. These actions are coordinated by the Coalition for Action in Higher Ed (CAHE), with support from the AAUP and HELU, but they are also local, directed towards the challenges within each community. Please consider organizing your own event on April 17 and registering it on the national site. 

In California, for example, faculty, staff, and students throughout the Cal State system will join together in cross-campus rallies to protest the massive budget cuts—almost 8 percent—ordered by Governor Newsom. They are also calling for the Cal State leadership to affirm its commitment to immigrant rights, provide sanctuary from ICE, and reinvest in the diverse communities, many of them lacking in economic privilege, that have made the Cal State system an emblem of higher education for the people—a word that carries extra weight in light of the Cal State chancellor’s $17 million AI deal with tech companies, a venture ominously called the AI Workforce Acceleration Board. 

Shared governance is a theme across all of the actions planned for April 17. The AAUP is among the sponsors, as is the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), and the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE). Economic justice is another common concern, reflected in the sponsorship of the Debt Collective, a national movement working towards  publicly funded college, universal healthcare and guaranteed access to housing for all, as well as Scholars for a New Deal in Higher Education. And the crisis of the present moment is reflected in the sponsorship of organizations devoted to free speech and the struggle for Palestine, among them the Middle East Studies Association, Jewish Voices for Peace, and the Faculty for Justice in Palestine Network. 

In addition to local campus actions, there will be a day-long sequence of online events where you can find answers to practical questions related to mobilizing, safety, immigrant rights, red state challenges, and other concerns. The online activities will culminate in a national teach-in (7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT) featuring analysis of the key issues covered over the course of the Day of Action: attacks on campus workers, organizing campus unions, fighting for academic freedom and free speech, building power against university governing boards and trustees, speaking out for Palestine, education and debt, and higher ed and racial justice. To see the lineup of online events, and to register for each of them, click here. As a lead up on Monday April 14 to the Day of Action on Thursday April 17, CAHE is offering a free virtual screening of The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests? The film will be shown at NYU’s Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Film Center followed by a discussion with the directors and activists that will be streamed for those who register for the virtual screening. 

For some campuses, April 17 is a way of connecting the local to the national. At the University of Maryland, members of United Academics of Maryland and members of Asian student groups will hold an in-person teach-in before holding a “watch party” for the final Day of Action online session. In other places, the purpose of the Day of Action is to bring people together in response to specific institutional threats. At Indiana University-Bloomington, where the crackdown on student protest last spring saw the Indiana State Police installing a sniper on the rooftop of a college building, there will be a daytime walk out and rally to publicize the People’s Program for IU 2030. This is a grassroots, collectively-envisioned blueprint for a just and equitable future at IU, presented as a counter-vision to the university’s new, tech-buzzed strategic plan, a top-down initiative that comes at a moment when policies limiting expressive activity have led to firing threats against dissenting members of the community. 

Many campuses are using the Day of Action as the basis for an AAUP membership drive. Here at NYU, our chapter membership has doubled in size and continues to grow in the wake of the university’s decision on two occasions last year to have student and faculty protesters arrested. New chapters are forming at institutions across the nation, as faculty seek the protection that collective representation, and united action, can bring. One hundred and ten years ago, in 1915, the AAUP produced its founding document on academic freedom under the leadership of a Columbia economics professor, Edwin R. A. Seligman. There is of course a certain irony in the idea that the institution that nurtured this milestone advance in the freedom of expression should now exemplify the craven and repressive “we had no choice” position adopted by administrators and trustees of higher education today. There is some reparative justice in the fact that the April 17 Day of Action is the anniversary of the first day of the Columbia University encampment, also Palestinian Political Prisoner Day, an annual call to increase awareness of the human rights struggle taking place in Israeli prisons.

Anna McCarthy is professor of cinema studies at NYU and president of NYU’s chapter of the AAUP.