College campuses have become ground zero for President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Under his and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s guidance, federal agents have detained multiple international students under threat of deportation.
Starting with the March 8 arrest of Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia University housing, multiple students and faculty have been targeted, including Cornell grad student Momodou Taal, whose student visa was revoked by the State Department earlier this month; and 21-year-old Yunseo Chung, a Columbia student and permanent resident, who a judge recently ruled could not be held in Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention as the deportation case against her continues.
This week, footage spread online of plainclothes ICE agents snatching Tufts grad student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, spurring local protests. Like Khalil, Ozturk is being held in a Louisiana ICE facility, allegedly for signing onto an op-ed in the college newspaper calling for university divestment and for Tufts to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.” The government has not specified what she is supposed to have done, beyond “activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
On Friday morning, Ozturk, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Massachusetts, filed a petition arguing that Ozturk’s “detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process” and asks that “she be immediately returned to Massachusetts and released from custody,” per the press release. On the same day Ozturk was detained, Alireza Doroudi, a grad student at the University of Alabama, was “reportedly arrested at around 5 a.m. at his home,” according to the college paper.
All were seemingly targeted for pro-Palestine speech or attending related protests; Georgetown postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri was also detained by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents, though there’s no evidence that he participated in the pro-Palestine movement directly. Instead, Suri’s lawyer is arguing that he was targeted because his wife is Palestinian-American and her father previously had ties to Hamas.
Columbia specifically continues to be a hotbed for these issues. After the Trump administration threatened to pull $400 million in federal funding over the university’s handling of pro-Palestine protests, Columbia agreed to the government’s terms. Last Friday, the university announced that “it would overhaul its student disciplinary process, ban protesters from wearing masks, bar demonstrations from academic buildings, adopt a new definition of antisemitism and put its Middle Eastern studies program under the supervision of a vice provost who would have a say over curriculum and hiring,” per the Associated Press.
The legality of these detentions, and the targeting of students and faculty over protests, is being challenged in the courts, including with a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association, represented in part by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia. The press release reads in part, “Today’s filing argues that the ideological-deportation policy has created a climate of repression and intense fear on university campuses, ‘terrorizing students and faculty for their exercise of First Amendment rights in the past, intimidating them from exercising those rights now, and silencing political viewpoints that the government disfavors.’”
In the meantime, university members from professors to students to campus workers are unsure how to respond. Teen Vogue spoke to the elected president of the AAUP, Todd Wolfson, professor of media studies at Rutgers University, about the union’s approach to surviving the Trump administration; right-wing attacks on higher education; and what those on campuses can do to protect each other and fight back.
“The legal mechanisms are one level, but courts are not going to be our savior here, so we must organize and build collective power at the campus level, and then build it out from there,” Wolfson tells Teen Vogue. “Then we need to build mass militancy.”
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Todd Wolfson: We feel there needs to be a union-slash-organization that's devoted to higher ed, that brings an organizing, militant, fighting energy to the sector. We felt that before Donald Trump was elected, that this was really necessary because of the 70 years of divestment that have taken place on our campuses and all the outcomes, which have frankly queued up the attack from these right-wing ideologues that we've seen more recently. The long divestment has both hollowed out the core of higher ed, and also created mission drift, where higher ed forgets what its purpose is. And so that's made it much easier for this radical right-wing attack to take place.
We wanted to build alliances that didn't hew to the traditional trade or job category alliances, where faculty align with faculty, grad workers align with grad workers, professional staff align with professional staff. We feel that it's necessary to break down those barriers and build a movement for higher education at the campus and national level[s] that includes all of us and organizes for all of us, including our students and the communities where we work and live. We also wanted to build a coalition so that we could start to express the sector's will at the national level in many ways — politically, electorally.
At the most fundamental level, it means organizing, organizing, organizing: Training people on how to do one-on-ones; training chapters on how to build membership, run meetings, build campaigns, build power; and then scaling that up at the national level — because there are so many unions that represent higher ed workers — by building a national coalition of higher ed unions, which we've done, called Labor for Higher Ed. I think the approach has been to really transform the sector and make it a sector that can stand up for itself and fight both around state and federal divestment, which has taken place, and put out a proactive vision of a fully-funded public higher education. [That includes] an end to student debt, an end to contingency on our campuses, work with dignity on our campuses, and yes, academic freedom, freedom of speech, etcetera; and also, respond[ing] to these much more recent right-wing radical incursions.
TW: Like everyone, when the news dropped about the Trump administration's coercion or extortion of Columbia, threatening $400 million in essentially all biomedical research to force pretty radical academic changes that are [a] massive political intrusion onto the autonomy of the university, we were dismayed. We wanted and expected and hoped that Columbia itself would stand up and use legal and other mechanisms to fight back. They made a different decision, so we decided somewhere in the process that we felt like it was critical for AAUP and AFT to work together; we also were in a lot of dialogue with United Auto Workers (UAW), which has members at Columbia; and we decided to launch this lawsuit.
The biggest goal is to say it's illegal. You can't use federal funds that have nothing to do with speech to try to control speech on campus. If the federal government thinks that there's rampant anti-Semitism on campus — and they offered no evidence [of that], but if you think that — then there's a process, and that process is not to go after pediatric cancer research to get them to toe some line around making campus safer for Jewish students.
We sued both to take this on at Columbia, but also to draw a line, because we know that their goal is going to be to roll Columbia and then roll the rest of that sector… because Columbia had chosen not to [draw a line]. In this way, this is where labor fills the breach. It has to fill the breach. And this is why labor organizations in higher ed and in every sector are critical to the future of this country, particularly with the rise of fascism. [Ed. note: In a statement provided to the New York Times, Columbia interim president Katrina A. Armstrong said the agreement was part of an effort to “make every student, faculty and staff member safe and welcome on our campus.” Teen Vogue reached out to Columbia for comment on the lawsuit.]
TW: How we're approaching [AAUP’s] national work comes out of lessons learned at Rutgers. I became president of the Rutgers faculty union right as COVID hit, and Rutgers is one of the biggest universities in the country. It's got 70,000 students and 30,000 employees, so 100,000 people; it touches the life of probably everyone in Jersey.
As soon as the pandemic hit, they started saying to me, as the president of the Faculty Union, there's gonna be some drastic cuts and layoffs here. So we coalesce[d] this coalition of workers unions and organized together. It wasn't perfect, but [we] did this thing called a work share program, which is sort of like furloughs, but you're kept whole through federal and state unemployment. We offered it to the university. I think when we first offered it, we saw savings of well over $100 million. They rejected it, did some stuff, laid some people off. But we kept fighting. We ended up winning it and getting job security first, staff and adjuncts got rehired, etcetera.
But importantly, the lesson that came out of it for me was that it's hard, hard, hard to organize across job category because of difference — difference in power at the institution; racialized, gendered differences that often adhere to those differences in structural power, right? It was really hard work, and we failed in many ways, but it was the way we were going to have the most power in responding to the institution and the institution's anti-human decisions.
That’s how we've been operating at Rutgers since then, not always with all the unions, but we went on strike in ‘23 and [then] we went on strike with all the three academic unions. Ten thousand workers went out together, and we had much more power when we did that than we would have if any singular union went out alone. (In response to a request for comment, a representative for Rutgers told Teen Vogue, “Rutgers deeply values its students, faculty, and staff and is committed to providing an environment where every member of our community can be supported and thrive. Through the efforts of our community, we are proud to be among the leading public universities in the country and rank among the best places to work in New Jersey.”)
TW: The grads and even faculty that are foreign born workers are scared as hell — as they should be. We just saw what happened to the grad student at Tufts yesterday. They're abducting people off the streets. They're forcing Columbia to pass rules that say students can't protest wearing masks, yet when they abduct people, [the agents are] all wearing masks. It's crazy what's going on here. There's a sense of fear. We're thinking through, how do we respond to this?
It was one thing when there was an encampment and the universities threatened to bring in the police on the encampment on Rutgers’ campus[es], and faculty — and I was one of them, through the union — put a ring around the encampment and said, you're gonna have to come through us to get to the students. That is easy, because there was one place, one time, right? But the way they're approaching these abductions and deportations is it can happen on any street at any moment, and it can happen to any person. They're going after people who aren't necessarily the leaders of these encampment movements. I think the woman at Tufts, she had written like one op-ed.
That is a much more difficult problem to respond to, because you're going to be on a street corner. We can't respond in time to those things. We're thinking about what to do at Rutgers, but I can't tell you that we have a solution. This is a big problem where we have ICE on our streets abducting people because Donald Trump or Marco Rubio don't like their speech. That's crazy, and we have to figure out how to respond to it. But it does present a logistics problem, if nothing else.
TW: Organizing, joining whatever organization exists on your campus that represents students, faculty or staff. Maybe it's a union, maybe you don't have a union, maybe it's an AAUP chapter. You should be joining those things right away.
If no organization exists, I think it makes sense to build something new. And if organizations exist but they're not meeting the moment at the local level, then it maybe makes sense to build something new as well. But what we're also finding is people starting new things where things exist, and that's not always helpful. So where things exist, whether it's your local UAW or your local AAUP or AFT, or your local student organization that's fighting over these issues, you should join it.
Alongside that — and we want to launch something like this, but we haven't done it yet — there should be a process where faculty, students and staff are signing letters at the campus level, writing and then signing petitions at the campus level, calling on our institutions not to obey the administration. You need to get a critical mass of signatures on those letters for them to have meaning for the administration of the campus. Then at the national level, we're trying to build out a network of lawyers that can defend and support people.
We also have to figure out a way to scale up the militancy in our sector. We have a day of action on April 8 that's called Kill the Cuts — killthecuts.org — and that is us building towards something where we would be ready for a much more militant approach, because we think we can make a more militant response at scale, which we think we need to do.
Then there also needs to be a political strategy. People need to be talking to their elected leaders and putting a lot of pressure on them, particularly in red and purple districts, where the cuts to higher ed are actually devastating. Those elected leaders need to be called out because their own constituencies are getting really hurt by Trump's reckless moves.
The overarching reason we're in such a bad state right now is because the radical right has been the only part of society that's been talking about and defining higher education, and they've been doing it for a couple years, from Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida through the last election and now post-election; and also with those Education Workforce [Committee] meetings last year. They've done a really good job at completely targeting and undermining higher education. Some of it we played into, because tuition is ridiculous, and families shouldn't have to pay that kind of tuition, and students shouldn't have to go into debt to get a college degree. Those are things that need to end.
American higher education has always been flawed. Our public land grant institutions often were developed on stolen land. Obviously it's been an institution that's favored white people and left people of color out for a long time. That said, it's also been the best higher ed system in the world in terms of innovation in research and technology. It's been a real engine of this country's economy.
For us, we want the opposite of what the Republicans — and maybe even what the Democrats — want. We want a fully-funded sector. We want a sector where any kid can go and get a college degree without going into debt, and then figure out what kind of world they want to build and become a critical thinker and become part of this democracy, if that's what we can call it at this point.
The Republican attack on higher ed undermines everybody in this country, and they're doing it not because of high tuition rates. They're doing it because an educated populace is a problem for fascism, and they want to kill it. It's just important to reset that and say that this sector, though not perfect, has a really important role to play. It's the reason we have the internet. It's the reason we have any healthcare breakthroughs we get in this country. They all get built out of our labs in our research, and attacking it is something that hurts all of us, and it's crazy.
We're going to come out of this stronger, no doubt about that… But I say that recognizing that so many of us are going to suffer along the way, and it's going to fall on vulnerable communities, people of color, transgender people, foreigners, and so I say it not washing out what's in front of us, because I'm scared to death too.
