Our campuses in the Tri-Co are unfortunately, under unprecedented attack. In recent weeks, a new direction on immigration policy by the Trump administration has led to detention, detainment, and deportation of college and university students and faculty across the country, as well as the rescinding of hundreds of student visas “without reason or warning,” as described by the Wall Street Journal. At the same time, the federal government has threatened to withdraw billions of dollars of federal funding from universities across the country, compounding fear of budgetary crisis after its earlier decision to review its policies around research grants at various agencies. This threat has been used as a cudgel to force significant ideologically driven changes to U.S. colleges and universities. These changes threaten academic freedom, the safety of our communities, and our internal processes for governing ourselves.
As we approach the busy season of finals and spring commencement, faculty, students, and staff have a different set of topics on their minds than usual. Rather than writing papers, mentoring students, and preparing campus for a period of celebration, we are instead preparing policies for whether or not our classroom and office doors should remain open and wondering whether a walk across campus to the library, to the cafeteria, and to the classroom may be interrupted by ICE agents. Others must worry about whether to leave the country to conduct research or to return home to see loved ones. It is true that the most public threats to higher education have, for now, mostly been limited to large, highly selective universities; it is also the case that those attacks are a harbinger for what now threatens our communities.
While these attacks have intensified, they are not new. Last spring, the essential principles of shared governance and academic freedom were under attack from donors at many institutions of higher education and from both political parties. The challenge to our neighbor, the University of Pennsylvania, led to the resignation of its president and significant restrictions on student and faculty dissent as well as a chilling atmosphere for programming, research, and teaching around a number of topics related to Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East. This was the context for the organization of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education — which includes, among its most prominent members, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) — and the first annual National Day of Action in 2024. In our communities, this day was also the occasion of Haverford faculty beginning their AAUP chapter anew. Since then, we have witnessed the foundation of tens, if not hundreds, of new AAUP chapters across U.S. campuses, and the pivot of the national AAUP to a powerful wall-to-wall organizing strategy that aims to bring all workers in higher education, as well as students, into the fold.
The National Day of Action this year finds us all at a moment of great jeopardy, but also occasions the importance of us standing together for asserting the public value of liberal arts education specifically and higher education broadly. The Coalition for Action in Higher Education, which is made up of labor unions, professional associations, and other organizing groups like the Debt Collective, includes among its demands the assertion of the freedom to teach and learn, to defend the value of dissent, to declare education as a civil right, and to defend worker autonomy. We insist that a robust higher education is an essential foundation for a healthy, resilient democracy, and liberal arts colleges, where closely-knit intellectual communities are cultivated and dissent based on extensive reading and critical thinking is nurtured, play a pivotal role in defending civil freedom.
The only way to achieve these goals, goals that underpin the vision of education that animates our work in the Tri-Co, is to band together. As Bryn Mawr College alumna Grace Lee Boggs has said, “In order to survive, we must take care of one another.” Survival means caring for our shared communities, affirming our values, and renewing the bonds of connection within and across our communities. Our institutions have taken a principled stand against federal overreach before. Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore all refused to take part in a federal student loan program in the late 1950s because it required a loyalty oath. Swarthmore President Courtney Smith wrote, “As an educational institution Swarthmore College believes that strong citizens in a democratic society are produced in an atmosphere of freedom where ideas do not need to be forbidden or protected.” Faculty at Haverford wrote in the AAUP Bulletin of the “special features” of a liberal arts education, which included not shying away from “divergent yet passionately held philosophical convictions.”
Our shared commitment to our students, our colleagues, and each other is at stake. We seek ways to stand together with campuses in Philadelphia and over a hundred other universities across the U.S. to insist upon the essential public value of the work we do in our institutions. Moreover, we assert that our communities, which include undocumented people, trans people, students and faculty on visas, must and will continue to exist. The way to discover how to take care of one another can be found only through working in community with one another.
