Organizing the Neoliberal University
Organizing the Neoliberal University
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Organizing the Neoliberal University
The essays in this issue begin to lay out a vision for a broad, coordinated, and powerful movement to reclaim the corporate university. Now it’s up to all of us to build it.
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Image courtesy of the authors Digital Organizing against the Neoliberal University
Picking a fight with the university in the middle of a pandemic required AFSCME Council 3 to develop new digital tools to build its membership, develop a structure more responsive to workers’ concerns, strengthen coalitions, and fight back against the university.
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Fighting Neoliberal Universities in States without Bargaining Rights
UCW undermines neoliberal universities by bringing workers who are never meant to cross paths into conversation about how to fundamentally transform higher education.
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Image courtesy of Erin Markiewitz The Abolitionist Strike
Graduate employees at Michigan went on strike to demand a safe reopening and a university free of police. We talked with the union’s vice president about how they did it and what they learned.
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Dave Adamson We Were All Exhausted: On the Natural Alliance between Football ‘Student-Athletes’ and Contingent Faculty
Contingent faculty and college football players are natural allies. They should join in a fight together for worker’s rights on campus.
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Photo courtesy of the author A Higher Ed Agenda for the Common Good
It is time to re-imagine higher education to end the racialized inequities the current paradigm reinforces and to create more educational opportunities for all.
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Photo courtesy of the author Fighting for Mental Healthcare in the Ivory Tower
The crisis of mental health among graduate workers is neither inevitable nor insurmountable.
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Images courtesy of the authors How to Win a Contract in a Pandemic
“People are finding it harder and harder to maintain any sort of illusions about…their relationships to these institutions.”
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Image courtesy of the authors Contract Personalis: How Georgetown’s Graduate Workers Organized to Win
Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees won a collective bargaining agreement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three strategies — resonant framing, centering members’ lived experiences, and solidarity from internal and external allies — were the core of their contract campaign.
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Image courtesy of the author UnKoch Everything: Tactical Lessons Toward Structural Transformation
Higher education has never been safe or welcoming for those of us impacted by structural racism. At UnKoch My Campus, we’re learning that to truly “unKoch” the academy, we need to challenge entrenched gender, class, and racial inequities on campus and open up space for reimagining institutions of higher education.
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Image courtesy of the authors The Other College Debt Trap
Colleges and universities are real estate. This contradiction provides a framework for workers and students to build power that can resist concessions; organize more people into the labor movement; and push for policy changes that weaken the grip of institutional finance over our education system.
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Image courtesy of the authors United We Fight at Rutgers
The public university of the 21st century needs to listen to and include everyone’s voices. Here’s how the Coalition of Rutgers Unions is using this moment to model that vision.
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Image courtesy of Sara Myklebust Here’s How We Not Just Reopen, But Transform Higher Education
A letter from the workers, students, and faculty who know what Higher Ed needs
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Image courtesy of the author The Waiting Game: Fighting Delay as a Union-Busting Tactic
Delaying the legal processes of forming a union is among the primary tactics that neoliberal universities have when it comes to squashing organizing tactics. To fight that, faculty unions must keep their sights on the long-game.
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Image courtesy of Sam Klug Organizing at the Frontier of Higher Education
Julie Kushner on her decades-long career organizing university workers, her vision for building deep coalitions of students and workers, and why she thinks union organizers are “the best people.”