Contingent faculty and college football players are natural allies. They should join in a fight together for worker’s rights on campus.

It is time to re-imagine higher education to end the racialized inequities the current paradigm reinforces and to create more educational opportunities for all. 

The crisis of mental health among graduate workers is neither inevitable nor insurmountable.

UCW undermines neoliberal universities by bringing workers who are never meant to cross paths into conversation about how to fundamentally transform higher education.

Picking a fight with the university in the middle of a pandemic required AFSCME Council 3 to develop new digital tools to build its membership, develop a structure more responsive to workers’ concerns, strengthen coalitions, and fight back against the university.

Graduate employees at Michigan went on strike to demand a safe reopening and a university free of police. We talked with the union’s vice president about how they did it and what they learned.

The public university of the 21st century needs to listen to and include everyone’s voices. Here’s how the Coalition of Rutgers Unions is using this moment to model that vision. 

A letter from the workers, students, and faculty who know what Higher Ed needs

Julie Kushner on her decades-long career organizing university workers, her vision for building deep coalitions of students and workers, and why she thinks union organizers are “the best people.”

Delaying the legal processes of forming a union is among the primary tactics that neoliberal universities have when it comes to squashing organizing tactics. To fight that, faculty unions must keep their sights on the long-game.

Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees won a collective bargaining agreement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three strategies — resonant framing, centering members’ lived experiences, and solidarity from internal and external allies — were the core of their contract campaign.  

Higher education has never been safe or welcoming for those of us impacted by structural racism. At UnKoch My Campus, we’re learning that to truly “unKoch” the academy, we need to challenge entrenched gender, class, and racial inequities on campus and open up space for reimagining institutions of higher education.

Colleges and universities are real estate. This contradiction provides a framework for workers and students to build power that can resist concessions; organize more people into the labor movement; and push for policy changes that weaken the grip of institutional finance over our education system.

“People are finding it harder and harder to maintain any sort of illusions about…their relationships to these institutions.”