The 2025 National Day of Action: Talking with the Coalition for Action in Higher Education about "the World We Live in and the World We Want."

Today we talk with members of the organizing collective of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, or CAHE, about their second National Day of Action, taking place on Thursday, April 17. The Day of Action is a call for free higher education in every meaning of that term. CAHE calls for “the elimination of all existing student debt, making all public colleges and universities tuition-free, and ensuring that our colleges and universities remain sites of robust free thinking about the world we live in and the world we want.”

We talk about the genesis of this group, and the gap it seeks to fill at the intersection of all of these interests, with Palestine squarely at the center. CAHE is thus a critical hub for activism that addresses each of the major points of attack on education coming from the Trump administration. 

Karim Mattar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education.  He is currently at work on two book projects.  The Ethics of Affiliation seeks to develop a curriculum and a public pedagogy of truth and reconciliation in historic Palestine, focusing on the areas of education, culture, public institutions, civil society, and law.  Reflections on Palestine: Exile, Privilege, Responsibility interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to the oppressed.  Also a dedicated community organizer, Karim works at the local, state, and national levels to enhance public awareness and understanding of Palestinian literature, history, and politics and to advocate for Palestinian liberation.  Karim received his D.Phil. in English at the University of Oxford in 2013, and writes and teaches more broadly on comparative Middle Eastern literatures and cultures, the history of the novel, media and technology, and critical theory.

Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue.  He is the author of several books including most recently We Charge Genocide! American Fascism and the Rule of Law (Fordham University Press) and (with Jeanelle Hope) The Black Antifascist Tradition Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition (Haymarket Books).  He is a member of Purdue AAUP and the organizing collective for the Coalition for Action in Higher Education.  He is also a member of Writers Against the War on Gaza.

Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. Her most recent work is a volume co-edited with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson called The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom (Beacon Press, 2024). She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of The Palestine Exception: What's at Stake in the Campus Protests?