Last Friday, on Nov. 7, labor unions and other higher education organizations from around Pennsylvania rallied at each of Senator Dave McCormick’s seven offices to protest his support for funding cuts and the Trump administration’s wider actions.
“We’ve seen continuous attacks on higher education, [on] both students and faculty,” said Dr. Liz Polcha, Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Drexel University. “Government officials and politicians shouldn’t be dictating what we do in our classrooms… and what students can and cannot learn.”
Faculty, staff, and students from across Philadelphia’s many colleges and universities attended the rally. Community College of Philadelphia professor Marissa Johnson said they had gathered “to say, ‘Senator McCormick, you have failed Philadelphia’… some of the best and brightest students are being failed.”
One of her students, representing the CCP’s chapter of the Sunrise Movement, added that he knows “the importance of giving students the opportunity to get ahead… students like me who rely on Pell grants, rely on SNAP, rely on the CCP.”
President Trump proposed a budget in June that would cut essential sources of federal funding for colleges and universities. While many of the proposed cuts were rejected by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, Pell grant eligibility was reduced as part of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, and the Department of Education froze or cancelled thousands of grants, essentially cutting that funding anyway. There is uncertainty about what will be cut in the final budget.
“I teach a class called ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities,’ and the National Endowment for Humanities is one of the government organizations that is affected by the cuts,” Polcha told The Triangle about her personal experience with President Trump’s crackdown on grants deemed related to DEI. “I start to wonder, is my research going to be funded anymore… under the Trump administration, and the answer is probably no.”
“We want Drexel to take an affirmative stance that they would support vulnerable faculty if they do run afoul… of the kinds of punitive measures the government is taking,” Dr. Linda Kim, associate professor and Vice President of Drexel’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told The Triangle. Polcha, who is also involved with Drexel AAUP, said, “At AAUP, we’re always talking about how can we support each other, so that we know that we have research opportunities, and also so that we know that Drexel is looking out for us… and they’re going to advocate for us as we go through things like promotion or evaluation.”
The Department of Education has promised “substantial and meaningful federal grants” to any college or university that signs its Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. Kim warned that “if Drexel were to sign onto that compact, it would effectively be recruited into an arm of the federal government in policing all of those provisions [of the compact].” She believes universities “should not be making these deals with Trump,” adding that “we’ve seen what’s happened to Columbia: they were willing to bargain and yet they still haven’t seen the federal research funds released.”
Kim quizzed the crowd on a list of scenarios, asking them whether each would be in violation of the compact. She claimed that simply teaching Gender Studies would not be allowed under the compact’s rules against “purposefully punish[ing]… conservative ideas.” Similarly, she claimed admitting an international student who had posted in support of Palestine on social media would violate the compact’s requirement to reject international students “who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.”
Kim told The Triangle that the compact redefines “what most academics think gender constitutes;” it explicitly requires signatories to interpret “‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes.”
Polcha believes that “these attacks like we see in the compact are really thinly veiled white supremacist ideology,” adding that she’s concerned about “the conversations [she’s] allowed to have in the classroom.”
On Oct. 3, Pennsylvania State Representative Rick Krajewski, whose district includes University City, introduced legislation to the Pennsylvania House that would withhold state funding from institutions that sign onto President Trump’s compact. On Oct. 16, Penn, one of the nine universities where the compact was initially presented, rejected signing it. The compact is now open to all colleges and universities to sign until Nov. 21.
Krajewski led the rally in chanting, “Up with higher-ed, down with billionaires!” A significant focus of the rally was on real estate executives and billionaires supporting the Trump administration’s actions at the local and national levels. He criticized Philadelphia’s universities for being afraid of funding cuts despite their financial security from endowments. Endowment assets are typically reserved for emergency use only, though Krajewski argued that “if this isn’t an emergency, then I don’t know what is.”
Many of the speakers emphasized student engagement as crucial to past labor wins for faculty and staff, such as the 2023 Temple University graduate employees’ strike and the March 2023 school worker strike in Los Angeles.
“Students have so much power,” Polcha specifically called out to student organizers at Drexel, adding that “especially in this moment of transformation, Drexel is paying attention to the classes students want to take… they want to hear from you, and so if we can get student voices in this fight, we would be even stronger.”