There are unfolding crises in government funding and support for higher education in the US and UK. Highlighting the parallels between these crises, Jana Bacevic argues the only available response to academics is to organise around their shared interests.

It is a rare moment when universities in the UK look at their counterparts in the US with anything but envy. The first month of Donald Trump’s administration, however, may have created exactly one such moment. In a stream of executive orders, two areas affecting higher education immediately stood out. One targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and policies; the other freezing federally funded research, including grants administered through National Institutes of Health (for instance, research on cancer and infectious diseases) and the National Science Foundation, including climate change-related research. While some of these orders are currently held up in courts, the power of the executive in the US means the President is likely to eventually see some of them through.

This kind of scenario may seem hard to imagine in the UK. The Head of State has no comparable political power (and, even if they did, would be unlikely to use it). So far, the UK’s Labour government has shown little inclination to pursue the ‘war on woke’ with the same fervour as their predecessors. US research universities are significantly more reliant on government grants, whereas their UK counterparts depend on tuition fees, especially those from ‘overseas’ students. Yet, policies are never only about ideology or only about efficiency; there is a deeper convergence between what is currently going on in the UK and the US, and it concerns the restructuring of the labour force.

DEI has long been the dog whistle of choice for reactionaries, one that has found unlikely adherents across political divisions. Targeting DEI initiatives is an easy way for the Trump administration to show voters they are delivering, but it is also an efficient way to undercut the sector’s ability to maintain a narrative critical of the administration. The administration’s various ideologues have been vocal about classifying not only Critical Race Theory, but any narrative offering a less-than-rosy perspective on US history or its present as unpatriotic or ‘un-American’.

While tenure protects some academics in the US, it is not only their less securely employed colleagues, but also administrators and all those associated with programme management whose jobs will be at risk.

This has implications for programmes and courses that engage with racial, environmental, and reproductive justice, critique of colonialism, or acknowledge the existence of more than two genders (as gender studies and many Indigenous ontologies do). The new administration’s official designation of men and women as the only genders means this has different implications than in the UK, where ‘terf wars’ in academia have mostly (in my analysis, wrongly) taken the form of conflicts over academic freedom and freedom of speech. While tenure protects some academics in the US, it is not only their less securely employed colleagues, but also administrators and all those associated with programme management whose jobs will be at risk. PhD positions and postdocs are routinely funded through grants; federal grants come with overheads that help cover universities’ operational costs. It is not clear whether, and which, universities will be able to make up for shortfalls caused by pauses to or termination of federal funding.

For at least some academics and students, termination of contracts may mean not only loss of income, but also a threat to immigration status. The recent arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student currently threatened with deportation, suggests that universities and colleges are no longer protected from immigration raids, even when they pre-emptively comply with the new administration as Columbia has done.

the likely result of these policies, beyond sowing chaos and confusion, is a major restructuring of the workforce.

In the short run, this probably means currently employed academics will have to do much more work. In the long run, the likely result of these policies, beyond sowing chaos and confusion, is a major restructuring of the workforce. Close to two-thirds of academics in the US are not tenured. Those not able to readjust to the ideological mandate of the new administration will join former federal workers in the growing ranks of short-term, precariously employed ‘cognitariat’ or have the option of taking a job in one of the sectors the Trump administration seems set to boost – oil and gas, or perhaps Tesla factories.

Analogies are always tenuous, but several cases of major restructuring come to mind. The aftermath of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, when the regime retaliated through the mass-firing of intellectuals, as well as similar events in Hungary and former Yugoslavia; contemporary Turkey and Russia, where academics have been under prolonged persecution by their respective regimes; and most infamously purges of Jews from academic (and other civil service) positions in Germany in the 1930s. Authoritarian regimes are fond of making a show out of suppressing intellectuals. It makes sense, however, to remember these techniques exist on a continuum.

A restructuring of the higher education workforce, on a smaller scale, is currently underway in the UK. Close to a hundred of UK institutions have announced job cuts in some form, either through a combination of voluntary and compulsory redundancies, or closing entire programmes, often in social sciences and humanities. If the majority of these plans go through, it is not clear that the UK economy nor its welfare system would be able to absorb it. Similarly to the US, loss of employment has implications for immigration status. Given that immigrants on work visas are usually not eligible for unemployment benefits (the ‘no recourse to public funds’ clause), many will have no choice but to leave the UK – or risk deportation.

In this sense, cheeky suggestions that UK universities could use Trump’s war on higher education to attract staff from the US are both morally and practically disqualified. Of course, it would be good if UK universities would offer solidarity and, even if temporary, funding assistance to colleagues in the US, along the lines of French universities, or by Scholars at Risk. This, however, would require a fundamentally different moral and political vision: one where international academic staff and students are co-creators rather than resources to be exploited and where knowledge is a truly global public good. Needless to say, such a vision should extend beyond US academics alone.

cheeky suggestions that UK universities could use Trump’s war on higher education to attract staff from the US are both morally and practically disqualified.

In the immediate future, the best way for academics to respond is to get organised, both through trade unions and other affinity groups (for instance, federal employees and migrants). Trade unions have historically been at the front of resistance to authoritarianism: new forms of authoritarianism call for renewal of organising. There is scope for learning from Amazon workers who resisted union-busting, or workers from the Italian GKN factory who, in response to cuts, took collective ownership of the factory and repurposed it for sustainable production. In the long run, democratic societies need a democratically-run higher education.

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