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Seamster: Yeah. I don’t want to spin…

Bacon: Not defending it, I’m not praising it.

Seamster: But it is a common tactic, as you said, among authoritarian governments.

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.

But even, being able to read a novel requires… like, what are novels about? They’re often about authoritarian governments and what happens next. And for us to read history. And I spend so much time with my students just talking about history.

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.

And so, I think that is a major part of the intellectual project of attacking higher education, in terms of generating alternative sources of information. but I think you said that they’re obsessed with those Ivy League places. I think there’s a lot of competing elements that they both want to destroy these places, and they want to.

They know that these places confer status and that they want to control them

Bacon: And they want to destroy them. That’s what they want. To destroy them or just control them. And maybe a little bit of both.

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.

And I think that is already happening. And similarly to how they want these spaces of education to be more exclusive—with a student body that better represents what it used to and likely to be whiter and male and better off—but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they want the resources of all the knowledge and education to come with it.

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…

Bacon: And a school like yours… I can’t tell what the University of Iowa is, which is a state school, flagship school, good school, but, like, not as expensive and elite as the sort of Dukes. So I guess—just following the news—it seems like the red states, and not just Trump, they want the professors to be nervous about talking, right?

They definitely want you to feel nervous about speaking your truth, right?

Seamster: Right. Yes.

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?

Seamster: Well, I mean, speaking it… it helps that I, for now, I’m still allowed to speak as myself, as I am doing, and not as a representative of the university.

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.

Different states are at different places in that timeline, which has been true since I worked at Tennessee in 2016. And then Iowa. So this has been happening for a long time. And so I think a lot of faculty are concerned, and yet they also really know these things are important, and they also know that what is happening in classes is not indoctrination.

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.

One way that I work on myself to feel comfortable walking into a classroom of strangers and talk about these things that are so charged right now is I make them write a lot so I can hear what they’re thinking if they’re not willing to say it in class. And so many of them express concern or just generalized anxiety about talking, but I can tell that they are on board with the ideas and that they’re learning a lot and that they are wanting to know more.

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 I also feel like the hammer’s coming down everywhere. We wouldn’t have thought before this year that cancer research would be one of the targets.

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.

So I think that when we see that this is not just about certain words or phrases that are problematic now, but that we see that this is a threat to the whole institution, that opens up new possibilities for solidarity and working together to fight these things, because we’ve seen when unions and affiliated groups are fighting, that they’re winning.

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.

And so I guess I have two sort of feelings about the comment I wanted to give you. The one is, like, no, that’s actually not what happened. Did you know that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were leading the Democratic Party? Joe Biden talked about infrastructure every day, and what are you talking about?

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.

And I think—so how do you, when you read it… I mean, I’m not quoting this right, yeah—but just in general, ‘Democrats are too woke and too into identity issues.’ How do you hear that?

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.

And instead, we often have a backlash. When we see social progress in things like recognizing that Black lives matter as this very, very basic fact, or recognizing that the racial wealth gap exists—not even saying we’re going to fix it…

Bacon: Even if we said we were going to fix it, we didn’t fix it at all.

Seamster: Just mentioning it.

Bacon: Just mentioning, yes.

Seamster: And so we are living through a period of backlash, as we have before, which is the reason why—being of historical facts—I always teach about Redemption as the period following Black Reconstruction, to say, like, look, there are periods where society moves forward and then people work on recreating all of the structures, but even more violently in a different way, with a new form of violence than previously.

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 so I think that there is a way to… I was also just teaching about intersectionality this past week and talking about Crenshaw’s point that identity politics, as she was framing them, were not about dividing groups and comparing them. It was about building solidarity across groups and coalition-building specifically. And I would hope that Pete Buttigieg could just realize that, like, you can be part of a very large coalition, and that identity politics is about recognizing the commonalities across different forms of problems and what you do with that together.

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.

And I’ve just been thinking about that—how often she identified people being like, oh, has feminism gone too far? And I think we’re living through the exact same thing now, where, like, one step forward is, wow, we were not ready for that.

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.”

And I think it’s brilliant that you got AI in there, before AI sort of turned into what it is on some level, but I think you really got there. So what is it—why is it important for someone like Donald Trump to neutralize knowledge?

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.

Like, we’re losing our ability as social scientists to even measure what is happening, and that’s not by accident. So our, like, our ability to name, to compare, to use theories to make predictions—like I was doing on January 19th—to be able to look at a system like AI and be like, what is this for? That’s the type of thing that we do as scholars, and which I think… which I really enjoy getting to teach students who may not have thought of themselves as deep thinkers, to start asking questions that they can’t answer and be really excited for them, and know that I’ve now troubled them for the rest of their lives—that they’re going to realize that there are things that we don’t know the answer to and that they might need to figure it out or live with contradictions.

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.

And so, yeah, I think the more that they come for this specific area is the way I know that it matters.

Bacon: They’re attacking higher education for reason.

Seamster: Yes.

Bacon: That’s a great way to end. Professor, thank you so much for joining me. Good to see you.