Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic Show, Right Now. I’m joined by the University of Iowa, professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Louise Seamster. Thanks for joining me.
Bacon: And so, I want to talk— you write a lot about education, about a lot about policy, a lot about kind of how our society works. You’re a sociologist. So I want to talk about, first of all, we’ve had a lot of focus on what the Trump administration has done to universities and sort of focus on the university as an institution.
Seamster: Yeah. I mean, all of these things are happening at once. Well, I’ll start by saying it’s hard to even track because a lot of the policies that are launched are floated and then you’re not sure which actually take place, or they’re issued in a declaration and you’re not sure what is mobilized behind it.
There’s also a lot going on at the same time that you could argue is either trying to unwind Biden administration policies that were attempting to address a student debt crisis and actually make good on promises around debt forgiveness for existing programs or improve them.
So already very, very few people are even going to get that debt forgiveness prior to Biden’s temporary waivers and fixes. But this is saying that what was problematic was the fact that people at least had the hope of having loan forgiveness at the end. This is going to make—and it’s already making—a lot of either current or prospective students very concerned, including my own students.
So that would have… it’s all of these things together are going to negatively affect the same students who are already the most affected by the student loan crisis, which is students of color and women and people who have been targeted by colleges in a lot of different ways. And we—we should definitely be concerned about that as well.
Seamster: Yes, I believe so. I will say I have not looked too deeply into those, but things like shifting the way Pell Grants work—I believe trying to name, rename Pell Grants, Trump Grants—is one of the plans on deck.
Bacon: There was a discourse in 20 21, 20 24 that was in the Biden years, there were a couple arguments. One is too many people are going to college. And this was at times Democrats say, like what do we think about that as an argument, as a point of a comment?
And there were some people who said that no matter the cost, this is worth it. There were other people who said you shouldn’t have to do that to make it worth it. And what I think is really important is— I’m thinking of another sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s work on this—talking about the education gospel, which kind of covers up a multitude of other problems with society, where education is being made to try and cover for the fact that we have a poor labor market, that people aren’t sure of what life chances they’re going to have without college. That it becomes kind of the floor that you require, and that people are doing worse and worse without that floor.
Bacon: Kind of hints that it’s less that a college degree is a credential and more that not having a college degree— it’s almost a decredential is what she’s kind of getting at.
And also we’re going to need teachers and nurses and doctors and engineers, and we need people who are not just chasing that one major that this year they promised is going to get them the career that can repay the investment. So I think that the push of saying too many people are attending college is coming alongside the last few decades’ opening up of universities to a more diverse student body.
But I also think you shouldn’t be pressured to attend as a kind of do-or-die. But I also think that goes alongside, in my ideal world, everybody who wants to go and spend time reading about what’s our society, what are we doing, what do we owe to each other, can do that and spend a few years without this incurring a major cost on their lives.
Bacon: I think part of what I want to make sure I understand for people is, part of it, there’s a disagreement among people who probably voted for Harris on higher education. I think it’s worth starting there because then the Trump fight on some level makes more sense.
Help me explain why student debt cancellation was worthwhile? Not just for teachers, not just for these certain jobs, but sort of for the broad public. Why was that a useful goal?
And as McMillan pointed out, she was very early in pointing out how predatory components of this industry—and the for-profit colleges—were taking advantage of the weak job market and pressures to improve your credentials after the Great Recession by taking in this onslaught of people who’d been forced out of the job market or otherwise vulnerable, and pointing out that their industry really feeds off of economic uncertainty.
So the same strategies of who they’re recruiting, of policies, of partnerships—public-private partnerships—going in a much more career-focused direction of saying, oh, we could be doing mini-credentials, we could be targeting people coming back to school and older adults, we should be doing online programs, and that a lot of this is hinging around bringing in more revenue.
And where I and others came in, in the late 2010s, was in looking at the data in terms of what was showing up in terms of outcomes for assuming student loans in particular, and the racial disparities in student loans. So my group, working with Chénier, found that our first piece—we found that Black student debt had tripled in just 12 years at the household level, and that already by then a third of Black households were holding student debt, and that this was going up much faster than white households.
Bacon: The terms both being the cost was going to be much higher than you expected and much higher than the white students paid a couple of generations ago. And also that the expansion was that you were supposed to foot the bill on your own, and this is the way we were going to solve racial inequality through education—right, on your back basically.
That was extremely concerning to us in looking at how that claim that you were just laying out then compounds inequality when we add in racial job discrimination and all the other factors that are differences in wealth in your family and your ability to pay down your debt.
Bacon: One other thing that happened in the Biden years that’s worth noting is that there’s evidence of growing education polarization, meaning college graduates are voting more Democratic, non-college are voting more Republican.
Seamster: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think Democrats in general are afraid of embracing any statement made about them. They’re like, we’re not like that. And so I think that’s a part of this. And I think also then they kind of buy into that stereotype of because they’re college graduates, they must be also, be white, cosmopolitan, wealthy elites, instead of being, like, no, that’s a sign of how to be part of the working class these days often still requires some form of college education.
Bacon: So higher education is required for a lot of jobs. And it’s not being a campus for four years at Yale, right?
Bacon: Whose parents are middle class and whose parents probably did pay for a lot and could.
They’re living governed by this economic pressure because they’ve been told you have to do this to get a job. And then they’re also having to make decisions about their major not based on their interests, but what they think maybe kind of has a chance of getting them a job after this. So that was, I think, a big part of the disconnect in the discussion about what made student debt cancellation allegedly regressive or not.
And I just—I will just say because I was part of that debate for so long, you put that to 2023… I feel like it was most active in 2020 or so, but 2023 was when the Supreme Court overturned Biden’s debt relief plan.
So I thought it was really interesting that nobody out of all those groups said this is regressive. They were showing, to me, the true colors of the people pushing for the status quo, which is like: this debt is an instrument of control, and it leads people to live their lives governed by the discipline that student debt creates, and that there are a lot of people who benefit from that.
This administration has come in with a very unified stand, which is that the current colleges are liberal and woke and annoying and full of annoying professors teaching Marxism, and also too many people are going to college, and we are going to sort of destroy all of this.
Seamster: I’ve been thinking about this in that there’s contradictions. It is a unified stance in some ways in terms of coming after higher education as a symbol of all the things they hate.
And when you look at the first things that they’ve been doing—both through actions and through people self-censoring—is censoring our ability to discuss what they are doing.
And they’re probably smart to do that on some level, although that makes sense. They do that, right, and you’re challenging their authority in a certain…
Bacon: Not defending it, I’m not praising it.
Because if the whole—if your world relies on the production of propaganda—then having an educated population, specifically, who can analyze and identify propaganda as such, that is going to be a problem. And I also think this, to me, is a plug for the humanities. As an English major, we’ve done so much dismissal of the value of a humanities major, but when you think about what texts you are reading and learning how to critically analyze and how to think about language and not just on this superficial level— I actually want to make a plug for it. It’s not just doctors and teachers that I think I’m standing up for.
The administration has said that what they’re banning is faculty talking about ideology. I spend all of my time in classes just talking about historical facts—things that occurred that they had no idea had happened, or even recent past events that they weren’t tracking—because I just feel like we need to build up a bigger knowledge base for students.
They know that these places confer status and that they want to control them
Seamster: I think it’s both. And I think we need to understand that tension when we’re trying to say, is it really this or is it really that? It’s really both. It doesn’t all make sense put together. They are dismantling higher education, the Department of Education, at the same time that they’re weaponizing it to control universities, and it’s not just one or the other. What they do want is to transform these spaces so that they’re unrecognizable.
I think there’s an element of that scamification of higher education that I was talking about, with the growth towards ‘lower ed,’ that is going to stay. That you don’t want to just eliminate these institutions. You want them to be singing your song. So, they want all of these places to be on board with saying the same statements that reflect and validate what they’ve been claiming about the world and…
They definitely want you to feel nervous about speaking your truth, right?
Bacon: And do you, do you feel nervous about it? I mean you’re here, so, I mean, you’re not too nervous, but do you feel nervous?
And this is based on my research. So there’s all the— for now we… there’s kind of some, there’s some red lines that are being crossed in places like Texas, where I’m referring, where the rules are explicitly coming for curriculum, or in places like Florida where classes are having, very, very close-grained oversight about what you can and can’t even say.
And that this is not a good-faith critique—that faculty want classes to feel vibrant and intellectually engaging and have people debating one another and bringing in ideas. And the, I would say, the chilling effect is not just on faculty; it’s definitely on students as well.
I have so many students write, These should be required courses for everybody to take at the end of every semester. And so I know that it is important, and that there’s… we see so many examples of people anticipating in advance and changing their language. But I also know that it’s because it’s important to talk about that people are coming after this.
And so this is not just about us. This is a really collective problem, and it requires solidarity across a lot of different areas. Instead of being like, oh, well, the problem is the people who teach about race like me, or the problem is just this language or environmental justice, and if we just cut that out… I really want to bring attention to the many groups who’ve been pushing back, like my professional organization, American Sociological Association, which worked with the American Federation of Teachers to sue Trump over their Dear Colleague letter back in February that was trying to negate or prevent teaching of language about race and gender and sociology generally—and they won.
Bacon: Let me close with two questions, or two topics I’m talking about. The first is, I think Pete Buttigieg over the weekend said something—he was interviewed somewhere—something along the lines of, like, Democrats were only talking about identity issues and that turned off people, and that’s why we lost.
The other was sort of, like, to sort of lean into what he’s saying and really probe it is, like, if you mean Black Lives Matter and Me Too and trying to solve the racial wealth gap are identity issues, I guess that’s true. But I don’t think those are frivolous and silly and not worth discussing.
Seamster: Yeah, I think, firstly, to—as a scholar of racial inequality and who’s addressed and written a lot about ideas of racial progress, for instance—is that our linear myth of how progress works is not how society works.
Bacon: Even if we said we were going to fix it, we didn’t fix it at all.
Bacon: Just mentioning, yes.
And I think you can say we’re living through that now. So it makes sense that a lot of people will look at that and be like, oh, we went too far, because now look what happened. That’s why we need scholars of history to be like, that’s not how that works. I’ve known plenty of people who’ve pointed out that what we’re living through right now is a form of identity politics in terms of grievance politics around what they perceive as, like, the assertion that equality should be possible is offensive to people who have benefited so long from hoarding resources.
And it’s really not about people as individuals and their specific issues, except insofar as they become political when they’re shared together. And it’s a way to demean and devalue a really important movement. It’s also a way to try and put that behind us in the same way that, like, Susan Faludi in her book Backlash was saying that after every advance for women’s rights, people would come back and smooth all that history away and be like, yeah, that never happened—like, that went way too far, and yet it never happened, and now where we are is good.
Bacon: And I’ll close with—you had a Bluesky note, this is on January 19th, 2025. So early on, very early on, but time-stamped and proven as very prescient: “the attack on humanities/social education courses, departments, the removal of books from K–12 libraries, and the rush to AI-ified higher ed all have the same outcome. It’s different ways to neutralize knowledge, whether by erasing it or turning it into bland porridge.”
Seamster: So that then whatever he says is correct, because knowledge is about that multiplicity of ideas, and it is about being able to learn what is happening.
Just the ability to remember what was happening last week is eroding out from under us. And so just being able to anchor ourselves to this infrastructure that we have built—as elitist and problematic as it has been—as the ability to record facts and track what’s happening and, like, stay true to our values, is going to be all the more important. And we know that because they are attacking it. We know that from the empty bookshelves—that those books mattered.
Bacon: They’re attacking higher education for reason.
Bacon: That’s a great way to end. Professor, thank you so much for joining me. Good to see you.
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