If you follow this Substack, you probably already know about the massive UAW strike in the University of California system, where 48,000 academic workers, most of them graduate students, are walking picket lines and demanding that the UC (whose upper managers make plush salaries) pay them enough to rent apartments and buy groceries and other utopian things. This is the largest academic strike in American history. There has been nothing on its scale before.
The labor tsunami is hitting other campuses too, where workers are likewise cut out of the wealth and power generated by universities, and where they are exploited by cynical administrators who assure them that “loving the work” is more important than a decent wage or healthcare. Agitation has come to the famously “progressive” but actually exploitative New School, where the faculty has authorized a strike; to the University of Kansas, which has a new 1,500-worker academic union; to Yale, where graduate students are finishing a decade-long battle to organize with Unite Here! Local 33; to the University of Illinois-Chicago, where faculty are voting on whether to walk out; to dozens of other institutions, at the professorial, graduate, and undergraduate levels.
As this newsletter’s policy goes, Academia is not an island. Trends in the higher-education industry are entangled with macro-phenomena across the US economy, where more and more workers are fighting back against the bosses. You see it at Amazon facilities, at Starbucks cafés, at Chipotle franchises; you see it in radical K-12 unions in Chicago and LA and West Virginia; you see it in the agonizing UMWA strike at Warrior Met in Alabama, where miners and their families have held the line for over a year; you see it in the gathering national railroad walkout. Labor wars are popping off everywhere. It hasn’t been like this since the 1970s.
And just like in the late Seventies / early Eighties, when capital finally managed to crush labor by engineering a recession, nobody in power likes to see militant workers, even if President Biden sometimes says nice things about unions without actually doing much to, say, re-staff the NLRB. Administrators at universities are like their boss-class counterparts everywhere, devoted to the annihilation of worker power in favor of managerialist logics that serve capital accumulation. In the UC, management is so far playing cool, wagering that the strike will peter out in a couple of weeks as material pressures force postdocs, TAs, researchers, and graders back to work, where they’ll shut up and let the academic C-suite handle things. Business as usual is the prayer of admins everywhere.
However, business as usual has been a catastrophe for underpaid, overstretched workers and indebted, anxious students. The status quo is unsustainable, and everyone with honest eyes sees this unless their salary depends on looking elsewhere.
Traditionally, academics lack a strong labor sensibility. Many professors don’t consider themselves workers who have a lot in common with delivery drivers, package pickers, baristas, and other people without fancy credentials. But this is changing, as the contingent majority acquires class consciousness and gives up liberal, tenured-class fantasies of professors as independent knowledge creators. A grim material reality will do that to you.
What we have in the late months of 2022 are competing visions of Higher Education: a democratic one where decisions are made by the people who keep the institutions running (faculty, staff, students) or one beholden to capital and its well-compensated managers. You can have academic social democracy or you can have death-spiraling ivory-tower capitalism; you can’t have both, and at this point it’s clear which one would be better for most human beings.
Workers don’t just “work in” higher ed. They are higher ed.
There’s no honorable neutrality: You’re either with labor democracy or managerial capitalism. It’s the 2020s, not the 1990s, when at least some professors could still claim they had institutional power. Now tenure is largely destroyed and disposable “contingent” faculty (like me) fill our classrooms. The sides are stark—it is, I think, intellectually dishonest and politically weak to pretend otherwise. (Nice Tenured People who don’t want to rock the boats they’re in, I am looking especially hard at you.) This is not nuanced. We can have universities that work for workers, that belong to the labor which constitutes them, and that contribute to what Eugene Debs called “the universal commonwealth” instead of stealing from it, or we can double down on a status quo that reproduces toxic, antidemocratic systems.
The same market ideology that is boiling the planet is wrecking higher ed’s ability to fulfill its teaching and research missions. Which side are you on?