Debates on college campuses’ political influence in President Donald Trump’s America dominated the discussion at a Northwestern University Graduate Workers’ workshop Monday afternoon at their downtown Evanston office.
The teach-in, hosted by NUGW’s Solidarity Committee and facilitated by NUGW History Department Steward John Pollard, delved into the little-known 1971 Powell Memo, which American jurist and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell issued confidentially to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Education Committee Chair, Eugene B. Sydnor.
The 34-page memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” addressed rising “disquieting” anticapitalist sentiments during the Cold War, identifying college campuses as the “single most dynamic source” of the assault on America’s enterprise system.
“I wanted people to see that this is a longer history of right-wing politics attacking the (idea of the) university,” said Pollard, who is also a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the History Department.
The workshop comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s actions against higher education, including federal funding freezes, student visa terminations and antisemitism investigations. Last week, University leadership announced a “series of cost-cutting measures” in light of the funding freeze.
In the workshop, Pollard argued that the memo laid the groundwork for the establishment of conservative, pro-business think tanks and the rising distrust of liberal-leaning elite universities.
He drew parallels between the memo and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy program that outlined directives to eliminate “woke ‘diversicrats’” from college campuses. The initiative also called to limit the issuances of visas to Chinese scholars. Both stances have been upheld by the 2025 Trump administration.
However, Pollard pointed out that the Powell Memo moved to reform higher education through textbook reevaluations and balanced faculty representation instead of dismantling the system entirely — a reflection of the 20th century’s higher cultural regard for higher education, he said.
While event attendee Jorin Graham, a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, emphasized that Trump is more “destructive” against universities, they noted that Trump advocates for the same type of “viewpoint diversity” described in the memo.
Graham also highlighted that the Powell Memo exclusively focused on “bright young men” on college campuses. However, they added, today’s higher education tensions implicate vulnerable communities whose access to American higher education has increased since the 1970s, including women, people of color and international students.
“In terms of next steps, I’m really interested in what can be done in order to make sure that education remains accessible for those people,” Graham said.
Both Pollard and NUGW Solidarity Chair Salma Mostafa, an NUGW Sociology Department Steward and third-year Ph.D. student in sociology, said they aimed for attendees to learn from historical precedents to fight back against attacks on higher education.
Mostafa advocated for the “reframing” of the idea of the classroom through NUGW’s solidarity workshops, which are open to members of the public.
She said she also hopes to expand the programs to the wider Chicago area and increase their accessibility to communities beyond NU graduate students.
“Any kind of education that’s popular and that invites community members is political education,” Mostafa said. “This is something that should be a regular practice.”
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