The unprecedented mob assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 represents perhaps the most stunning collision yet between the world of online disinformation and reality.
The supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump who broke into Congress did so in the belief that the U.S. election was stolen from them after weeks of consuming unproven narratives about “ballot dumps,” manipulated voting machines and Democrat big-city corruption. Some — including the woman who was shot dead — were driven by the discredited QAnon conspiracy theory that represents Democratic Party elites as a pedophile ring and Trump as the savior.
It’s tempting to hope that disinformation and its corrosive effects on democracy may have reached a high-water mark with the events of January 6 and the end of Trump’s presidency. But trends in technology and society’s increasing separation into social media echo chambers suggest that worse may be to come.
Imagine for a moment if video of the Capitol riot had been manipulated to replace the faces of Trump supporters with those of known protestors for antifa, a left-wing, anti-fascist and anti-racist political movement. This would have bolstered the unproven story that has emerged about a “false flag” operation. Or imagine if thousands of different stories written by artificial intelligence software and pedaling that version of events had flooded social media and been picked up by news organizations in the hours after the assault.
That technology not only exists. It’s getting more sophisticated and easier to access by the day.
Trust in democracy is eroding.
Deepfake, or synthetic, videos are starting to seep from pornography — where they’ve mostly been concentrated — into the world of politics. A deepfake of former President Barack Obama using an expletive to describe Trump has garnered over eight million views on YouTube since it was released in 2018.
Most anyone familiar with Obama’s appearance and speaking style can tell there’s something amiss with that video. But two years is an eternity in AI-driven technology and many experts believe it will soon be impossible for the human eye and ear to spot the best deepfakes.
A deepfake specialist was hailed early last year for using freely available software to “de-age” Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci in the movie “The Irishman,” producing a result that many critics considered superior to the work of the visual-effects supervisor in the actual film.
In recent years, the sense of shared, objective reality and trust in institutions have already come under strain as social media bubbles hasten the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories. The worry is that deepfakes and other AI-generated content will supercharge this trend in coming years.
“This is disastrous to any liberal democratic model because in a world where anything can be faked, everyone becomes a target,” Nina Schick, the author of “Deepfakes — The Coming Infopocalypse,” told U.S. author Sam Harris in a recent podcast.
“But even more than that, if anything can be faked … everything can also be denied. So the very basis of what is reality starts to become corroded.”
Governments must do more to combat disinformation.
Illustrating her point is reaction to Trump’s video statement released a day after the storming of Congress. While some of his followers online saw it as a betrayal, others reassured themselves by saying it was a deepfake.
On the text side, the advent of GPT-3 — an AI program that can produce articles indistinguishable from those written by humans — has potentially powerful implications for disinformation. Writing bots could be programmed to produce fake articles or spew political and racial hatred at a volume that could overwhelm text based on facts and moderation.
Society has been grappling with written fake news for years and photographs have long been easily manipulated through software. But convincingly faked videos and AI-generated stories seem to many to represent a deeper, more viral threat to reality-based discourse.
It’s clear that there’s no silver-bullet solution to the disinformation problem. Social media platforms like Facebook have a major role to play and are developing their own AI technology to better detect fake content. While fakers are likely to keep evolving to stay ahead, stricter policing and quicker action by online platforms can at least limit the impact of false videos and stories.
Governments are coming under pressure to push Big Tech into taking a harder line against fake news, including through regulation. Authorities can devote more funding to digital media literacy programs in schools and elsewhere to help individuals become more alert and proficient in identifying suspect content.
When it comes down to it, the real power of fake news hinges on those who believe it and spread it.
Questions to consider:
1. How can technology be used to spread fake news?
2. Why is disinformation potentially harmful to democracy?
3. How do you think the rise of AI technology will affect the type of information people consume?
UC Berkeley School of Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky spoke at this week’s APLU conference.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images
PHILADELPHIA—The final speech at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’ annual conference this week dissected the Trump administration’s “financial assault” on universities and urged the Supreme Court to be a check on a president whom Congress hasn’t reined in.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and a constitutional scholar, also told the attendees of the APLU meeting that their institutions should be united against the administration’s attacks on higher ed.
“The one thing we all learned on the playground is if you give in to a bully, it only makes it worse in the long term,” Chemerinsky said Tuesday, adding—to applause—that “it’s so important that institutions of higher education stand together at this moment and stand together for our shared missions.”
The speech comes after multiple prominent universities, including a few public ones, refused to sign Trump’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which asked them to give up significant autonomy in exchange for an unspecified edge in competitions for federal funds.
It also follows legal victories against the administration’s grant cancellations. Litigation by UC researchers against Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency and other federal agencies and officials has restored more than $500 million in federal research grants, which the administration cut at UCLA after the Justice Department accused it of tolerating antisemitism during a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment. Chemerinsky, who is Jewish, is representing the researchers in that litigation.
Asked for comment, a White House official told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “UC Berkely clearly needs to make some changes – violence broke out on UC Berkeley’s campus just last night and they have failed to police antisemitism by tolerating an ‘unrelenting’ steam of antisemitic harassment toward Jewish students and faculty.”
Even before the latest cuts, Chemerinsky estimated the Trump administration had already slashed close to $1 billion in funding for faculty and researchers across the UC system, a figure that he said was much higher than DOGE’s tally. The UC system didn’t confirm or deny this estimate or provide a more recent estimate Tuesday, saying the system was closed for Veterans Day.
“I think the termination of grants that we’ve seen, whether it’s to researchers and faculty or to universities, is clearly illegal,” Chemerinsky said. But when it comes to “nonrenewal of grants in the future and funding in the future,” he added, the “government has far more discretion, and there it’s going to be much harder to bring legal challenges.”
Chemerinsky also said federal funding cuts are just one of four financial vulnerabilities the administration has identified in universities: “they’re very dependent” on federal money, tuition, philanthropy and foreign students. Using his own institution as an example, he said Berkeley Law has an L.L.M., or master of laws, degree program that’s exclusively for foreign students and represents $20 million in its annual budget.
He then expressed concern about how the Supreme Court has ruled on the administration’s actions, even beyond higher ed.
“By my count, 39 matters have come to the Supreme Court since [Inauguration Day] Jan. 20, challenging actions of the Trump administration,” he said. “All are instances where the lower courts ruled against the Trump administration, and in 36 of 39, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Trump administration.”
Noting eight of the nine justices graduated from the law schools at either Harvard or Yale Universities (Amy Coney Barrett graduated from the University of Notre Dame), he said, “My optimistic self believes that the United States Supreme Court will stand up for higher education.” Chemerinsky added that since Congress hasn’t served as a check on the president, it’s up to the federal judiciary to uphold the laws and the Constitution.
Fittingly, his speech took place at a Philadelphia hotel about a 15-minute walk from where the founders adopted the Constitution. APLU said more than 1,300 people attended this week’s three-day conference.
“Ultimately, I believe the guardrail of our democracy has to be the courts and the Supreme Court,” Chemerinsky said. “If there is going to be a check on a president who has authoritarian impulses, it’s going to have to be from the restraints of the Constitution—and the only way we can enforce those is the courts.”
Chemerinsky noted that “one characteristic of every authoritarian—or would-be authoritarian—rule is the way they go after universities. What we’ve seen in the last nine and a half months is unprecedented in American history.”
He compared Trump’s actions to McCarthyism, the 1950s-era political persecution of faculty, government employees and others. But Chemerinsky pointed out that back then, “it wasn’t the president of the United States leading the attack on higher education,” and “there wasn’t the financial assault on universities.”
“But the one thing that the McCarthy era should say to all of us is that history will judge us,” he said. “Twenty, 30, 50, 75 years from now, people will look back on us the way we look at university officials in the McCarthy era, and they will judge us as to whether we capitulated or whether we had courage.”
Amanda Fuchs Miller On this Election Day, it is critical to think about how we as a country want to ensure that more young people vote and get involved in public service. As a democracy, we should all be striving to make it easier for new voters to register, get to the polls, and have their vote count. However, what we are seeing instead are efforts to make it harder for college students to be engaged in our electoral process – through restrictions on supports and language designed to have a chilling effect on voting instead of encouraging it.
Right before college students returned to campuses, the U.S. Department of Education issued new guidance designed to make it harder for college students to vote. Every school year, students receive an email with information about how to register to vote. This is because it is required in law. The Higher Education Act requires institutions of higher education to “make a good faith effort to distribute a mail voter registration form…to each student enrolled in a degree or certificate program and physically in attendance at the institution, and to make such forms widely available to students at the institution.”
Contrary to statute, the Trump Administration is now encouraging schools to limit who they send this information to – saying that if a school doesn’t send it to students who they have “reason to believe” are ineligible to vote, that’s okay. In addition to this being contrary to law, which requires all students to receive this information, this will increase the likelihood of students who are eligible not receiving information about how to register to vote (thus suppressing their votes) – and is likely to most impact students of color. The Department is also encouraging the voter registration information to include language reminding students of the list of ways that voting may be fraudulent – another tactic that may have a chilling effect on students going to the polls.
The same Department guidance prohibits students from being paid with federal work-study funds for any voting-related activities. A press release from the Department says that they are making a change to this longstanding policy because “Federal Work-Study is meant to provide students opportunities to gain real-world experience that prepares them to succeed in the workforce, not as a way to fund political activism on our college and university campuses.”
As we prepare our next generation of leaders to play a role in our democracy, in government, and in public service, it is hard to see how allowing students to participate in nonpartisan voting engagement is not aligned with experience they will benefit from in the workplace. By engaging in nonpartisan voter registration efforts using work-study positions, college students are able to increase the number of their peers who are registered to vote while learning and participating fully in our democratic system – all while earning the funds they are entitled to so that they can afford a college degree. It can’t go without saying that this restriction is also counter to statute and regulations which do not limit the types of on-campus work study positions to those that are in the “public interest,” as the guidance suggests. That limitation is only linked to off-campus work-study positions.
In a survey by CIRCLE following the 2024 elections about why young people didn’t register to vote, more than one in 10 – 12 percent – of people aged 18-34 said they did not know how to register or had problems with voter registration forms. Nearly a third of young people – 31 percent – said they were too busy, ran out of time, or missed the registration deadline. Without receiving voter registration information, in an objective way, from their college or university or their peers on campus, these numbers are likely to go up as more students will lack the information they need about voter registration.
Ensuring college students are able to vote shouldn’t be a partisan issue. In 2024, there were disparities by both gender and race in youth voter turnout. We all benefit from a democracy where everyone’s voice is heard and every vote is counted – for whomever the ballot is cast.
_________
Amanda Fuchs Miller is president of Seventh Street Strategies and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Higher Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education in the Biden-Harris Administration.
Sidra Khan is a young Muslim woman in India who aspires to be a lawyer. Since early childhood, she has valued and respected Islam, the religion she was born into. But her headscarf now meets eagle eyes when she travels on public transport or tries to make a point during college lectures.
She feels that anti-Muslim rhetoric in India is causing her peers to judge her on the basis of religion and not merit. This, many Muslim students like Khan feel, is a casualty of having the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi rule India.
Over the last decade, the government of this secular country long considered the world’s largest democracy has introduced religious-based laws and politicians have incited anger and hatred against those who aren’t Hindu through rhetoric in speeches and AI campaigns. In northeast India’s Assam state, Wajid Alam, a college history student, watched a new election video from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party with unease.
An AI generated video shared by BJP’s official social media handles suggested that if the BJP loses power, Assam would be overrun by Muslims. It used AI-generated imagery to depict Muslims in hijabs and skull caps allegedly taking over airports, stadiums, tea gardens and other public spaces.
It concluded with a message claiming Muslims could grow to 90% of Assam’s population, provoking other religious groups to choose the BJP to get rid of Muslims.
The politics of religion
For Alam and millions of Muslims in Assam, the video felt like an attack. And it is not the first time the BJP has been accused of demonizing religious minorities. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India — a country founded on principles of secularism and religious freedom — has seen growing hostility toward Muslims and Christians.
Some 200 million people in India practice the Muslim faith, making it the world’s third largest population of Muslims.
Modi became India’s 14th prime minister in May 2014. Not long after, reports of attacks on religious minorities began to climb. In June 2014, Mohsin Shaikh, a young Muslim IT worker in Pune, was beaten to death by Hindu extremists — the first of several lynchings that followed.
A year later, in 2015, a Hindu mob in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, killed Mohammad Akhlaq on suspicion of eating beef — considered a serious offense in the Hindu religion. That made global headlines and signalled the rise of cow-protection vigilantism.
By 2016–17, assaults on Muslims accused of trading or transporting cattle spread across northern India, with cases like the lynching of dairy farmer Pehlu Khan in Rajasthan. Christians, too, came under pressure during this period: nationalist groups staged forced reconversion campaigns, disrupted prayer meetings, vandalized churches and invoked new anti-conversion laws to arrest pastors and worshippers.
Muslims under Modi’s rule
Together, these incidents marked the early years of the Modi era as a turning point, when both Muslims and Christians began to face growing hostility in daily life.
At the same time, hostile rhetoric against minorities became increasingly common in election campaigns. BJP leaders and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups framed Muslims as “outsiders” or “invaders,” with speeches warning of demographic “takeovers” or linking entire communities to terrorism and cow slaughter.
Christians were accused of running covert “conversion factories,” with pastors painted as threats to India’s cultural identity. These narratives — echoed at rallies, on television debates and, more recently, through AI-generated propaganda — blurred the line between campaign messaging and hate speech. For many analysts, this marked a shift: politics was no longer just influenced by religion, but actively weaponizing it to polarize voters.
These speeches were not isolated slips but part of a larger pattern. Muslims were painted as “infiltrators,” “termites” or participants in a supposed “love jihad” plot to convert Hindu women, while Christians were accused of running “conversion factories” and threatening India’s culture.
Senior BJP figures, including party president Amit Shah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, used such language at rallies to mobilize support. Over time, this messaging blurred into mainstream political discourse, normalizing suspicion and hostility toward entire communities.
Political divisions
India’s experience is part of a wider global pattern. Around the world, political movements are blending nationalism and religion to define who “belongs.” A recent Pew Research Center study found that while the United States ranks lower than many countries on overall religious nationalism, it stands out among wealthy democracies for how many adults say the Bible should influence national laws or that being Christian is essential to being truly American.
In the United States, debates over Christian nationalism have become a powerful current within the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s political rhetoric.
Trump and allied evangelical leaders increasingly frame America as a “Christian nation,” a message that blurs the line between faith and state power. Commentators warn that this effort to link patriotism with religion mirrors broader global trends — from India to Israel to Turkey — where religious identity is being harnessed for political gain.
Both the U.S. and Indian constitutions enshrine secularism, which is the idea that the state would keep equal distance from all religions. In India’s case, that principle mattered in a country where Hindus form the majority but millions of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists also call the nation home.
A history of strife
Even before Modi, religion and politics were sometimes entwined: the Congress Party drew on Hindu symbolism, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots scarred the country and the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992 shook faith in secularism. Still, the political consensus was that India was not to be defined by one faith.
“But a lot has changed under Modi and the BJP,” said Sneha Lal, a Hindu student studying to become a primary school teacher. “We did not grow up in this India.”
Lal is bothered by some of the BJP’s tactics that have promoted anti-conversion laws in several states, laws often used against Christians and Muslims accused of proselytizing.
In 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act introduced fast-track citizenship for non-Muslim refugees, a move widely criticized as discriminatory toward Muslims. That same year, Delhi revoked the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. Alongside these legal changes, election campaigns have increasingly featured polarizing rhetoric, and propaganda — including AI-generated videos — has circulated warning of demographic “takeovers.”
Critics say these policies and messages together mark a break from India’s founding secular vision, pushing the country toward a Hindu-first identity.
Can there be a unified national identity?
Seema Chishti, a senior journalist who has witnessed India’s journey from secular to right-wing, said that mixing religion with politics and diluting India’s unified national identity across religious and ethnic groups is a stated core principle of the ruling party, based on its militant roots.
“The Indian Constitution recognises no barriers to being Indian, i.e. nationality is not contingent on faith, caste, region, creed, gender or political views,” Chishti said. “BJP has loudly proclaimed ‘Hindu-India’ and instilled ‘Hindu’ nationalism in politics, education, the armed forces and every other facet of Indian life.”
An example of Modi’s attempt to link Indian-ness with Hinduism is the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 which fast-tracks Indian citizenship for non-Muslims from three neighbours: Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. “This action echoes ideas of India being a Hindu homeland,” Chishti said.
On 15 August 2025, on India’s 79th Independence Day, Modi addressed crowds gathered at Delhi’s historical Red Fort, as he did the last 11 years that he has been in power.
On a day which commemorates India’s long struggle for self-rule that culminated in self-governance and independence from the British empire, Modi referred to the right-wing paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS as a philanthropic organization. RSS has espoused an India for Hindus only.
Intolerance and violence
All this has had tragic consequences. On 25 September, a seven-year-old Muslim boy was abducted from his neighborhood and brutally murdered in northern India’s Azamgarh.
But religious hate crimes haven’t only targeted Muslims. On 11 June, a mob allegedly linked to Hindu extremist groups attacked guests at a Christian wedding and set fire to a utility vehicle. And on 25 July, two Catholic nuns were arrested in central India’s Chhattisgarh state following a complaint by a member of an extremist Hindu group.
India’s United Christian Forum reported that in 2024, Christians across the country witnessed 834 such incidents, up 100 incidents from 734 in 2023 — that comes out to more than two Christians being targeted every day in India simply for practising their faith.
These incidents of attacks and even public hate speeches against Christians are not limited to vandalism, they extend to physical assaults, disruption of prayer gatherings, financial boycotts and even motivated arrests.
This anti-Christian sentiment has been fanned by Hindu extremist groups in the country, which are indirectly and sometimes directly backed by the ruling BJP and other Hindu nationalist groups. These groups are increasingly using anti-conversion laws created in the Modi era to harass Christians.
Christians in India
Arun Pannalal, president of the Chhattisgarh Christian Forum, said that two things are happening: Lawlessness of mobs who target Christians is ignored by police, while Christians often find themselves subject to seemingly random arrests.
“On random calls by Bajrang Dal goons the Police arrested the nuns, without evidence of anything,” Pannalal said. “But when the nuns wanted to complain against the goons, it was not lodged.”
Chishti said that more than politicising religion, by inserting religion into politics, the BJP is trying to portray itself as the only ‘Hindu’ party and the others consequently as not. She maintains that the BJP has fought elections on issues that polarise Indians, divide them and not on its performance or electoral record. Its electoral dominance has also meant that other parties in the fray, the opposition too find themselves playing on the BJP’s turf.
“The BJP has done its best to make the political discourse about faith, symbols of religion — Hindu and Muslim — and portraying themselves as saviours of the Hindu faith and righting so-called historical wrongs,” Chishti said.
As a result, the media focuses on the religious conflicts, instead of other pressing issues, such as the economic well-being of people, the public health or education systems, joblessness and inflation, Chishti said.
As India heads toward future elections, the blending of religion and politics raises questions not just for its own democracy but for others around the world. For young people in India, the stakes are immediate: whether their country remains true to its founding promise of secularism and equal rights.
But for readers everywhere, India’s story is part of a larger global trend from the United States to Turkey to Israel, where religion and nationalism intertwine to shape politics. Understanding how these forces play out in the world’s largest democracy can help us make sense of how faith and power continue to influence politics across the globe.
India’s struggle shows that when religion becomes a political weapon, democracy itself can become the battleground.
Questions to consider:
1. How is freedom of religion protected in India?
2. In what ways are Muslims being treated differently by the Modi administration?
3. In what ways to you feel comfortable or uncomfortable in your community expressing your faith?
Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous memoir has just been released, detailing how she was groomed by Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, whom she met at Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort. In Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, she writes that she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew three times, beginning when she was 17, and was beaten and raped by a “well-known prime minister.” Virginia Giuffre died by suicide earlier this year in Australia at age 41.
Democracy Now! speaks with Amy Wallace, Giuffre’s ghostwriter, who says Giuffre experienced the “depths of hell” with Maxwell and Epstein. “It’s not just a catalog of horrors. It’s a woman who is terribly abused as a child, escapes from that terrible abuse … and then becomes an advocate,” says Wallace.
The Sept. 3 ruling for Harvard by federal judge Allison Burroughs is the most important decision so far for defending academic freedom against the attacks by the Trump administration. The permanent injunction against the Trump administration’s ban on funding to Harvard will eliminate much of the Trump regime’s ability to hold Harvard hostage—unless it is able to find a higher court willing to defend these illicit attacks on higher education and free expression.
With this ruling, Columbia’s decision to submit to the Trump administration and pay $221 million looks not merely spineless but financially stupid. While former Harvard president Lawrence Summers praised Columbia’s submission and urged Harvard to obey, a large group of Harvard faculty and students fortunately pressured their administrators to hold firm, at least for long enough to enable a court ruling that restores the money researchers at Harvard are entitled to.
Now that this ruling has been won, Harvard needs to take the fight to its conclusion. It cannot settle with the Trump administration and give away this victory, since that would leave Harvard at the mercy of Trump officials anytime they decided to punish Harvard again. A settlement by Harvard now would be not only cowardly but crazy.
The conservatives on the Supreme Court may soon be forced to choose between obeying the law and the Constitution or obeying Donald Trump, and they have shown little desire to defy the president’s commands no matter how illicit they are.
The most likely path for the Supreme Court justices to help the Trump administration destroy higher education is jurisdictional. The Trump administration argued unsuccessfully that this entire lawsuit must be heard in another federal court because it relates to federal contracts.
The court could order that the legal process begin anew in a different court, reinstate the Trump bans against Harvard and hope that the long pathway to a resolution would pressure Harvard to give Trump his $500 million extortion and agree to suppress academic freedom without the Supreme Court needing to review a case where the law is unquestionably on Harvard’s side.
But while the unprincipled political hacks who dominate the Supreme Court make that evasion of moral and legal responsibility a possible result, it’s also possible that enough conservative justices have a modicum of integrity left to question the obviously illegal and unconstitutional attacks on Harvard—not because they like Harvard, but because they recognize the necessity of the Supreme Court restraining a president who is indifferent to the law and the Constitution.
It’s important to point out just how dumb the Trump administration officials are. By issuing a May 5 freeze order stating, “Today’s letter marks the end of new grants for the University,” the Trump administration removed any possible doubt that it had made a final decision against Harvard in violation of the law and the First Amendment.
If the Trump administration had simply frozen grants but pretended to make an ongoing evaluation, it might have created enough doubt to survive judicial scrutiny long enough to force Harvard into submission. Instead, the overwhelming desire to punish Harvard by any means possible may ultimately lose this case for the Trump administration. For all of the partisan posturing and ideological bias, some judges still will follow the law, and the law is clearly on Harvard’s side, as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression noted in what it called “the flatly unlawful and unconstitutional means used by the Trump administration in this attempted hostile takeover.”
Every other university now has a clear path for what it needs to do: resist, sue, win. It’s absolutely shocking that Harvard has been the only university to (however reluctantly) undertake the aggressive litigation approach that is the only reasonable strategy against the repression of the Trump regime.
The fight by Harvard against Trump’s authoritarianism could be a victory not just for higher education, but for democracy. But Harvard needs to keep on fighting if it wants to prevail.
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.
Wolfson (at podium) at a news conference at AAUP headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Ryan Quinn/Inside Higher Ed
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.
Wolfson at a rally outside the Health and Human Services Department headquarters.
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.
As the 2026 midterm elections approach, efforts to manipulate congressional district boundaries—under the guise of redistricting—pose a serious threat to representative democracy in the United States. These efforts are not simply a matter of partisan politics; they represent a calculated attack on the principle of one person, one vote, and on the fragile trust working Americans place in democratic institutions.
Across multiple states, redistricting maps are being drawn to favor incumbents and dominant political parties, most often through a practice known as gerrymandering. While both major parties have been guilty of gerrymandering, the recent wave of redistricting efforts has intensified in key battleground states, particularly following the 2020 Census and court rulings that rolled back federal oversight.
Some of the most blatant manipulations are unfolding in Southern and Midwestern states, where legislatures have redrawn districts to dilute the voting power of Black, Latino, and low-income communities. In states like Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Ohio, courts have intervened—only to be ignored, delayed, or overruled by higher courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. The result: districts that favor white conservative voters while silencing diverse urban and working-class voices.
These distortions in representation aren’t merely political—they have real consequences for education policy, healthcare, labor rights, and civil rights. When working families and students find themselves in districts designed to neutralize their votes, their needs are less likely to be met by elected officials. Funding for public education, protections for contingent workers, and relief from student loan debt are often neglected in favor of corporate interests and ideological agendas.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision paved the way for even more aggressive gerrymandering, ruling that federal courts could not adjudicate claims of partisan gerrymandering. That decision effectively gave state legislatures a green light to draw lines with political intent, even when the result undermines basic democratic principles. And with the Voting Rights Act gutted in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), many communities of color no longer have a legal shield against discriminatory maps.
In a just system, redistricting would be handled by independent commissions. In some states, this is happening—California, Michigan, Arizona, and a handful of others have taken steps toward fairer maps. But in most of the country, the party in power controls the process and uses sophisticated data tools—often developed by private firms with little transparency—to fine-tune districts down to the household level. This isn’t democracy. It’s data-driven voter suppression.
For students, low-income voters, and working-class Americans, the implications are profound. A House of Representatives that does not reflect the electorate cannot be expected to act on behalf of its needs. Adjunct professors, student debtors, gig workers, rural teachers, and public librarians already operate on the margins. When their political voices are diluted, they are pushed even further to the periphery.
These redistricting battles also have an educational cost. In states where partisan gerrymandering has secured one-party rule, legislatures have targeted curriculum content, attacked diversity and inclusion programs, cut higher education funding, and undermined faculty tenure—all without meaningful opposition. Political disempowerment leads directly to institutional decay.
The Higher Education Inquirer calls attention to these developments not only because they distort elections, but because they warp the social and economic future of the country. The 2026 House elections may be won or lost not at the ballot box but on a redistricting map drafted behind closed doors in state capitals.
The right to vote is hollow if the outcome is predetermined. The promise of representative government collapses if districts are engineered to deny equal voice. Without public awareness and pressure, these efforts to undermine democracy will go unchecked.
It’s time to speak plainly: Unless there is a national movement to restore fairness to the process, the House of Representatives in 2026 will be even less representative of the people it claims to serve.
Sources:
Brennan Center for Justice. “The Redistricting Landscape, 2023–2026.”
ProPublica. “How Politicians Use Redistricting to Lock in Power.”
NPR. “Supreme Court Ruling Lets Partisan Gerrymandering Stand.”
Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “Voting Maps and Racial Disenfranchisement.”
ACLU. “Gerrymandering: How It Works and Why It Harms Democracy.”
U.S. Census Bureau. “Apportionment and Redistricting Data.”
