Daniel Birchok, President, University of Michigan Flint-AFT AAUP & Anke Wolbert, HELU Steering Committee & President, Eastern Michigan University AFT Local 9102
On November 5 & 10, the Michigan HELU Coalition successfully hosted HELU’s first candidate town hall. In this particular case, the candidates are competing for the democratic nomination for the Michigan U.S. Senate seat in the 2026 Midterm Election. Of the five currently declared candidates, three accepted our invitation: Abdul El-Sayed, Rachel Howard, and Mallory McMorrow.
Each candidate was given about 45 minutes and responded to preset questions, as well as questions from the floor. Preset questions were developed with the HELU Higher Education Federal Policy Agenda as their framework, and were asked by members of our coalition who are differently placed within Michigan’s higher education landscape, including students, faculty, and librarians, and members of different campuses, locals, and state federations. The preset questions reflected our interest in understanding the candidates’ policy stances on the following four topics: higher education access and affordability; academic freedom, the right to learn, and free speech; addressing inequalities between and within campuses, including among different kinds of institutions and different tracks of faculty and staff; and how to shift university hospitals from for-profit to public good models.
Oftentimes, candidates for public office, national and state-level, receive endorsements from the AFL-CIO and/or our International Unions/State Federations without much consideration of their policy stances towards post-secondary education, particularly higher education. More often than not, candidates have to explain their K-12 platforms only. Sometimes they are queried about their attitudes on the trades and community colleges. Perhaps there is a question about college debt and affordability. But potential candidates rarely have to engage with Higher Education policies on a deeper level.
They do not have to demonstrate that they understand funding for public universities and how that impacts rising tuition costs, nor that they are aware of the interplay between regional comprehensive universities, flagship universities, community colleges, and private universities and colleges. They most certainly do not have to comment on the contingency crisis.
In Michigan, the MI HELU coalition decided that we wanted to get ahead of the curve by providing candidates with a forum that focused exclusively on Higher Education and the challenges we are facing.
Now that the town halls have concluded, candidates are submitting their answers to the preset question in writing. We are planning to circulate these to members of our Michigan coalition, as well as to our locals and state federations, and carry out a survey to find out which answers speak most compellingly to our coalition. We are also in the process of developing a candidate pledge that is based on HELU’s Policy Platform, which we hope to circulate to the candidates. We see all of these efforts as ways to inform a grassroots conversation about where the candidates stand on higher ed before the endorsement process truly begins.