Strategies to Abolish Faculty Contingency
Tuesday, June 20 @ 4pm PT/5pm MT/6pm CT/7pm ET on Zoom
More than 75% of faculty in higher ed are contingent. As organizers at Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), we refuse to accept the unjust systems of worker exploitation embedded in our higher ed institutions, and we are working to change them from the ground up.
This event will feature winning organizing strategies undertaken by HELU member organizations across the United States, including during recent high-profile struggles from Rutgers to the University of California system and beyond. You are invited to join us in this collective effort. We welcome you to read this working document from the event organizers that frames the discussion.
Agenda
- Welcome & opening frame (5 minutes)
- Panel 1: Strategic Lessons from Recent Struggles – moderated by Joe Ramsey, FSU-MTA-NEA (25 minutes)
- “Adjunct Autonomy and Strategic Alignment” – Bryan Sacks, Vice President, PTL Faculty Chapter AAUP-AFT, Rutgers University
- “Open Bargaining to Win Job Security” – Katie Rodger, President, UC-AFT, University of California
- “Building a Common Good Coalition vs. a Race and Class Tiered System” – Colena Sesanker, Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges (The 4Cs – SEIU Local 1973)
- Thematic breakout rooms – each participant will choose one breakout room to join, topics listed below (20 minutes)
- How to get more involved (10 minutes)
- Panel 2: New Strategies to Take On Contingency System-Wide – moderated by Mia McIver, UC-AFT (20 minutes)
- “Structural Change: Moving Beyond Simply Calling for More Full-time Hires” – John Govsky, Co-Chair, California Federation of Teachers (CFT) Part-Time Faculty Committee
- Helena Worthen & Joe Berry, authors of Power Despite Precarity
- Moderator Q & A with all panelists
- Open discussion breakout rooms (15 minutes)
- Conclusion & call-to-action (5 minutes)
Breakout Room Topics
Choose one to join:
- A unit of one’s own?: Do we need ‘contingent only’ unions in a wall-to-wall vision?
- Academic freedom: What it is and how to use it
- Are contingent faculty allowed to reproduce? The crisis of care for contingent faculty
- Building power for teaching faculty within research institutions
- Confronting assumptions of meritocracy: Building solidarity between tenured and more contingent faculty
- Making our contingency public: Building honest dialogue with students as a way of raising consciousness and building power
- Organizing beyond the workplace: Regional contingent faculty unionism (‘The Metro Strategy’)
- Organizing without collective bargaining
- Seizing the mic: Centering people of color, women, and queers in our critiques of tiered academic labor
- Strategies on moving toward a 1-tier system in community college
- Taking on the contingency… of state funding: How we can (and must!) leverage governmental power in support of our struggles
- Uniting With Other Campus Workers: Campus labor coalitions against contingency
- What are the levels of contingency, who is included, and why we need to work together
- & open conversations discussing the evening’s panels