American higher education is in crisis.
Changes to student loan
financing,
a decline in the number of international students, and a weaponized
federal research apparatus are creating historic challenges for everyone. Every day, new pitfalls emerge out of Washington and state
capitals across the country. Right now, for instance, the Department of
Education is finalizing a rule that would limit
financial aid for graduate students if the program they are enrolled in does
not produce enough graduates who make enough money, threatening a large number of graduate arts programs. At stake are the jobs of thousands of people who are
employed by schools across the country. Now we’re beginning to see the toll
this is taking. Layoffs have hit multiple universities. Boston
University laid off more than
100
of its staff last spring, the New School
laid off nearly 90 faculty and staff, the University of Maryland laid off 84 employees, and Harvard’s
Faculty of Arts and Science is looking at laying
off 25 percent
of its staff (thanks to a plan put together by McKinsey and
Company).
Most dramatically, Hampshire College
announced
the closure of its doors this past spring. It will unfortunately not be the
last institution to fold. Where faculty have jobs, they increasingly
do not feel free to do their work. In Texas, the A&M and Tech systems have implemented
prohibitions
on teaching of race, sex, and gender—leading to the cancellation or modification
of courses. At the University of Texas at Austin, departments have been merged, likely because of pressure caused by “anti DEI” bills, which also saw the closure of student services offices across the state of
Texas. But it’s not just public universities in Republican states that face
these pressures. At Harvard, the heads of the Center for Middle
East Studies
and the FXB Center for
Health and Human Rights were dismissed from their roles for running
programming related to Palestine. Facing distrust from the public, hostile
lawmakers, and corporate decision-making practices, what are the students, staff, and faculty of the ivory tower to do? The solution lies in what graduate
students across the country have been doing for the past few years; what
workers in the U.S. have done for over a hundred years—organize a union.Both inside and outside of higher
education, there has been talk for years about what ails the system and why it
has seemingly become out of touch and distrusted. A core tenet of the oft-repeated
arguments is that universities have become bastions of activism, rather than
places where scholarship is cultivated. The lone scholar who spends years
studying Plato and Aristotle is run off campus and replaced by a purple-haired
student with a sticker-laden megaphone; or so we are told. At the same time,
universities are critiqued for not being engaged enough with communities, for setting kids up with degrees that will not serve them in the “real world”—the
bubble of scholarly pursuit is simultaneously romanticized as a lost
bygone era and source of present-day weakness.The solution to this put forward by higher
education leaders is to invest millions in viewpoint diversity or civic
engagement centers, like those at Tufts University and the University of North Carolina, with the goal of
bringing more conservative voices to campus. At the behest of donors and
lawmakers, universities have become a battleground for the culture war. When you dig in to the polling
numbers
about why universities are distrusted, it is true that a vast majority of Americans
believe colleges and universities are headed in the wrong direction. Within
those numbers, about 45 percent of people believe that universities do not do
enough to expose students to a wide range of opinions. Meanwhile, 80 percent believe
that universities are doing a poor job of keeping tuition costs
affordable. The reality is that universities have come to be operated more as businesses than as not-for-profit entities of higher
education, and this has led to their having the trust that businesses
are afforded. Presidents of private colleges, in particular, are paid in the millions (at public
universities, so are the football coaches). Universities have
amassed huge amounts of
property,
corporate consultants are brought in for all sorts of reasons, and tuition
costs continue to skyrocket. This trend is slated to get worse as universities
seek to disentangle themselves from public dollars to make them less fickle to changes
in political winds. Despite being operated like businesses, universities encourage their workers to view their pursuit of knowledge
and/or labor in support of it as separate from work that would require a union: It is a privilege to be able to do scholarship or work in higher education, and
therefore you don’t require a union like a coal miner or an autoworker. It is
this separation of profession that encourages isolation from other
working people. When graduate students across the country unionized with
the United Auto Workers, they showed
up on the picket line
when autoworkers went on strike in 2023. Dues paid by academic workers support other industries when they are on strike, and vice versa.I’ve seen this dynamic firsthand as a
member of a graduate labor union. When workers of the local grocery
store chain
went on strike, in 2019, the union coordinated people to join up at the picket
line. A few of us joined one rainy morning and were approached by a white guy
in an NRA hat, holding a strike sign. He thanked us for being there; regardless
of what he may have heard about universities, or what differences may have
otherwise existed politically, here was an example of workers coming together
in a material struggle. Unions contribute to community cohesion
and trust. In Rust Belt Union
Blues,
Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol write about how unions in Pennsylvania
integrated themselves into every facet of daily life. The union hall was a
place where weddings and community functions occurred; the union itself was a
source of connection—where people felt united based on their shared identity as
workers. As unions dwindled due to deindustrialization, so too did this broader
union infrastructure, leaving people to find social identity in other group
settings, some of them more reactionary. Higher-ed unions are not going to
magically solve community isolation and atomization, but considering the acute
need to boost community understanding and trust for this sector, in particular,
academic workers can and should be part of the solution. Organizing a union requires having hard
conversations.
It requires you to talk to many different people across life and work
experience, political allegiances, and other divisions. They may or may not
agree with the purpose of a union. Still, this dialogue exposes you to alternative viewpoints in a
more visceral way than the proposed “viewpoint diversity” centers will allow.
Whether or not everyone agrees from the outset, they will ultimately be a part
of your union if you succeed. And to get there, you have to do the necessary work
of convincing a majority of the potential beneficiaries of labor organizing
that it’s a worthwhile effort—that at the end of the day, they’ll all come out
ahead. There are many tangible material benefits
that unionization can provide; it creates leverage on university governance, where faculty, staff, and students may otherwise feel they have none. But unions
are not a panacea—in light of broader industry-related shifts, layoffs do
happen (Harvard staff who are facing cuts are
unionized).
It happened to the auto industry, and it can happen to higher ed. Nevertheless,
organizing makes any cuts to workers much more costly to do, and it gives
workers far more benefits when parting. For people in higher education, the last
year has been spent on edge watching decisions come down the pipeline that have
impacted their industry and their livelihoods, with no ability to control what
happens. It is a feeling of utter and complete helplessness. Universities and
professional organizations have been mostly siloed in this effort, relying on
conversations with members of Congress and direct negotiations with the government,
or otherwise taking legal action. As the public has been galvanized by issues
of war, immigration, and the economy, the destruction of America’s research and
academic institutions is not a top priority for people’s attention.This siloing also occurs on campus. Currently,
the American
Association of University Professors is trying to organize faculty across different fields of study. For years, it
was thought that humanities faculty were the ones primarily under threat, so they
currently make up more of the AAUP’s base. Now it is science faculty who are
facing the chopping block and are doing so unorganized and unprepared. While
humanities faculty may be aware and sympathetic, it ultimately takes members of
the scientific community to provide insight on how certain policies put forward
by federal agencies may impact them. You cannot be a bystander to the saving of
your field; no one else will have these conversations for you. As nonsensical and counterproductive as these
cuts are to the national interest, they are no different from what a factory
worker experienced during the signing of the free trade agreements of the 1980s and
1990s. Watching the government take an ax to your industry and countless
communities, with little recourse available, is depressing. Organizing can help
allay the bad feelings and put those who are under the boot back on the front foot. Universities
may not be able to mobilize the public or build effective coalitions as institutions, but members of the university community can—and should. Through the union, every street becomes
the classroom; coalitions are built, picket lines are formed, and people come
to understand each other across lines of division. This may seem overly
idealistic and hopelessly naïve. There’s no doubt that the battle will be a
hard one. All the same, it is a path forward with tangible steps and real
benefit—if only because you’ll be fighting the fight together. Form the union
today, protect your job tomorrow, build a better community next week.