From the President: Needed: Foot Soldiers with Dreams
By Cary Nelson
I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Jackbooted university managers have trod all over faculty rights for a decade. Shared governance is at best the object of administrative contempt. Faculty control over the curriculum is whittled away by online degrees designed by bureaucrats.
Academic freedom is compromised by policies for e-mail use and campus servers. And the burgeoning class of contingent faculty without health care, retirement plans, due process, or job security makes college teaching a new form of wage slavery.
Unfortunately, the faculty as a whole has one foot in the cradle and one in the grave. It is generationally divided between those too young to know any better and those waiting to retire. They all need to buy good union-made shoes and organize.
When I wake up each morning and put on my own shoes, I keep wondering if it is the day I’ll be walking arm in arm in solidarity with my colleagues. I believe that public higher education is ripe for a new wave of collective bargaining campaigns. I believe that faculty at private institutions will some day declare National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University irrelevant and seize the power inherent in numbers.
Exactly when the tipping point will come I cannot say, but historically, worsening conditions eventually produce resistance. The other shoe will drop. Exploitation will engender organization.
Are we ready for that day? Do we have unions that can hail faculty frustrated by institutional missions they no longer recognize? Do we have unions that can simultaneously invoke practicality and idealism? Do we have unions that can overcome the antagonism toward collective bargaining that is widespread in American culture and perilously joined to faculty members’ belief in their independence and individuality? Is there any chance the public would admire us in the wake of a new wave of faculty unionization?
Commitment to academic freedom and shared governance, founding staples of AAUP collective bargaining, are certainly essential components of faculty unions worthy of both our own devotion and public support. But much education will be required before the public either understands or endorses these values. Meanwhile, unions need to recover their historic devotion to the public good if they are to refurbish their image. What better place to do that than a college or university campus? What better place to harness student idealism to the faculty’s capacity for articulate advocacy?
We might begin by turning the campus itself into a laboratory for social justice. Help organize our weakest brothers and sisters on campus, from contingent faculty and graduate employees to secretaries and cafeteria workers. A faculty union should make universal workplace justice its first priority. Insist that all workers have health care, a living wage, and due-process rights. Insist that all students from poor and lower-middle class families receive a free college education. Insist that the huge gap between the highest-paid administrators and the teachers on the line be closed. Then turn outward and demand the same commitments from local industry and local government. A faculty union should be a force that galvanizes a community to work for a better life for all. It should be a source of public inspiration and solidarity.
We all know how many Americans now regard unions as group efforts to avoid work. Worse still, many union members themselves vote against their economic and political self-interest in national elections. Faculty collective bargaining needs to lead the effort to reverse both these trends and restore unionization’s progressive ambitions and its utopian heart.
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