Billionaires and the ultra-wealthy have no place in setting the future agenda for higher ed. We – the students, community members, workers that actually make the campus work – do.
In Michigan, the MI HELU coalition decided that we wanted to get ahead of the curve by providing candidates with a forum that focused exclusively on Higher Education and the challenges we are facing.
Together, we’re fighting back against the demonization of higher ed and we won’t cave to governmental bullying to water down our education system with the goal of elimination. Our students deserve better, and so do we.
Founded in 2020 during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SNDHE) is a group of teachers and researchers committed to rebuilding our colleges and universities so that they can be a true public resource for everyone.
And now [New York is] being punished by a federal government that sees organized labor, public education, and social investment as threats instead of strengths.
Public protest and influencing public opinion is keeping UCW (CWA Local 3821) busy. Members have been fighting fiercely to Defend Remote Work at their state institutions.
We invite you to support HELU’s work by making a direct financial contribution. While HELU’s main source of income is solidarity pledges from member organizations, these funds from individuals help us to grow capacity as we work to align the higher ed labor movement.
In 1649, a group of English radicals sent a petition to the House of Commons. In it, they lamented the licensing of printing — which allowed the government to “pre-censor” books and pamphlets — as well as the harsh punishments for publishing unlicensed or “scandalous” ones.
The radicals warned that this kind of censorship would usher in a tyranny, and they insisted that it “seems altogether inconsistent with the good of the Commonwealth, and expresly [sic] opposite and dangerous to the liberties of the people.”
These radicals, known as the Levellers, paid dearly for their defiance. Their leaders were repeatedly imprisoned, and their demands for near-universal male suffrage, religious freedom, and unrestricted speech were crushed.
Yet their bold vision left a legacy. Later champions of free expression, from the authors of Cato’s Letters to John Wilkes, carried their arguments forward. Those ideas crossed the Atlantic, circulated in pamphlets at revolutionary speed, and ultimately found their way into state constitutions and the First Amendment.
Centuries later, it seems Britain is in dire need of a new generation of Levellers.
In April, The Times reported that more than 30 people a day were being arrested for various online offenses, equating to 12,000 arrests a year, according to The Telegraph. In June, Hamit Coskun was fined £240 for a religiously aggravated public order offence after burning a Quran and shouting profanities against Islam outside the Turkish consulate in London — an act of protest against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s authoritarian Islamism.
With every arrest, the British must remind themselves: Rights lost are not easily regained.
In March, six girls at a Quaker meeting house in London were arrested for “suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” for holding a meeting about a potential non-violent protest. They were part of a group called Youth Demand, which had been carrying out acts of civil disobedience as part of their “fight to end genocide.” Thirty officers were involved in the arrest, which was part of a larger campaign of raids for similar offenses that took place across the city that day.
Nearly 900 people were arrested in London over the weekend for protesting against the government’s ban on the advocacy group Palestine Action under an anti-terrorism law, which in the U.S. would be similar to the Trump administration declaring Students for Justice in Palestine a terrorist organization. Expressing support for a proscribed organization is punishable with up to 14 years in prison.
And Irish comedian Graham Linehan was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport last week. Linehan, a vocal critic of gender self-identification, rejects the idea that biological sex can be changed and opposes access for biological males to female-only spaces. His alleged crime apparently consisted of three tweets from April, one of which read:
The tweets were undoubtedly harsh and deeply offensive to many transgender people, who see Linehan’s stance as a denial of their very identity. Yet tolerating speech that offends our most cherished beliefs is the price of any meaningful conception of free expression, whether in law or in culture.
Even in the U.S., where legal speech protections are stronger than in the U.K., (imminent) incitement to violence can be restricted. However, a provocative tweet from more than four months ago suggesting that someone “punch” others in a hypothetical situation does not meet any meaningful threshold of incitement (imminent or not) — no more than do abstract exhortations to “punch Nazis” or, conversely, to attack “TERFs,” as some trans activists have urged.
All told, it is difficult to escape the depressing conclusion that the home of the Levellers, Cato’s Letters, John Wilkes, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, John Stuart Mill, and George Orwell has taken a deeply troubling turn away from the robust tradition of free speech these seminal figures argued so eloquently for.
With every arrest, the British must remind themselves: Rights lost are not easily regained. And for Americans looking across the pond in horror, a warning: It can happen here, too.
Why John Milton’s free speech pamphlet ‘Areopagitica’ still matters
Milton’s most important work on free speech was “Areopagitica,” a short polemical pamphlet that argued “For the Liberty of unlicensed printing.”
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bill? Higher Ed Fights Back! Monday, August 18 at 7:30 PM ET / 6:30 CT / 5:30 MT / 4:30 PT
Join HELU leaders and organizers for our upcoming webinar “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bill: Higher Ed Fights Back” on Monday, August 18th at 7:30 PM ET / 6:30 CT / 5:30 MT / 4:30 PT. We’ll be joined by Sara Garcia, a policy analyst for Senator Bernie Sanders on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP). Sara will walk us through the parts of the bill that will affect higher education and discuss what’s possible in terms of pushing back. Thomas Gokey of the Debt Collective will discuss how the myriad changes to student lending will affect student borrowers and we will end with discussion and call to act in the fall with our colleagues across the country and fight back against the attacks on higher education in the United States.
Higher ed workers – staff, faculty, university healthcare workers, facilities & maintenance workers, research assistants, academic advisors, students; in short, anyone who works on a campus – must come together as a united front to defend higher education as a public good. Higher ed must be fully-funded, with living wages and job security for everyone working on campus. We must look into the next four years with courage, determination, solidarity, and long-term strategy. Register for the August 18 webinar here.
Principals from K-12 schools across the country traveled to Seattle to attend UNITED, the National Conference on School Leadership, July 11-13, where they discussed and shared solutions for the many challenges facing the education sector.
From concerns over school safety to the dilemma of chronic absenteeism, school leaders heard about innovative ways to tackle these issues by embracing local partnerships or looking into resources from national organizations.
Principals also learned about creative approaches emerging in the classroom. At one Indiana high school, for example, a public relations class is helping both to boost the school’s messaging to its community and to build students’ media skills. District administrators at Portland Public Schools, meanwhile, discussed how they’ve navigated and sustained a high-impact tutoring program in the state’s largest school district.
Read on for K-12 Dive’s coverage of the 2025 annual combined meeting of the National Association of Elementary School Principals and the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshitification—originally coined to describe how digital platforms decay over time—perfectly captures the grim evolution of U.S. higher education. Institutions that once positioned themselves as public goods now exist primarily to sustain themselves, extracting revenue, prestige, and labor at the expense of students, faculty, and the broader public.
In the post–World War II era, higher education in the United States was broadly seen as a driver of social mobility, economic growth, and democratic citizenship. The GI Bill and substantial state funding opened college doors to millions. Tuition at public institutions was minimal or nonexistent. Academic freedom, faculty governance, and research for the common good were foundational ideals.
By the 1980s, neoliberal policies began to reshape the higher education landscape. Public disinvestment led institutions to rely more heavily on tuition, philanthropy, corporate partnerships, and student debt. Universities became more bureaucratic and brand-conscious. Students were reframed as consumers, and education as a commodity. Faculty positions gave way to underpaid adjunct labor, and Online Program Managers like 2U, Academic Partnerships (aka Risepoint) and Kaplan emerged to monetize digital learning. Marketing budgets ballooned. Classrooms and research labs became secondary to enrollment targets and revenue generation.
A 2019 Higher Education Inquirer report revealed how elite universities joined the downward spiral. Institutions like Harvard, Yale, and USC outsourced online graduate programs to 2U, employing aggressive recruitment tactics that resembled those of discredited for-profit colleges. Applicants were encouraged to take on excessive debt for degrees with uncertain returns. Whistleblowers likened it to fraud-by-phone—evidence that even the most prestigious universities were embracing an extractive model.
Doctoral education offers a deeper glimpse into how enshitification has hollowed out academia. Sold as a noble pursuit of truth and a path to secure academic employment, the Ph.D. has become, for many, a journey into economic instability, psychological distress, and underemployment. Only a small percentage of doctoral students land tenure-track jobs. Graduate schools continue to admit far more students than they can responsibly support, while providing little preparation for careers outside academia. Mentorship is often lacking, and financial support is frequently inadequate. Many graduate students rely on food pantries, defer medical care, or take on gig work just to survive. Meanwhile, universities benefit from their labor in teaching and research.
International graduate students face even steeper challenges. Promised opportunity, they instead encounter a saturated job market, low wages, and immigration precarity. Their labor props up U.S. research and rankings, but their long-term prospects are often bleak.
The rise of career-transition consultants—like Cheeky Scientist and The Professor Is In—has become a booming cottage industry, a byproduct of the failed academic job pipeline. For most Ph.D.s, what was once considered “alternative academia” is now the only path forward.
Financial hardship compounds the crisis. Graduate stipends in many programs are far below local living wages, especially in high-cost cities like San Francisco, Boston, or New York. Few programs provide retirement benefits or financial literacy resources. The financial toll of earning a doctorate is often hidden until students are years deep into their programs—and years behind in wealth accumulation.
Meanwhile, university medical centers—often affiliated with elite institutions—offer a parallel example of institutional enshitification. These hospitals have long histories of exploitation, particularly of poor and minority patients. Even today, these facilities prioritize affluent patients and donors, while relying on precariously employed staff and treating marginalized communities as research subjects. The disparities are systematic and ongoing. The rhetoric of innovation and healing masks a legacy of racial injustice and extractive labor practices.
Legacy admissions further entrench inequality. While race-conscious admissions have been rolled back, legacy preferences remain largely untouched. They serve to maintain elite networks, ensuring that wealth and access remain intergenerational. These policies not only contradict the rhetoric of meritocracy but also deepen structural inequities in the name of tradition.
Today, higher education serves itself. Institutions protect billion-dollar endowments, award executive salaries in the millions, expand sports programs and real estate portfolios, and depend on underpaid faculty and indebted students. Campuses are rife with inequality, surveillance of student protest, and performative gestures of inclusion, even as DEI initiatives are gutted by state governments or internal austerity.
The consequences are clear. Enrollment is declining. Campuses are closing. Faculty are being laid off. Public trust is eroding. And even elite institutions are feeling the strain. Doctorow’s theory suggests that once a system has fully enshittified, collapse becomes inevitable. The College Meltdown is not hypothetical—it’s here.
And yet, collapse can be a beginning. Higher education must be radically reimagined: public investment, tuition-free education, student debt relief, labor protections, honest admissions policies, and genuine democratic governance. The alternative is more of the same: a system that costs more, delivers less, and cannibalizes its future to feed its prestige economy.
Selected Sources
Caterine, Christopher L. Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Cassuto, Leonard. The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It. Harvard University Press, 2015.
Kelsky, Karen. The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. into a Job. Three Rivers Press, 2015.
We’re on day 4 of our 5 days of ULP strikes, and the SBWU strike lines keep spreading! Baristas are fired up and ready to fight for a fair contract and protest hundreds of unfair labor practices – and as each day passes, more and more workers are walking off the job.
Today, we’re out in 3 new cities: Boston, Portland, and Dallas! Here are the 13 cities we’re holding anchor pickets in:
LA: 10am PST @ 3241 N Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA
Seattle: 1pm PST @ 1124 Pike St, Seattle WA
Chicago: 12pm CST @ 5964 N Ridge Ave, Chicago, IL
Denver: 12pm MST @ 2700 S Colorado Blvd, Denver, CO
Columbus: 12pm EST @ 7176 N High St, Worthington, OH
Pittsburgh: 8am EST @ 5932 Penn Cir S. Pittsburgh, PA
St. Louis: 12pm CST @ 8023 Dale Ave, Richmond Heights MO
Philadelphia: 9am EST @ 1528 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA
Brooklyn: 9am EST @ 325 Lafayette, Brooklyn, NY
Long Island: 1pm EST @ 914 Old Country Rd, Garden City, NY
Dallas: 11am CST @ 1445 West University Drive, Denton TX
If you’re able to join your local picket line, workers would love supplies like: hand-warmers, food, water, hot beverages, and energetic vibes! Don’t forget to bring your own picket sign!
Don’t live near a picket line?We still need you! Striking baristas are calling on allies to flyer as many not-yet union Starbucks as possible. Workers across the country are infuriated over the paltry 2% raise, and SBWU gives not-yet union baristas a path to increase their wages. But in order to win, we need not-yet union stores to get in the fight. We’re asking allies to flyer these stores and talk to baristas about the union.
Show us your solidarity: register your canvassing event, attend an anchor strike line near you, and DO NOT cross the picket line!
From Levin Kim, HELU Chair Over the first 100 days of the Trump Administration, higher ed workers from coast to coast have been fighting back against attacks on critical lifesaving research, on immigrant workers, on education and research in the public interest. We’re in the fight of our lives, for our work, our communities, and our future.
Despite alarming news on the daily—from students and workers removed from our campuses, firings, program closures, government intervention in classroom curriculum, and brazen attacks on academic freedom—we refuse to be immobilised into inaction because we know a better world is possible if we fight for it. We’re standing up for the future of higher ed by building a wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast movement of workers ready to organize, to fight, and to win. Now is the time for coalition-building, for moving your coworkers to take action together, and getting out in the streets. Find and attend a May Day event near you tomorrow, and stay tuned for more ways to take action.
More than 2,000 members from across the United States, Canada and the Caribbean spent four days charting the future of our union and recommitting themselves to the solidarity that powers the union at the USW’s triennial constitutional convention earlier this month.
International President David McCall opened the convention by calling on union members to fight back against wealthy elites who want to silence workers across North America.
“To turn back the tide of economic injustice and corporate greed, we need to truly be all in,” McCall said. “We can hold nothing back, and we need every member to join in the fight – for as long as it takes.”
In debating resolutions ranging from fair trade to civil and human rights, delegates shared their struggles and victories in the fight against corporate greed. They also heard from trade unionists from other countries and a panel of federal workers who warned of broad attacks on workers’ rights coming out of Washington, D.C.
While billionaires like Elon Musk may be emboldened under the current administration, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler declared that with 71% of Americans supportive of unions, union members are in a “generational moment” to build the labor movement. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond reminded delegates that “we know the way forward.”
The way forward is going all in on solidarity. Delegates demonstrated what that looks like by taking action right from the convention floor by calling their members of Congress to demand passage of the bipartisan Protect America’s Workforce Act.
Delegates left Las Vegas fired up and ready to carry that energy forward into their workplaces and communities.
“Being all in isn’t a one-time action – and it isn’t a bet,” McCall said. “It’s our way of operating, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”
You can find full coverage of our convention, including photos, videos, resolutions, and more, on the USW website.
If institutions won’t stand up to the Trump administration, then it’s up to academic workers, students, communities, and citizens to stand up for them. Because we have the strongest levers of power over our local institutions.
While international students have become the first target on campuses, it’s important to remember that a portion of faculty (and in particular contingent faculty who are more precarious), administration, and campus service workers are also vulnerable to ICE. The consequences of these actions could have far-reaching effects. Due process of the law is not for specific groups. We all have it or no one has it.
This absolutely is an attempt to silence dissent in the country, especially on college campuses.
This absolutely is authoritarianism.
This absolutely is in line with the current attacks on higher education which were laid out in Project 2025. And in line with the crackdown on student protests before Trump took office.
And what’s worse is that many of our institutions are refusing to stand up for students.
Thankfully, unions are already responding.
We have to rise to this moment or higher education will never be the same.
On April 17, HELU is partnering with the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE) for the National Day of Action for Higher Education. There are more than 175 events planned in 44 states for April 17. We urge you to join us however you can, either in-person or online.
As campus workers, students, and community members, we have a
unique power and responsibility to exercise our collective voice in this
moment of turmoil. It is our labor and our ideas which sustain higher
education, and higher education sustains our economy and communities.
