What I Have Learned About the Future of Higher Education From The New School Strike

There's a bigger role for the federal government in stabilizing the conditions of labor

Dec 09, 2022

Update: as of Sunday, December 11, the strike at The New School has ended.

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Photo credit: Matias Fernandez/Wikimedia Commons

Over three weeks ago, I wrote about an imminent part-time faculty strike at my place of employment, The New School, a university in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

Well, guess what? Three weeks later, la lutte continue!

Although there seemed to be a breakthrough yesterday, I am now beginning to believe that getting Brittney Griner out of Russia was easier than settling this strike. We were just informed by our President that despite major concessions on the part of the university yesterday, the negotiations remain stalled over healthcare issues. After three weeks of no teaching, the last week of the semester and grading period loom, and whether we can salvage them depends on whether the two sides can come to an agreement over the weekend. The latest message says that the union has declined to make itself available today—and the bargaining committee won’t make a commitment to meeting tomorrow.

Both sides are using students as hostages.

That said, this strike has been quite different than others I have lived through here and at other institutions. I have never, for example, seen instruction come to a complete halt. Normally, faculty move their classes off campus during a strike, and because we now have Zoom, depressing as it is, it is even easier to continue some semblance of education during a labor dispute. This time, however, the union established the concept of a “digital picket line,” which meant that any activity on the university’s platforms is scabbing, as is any work done for the university.

Especially teaching and grading.

The full-time faculty, all 13% of us, embraced this concept, which is the second thing I have never seen before: full-time and tenure-stream faculty who decide to (correctly, in my view) identify their interests with the 87% of our colleagues who teach on a per course basis. The New School AAUP chapter adopted the slogan “One Faculty,” with the result that full-timers are withholding all labor until the strike is settled.

Let’s hope that afterwards, should there still be a New School, this identification between full-time faculty and other teaching constituencies endures. It is also quite clear that the conditions of labor have eroded dramatically in the last decade, and we have much to learn from our contingent colleagues about how to push back on that.

This leads me to the other thing I have never seen before: the day before yesterday, full-time faculty, part-time faculty, graduate assistants, and staff received an email from the university administration demanding our return to work. The email informed us that every Monday, we would all be asked to “attest” to having performed all our required university duties the week before and that if we were untruthful about that, we could be terminated.

[PARENTHETICAL: This caused me to fly into a complete rage: I didn’t create this situation, and I will be damned if I will perform humiliating rituals or be ordered across a picket line because other people can’t do their job of agreeing on a contract.]

As my colleague McKenzie Wark wrote in an essay that is worth reading in its entirety,

The administration is now requiring full time faculty to sign a sort of “loyalty oath”—seemingly unaware that the New School was founded a hundred years ago by scholars who refused to sign a loyalty oath at Columbia University. They try to wrap themselves in the mantle of New School values, but their tactics are copies of those tried at other universities using the same sorts of anti-worker lawyering they are using against us. It’s a betrayal of both esprit de corps and of the New School and of its collegiate body.

Betrayal is the perfect word—but it is a betrayal that also reveals our administration as panicked and in an existential state of disarray.

So, the first thing I have learned from the strike at The New School is that the organizing terrain has changed, and my university, at least, (which has hired a very expensive and, as far as I can tell, useless, law firm) brought a knife to a gunfight three weeks ago. And as far as I can tell, since the negotiations themselves are confidential, regardless of what the university concedes, the union wants more. The longer this drags out, the more students—many of whom, along with their parents, are frantic about a third of the semester being flushed down the toilet— will walk away in the spring or transfer.

The second thing: it is clear that the faculty unions are changing their tactics. They want to make employing contingent and graduate student labor so expensive that universities can no longer use those workers to prop up their budgets. Which I kind of admire, I must say. This has been the elephant in the room for years. Many years ago, I was mobbed on Twitter for saying that if academics refused to work as contingent labor, the system could be broken: yet, I have always believed that. Now, the UAW has found a workaround: Do you want contingent, flexible labor? OK—but why should you have to pay less for it?

The third thing I would observe is that this strike reveals an obvious need for government intervention across the higher education ecosystem. Government plays two roles in university life now: accreditation and lending. But although both of these functions are important, there are at least two other areas where the government could support higher education in a way that would have made a difference in this strike.

What would these things be?

Passing legislation that made all education workers eligible for fee-based Medicare. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the government would have to pay for our health insurance: those fees could continue to be paid as they are now, a portion by us and a portion by the university. What this would do is make the cost of care predictable, and take it off the bargaining table in union negotiations. As importantly, it would give every employee in the university, from the President to the janitorial staff the same health care plan, eliminating inequalities based on status and salary.

By lowering the cost of health insurance and making cost increases modest and predictable, the government could also get something else it dearly wants: a brake on tuition increases.

Passing legislation mandating that at least 50% of any faculty be full-time instructors. For years, politicians and business leaders have been trumpeting “flexible” workforces, while university leaders have opined about how knowledge is changing so quickly that faculty cannot adapt quickly enough to the needs of the future. Both of these things, while they seem concrete, are actually abstract. Certainly, a non-unionized adjunct workforce can be trimmed back at times of financial duress, but really, it is a constant trimming around the edges: in other words, classes are added and subtracted depending on enrollment, but enrollments don’t really change that much. And swiftly changing knowledge? In most fields, that isn’t an issue—it is the responsibility, and the joy, of an academic to keep up with what their students need to know.

But you know what a huge contingent labor force is as well? A massive vulnerability. At the New School, even if full-time faculty had not supported our part-time colleagues, when 87% of your instructional staff stops working, the university is basically closed for business. In other words, it is neither good for students, nor is it good for the higher ed infrastructure, to give one category of workers that much leverage.

Such legislation would also begin to reverse the adjunctification of higher education.

Passing legislation that mandates minimum standards and minimum pay for contingent faculty contracts. Part of what I understand has been at issue here is that contingent faculty are paid for classroom hours but not for preparation or for evaluating student work. This would make them like all other faculty: for much of my life, I have worked close to a 60 or 70-hour week, when in fact, I cannot be required by law to work more than a 40-hour week. I am told that my “research and service to the profession” is part of what I am paid for and evaluated on, and yet, doing those things in addition to teaching means working 10-12 hour days and through much of the weekend.

But because contingent faculty make so much less than I do, my quality of life issue becomes their economic survival issue. Furthermore, when contingent faculty are hired and fired at the last minute, they do not know month to month and year to year where, for whom, or if they will be working.

Finally, contingent faculty are asked to devote themselves to an institution and its students without any hope that they will advance as teachers or professionals, or even be retained for the following semester. As Kevin R. McClure, a professor of education, observed this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, this is a feature of university staff jobs as well. “People shared stories of “promotions in title only,” McClure wrote, “in which a person earned additional responsibilities but no additional pay. Stories of administrative assistants who earned graduate degrees and new skills but could never be viewed as anything except secretaries. Stories of promised advancement that never materialized.”

What is the obvious response to workers treated this way? To disidentify with the university and let their union burn it to the ground if they must.

Which may be exactly what is happening to The New School.

Do you have ideas about how to restructure higher education? Then please,

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