Democracy Works8 Syys 2025

Standing up for higher education

Summer is typically a quiet time for higher education but this summer has been anything but quiet amid funding cuts, lawsuits, and questions about the value of American colleges and universities.

Our guests this week are part of Stand Together for Higher Ed, a new nonpartisan movement of university faculty and staff focused on building collective power to uphold the core values of higher education. Kathy Roberts Forde is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mark Pachucki is associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-author of the university's Mutual Defense Academic Compact (MDAC) resolution.

Ford, Pachucki, and their Stand Together for Higher Ed colleagues spent the summer talking to faculty and staff from universities across the country about what they can do to defend their institutions amid ongoing attacks and threats from the federal government. They don't have a quick, easy answer but they do have a plan for how people across campuses come together to share how higher education impacts our everyday lives.

Is this approach enough? Chris Beem and Candis Watts Smith disagree on the value of Stand Together's approach and discuss their differences at the end of the episode.

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