By Maggie Williams
The much-discussed national crisis in American higher education hit me particularly hard this year. At William Paterson University, where I have taught for 13 years and am now a tenured Full Professor, I am in danger of being laid off, along with dozens of colleagues. My local union has managed to negotiate the number of job losses down by about ⅔ of what Administrators originally threatened, but it’s very likely that similar negotiations will occur next year. And the year after that. Meanwhile, AFT and AAUP National Leadership are calling for a New Deal for Higher Ed and fellow academic workers are organizing at both public and private institutions that face the same kind of “academic disaster capitalist” decisions–cutting programs and firing tenured faculty and full-time staff rather than chopping from the top.
At the same time, GWC-UAW Local 2110: the Union for Research and Teaching Assistants at Columbia University is about to enter the third week of a contract strike.
This post is about how the two fights are linked–both for me personally, and for the broader future of American universities.
Click here to read the full post at the Material Collective.
Solidarity Caucus 