2026
August 28, 2026
Board member Aimee Loiselle presents at the Next System Teach-Ins (NSTI) Organizer Workshop, “Practical First Steps in Organizing Your Teach-In.” NSTI runs these workshops (register here) on alternate months to train organizers and create momentum for the April 2027 launch of the second round of teach-ins. With other organizers, Loiselle discusses the history of successful justice and labor movement tactics for bringing in new participants to build widespread democratic movements.
July 2026
SFNDHE joins Next System Teach-Ins (NSTI) as a convener. Board members Aimee Loiselle and Annelise Orleck serve as the representatives and support SFNDHE members and followers in organizing and leading their own teach-ins. NSTI is a global project of George Mason University, University of Vermont, AAUP, Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and others to bring people together — on college campuses, in neighborhood centers, union halls, and public spaces — in the work of building a system that sustains the future we all deserve.
April 8, 2026
Board member Jill Penn in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the damage to Georgia higher education from reckless budget cuts.
March 16, 2026
Board member Aimee Loiselle facilitates a roundtable, “How to Build a College: Experimental Alternatives in the History of Higher Education,” part of the series Higher Education: Forgotten Pasts/Alternative Futures. Presenters share histories of alternative programs and colleges in the 20th century.
—> Check out all the Forgotten Pasts/Alternative Futures webinars on our YouTube playlist. These present ways to envision and enact new futures for higher education. Presented in collaboration with the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and Critical Legal Collective, SFNDHE is working on how we might fully reimagine and bring to fruition higher education as a democratic and egalitarian public good for all students, faculty, staff, and community members.
2025
November 14, 2025
SFNDHE joins with co-sponsors the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and Critical Legal Collective to coordinate the Symposium on the University and Democracy, hosted by the Boston University School of Law. Universities are meant to be guardians of democracy and bulwarks against authoritarianism. Yet many of our most powerful universities have enabled the Trump administration’s open effort to exert “existential terror” on our institutions and our communities. This convening will critically examine why universities have failed to protect democracy and how we might democratize our institutions and reorient toward their core mission: to pursue truth and knowledge for the common good.
September 24, 2025
Board member Lisa Levenstein introduces the webinar, “Indigenous Nations and Higher Education,” in the series Forgotten Pasts/Alternative Futures co-sponsored by the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education, and Critical Legal Collective. Jeremiah Chin, professor of law at the University of Washington, moderates the conversation, which explores how Indigenous nations can provide a source of counter-sovereignty for the functions of educational governance historically overseen by federal offices. Panelists include Eva Flying, president of Chief Dull Knife College; Megan Bang, professor of learning sciences at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy; Sandy Grande, professor of political science and Native American and Indigenous studies at University of Connecticut; Amanda Tachine, professor of educational studies at University of Oregon; and Bryan Brayboy, professor of earth systems science for anthropocene at Northwestern University. Recording available here.
April 28, 2025
Shannan Clark leads the webinar, “Lessons from the CUNY Experience,” the first in the series Forgotten Pasts/Alternative Futures, which is co-sponsored with the Critical Legal Collective and AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. Panelists include Dr. Ellen Schrecker, professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University; Dr. Corrina Mullin, adjunct professor of economics and political science at Brooklyn College and John Jay College, CUNY; and undergraduate CUNY student, Musa Kareem. The conversation is moderated by Professor Chaumtoli Huq, professor of law at CUNY School of Law, and explores the history of support for higher education as a public good, with free or very low tuition, including a close look at the example of the City University of New York (CUNY), past and present. Recording of available here.
2024
December 2024
Board member Juliana Pare-Blageov is quoted for a story on the historic nature of the attack on higher education in Florida by In These Times. Journalist Kathryn Joyce explores how the campaign against New College by Chris Rufo both anticipated and reflected a wider right-wing assault on higher education.
April 9, 2024
Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education and 427 historians send a letter to the American Historical Association Council requesting that its members carefully consider issues of funding and advocacy when seeking to hire a new executive director for the American Historical Association. Part of SFNDHE’s 2024 Professional Organization Campaign, the letter asks the AHA Council to reflect on the need to hire someone with “a profound understanding of the multiple crises that face American higher education – and within it the American historical profession – and to suggest a radically transformative vision of how to address them.”
March 8, 2024
SFNDHE virtual Spring Forum, “The Big Con in Higher Education,” features Rachel Ida Buff (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) and S. Ani Mukherji (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) discussing how private consulting firms are transforming the university and how to fight back.
February 2024
SFNDHE launches its Professional Organizations Resolution Initiative, asking the organizations that represent the academic disciplines to address the crisis in higher education and join the battle to make higher education a true public good for everyone.
2023
November 1, 2023
Virtual Fall Forum “Dispatches from the Crisis – West Virginia University” on the department closures, terminations of faculty, and budget cuts sweeping across the university. It features WVU faculty Dr. Lisa DiBartolomeo (World Languages) and Dr. Jessica Wilkerson (History) sharing their experiences fighting the cuts at WVU and offering takeaways for people on other campuses.
June 2023
Board members Eileen Boris, Karma Chávez, Lisa Levenstein, and Annelise Orleck plan and lead a SFNDHE roundtable on the crisis in higher education for the Big Berks in Santa Clara, California.
May 2023
Board member Aimee Loiselle coordinates the opening plenary “Building a Higher Ed Labor Movement” and the panel “Global Precarity and Academic Freedom” for the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) conference at Rutgers University – New Brunswick.
March 2023
Board member David Stein, with Claire Goldstene of the LAWCHA Contingent Faculty Committee, facilitate a Chat Seminar on the challenges of contingent labor in higher education at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in Los Angeles.
February 2023
SFNDHE builds and shares Toolkits for use by organization members, ambassadors, and supporters.
2022
October 7, 2022
Lisa Levenstein and Jennifer Mittelstadt on “The Real Fight for Academic Freedom” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
October 2022
Jennifer Miller and Aimee Loiselle guest edit the Fall 2022 special issue of AAUP’s Academe, on Revolutionizing Higher Education Budget and Finance.
May 2022
In Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, Aimee Loiselle on the origins, purpose, and collaborations of Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education.
April 2022
Member Aimee Loiselle joins the roundtable “Scholarly Work and the Work of Scholarship in an Era of Contingency” at OAH Boston with Beth English (OAH Executive Director), Will Jones (University of Minnesota), Lauren Braun-Strumfels (Raritan Valley Community College), and Benjamin Irvin (Journal of American History). They discuss the ways the increasing employment of contingent faculty and academic staff is a problem for the entire field of history. Contingency undermines shared governance, academic freedom, scholarly associations, and academic publishing.
March 2022
The Racial Justice Working Group partners with the #TruthBeTold campaign to protect and advocate for intellectual freedom, which is coordinated by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD). Their parternship includes a special effort to share templates that facilitate faculty senate resolutions.
March 2022
Lisa Levenstein and Aimee Loiselle make a collaborative solidarity video for the chapter meeting of the DePaul University AAUP to share inspiration and their experiences organizing events and actions for SFNDHE, HELU, and AAUP chapters.
February 2022
At the HELU Winter 2022 Summit, our Racial Justice Working Group helps coordinate the panel “Organizing for Racial Justice,” with contributing member Karma R. Chávez as chair and Adom Getachew presenting her experience establishing a new Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.
2021
Fall 2021
Board members Ian Gavigan and Jennifer Mittelstadt on higher ed organizing and the possibility for national reform in Dissent Magazine, “A New Deal for Eds and Meds?”
July 7 and 9, 2021
SFNDHE co-facilitates the largest summit of local labor unions in higher education to blaze a new path for the formation of Higher Education Labor United (HELU), which champions coalition labor organizing and a wall-to-wall nationwide agenda for higher education.
July 2021
Board member Jennifer Miller in the New Hampshire Union Leader, “New Hampshire Needs College for All.”
Summer 2021
Board member Aimee Loiselle coordinates the AAUP webinar “Tackling Austerity Budgets.” It presents tactics for engaging in budget activism to address the finance logistics of austerity, elimination of departments, wall-to-wall worker organizing on budget issues, institutional debt, and more.
May 27, 2021
SFNDHE members organize and lead the plenary session of the annual meeting of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) – virtual due to Covid-19. Introduction and panel.
May 19, 2021
AAUP webinar on Racial and Social justice, hosted by members Annelise Orleck and Beverly Sheftall.
May 13, 2021
New York Times, Guest Essay, “Should Two and Four Year Degrees Be Free?” by member Colena Sesanker and her colleague Stephen Adair.
May 2021
SFNDHE members edit the special edition of AAUP’s Academe. Check out the authors making the case for a New Deal for Higher Education.
February 10, 2021
Watch the national launch of the AFT-AAUP campaign, “A New Deal for Higher Education,” with Representative Ayanna Pressley, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and multiple union leaders.
AFT-AAUP “A New Deal for Higher Ed” campaign coverage: “Campaign Pushes for Reauthorization of Higher Education Act,” Diverse Education.
AY 2021
Collegeland: a podcast on higher education that takes you on campus for the real stories: creators and hosts Lisa Levenstein and Nan Enstad.
2020
December 16, 2020
Jennifer Mittelstadt, Lisa Levenstein, and Suzanne Kahn present “A True New Deal for Higher Education: How a Stimulus for Higher Ed Can Advance Progressive Policy Goals,” a white paper with the Roosevelt Institute.
November 20, 2020
SFNDHE partner Eleni Schirmer, “It’s Not Just Students Drowning in Debt!. Colleges Are Too!” The Nation.
October 14, 2020
SFNDHE member Adom Getachew, “What’s at Stake for Higher Education in the Election?” The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Summer 2020
SFNDHE member Nan Enstad, “Why Revenue Generation Can’t Solve the Crisis in Higher Education, Or, What’s That Smell?” AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom Vol 11.
August 4, 2020
SFNDHE founder and member Annelise Orleck, “Rebuilding Higher Education as a Common Good,” AAUP Closing Plenary, Summer Institute.
