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Over the past seven months, members of the American Association of University Professors, a 110-year-old organization that is fundamental in defining and protecting academic freedom, have found themselves, their disciplines and their universities on the receiving end of the Trump administration’s unrelenting attack on higher ed.

As Republicans in some states diminish the influence of faculty senates, AAUP state- and campus-level chapters, which often also represent faculty as official unions, have led the criticism of the federal government’s actions. But how is the AAUP planning to fight now—more than half a year into Trump’s return to power, as Washington continues to pressure some of the country’s most powerful universities into making concessions?

Late last week, Inside Higher Ed interviewed Todd Wolfson, whom AAUP members elected as their president in June 2024. A former union leader at Rutgers University, Wolfson denounced the Trump-Vance ticket well before the GOP victory in November. Now, he’s leading the AAUP as it protests, sues and otherwise tussles with Trump.

The following transcript of the interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Q: We’re now more than six months into Trump’s second administration. What is the current state of academic freedom?

A: It’s being washed over by an administration that has no respect, or even probably understanding, of the concept. We’re seeing massive infringement of academic freedom at the individual level. But then, it’s also the academic freedom of institutions.

In the McCarthy era, the attacks on academic freedom were attacks on individual faculty and demands for loyalty oaths and those sorts of attacks on individuals, not on institutions. So I’d say that, in the current moment, academic freedom is under its most fundamental attack we’ve ever seen, both in its attack on individual academics, but also on institutional autonomy from the federal government, ideological control.

Q: Did you expect the Trump administration to target higher ed this much, or in these ways? What has and hasn’t surprised you?

A: We were raising the alarm about this from before the election. We were very concerned about statements coming out of … the Trump campaign and then JD Vance’s mouth. So we recognized a threat. I mean, if you go back and look at Trump’s campaign video about higher ed, it’s like pure lunacy, right?

And it’s not that this was new—because [of Florida governor] Ron DeSantis—but it was alarming. Even with that, though, I would say that, clearly, we underestimated how dangerous it was. I did not expect a wholesale assault on the sector, squeezing it from every direction. And so, yes, I’m surprised. We were not prepared for how they’ve approached dismantling higher education.

I never expected the Trump administration to take a democracy, or the health of American society, to heart, because they’re grifters and they’re in it for their own personal power and their own personal wealth. But I did not expect that they would be so outlandishly intent on destroying a sector that’s so important to the fundamental values and power of American society.

Q: Yeah, you called then–vice presidential candidate JD Vance a fascist last August. Has he turned out to be one?

A: I would say so.

Vance and Trump and [Christopher] Rufo and Stephen Miller and the ilk that run our government are fascist in a 21st-century variant—not operating within the constructs of our society, [but] trying to rip those constructs down. I think the last six months have borne out my position pretty well.

The ilk that run our government are fascist in a 21st-century variant—not operating within the constructs of our society, [but] trying to rip those constructs down.”

Q: How has the AAUP resisted the Trump administration’s actions, and universities’ apparent responses to those actions?

A: The first and most important is we’re organizing our members, we’re doing a lot of political education with them, we’re thinking together about the problems at the campus level and then the problems at the state and national level, and we’re talking about how we approach it. We’ve grown more than this organization has ever grown in the last six months.

We built out coalition[s]. And so I think the most important [coalition]—but not the only one—is that we have established and coordinated a space called Labor for Higher Ed where all the international unions sit together and work together to come up with a coordinated plan to respond to the Trump administration. That’s never happened before. We have every major union that has higher ed workers sitting at that table.

[Secondly,] we sued the Trump administration on our own six times. With our AFT [American Federation of Teachers] as our [union] affiliate … probably another three or four times.

They’re doing so many things that are so obviously unconstitutional and illegal, and so we’re trying to use the courts to slow them down.

The third [tactic]—and you’ll see more of this, but you’ve probably been watching and seen it throughout the spring of last year—is getting our people into the streets, fighting back, offering a different vision. This has primarily happened in response to the NIH, NSF cuts.

The fourth area is that we need to offer … a countervision of higher education to the Trump vision, which is higher education ideologically controlled by the federal government, in its most extreme form, as well as the complete destruction of our biomedical research infrastructure and our research over all.

We’re working on a policy vision that will move us into the midterms … a counterimaginary of higher ed to the imaginary that’s been developed by the Trump administration, by Chris Rufo, one where we’re all Marxist ideologues indoctrinating our students.

The last area is that we’re supporting the development of organizing at the campus level to challenge and hold our administrations accountable, whether supporting the mutual aid defense compact projects that [have] mushroomed across higher ed, or supporting the fights at campus levels around academic freedom and freedom of speech, or any other number of things that we’re doing to support faculty at the campus level, to get their administrations to hold firm and not to bow to the Trump administration’s demands before they even make them.

We had 40,000 members, now we have something like 50,000 members [since Wolfson was elected president last year]. By the end of the calendar year, I’d like to see [60,000]. And that’s dues-paying members.

Q: Has there been an increase in the number of campus chapters or state conferences?

A: Since Trump was elected, I think we’ve grown by at least 40 chapters. Some of those chapters had gone dormant and then renewed and came back to life.

So if we had, when [current AAUP leaders] took office, something like 500 chapters, now there’s something like 550.

Q: Do you have any regrets about tactics or actions your organization has taken so far during the second Trump administration?

A: Certainly, I have regrets. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t know if this is a regret, [but] I think that our sector is not fully ready to respond to the real threats. Our sector needs to be able to take militant job actions and other sorts of actions as this issue continues to ramp up.

We won’t do that if we don’t have the ability to do it at a scale that makes it powerful and meaningful and effective. And so I think that’s the thing we are working on, and anything we do—and I want to underscore this—would be nonviolent and peaceful.

But, nonetheless, we need to be able to militantly show how concerned we are—not only over our own institutions and our own jobs and our students, but also around higher education and the future of our democracy.

Q: Is what you’re saying is needed is a simultaneous general strike across higher education institutions across the country?

A: If we continue to have a federal government that takes over our cities and puts our cities under martial law and abuses the institutional autonomy of our higher education institutions and does all sorts of things that we all see are undemocratic and dangerous, we need to be prepared not only for a general strike in higher education, but a general strike over all.

I don’t think a higher education general strike is an action that will be effective, because I don’t think that higher education alone has this sort of industrial power to hurt the economy in a way that could force us to try to move through this moment.

If the Trump administration continues on its course … the only force that could respond to that effectively is a labor movement that is willing to withhold its labor, and in a general way.”

But I’m saying if the Trump administration continues on its course—which is a course that’s antidemocratic, that could undermine elections, that could take over cities, that could endanger citizens in the way it did in L.A. and now is doing in D.C., and that is destroying our democracy one piece at a time—that the only force that could respond to that effectively is a labor movement that is willing to withhold its labor, and in a general way.

Q: I was wondering whether you felt that your organization relied a little too much on litigation, or whether protest fell flat.

A: Maybe society writ large in the U.S. is depending too much on courts. I wish we were prepared, as workers in the sector, to take approaches that were more direct than just the courts. But, obviously, we can only be a reflection of the workers in the sector. We cannot, as an institution, push ourselves well beyond where our workers are at.

Q: I think many people would agree that things have gotten worse and worse as the Trump administration has progressed … What does AAUP plan to do differently going forward?

A: There can’t be an expectation that the moment that the Trump administration took office, that … all of the higher ed workers and our students would have been ready and prepared to respond. There is often a lag time between a crisis and the public’s response to that crisis.

We should be critical of ourselves and critical of our tactics and think about how to respond better and move forward better. We see the next 16 months as really important, and that rolls us through the midterms of 2026.

We don’t plan to do this alone. We plan to do this with every higher ed worker, and so that’s why Labor for Higher Ed—this table that represents millions of higher ed workers coming together and working together and coming up with this plan together—is so important. We’re also building an aligned table with our students and student organizations, and also with alumni and alumni organizations. And so we think that if those three forces can come together and fight specifically over higher ed, we can make a real fight.

Ryan Quinn/Inside Higher Ed

But I’ll say this … higher ed workers alone cannot beat back the Trump administration. It needs to be a multisector fight. Federal workers—who are also under attack—we need to build alliance with them. K–12 teachers, health-care workers, immigrant workers, progressive community organizations all need to build an aligned front that is ready to take risks, because if we don’t take those risks, we may look at what we have in 2026 and we might not have clean, fair elections.

I think we have to take that very seriously, and we have to build our power to respond.

[Currently, we need] a real fight around the budget, from now through October, a fight around the budget that demands a fully funded NIH, NSF, NASA, [that] pushes around the destruction of the student loan program [and] fights over the TRIO program … which is a program for first-generation college kids.

From there, we are going to be really working on our campuses, building campus-level campaigns and state-level campaigns around higher education.

The things we want to have in [the national] vision are things like a demand for free public higher education, college for all and an end to adjunctification, an end to student debt, more research funding … and then use that vision to really fight for candidates that lift up our imagination of higher education as we move into the midterms.

We are going to fight in the streets and we’re going to fight politically. This is a political battle, and we need to respond politically in this battle.

Q: How do you fight an enemy that seems to thrive on conflict and to derive strength partly by othering certain groups of people—and, among those groups of people … faculty?

A: Faculty and the press and people of color and women and gay people and trans people and anybody that’s not white, Christian nationalist, in the end, is othered. And then even within the white Christian nationalist community, if you’re not MAGA, or you care about a free press, or care about free inquiry, you’re othered.

That first six months was a freaking whirlwind, and so we were really reactive, we were reacting. The Trump administration set the tone—not just for us, to be clear, obviously [for] the Democratic Party, but the progressive community more generally or any sector under attack.

We have been too reactive to the political environment, and so I think the biggest thing that we need to do is stay on our message and vision.

Now there seems to be some fracturing, maybe over Palestine, in the right-wing echo chamber. But, in general, that echo chamber has operated in lockstep and it’s huge, and we don’t have anything like that. Whatever we do, we’re never going to have the megaphone that they have. But, what I do believe is that we must put out our own proactive vision. It can no longer be “Ron DeSantis is mean, and he’s saying bad things about DEI and we need to stop him,” or “Donald Trump is saying bad things about Harvard,” or “Chris Rufo, can you believe how ridiculous the things he puts out are?”

We can’t be constantly responding to them. We can’t have kids going into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to get a college degree, and we need to make sure that we have work with dignity and free inquiry and we need to make sure we have the best research infrastructure in the world.

Q: You mentioned Palestine. What position, what action, if any, does national AAUP need to take on Israel and Palestine at this moment? … I know that you guys already dropped your categorical opposition to academic boycotts before Trump’s election.

A: We believe strongly that no weapons should be sent to Israel, at all. Not defensive or offensive, nothing.

What do we do in the U.S., where antisemitism has been used as a weapon, in many ways, by the Trump administration to bring universities to heel—and many times stripping out, or threatening to strip out, hundreds of millions of research dollars that often affect Jewish faculty members? Versus what our position should be on the conflict in the Middle East?

First and foremost, our job is to safeguard ourselves at home and to set a vision that aligns with what we’re trying to do in the United States. We need to stand up for academic freedom, for freedom of speech, for freedom of assembly for our students so they can protest the war—the genocide, excuse me—that’s taking place in Gaza.

We need to stand up to the weaponization of antisemitism in the Title VI process. And we need to make sure that we defend our members.

We think the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which does not get involved with questions of the Israeli state at all, is a much more apt way of defining antisemitism.

The numbers of universities and faculty and university presidents [in Gaza] that have been killed and universities that have been destroyed in this war is mammoth. We are certainly educating our members on this concept of scholasticide.

It seems pretty obvious that they are—but if, in fact, Israel is purposefully destroying the educational infrastructure, both K–12 and higher ed, of Palestine, and of Gaza, that stands against our values of academic freedom. And if that’s the case, and we can unify around that, then we will take a stand and call for an end to the scholasticide.

Q: What will it take, ultimately, to get the Trump administration to relent in its attacks on higher ed?

A: Ultimately, we need a massive movement of higher ed workers and students. But, again, I don’t think that’s enough.

I believe as higher ed goes, so goes democracy. But the converse isn’t absolutely true. Higher ed alone cannot save democracy, but we’re a critical part.

It needs to be a broader societal movement to save our country.