Transcript: Why Professors Got Behind El-Sayed

AAUP President Todd Wolfson says that endorsing El-Sayed and other candidates is part of defending both higher education and democracy.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 24 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: We have a great guest and interesting discussion today. Todd Wolfson is a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, and for this session, he’s also the president of the American Association of University Professors, and we’re going to talk about some of the work AAUP has done and is doing. So Todd, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.

Todd Wolfson: Thanks for having me, Perry. I appreciate you.

Bacon: So we’re going to talk about something that’s controversial even among my liberal friends, for lack of a better way to say that, which is, AAUP on the eve of the Michigan primary decided to endorse Abdul El-Sayed in that primary.

So talk about what made you—because it’s interesting, I think it’s clear that on higher education, the right and Republicans are in a different place than Democrats are, but I’m not sure I totally know where Haley Stevens and El-Sayed differ on higher education. So talk about why you decided to make that endorsement in that primary.

Wolfson: Yeah, I’ll say there’s a history here. I was elected in the summer of ‘24, before the Trump-Harris presidential campaign, and when I was elected, we pivoted really fast to put out a vision for higher ed, like a fully funded public system, more investment in the system. We can go down the line. I can talk about that later if you want.

And we did it, and we signed off with all the big unions that represent higher education workers, so NEA and AFT and SEIU—some faculty, some represent staff, some represent medical workers. And then we started working with the Harris campaign, because they had said they support a lot of our vision, and we were planning to actually endorse all the way back then. We didn’t get it done, ultimately, for a host of reasons.

And so fast-forward into the ‘26 cycle. We were very public that we were planning to endorse. With our membership more publicly than that, I put out plenty of statements saying that we’re—

Bacon: Endorse in primary, just to be clear—endorse in primaries.

Wolfson: Potentially endorse in primaries, and certainly endorse and engage. I can get to El-Sayed and Stevens. And so then, the thing that made the Michigan race important, I’ll say, is—there’s a couple things. One is that Abdul’s father was a president of an AAUP local in Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, which is an AAUP local that represents faculty at EMU. Abdul himself was an AAUP member, and also an AFT member, and we’re affiliated with AFT. And we started having dialogue, and we put out our vision. AAUP and AFT came out with a blueprint for higher ed. Again, I can lay out what the vision was, and we shared it with him, and he fully endorsed it.

And I’ll say there’s another piece to this, which is, another higher education organization who we work closely with, Higher Ed Labor United, had a town hall for the Democratic nominees—and this was well back before McMorrow dropped out. McMorrow and El-Sayed came. Stevens did not come.

Our local at Wayne Academic Union had a questionnaire which they gave out to all three candidates. Stevens neglected to respond to our questionnaire, which asked basic questions like, “Do you support a fully invested public system?” Et cetera, et cetera. And then our AFT Michigan affiliate—they’re not affiliated with us, but we’re in relationship with them—they also did a survey. Most of our unions in Michigan are part of AFT Michigan, and they did a poll, and it said that 80 percent of their membership supported El-Sayed, and they endorsed.

And so then we moved to endorse shortly thereafter, for this multiple set of reasons. One, he was aligned with us in our vision for higher ed. Two, his family comes out of our union. And three, both our membership and the membership at AFT Michigan had overwhelmingly supported him. And, just to keep this rolling, we plan to make multiple endorsements going into the midterms for the general. So there’s two questions to parse out here. One, should we have engaged in a primary? But then two, should we be endorsing writ large?

Bacon: Yeah, and I’m going to ask both of them. The first was the primary. So let me stick with the primary question first, because I think—OK, so I’m going to speak in more political language, and you can see how you want to respond to that.

So what I’ve seen is, my professor friends who I would describe, particularly professors who I would describe as more progressive and more leftist, are for this. The ones who I would describe as more center left are against this. I’d put Abdul more in the progressive camp. Stevens is more in the center left camp.

Is it possible that AAUP is more aligned, or you’re more aligned, with the sort of progressive camp, and that’s partly why you would want to endorse him in this race?

Wolfson: No. If a centrist Democrat came out and said publicly, Look, we want a fully invested public system. We want a public higher ed system that pushes back against overwhelming contingency of faculty workers. We want a public system, and a federal research program that fully funds NIH and NSF and is going to take care of Pell, et cetera, we would absolutely be endorsing them.

I’ll keep this as an I proposition: higher education has been defunded in the United States, the public system, over the last 60 years. It’s been a serious divestment from the federal and state governments, and it’s led to all sorts of outcomes that have been really bad for the United States, for our higher education system, for our students, and for our faculty and staff. And so we feel like we need people who are going to stand up and champion the system. I don’t care who they are, if they’re going to champion higher ed right now.

The Republicans have been hell-bent on destroying what is the greatest higher education system in the world, bar none. And so it’s time for us to stand up and fight for that system. What we said was, we need champions, people who are going to say, This is a critical issue to me, who are running for elected office, and Abdul El-Sayed said that. So no, I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t endorse a more centrist candidate who is speaking our language around higher education.

Bacon: Let me push, and we’ll ask some more questions, which is—

Bacon: I would support a centrist Democrat who liked wealth taxes, who loved unions, et cetera, et cetera, who wanted to ban data centers. Those people tend not to exist, because that’s not what centrist Democrats are. And we just had a Democratic president who we had to beg and plead to forgive college debt, who seemed to be leery of defending colleges.

Is part of the issue here that centrist Democrats, like Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnists, love to demean college professors and so on? So is part of being a centrist Democrat right now trashing higher ed, and therefore is that unfortunately where we are right now? Because that’s how I perceive it.

Wolfson: I think that’s what I feel, right? Like, our truck is not with the centrists, it’s them coming after us.

And so what we’ve seen—a great academic called Stuart Hall called it the Great Moving Right Show. And as the Republicans move right on higher ed, the centrist Democrats move right with them, and have made us a problem. We are not a problem, right? They talk about faculty being leftist, and I’m thinking to myself, I represent a dude who’s dreaming about a black hole, another guy who’s training nurses, a woman who is an engineer, and the large majority of my faculty are not thinking politically. They’re building the society we all depend on.

And for Democrats not to embrace........

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