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| Banff, Alberta back country on June 5, 2026 |
This is the third of the talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. The others were Chris Nealon’s and Asheesh Kapur Siddique’s is here, along with my introduction to the panel.
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This paper is a response to two trends I've noticed over the past couple of years.
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| Banff, Alberta back country on June 3, 2026 |
CHCI funds research initiatives, among other things--see their Climate Futures call and other initiatives. The theme of this year's meeting was "Building the Future We Want," which is also an implicit theme of this blog. Building that future means putting humanities research into modes of influence in the world, which involves transforming our existing knowledge system, an issue with which I'm a bit obsessed.
This is the corrected text of a talk I gave online to the Wayne State University conference, “Public Budgets, Public Good,” on April 30, 2026. Many thanks to the audience, whose questions about theory and practice were excellent. Thanks also to the sponsors: Labor@Wayne, AAUP, HELU, and Public Good U. I’m still sorry I wasn’t there in person.
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I’ve always seen the university as a force for the general development of society, having been influence by a tradition that includes Humboldt & Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Du Bois, John Dewey, CJR James, and many thinkers since. This has made it easier to grasp the fact that the university’s largest effects are a combination of non-monetary and public. These public effects have been rendered “dark matter” by the political and business worlds, which have steered people exclusively toward the private pecuniary effect of the B.A. wage increment over high school. College presidents and other officials have simply echoed them. This is overbearingly true in the US and the UK, and amounts to a mass miseducation about education. But it is also true elsewhere, and apparently in China.
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| Train Entering Station NYC on Oct 30, 2022 |
I mean the question literally. The New School (TNS, by which I’ll mean all its colleges) has advantages most private colleges would die for. Why is it now trying to push out 40% of its faculty and most experienced staff, mainly on the academic, non-arts side? How did it develop a $48 million deficit for the current year, or around 10% of operating expenditures? President Joel Towers has announced these things but does not explain them. His administration has published a closure list with no academic reasoning about the choices.
I’ve read all the documents I can access. My sense is that senior managers have made important financial errors over a number of years, and yet the underlying problem is poor academic planning. 2025’s Summer Working Groups notwithstanding, senior management have not yet constructed a multi-year collaborative academic planning process involving all faculty and frontline staff.
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| Indiana University on November 6, 2025 |
Critiquing universities is one thing and rebuilding them is another. Getting from the first to the second was a constant topic at the four U.S. universities where I spoke over the course of a few weeks this past month.
I visited the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and Indiana University Bloomington. Warm thanks to my hosts and audiences in all those places, who were generous in every way. I learned enormously from comments and various extensive discussions.
At each university, bad things were being done to faculty and their programs. In each place, faculty were doing things back. We talked non-stop about whether this doing-back was working and what faculty members could and should do next.
Tenure-track faculty are in an odd position. They are neither principals nor agents: they lack corporate power in universities. They lack legal power of the kind possessed by governing boards. They have lost the relationship power of the old collegiality that tenure-track faculty assumed. They’re now in a world that’s familiar to non-tenure track faculty and graduate students. What next?
Most of those I spoke with saw the first job as defense against outside attacks. And in fact, faculty legal defense has been working well. At UCLA, joint faculty and union lawsuits have now led to a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump Administration’s pursuit of a $1.2 billion fine against UCLA that aims to extort an agreement like that the Administration imposed on Columbia University (Jaweed Kaleem has an overview). Over the summer, a group of UC faculty sued Trump’s National Institutes for Health to restore blocked research funding. This lawsuit also succeeded at getting a temporary injunction.
It’s worth noting that the UC Board of Regents and the Office of the President have accepted if not condoned the Trump Administration’s unlawful coercion by failing to dispute it. Faculty groups have had to fill a leadership vacuum. Incredibly, the UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) had to sue their own Board of Regents to obtain the text of the Trump demands to which they were thinking of committing the University: this suit was also successful. (UC then asked the California Supreme Court to overturn the lower court ruling, which they declined to do.) UC senior managers have neither defended the University in court against unlawful attacks nor acknowledged any obligation to collaborate with the UC community. It’s remarkable that their main legal actions have been taken against their own employees.
During the UCLA conference that had brought me to campus, I met an author of one of two major resolutions submitted to the November meeting of the UCLA Legislative Assembly. The “Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning” recites chapter and verse of the obligations that managers have to work with faculty bodies on planning and budget. It calls for the belated release of comprehensive financial statements for fiscal years 2024–25 and 2025–26, including “statements of revenues, expenditures, reserves, and a clear definition and accounting of the reported deficit.” It goes on to demand four modes of data sharing and communication that include “detailed analyses and forward projections” in nine separate categories. The Resolution itself tells a story of breached collaboration that took some real work to put together.
Take a look--it is impressively strong and complete. People often cite the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as having shifted state legislatures to the right by circulating model policies that members can cut and paste into bills for their state. Faculty Senates could treat this Resolution as a model policy and adapt it for their campus.
**UPDATE
The UCLA Academic Senate has announced the results of the votes on these Resolutions:
Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of
Shared Governance in Budget Planning
Legislative Assembly members voted via the Academic Senate Data
Management System on the Resolution on Financial Transparency and the
Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning. The Legislative Assembly
received a total of 116 votes cast: 115 Approve, 1 Oppose. This
Resolution required a majority of votes cast by present members to be approved.
[AIPSC (2nd ed.) 5.1]. A majority of votes cast (99%) were to Approve this
Resolution.
Resolution on Information Technology Accountability,
Transparency, and Shared Governance
Legislative Assembly members voted via the Academic Senate Data
Management System on the Resolution on Information Technology Accountability,
Transparency, and Shared Governance. The Legislative Assembly received a total
of 106 votes cast: 104 Approve, 2 Oppose. This Resolution required
a majority of votes cast by present members to be approved. [AIPSC (2nd ed.)
5.1]. A majority of votes cast (98%) were to Approve this Resolution
These are the strongest large-group Senate votes I have ever seen. It's as though the repression isn't working anymore, and, to quote Avery Gordon, "when the repression isn't working anymore, the trouble that results demands re-narrativization."
** END UPDATE
For the most part, the faculty stories were painful to hear. They were mainly about having to react to the unilateral actions of more powerful people. The people who had power over the university mainly didn’t like the university. Their views ranged from indifferent to openly hostile. The powerful people decided actions that damaged faculty without working with them in advance: in many cases damage seemed like the aim of the action. The faculty got the job of accepting the decisions and then twisting them into place.
I saw good stories interrupted. There were great early chapters. Chapter 1: the administration commits an offense against education or Thought Itself. Chapter 2. Faculty organize and strike back! Chapter 3: the governing board responds by curtailing faculty and student rights. That’s terrible! I can’t wait to see what happens in Chapter 4!
But what if there is no Chapter 4?
I am not sure how to talk about this. I don’t mean it as a criticism of the many university faculty members working like mules to be heard at all. But I do want to head off a doomer reading that posits the general inability of faculty to defeat their senior managers and governing boards. Some faculty do see the ongoing power of boards and managers as proof that this or that effort completely failed, and that therefore new efforts will fail too. This view is a psy-op, not reality.
Indiana was the only red state on my program, and its politicians have gone full MAGA with the war on universities you’d expect. In early 2024, its legislature passed a law requiring professors to promote “intellectual diversity” to keep their tenure, adding a post-tenure review to match, along with other stuff. They’ve continued to meddle, and have empowered an autocratic president, Pamela Whitten, to do what she will irrespective of the views of the faculty council among other university groups; she’s attracted national coverage with the disturbing results.
In early spring 2024, the Bloomington Faculty Council proposed a vote of no confidence in Whitten (core motivations listed in the petition). The motion passed 827 to 29. (A parallel no-confidence vote also carried against IU provost Rahul Shrivastav.)
Yet Whitten and Shirvastav remain in post, and the IU Board’s response to the 96.6% no-confidence vote against Whitten was to give her a $175,000 bonus in September 2024, soon followed by a $200,000 raise. Thus concluded our Chapter 3.
One member of the audience at my IU lecture used the board’s big middle finger to the faculty as proof that resistance was futile—just like the actions I described in my lecture. I asked the audience, “after you voted no-confidence and the board then gave Whitten a bonus, what did you do next?” The president of the Bloomington Faculty Council who’d gotten the remarkable vote made a zero with his fingers. “It was followed by nothing,” he said.
Well ok, I said, you didn’t lose exactly. You just stopped playing. They didn’t stop playing. That doesn’t prove faculty can’t win. It proves you have to keep playing.
I was constantly impressed with how intelligent and committed academics are, including graduate students who are facing futures without proper support. We don’t appreciate that enough about ourselves. Everyone I met showed the intelligence and commitment that comes partly from the long process of building intelligence in teaching and research. These are real powers in the face of incessant negative propaganda and disrespect.
Hovering over all proposed solutions was the prospect of faculty unionization. That wasn’t because people agree that tenure-track faculty are ready to unionize—most thought they weren’t—but because the traditional alternative, collegial shared governance, has been unilaterally degraded or rejected by senior managers and boards. A lot of tenure-track faculty are now where graduate students were a few decades go.
Tenure-track as well as non-tenure track faculty do now need collective bargaining rights. But faculty won’t get them or get the public on their side or be clear about what to do once they have them unless they tell their stories, and never stop telling them, and never stop acting on them.
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| Bodrum Castle, Türkiye Sept 12, 2025 |
At our friend Andrea’s birthday in Hampshire last weekend, the Man in the Lime Suit said to me above the din, “they’ve taken the spark out of everyone. Taken what’s inside people that belongs to them and makes them act.” I nodded. The spark never does go out, but I knew exactly what he meant.
The spark to make one’s own things is the origin and outcome of teaching and research. It leads to a set of powers in art to show what’s not seen and to diverge from what exists.
In politics, it’s to break with a nightmare of the present, and build an alternative to it, brick by brick, where you have to make most of the bricks yourself.
In management, the spark enables the creation of the positive narrative of your institution’s destiny and the coordination of your people into a powerful movement towards it. (I wrote about these linked elements last time.)
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| UC Irvine on May 8, 2018 |
This is actually a national question. Trump has done a classic “heighten the contradictions” of the political economy of the US research university.
This political economy has always been unstable, and three decades of reductions in per-student state funding have kept the boat rocking back and forth. Now the Trump Administration has blown holes in most sources of federal research funding. Meanwhile, state funding is mainly flat or down, and will be under renewed pressure as the provisions of Trump’s tax cut bill come into effect.
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| Outside Lafayette, La. on October 27, 2018 |
I just wrote a mini-grant for $858, to cover flight and hotel for a speaker. To justify the choice of speaker and the validity of event, I composed a few hundred words, to explain to an audience out of field and possibly outside of academia why one invites speakers from other institutions to share their expertise. My speaker is a full professor and department chair at a major research institution. They are a noted scholar in our field of Latin American Studies. Their appropriateness as a speaker is not in the slightest doubt.
In the past, the $858 would have come out of a departmental speaker budget. I would not have to spend the afternoon explaining in words of one syllable why the event was being held and who the person was, nor creating documentation to prove I really had looked up and compared flight costs. But that was how I spent a lot of time today that would otherwise have been dedicated to research and teaching.
I have been a professor for many years and before that, I was a graduate student with a teaching role. I have written many small internal grants. Initially, it was only one every couple of years, for special activities like summer research travel. Now almost every routine activity requires a mini-grant. The five-year vita I recently prepared listed ten in a category I now call “Selected Internal Funding.” A complete list would have crowded the document, since as departmental budgets shrink, funding requests for everyday operations are needed more and more often.
I have never been turned down for a funding request. Never. I suspect the reason is that the institution funds all legitimate proposals. I repeat, these grants are for amounts that in the past department chairs or deans would have controlled and would have simply authorized. They would do this not out of corruption or favoritism, but because they were familiar with the field and could exercise good judgment about it.
When I raise this issue, some faculty say they have given up writing mini-grants and only apply for major external grants. I am also a good writer of these, but major grants, at least in my field, do not fund everyday operations. And by major grants I mean grants from national research organizations like the NEH or ACLS. I do not mean fundraising. I also lobby civic organizations to support campus projects, but such fundraising covers different kinds of activities than do research grants to the Guggenheim Foundation.
The mini-grants address needs not covered by other mechanisms. That is why I continue to apply. I do have some better paid and wealthier colleagues who dispense with the mini-grants and support university activities with personal funds, but they are few. Others take consulting gigs to substitute for the mini-grants, pointing out that if it takes five hours to write and then administer a mini-grant for $750, and they can raise $750 in three hours’ consulting, they’ll do the consulting.
My research office suggests that applying for mini-grants helps us to reflect and articulate our research programs to ourselves. The fact is it doesn’t. Writing a book proposal or a major external grant can do that, just as updating and reformatting a vita can help rethink a career trajectory. But explaining basic things like why we go to conferences or, as I did for one mini-grant, why professors read books, does not help me clarify my ideas. At the outside, it might help explain what I am doing to an uninformed auditor. But that kind of explanation to such a person makes a negative contribution to my scholarly life.
The formulae for the mini-grants typically imitate those of major grants in the sciences, as does the idea that everything done should be grant funded. But in these fields, people spend as much as half of their work time applying for the funds they need to do their jobs. Rather than address that impractical situation, universities now replicate it at every level. The exercise seems particularly absurd when we are asked by our university to defend our job positions, or to explain that conducting research is part of our contract with them, and we are complying.
But what is happening here? Every time there is a new, allegedly competitive, centralized internal funding opportunity, it is presented as new funding intended to help us, yet simultaneously, money disappears from regular departmental budgets and the regular library budget. A central committee reviews all the proposals, and individual units across campus lose autonomy. The university says this reduces “siloing.” In some cases it can be fairer since there are always people involved who do not know the applicants. But overall, it seems to be about a reduction in shared governance.
That is to say that every mini-grant application is a symptom of a department without a budget and, in the case of many of mine, a library without materials. When departments do not have budgets for research and libraries do not have them for materials, and faculty instead apply for funding to a mysterious committee in Academic Affairs, that committee has taken over functions that multiple department chairs, librarians, and others would have shared in the past. This is a concentration of power in a rather faceless group. Even if there were a Senate committee administering such things, the atmosphere would be less corporate.
I note further that Human Resources nowadays is not a department of my university, but a service we have outsourced to a corporate “partner.” People who have increasing power over us are not colleagues or university employees. I wonder when the same will happen to the committee that judges the mini-grants.
What should be happening instead? Universities should restore department budgets for routine scholarly activities that are central to university education, central for undergraduate students as much as for everyone else. This would increase the use of decentralized academic expertise, lodged in departments, which would in turn increase the efficiency of the overall system. And it would reduce the excessive administrative labor of the many, many scholars in my position.
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| University of Louisiana, Lafayette on October 25, 2018 |
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| River Thames, London on December 24, 2015 |
This hostility to education and to the educated was temporarily dampened by the economy after World War II. US dominance of world manufacturing meant that non-college people could find good and growing wages. The booming "technostructure" of white collar jobs rewarded college degrees with good and growing salaries.
College was a ticket to the good life so it was hard for politicians to attack it. Republicans were partially disarmed because college grads voted Republican. Meanwhile, non-college whites could also get into the middle class with a factory job, so resentment of college’s wage premium was harder to stoke.
That anomalous period has been over for decades. Reaganism and then Clintonism imposed anti-egalitarian economic policies that withdrew affluence from the working classes—right as the white supermajority began to fade. On their side, university managers oversold and in fact mis-sold learning as earning.
Today, with college wages not assured even in exchange for high tuition and student debt, human capital theory reads as a long con on working people. Republicans have long redefined expertise—and university-style analysis and critique—as attacks on heartland values and equally on the entrepreneurial will, the sole source of progress and national wealth.
It’s not surprising that knowledge hatred is in full flower. It is driven by and supports the sultanistic oligarchy that Trump, Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, et al. are seeking to establish.
Whether the subject is cryptocurrency, “AI,” decarbonization, taxes, or immigration, we regularly see a defiant refusal to think things through. This is in part in emulation of Trump himself. He flamboyantly disdains the analytical part, jumps on the conclusion he wants, and then forces it to be the situation’s truth. He talked nonsense all the way to the White House, twice.
Pride in thinking badly creates disasters large and small. One example comes from reporting by Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff about a Mexican-American named Jaime Cachua in Rome, Georgia.
He sat at his kitchen table in rural Georgia across from his father-in-law, Sky Atkins, the family patriarch. Jaime, 33, hadn’t seen his own father since he was 10 months old, when he left Mexico in a car seat bound for the United States. It was Sky, 45, who had stood by Jaime at his wedding, helped him move into his first house and stayed at the hospital overnight when one of Jaime’s children was sick with pneumonia.
“There’s nothing to stop them from rounding me up once he takes office,” Jaime said.
Sky had spent much of his adulthood preparing to protect his family in a crisis. He’d learned survival tactics in the Army and had trained in hand-to-hand combat as a Georgia corrections officer. In the last few years, as he sensed the country becoming more polarized and volatile, he’d built up a small collection of firearms and a cache of emergency supplies. He’d been anticipating a moment when the government might rise up against his family, but this particular crisis was one he’d helped to create.
“I’m going to be straight with you,” he told Jaime. “I voted for Trump. I believe in a lot of what he says.”
“I figured as much,” Jaime said. “You and just about everyone else around here.”
“It’s about protecting our rights as a sovereign country,” Sky said. “We need to shut down the infiltration on the border. It’s not about you.”
“It is about me,” Jaime said. “That’s the thing I don’t understand.”
Sky Atkins filled his brain with Trump's fake knowledge about liberals and the border and voted to deport his own son-in-law.
I’ve cited Masha Gessen's de facto tag line for this set of posts, “Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy.” This rejection needs to be fought. It is damaging societies everywhere, very much including the United States.
However, this injunction to prevent the rejection of expertise stumbles on the many problems with expertise itself. Expertise generated the forty-years war on race-based affirmative action. Expertise installed neoliberalism as a fact of economic nature. Expertise helped create the political paralysis in most wealthy countries with its constitutive suspicion of popular intelligence and public demands.
I too have critiqued expertise at length—critiqued specific, dominant, incredibly powerful uses of expertise. Unmaking the Public University took on the war on affirmative action. "Racial Equality after Affirmative Action" critiqued the professional war on equality. A chapter in The Limits of the Numerical attacked the Clintonite (and Obaman) use of economic modeling to undermine the non-college working class. Another chapter in that volume (with Aashish Mehta) explored expert quantification’s suppression of the non-pecuniary benefits of education that aim at intellectual capability for the whole population. All the chapters in the collectively-authored Metrics that Matter critique the expert metrics (wages by major, selectivity) that the experts have used to miseducate the public about the benefits of education. I’m unambivalently pro-university as such, pro-expertise as such, pro-thinking even when J.D. Vance is doing it, and yet my god the labor required to distinguish between good and bad modes of expertise. At some point it starts to feel like protesting too much and washing blood off one’s hands.
So, yes, many forms of expertise have weakened society and wrongly helped disempower the wider population. I’m sure Gessen would agree that the expertise we defend is an expertise we also rebuild. (See their piece on the battle between Supreme Court legal vs. medical expertise on healthcare for transgender people.) Expertise is often its own worst enemy, especially when it is an enemy of exactly the everyday standpoint knowledge on which our so-called democracy actually depends.
Another example of the problem appears in an essay of Roderick Ferguson’s earlier this year. It the course of a discussion of the State of Florida’s attack on the teaching of race and race in history, he invokes an essay on intellectuals by Edward Said:
Said pointed to how professionalism pulls back the self at the very moment that it should be launched into critical thinking and ethical commitments. Professionalism is how we habituate ourselves to lines of thought that are organized to protect the status quo. It fosters a notion of responsibility that fixes people’s gaze on profession[alism] and its criteria for good behavior. Presuming its job is to deliver people to the mainstream, professionalism rarely brings them to alternative destinations, ones that try to achieve something other than the given order. As a result, professionalism promotes notions of responsibility that are antithetical to the forms of responsibility . . . that are presumed in ancestral sources. Indeed, as professionalism lures people—especially minoritized individuals—from more critical routes, it reveals itself to be a terrain ripe for ethical, intellectual, political, and existential crises.
Ferguson’s title is, “An Interruption of Our Cowardice,” and that is indeed the thing that experts must now seek.
My basic view is that the U.S. needs a revolution in its knowledge culture, from anti-knowledge to systematically pro. This must be a popular revolution in the sense that it transforms a key institution of knowledge –the university—while preserving and redirecting its resources, its base knowledges, its intensities, its collaborations, its spaces of actual thinking, bringing the full public into contact with these and learning much better than it currently does from that public.
This talk of “actual thinking” is awkward in the liberal arts, since we are all constructivists now. Who are we to say J.D Vance is anti-knowledge? He's a Yale law grad and he's pro knowledge-- pro his knowledge and Trump's knowledge. If we can't wave around a simple picture of anti-knowledge how can we say he's part of a "rejection of genuine expertise"?
Well, in Vance's case we can wave around a picture of him refusing to admit that Joe Biden was elected president in 2020. The same goes for Trump times 10,000. Also the broligarchs, et al. that surround them. The more complicated cases of anti-knowledge knowledge just take more work to expose and replace.
Everyday people—“non-college” as we now call them—do serious thinking routinely: child care, car repair, shop-floor process flow, delivery routes, gardening, a friend’s alcoholism, you name it, serious thinking takes place or happiness and survival don't occur.
Take Sky Atkins' not linking Trump's deportation rhetoric to the deportation of his Dreamer son-in-law.
In reality, Atkins is perfectly capable of enacting "genuine expertise.” He did this with his martial training. He can think, ok, my family member Jaime is undocumented and then study up on what to do. He can read official government documents about Jamie's legal limbo. He can read expert commentary on current Dreamer legal issues rather than rely on podcast, Facebook, and TV sources. He can steep himself in the details of the immigration process that Jaime has already undertaken and help him strategize about it. He can think through the likely effects on Jamie of a Trump win. He can come to a judgment about likely Trump effects by weighing pros and cons.
Atkins might ponder deeply and then decide that were America rid of 10 million undocumented people and his son-in-law is gone with them, then so be it.
Or he might support mass deportation but assume that it will never affect Jaime—as he seems to do. But he can and should test such conclusions with friends and family, and take on board negative feedback.
He can take this feedback or do further reading and rethinking and then plausibly and logically conclude that though he believes in “a lot of what Trump says,” he really shouldn’t actually vote for Trump. He could also tell his friends why he won’t vote Trump and why they shouldn’t either.
This general process is easy enough to explain to anyone. It means investigating a claim to see if it holds up or not.
The process isn’t peculiar to software engineering or literary criticism, but is part of everyone’s everyday life. Are eggs really cheaper at that other store today? This needs looking into. People have procedures for doing that. Show me the parent who is not an expert on comparative pricing.
Thinking doesn’t deny or purge emotions (“The Democrats couldn’t care less when I can’t afford eggs”) but works with emotions and works them through. This should mean, in voting, studying enough in this field of interest, food prices, to create a few more sentences in one's head (“my town used to have 12 groceries stores and now they’re 8. And they all seem to be owned by 2 or 3 chains”).
Professional intellectuals have the same obligation to think, and we are as good at skipping thought as any other group. This skipped thinking gets into public discourse that pisses off tens of millions of people because they know it’s wrong.
Exhibit A this year was “inflation is under control.” This came from price statistics whose model has flaws and which is also detached from the kind of standpoint experience that made voters not believe it. We know how this worked out.
Again, it takes work to understand things. Organized expertise offers short cuts, because you can figure things out faster and more accurately if you know the subject, the methods, the other people who know similar things, and previous successful solutions. This applies whether you’re in high energy physics or bulk food purchasing.
Expertise is the result of labor, not of elite status. This needs to be pointed out all day long, especially during an administration that will be hostile both to labor as such and to labor that generates inconvenient truths.
For me the key is the collective stance toward knowledge coupled with the ethos of knowledge that the collective stance accrues. Having a pro-knowledge stance is the life-and-death difference between pretty good knowledge and knowledge that gets a lot of people harmed or killed.
Creating this stance and its rebuilt institutions is something that professionals and non-college people will have to do together. We need each other to do this right.
This is the first of two papers we're posting from an MLA panel last week, entitled "Organizing University Labor," put together by Eva Cherniavsky at the University of Washington- Seattle (her most recent post here was on the gutting of the humanities in WA). I thought of both papers under the title "After Shared Governance," as both discuss non-Senate modes of faculty control while also taking a critical look at faculty unions.
From the moment Joe Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee right up to election night, Cornel West’s stated position, which he repeated almost as a mantra on every platform that would have him, was: The Left must do everything possible to defeat Donald Trump, while at the same time we cannot lie to ourselves about who Joe Biden is. Which is to say, he is no friend of ours. And I begin with this because there’s never been a day in this country when the labor movement was not under attack, so unions must be defended. Defense, though, does not preclude legitimate, robust critique, and we cannot ignore the structural flaws in our labor unions as they actually exist.
Indeed, just as a Biden administration provides more advantageous terrain for struggle, having a union is overall better than not—virtually every metric shows this to be true—but we’re still in a fight, and unions, far from being the end point, are just another battlefield. Because despite romanticized ideals of workers coming together in democratic self- determination and so forth, national unions are bureaucratic institutions with their own internal hierarchies, and in many ways collaborate with employers in a class war against their own membership, while at the same time working tirelessly to contain a growing militancy within the working class.
First a brief overview of my own experience. Between the Fall of 2015 and Spring 20l8, I was a Lecturer in the University of California system, represented by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), first for two years at UC Riverside in the University Writing Program, then a year at UCLA in the English Department. “Lecturer” is the term for full- and part-time non-Senate Faculty. Tenure-track this obviously was not, but working conditions were decent—certainly better than in many contingent positions. A full teaching load at UCR is eight courses per year, which is a 3-3-2 on their quarter system, with a base salary of around $53,000 plus benefits, with 1.5% deducted from each paycheck for collective bargaining fees under the fair-share provision of California law. In other words, this was a comfortable second-tier academic job.
No one approached me, but I formally joined AFT Local 1966 right away, since membership aligned with my political beliefs and there was no extra cost.
I’d initially been hired at the very last minute and given three classes for the Fall quarter. Shortly thereafter, it became apparent I’d also be needed for Winter and Spring, at which point the collective bargaining agreement required that I be appointed to an annual-year contract, and I was back-paid to the previous July. Over the winter I reapplied for my job—a full application complete with cover letter, teaching materials, letters of recommendation, and so on—and near the end of spring I was rehired on another annual-year contract, which was great as there’d be no gap in my income over the summer.
So, again, there were real upsides overall, but I use the term “rehired” intentionally, as I’m sure many of us are familiar with the stress and uncertainty of self-terminating contracts. The union had negotiated a “Continuing Lecturer” designation, which secures ongoing employment after 18 quarters in a single department, but that’s still six years of reapplying for your own job, and a number of departments within the UC had reputations for excessive turnover, particularly around the 14th or 15th quarter to avoid granting ongoing status. I was told this was a priority for future negotiations, but it seemed nothing else could be done.
In my case, late in the summer after my second year I received a department-wide email announcing that unless we’d already heard otherwise, we were not being rehired, and that this included “several experienced Lecturers.” Obviously, we were in competition each year with the entire applicant pool. The union could not or would not protect our positions, and all those nice union benefits were out window as I was out of a job.
Late in August 2017, I was hired by the English Department at UCLA, and though I was part of the same bargaining unit, that department viewed the Lecturer position more as a gentleman’s postdoc for their own PhDs who’d failed to secure tenure-track jobs upon graduation, and never hired anyone for more than a year or two at most. I was only brought in because one of their medievalists backed out last minute to consult full- time on a television series then in production. Such is Hollywood. And as another unspoken rule, the UCLA English Department did not hire anyone full-time, so I was given their standard 2-1-1 for the year. To be fair, this is a 57% appointment and thus benefits eligible. But I had to supplement my income with courses across town at USC, and neither of these unwritten rules were known to me until well into my time there.
This also happened to be the lead-up to the Janus v. AFSCME decision, which everyone correctly anticipated would rule fair- share fees unconstitutional and spread the free-rider problem to the 20 states where these fees were then legal. No longer would the AFT automatically collect that 1.5% of every Lecturer’s paycheck; they would now have to incentivize workers to join the union.
I signed up to help with some outreach, paired with a union staffer. This turned out mostly to involve chasing down Lecturers between classes and confronting them with a sales pitch that basically started and ended with: You’re benefiting from a contract the union negotiated, be grateful, and feel guilty for not signing up. To be blunt, it was a shockingly lazy, patronizing effort.
Jane McAlevey, a veteran organizer and now a senior policy fellow at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, extensively documents her experience and frustrations with national unions in her first book, Raising Hell “Today,” she writes in her second book, No Shortcuts, “attempts to generate movements are directed by professional, highly educated staff who rely on an elite, top- down theory of power that treats the masses as audiences of, rather than active participants in, their own liberation” (9). She goes on to outline three approaches unions take to bring about change and engage their members: Advocacy, Mobilization, and Organization. Advocacy takes place at the level of policy and political lobbying. Mobilization relies on large numbers of workers at rallies and photo-ops, but still “staffers see themselves, not ordinary people, as the key agents of change. To them, it matters little who shows up, or, why, as long as a sufficient number of bodies appear” (10).
But in true organizing, as McAlevey defines it, “the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority… Individual campaigns matter in themselves, but they are primarily a mechanism for bringing new people into the change process and keeping them involved” (10). Few unions today invest the time and resources into organizing, first, because it takes those time and resources, but also because it decentralizes power away from the union leadership that has worked so hard to consolidate its power.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the AFT campaign. While the histories, memoirs, and how-tos of the labor movement focus on the challenges, rewards—the excitement—of unionizing a workplace, our bargaining unit had remained unchanged since 1984, and relations between the UC administration and the union had long since stabilized.
So aside from the obvious—hoping people would sign up—what were we doing? Certainly not organizing, and not mobilizing to put any pressure on the administration. Even in a contract year, the negotiations were just tinkering around the edges, and more importantly they were a thing that happened elsewhere, at some conference table behind closed doors, among people neither these prospective members nor I would ever meet.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was experiencing the culmination of decades of labor concessions and institutional inertia--much of it the result of fair-share fees and exclusive representation, both products of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Shaun Richman, a former organizing director for the AFT and writer for In These Times, explains some of this in his book, Tell the Bosses We’re Coming:
From their inception, mandatory union fees were never intended to compensate unions for the financial costs they bear for bargaining and filing grievances. Mandatory union fees are the compensation for the political costs of representing all the workers in a shop and maintaining labor peace… It is the combination of exclusive representation and the union shop that enables unions to agree to “shared sacrifice” or just plain old concessions and do the heavy lifting of selling them to the workers as being “good for the company” or the long term viability of jobs. (33, emphasis in original)
This is precisely how unions have defended mandatory fees and the structure of the National Labor Relations Board itself in court, right from the start. Richman again: “Unions were there defending the NLRB on the basis of collective bargaining’s stabilizing effect on the economy” (64). This is the same line of argument that union attorneys used in Janus v. AFSCME.
David Frederick, attorney for Illinois AFSCME Council 31, argued: “The key thing that has been bargained for in this contract for agency fees is a limitation on striking. And that is true in many collective bargaining agreements” (Kishore). He went on: “The fees are the tradeoff. Union security is the tradeoff for no strikes."
Illinois Solicitor General David Franklin went further in supporting the union’s position, claiming the state has “an interest… in being able to work with a stable, responsible, independent counterparty that’s well resourced enough that it can be a party with us” (Kishore).
And here is Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT, whose salary is around $450,000 a year, in the Washington Post:
Collective bargaining allows employers and employees to forge agreements on the basis of shared interests that address both parties’ priorities and concerns. Without bargaining rights, educators are left with few options to have their voices heard and are forced to take more public actions, such as protesting to lawmakers, to have their priorities addressed.”
Heaven forbid, we might take it upon ourselves to protest to lawmakers.
It doesn’t get much clearer; in their own words, the state and the union are partnering to collude with employers to suppress worker opposition, and the union’s main concern—”union security”—has nothing to do with workers and everything to do with consolidating its own power to mirror, organizationally, its counterpart.
In their article "Intergroup Solidarity and Collaboration in Higher Education Organizing and Bargaining in the United States," Daniel Scott and Adrianna Kezar of USC write:
Bureaucratic unions shifted their organizational structures and procedures to be more formal, pursuing survival through efficiency as they became more organizationally similar to the employers they negotiated with. They … hired additional administrative staff, and many adopted rigid procedures for addressing grievances… so that the union could evaluate and respond to grievance issues one-by-one.
This trend had the effect of strengthening the union’s position as mediator between employer and employee, while limiting the individual worker’s ability to collaborate with others and take other forms of active involvement in addressing their concerns (Clawson and Clawson 100). (Scott 106)
As David Graeber points out in The Utopia of Rules, “a bureaucracy, once created, will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it” (150). This is why the AFL-CIO opposes the Green New Deal and why AFSCME, the AFL-CIO, and UNITE-HERE are resistant to Medicare For All: negotiating healthcare being one of their main reasons for existence.
The AFT has built a robust infrastructure within the UC system. It made itself an indispensable mediator between administration and non-Senate Faculty, contained labor unrest through no-strike clauses while extracting fees from the entire bargaining unit, and locked in an academic underclass of limited-term, contingent faculty. This is not out of character for a national union, as the United Auto Workers is infamous for a 2007 concession that created a two-tier wage system for hourly employees, with the lower tier maxing out at $10 less per hour than higher-paid workers. From the AFT’s perspective, too, individual Lecturers are interchangeable. Remember, “it doesn’t matter who shows up." Thus the bargaining unit, the overall entity, is not contingent: between 2015 and 2018 there were about 3,000 Lecturers and the number now somewhere just over 4,000. The bargaining unit is not just stable but growing.
From the Lecturers’ perspective, though, the situation is far different. I, we, didn’t complete a dozen years of higher education to cycle through a one-year job, and yet that is what is increasingly happening. Unions have indeed faced a coordinated, decades-long assault by both business and government. But the decline in union membership throughout the country, as well as the resistance I saw from fellow Lecturers, is also fueled by unions’ willful impotence.
In that same Washington Post article, Weingarten admits: “Fifty-two percent of teachers say they feel their perspective is only ‘somewhat’ represented, and 20 percent say their perspective is ‘not very much’ or ‘not at all’ represented by their unions.” That’s roughly three disaffected teachers out of every four. And how could they not be, when they have no say in the priorities, strategies, or tactics of their union?
With fair-share fees now unconstitutional, unions are forced to convince workers of their value, but what does that process look like? Can a union deliver the kinds of working conditions we want? In my ideal university—and given the current political situation I want to be careful with talk of revolution or overthrow—but in my ideal university we expel nearly all administration and return to faculty governance. Perhaps our employment would be built around a traditional tenure system, but regardless we would work full-time and we’d bring an end to self- terminating contracts.
Here’s where it gets tricky: according to the NLRB, if you have a say in the operation of the workplace, as you’d have as a member of a functioning academic Senate, then you’re considered management and not eligible for union representation. And no formal union will help us reach a point that dissolves its own membership.
Further compounding the problem of organizing is the fact that the academic labor force is divided into not two, but three tiers--tenure-track, full-time non-tenure track, and adjunct--or actually four tiers if you count graduate students, who over the years have shifted more and more from TAs toward teaching their own sections.
Three of these tiers comprise their own unique bargaining units, and it’s not an apprentice or seniority system in which we toil for a certain amount of time in the lower rungs before moving up to a better position. As my own experience showed, even Lecturers in slightly-less exploited union jobs are still, every year, part of the reserve pool of adjunct labor.
Universities, as a class, determine the overall size of that pool, by virtue of awarding PhDs academia controls its own labor market. This is a problem to be sure. But complaining about the overproduction of PhDs misses the point. In my current department, a full teaching load is 4/4. With a sane and pedagogically appropriate load my department would double in size. I’d argue that’s the case nationwide.
So how then to organize? Our first responsibility is to the most exploited and precarious among us, and that includes not just contingent faculty but our fellow workers in custodial and dining services, groundskeeping, and so on who make our jobs possible. “Wall-to-wall” unionization is one possible answer, in which everyone in the institution—graduate student workers, faculty, and staff—are represented collectively, as Arizona State University workers just announced would happen.
But organizing takes time and a commitment to investing in individual people. With contingent faculty, even if you convince someone to join the fight they might well be at another university next semester or next year.
Non-union associations like New Faculty Majority seem to be a good start, but they appear to be operating mainly on the level of advocacy: writing policy papers and op-eds, circulating petitions, tweeting, and fundraising. We don’t need more petitions (or conference papers) so much as we need more strikes. So I fear they will encounter the same organizational incentives of other top-down nonprofits, the most important being that when your salary depends on a problem it becomes difficult to solve that problem.
One of the more interesting approaches, it seems, and one deployed with success by SEIU in Boston, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington D.C., is the Metro Strategy. In this, organizing is based not on institution or department or bargaining unit, but instead on metropolitan region. In Los Angeles, there are three UCs, seven Cal States, and well over a dozen city colleges within driving distance of downtown, and I'm counting only public institutions.
As Scott and Kezar write, the Metro Strategy is
particular[ly] effective for contingent faculty and other types of contingent workers because it follows the distribution and flows of contingent workers, rather than starting with the individual university and inevitably leaving many workers at other institutions out (Berry and Worthen 436–38). . . . [This] increases the mass of workers who are organized, so they can negotiate with multiple employers and have an impact that goes beyond an individual site. (119)
Both “wall-to-wall” and Metro strategies organize within existing union infrastructures, of course, but build solidarity across larger sections of the academic working class—particularly throughout the adjunct labor market of a fixed location—and provide far more leverage and potential for escalation.
Escalation is key, as strikes get the goods. More importantly, strikes beget more strikes. To quote Richman again: “It is the visible resistance of organized workers that inspires people to join the labor movement” (58). We’ve seen this in the Red For Ed strikes that spread across the country in 2018, and the credible threat of strikes during COVID-19 that are inspiring more and more workers to stand up for their own safety.
We can expect, however, that any increased militancy or strike attempts will be vigorously opposed by union leadership, whose class interests are not our class interests, which puts us in the same dilemma faced by the broader Left with respect to the willfully impotent Democratic Party: is it better to organize within and attempt to take over a neoliberal institutional apparatus, or to build power from below and challenge existing structures from the outside?
As a popular meme asks: Why not both?
Works Cited
Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2016.
Kishore, Joseph. “Union lawyer tells US Supreme Court: ‘Union security is the tradeoff for no strikes.’” World Socialist Web Site. 28 Feb. 2018. Web.
McAlevey, Jane F. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Richman, Shaun. Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21st Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020.
Scott, Daniel and Adrianna J. "Intergroup Solidarity and Collaboration in Higher Education Organizing and Bargaining in the United States," Academic Labor: Research and Artistry: Vol. 3 , Article 10, (2019).
Stone, Evan and Randi Weingarten. “As unions await a key Supreme Court decision, a simple plea: ‘Educators want their voices heard.’ Washington Post. 21 June 2018.
White, Jerry. “As teacher struggles spread, unions redouble effort to suppress class struggle.” World Socialist Web Site. 09 Mar. 2018. Web.
