Concerned Faculty Letter to UCSB Chancellor and Senate Chair on Munger Hall

To: Susannah Scott, Academic Senate Chair, UCSB 

Henry Yang, Chancellor, UCSB 

Cc: Michael V. Drake, UC President 

Cecilia Estolano, Chair, UC Board of Regents 

Robert Horwitz, Chair, UC Academic Senate 

From: Concerned UCSB Senate Faculty 

Re: The planning of Munger Hall at UCSB 

The UCSB Academic Senate Town Hall Meeting, “Faculty Questions on the Munger Hall Project,” held on November 15, 2021, intensified pervasive and significant concerns about 

(a) UCSB administration’s lack of response to fundamental questions about student well-being related to the Munger Hall project, including concerns about mental health, physical safety, security, and accessibility; 

(b) student housing options on campus and future housing projects; 

(c) building funding, planning and construction processes at UCSB; 

(d) abrogation of the right of faculty shared governance; 

(e) the impact of these decisions on UCSB’s stated commitment to social justice and equity; 

(f) UCSB administration’s failure to adequately take into account and address the opinion of experts in architectural design and rethink the design to ensure student well-being. 

To elaborate:

On the Design of Munger Hall: A broad swath of architectural design and housing experts both within and outside the university have criticized the design. Among its many problems we call particular attention to: (i) lack of natural light and ventilation—particularly the absence of openable windows; (ii) floor plan that reveals poor organization of space at the scale of the rooms, the suites, and the entire floor space at each level; (iii) inadequate thought given to student accommodation and well-being, given what we know about virus transmission, quarantine, and recovery in situations such as COVID-19; (iv) poor wayfinding and evacuation plans that would greatly endanger students in fires, earthquakes and other disasters; (v) massing and volume; (vi) environmental sustainability. 

We, the faculty, are gravely concerned by these issues, and we urge the UCSB administration, including Chancellor Yang, to address openly, explicitly and responsibly the many questions regarding the current design’s impact on the safety, security and mental well-being of the students. These fundamental questions were not answered at the November 15 Town Hall meeting and we urge the administration to answer them now. 

On Due Process: A key reason for the current state of affairs is that the usual design review process that has governed campus construction over the last 30 years was bypassed. The request-for-proposal stage of the design review process was ignored, thereby eliminating potential competition to Munger’s design. When the design review committee and its panel of architects were asked to comment, their views were not adequately taken into account. 

We have two options to move forward: 

1. Stop the plans. Begin the entire design process again following the established procedures of the design review committee. 

2. Halt the process and modify the plans. Consider the advice of a joint committee of experts on design, health and safety, drawn from both outside and inside UCSB, including Academic Senate Members and student representatives. The UCSB Academic Senate must have a say in the composition of such a panel of experts, the issues they will be asked to consider, and the way in which their recommendations would be implemented. 

We wish to send a clear message to the Chancellor, UC Office of the President, the UC Board of Regents, and the donor, that we will not accept inequitable and unsafe options for student housing. 

While we recognize the measures that must be taken to resolve the immediate housing crisis, we call on UCSB to democratically and transparently develop a long-range housing plan that ensures safety, affordability, community responsibility, and environmental sustainability for students, faculty, and staff. Not only does UCSB have a responsibility in this regard, but so do the President of the University and the UC Board of Regents. 

Sincerely, Concerned UCSB Senate Faculty, including, 

Constance Penley 

Swati Chattopadhyay 

Laurie Monahan 

Eileen Boris 

Dominique Jullien 

Bishnupriya Ghosh 

Lisa Hajjar 

Jeffrey Stopple 

Bassam Bamieh 

John Majewski Richard Wittman 

Ann Bermingham 

Michael Curtin 

Ann Jensen Adams 

Omer Egecioglu 

Mark A. Meadow 

Harold Marcuse 

Catherine L. Albanese 

Heather Badamo 

Sabine Frühstück 

William Robinson 

Barbara Herr Harthorn 

Herbert M. Cole 

David White 

Steven Gaulin 

Bhaskar Sarkar 

Kip Fulbeck 

Barbara A. Holdrege 

William Elison 

Kate McDonald 

Christina Vagt 

Juan E. Campo 

Arpit Gupta 

Julie Carlson 

Elisabeth Weber 

Stephan Miescher 

Jenni Sorkin 

Janet Walker 

Kevin B. Anderson 

Nancy Gallagher 

Aazam Feiz 

Hilary Bernstein 

Wolf Kittler 

John S. W. Park 

Silvia Bermudez 

Sara Pankenier Weld 

Marko Peljhan 

Jorge Castillo 

Jill Levine 

Evelyn Reder 

Kim Yasuda 

Erika Rappaport 

James Frew 

Janet Afary 

Fabio Rambelli 

Amr El Abbadi 

Giuliana Perrone 

Salim Yaqub 

Elena Aronova 

Cristina Venegas 

Stuart Tyson Smith 

Phill Conrad 

Volker M. Welter 

Adrienne Edgar 

Joseph Blankholm 

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi 

Catherine Nesci 

John W. I. Lee 

Sylvester O. Ogbechie 

Daniel Masterson 

Grace Chang 

Daniel Reeve 

Enda Duffy 

Roberta L. Rudnick 

Leroy Laverman 

Walid Afifi 

Iman Djouini 

Cherrie Moraga 

Dorota Dutsch 

Mark Maslan 

Charmaine Chua 

Roberto Strongman 

Amrah Salomón J. 

Ralph Armbruster Sandoval 

Carlos J. Garcia-Cervera 

Darren Long 

Sharon Tettegah 

Aashish Mehta 

Kaustav Banerjee 

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia 

Helen Morales 

Casey Walsh 

Terrance Wooten 

Birge Huisgen-Zimmermann 

Felice Blake 

Juan Cobo Betancourt 

Mario Garcia 

Scott Marcus 

Ingrid Banks 

Jody Enders 

Nelson Lichtenstein 

France Winddance Twine 

Lisa Jevbratt 

Ellen McCracken 

Juan Pablo Lupi 

Gisela Kommerell 

Edwina Barvosa 

Jeremy Douglass 

Valentina L. Padula 

Mayfair Yang 

Harvey Molotch 

Sven Spieker 

Stuck in the Middle with You

by Bill Lyne, English Department,  Western Washington University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

United Faculty of Washington State blog is here.

To Fight the Bosses, First We Fight the Union Bosses

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.

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