By the Student Commission of the FRSO
Class is back in session: for many, the Fall 2025 semester has begun. Students are coming back to a fraught situation. Trump has done his best to degrade public education. He aims to eliminate his political competition, who draw much support from forces on college campuses. What he presents as an alternative to education is no alternative at all: for-profit schools that teach lies from the “Make America Great Again” platform, owned by his peers and too expensive for most to attend.
Trump and his Secretary of Education Linda McMahon have unleashed a myriad of assaults on education. They are pressuring universities to cut ethnic studies, cultural centers, academic programs and jobs, to erase the history of oppression from curricula, to push out working-class youth, and to end student protest. Meanwhile, they want to use universities to continue conducting research for U.S.-backed wars, interventions, occupations and genocides that threaten peoples around the world. Like ICE, the Department of Defense saw huge budget increases.
The Office of Civil Rights, once a tool used to fight discrimination, has turned into its opposite. Trump is using the OCR to launch federal investigations at over 50 colleges for so-called discriminatory DEI policies or for so-called antisemitism, or in other words, pro-Palestine protests and divestment campaigns. To this end, he formed the Department of Justice Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. Columbia University caved into many of Trump’s demands and let federal agents search dorms and detain students. Several of their cases, including Mahmoud Khalil, gained national attention and infamy.
Many administrators leapt at the chance to get rid of programs they viewed as non-lucrative and to restrict protests that have been a thorn in their side. Many boards of trustees snuck in secret meetings during summer break to remold colleges according to Trump’s agenda. Anti-free speech policies now restrict flyering, postering and campus events. Cultural centers are being “merged” together and replaced with “student activities” offices. Diversity offices are closing. Majors like African American Studies, Chicano Studies, or Women’s and Gender Studies, which should all be expanded, are being frozen or axed. Initiatives to increase the admissions of Black, Chicano, Latino and other students are coming to an end. Language programs face cuts. In many cases, staff are being fired.
Trump’s ultimate goal is to dismantle public education. By firing half the staff at the Department of Education and transferring its powers to other departments, much of the apparatus that facilitates financial aid disbursement will be weakened. When states declare budget crises, cuts to education, healthcare, and other social services follow. The plan is for schools to close. In their place, expensive private schools funded by the likes of the DeVos family – Trump’s first Secretary of Education – will spring up like poisonous mushrooms. Combined with wage garnishment for defaulted student loans and the end of payment deferment, student loan debt will become so punishing that fewer working-class students will go to college. At the end of this mission, education truly will be only for the rich.
There are real things university administrators can do to resist Trump’s agenda: they can put the schools’ multi-million fundraiser monies towards jobs instead of investment portfolios. They can open up the colleges’ endowment funds and use that money to keep programs. They can cut from their own bloated administrative pay, which can amount to millions. They can defy Trump’s administration and call his bluff, instead of rolling out the red carpet and handing MAGA the key to the city.
Real resistance will come from people power – from students, faculty, campus workers and unions. In Spring 2025, Students for a Democratic Society chapters fought for international students to get back their visas, and in some cases won. Now, SDS is embarking on a campaign to Stop Trump’s Agenda. Its chapters are pushing everywhere for noncompliance with the Trump administration, for sanctuary policies, for an end of cuts to cultural programs, and an end to attacks on free speech.
SDS has called a National Day of Action to Stop Trump’s Agenda on August 28 for this purpose. SDS believes that education should be to the betterment of society – not for U.S. wars, not to make more architects of capitalism, not for racist miseducation. Campuses should be centers for young people to engage with revolutionary politics and organizing for the first time.
If we dare to fight, we stand a chance to win. If you are a revolutionary-minded student who wants to strike a blow against Trump and his ilk, start where you can – build a fight on campus. Join Students for a Democratic Society and sign up to start a chapter on its website, www.newsds.org. Call for a meeting, print a flyer, plan a protest. Raise demands that reflect the needs of the people on your campus, in terms that they can understand: “Stop Trump’s Agenda! Save Cultural Programs! No Deportations, Sanctuary Campuses Now!” Let us know what you’re up to and how far you want to go to build a revolutionary movement by writing to us on frso.org.
Our schools as we know them are in danger, but we can save them. We will forge a new generation of formidable, revolutionary young people, poised to take their place in the world. The last few years have proved it: students are ready to fight. If you haven’t joined the student movement yet, there is no better time to start than now.
