An interview with United Faculty for the Common Good
ROTUA LUMBANTOBING, GABRIEL WINANT, TODD WOLFSON
IN THE PROMISING EARLY DAYS of the Biden Administration, there occurred a moment—brief and soon forgotten—when it seemed like we might have a chance to repair the trainwreck of the higher-ed economy. During the debate on the omnibus social and domestic policy legislation called Build Back Better, Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal introduced a new version of their “College for All” proposal. Initially co-sponsored by seven other senators and endorsed by a wide range of major unions and civil society organizations (the American Federation of Teachers, Service Employees International Union, the NAACP, the Children’s Defense Fund), the measure proposed to plow billions in federal dollars annually into public colleges and universities: in particular, $10 billion in annual subsidies for underfunded institutions, and public support to bring tuition down to zero for students under the income threshold of $125,000.
Had it been enacted, College for All would have dramatically remade the higher education system, including its labor market. The proposal would have required that public colleges and universities, flush with new income, transition within five years to a 75 percent tenure-track and tenured instructional workforce, giving hiring preference to their current contingent faculty for transition to the tenure track. Anticipating that institutions might seek to comply by laying off contingent faculty and increasing the workload on tenure-line instructors, this measure also would have prohibited such a speedup. A significant sector of the academic labor movement organized around this dimension of the program in particular, joining a fight long led by the Debt Collective. Graduate student and faculty unions sought to link the crisis of tuition costs and debt to academic working conditions, setting up mass call-ins to congressional offices and incorporating the demand for College for All into their ongoing union recognition and contact struggles. For the first time in my lifetime, it seemed possible to imagine that we might reverse the generational collapse of academic work.
This campaign developed under the aegis of two new organizations: Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (of which I’m a board member), which has worked to develop and represent a vision of academic renewal within the scholarly disciplines; and Higher Education Labor United (HELU), whose purpose is to stand in where, in another part of the economy, there might be an industrial union of which everyone is a part—a Union of College and University Workers. Unfortunately, our industry is a jurisdictional mess. Unionized academic workers are scattered between AFT, SEIU, the UAW, the Teamsters, the Steelworkers, UE, CWA, UNITE HERE, which is to say nothing of the fragmentation of non-academic staff…..
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/do-much-more-to-meet-this-moment/
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After the truth-shower 