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Riverside"},{"term":"Graduates"},{"term":"Policing"},{"term":"STEM"},{"term":"Tenure"},{"term":"democratic university"},{"term":"For-Profit"},{"term":"University of Wisconsin System"},{"term":"Discrimination"},{"term":"Diversity"},{"term":"Economy"},{"term":"Steven Salaita"},{"term":"Teaching"},{"term":"UC Los Angeles"},{"term":"Athletics"},{"term":"Corruption"},{"term":"Critical University Studies"},{"term":"Neoliberalism"},{"term":"Religion \u0026 Culture"},{"term":"UCLA"},{"term":"Graduate Student Conditions"},{"term":"UC Irvine"},{"term":"UCPD"},{"term":"UCSC"},{"term":"health care"},{"term":"Academic everything"},{"term":"Grad Student Strike"},{"term":"Isla Vista Shootings"},{"term":"Linda Katehi"},{"term":"Philanthropy"},{"term":"Structural Racism"},{"term":"Student Debt"},{"term":"UCSB"},{"term":"Academic Boycotts"},{"term":"Admissions"},{"term":"Biden"},{"term":"British Universities"},{"term":"Budget Cuts"},{"term":"Closures"},{"term":"Democrats"},{"term":"K-12"},{"term":"Margaret Spellings"},{"term":"Munger Hall"},{"term":"Newsom"},{"term":"Presidential search"},{"term":"Quantification"},{"term":"Sexual Harassment"},{"term":"UC Health"},{"term":"Workforce"},{"term":"anti-racist pedagogy"},{"term":"higher education policy"},{"term":"reparations"},{"term":"2020 Election"},{"term":"ACCJC vs. CCSF"},{"term":"Cooper Union"},{"term":"Covid-19 Cuts"},{"term":"Cuts \u0026 Cuts"},{"term":"Debt-Free College"},{"term":"Fake Knoweldge"},{"term":"Fake Knowledge"},{"term":"FutherCuts"},{"term":"Gender"},{"term":"LGBTQ"},{"term":"Metrics"},{"term":"More Cuts"},{"term":"Nonpecuniary effects"},{"term":"November 2009"},{"term":"President Drake"},{"term":"State Audit"},{"term":"UC Merced"},{"term":"UCSF"},{"term":"USC"},{"term":"University of Missouri"},{"term":"Vegara vs. California"},{"term":"abolition"},{"term":"abortion"},{"term":"carbon offsets"},{"term":"climate crisis"},{"term":"climate policy"},{"term":"human capital theory"},{"term":"opinion survey"},{"term":"public support"},{"term":"review of The Great Mistake"},{"term":"slavery"},{"term":"stimulus"},{"term":"value of a college degree"},{"term":"white nationalism"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Remaking the University II: Knowledge Rebellion"},"subtitle":{"type":"html","$t":"A blog on higher education and related issues."},"link":[{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#feed","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/posts\/default"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/-\/Unions?alt=json-in-script\u0026max-results=10"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/search\/label\/Unions"},{"rel":"hub","href":"http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/"},{"rel":"next","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/-\/Unions\/-\/Unions?alt=json-in-script\u0026start-index=11\u0026max-results=10"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Chris Newfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/01078395415386100872"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"generator":{"version":"7.00","uri":"http://www.blogger.com","$t":"Blogger"},"openSearch$totalResults":{"$t":"19"},"openSearch$startIndex":{"$t":"1"},"openSearch$itemsPerPage":{"$t":"10"},"entry":[{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-7255478641756429040"},"published":{"$t":"2021-01-17T07:27:00.003-08:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2021-01-17T07:34:09.152-08:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Contingent Faculty"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Faculty"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Stuck in the Middle with You"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgYbuNU2Skvnxdgwjv84On7r5pVt1zckUGPIjkyLppgb3DaQMJwT4a8WopG1rVbHe0qTSm0F8ktBntivq3bJ8hNuMni2EeCldObAB2ryiPZZUeTM3ShfIQSjsLsU5gr5Hov1jmIbP0VDMs\/s1024\/Westernwashington+Univ.jpg\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"674\" data-original-width=\"1024\" height=\"264\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgYbuNU2Skvnxdgwjv84On7r5pVt1zckUGPIjkyLppgb3DaQMJwT4a8WopG1rVbHe0qTSm0F8ktBntivq3bJ8hNuMni2EeCldObAB2ryiPZZUeTM3ShfIQSjsLsU5gr5Hov1jmIbP0VDMs\/w400-h264\/Westernwashington+Univ.jpg\" width=\"400\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Ci\u003EThis is the second of two papers from an MLA panel on \"Organizing University Labor,\" organized by Eva\u0026nbsp;Cherniavsky at the University of Washington-Seattle. The first, by Thomas Winningham, is \u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/2XAcy5x\" style=\"font-style: italic;\"\u003Ehere\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Ci\u003E. This piece explains why collective\u0026nbsp;bargaining has worked better for faculty at Western Washington (pictured) than shared governance.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003Eby Bill Lyne, English Department, \u0026nbsp;Western Washington University\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe legislation allowing faculty at four-year public universities in Washington state to unionize passed in 2002. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAfter 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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFor 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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;If nothing else, it has helped us understand who’s really on what side and why. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhen we first began to organize, the university president met us with the standard tale of academic romance. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThis tone deafness showed how disconnected the administration had become from faculty life on the ground and how ripe we were for unionization. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;The faculty senate had devolved into a bi-weekly forum for complaints about parking. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAll of that changed with collective bargaining. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;That legal requirement made it imperative that both sides start paying more real attention to the predicament of the other. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhile bargaining sharpened and clarified our differences, it also began to show how much we actually had in common. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp; 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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;We watched them grow frustrated and bored with their lawyer’s strategy of stonewall and delay. \u0026nbsp;The members of their team who engaged us in actual conversation or nodded too sympathetically at our points suddenly disappeared from the bargaining room. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe 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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThis 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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn 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. \u0026nbsp;Higher education unionization fits squarely into what is left of the U.S. labor movement. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;We raise millions of dollars in PAC money and are a reliable phone banking army for the Democratic party. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ESo 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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe 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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EBusiness elites quickly began to recognize colleges as a problem. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ETurning public institutions private has also no doubt shaped the careers and mindsets of college administrators. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAnd 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. \u0026nbsp;Here in Washington, the last few years have brought tangible signs that the ground of higher education may be shifting. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAt 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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EA 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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;The revolution we will have to leave to our students. \u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EUnited Faculty of Washington State blog is \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.ufws.org\/blog\/ \"\u003Ehere\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/p\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/7255478641756429040\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2021\/01\/stuck-in-middle-with-you-bargaining.html#comment-form","title":"0 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/7255478641756429040"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/7255478641756429040"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2021\/01\/stuck-in-middle-with-you-bargaining.html","title":"Stuck in the Middle with You"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Chris Newfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/01078395415386100872"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgYbuNU2Skvnxdgwjv84On7r5pVt1zckUGPIjkyLppgb3DaQMJwT4a8WopG1rVbHe0qTSm0F8ktBntivq3bJ8hNuMni2EeCldObAB2ryiPZZUeTM3ShfIQSjsLsU5gr5Hov1jmIbP0VDMs\/s72-w400-h264-c\/Westernwashington+Univ.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"0"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-7544634836408427921"},"published":{"$t":"2021-01-13T12:07:00.000-08:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2021-01-13T12:07:00.837-08:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Academic Labor"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Contingent Faculty"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"To Fight the Bosses, First We Fight the Union Bosses"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEjYEQIlHmCy4uX1KPSQNJA_eMAmXUHUPjo-2dVKoSoCi48ZJM4QxLX2bSDbY7-Mph0Vu5e0q8tITJiS9xtpQm_en-r9bnfLBAuw50uQov-2-OcHT6EuE71unxxeiElxOjQi4KEhEFU4YIA\/s790\/bargaining-table-2+NALC.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"404\" data-original-width=\"790\" height=\"205\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEjYEQIlHmCy4uX1KPSQNJA_eMAmXUHUPjo-2dVKoSoCi48ZJM4QxLX2bSDbY7-Mph0Vu5e0q8tITJiS9xtpQm_en-r9bnfLBAuw50uQov-2-OcHT6EuE71unxxeiElxOjQi4KEhEFU4YIA\/w400-h205\/bargaining-table-2+NALC.jpg\" width=\"400\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003Eby T.E. Winningham, Syracuse University\u003Cp\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ci\u003EThis is\u0026nbsp;the first of two papers we're posting from an MLA\u0026nbsp;panel last week, entitled \"Organizing University Labor,\" put together by Eva Cherniavsky at the University of Washington- Seattle (her\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2019\/05\/brave-new-stem-university-or-myth-of.html\" style=\"font-style: italic;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;most recent post here\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Ci\u003E was on the gutting of the humanities in WA). I thought of both papers under the\u0026nbsp;title \"After Shared Governance,\" as both discuss non-Senate modes of faculty control while also taking a critical look at faculty unions.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFrom 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EWhich is to say, he is no friend of ours.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp; \u003C\/span\u003EAnd 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EDefense, though, does not preclude legitimate, robust critique, and we cannot ignore the structural flaws in our labor unions as they actually exist.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIndeed, 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EBecause 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFirst a brief overview of my own experience.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EBetween 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E“Lecturer” is the term for full- and part-time non-Senate Faculty.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003ETenure-track this obviously was not, but working conditions were decent—certainly better than in many contingent positions. A\u0026nbsp;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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EIn other words, this was a comfortable second-tier academic job.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ENo 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EI’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.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EOver 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ESo, 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.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EI was told this was a priority for future negotiations, but it seemed nothing else could be done.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn 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.”\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EObviously, 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ELate 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EI was only brought in because one of their medievalists backed out last minute to consult full- time on a television series then in production.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003ESuch is Hollywood.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EAnd 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.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003ETo 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThis 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003ENo 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.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EI 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003ETo be blunt, it was a shockingly lazy, patronizing effort.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EJane 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, \u003Ci\u003ERaising Hell\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E“Today,” she writes in her second book, \u003Ci\u003ENo Shortcuts\u003C\/i\u003E, “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.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EAdvocacy takes place at the level of policy and political lobbying.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EMobilization 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003ETo them, it matters little who shows up, or, why, as long as a sufficient number of bodies appear” (10).\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EBut 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).\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EFew 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the AFT campaign.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EWhile 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.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ESo aside from the obvious—hoping people would sign up—what were we doing?\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003ECertainly not organizing, and not mobilizing to put any pressure on the administration.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EEven 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EUnbeknownst 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.\u0026nbsp;Shaun Richman, a former organizing director for the AFT and writer for \u003Ci\u003EIn These Times\u003C\/i\u003E, explains some of this in his book, \u003Ci\u003ETell the Bosses We’re Coming\u003C\/i\u003E:\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cblockquote\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFrom 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp; \u003C\/span\u003E(33, emphasis in original)\u003C\/p\u003E\u003C\/blockquote\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThis is precisely how unions have defended mandatory fees and the structure of the National Labor Relations Board itself in court, right from the start.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003ERichman again: “Unions were there defending the NLRB on the basis of collective bargaining’s stabilizing effect on the economy” (64).\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EThis is the same line of argument that union attorneys used in Janus v. AFSCME.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDavid 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EAnd that is true in many collective bargaining agreements” (Kishore).\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EHe went on: “The fees are the tradeoff.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EUnion security is the tradeoff for no strikes.\"\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIllinois 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).\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAnd here is Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT, whose salary is around $450,000 a year, in the Washington \u003Ci\u003EPost\u003C\/i\u003E:\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cblockquote\u003E\u003Cp\u003ECollective bargaining allows employers and employees to forge agreements on the basis of shared interests that address both parties’ priorities and concerns.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EWithout 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.”\u003C\/p\u003E\u003C\/blockquote\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0026nbsp;Heaven forbid, we might take it upon ourselves to protest to lawmakers.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIt 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn their article \"Intergroup Solidarity and Collaboration in Higher Education Organizing and Bargaining in the United States,\" Daniel Scott and Adrianna Kezar of USC write:\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cblockquote\u003E\u003Cp\u003EBureaucratic 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EThey … 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.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003C\/blockquote\u003E\u003Cblockquote\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThis 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).\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E(Scott 106)\u003C\/p\u003E\u003C\/blockquote\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAs David Graeber points out in \u003Ci\u003EThe Utopia of Rule\u003C\/i\u003Es, “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).\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EThis 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe 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.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EThis 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EFrom 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFrom the Lecturers’ perspective, though, the situation is far different.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EI, 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.\u0026nbsp;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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn that same Washington \u003Ci\u003EPost\u003C\/i\u003E 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.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EAnd how could they not be, when they have no say in the priorities, strategies, or tactics of their union?\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWith 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EPerhaps 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHere’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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EAnd no formal union will help us reach a point that dissolves its own membership.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFurther 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThree 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.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EAs my own experience showed, even Lecturers in slightly-less exploited union jobs are still, every year, part of the reserve pool of adjunct labor.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EUniversities, as a class, determine the overall size of that pool, by virtue of awarding PhDs academia controls its own labor market.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EThis is a problem to be sure. But complaining about the overproduction of PhDs misses the point.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EIn my current department, a full teaching load is 4\/4. With a sane and pedagogically appropriate load my department would double in size. \u0026nbsp;I’d argue that’s the case nationwide.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ESo how then to organize?\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EOur 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E“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.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EBut 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ENon-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. \u0026nbsp;We don’t need more petitions (or conference papers) so much as we need more strikes.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003ESo 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOne 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.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EIn 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAs Scott and Kezar write, the Metro Strategy is\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cblockquote\u003E\u003Cp\u003Eparticular[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). . . .\u0026nbsp;[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)\u003C\/p\u003E\u003C\/blockquote\u003E\u003Cp\u003EBoth “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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EEscalation is key, as strikes get the goods.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EMore 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).\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;W\u003C\/span\u003Ee’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.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWe 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?\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAs a popular meme asks: Why not both?\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cb\u003EWorks Cited\u003C\/b\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EGraeber, David.\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EThe Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/i\u003EBrooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2016.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EKishore, Joseph.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E“Union lawyer tells US Supreme Court: ‘Union security is the tradeoff for no strikes.’”\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Ci\u003EWorld Socialist Web Site\u003C\/i\u003E.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E28 Feb. 2018.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EWeb.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMcAlevey, Jane F.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Ci\u003ENo Shortcuts: Organizing for Power\u003C\/i\u003E.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003ENew York: Oxford University Press, 2016.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ERichman, Shaun.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Ci\u003ETell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan \u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ci\u003Efor Workers in the 21st Century\u003C\/i\u003E.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003ENew York: Monthly Review Press, 2020.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EScott, Daniel and Adrianna J.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003E\"Intergroup Solidarity and Collaboration in Higher Education Organizing and Bargaining in the United States,\"\u003Ci\u003E Academic Labor: Research and \u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ci\u003EArtistry\u003C\/i\u003E: Vol. 3 , Article 10, (2019).\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EStone, Evan and Randi Weingarten.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E“As unions await a key Supreme Court decision, a simple plea: ‘Educators want their voices heard.’\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EWashington \u003Ci\u003EPost\u003C\/i\u003E.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003E21 June 2018.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhite, Jerry.\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E“As teacher struggles spread, unions redouble effort to suppress class struggle.”\u003Cspan style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Ci\u003EWorld Socialist Web Site\u003C\/i\u003E.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003E09 Mar. 2018.\u003Cspan class=\"Apple-tab-span\" style=\"white-space: pre;\"\u003E\t\u003C\/span\u003EWeb.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.nalc.org\/news\/nalc-updates\/contract-negotiations-update-bargaining-to-continue-beyond-midnight-deadline\"\u003EPhoto Credit\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/7544634836408427921\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2021\/01\/to-fight-bosses-first-we-fight-union.html#comment-form","title":"0 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/7544634836408427921"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/7544634836408427921"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2021\/01\/to-fight-bosses-first-we-fight-union.html","title":"To Fight the Bosses, First We Fight the Union Bosses"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Chris Newfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/01078395415386100872"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEjYEQIlHmCy4uX1KPSQNJA_eMAmXUHUPjo-2dVKoSoCi48ZJM4QxLX2bSDbY7-Mph0Vu5e0q8tITJiS9xtpQm_en-r9bnfLBAuw50uQov-2-OcHT6EuE71unxxeiElxOjQi4KEhEFU4YIA\/s72-w400-h205-c\/bargaining-table-2+NALC.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"0"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-4446973408030671757"},"published":{"$t":"2020-07-30T15:47:00.014-07:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2020-07-31T08:26:50.835-07:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Academic Labor"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Admin Responses"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Covid-19"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Workforce"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"UCSD Lays Off Housing \u0026 Dining Workers- Temporarily? "},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 0in 1.2pt 0in 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhR7JC3ftyw-2atm5w15JE3gInWZVEVODkyNIGOEm9CJHjevTAfTDNfq9-X5vXDcA43423SUOOCgXxcELKDjbmNq4exlIiLEG-9N3rTXQuwZdNDKpzdwI53ryJfqaDs7j4o6KfBHT43W10\/s771\/UCSD+North+Campus+Erik+Jepsen+Triton051619.png\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"454\" data-original-width=\"771\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhR7JC3ftyw-2atm5w15JE3gInWZVEVODkyNIGOEm9CJHjevTAfTDNfq9-X5vXDcA43423SUOOCgXxcELKDjbmNq4exlIiLEG-9N3rTXQuwZdNDKpzdwI53ryJfqaDs7j4o6KfBHT43W10\/s320\/UCSD+North+Campus+Erik+Jepsen+Triton051619.png\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 0in 1.2pt 0in 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Cfont style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Eby Amie Campos, PhD Candidate, History\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/font\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 0in 1.2pt 0in 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Cfont style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003ESimeon Man, Associate Professor, History\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/font\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 0in 1.2pt 0in 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Cfont style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003ERihan Yeh, Associate Professor, Anthropology\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/font\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 0in 1.2pt 0in 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Cfont style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/font\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 0in 1.2pt 0in 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Cfont style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EOn the morning of June 15th, \u003C\/font\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.10news.com\/news\/coronavirus\/about-200-ucsd-employees-laid-off-temporarily-due-to-pandemic\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Eapproximately 200\u003C\/span\u003E \u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EHousing, 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.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 5pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EThis move came just two weeks after Chancellor Pradeep Khosla’s \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;\"\u003Eto 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.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 5pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EIn a public statement regarding this mass firing, the university characterized the layoffs as \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/adminrecords.ucsd.edu\/Notices\/2020\/2020-6-23-2.html\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Einevitable.\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E We should not be misled into accepting this austerity narrative. AFSCME, the union representing the majority of the affected workers, released its \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/afscme3299.org\/media\/new-research-covid-19-austerity-not-necessary-at-university-of-california\/\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Eresearch findings \u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003Ebased 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, \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Ethe university advertised \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Etemporary positions in dining services following the layoffs. At the May 20 \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/regents.universityofcalifornia.edu\/meetings\/videos\/may2020\/may2020.html#board5.20\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003ERegents meeting \u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Eon “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\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt;\"\u003Einto the endowment’s unrestricted funds and applying for low-interest federal loans through the CARES Act at different campuses.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 15.35pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EWithout 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 \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.sandiegocounty.gov\/sdhcd\/rental-assistance\/income-limits-ami\/\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003EArea Median Income (AMI).\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E 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 \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/ucannualwage.ucop.edu\/wage\/\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Eregular pay\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Eexceeds $200,000. \u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 1.2pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EUCSD’s treatment of its workers also exposes the dangerous assumptions and inequities embedded in its \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2020\/06\/23\/us\/uc-san-diego-covid-19-fall\/index.html\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Emuch-publicized \u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E“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 \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/ucsdnews.ucsd.edu\/pressrelease\/introducing-the-uc-san-diego-return-to-learn-program\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Epilot plan\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;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 \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/afscme3299.org\/blog\/covid19\/\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003EPPE \u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Eor 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.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 1.2pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EThe 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 \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"#\"\u003Erealities\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E. A 15-page list of \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"#\"\u003Edemands \u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Eissued 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 \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"#\"\u003Eop-ed \u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Epublished on July 4th by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS Local 94) titled “We Will Not ‘Return to Earn.’”\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 3.1pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EWe 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 \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2020\/06\/23\/us\/uc-san-diego-covid-19-fall\/index.html\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Esafe campus opening \u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Ein the fall despite rapidly \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.sandiegouniontribune.com\/news\/health\/story\/2020-06-24\/surge-in-coronavirus-cases-puts-reopening-of-uc-san-diego-in-doubt\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Erising infection rates\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E, while keeping labor costs down and reneging on its rehiring promise in the event that “Return to Learn” is unfeasible.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 3.8pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EUCSD 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 \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/meded.ucsd.edu\/index.cfm\/groups\/hfit\/students\/undergraduate_students\/\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Eclinical training\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E, 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.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 26.35pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cb\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EHow you can support HDH workers:\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/b\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EWe call on the university to reverse the layoffs. In the meantime, donations can be made to UCSD Mutual Aid’s \u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"color: #1155cc; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.gofundme.com\/f\/covid19-mutual-aid-for-ucsd?utm_source=customer\u0026amp;utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet\u0026amp;utm_medium=copy_link-tip\" style=\"color: #954f72;\"\u003Egofundme page \u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003Ein order to support workers facing financial difficulties. Chancellor Khosla’s office can be reached at 858-534-3135.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 26.35pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;\"\u003EA Spanish language version of this piece is \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1Oqdill-9KqBD5qvdiSWUVgGJQ12Ke52G\/view?usp=sharing\"\u003Ehere\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"border: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 18.95pt 26.35pt 0.0001pt 0in;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-size: 14.6667px;\"\u003EUCSD North Campus:\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003EPhoto Credit\u0026nbsp; Erik Jepsen,\u0026nbsp;\u003Ci\u003ETriton\u003C\/i\u003E May 16, 2019\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 0in;\"\u003E\u003Co:p\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/4446973408030671757\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2020\/07\/ucsd-lays-off-housing-dining-workers.html#comment-form","title":"0 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/4446973408030671757"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/4446973408030671757"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2020\/07\/ucsd-lays-off-housing-dining-workers.html","title":"UCSD Lays Off Housing \u0026 Dining Workers- Temporarily? "}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Chris Newfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/01078395415386100872"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhR7JC3ftyw-2atm5w15JE3gInWZVEVODkyNIGOEm9CJHjevTAfTDNfq9-X5vXDcA43423SUOOCgXxcELKDjbmNq4exlIiLEG-9N3rTXQuwZdNDKpzdwI53ryJfqaDs7j4o6KfBHT43W10\/s72-c\/UCSD+North+Campus+Erik+Jepsen+Triton051619.png","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"0"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-6256801941652316090"},"published":{"$t":"2020-05-07T12:15:00.001-07:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2020-05-11T11:52:36.000-07:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Grad Student Strike"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Graduate Student Conditions"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"UCSC"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"UCSC Assistant Professor Letter to Admin: Rescind Disciplinary Action"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\n\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhh26X9lJ9so9Kr9YZDBd3lzVlj5riAt-VXIJ4tDPVZb1z1fExmFTgZzzv7XEp5byv6AqthF9HMjDqBJ7i7A4ywXjkR866bgzVhZGMSSzavqkBUYW8KnXOAk7XuV6Pr0OcNAbkcDKl7-E0\/s1600\/shameonUCSC-min-1536x864.png\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"864\" data-original-width=\"1536\" height=\"180\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhh26X9lJ9so9Kr9YZDBd3lzVlj5riAt-VXIJ4tDPVZb1z1fExmFTgZzzv7XEp5byv6AqthF9HMjDqBJ7i7A4ywXjkR866bgzVhZGMSSzavqkBUYW8KnXOAk7XuV6Pr0OcNAbkcDKl7-E0\/s320\/shameonUCSC-min-1536x864.png\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Ci\u003EThis 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).\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nDear Colleagues,\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nAssistant 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nEchoing 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.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nTo 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nWe 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.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nThe 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nDisciplinary 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nAs 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.\u0026nbsp; We spent afternoons being interviewed by disciplinary officers who were attempting to corroborate police reports with student accounts.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nQuantitatively, 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nThese 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?\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nTo 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.\u0026nbsp; This heavy-handed process raises troubling questions—for us\u0026nbsp; as well as our graduate students—about the potential uses of Canvas for surveillance and discipline.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nTo 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nMany 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.\u0026nbsp; \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nSome 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.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nThese 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\u0026nbsp; 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nNow 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nWe hope that the administration will take seriously our request to halt the disciplinary process and will offer a response to this letter. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nSincerely,\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nAssistant Professors of FOG, UCSC\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/6256801941652316090\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2020\/05\/ucsc-assistant-professor-letter-to.html#comment-form","title":"0 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/6256801941652316090"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/6256801941652316090"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2020\/05\/ucsc-assistant-professor-letter-to.html","title":"UCSC Assistant Professor Letter to Admin: Rescind Disciplinary Action"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Chris Newfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/01078395415386100872"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhh26X9lJ9so9Kr9YZDBd3lzVlj5riAt-VXIJ4tDPVZb1z1fExmFTgZzzv7XEp5byv6AqthF9HMjDqBJ7i7A4ywXjkR866bgzVhZGMSSzavqkBUYW8KnXOAk7XuV6Pr0OcNAbkcDKl7-E0\/s72-c\/shameonUCSC-min-1536x864.png","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"0"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-3597240653663550729"},"published":{"$t":"2018-05-04T11:07:00.002-07:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2018-05-04T11:07:26.410-07:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Budget"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"democratic university"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Diversity"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Employee Benefits"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Inequality"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"AFSCME STRIKE MAY 7-9"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\n\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhNML335e5i9P78GSlsHO-NJ81r9jlyPXLYmi_TJAO5WjafHjHfb-39lND8qQLaeIRVjL9rkLlM9z1TkFP4b38yDVRklYo9sr2mLjZBF-XJrwfbrBHQX6AqTI-nRT20HvKFpO8K1MKTKHiB\/s1600\/AFSCME+STRIKE.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"171\" data-original-width=\"295\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhNML335e5i9P78GSlsHO-NJ81r9jlyPXLYmi_TJAO5WjafHjHfb-39lND8qQLaeIRVjL9rkLlM9z1TkFP4b38yDVRklYo9sr2mLjZBF-XJrwfbrBHQX6AqTI-nRT20HvKFpO8K1MKTKHiB\/s1600\/AFSCME+STRIKE.jpg\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\nUC Service and Patient Care workers will be going on strike from Monday May 7 to Wednesday May 9.\u0026nbsp; AFSCME, the union representing these workers, has been negotiating with UC for over a year with little success and the University \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/fox5sandiego.com\/2018\/04\/26\/uc-employee-union-calls-3-day-strike\/\"\u003Ehad imposed a settlement for the 2017-18 fiscal year\u003C\/a\u003E.\u0026nbsp; As the union indicates \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/afscme3299.org\/bargaining-update\/\"\u003Ehere\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;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.\u0026nbsp; Given that inflation is now \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/05\/02\/us\/politics\/federal-reserve-meeting-rates.html\"\u003Ehovering around 2%\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;this can hardly be considered the generous offer the University insists it is.\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\nTo make matters worse, service and patient care workers are already among the lowest paid workers at UC.\u0026nbsp; As a recent \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/afscme3299.org\/documents\/reports\/Pioneering-Inequality_WhitePaper.pdf\"\u003EAFSCME Study\u003C\/a\u003E made clear inequality within UC has been increasing dramatically over the recent past.\u0026nbsp; UC's lowest paid workers already face difficulties making ends meet.\u0026nbsp; (\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/afscme3299.org\/documents\/reports\/Pioneering-Inequality_WhitePaper.pdf\"\u003E26)\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp; This general inequality is compounded by racial and gender inequities that run throughout the UC workforce.\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\nCompounding the issue is UC's continued insistence on its right to sub-contract out its labor needs.\u0026nbsp; 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.\u0026nbsp; As UC expands its use of sub-contractors the living conditions of its lowest paid workers worsens dramatically.\u0026nbsp; (\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/afscme3299.org\/documents\/reports\/Pioneering-Inequality_WhitePaper.pdf\"\u003E26-27\u003C\/a\u003E)\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\nThere are a variety of places you can go to find ways to support the strikers:\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\nCA-AAUP has a statement \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.caaaup.org\/ca-aaup-official-documents-and-resolutions.html\"\u003EHERE\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\nAFSCME Strike Locations can be found \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/afscme3299.org\/strike-announcement-locations\/\"\u003EHERE\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\nAFSCME's statement on the negotiations can be found \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/afscme3299.org\/bargaining-update\/\"\u003EHERE\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\nThe AFSCME report on Inequality at UC can be found \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/afscme3299.org\/documents\/reports\/Pioneering-Inequality_WhitePaper.pdf\"\u003EHERE\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003C\/div\u003E\n"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/3597240653663550729\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2018\/05\/afscme-strike-may-7-9.html#comment-form","title":"1 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/3597240653663550729"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/3597240653663550729"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2018\/05\/afscme-strike-may-7-9.html","title":"AFSCME STRIKE MAY 7-9"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Michael Meranze"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/05336793340375780406"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhNML335e5i9P78GSlsHO-NJ81r9jlyPXLYmi_TJAO5WjafHjHfb-39lND8qQLaeIRVjL9rkLlM9z1TkFP4b38yDVRklYo9sr2mLjZBF-XJrwfbrBHQX6AqTI-nRT20HvKFpO8K1MKTKHiB\/s72-c\/AFSCME+STRIKE.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"1"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-5874946863874164413"},"published":{"$t":"2018-01-31T15:26:00.001-08:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2018-01-31T15:26:12.283-08:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Academic Labor"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Columbia Plans to Commit Unfair Labor Practice in Hopes of Denying Graduate Student Workers Their Labor Rights"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\n\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEiRHF8NcYnP7K01emhSznmgy70E-NivVExXbVG280IdiSdBoODn1oSc8dGHrNshNJfvKgmaXlEmfVIQDuh9GhjZbQu6Wvmfc64yxQk01diTLQjY2ZnOt8iwKJVQiMX37rzjfosZ4_yVohnt\/s1600\/The_protectors_of_our_industries.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"889\" data-original-width=\"1200\" height=\"237\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEiRHF8NcYnP7K01emhSznmgy70E-NivVExXbVG280IdiSdBoODn1oSc8dGHrNshNJfvKgmaXlEmfVIQDuh9GhjZbQu6Wvmfc64yxQk01diTLQjY2ZnOt8iwKJVQiMX37rzjfosZ4_yVohnt\/s320\/The_protectors_of_our_industries.jpg\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\nYesterday Columbia University Provost John Coatesworth announced that the University was \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/columbiagradunion.org\/app\/uploads\/Status-of-student-assistants-under-federal-law-20180130.pdf\"\u003Erefusing to bargain in with the Graduate Workers of Columbia \u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;(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.\u0026nbsp; 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\" \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.nlrb.gov\/rights-we-protect\/employerunion-rights-and-obligations\"\u003Ein reality it is choosing to engage in an unfair labor practice and daring the union to sue it\u003C\/a\u003E. As with the longer history of the University's employment of labor-busting law firms to stretch out the certification process, Columbia appears determined \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/entry\/columbia-university-refuses-to-recognize-its-graduate-students-union_us_5a70e0cfe4b0a6aa487426e8\"\u003Eto take advantage of President Trump's election in order to find a legal venue hostile to labor\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nThe hypocrisy of Columbia is overwhelming.\u0026nbsp; 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.\u0026nbsp; But apparently they are only committed to these principles when it will not cost them control over their graduate student laborers.\u0026nbsp; Both the University and the Union have debated these issues for years and the graduate students have voted that they want representation.\u0026nbsp; Columbia has refused to accept that it \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/01\/30\/nyregion\/columbia-university-wont-bargain-with-graduate-student-union.html\"\u003Elost the argument when graduate students overwhelmingly voted in favor of unionizing\u003C\/a\u003E.\u0026nbsp; Columbia--like so many of its peers--claims that a union would constitute a \"\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/unionization.provost.columbia.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/content\/UAW-Letter.pdf\"\u003Ethird party between student and teacher.\u003C\/a\u003E\" But it has not hesitated in seeking out external law firms to fight the unionization.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nMore importantly, the issue of unionization is not concerned with the relationship between teachers and graduate students as students.\u0026nbsp; It is concerned with the relationship between university management and graduate student workers as \u003Cu\u003Eemployees\u003C\/u\u003E.\u0026nbsp; 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.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nSince Columbia's intellectual and academic arguments are very weak it appears that ultimately this is about power.\u0026nbsp; The Columbia administration's decision to hoard theirs in clear contradiction to both the NLRB and the expressed will of their graduate student workers.\u0026nbsp; 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.\u0026nbsp; But what that really means are paternalistic relationships in which subordination is key.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nIt is important to recognize that the threat to academic freedom and learning does not come from graduate student unions but from overweening managerial authority.\u0026nbsp; 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.\u0026nbsp; 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.\u0026nbsp; 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.\u0026nbsp; Its concerns lie elsewhere.\u0026nbsp;\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nColumbia's administration should be ashamed of itself.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/5874946863874164413\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2018\/01\/columbia-plans-to-commit-unfair-labor.html#comment-form","title":"1 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/5874946863874164413"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/5874946863874164413"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2018\/01\/columbia-plans-to-commit-unfair-labor.html","title":"Columbia Plans to Commit Unfair Labor Practice in Hopes of Denying Graduate Student Workers Their Labor Rights"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Michael Meranze"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/05336793340375780406"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEiRHF8NcYnP7K01emhSznmgy70E-NivVExXbVG280IdiSdBoODn1oSc8dGHrNshNJfvKgmaXlEmfVIQDuh9GhjZbQu6Wvmfc64yxQk01diTLQjY2ZnOt8iwKJVQiMX37rzjfosZ4_yVohnt\/s72-c\/The_protectors_of_our_industries.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"1"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-6936122242523112309"},"published":{"$t":"2017-02-09T09:13:00.000-08:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2017-02-09T09:13:25.755-08:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Academic Labor"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Austerity"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Employee Benefits"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Iowa Republicans Threaten the Living Conditions of Graduate Student Workers"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\n\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgzJUrBGeZXhS6Lt1bpqS8UQLOSAE8IOBOw8TRDuoE-c90V2oezfydW3y0xVzgDrCIpw5653627FAuod4u4TwFm9XQXpCRWyf3TkT3eWXYdflq9Ou9Z2GyYKqfNYPUAjs0CyiHecyvUjtCl\/s1600\/sefrdoingwork.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" height=\"197\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgzJUrBGeZXhS6Lt1bpqS8UQLOSAE8IOBOw8TRDuoE-c90V2oezfydW3y0xVzgDrCIpw5653627FAuod4u4TwFm9XQXpCRWyf3TkT3eWXYdflq9Ou9Z2GyYKqfNYPUAjs0CyiHecyvUjtCl\/s320\/sefrdoingwork.jpg\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\nAs you may recall, a \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.legis.iowa.gov\/legislation\/BillBook?ga=87\u0026amp;ba=sf41\"\u003Ebill to eliminate tenure was recently introduced into the Iowa State Senate\u003C\/a\u003E. After a \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/academeblog.org\/2017\/01\/19\/we-can-make-a-difference\/\"\u003Egood deal of pushback\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;it appears to \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.bleedingheartland.com\/2017\/01\/18\/dont-panic-iowa-house-education-chair-doesnt-want-to-abolish-tenure\/\"\u003Ehave stalled\u003C\/a\u003E. \u0026nbsp;But that doesn't mean that the state's Republicans are done trying to attack the rights of Iowa's public workers. \u0026nbsp;In their latest salvo, they are proposing to \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.legis.iowa.gov\/legislation\/BillBook?ba=SF213\"\u003Eseverely 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\u003C\/a\u003E. Although this is a widespread attack on \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.thegazette.com\/subject\/opinion\/letters-to-the-editor\/letter-fight-attack-on-collective-bargaining-20170207\"\u003Eall public employees\u003C\/a\u003E, the proposed legislation will strike hard at the state's graduate student employees.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nAt the core of the proposed legislation are two important issues. \u0026nbsp;The first is to make it illegal to negotiate things like benefits or supplemental income or retirement. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;Although University of Iowa officials \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.desmoinesregister.com\/story\/news\/education\/college\/2017\/02\/01\/ui-graduate-benefits-continue-despite-bargaining-reform\/97354812\/\"\u003Ehave indicated\u003C\/a\u003E 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nThe second and equally serious threat is posed in a change to the system for certifying unions. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp;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 \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Iowa_gubernatorial_election,_2014\"\u003Eonly received 59% \u003C\/a\u003Eof an electorate that was \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/updates\/2014-midterm-election-turnout-lowest-in-70-years\/\"\u003Eapproximately 50% of the state's eligible voters\u003C\/a\u003E.\u0026nbsp; It is especially burdensome to graduate student workers whose eligible unit members are so often in flux. \u0026nbsp;Moreover, the bill would force re-certification elections every two years.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nIn taking these steps, Iowa Republicans are seeking to undo a \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/140485\/republicans-set-destroy-iowas-labor-unions\"\u003Elong-standing system of collective bargaining for public employees.\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp; 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. \u0026nbsp;Iowa's Republicans are now seeking to destroy that system and hamstring public employee unions. \u0026nbsp;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.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nBut this is more than just an Iowa issue. \u0026nbsp;Iowa has long been a right-to-work state and its hostility to unions is clear. \u0026nbsp;But just as with Wisconsin, Iowa Republicans are part of a larger drive to attack unions and worker's collective rights across the country.\u0026nbsp; \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/140485\/republicans-set-destroy-iowas-labor-unions\"\u003EOne Iowa Representative (along with one from South Carolina) has recently introduced\u003C\/a\u003E a \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/steveking.house.gov\/media-center\/press-releases\/king-re-introduces-national-right-to-work-act\"\u003Enational right to work bill in the House of Representatives\u003C\/a\u003E. These initiatives are not simply of local interest. \u0026nbsp;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. \u0026nbsp; 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. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/6936122242523112309\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2017\/02\/iowa-republicans-threaten-living.html#comment-form","title":"3 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/6936122242523112309"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/6936122242523112309"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2017\/02\/iowa-republicans-threaten-living.html","title":"Iowa Republicans Threaten the Living Conditions of Graduate Student Workers"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Michael Meranze"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/05336793340375780406"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgzJUrBGeZXhS6Lt1bpqS8UQLOSAE8IOBOw8TRDuoE-c90V2oezfydW3y0xVzgDrCIpw5653627FAuod4u4TwFm9XQXpCRWyf3TkT3eWXYdflq9Ou9Z2GyYKqfNYPUAjs0CyiHecyvUjtCl\/s72-c\/sefrdoingwork.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"3"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-6432905357987653706"},"published":{"$t":"2014-12-08T11:01:00.001-08:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2016-03-18T18:47:23.986-07:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Academic Labor"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Cuts"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Faculty"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Governance"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Graduates"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"guest post"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Shared Governance"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"I Will Not Work as a Strikebreaker: (UPDATED) Grad Strike Ends with Agreement 12\/10"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\n\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\n\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEjc_8DZwuSbwtoh8o05R3nZUJo-pHELvJfNM_bVJFZukQV40sTEUeZZQz3II8wFx6VuAY9BecngYy4Xc92sZKCcajBrjEHm4DBspYnkohTKAhcH61EP5bWeMw1WFBoaHiLsmKJygeofmTo\/s1600\/UOStrikeTrustees_UO_a21718.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEjc_8DZwuSbwtoh8o05R3nZUJo-pHELvJfNM_bVJFZukQV40sTEUeZZQz3II8wFx6VuAY9BecngYy4Xc92sZKCcajBrjEHm4DBspYnkohTKAhcH61EP5bWeMw1WFBoaHiLsmKJygeofmTo\/s1600\/UOStrikeTrustees_UO_a21718.jpg\" height=\"213\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u0026nbsp;\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eby Matthew Dennis, Professor of History and Environmental Studies, University of Oregon\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Ci\u003EAfter 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. \u0026nbsp;Kaitlin Mulhere has a \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2014\/12\/03\/u-oregon-grad-students-strike-better-benefits\"\u003Egood overview\u003C\/a\u003E at \"Inside Higher Ed.\" UO's faculty senate passed a r\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/senate.uoregon.edu\/content\/opposition-efforts-academic-affairs-dilute-and-degrade-academic-standards-event-graduate\"\u003Eesolution criticizing the administration's handling of the strike\u003C\/a\u003E, focusing in part on admin's plan to bypass TA grading \u0026nbsp; in a way that would weaken academic standards \"by administrative fiat.\" \u0026nbsp;The UO faculty senate is \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.uomatters.com\/2014\/12\/senate-task-force-takes-swift-action-to-revoke-blandyaltman-strike-grading-diktats.html\"\u003Enow investigating this issue. \u003C\/a\u003EThe grad strike\u0026nbsp;coincides with a conflict between UO faculty and its Board of Trustees (pictured above) over faculty governance. The Board is planning to \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/trustees.uoregon.edu\/sites\/trustees1.wc-sites.uoregon.edu\/files\/field\/image\/Full%20BOT%20Notice%20and%20Materials%20120414%20-%20r.pdf\"\u003Echange 70 policies \u003C\/a\u003Eat its meeting this week, and some major changes in the UO Constitution have been proposed by the Board chair. \u0026nbsp;These and other issues are well-covered by the \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.uomatters.com\/\"\u003EUO Matters blog\u003C\/a\u003E, where their scanner processes official documents 24 hours a day.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Ci\u003EUO professor Matt Dennis \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/registerguard.com\/rg\/opinion\/32508160-78\/gtf-strike-a-bad-sign-for-uo.html.csp#\"\u003Ewrote an op-ed for the Eugene newspaper\u003C\/a\u003E that lays out the issues. His letter to his students is below, in which he makes institutional issues part of his students' overall education.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EDear Students,\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EThe Graduate Teaching Fellows union (GTFF) has declared its intention to go out on strike\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Enext week, on Tuesday December 2. I’m writing to you now to explain how this will affect\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EHistory 201. The GTFF and the UO administration’s labor representatives have been in\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Enegotiations since last November (2013) and have hit an impasse. The GFTF has made a\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Enumber of reasonable demands, which the administration seems unwilling to grant. As a\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eresult the GTFs have chosen to use the only real leverage they possess—to withhold their\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Elabor. Strikes are disruptive—that’s their point. We notice the critical contribution that the\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Estrikers—our GTFs—make to our educational lives, and we hope that the administration\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Equickly realizes that as well and settles their conflict with the GTFF. It’s impossible to\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Epredict, however, how long the strike will continue.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003ESome will blame the GTFF for this disruption in undergraduate teaching, but the\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eadministration bears considerable blame for its unwillingness to compromise. They have\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Elikely spent more in their prolonged negotiations with the GTFF than it would have cost to\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Efund the GTFF’s requested two-week sick leave policy. And it will cost much more to hire\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ereplacement workers to circumvent the strike. My personal opinion is that this approach is ill\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eadvised, counterproductive, irresponsible, and needlessly expensive. Though the central\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eadministration represents itself as “the university,” in fact the heart of the university is its\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Estudents (undergraduate and graduate), faculty, and staff—most of whom have not had any\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Esay in the negotiations, even though we have the most at stake.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EThe administration seems willing to compromise the academic integrity of the university in\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ethe interest of “continuity.” I am not. It has recommended a number of “options” to work\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Earound the strike, including hiring others to grade your work, even suggesting advanced\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eundergraduates, canceling exams and other assignments, transforming exams into multiple\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Echoice tests, or simply grading students on the work already performed. In History 201 this\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ewould entail abandoning the syllabus (my contract with you), and awarding final grades\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ebased on some 55 percent of the graded work completed so far. Because this course is\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Edesigned to reach a large number of students—over 100—and because my other\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eresponsibilities already demand 100 percent of my time, I am not able to grade your work\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Emyself. But, on professional and moral grounds, I would not do so in any case. Your GTFs\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ehave done a terrific job, worked with you closely, and know you and are in a position to\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ejudiciously evaluate your performance. Under present circumstances I cannot do as well--as\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ewell as you deserve. Nor will I undermine their efforts to get a just contract. I will not work\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eas a strikebreaker or “scab.”\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EWhere does that leave us in History 201? The exam you took last Tuesday, November 25 (20\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Epercent of your grade) is not yet graded, but it should be evaluated, and your grade on it\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eshould be counted in the calculation of your final grade. As should your final exam. Next\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eweek, during the strike, I will deliver my final two lectures in the course as scheduled. The\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ediscussion section meetings taught normally by GTFs, scheduled for week 10, will be\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ecancelled. The final exam (25 percent of your grade) will occur as scheduled on Tuesday,\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EDecember 9 at 8:00 a.m. I will proctor the exam myself and collect your examination books,\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ebut the exams will remain ungraded until the strike is settled and the GTFs are able to grade\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ethem. Thus, if the strike extends into finals week or beyond, you will not receive a grade in\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EHistory 201. Under these circumstances, with so much of your work ungraded, I am unable\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eto file any grades ethically, responsibly, or fairly.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EIt’s possible that a representative of the administration might decide that filing grades—even\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eindiscriminate ones—is more important than insuring the integrity and justness of such\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Egrades. Communications from the administration have suggested that in some cases it might\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eusurp the role of “instructor of record” and file grades themselves. Such a move would be\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Earbitrary and capricious, and a fundamental violation of academic freedom, but it could\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eoccur nonetheless. I certainly hope that this does not happen, and that the strike is quickly\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Esettled, that the administration treats you equitably and with the respect you merit, and that\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ethis mishandling of negotiations with the GTFFs doesn’t damage the integrity and reputation\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eof the University of Oregon we have worked so hard to sustain.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EYou may be concerned about how all this will affect your academic progress or financial aid.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EI am empathetic. These are important administrative matters, requiring administrative fixes\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ein these extraordinary circumstances. I encourage you to contact the administration, which\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eshould be able to find workable administrative solutions that do not compromise the\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eacademic integrity of the university. It’s their responsibility—and it’s in their interest as well\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Eas yours—to ensure your ongoing eligibility for financial aid.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EI will see you all next week and answer any questions you have then. I hope in the meantime\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ethat you have a nice Thanksgiving holiday and that somehow the strike is averted.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003Ebest wishes,\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EMatthew Dennis,\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EProfessor of History and Environmental Studies\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EHistory 201\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E***\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EChris here: this is the strike resolution letter, \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.uomatters.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Screen-Shot-2014-12-10-at-8.55.30-AM.png\"\u003Eposted\u003C\/a\u003E at \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.uomatters.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Screen-Shot-2014-12-10-at-8.55.30-AM.png\"\u003EUO Matters\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\n\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhZXn9u-6YlvPMQ5n_lQ7VEaiyTjik3d8P85kNDaXPPyJVq9piKerI7j0wxjocFoPu_TA79L4NYlxplVGq8eEOkLZW3x_4q3wo6objRvXgFGrGKZkSjKlruDi5SlWKejejg09itFPPF6hE\/s1600\/UOStrikeResolutionLetter1214.png\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhZXn9u-6YlvPMQ5n_lQ7VEaiyTjik3d8P85kNDaXPPyJVq9piKerI7j0wxjocFoPu_TA79L4NYlxplVGq8eEOkLZW3x_4q3wo6objRvXgFGrGKZkSjKlruDi5SlWKejejg09itFPPF6hE\/s1600\/UOStrikeResolutionLetter1214.png\" height=\"400\" width=\"357\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/6432905357987653706\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2014\/12\/i-will-not-work-as-strikebreaker-letter.html#comment-form","title":"8 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/6432905357987653706"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/6432905357987653706"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2014\/12\/i-will-not-work-as-strikebreaker-letter.html","title":"I Will Not Work as a Strikebreaker: (UPDATED) Grad Strike Ends with Agreement 12\/10"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Chris Newfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/01078395415386100872"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEjc_8DZwuSbwtoh8o05R3nZUJo-pHELvJfNM_bVJFZukQV40sTEUeZZQz3II8wFx6VuAY9BecngYy4Xc92sZKCcajBrjEHm4DBspYnkohTKAhcH61EP5bWeMw1WFBoaHiLsmKJygeofmTo\/s72-c\/UOStrikeTrustees_UO_a21718.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"8"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-2924662036412235048"},"published":{"$t":"2014-10-17T09:35:00.000-07:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2016-03-18T18:52:18.218-07:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Academic Freedom"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Academic Labor"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Budget"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"guest post"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Privatization"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Protests"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Students"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"UC"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"UC Berkeley"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"After the Freeze: UC Privatization Since 2012"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\n\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgJ8Fc0TC4QF_EExhBvLolndd0cE2TMU1kMGolrB6X7RvCjqlxI2-0b559_R6WYfjiL_km2a71Qb5YCOYoM07vH5ce_48i_5niAMWRZMHhwkgCjYj0M4AiXHD-_IUv39vQ1alADn9VNn7M\/s1600\/Berkeley+100214.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgJ8Fc0TC4QF_EExhBvLolndd0cE2TMU1kMGolrB6X7RvCjqlxI2-0b559_R6WYfjiL_km2a71Qb5YCOYoM07vH5ce_48i_5niAMWRZMHhwkgCjYj0M4AiXHD-_IUv39vQ1alADn9VNn7M\/s1600\/Berkeley+100214.jpg\" height=\"240\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;\"\u003E\u003Ci style=\"background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;\"\u003Eby Amanda Armstrong, Rhetoric Department, UC Berkeley. \u0026nbsp;5th\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ci style=\"background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;\"\u003Eof 5 talks from\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/ucbfa.org\/2014\/09\/the-operation-of-the-machine\/\" style=\"-webkit-transition: 0.2s; background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #828282; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: 0.2s; vertical-align: baseline;\"\u003EThe Operation of the Machine panel\u003C\/a\u003E, UC Berkeley October 1,\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2014\/10\/the-operation-of-machine-uc-then-and-now.html\" style=\"-webkit-transition: 0.2s; background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #828282; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: 0.2s; vertical-align: baseline;\"\u003Eintroduced\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;by Prof. Colleen Lye. \u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/reclaimuc.blogspot.com\/2014\/10\/after-freeze-uc-privatization-since-2012.html\"\u003ECross-posted\u003C\/a\u003E from Reclaim UC\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cspan style=\"border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;\"\u003E\u003Ci style=\"background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Ci\u003EPhoto: Outside the office of UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Real Estate, October 1, 2014\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EI’m going to be talking today about the operation of the UC machine\u0026nbsp;\u003Ci\u003Ethen\u003C\/i\u003E, versus its operation\u0026nbsp;\u003Ci\u003Enow\u003C\/i\u003E. But not\u003Ci\u003Ethen\u003C\/i\u003E\u0026nbsp;as in 1965. More like\u0026nbsp;\u003Ci\u003Ethen\u003C\/i\u003E\u0026nbsp;as in 2009.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EI still have\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/reclaimuc.blogspot.com\/2013\/02\/managements-backup-plans.html\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Evivid memories\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;from fall 2009—a semester when students, workers, and professors built assemblies, walked out of classes, and took direct actions to challenge austerity measures being imposed by the newly-appointed UC President, Mark Yudof. These austerity measures included a 32% tuition increase, furloughs for faculty and staff, and layoffs of over 2,000 service workers across the UC system.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EAt one of the first walkout planning meetings I attended that fall, people were talking about something called the “\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/cucfa.org\/news\/tuition_bonds.php\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003EMeister report\u003C\/a\u003E,” which I later learned was named after its author, UC Santa Cruz Professor Bob Meister. The Report talked about how UC administrators were able to take out low-interest construction bonds because they essentially pledged to Moody’s and other rating agencies that they would raise student tuition if necessary to pay back the bonds.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EThe Meister Report challenged the official story of the 2009 tuition hikes, which claimed that the hikes were necessary given the state’s defunding of public education. The report suggested that, in hiking tuition so drastically, UC administrators weren’t only making up for state defunding – they were also showing bond rating agencies that they had the political will and capacity to deliver steep fee hikes if necessary. And they were protecting their ability to carry on with construction projects, even if this meant trimming funds for basic instruction and saddling students with more debt.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EIn this way, the Meister Report opened up questions about how and in whose interests UC administrators were managing the money they did have, and about why so many construction projects were moving forward even at a moment of financial crisis. 2009 was thus defined by the\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/wewanteverything.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/24\/communique-from-an-absent-future\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Epoliticization\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;both of UC real estate development and of rising student debt levels; it was also a period of\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/labornotes.org\/2009\/09\/multi-union-coalition-uc-strikes-back-devastating-cuts\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Esignificant political\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/libcom.org\/library\/after-fall-communiques-occupied-california\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Emobilization\u003C\/a\u003E. Even so, we did not succeed in stopping the fee hikes, or otherwise reversing austerity on a large scale. There were some minor victories though: at Berkeley, some of the demands of those who\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ISZrR7qE-Oc\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Eoccupied Wheeler Hall\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;on November 20\u003Csup\u003Eth\u003C\/sup\u003Ewere realized. The University renewed its essentially no-cost lease to the Rochdale co-op, and a number of custodial workers who had been laid off were rehired.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EThe larger political victory came in 2011 and 2012. Facing another round of steep fee hikes, students\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.reclamationsjournal.org\/blog\/?ha_exhibit=writings-of-campus-occupy-anti-privatization-movements-fall-2011\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Elinked their organizing\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;against privatization to the larger occupy movement. We set up encampments on the campuses, and, after acts of police violence, held massive strikes at Berkeley and Davis. The movement broadened through the spring, with people in all sectors of education marching to the capitol building in Sacramento and occupying it, in order to build support for progressive taxation and for the refunding of public education and social services. Ultimately,\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/labornotes.org\/2012\/03\/california-unions-compromise-millionaires-tax\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Ea ballot initiative\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;for progressive taxation\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2012\/11\/07\/prop-30-passes-california-education_n_2087931.html\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Epassed\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;and, with guarantees of more state funding, the regents agreed to freeze in-state tuition for at least four years.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003ESince the political victory of 2012, some things have changed. In the aftermath of the in-state tuition freeze, the priorities and practices of UC administrators have mutated somewhat, which, I want to suggest, presents an altered political context, and some ambiguities, for those of us interested in challenging University privatization. To begin to get a sense of this new terrain, we can look at recent bond rating reports and UC financial documents.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EThis year, two rating agencies,\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.moodys.com\/research\/Moodys-downgrades-University-of-California-to-Aa2-and-assigns-Aa2--PR_294817\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003EMoodys\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;and\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/news\/fitch-downgrades-university-california-general-213100854.html\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003EFitch\u003C\/a\u003E, downgraded the UC’s bond rating. In explaining their decision, Moodys noted that, while “The university's debt doubled over the last eight years,…. Political and public scrutiny of the rising cost of higher education will constrain UC's ability to grow net tuition revenue.” They continued: “The university's relatively low cost compared to other market leading universities and expansive geographic draw of students help offset these pressures.” In other words, UC administrators aren’t politically able to raise enough tuition revenue to offset their debts, but at least they can make money on out-of-state tuition, and maybe sometime soon they’ll be able to raise in-state tuition as well.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EThese bond rating reports, in addition to vindicating Bob Meister’s analysis from 2009, help clarify and explain a couple strategies recently undertaken by UC administrators—strategies that are spelled out fairly explicitly in\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.scribd.com\/doc\/241743125\/2014-UC-Financial-Documents\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003EUC’s financial documents\u003C\/a\u003E.\u0026nbsp;\u003Cb\u003E\u003Ci\u003EFirst\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/b\u003E: In the absence of a political context conducive to across-the-board tuition hikes, administrators have nevertheless tried to increase tuition and fee revenues by admitting more out of state students and by increasing other costs students have to pay (including for housing and healthcare). And\u0026nbsp;\u003Cb\u003E\u003Ci\u003ESecond\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/b\u003E: In an attempt to decrease their debt levels, administrators have begun to aggressively promote the privatization of development. Instead of generally taking on debt to construct buildings themselves, they are now often working to rent out university-owned land to developers who are willing to build, and in some cases manage, dorms, labs, and other facilities.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EIn what follows, I will discuss these two administrative strategies, as well as some of their possible political implications.\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cb\u003EFirst\u003C\/b\u003E, on UC administrators’ recent attempts to salvage tuition and fee income. This really varies by campus, and I’m going to focus mostly on Berkeley. Following the crisis of 2009, Berkeley administrators started actively recruiting out of state and international students, who paid more in tuition. In the last couple years, as the cost of out-of-state tuition has risen to almost three times that of in-state tuition, administrators continued to admit progressively more out-of-state students.\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/newscenter.berkeley.edu\/2013\/04\/18\/campus-announces-2013-14-freshman-admissions-decisions\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003ELast year\u003C\/a\u003E, a third of new admits came from outside of California.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/studentunionofmichigan.wordpress.com\/2014\/09\/25\/unpacking-the-myths-of-financial-aid\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003ELike other public universities\u003C\/a\u003E, Berkeley has started “leveraging” student aid to compete to enroll higher-income, out-of-state students. The new\u0026nbsp;\u003Ci\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/financialaid.berkeley.edu\/middle-class-access-plan\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003EMiddle Class Access Plan\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E, the cutoff for which was just raised to include those from families making up to $150,000, leverages relatively small grants in exchange for the higher return of out-of-state tuition revenues. Berkeley has also\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.housing.berkeley.edu\/livingatcal\/springrates.html\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Eselectively\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.housing.berkeley.edu\/livingatcal\/rates.html\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Eincreased\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;housing costs since 2012, raising rents dramatically on the most desirable housing options, while keeping other rents relatively flat. This follows a period of dramatic rent hikes; between\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/education\/article\/UC-Berkeley-s-lack-of-services-leaves-many-2923526.php\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003E2001\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;and\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.dailycal.org\/2011\/09\/21\/campus-room-and-board-among-costliest\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003E2011\u003C\/a\u003E, room and board rates nearly doubled. Finally, as part of the restructuring of SHIP in 2013, Berkeley\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/uhs.berkeley.edu\/home\/news\/berkeleyship.shtml\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Eraised healthcare premiums\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;by thirteen percent for undergraduates and twenty percent for graduate students—a cost increase that mostly falls on grad students in professional schools, whose tuition rates have also continued to increase.\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EThinking politically about this situation, it’s worth saying initially that a politics organized around the principles of racial justice, class equality, and affordable public education remain critical. Since 2009, the admission and enrollment rates of black students have\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/legacy-its.ucop.edu\/uwnews\/stat\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Edeclined\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/newscenter.berkeley.edu\/freshman-admission-data-2014\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Eeven further\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.mercurynews.com\/ci_23516740\/affirmative-action-ban-at-uc-15-years-later\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Ethan\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;in the immediate aftermath of Proposition 209. Over this period, the class composition of the student body has also been shifting; there are\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.cshe.berkeley.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/shared\/publications\/docs\/ROPS-JD-GT-PoorRich-10-8-08.pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Erelatively\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/diversity.berkeley.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/UCB-Ethnic-and-Income-Diversity.pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Efewer\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.dailycal.org\/2014\/04\/03\/uc-college-board-partner-recruit-low-income-students\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Elow-income students\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;but significantly more from the highest income brackets. Since 2001, the costs borne by all students have continued to rise, even for those receiving the maximum support from Pell Grants and the Blue and Gold plan. For these and other reasons, it’s critical that we continue to target the race and class exclusions that are only becoming more entrenched in the admissions process.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EBut I think we also should be thoughtful about how politically to address the fact that the\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/hechingerreport.org\/content\/residents-crowded-college-state-foreign-students_16363\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Ebulk of new tuition\u003C\/a\u003Eand fee revenues has been coming from out-of-state and international students, who now make up a greater percentage of the student body and have the potential to take on a greater role—as either protagonists or antagonists—of any student movement against privatization that might reemerge. Perhaps advocating for across the board rent and tuition reductions, including for out-of-state tuition, would be a generally compelling way to address affordability issues, which would push back as well against UC administrators’ post-2012 strategy for increasing tuition and fee revenues.\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EThe\u003Cb\u003E\u0026nbsp;second\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/b\u003Epost-2012 administrative strategy concerns the privatization of development. In June 2012, right around the time the Regents announced that they would freeze in-state tuition if Proposition 30 passed, Berkeley housing administrators\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.dailycal.org\/2012\/06\/05\/uc-berkeley-to-collaborate-with-private-developers-to-build-student-housing\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Eannounced\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;that, in order to limit their construction-related debt, they would begin seeking out private developers to build new dorms. This kind of privatization of dorm construction had been happening for some time at Irvine and Davis. And Berkeley had done something similar with the Blum Center, as well as in partnering with BP to fund the construction of the Energy Biosciences Institute building on Hearst and Oxford.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EJust in the last couple of years though, the privatization of construction has significantly intensified across the UC system. The UC Office of the President recently posted on their website\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.ucop.edu\/real-estate-services\/_files\/documents\/ppp_at_uc.pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Edocuments\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;outlining the various partnerships, or rent agreements, the campuses are looking to make with private developers. At Berkeley, housing administrators announced that the Martinez commons would be the final dorm funded and built in-house, and they recently\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.dailycal.org\/2014\/05\/05\/negotiations-redevelopment-bowles-hall-underway\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Eleased\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;Bowles Hall to a private entity interested in redeveloping the building. They are\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.cp.berkeley.edu\/reso\/RFQ\/RFQ%20For%20Developer-Channing%20Ellsworth-1-12-12-Published.pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Eworking now\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;on finding a developer interested in building and managing a new dorm on Ellsworth and Channing. The Berkeley rent stabilization board has\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.cityofberkeley.info\/uploadedFiles\/Rent_Stabilization_Board\/Level_3_-_General\/7.a.4_Letter%20to%20U.C.%20Berkeley%20re%20student%20housing.pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Eexpressed concern\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;that such privately developed and managed dorms could further drive up student rents, especially when other privately-run dorms, such as the newly-constructed\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.berkeleymet.com\/rent-now\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003EMetropolitan\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;on Dana and Durant, charge rents higher than the cost of room and board. Construction workers’ unions have also raised concerns about the fact that, unlike building projects on campus, these development projects\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.ucop.edu\/real-estate-services\/_files\/documents\/ppp_at_uc.pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Ewon’t be bound\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;by state prevailing wage laws, and so could involve more dangerous and exploitative building practices.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EUC Berkeley administrators have also been working to make arrangements with private firms for the development of portions of the Gill Tract, in Albany. So far, the efforts of\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/occupythefarm.org\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003EOccupy the Farm\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;have stalled this development, and have put on the agenda the conversion of the Gill tract into space for community-based farming, research, and education.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EBerkeley administrators, including the\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/newscenter.berkeley.edu\/2013\/12\/17\/vice-chancellor-for-real-estate\/\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Enewly appointed\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;Vice Chancellor of real estate Robert Lalanne, are also working on\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/vcaf.berkeley.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/02.06.14%20AFLG%20meeting_0.pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Ecoordinating\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;a massive development project on 109 acres of land owned by the University in Richmond Bay. They are saying this project will involve private construction and management of some of the research facilities, and recently published an “\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.cp.berkeley.edu\/RFQ%20Infrastructure%20Master%20Plan%20FINAL%20-%20RFS%201-30-14%20(3).pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003EInfrastructure Master Plan\u003C\/a\u003E,” outlining ways for private companies to buy space and influence at the Richmond Bay campus.\u0026nbsp;\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EA coalition of labor and community groups has issued a number of\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/calprogressivecoalition.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/08\/cal-disorientation-guide-20141.pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Edemands\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;around this development project including the payment of prevailing wages to construction workers, the promise that all service workers employed in the facilities will be represented by AFSCME, the opening up of space for community-based and community-driven research, that those profiting from the project help fund affordable housing in Richmond, and that formerly incarcerated people be hired for some of the construction and other work set to occur. These are demands that students and workers on campus can help amplify. And in general, I think it’s imperative that we respond to UC’s efforts to privatize construction by building relations of solidarity with local communities and making the case for a kind of public knowledge making.\u003Co:p\u003E\u003C\/o:p\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EI can imagine some ambiguities and difficulties that might accompany such a project, aside from just the myriad practical challenges of coalition building and of building power sufficient to interrupt administrative agendas. It might also be hard to know when to oppose new development outright and when to try and direct it to less damaging, more accessible and public-oriented ends. And there’s a question as well about federal research money, which is public in one sense but is often linked to military or other state interests. In a\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/vcaf.berkeley.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/02.06.14%20AFLG%20meeting_0.pdf\" style=\"color: #2eb9ff; text-decoration: none;\"\u003Epower-point presentation\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;last spring, Robert Lalanne, the Vice Chancellor of real estate, noted that drone development and testing is part of the research agenda for Richmond Bay. Given the entailments of much federal research, how can we envision and struggle for a kind of public knowledge making that is resolutely anti-militarist?\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003E\u003Cbr style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\" \/\u003E\u003C\/span\u003E\n\u003Cdiv class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;\"\u003E\n\u003Cspan style=\"font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\"\u003EAny renewed movement against university privatization will need to work through these ambiguities and difficulties. But if the last six years have shown us anything, it’s that concerted action on the part of students, workers, and instructors can fundamentally shift the operations of the university, and can block the worst effects of university privatization, if not reverse this process outright. So there is reason to try, and to hope.\u003C\/span\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/2924662036412235048\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2014\/10\/after-freeze-uc-privatization-since-2012.html#comment-form","title":"2 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/2924662036412235048"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/2924662036412235048"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2014\/10\/after-freeze-uc-privatization-since-2012.html","title":"After the Freeze: UC Privatization Since 2012"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Chris Newfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/01078395415386100872"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgJ8Fc0TC4QF_EExhBvLolndd0cE2TMU1kMGolrB6X7RvCjqlxI2-0b559_R6WYfjiL_km2a71Qb5YCOYoM07vH5ce_48i_5niAMWRZMHhwkgCjYj0M4AiXHD-_IUv39vQ1alADn9VNn7M\/s72-c\/Berkeley+100214.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"2"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170716682680204889.post-6110262491110641199"},"published":{"$t":"2014-07-22T09:27:00.001-07:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2017-08-22T08:48:29.638-07:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Academic Labor"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Contingent Faculty"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Faculty"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"guest post"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Income"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Protests"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Tenure"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Unions"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"What Can We Do Now That Adjunct Sections are Written Into Universities’ Fiscal Survival Strategy?"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Ctable cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" class=\"tr-caption-container\" style=\"float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;\"\u003E\u003Ctbody\u003E\n\u003Ctr\u003E\u003Ctd style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgs29ZyBUTMIECLV9orQSGcGTpeppZmuM5yf0xMji8VMpt9JRckQxzb3bOpUi0RCDE9HAMFlB7ayzvXaDA6S9CyqKb8XzFLAXW_WtsJ4F5AbvdUD3Ol1MRFCj7TL8FxUzw2JCQTxmUhsNo\/s1600\/UnitedAcademicsUO2013.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgs29ZyBUTMIECLV9orQSGcGTpeppZmuM5yf0xMji8VMpt9JRckQxzb3bOpUi0RCDE9HAMFlB7ayzvXaDA6S9CyqKb8XzFLAXW_WtsJ4F5AbvdUD3Ol1MRFCj7TL8FxUzw2JCQTxmUhsNo\/s1600\/UnitedAcademicsUO2013.jpg\" height=\"213\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/td\u003E\u003C\/tr\u003E\n\u003Ctr\u003E\u003Ctd class=\"tr-caption\" style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003EImage for U of O\u003C\/td\u003E\u003C\/tr\u003E\n\u003C\/tbody\u003E\u003C\/table\u003E\n\u003Ci\u003Eby \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/www.pdx.edu\/english\/jennifer-ruth-phd\"\u003EJennifer Ruth,\u003C\/a\u003E English Department, Portland State University\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nThis is the second of a two-part post. \u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.co.uk\/2014\/07\/why-are-faculty-complicit-in-creating.html\"\u003E“Why are Faculty Complicit in Creating a Disposable Workforce?\u003C\/a\u003E” appeared last week.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nWe need rapidly to increase pressure on university administrators for change. I believe that administrators are slowly digesting the (academic and public relations) downsides of relying on instructors to whom the institution makes no real commitment, but at the same time they are under unprecedented budget pressures. \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.co.uk\/2014\/07\/confronting-our-permanent-public.html\"\u003EChris’s post on public austerity\u003C\/a\u003E spelled out many of these pressures. We desperately need to build a coalition that unites university constituencies in efforts to increase state funding.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nBut the adjunct crisis is tricky in this context. It is hard for university leadership to translate the ethical and political disaster we’ve all created with contingent labor into any form of public appeal. Most obviously, administrators attempting to explain the deleterious consequences of adjunct reliance might be interpreted as insulting a significant percentage of their employees. It seems inescapable that at least this part of the fight to restore the public university is going to have to be assumed by the faculty, primarily at the level of departments. We can try to mitigate the degree to which the fight is an adversarial one pitting departments against central administrators, but some conflict is unavoidable.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nIn \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.co.uk\/2014\/07\/why-are-faculty-complicit-in-creating.html\"\u003EPart One\u003C\/a\u003E, I argued that we should insist on the funds for full-time tenure-track positions by withholding the use of cheap adjunct sections. I spent most of my time discussing the inter-departmental psychological obstacles that must be overcome to pursue such a strategy.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nLet’s say, though, that your department successfully makes it through the discussions needed to build consensus. You collectively have decided to dramatically reduce adjunct usage as part of a plan to rebuild decent positions. What happens then?\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nHere, in part two, I explore what such a recommendation could possibly mean given that adjunct usage is baked into university budgets. Were we to do this—i.e., tell everyone expecting adjunct sections that we are trying to get good positions by not putting these sections on our schedules and then do just that—just how big a bomb would be set off?\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nFirst, we should consider the scope of our universities’ economic dependence on adjuncts. I’m going to use my own university as my basis so please bear with some details regarding Portland State. State support for the university has dwindled to only 11% of the budget. Our endowment is negligible. Consequently, our revenue is driven almost entirely by tuition. Tuition has been raised repeatedly over the years and, for a number of good reasons, cannot be raised any higher for the foreseeable future.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nThe professoriate at PSU consists of three faculty groups: tenured and tenure-track, full-time non-tenure-track, and adjunct. If we set aside the (very important) issues of job security and academic freedom, we can consider TT and full-time NTT faculty to be comparably-treated groups in pay, benefits, and work expectations. (There will be objections to this characterization but relative to the third group of faculty – adjuncts –it certainly holds true.) We have seen considerable tensions in a full-time workforce birfurcated into those with access to tenure and those without. The term “2nd-class citizen” for NTT faculty is invoked regularly, which tends to crowd out the more fundamental problem--the existence of our “3rd class citizens.” True to the national stereotype, adjunct faculty are largely invisible within the PSU University community. Full-time NTT serve on Senate, interact regularly with their TT colleagues and administrators, and are represented alongside TT faculty in the union (PSU-AAUP). To the extent that adjuncts’ voices are heard, it is primarily through their union, which bargains separately. Finally, it’s worth noting that a higher percentage of PSU’s professoriate are full-time (TT or NTT faculty) relative to the national average (29% vs. the 20% the Delphi Project cites as typical[1]).\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nAdjunct faculty deliver roughly 30% of PSU’s student credit hours (SCH) while full-time (TT and NTT) faculty deliver 70%. A whopping 92% of every tuition dollar earned by an adjunct instructor is net revenue compared to 24% of each dollar for full-time faculty. This means that after deducting expenditures (salary, etc.), the percentage of university base revenue contributed by adjunct SCH is 42% compared to 58% by the full-time faculty SCH. Nearly half of the university’s budget is built on adjunct usage.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nIn other words, the adjuncting that was once rationalized as a stop-gap and ad hoc measure is now the lifeblood of the budget. Were there to be a coordinated effort across departments to stop offering adjunct contracts, the university would go into full-blown cardiac arrest. I understand why the comparisons of adjunct faculty to slaves strikes many of us as both inappropriate and offensive, but one can see from this information why the analogy is tempting. To economically sustain itself, the public university needs people to perform work that it cannot afford to compensate, at least not remotely adequately. It goes without saying that this situation is hardly unique to PSU, though our desirable urban setting in Portland, Oregon probably gives us an unusually large pool of qualified people to exploit.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nIn this context, what would happen were departments to resist adjunct usage by imposing what amounts to an adjunct strike (albeit one initiated by the professionally-salaried full-time faculty)? \u0026nbsp;Most likely, they would meet with enormous and frantic resistance. Chairs and directors who won’t sign adjunct contracts could be pressured or forced to step down. Rumors would fly that administrators plan to retaliate by finding ways to shut down participating departments and to deny their junior faculty tenure. Second only to the guilt you’d feel for abruptly turning your back on the talented adjuncts who taught for your department for many moons is the guilt you’d feel about the panicked students piling up in the main office because they couldn’t get the classes they need. Forced to take out more student loans to extend their time in school, they would feel swindled. What university admits students, they would rightly ask, and then makes it impossible for them to graduate?\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nWho would knowingly go down this road? And yet if we don’t start taking some steps in this direction, nothing will change. It is true that without radical intervention on anyone else’s part, adjunct organizing, where it is legal, will make adjunct usage more and more expensive. This might ultimately land us in a similar place, but how many years from now? We need more good jobs now and some pain in reform is unavoidable. We have been getting something for cheap that allowed us to do things we wanted. That most of these things were worthy, such as keeping students on track for graduation, is beside the point. With no sudden windfalls (from the state or federal government or from donors) on the horizon, we have to bust our way out of this predicament with the same pint-sized budgets that pushed us into it.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nHere’s how I suggest we start: Have the discussion within your department. Learn your own university’s numbers and then your own department’s specific numbers. Explain to your Dean that you feel you can no longer in good conscience be complicit in the abuse of adjuncts. Simultaneously reassure him or her that you are prepared to do everything in your power to lessen the “damage” done to all the constituencies that in one way or another benefited from the adjunct abuse.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nWhat is within your power to change will vary widely by department. How your department organized its labor thus far, the disciplinary protocols driving research expectations (and, thus, promotion and tenure), the service needs: all of these things and more will play a part in determining how much room you have to maneuver. The goal, though, is to offer up as much as you can in return for new lines. The idea is that you might have to absorb some of the work previously done by adjuncts but, in return, you will get new full-time lines and you will no longer be complicit in adjunct exploitation. Remind your Dean that you are only doing now what you always should have done and what you will have to do in the future. Remind him or her that if you wait, you will be making these changes on a union’s terms not on the university’s.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nSome further steps: Assess the department’s past in relation to the growth in adjunct use. When did your department start the practice and why? Take a fresh look at existing circumstances. Are there faculty who went down to half-time but you never argued to restore the missing instruction in the form of a new hire? Are there people who once carried full courseloads but are now directors of programs or otherwise engaged but you never made up the loss (except by way of adjuncts)? Figure out how you got where you are and what the lost opportunities for new full-time hires were in the past. It is important to document this background.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nFind all low-hanging fruit. Are there enough funds for sections that could be bundled into full-time positions before asking for new investment? Are there funds for “perks” (and, yes, I mean heretofore necessities like travel money) that could be redirected? Are there ways to avoid low-enrollment classes? Are you and your colleagues willing to resume advising and mentoring, making a professional advisor unnecessary (freeing a salary plus benefits that could go to a full-time instructional position)? Are there staff positions that could be economized?\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nEliminate as many course releases for full-time faculty as possible so that it’s clear that whatever adjunct sections are left over are not there to benefit full-time faculty but are the result of real need. Putting up some of your “own” money is how you buy good will with, build trust with, and minimize the possibility of retaliation from administrators.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nThis is already more than anybody wants to hear so I’ll stop for now. Believe me, I get why nobody wants to hear any of this. Mounting this full-frontal assault in real life resulted in scorched earth among full-time departmental colleagues, some of whom were old friends. (Weirdly as I’ve discussed for this blog before, the earth was less scorched between the department and the university administration.) It also resulted in a few new tenure lines and a few saved national searches. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\nGiven how far we’ve gone down Contingency Road, the way back is going to be more painful than anyone wants it to be. But the rewards make the effort necessary and worthwhile: less exploitation, better education, internal relations based on improved equity, and a larger contribution to the public good.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\n\u003Cdiv\u003E\n\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\n"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/feeds\/6110262491110641199\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2014\/07\/what-can-we-do-now-that-adjunct.html#comment-form","title":"7 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/6110262491110641199"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/1170716682680204889\/posts\/default\/6110262491110641199"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"https:\/\/utotherescue.blogspot.com\/2014\/07\/what-can-we-do-now-that-adjunct.html","title":"What Can We Do Now That Adjunct Sections are Written Into Universities’ Fiscal Survival Strategy?"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Chris Newfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/01078395415386100872"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"16","height":"16","src":"https:\/\/img1.blogblog.com\/img\/b16-rounded.gif"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgs29ZyBUTMIECLV9orQSGcGTpeppZmuM5yf0xMji8VMpt9JRckQxzb3bOpUi0RCDE9HAMFlB7ayzvXaDA6S9CyqKb8XzFLAXW_WtsJ4F5AbvdUD3Ol1MRFCj7TL8FxUzw2JCQTxmUhsNo\/s72-c\/UnitedAcademicsUO2013.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"7"}}]}});