From Helena Worthen
No. Wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast is just the simplest way to state where we’ve got to go in order to eliminate contingency, reclaim academic freedom and get back higher education as a public good.
“Wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast” may be ambitious, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. HELU is just the current front edge of a movement that has been building with increasing intensity since the mid-1970s, about the same time as the onset of neoliberalism, when hiring faculty as contingents solved interlocking problems facing middle managers. Over that time, contingency expanded from 25% of faculty to 75% today. Contingents are now the norm, the critical mass of faculty.
Here is a quick list of organizations formed since 1970 to try to put a brake on the spread of contingency. These are earlier waves of the labor movement that are now coming together in HELU:
- The Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL International)
- Coalition on the Academic Workforce
- CA Association of Part Time Instructors (CAPI),
- Local COCALs and similar groups in CA, WA, OR, NY, CN, etc.
- California Part-Time Faculty Association
- Campaign for the Future of Higher Education
- Campaign for Equality
- New Faculty Majority
- Campus Equity Week
- United Campus Workers
- North American Alliance for Fair Employment (NAFFE)
- Scholars for a New Deal
Over time, the goals of these organizations morphed along with their targets and resource bases. Sometimes it was because the legal context changed; sometimes it was because new groups came onto the field and brought a wider perspective or formulated the problem differently. All of them looked toward a future horizon, but sometimes that horizon was short-term or local. They had different ways of getting funding: grants, dues, donations, etc. Sometimes they had the support of parent unions and sometimes not. Some are still going strong. Sometimes, they won. In other cases the organization itself is no longer active but some of its members have continued the fight elsewhere. But in no case did they have a vision as broad and as encompassing, or as challenging as HELU’s.
An indication of the energy captured in this movement today is the current surge in organizing and the giant strikes in big and little higher ed institutions (Rutgers, the UC system, Columbia in Chicago, the CSU system, the APSCUF system in Pennsylvania and so on). These strikes all led to improvements in the working conditions of the lowest-paid, least secure workers.
It is true that the gap between even the highest goals of these prior organizations and HELU’s total wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast goal is breath-taking. But once a goal like HELU’s has been visualized and expressed, there is no turning back. Sooner or later, we’ll get a higher ed system that is organized “wall to wall and coast to coast” for the public good, by students, faculty and all higher ed workers and their families. The alternative is to let things keep on going the way they are until U.S. higher education workers are virtually all contingent and precarious.