On February 19, academic workers, students, and their allies took part in a nationwide Higher Education Day of Action, called by the coalition of unions organized under Labor for Higher Education in at least 16 cities. This coordinated mobilization denounced the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on higher education workers, including cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, the freezing of National Science Foundation (NSF) grants that include “DEI-terms,” as well as executive orders aimed at making it easier to deport and criminalize immigrant workers and students at universities and schools. 

These measures are designed to strangle funding for research institutions, including lifesaving research on topics like pandemics and trans health care. These attacks also threaten the livelihoods of countless academic workers, from tenured professors to precariously employed adjuncts and graduate workers, as well as staff. Already, the NSF has laid off 10 percent of its workforce, signaling a broader offensive against publicly funded research.

There is even growing backlash within Trump’s own party, with Republican lawmakers and higher education officials acknowledging that the attacks would have a devastating economic toll in communities that employ thousands at universities. These attacks are not only aimed at research programs but are meant to weaken universities as a whole, undermining their role as spaces of critical thought and political organizing. In fact, it’s no surprise that they come on the heels of a historic student and worker movement in higher education which in recent years has denounced the lack of academic freedom, the university’s link to imperialist interests, and the precarity of university workers. 

Despite Trump’s attempts to impose his reactionary agenda, opposition is growing. Yesterday’s protest in New York City brought together hundreds of unionized academic workers, students, and local activists who linked their struggle to a simultaneous action led by federal workers and their unions against Elon Musk’s mass layoffs and cuts to services in the public sector. This convergence of struggles underscores a crucial reality: we need to coordinate our struggles against a broader offensive targeting workers, public services, and democratic rights. 

Trump and Musk Are Heading a Billionaire-Led Assault on Workers and the Oppressed 

In addition to the attacks on higher education, the Trump administration, with Musk leading the anti-democratic Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has initiated mass layoffs and cuts across federal agencies. Musk, who is unelected and the wealthiest person on the planet, has been working alongside his fellow billionaire Trump to dismantle the last bastions of unionized labor in the public sector. 

Many federal and academic workers, unlike Musk’s own employees, have union representation. Musk has aggressively fought unionization at Tesla and SpaceX, using mass layoffs, firings, and retaliatory measures to intimidate workers. Therefore, the layoffs at NSF and Musk’s broader anti-union actions are also about breaking the back of organized labor. At the same time, these attacks affect oppressed sectors of the working class disproportionately as Black workers make up about 18 to 20 percent of the federal workforce — more than their share of the general U.S. workforce.

The Far Right’s aggressive defunding and restructuring of higher education is designed to pave the way for privatization and undermine academic freedom. Cutting public funding for research and universities hands over knowledge production to capitalists like Musk, who can step in to fill the gaps left by gutted public institutions — ensuring that scientific advancement is linked even more directly to the interests of the ruling class.

Musk benefits directly from the weakening of the public sector, as it allows corporations like his to more easily exploit workers, resources, and technology for profit in the industries that Musk operates in, from space exploration. to AI, to energy.

Finally, the attacks on DEI programs and research agendas are part of Trump’s ideological agenda to pin the blame for deteriorating working and living conditions on the Left and oppressed people and divert attention away from the root causes of economic and social crises in the United States. Instead, Trump hopes to reshape higher education and scientific advancements around the interests of the most reactionary sectors of the bourgeoisie rather than the needs of the working class and oppressed.

We Need a Working-Class Movement Against the Far Right

Yesterday’s Day of Action is a crucial first step, but it must be expanded into a larger movement. The battle is not just for higher education workers and federal employees, but for the entire working class. These coordinated attacks are designed to discipline workers, silence dissent, and further privatize knowledge and public institutions to serve capitalist interests. 

To truly resist the Far Right’s offensive, we must build a mass, independent, and militant movement — one that mobilizes across the rank and file of unions, forging strong alliances between academic workers, public sector workers, both employed and unemployed, the broader labor movement, activists, patients, and students affected by these attacks. The seeds of this movement lie in the historic labor strikes at universities across the country from the University of California to the New School in New York. We can also learn from experiences in self-organization like the rank-and-file academic workers assembly which organized a sick out to fight back against the attacks on democratic rights at universities. 

At the same time, the fight to defend higher education and public services cannot be separated from the broader struggle against the Far Right’s reactionary agenda. This includes fighting back against Trump’s measures that target immigrants and trans folks. 

This fight implies confronting the union bureaucracy who is calling for cooperation with the Trump administration, the university administrators who did not hesitate to repress students and workers in the face of attacks, and the Democratic Party who insists that our only option is to wait for the next elections. These complicit sectors are disarming us in the face of an escalating assault on the working class and the oppressed. 

Instead, our path forward should be based on independent, working-class struggle — one that directly confronts the Far Right, challenges a system that prioritizes profit over people, and reclaims education and public institutions as instruments of liberation rather than tools of exploitation and oppression.