News Brief: As Trump Crushes Academia, the NYT and Atlantic Still Fight 'Woke' Wars from 5 Years Ago
Citations Needed
Citations Needed
4.8 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this News Brief, we are joined by Chenjerai Kumanyika and Todd Wolfson of the American Association of University Professors to discuss Trump's gutting of higher education, its expansion on previous neoliberal privatization efforts, and how big donor and media backlash against "woke "academics and anti-Gaza genocide protestors is fueling the possible end of academic independence as we know it.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I'm Nima Shirazi. |
| 0:07.4 | I'm Adam Johnson. |
| 0:08.4 | You can follow the show on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod. Facebook, Citations |
| 0:12.1 | needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com slash citations needed podcast. |
| 0:17.4 | All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated because we are 100% |
| 0:21.5 | listener funded. We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes of |
| 0:25.8 | citations needed. And today, Adam, we are so excited to be joined by two amazing guests to |
| 0:32.1 | talk about attacks on higher ed and the general kind of anti-intellectual strain of what we are seeing in |
| 0:40.6 | our national politics right now. Obviously, we can get to the current administration, but it did not |
| 0:46.2 | begin there, nor will it end there. We are going to be joined by two great guests. The first, |
| 0:51.6 | Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University |
| 0:55.1 | Professors, or AAPU, which represents more than 55,000 faculty and higher ed workers across 550-plus |
| 1:03.2 | campuses nationwide. He's also the National Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers. |
| 1:07.6 | Board member of the New Alliance for Higher Education is associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and is a long-time |
| 1:14.7 | leader of the Rutgers Academic Workers Union. Todd is also co-director of the Media |
| 1:19.9 | Inequality and Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for |
| 1:23.9 | Communication. We're also joined by Chen Jari Kumanika, assistant professor at the Arthur |
| 1:29.0 | L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. He is AAPUP council member and Peabody Award winning |
| 1:35.9 | host of the podcast on Civil and Empire City, the untold origin story of the NYPD. Todd and Chenjerai, thank you so much for joining us |
| 1:47.1 | today on Citations Needed. Thanks for having us. Citations needed, much respect. You know what I mean? |
| 1:52.7 | First of all, I have to just jump in and say, I know this is a news brief, but I just have to say so |
| 1:57.8 | much respect for the work y'all been doing. Y'all been really breaking things down. |
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