UC Santa Barbara on March 5, 2020     

On Friday August 8, the Trump administration demanded a $1 billion "settlement" from UCLA after freezing $584 million in federal grants for vital scientific and health research. The proposed $1 billion agreement would be the largest settlement since Trump began extorting universities, and marks the first attempt of the federal government to ransom payment from a public university. These attacks have been waged under the guise of fighting antisemitism and investigating alleged Title VII violations, but we see them for what they are: an attempt to cripple public higher education in the nation’s premier public university system. 

This is the second of two papers from an MLA panel on "Organizing University Labor," organized by Eva Cherniavsky at the University of Washington-Seattle. The first, by Thomas Winningham, is here. This piece explains why collective bargaining has worked better for faculty at Western Washington (pictured) than shared governance.

by Bill Lyne, English Department,  Western Washington University

The legislation allowing faculty at four-year public universities in Washington state to unionize passed in 2002.  Union organizers from NEA and AFT arrived on our campus at Western Washington University the next fall, and three years later, after a lot of organizing work and a series of relentless, baseless and tedious bargaining unit challenges from our administration, our faculty voted to unionize as the United Faculty of Western Washington, affiliated with both NEA and AFT.  The university president--who was near retirement, had argued vigorously against our unionizing, and took our vote very personally—hired the law firm of Jackson Lewis (a firm famous for their scorched-earth approach to unions) to bargain our first contract.  

After 18 months of bargaining, stalemate, and arbitration, we declared impasse and the lawyer went home to Seattle, no doubt convinced that he had earned his hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.  Four days after he left, one of the vice presidents from the administration bargaining team called me and she and I settled a full tentative agreement in a three-hour session on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.  When the expensive lawyer was informed of the details of our deal (which included basic things like grievance to arbitration and a stable workload), he strenuously urged the Board of Trustees not to ratify it. The trustees, about to hire a new president and fed up with a process that had taken so long, wisely chose to ignore him and support the university’s faculty and administration.

For the next ten years, we amiably bargained successor agreements (one of which NEA called “the best contract in America”) without the benefit (or expense) of a union-busting lawyer sitting between faculty and administration.  Our relatively short experience with collective bargaining has revealed both its value and its limits and clarified quite a bit about the predicament of public higher education in the 21st century.  If nothing else, it has helped us understand who’s really on what side and why.  

When we first began to organize, the university president met us with the standard tale of academic romance.  Collective bargaining, she argued, would wreak havoc on our cherished values of collegiality and shared governance. Deans and faculty would no longer be able to say hello to each other in the grocery store or compete on the same bicycle race teams. Our august faculty senate would be rendered impotent.  One administration spokesperson even suggested that something called “the union” might make us all wear uniforms. The whole campaign resembled that of a 1960s southern sheriff warning that Yankee agitators were coming to put crazy ideas into the heads of the local happy Negroes.  

This tone deafness showed how disconnected the administration had become from faculty life on the ground and how ripe we were for unionization.  Our salaries were in the 19th percentile of our peer universities, tenure and promotion decisions had become increasingly mysterious and arbitrary, tenure track faculty lines were disappearing and carloads of new administrators seemed to be arriving every week.  The faculty senate had devolved into a bi-weekly forum for complaints about parking.  An actual voice in the running of the university—the thing that the administration argued we would lose with unionization--was the thing it was clear we didn’t have.  We spent a lot of time in committee meetings and doggedly fulfilling the requirements of empty process, but all real decisions, especially about the deployment of university resources, were made without faculty in the room.  

All of that changed with collective bargaining.  When recommendations from committees that administrators are under no obligation to follow metamorphose into binding and enforceable contractual agreements, the administration-faculty relationship changes dramatically.  Shared governance was the impotence of faculty resolutions followed by the omnipotence of administrative decisions. Collective bargaining is nobody gets to leave the room until we have an agreement that recognizes the interests of both sides.  That legal requirement made it imperative that both sides start paying more real attention to the predicament of the other.  If we were going to get to a good, workable contract, we had to stop pretending that we were all on the same side with the same interests.  The formal exchange of proposals that each side would actually have to live with forced both the faculty and the administration to crawl out of their own echo chambers and actually listen to the other side.  

While bargaining sharpened and clarified our differences, it also began to show how much we actually had in common.  And for that we owe a debt to the union-busting lawyer that the administration hired for that first contract. He was a formidable fellow, with a wealth of labor law experience, but he had done very little public sector bargaining and had no experience with higher ed bargaining.   What he didn’t understand was that, unlike his private sector clients, his current client actually had a lot in common with the faculty that sat across the table.  This was not a situation where one side’s goal was to squeeze as much blood as possible from labor and the other’s was to retrieve as much of the fruits of their labor as possible.  Our trustees were mostly business types, but they had no obligation to shareholders and most of them vacillated between idealistic and clueless about public higher education.  The administrators who sat across the table from us were certainly subject to the neo-liberal pressures that bore down on all university bosses, but most of them had been faculty at one time and even the most mendacious among them probably still cared about students.  We watched them grow frustrated and bored with their lawyer’s strategy of stonewall and delay.  The members of their team who engaged us in actual conversation or nodded too sympathetically at our points suddenly disappeared from the bargaining room.  

The university president had been right in her warning that collective bargaining would put a third party between administration and faculty, but that third party turned out not to be the union thugs she was imagining, but rather the mercenary lawyer she had hired.  Once he was gone, the rules and responsibilities still remained for both sides, and that structure along with the legal equality of the two sides at a bargaining table forced us to stop hurling blow-off platitudes past each other and get down to cases.  Collective bargaining has brought us better salaries and working conditions, but perhaps the most important thing it has delivered is a vastly improved working relationship.  We now have a respect for each other and a problem-solving working relationship that we never would have achieved under the old myths of shared governance.  

This kind of class collaboration as the pinnacle of faculty union achievement has sent and will continue to send shivers down the spines of my faithfully radical colleagues, and rightly so.  Just as collective bargaining has revealed the bankruptcy of shared governance, it has also definitively shown us that college professors are not a revolutionary class.  We are mostly the children of the professional and managerial classes, our jobs require us to spend a lot of time alone with our books so solidarity does not come naturally to us, our professional training has conditioned us to suck up to authority, our political and ideological commitments vary wildly across disciplines, and within our larger class we are divided into comfortably upper middle class tenure-track professors and a large proletariat of contingent faculty who still live better and have more prospects than most Americans living below the middle class. Even those of us who teach from a radical or Marxist perspective have mortgages, drive Subarus, and contribute to a 401(k) plan.  Ultimately, we are much more of a guild than a union, at least as a union might be imagined by the Third International or the IWW. 

In this, of course, we are no different from our parent companies at NEA and AFT, who both have multi-story buildings blocks from the White House, complete with outsourced cafeterias and human resources departments.  Higher education unionization fits squarely into what is left of the U.S. labor movement.  We are part of a slightly left-liberal consensus, carefully regulated by state and federal labor law (the sturdy framework created by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, amended by Taft-Hartley in 1947, and perpetuated through a series of Supreme Court decisions up to and including Janus), designed to give U.S. business relative labor peace.  We raise millions of dollars in PAC money and are a reliable phone banking army for the Democratic party.  

So it should come as no surprise that the conditions always exist for faculty unions and university administrations to work and play well together, especially when administrators can be convinced that it is worth it to trade a little bit of power for a more content faculty.  And it just may be possible, especially in the current moment, that these conditions could allow faculty and administration to collaborate on something relatively radical that goes beyond guild wages, benefits, and working conditions.  

The real reason that public higher education faculty need unions is the same reason that public higher education administrators behave like corporate bosses: the defunding of public higher education that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  At about the same time that organized labor was fully defanged, college campuses became the center of progressive and radical organizing in the U.S.  In the 1950s and 60s, in the wake of the GI Bill, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s movement, students of diverse races, classes, and genders began showing up in public colleges in significant numbers for the first time.  They brought civil rights, women’s rights, and free speech movements to campus and began demanding respect and curricular change (Ethnic Studies Programs, Women’s Studies Programs) in ways that began to fundamentally rearrange colleges and universities.  

Business elites quickly began to recognize colleges as a problem.  Lewis Powell, in his now-famous “Powell Memorandum” to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, devoted several pages of his conservative blueprint to “The Campus,” offering a detailed plan to regulate textbooks, make the faculty more conservative, and influence graduate schools of business.  This turned out to be overkill, as most of his objectives could be achieved by simply defunding public higher education. Up until this time, public higher education had been essentially free. But as soon as Black and Brown, first generation and working class students began arriving in numbers, states, led by Governor Ronald Reagan’s very public attack on the University of California (especially the Berkeley campus), began the systematic disinvestment in public higher education.  As the percentage of white students in public higher education has declined over the decades so has state funding, at almost exactly the same rate.  This massive, nationwide act of structural racism has led to public tuition rising to private school levels and created the bankers’ paradise of massive student debt.  

Turning public institutions private has also no doubt shaped the careers and mindsets of college administrators.  We should never mistake the time when public higher education was available to only white men as a golden age, but the job of college president in a time when the campus was fully funded by the state was surely more academic and faculty oriented.  It was a job for which someone with a PhD in Physics, English, or Political Science might be relatively qualified. Today, the academic training a college president receives when they are still planning a career as a teacher and scholar has little relevance for the CEO job they have ended up with. A day filled with courting donors, building marketing campaigns to attract premium-paying out-of-state students, managing the debt-financing of fancy dorms and gymnasiums, and negotiating food service contracts with private prison vendors is a long way from that dissertation on Hawthorne or that article about molecular biology. The recent history of public higher education is what has turned administrators into managerial overseers and faculty into labor costs, putting us on opposite sides of a divide that is best bridged with collective bargaining.  

And it may be that the relationships we’ve developed in that bargaining have prepared us to work together on something bigger than the labor/management dance.  Here in Washington, the last few years have brought tangible signs that the ground of higher education may be shifting.  In 2015, the Washington State Legislature, led by the Republican-controlled Senate, reduced tuition at Washington’s public universities by 20%. This would not necessarily be that remarkable were it not for the fact that they also replaced the lost tuition revenue with an equal amount of new state appropriations. In 2017, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began funding the College Promise Coalition, whose goal is to increase post-secondary degree attainment to 70% of Washington citizens. In 2019, the legislature instituted the Washington College Grant as an entitlement available to all students who qualify. Under this entitlement, anyone from a family of four making $50,000 or less can go to any public college in Washington for free. Any student from a family making $96,000 or less receives some grant support. This grant is funded by a tax on businesses, a tax that was strongly supported by both Microsoft and Amazon.  

At the same time, there are signs that voters and policy makers are beginning to come around to the idea of higher education as a public good.  In a 2020 poll conducted by the College Promise Coalition, 70% of voters, perhaps fed up with the chaos that ignorance brings, said that the most important thing higher education can do is produce well-rounded citizens who make our communities strong.  And in our tech-heavy state, so far the digital giants don’t seem to be trying to use the pandemic as a way to move all education online. Most people seem to be recognizing that online education is a ghost of the real thing and that digital divides create huge educational inequities.

A confluence of accidents, consequences, and intentions has brought us to a place where a fairly broad consensus is developing around the idea of making public higher education more public.  In this context, we might convince our administrations that instead of hiring a token vice president for diversity, they should recruit many more low income Black, Brown, and Native students. Together we might convince state legislatures to fund food, housing, and childcare subsidies for those student for whom free tuition is not enough.  And perhaps at the bargaining table we can agree that committing to a larger percentage of tenure track faculty is the best thing we can do for students, especially those from the neglected regions of capital.  If we can convince our administrative friends that we are in a place where running a college more like an educational institution and less like a business will bring them praise rather than pink slips, we might be able to turn the institutional battleship just a little bit.  The revolution we will have to leave to our students.   

United Faculty of Washington State blog is here.

by T.E. Winningham, Syracuse University

This is the first of two papers we're posting from an MLA panel last week, entitled "Organizing University Labor," put together by Eva Cherniavsky at the University of Washington- Seattle (her most recent post here was on the gutting of the humanities in WA). I thought of both papers under the title "After Shared Governance," as both discuss non-Senate modes of faculty control while also taking a critical look at faculty unions.

From the moment Joe Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee right up to election night, Cornel West’s stated position, which he repeated almost as a mantra on every platform that would have him, was: The Left must do everything possible to defeat Donald Trump, while at the same time we cannot lie to ourselves about who Joe Biden is. Which is to say, he is no friend of ours.  And I begin with this because there’s never been a day in this country when the labor movement was not under attack, so unions must be defended. Defense, though, does not preclude legitimate, robust critique, and we cannot ignore the structural flaws in our labor unions as they actually exist.

Indeed, just as a Biden administration provides more advantageous terrain for struggle, having a union is overall better than not—virtually every metric shows this to be true—but we’re still in a fight, and unions, far from being the end point, are just another battlefield. Because despite romanticized ideals of workers coming together in democratic self- determination and so forth, national unions are bureaucratic institutions with their own internal hierarchies, and in many ways collaborate with employers in a class war against their own membership, while at the same time working tirelessly to contain a growing militancy within the working class.

First a brief overview of my own experience. Between the Fall of 2015 and Spring 20l8, I was a Lecturer in the University of California system, represented by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), first for two years at UC Riverside in the University Writing Program, then a year at UCLA in the English Department. “Lecturer” is the term for full- and part-time non-Senate Faculty. Tenure-track this obviously was not, but working conditions were decent—certainly better than in many contingent positions. A full teaching load at UCR is eight courses per year, which is a 3-3-2 on their quarter system, with a base salary of around $53,000 plus benefits, with 1.5% deducted from each paycheck for collective bargaining fees under the fair-share provision of California law. In other words, this was a comfortable second-tier academic job.

No one approached me, but I formally joined AFT Local 1966 right away, since membership aligned with my political beliefs and there was no extra cost.

I’d initially been hired at the very last minute and given three classes for the Fall quarter. Shortly thereafter, it became apparent I’d also be needed for Winter and Spring, at which point the collective bargaining agreement required that I be appointed to an annual-year contract, and I was back-paid to the previous July. Over the winter I reapplied for my job—a full application complete with cover letter, teaching materials, letters of recommendation, and so on—and near the end of spring I was rehired on another annual-year contract, which was great as there’d be no gap in my income over the summer.

So, again, there were real upsides overall, but I use the term “rehired” intentionally, as I’m sure many of us are familiar with the stress and uncertainty of self-terminating contracts. The union had negotiated a “Continuing Lecturer” designation, which secures ongoing employment after 18 quarters in a single department, but that’s still six years of reapplying for your own job, and a number of departments within the UC had reputations for excessive turnover, particularly around the 14th or 15th quarter to avoid granting ongoing status. I was told this was a priority for future negotiations, but it seemed nothing else could be done.

In my case, late in the summer after my second year I received a department-wide email announcing that unless we’d already heard otherwise, we were not being rehired, and that this included “several experienced Lecturers.” Obviously, we were in competition each year with the entire applicant pool. The union could not or would not protect our positions, and all those nice union benefits were out window as I was out of a job.

Late in August 2017, I was hired by the English Department at UCLA, and though I was part of the same bargaining unit, that department viewed the Lecturer position more as a gentleman’s postdoc for their own PhDs who’d failed to secure tenure-track jobs upon graduation, and never hired anyone for more than a year or two at most. I was only brought in because one of their medievalists backed out last minute to consult full- time on a television series then in production. Such is Hollywood. And as another unspoken rule, the UCLA English Department did not hire anyone full-time, so I was given their standard 2-1-1 for the year. To be fair, this is a 57% appointment and thus benefits eligible. But I had to supplement my income with courses across town at USC, and neither of these unwritten rules were known to me until well into my time there.

This also happened to be the lead-up to the Janus v. AFSCME decision, which everyone correctly anticipated would rule fair- share fees unconstitutional and spread the free-rider problem to the 20 states where these fees were then legal. No longer would the AFT automatically collect that 1.5% of every Lecturer’s paycheck; they would now have to incentivize workers to join the union.

I signed up to help with some outreach, paired with a union staffer. This turned out mostly to involve chasing down Lecturers between classes and confronting them with a sales pitch that basically started and ended with: You’re benefiting from a contract the union negotiated, be grateful, and feel guilty for not signing up. To be blunt, it was a shockingly lazy, patronizing effort. 

Jane McAlevey, a veteran organizer and now a senior policy fellow at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, extensively documents her experience and frustrations with national unions in her first book, Raising Hell  “Today,” she writes in her second book, No Shortcuts, “attempts to generate movements are directed by professional, highly educated staff who rely on an elite, top- down theory of power that treats the masses as audiences of, rather than active participants in, their own liberation” (9). She goes on to outline three approaches unions take to bring about change and engage their members: Advocacy, Mobilization, and Organization. Advocacy takes place at the level of policy and political lobbying. Mobilization relies on large numbers of workers at rallies and photo-ops, but still “staffers see themselves, not ordinary people, as the key agents of change. To them, it matters little who shows up, or, why, as long as a sufficient number of bodies appear” (10). 

But in true organizing, as McAlevey defines it, “the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority… Individual campaigns matter in themselves, but they are primarily a mechanism for bringing new people into the change process and keeping them involved” (10). Few unions today invest the time and resources into organizing, first, because it takes those time and resources, but also because it decentralizes power away from the union leadership that has worked so hard to consolidate its power.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the AFT campaign. While the histories, memoirs, and how-tos of the labor movement focus on the challenges, rewards—the excitement—of unionizing a workplace, our bargaining unit had remained unchanged since 1984, and relations between the UC administration and the union had long since stabilized.

So aside from the obvious—hoping people would sign up—what were we doing? Certainly not organizing, and not mobilizing to put any pressure on the administration. Even in a contract year, the negotiations were just tinkering around the edges, and more importantly they were a thing that happened elsewhere, at some conference table behind closed doors, among people neither these prospective members nor I would ever meet.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was experiencing the culmination of decades of labor concessions and institutional inertia--much of it the result of fair-share fees and exclusive representation, both products of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Shaun Richman, a former organizing director for the AFT and writer for In These Times, explains some of this in his book, Tell the Bosses We’re Coming:

From their inception, mandatory union fees were never intended to compensate unions for the financial costs they bear for bargaining and filing grievances. Mandatory union fees are the compensation for the political costs of representing all the workers in a shop and maintaining labor peace… It is the combination of exclusive representation and the union shop that enables unions to agree to “shared sacrifice” or just plain old concessions and do the heavy lifting of selling them to the workers as being “good for the company” or the long term viability of jobs.  (33, emphasis in original)

This is precisely how unions have defended mandatory fees and the structure of the National Labor Relations Board itself in court, right from the start. Richman again: “Unions were there defending the NLRB on the basis of collective bargaining’s stabilizing effect on the economy” (64). This is the same line of argument that union attorneys used in Janus v. AFSCME.

David Frederick, attorney for Illinois AFSCME Council 31, argued: “The key thing that has been bargained for in this contract for agency fees is a limitation on striking. And that is true in many collective bargaining agreements” (Kishore). He went on: “The fees are the tradeoff. Union security is the tradeoff for no strikes." 

Illinois Solicitor General David Franklin went further in supporting the union’s position, claiming the state has “an interest… in being able to work with a stable, responsible, independent counterparty that’s well resourced enough that it can be a party with us” (Kishore).

And here is Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT, whose salary is around $450,000 a year, in the Washington Post: 

Collective bargaining allows employers and employees to forge agreements on the basis of shared interests that address both parties’ priorities and concerns. Without bargaining rights, educators are left with few options to have their voices heard and are forced to take more public actions, such as protesting to lawmakers, to have their priorities addressed.”

 Heaven forbid, we might take it upon ourselves to protest to lawmakers.

It doesn’t get much clearer; in their own words, the state and the union are partnering to collude with employers to suppress worker opposition, and the union’s main concern—”union security”—has nothing to do with workers and everything to do with consolidating its own power to mirror, organizationally, its counterpart.

In their article "Intergroup Solidarity and Collaboration in Higher Education Organizing and Bargaining in the United States," Daniel Scott and Adrianna Kezar of USC write:

Bureaucratic unions shifted their organizational structures and procedures to be more formal, pursuing survival through efficiency as they became more organizationally similar to the employers they negotiated with. They … hired additional administrative staff, and many adopted rigid procedures for addressing grievances… so that the union could evaluate and respond to grievance issues one-by-one. 

This trend had the effect of strengthening the union’s position as mediator between employer and employee, while limiting the individual worker’s ability to collaborate with others and take other forms of active involvement in addressing their concerns (Clawson and Clawson 100). (Scott 106)

As David Graeber points out in The Utopia of Rules, “a bureaucracy, once created, will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it” (150). This is why the AFL-CIO opposes the Green New Deal and why AFSCME, the AFL-CIO, and UNITE-HERE are resistant to Medicare For All: negotiating healthcare being one of their main reasons for existence.

The AFT has built a robust infrastructure within the UC system. It made itself an indispensable mediator between administration and non-Senate Faculty, contained labor unrest through no-strike clauses while extracting fees from the entire bargaining unit, and locked in an academic underclass of limited-term, contingent faculty. This is not out of character for a national union, as the United Auto Workers is infamous for a 2007 concession that created a two-tier wage system for hourly employees, with the lower tier maxing out at $10 less per hour than higher-paid workers. From the AFT’s perspective, too, individual Lecturers are interchangeable. Remember, “it doesn’t matter who shows up." Thus the bargaining unit, the overall entity, is not contingent: between 2015 and 2018 there were about 3,000 Lecturers and the number now somewhere just over 4,000. The bargaining unit is not just stable but growing.

From the Lecturers’ perspective, though, the situation is far different. I, we, didn’t complete a dozen years of higher education to cycle through a one-year job, and yet that is what is increasingly happening. Unions have indeed faced a coordinated, decades-long assault by both business and government. But the decline in union membership throughout the country, as well as the resistance I saw from fellow Lecturers, is also fueled by unions’ willful impotence.

In that same Washington Post article, Weingarten admits: “Fifty-two percent of teachers say they feel their perspective is only ‘somewhat’ represented, and 20 percent say their perspective is ‘not very much’ or ‘not at all’ represented by their unions.” That’s roughly three disaffected teachers out of every four. And how could they not be, when they have no say in the priorities, strategies, or tactics of their union?

With fair-share fees now unconstitutional, unions are forced to convince workers of their value, but what does that process look like? Can a union deliver the kinds of working conditions we want? In my ideal university—and given the current political situation I want to be careful with talk of revolution or overthrow—but in my ideal university we expel nearly all administration and return to faculty governance. Perhaps our employment would be built around a traditional tenure system, but regardless we would work full-time and we’d bring an end to self- terminating contracts.

Here’s where it gets tricky: according to the NLRB, if you have a say in the operation of the workplace, as you’d have as a member of a functioning academic Senate, then you’re considered management and not eligible for union representation. And no formal union will help us reach a point that dissolves its own membership.

Further compounding the problem of organizing is the fact that the academic labor force is divided into not two, but three tiers--tenure-track, full-time non-tenure track, and adjunct--or actually four tiers if you count graduate students, who over the years have shifted more and more from TAs toward teaching their own sections.

Three of these tiers comprise their own unique bargaining units, and it’s not an apprentice or seniority system in which we toil for a certain amount of time in the lower rungs before moving up to a better position. As my own experience showed, even Lecturers in slightly-less exploited union jobs are still, every year, part of the reserve pool of adjunct labor. 

Universities, as a class, determine the overall size of that pool, by virtue of awarding PhDs academia controls its own labor market. This is a problem to be sure. But complaining about the overproduction of PhDs misses the point. In my current department, a full teaching load is 4/4. With a sane and pedagogically appropriate load my department would double in size.  I’d argue that’s the case nationwide.

So how then to organize? Our first responsibility is to the most exploited and precarious among us, and that includes not just contingent faculty but our fellow workers in custodial and dining services, groundskeeping, and so on who make our jobs possible. “Wall-to-wall” unionization is one possible answer, in which everyone in the institution—graduate student workers, faculty, and staff—are represented collectively, as Arizona State University workers just announced would happen. 

But organizing takes time and a commitment to investing in individual people. With contingent faculty, even if you convince someone to join the fight they might well be at another university next semester or next year.

Non-union associations like New Faculty Majority seem to be a good start, but they appear to be operating mainly on the level of advocacy: writing policy papers and op-eds, circulating petitions, tweeting, and fundraising.  We don’t need more petitions (or conference papers) so much as we need more strikes. So I fear they will encounter the same organizational incentives of other top-down nonprofits, the most important being that when your salary depends on a problem it becomes difficult to solve that problem.

One of the more interesting approaches, it seems, and one deployed with success by SEIU in Boston, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington D.C., is the Metro Strategy. In this, organizing is based not on institution or department or bargaining unit, but instead on metropolitan region. In Los Angeles, there are three UCs, seven Cal States, and well over a dozen city colleges within driving distance of downtown, and I'm counting only public institutions.

As Scott and Kezar write, the Metro Strategy is

particular[ly] effective for contingent faculty and other types of contingent workers because it follows the distribution and flows of contingent workers, rather than starting with the individual university and inevitably leaving many workers at other institutions out (Berry and Worthen 436–38). . . . [This] increases the mass of workers who are organized, so they can negotiate with multiple employers and have an impact that goes beyond an individual site. (119)

Both “wall-to-wall” and Metro strategies organize within existing union infrastructures, of course, but build solidarity across larger sections of the academic working class—particularly throughout the adjunct labor market of a fixed location—and provide far more leverage and potential for escalation.

Escalation is key, as strikes get the goods. More importantly, strikes beget more strikes. To quote Richman again: “It is the visible resistance of organized workers that inspires people to join the labor movement” (58). We’ve seen this in the Red For Ed strikes that spread across the country in 2018, and the credible threat of strikes during COVID-19 that are inspiring more and more workers to stand up for their own safety. 

We can expect, however, that any increased militancy or strike attempts will be vigorously opposed by union leadership, whose class interests are not our class interests, which puts us in the same dilemma faced by the broader Left with respect to the willfully impotent Democratic Party: is it better to organize within and attempt to take over a neoliberal institutional apparatus, or to build power from below and challenge existing structures from the outside? 

As a popular meme asks: Why not both?

Works Cited

Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2016.

Kishore, Joseph. “Union lawyer tells US Supreme Court: ‘Union security is the tradeoff for no strikes.’” World Socialist Web Site. 28 Feb. 2018. Web.

McAlevey, Jane F. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Richman, Shaun. Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21st Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020.

Scott, Daniel and Adrianna J. "Intergroup Solidarity and Collaboration in Higher Education Organizing and Bargaining in the United States," Academic Labor: Research and Artistry: Vol. 3 , Article 10, (2019).

Stone, Evan and Randi Weingarten. “As unions await a key Supreme Court decision, a simple plea: ‘Educators want their voices heard.’ Washington Post. 21 June 2018.

White, Jerry. “As teacher struggles spread, unions redouble effort to suppress class struggle.” World Socialist Web Site. 09 Mar. 2018. Web.

Photo Credit

by Amie Campos, PhD Candidate, History 

Simeon Man, Associate Professor, History 

Rihan Yeh, Associate Professor, Anthropology 

On the morning of June 15th, approximately 200 Housing, Dining, and Hospitality workers at UC San Diego were given notices of “temporary layoffs.” Those who were at work that day were instructed by management to meet at a cafeteria, with a promise of free lunch. Citing a 90% drop in students on campus, management told the majority-Spanish-speaking workforce - via a management-appointed translator - that they would be laid off for the rest of the summer. They were handed some information, including a sheet on how to apply for unemployment, and dismissed with written assurances that they would be returned to their jobs in early September. Lunch, unsurprisingly, was never served.

This move came just two weeks after Chancellor Pradeep Khosla’s to the university community denouncing the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery — a message that included a promise of “doing what can be done within our institution to make sure everyone feels that they belong and that they matter.” This juxtaposition reveals the unwillingness of the university to put its money where its mouth is. It has chosen a path that leaves 200 workers and their families, from low-income communities of color disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, without income for at least 2 months.

In a public statement regarding this mass firing, the university characterized the layoffs as inevitable. We should not be misled into accepting this austerity narrative. AFSCME, the union representing the majority of the affected workers, released its research findings based on publicly-available UC financial statements on May 18th. This report showed that the UC system can leverage its vast resources and stellar credit standing to lead California’s economic recovery by maintaining employment for its 227,000 workers rather than pursuing cuts. UCOP has not refuted AFSCME’s claims about usable reserves. Further undermining the austerity narrative,

the university advertised temporary positions in dining services following the layoffs. At the May 20 Regents meeting on “Projected COVID-19 Impact on 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 Revenue,” UC’s Chief Financial Officer Paul Jenny also presented a variety of options for weathering the COVID-19 financial storm, including dipping into the endowment’s unrestricted funds and applying for low-interest federal loans through the CARES Act at different campuses.

Without evidence that the University will face financial hardship if it does not enact layoffs, UCSD affiliates should not accept the administration’s chosen course. Dining service workers have an average annual salary of $41,000 -- well below San Diego County’s Area Median Income (AMI). While significant for workers, a two-month layoff has a negligible effect on UCSD’s overall budget. Chancellor Khosla, whose gross salary in 2018 was $477,384, has taken just a 10% pay cut, and the University continues to employ over 600 people whose regular payexceeds $200,000.

UCSD’s treatment of its workers also exposes the dangerous assumptions and inequities embedded in its much-publicized “Return to Learn” program. The majority of laid-off workers have been working on campus on rotating shifts throughout the pandemic, serving students who could not leave and staff who could not work from home. Yet since the university began its ambitious pilot plan in May to test all students on campus prior to the official start of “Return to Learn” in the fall quarter, UCSD has not offered its workers ample opportunities for free testing, nor has it provided them with adequate PPE or regular COVID-related training. Many workers have had to take precautionary measures themselves, in the absence of clear protocols or guidelines from supervisors, and have for months been worried about being exposed to the virus on campus and bringing it home to their families. The university’s demonstrated disregard for the health and well-being of its essential workers underscores the view that they are disposable and not part of the “campus community” deemed worthy of protection. This casts further doubt that the university will ensure the safety of other campus workers including students, and faculty as the “Return to Learn” program ramps up.

The effects of these decisions will reinforce existing racial and gender inequalities at UCSD and fly in the face of ongoing organizing by students, faculty, and staff, who demand that administrators address the institution’s own anti-Black, anti-Latinx, and anti-Indigenous realities. A 15-page list of demands issued by the Black Student Union (BSU) on June 22nd, which objects to these layoffs and calls for the defunding of the campus police, is one important example. Another is an op-ed published on July 4th by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS Local 94) titled “We Will Not ‘Return to Earn.’”

We reject the University’s plan to wait until early September to return laid-off workers to campus when they will have to scramble to meet the needs of arriving students. We view the plan as part of a flimsy and unethical strategy of UCSD administration hedging its bets to collect housing deposits from students who are promised a safe campus opening in the fall despite rapidly rising infection rates, while keeping labor costs down and reneging on its rehiring promise in the event that “Return to Learn” is unfeasible.

UCSD must reverse these layoffs, especially given Covid-19's trajectory and disproportionate impact on communities of color in San Diego. The close to 200 Housing and Dining workers and their families are invaluable members of the campus community and should be treated as such. UCSD is a major employer in the San Diego region that holds the livelihoods of many people in its hands. As a research institution, medical center, and major hospital, UCSD depends on labor provided by communities in San Diego, including low-income communities that have served as sites of clinical training, research, and experimentation for UCSD researchers. Reinstating these workers will be a small step in repairing the extractive relationships on which UCSD’s reputation as one of the nation’s top research institutions depend.

How you can support HDH workers: We call on the university to reverse the layoffs. In the meantime, donations can be made to UCSD Mutual Aid’s gofundme page in order to support workers facing financial difficulties. Chancellor Khosla’s office can be reached at 858-534-3135.

A Spanish language version of this piece is here

UCSD North Campus: Photo Credit  Erik Jepsen, Triton May 16, 2019

 

This is an open letter expressing the concerns of around a dozen Assistant Professors from the Faculty Organizing Group (FOG) at UCSC. The authors would like to encourage all colleagues to share stories of surveillance, intimidation and/or punitive measures taken by university administrations during the COVID-19 crisis with the hashtag #DisciplineAnd Punish. Also please follow the “Ad Hoc Committee of Scholars 4 COLA” on Facebook and on Twitter (handle: @COLASolidarity).

Dear Colleagues,

Assistant professors have been repeatedly asked, both formally and informally, to provide information about how the graduate student wildcat strike (and later, the COVID-19 pandemic) has impacted our research, teaching, and service on campus. Here is our collective response.

Echoing numerous calls from the faculty senate, individual departments, and colleagues at institutions across the United States, we write in the form of an open letter, to call upon the administration to stop their harmful disciplinary actions against graduate and undergraduate members of our campus community.

To our great dismay, what has impacted us the most is not the circumstances created by the strike itself, such as the absence of TAs in our lecture courses, additional grading, and general disruption to our teaching. Rather, the most taxing element has been the emotional, logistical, and material support we have provided graduate and undergraduate students as a direct result of the administration’s punitive responses to the strike. And now, in the midst of a global pandemic, many of us have been working countless additional hours to assist students who have been caught up in a needlessly aggressive disciplinary dragnet because of their involvement in the strike.

We are deeply frustrated by our campus administration’s misguided approach in responding to the strike, particularly the ongoing disciplinary hearings whose only purpose seems to be to intimidate and overwhelm students. These actions traumatize the students involved; it is unconscionable that they continue at a time when students are struggling in the face of unprecedented financial, psychological, and health risks. They also put a disproportionate burden on junior faculty members who have often been on the frontlines (sometimes literally—at the picket) in defending these students from a bureaucratic machine whose punitive actions seem to know no rhyme or reason.

The administration has been carrying out disciplinary proceedings against at least 49 students for strike-related activities, despite the passing of a faculty senate resolution and numerous faculty letters and requests calling for these disciplinary actions to stop. Students arrested at the picket line received interim suspensions; some of these students had been injured by police, and the suspensions impeded their timely access to medical care on campus. Arrested students and those who withheld grades have received warning letters in their files.

Disciplinary hearings have been ongoing, even after the onset of COVID-19, and even as cities and states closed courts and halted criminal proceedings. The administration has refused to halt or revoke any of these measures even after students submitted grades. Perhaps most mysteriously, they have formed a “Demonstrations Operations Team,” whose role remains opaque at best. Ostensibly charged with “coordinating the campus’ specific operational planning and response needs related to campus activism,” we have no information about who team members are and little to no knowledge about their budget, surveillance activities, oversight role, or involvement in issuing summons.

As faculty, our role has involved providing for the physical safety, emotional health, and academic success of our students. We have accompanied them to multiple disciplinary hearings when they were intimidated by disciplinary officers. We have also provided time and emotional support to vulnerable, frightened, and sometimes ill students. We organized a daily faculty march and picket line support group so that faculty observers were at all times at the base of campus to protect students from campus-paid police, and to serve as witnesses should testimonials later be required, which they were. We made donations of money and food to help already-struggling students continue to meet their daily needs. We worked to secure alternative funding and employment for fired graduate students and wrote numerous letters. These included character letters for students as part of the disciplinary proceedings and letters to campus administration expressing our dismay about how these proceedings have unfolded.  We spent afternoons being interviewed by disciplinary officers who were attempting to corroborate police reports with student accounts.

Quantitatively, many of us easily spent between ten and twenty hours a week on these activities during winter quarter (and into the present). This workload has only become more complex and time-consuming in the context of COVID-19, as we navigate the many bureaucratic and procedural inconsistencies caused by moving these disciplinary hearings to Zoom. In total, we estimate that assistant professors have spent at least 2,000 hours engaged in hearings and other activities related to our students’ punishment, intimidation, and dismissal—undoubtedly enough time to publish one or more articles, or even finish first books.

These numbers only gesture at a more worrying reality: the disturbing skill-sets acquired by assistant professors on our campus. We now know the answers to many questions we had previously never wished to ask: What is the difference between the CHP and campus police? What is the correct tone to use when speaking with police officers in riot gear to de-escalate a situation and avoid physical harm being inflicted on students? Where does our academic freedom begin and end when it comes to using Canvas or modifying our syllabi? Is a grade property—and, if so, who “owns” a grade? Should we be worried about our security of employment based on a student’s online report via the administration-provided Canvas widget (dubbed the Tattlebot by faculty)? Might photos taken of us by police at the picket line be used against us in future tenure and promotion decisions?

To offer an example of what this disciplining has looked like, one of us accompanied a graduate student - who had in fact submitted grades - to a hearing. They were being “investigated” for having temporarily moved these grades off Canvas. The charges included “interference with courses of instruction, theft or damage of intellectual property; unauthorized entry to, possession of, receipt of, duplication of, or use of any university services; theft or abuse of university computers and other University electronic resources; forgery, alteration or misuse of any university, state, federal or other government documents; obstruction or disruption of teaching; failure to identify oneself to, or comply with directions of, a university official; violation of any other university policy or campus regulation.” This list can only be read as a concerted attempt to intimidate and harass this student.  This heavy-handed process raises troubling questions—for us  as well as our graduate students—about the potential uses of Canvas for surveillance and discipline.

To offer a second example, another of us supported an undergraduate student who, after being present at the picket line in February, was later investigated for alleged “obstruction of university activities.” This student was one of a large number of undergraduates who had assembled at the base of campus in support of their TAs. That day, a number of faculty saw this student arrested during the well-documented episode of police overreach and outright brutality. During this student’s hearing, the faculty support person saw their student forced to relive the anxiety and lingering trauma from their interaction with police (a condition that has been formally diagnosed by a medical professional) as the student conduct officer posed confusing, leading questions. This student never received the opportunity to review the full evidence held against them, and was only sent piecemeal and contradictory police testimonies.

Many of us arrived at UC Santa Cruz excited about the university’s history of support for radical and progressive politics and intellectual thought. We looked forward to fulfilling the three components of our responsibilities as assistant professors—teaching, research, and service—at a public, Hispanic-serving institution that takes its commitment to undergraduates seriously. One of our primary activities in the past year has fallen somewhere between teaching and service: working closely with UCSC students, helping expand their intellectual horizons and acting as a source of support, as so many mentors have done for us. This role is rewarding but challenging for many of us—particularly for female-identified assistant professors and faculty of color, as we try to establish a balance between caring for our students’ welfare and maintaining our professional role as professors. It is particularly difficult on this campus even during the best of times, as campus services struggle to keep up with the very real problems of food insecurity, homelessness, sexual violence, and expressions of racism that confront our students. As a result, our role is often something between a social worker and a professor. We have no training for the former, nor is this labor particularly valued as we approach mid-career reviews and the always-ticking tenure clock. 

Some will say it was our decision—and not our responsibility—to assume this role. We could have watched from the sidelines as our students were harassed, arrested, and even physically injured. Yet such a position implies that professors’ mentorship and care should be restricted to classroom discussions. Moreover, the Academic Personnel Manual (210) states that, “Mentoring and advising of students and faculty members, particularly from underrepresented and underserved populations, should be given due recognition in the teaching or service categories of the academic personnel process.” Indeed, we see our activities around the strike as fully in line with our responsibility to support the most precarious members of our community.

These activities have continued into the spring. The administration’s present actions continue to undermine the well-being of our students, precisely at a time when their precarity has been heightened by COVID-19. While we worry about the welfare of our community, the administration seems to be undermining our efforts at every turn, continuing to traumatize students at a precarious time. Not only do their actions harm graduate students, they have also been profoundly destabilizing for undergraduates who have been swept up in disciplinary hearings. Indeed, for  all the UCSC administration’s statements of concerns about the impact of the strike on undergraduate learning, the reality is that undergraduate learning has been severely disrupted by such an opaque and inconsistent disciplinary process. It is alarming that as we transition to distance learning, the most immediate connection that students maintain with UCSC is through its disciplinary bureaucracy.

Now that the graduate students have announced that they will collectively submit outstanding fall and winter quarter grades, we believe that it is time to bring this disciplinary process to a close. We ask again that the university halt all disciplinary proceedings, end probationary periods and other sanctions (including the possible loss of housing stipends), and expunge the records of all graduate and undergraduate students under investigation.

We hope that the administration will take seriously our request to halt the disciplinary process and will offer a response to this letter.

Sincerely,

Assistant Professors of FOG, UCSC

UC Service and Patient Care workers will be going on strike from Monday May 7 to Wednesday May 9.  AFSCME, the union representing these workers, has been negotiating with UC for over a year with little success and the University had imposed a settlement for the 2017-18 fiscal year.  As the union indicates here the University's latest offer includes pay raises between 2 and 3% (depending on your workplace) combined with a freezing of step increases for 5 years, a rise in health care costs, and a shift to less retirement support.  Given that inflation is now hovering around 2% this can hardly be considered the generous offer the University insists it is.  

To make matters worse, service and patient care workers are already among the lowest paid workers at UC.  As a recent AFSCME Study made clear inequality within UC has been increasing dramatically over the recent past.  UC's lowest paid workers already face difficulties making ends meet.  (26)  This general inequality is compounded by racial and gender inequities that run throughout the UC workforce.

Compounding the issue is UC's continued insistence on its right to sub-contract out its labor needs.  Despite all the fanfare a few years ago about UC's policy of paying $15 an hour to its workers, that promise does not extend consistently to sub-contractors.  As UC expands its use of sub-contractors the living conditions of its lowest paid workers worsens dramatically.  (26-27)

There are a variety of places you can go to find ways to support the strikers:

CA-AAUP has a statement HERE

AFSCME Strike Locations can be found HERE

AFSCME's statement on the negotiations can be found HERE

The AFSCME report on Inequality at UC can be found HERE

Yesterday Columbia University Provost John Coatesworth announced that the University was refusing to bargain in with the Graduate Workers of Columbia  (the union for teaching and research assistants) despite the ruling of the National Labor Relations Board that Columbia graduate workers were entitled to collective bargaining through their chosen representative.  Although the University characterizes this decision as simply acting on its "right to have the status of graduate student assistants reviewed by a United States Court of Appeals" in reality it is choosing to engage in an unfair labor practice and daring the union to sue it. As with the longer history of the University's employment of labor-busting law firms to stretch out the certification process, Columbia appears determined to take advantage of President Trump's election in order to find a legal venue hostile to labor.

The hypocrisy of Columbia is overwhelming.  Columbia's President Lee Bollinger is a renowned scholar of the First Amendment and Columbia trumpets its commitments to the notions of free debate and the force of reasoned argument.  But apparently they are only committed to these principles when it will not cost them control over their graduate student laborers.  Both the University and the Union have debated these issues for years and the graduate students have voted that they want representation.  Columbia has refused to accept that it lost the argument when graduate students overwhelmingly voted in favor of unionizing.  Columbia--like so many of its peers--claims that a union would constitute a "third party between student and teacher." But it has not hesitated in seeking out external law firms to fight the unionization.

More importantly, the issue of unionization is not concerned with the relationship between teachers and graduate students as students.  It is concerned with the relationship between university management and graduate student workers as employees.  By implying that the issue is about relationships of teaching Columbia's management has misrepresented the situation--what the graduate students are demanding is the right to bargain over employment conditions not over their activities as students.

Since Columbia's intellectual and academic arguments are very weak it appears that ultimately this is about power.  The Columbia administration's decision to hoard theirs in clear contradiction to both the NLRB and the expressed will of their graduate student workers.  Like their fellows at the University of Chicago and Yale, to name only two, they are behaving much like feudal aristocrats have always done when faced with a challenge to their authority--by claiming that they are only concerned with maintaining personal relationships.  But what that really means are paternalistic relationships in which subordination is key.

It is important to recognize that the threat to academic freedom and learning does not come from graduate student unions but from overweening managerial authority.  I have taught in universities with unionized graduate students for nearly three decades and have not once had the union interfere with a genuinely pedagogical question.  I have, however, seen unions support graduate student employees in preventing their employment by the university overwhelm their capacity to fulfill their jobs on the one hand and pursue their studies on the other.  But as we can see more generally with the consistent decision by university managers to impose precarious working conditions on more and more of their labor force, management is not in fact thinking about either academic freedom or the relationship between teachers and students.  Its concerns lie elsewhere. 

Columbia's administration should be ashamed of itself.

As you may recall, a bill to eliminate tenure was recently introduced into the Iowa State Senate. After a good deal of pushback it appears to have stalled.  But that doesn't mean that the state's Republicans are done trying to attack the rights of Iowa's public workers.  In their latest salvo, they are proposing to severely restrict the range of public employee collective bargaining (with the exception of police and firefighters) and also to make it more difficult to establish and maintain union representation. Although this is a widespread attack on all public employees, the proposed legislation will strike hard at the state's graduate student employees.

At the core of the proposed legislation are two important issues.  The first is to make it illegal to negotiate things like benefits or supplemental income or retirement.  In effect, the aim is to make it possible only to negotiate on wages and leave workers to the whims of their employers (or the Governor) as to issues such as health care.  Although University of Iowa officials have indicated that they would continue to maintain graduate student employees' health care, one never knows what would happen in the face of a gubernatorial decision to reduce benefits or in the case of funding cuts to the University.

The second and equally serious threat is posed in a change to the system for certifying unions.  The legislation would make it necessary for a union to get the vote of a majority of workers within a collective bargaining unit for the right to represent, as opposed to getting a majority of those casting a ballot.  This is a high hurdle for any union or any candidate: under these rules, the current Iowa Governor would not have been elected since he only received 59% of an electorate that was approximately 50% of the state's eligible voters.  It is especially burdensome to graduate student workers whose eligible unit members are so often in flux.  Moreover, the bill would force re-certification elections every two years.

In taking these steps, Iowa Republicans are seeking to undo a long-standing system of collective bargaining for public employees.  Since 1974 Iowa public employees have operated within a system that forbade strikes (and there haven't been any) in exchange for a system that recognized their right to bargain collectively over a wide set of issues.  Iowa's Republicans are now seeking to destroy that system and hamstring public employee unions.  Given the material constraints that graduate student workers (and graduate students more generally) live within, the most likely result is a reduction in Iowa graduate students' total compensation and quality of life.

But this is more than just an Iowa issue.  Iowa has long been a right-to-work state and its hostility to unions is clear.  But just as with Wisconsin, Iowa Republicans are part of a larger drive to attack unions and worker's collective rights across the country.  One Iowa Representative (along with one from South Carolina) has recently introduced a national right to work bill in the House of Representatives. These initiatives are not simply of local interest.  They threaten to roll back the recent gains that graduate students have obtained through the NLRB and the ability of academic workers everywhere to unionize and defend their interests through collective bargaining.   The result will be to worsen the working conditions and autonomy of academic professionals in general and further subject education itself to the dictates of politicians and managers.

 by Matthew Dennis, Professor of History and Environmental Studies, University of Oregon

After a year of negotiations, the Graduate Teaching Fellowship Federation (GTFF) at the University of Oregon went on strike last week over the University's refusal to grant two weeks of automatically granted sick leave for illness or childbirth.  Kaitlin Mulhere has a good overview at "Inside Higher Ed." UO's faculty senate passed a resolution criticizing the administration's handling of the strike, focusing in part on admin's plan to bypass TA grading   in a way that would weaken academic standards "by administrative fiat."  The UO faculty senate is now investigating this issue. The grad strike coincides with a conflict between UO faculty and its Board of Trustees (pictured above) over faculty governance. The Board is planning to change 70 policies at its meeting this week, and some major changes in the UO Constitution have been proposed by the Board chair.  These and other issues are well-covered by the UO Matters blog, where their scanner processes official documents 24 hours a day.

UO professor Matt Dennis wrote an op-ed for the Eugene newspaper that lays out the issues. His letter to his students is below, in which he makes institutional issues part of his students' overall education.

Dear Students,

The Graduate Teaching Fellows union (GTFF) has declared its intention to go out on strike next week, on Tuesday December 2. I’m writing to you now to explain how this will affect History 201. The GTFF and the UO administration’s labor representatives have been in negotiations since last November (2013) and have hit an impasse. The GFTF has made a number of reasonable demands, which the administration seems unwilling to grant. As a result the GTFs have chosen to use the only real leverage they possess—to withhold their labor. Strikes are disruptive—that’s their point. We notice the critical contribution that the strikers—our GTFs—make to our educational lives, and we hope that the administration quickly realizes that as well and settles their conflict with the GTFF. It’s impossible to predict, however, how long the strike will continue.

Some will blame the GTFF for this disruption in undergraduate teaching, but the administration bears considerable blame for its unwillingness to compromise. They have likely spent more in their prolonged negotiations with the GTFF than it would have cost to fund the GTFF’s requested two-week sick leave policy. And it will cost much more to hire replacement workers to circumvent the strike. My personal opinion is that this approach is ill advised, counterproductive, irresponsible, and needlessly expensive. Though the central administration represents itself as “the university,” in fact the heart of the university is its students (undergraduate and graduate), faculty, and staff—most of whom have not had any say in the negotiations, even though we have the most at stake.

The administration seems willing to compromise the academic integrity of the university in the interest of “continuity.” I am not. It has recommended a number of “options” to work around the strike, including hiring others to grade your work, even suggesting advanced undergraduates, canceling exams and other assignments, transforming exams into multiple choice tests, or simply grading students on the work already performed. In History 201 this would entail abandoning the syllabus (my contract with you), and awarding final grades based on some 55 percent of the graded work completed so far. Because this course is designed to reach a large number of students—over 100—and because my other responsibilities already demand 100 percent of my time, I am not able to grade your work myself. But, on professional and moral grounds, I would not do so in any case. Your GTFs have done a terrific job, worked with you closely, and know you and are in a position to judiciously evaluate your performance. Under present circumstances I cannot do as well--as well as you deserve. Nor will I undermine their efforts to get a just contract. I will not work as a strikebreaker or “scab.”

Where does that leave us in History 201? The exam you took last Tuesday, November 25 (20 percent of your grade) is not yet graded, but it should be evaluated, and your grade on it should be counted in the calculation of your final grade. As should your final exam. Next
week, during the strike, I will deliver my final two lectures in the course as scheduled. The
discussion section meetings taught normally by GTFs, scheduled for week 10, will be
cancelled. The final exam (25 percent of your grade) will occur as scheduled on Tuesday,
December 9 at 8:00 a.m. I will proctor the exam myself and collect your examination books,
but the exams will remain ungraded until the strike is settled and the GTFs are able to grade them. Thus, if the strike extends into finals week or beyond, you will not receive a grade in History 201. Under these circumstances, with so much of your work ungraded, I am unable to file any grades ethically, responsibly, or fairly.

It’s possible that a representative of the administration might decide that filing grades—even indiscriminate ones—is more important than insuring the integrity and justness of such grades. Communications from the administration have suggested that in some cases it might usurp the role of “instructor of record” and file grades themselves. Such a move would be arbitrary and capricious, and a fundamental violation of academic freedom, but it could occur nonetheless. I certainly hope that this does not happen, and that the strike is quickly settled, that the administration treats you equitably and with the respect you merit, and that this mishandling of negotiations with the GTFFs doesn’t damage the integrity and reputation of the University of Oregon we have worked so hard to sustain.

You may be concerned about how all this will affect your academic progress or financial aid. I am empathetic. These are important administrative matters, requiring administrative fixes in these extraordinary circumstances. I encourage you to contact the administration, which should be able to find workable administrative solutions that do not compromise the
academic integrity of the university. It’s their responsibility—and it’s in their interest as well as yours—to ensure your ongoing eligibility for financial aid.

I will see you all next week and answer any questions you have then. I hope in the meantime that you have a nice Thanksgiving holiday and that somehow the strike is averted.

best wishes,

Matthew Dennis,
Professor of History and Environmental Studies
History 201

***
Chris here: this is the strike resolution letter, posted at UO Matters