Written by Geoff Johnson. Geoff Johnson is a member of CFT/AFT San Diego and Grossmont Guild. Johnson is also Adjunct Rep to the CFT Community College Council, Chair of the CCA/CTA Part-time Faculty Issues Committee, President of the AFT Adjunct/Contingent Caucus, and sits on the One-Tier Task Force. This message is addressed to locals that are not yet formal members of HELU.
US higher education is facing a period of unprecedented precarity, decades of disinvestment, spiraling costs, and more recently, direct assaults on academic freedom. While individual higher ed faculty, staff, and student worker unions have fought the good fight, on the state, local, and national level, local struggles have often been siloed by institution, union, and work to make it hard to band together across both union and work sector. HELU offers the promise of productive change, by creating a way in which union leaders and rank-and-file members can talk across union lines about the need for better pay and working conditions, access to affordable healthcare, job security, and academic freedom.
The corporatist and neoliberal forces arrayed against higher ed workers and students are considerable, from the well-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, to the more seemingly-educational advocacy groups like Complete College America who either seek to defund public higher education or remake their institutions into stripped-down diploma mills. Operating at the state and federal legislative level and all too often in collusion with higher education administration, they are a formidable foe. HELU creates the opportunity for rank-and-file members to also coordinate at the state and federal level and share policy ideas to counter the neoliberal and anti-academic agenda.
Even when affiliated with powerful national education unions, higher ed workers represent a small proportion of AFT and NEA membership. While NEA and AFT continue to do a good job of supporting their higher ed locals, those higher ed workers also need an organization focusing on higher education specifically. HELU is that organization.
Further, to achieve their ends, administrators often pit faculty, staff, and student workers against each other, creating a stratified system of higher ed labor where labor is more at odds with itself than focused on worker solidarity. HELU seeks to create a unifying space for faculty (both tenured and contingent), staff, and student workers, unionized or not, where together higher ed labor can secure the promise of public higher ed and a better America.
That is what HELU offers.