onurdongel/E+/Getty Images
In 2025, West Virginia’s Legislature required the state’s flagship university to establish a center on “civics, culture and statesmanship” devoted to teaching conservative ideas and traditions. Lawmakers appropriated $3 million for the effort. The result? Just one student enrolled.
Only a couple years earlier, the same Legislature had helped create the budget crisis that led West Virginia University to eliminate dozens of tenured faculty positions and close programs in subjects as fundamental as foreign languages. Today, students cannot major in Spanish, but they can major in e-sports. Political priorities receive new funding while core educational programs disappear.
Yet national debate remains fixated on something else entirely: the latest controversial statement from an Ivy League professor. As another academic year begins, Americans are once again asking whether universities have become too “woke,” whether professors are too political and whether faculty are responsible for declining public confidence in higher education.
Those debates begin with a basic mistake: Professors are not colleges and universities.
In no other industry do we so casually confuse labor with management. If an automaker produces defective cars, we do not blame the workers on the assembly line. If Netflix cancels a popular series, we do not blame the actors. If your bus arrives late, you probably do not blame the driver. Yet when universities become more expensive, eliminate academic programs or make unpopular institutional decisions, Americans routinely blame professors.
That confusion obscures what has actually happened to higher education.
For much of the 20th century, faculty occupied a unique position. Through tenure and shared governance, professors were more than employees. They helped determine curriculum, academic standards, hiring and the long-term direction of their institutions. Universities were never democracies, but they recognized that those responsible for teaching and research deserved a meaningful voice in how those institutions were governed.
Over the past several decades, that model has steadily unraveled.
State legislatures have dictated curriculum, restricted academic freedom and weakened faculty governance. Governing boards and administrators have centralized authority. Most significantly, tenure—the institution that gave faculty both independence and influence—has steadily eroded. Today, roughly two-thirds of college instructors work in contingent positions with no possibility of tenure, often hired one semester or even one course at a time.
When workers lose their seat at the governing table, they do not stop speaking. They simply begin speaking the way workers always have: collectively, through unions—and through politics.
That transformation has affected students as much as faculty. Over decades, states have reduced public investment in higher education while tuition and student debt have soared. Universities have increasingly responded by chasing market incentives, expanding administrative bureaucracy and reducing instructional costs. Students pay more. Faculty lose security. Academic programs disappear. These are not separate crises. They are the consequences of the same political and economic choices.
That is why today’s debates about “wokeness” miss the point.
According to Gallup’s 2026 survey on higher education, Americans who distrust colleges are about as likely to cite cost as ideology. Yet public debate overwhelmingly focuses on professors’ politics instead of the structural decisions that have made higher education more expensive, less democratic and less accessible.
That imbalance serves powerful interests. It shifts responsibility away from lawmakers, governing boards and administrators who shape higher education while turning professors into convenient villains.
Faculty did not choose this transformation. We did not dismantle tenure. We did not weaken shared governance. We did not slash public funding. We did not create the financial model that saddled students with unprecedented debt while turning academic labor into increasingly contingent work.
We are living with those decisions. And like workers everywhere, we are responding accordingly. Because when the conditions that make teaching and research possible become political questions, remaining silent is not neutrality. It is acquiescence.
No one is surprised when the United Auto Workers endorses candidates who support manufacturing workers or when teachers’ unions endorse candidates who support public schools. Those organizations understand that politics shape the conditions under which their members work and the public they serve.
Universities are no different. The American Association of University Professors is no different.
The only reason the AAUP’s endorsement of a political candidate became national news is that professors long imagined themselves as something other than workers—partners in governing their institutions rather than employees whose working conditions were determined by decisions made elsewhere.
That era is over.
Long before today’s battles, Albert Einstein understood what happens when intellectual workers lose the ability to shape the institutions they serve. A member of an American Federation of Teachers local at Princeton University, he argued that intellectual workers must organize “both to protect their own economic status and also … to secure their influence in the political field,” because doing so was essential to defending academic freedom and, ultimately, democracy itself. His insight feels remarkably contemporary.
Higher education is not a luxury. It is one of America’s greatest democratic inventions. It expands opportunity. It advances scientific discovery. It educates the people who build our economy. It prepares citizens to govern themselves. And it creates knowledge that no market can produce on its own.
That mission cannot survive endless disinvestment, political interference, attacks on academic freedom and the systematic erosion of the people whose work makes universities possible.
Academic workers did not create this crisis. But we intend to build something better: a system of higher education worthy of this country—affordable and accessible to every qualified student, governed once again by those who teach and learn within it, capable of educating the people who will build the world’s most innovative economy, and strong enough to sustain the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.
That is not a partisan project.
It is the unfinished work of American higher education.
