From Joe Ramsey
HELU’s Contingency Task Force (CTF) works to center the concerns of contingent faculty (both part-time and full-time), and to raise consciousness more broadly about the way that labor precarity erodes academic freedom and the common good mission of higher education. We also work to develop and share strategies for building faculty solidarity and equality across ranks. Over the next month we will be holding two public events you are welcome to attend!
First, we have a “Reading and Action” series event on Thursday, March 14 at 7:30pm ET, focused on responses to the new book Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene. (Video from an earlier event in this series can be found here.)
Co-sponsored with the Center for the Study of Academic Labor (CSAL) and the Contingent and Community College Faculty and Independent Scholars Joint Committee of LAWCHA. You can register here. (Registrants will receive a readers’ guide to the book as well as a thought-provoking essay about the volume by HELU organizer Helena Worthen.)
Second, on Saturday, March 23 at 2pm ET, we are holding a zoom event on “Strategies for the Community Colleges and Beyond: Taking on the Tiers and Fighting the Cutbacks” featuring a great panel of community college and contingent faculty leaders, from Connecticut to CUNY in NYC, to Columbia College of Chicago, the site of the longest adjunct faculty strike in US history, to California, and to Vancouver, Canada, where a “one-tier” faculty system has actually been established! We’ll be hearing about struggles and strategies from Coast-to-Coast–and from the Midwest as well! Register here.
All of our CTF events feature extended break out discussion rooms where attendees can share their experiences, ideas, proposals, and essential questions – and have them funneled back into HELU’s collective planning. Join us to learn about the struggles others are facing and the strategies they are using to respond and transform this unjust higher ed system, and to share your own! The Contingency Task Force also meets at 2pm ET, every other Saturday (next meeting March 9). Email chair Joe Ramsey to be added to the list at jgramsey@gmail.com. #OneFaculty