I always assumed I wouldn’t land a tenure-track job. Now I know I won’t. A job market that was already dismal when I started my PhD four years ago is now literally non-existent, with hiring freezes predicted for years to come. This immediate crisis is compounded by a broader set of developments one does not need imagination to foresee. Endowment losses as the financial market tanks, drops in undergraduate enrollment, further college closures, and the generalization of online lecturing will all further shrink the pool of resources previously set aside for tenured positions. The university in some form is of course likely to survive the pandemic. But there’s every reason to believe that this form will further accelerate the adjunctification and precarization of all academic workers underway since the 1970s. So no, I am not getting a (tenure-track) job. None of us are.
In response to the crisis, grad workers are nonetheless mobilizing across the country. The rank and file of national unions has been key in this coordination, which has remained largely unmediated by union staff or structures. Many of our campaigns have coalesced around the central demand of extended funding for one year. Some further common demands have included moratoria on rent collection in university-owned properties; guaranteed health coverage for COVID-19 testing and treatment for both grads and their dependents; and protections for international students. In addition, broader coalitions have been formed with the university’s service employees, to fight for the economic security of all workers on our campuses. Between campuses, national networks have formed and reformed. We are agitating and organizing our colleagues at our own universities, and coordinating with those beyond.
The response to the crisis has reanimated the power and initiative of the rank and file across universities. At my institution—Northwestern—I’ve noticed a dramatic surge in energy and initiative amongst the rank and file. We haven’t seen this much excitement since the early days of our organizing. We began a recognition campaign, as yet unwon, in 2016. For the few months before we affiliated, our meetings were full, the pace of conversation quick, the feeling that we could dramatically change everything widespread. After affiliation, a top-down organizing plan eventually robbed us of our sense of agency and initiative. One by one, organizers lost interest and drifted away from the increasingly anemic campaign (myself included). But things feel different now. We are back, in a sense, to where we started: with a mobilized base, with a sense that this is our union.
The current wave of renewed militancy and activity started with the UCSC wildcat strike for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). The wildcat began last December, grew and spread across the UC system through the winter, and is likely to soon merge into an Unfair Labor Practices strike. At Northwestern, we were endlessly inspired by the militancy of our Californian comrades. Along with many other grad unions, we issued symbolic displays of support. We also organized a Chicago-wide solidarity party, at which we raised over $1,000 for the UCSC strike fund. Yet some of us felt wistful, when we compared the revolt across California to our own sleepy campaign for union recognition. We hoped that somehow the strike would spread to the frozen Midwest and beyond. We hoped that, somehow, on some timeline, from some future perspective, Santa Cruz would be seen as our Nanterre.
Today, as our campaign escalates at Northwestern, this hope appears less and less remote. Across the nation, grad organizing is gaining momentum, with discussions of strikes shifting from occasional and furtive to frequent and public. From the current conjuncture, Santa Cruz looks less like a fluke, and more like the first in a new cycle of struggles that could spread across the country, to private and public schools alike.
Yet as increasing numbers of grad workers are drawn back into the frontlines of struggle, the scale of changes we are fighting for is yet to be defined. Are we fighting to slightly improve the status quo, or to abolish it? The most common demand across campus, extension of funding, is hardly sufficient for a common vision. While winning it will require considerable mobilization of graduate worker power, such a victory would represent only a temporary concession from administrations. A few departments have started circulating faculty letters of support for this demand. While we welcome such shows of solidarity, their typical phrasing reveals how moderate the demand is. A letter from the Yale American Studies faculty, for example, stressed that a funding extension would be a “special, one-time, emergency allocation”—as though to underline that grads are not demanding the impossible, but rather the possible, an extension of the normal way the university works. The demand to extend funding frames the COVID moment as exceptional, rather than an intensification of the long-standing crisis of academic labor, and invokes this false exception to justify the slightest concession to grad workers.
The crisis demands that we think bigger. We have yet to articulate a vision beyond emergency protections for ourselves and other university workers. How do we want to imagine what the university could look like in the 21st century, after so many years of defunding and corporatization? How can we imagine a future after COVID that isn’t simply more of the same? If the crisis has introduced the certainty that the university will be transformed, how can we bend its potential toward a fundamental reversal of its long neoliberal course?
When it comes to envisioning a transformation of the university, nostalgia for a midcentury “Golden Era” university won’t be enough. As the California Student Occupation movement has argued, the growth of mid-century public universities, with their abundant funding and tenured position, was specific to a historical moment that can’t be retrieved. It depended on high growth rates and wide tax bases, historical conditions that decades of outsourcing, financialization, and secular stagnation have all but disappeared. Moreover, the growth of the golden age university depended on the post-war militarization of the American economy. It was “underwritten by militarized funding priorities, nationalist agendas, and an incorporative project of counterinsurgency”—hardly projects we wish to endorse today. With Bernie out of the race, the promise of College for All, functioning like the G.I Bill to rebuild university funding through federal subsidies—a key structure of the postwar Golden Era university—has been extinguished.
Glimmers of an alternative vision have come to us from Santa Cruz, where the struggle has coalesced around financialization and social reproduction. COLA is fundamentally articulated around the problem of rent, a strategic vision that sees the university and the circulation of real estate capital as integrally connected. More broadly, this struggle is centered around the politics of social reproduction, with the free distribution of food from occupied dining halls providing a striking example. In other universities, the call for rent freezes appears to echo this sort of politics. So do proposals to cap the salaries of the highest paid employees and redistribute ensuing funds to universal meal programs for students and workers alike. What these strategies have in common is the idea that we are not fighting only for wages or contract extensions, but rather a transformation of the broader structural conditions of which university is part, and which determine our lives: what we eat, where we live, how we reproduce ourselves and, yes, how we study.
If the structural nature of the crisis facing us is becoming clear, its solution is still opaque. But this isn’t a problem. Visions of what is possible come out of struggle themselves. It is only when we experience our own power that our sense of the possible expands, it is only in fighting that paths forward appear. No one currently knows exactly what the university should, or could, someday look like. Nor do they need to. What is more important instead is the collective recognition that there is no going back from here. A recent commentary on COLA underlines this basic, negative assessment: “If we take seriously a politics of social reproduction, then a communist, non-capitalist society will need a means of feeding, housing, and caring for itself, just as it will need some means for transmitting knowledge. The actually existing university is not that means.”
The pandemic has dissolved the sustaining myth of grad school itself: that if you play along for long enough, you’ll get yours. For years the greatest obstacle in my own organizing conversations seemed to be the unstated assumption that our exploited and impoverished conditions as graduate workers were temporary, a necessary period en route to an illustrious, tenured career. The crisis has shattered this belief. It has made evident what many of us suspected all along: that grad school is not a prelude to be followed by something better. Instead, it is the main act. This is the rest of our academic lives. If anything, things will get worse.
The certainty that there is no going back to the old university is the engine for much of the present mobilization. For many years, the idea that the university could be reformed through balanced dialogue with university administrators has hobbled a more militant academic labor movement. The rude removal of this delusion has inaugurated a new stage in our organizing. What we know now is that the university will be transformed. What we must decide is whether this transformation will be an intensification of the status quo or its abolition. In this sense, the crisis threatens our livelihood, but simultaneously opens a much broader field of possibility.
So no, I am not getting a (tenure-track) job. None of us are. Most of us never were. That myth is dead, thank god. All we have now is stark reality: we have less than ever to lose.
Eli Lichtenstein is a graduate worker and Philosophy PhD candidate based in Chicago
Four University of California graduate workers – who themselves went out on wildcat grading and teaching strikes in 2019-2020, and are now members of the Rank and File Action (RAFA-UC) caucus in the UC Student Workers’ Union (UAW-2865) – talked to members of C-AWDU to get a frank assessment of the dynamics at play, and some of the prehistory, of this ongoing, important strike.
A year ago, we were holding rallies across the university demanding pay equity for adjuncts, but today we are fighting for our very lives and our livelihoods. The crisis has only made those injustices worse, and only made the need for a rank-and-file class struggle union more necessary. This context has produced these five demands that are powering our movement.
The pandemic has dissolved the sustaining myth of grad school itself: that if you play along for long enough, you’ll get yours. The COVID crisis demands that we think bigger than a return for the “Golden Era” of universities, or concessions to extend the status quo. How do we want to imagine what the university could look like in the 21st century, after so many years of defunding and corporatization? If the crisis has introduced the certainty that the university will be transformed, how can we bend its potential toward a fundamental reversal of its long neoliberal course?
Mass eviction from university housing in the coronavirus crisis has shown students what communities being gentrified have known for a long time: in most cities, the university is first and foremost a landlord. As student tenants, it’s up to us to organize towards collective actions that reflect the interlinked realities of work, tuition, debt, and rent.
In late December 2019, graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz began a wildcat strike to secure a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). In one of the most expensive housing markets in the US, graduate workers at UCSC are paid poverty wages, leaving many unable to afford basic necessities. The UC administration has responded brutally to the student action.
A wave of militant action has swept across UC Santa Cruz, based on the demand for a cost of living adjustment. Danielle Carr spoke to the wildcat strikers to learn more.
The recent wildcat action at UC Santa Cruz arose out of a long history of organizing against concessionary contracts. Shannon Ikebe gives a history of the strikes in terms of the 2018 University of California contract.
Jarrod Shanahan recently sat down with two strike organizers to discuss their experiences at Rutgers and why they needed to found the Rutgers Rank-and-File Caucus.
Nick Caverly reflects on Rubin and Bobroff’s pamphlet and the struggles of rank and file union members at the University of Michigan in the 1970s.
Gayle Rubin and Anne Bobroff distributed this essay in a pamphlet during a graduate student strike at the University of Michigan in 1975. In it, they argue that bargaining must be underwritten by strong rank-and-file power.
A former Cornell Graduate Students United Organizing Committee chair reflects on the union’s narrow recognition election loss, transactional unionism that instrumentalizes workers, and the challenge to build enduring democratic structures.
For years, CUNY’s two tier union system has colluded with public austerity to sell out adjuncts. A new militant movement has emerged to change that.
