From Mia McIver, HELU Chair, UC-AFT Local 1474
Dear HELU Members and Friends,
As higher ed workers, many of us are experiencing mounting attacks on our scientific research, humanistic inquiry, and politico-socio-cultural analysis, not to mention our very personhood. The premises of our common educational project–knowledge, expertise, teaching, and learning–are targets of suspicion, while our employers do little to shield us and our co-workers from ICE deportation raids.
It’s now clear that executive orders don’t have to target colleges and universities directly to sow doubt, uncertainty, and fear on campus. Our collective task as higher ed workers is to remain clear-eyed and courageous so we can protect higher education as a pillar of our civil society. Immigration policy, civil rights law, federal student loans, and even NIH cancer research funding are being weaponized to suppress and repress our power as higher ed workers.
HELU is leading a collective response to fight back.
HELU’s purpose–and unique capacity in this moment–is to connect local organizing to larger regional, state, and national formations. When we multiply and amplify our individual efforts, we can see that organizing to win labor justice is also organizing to win our democracy. Holding higher ed employers accountable for providing health insurance for part-time faculty, for example, as HELU members are coming together to do, means making college teaching a more secure and viable career, which means part-time faculty can exercise their voices fearlessly within and beyond their colleges and universities.
When the Debt Collective asked HELU to participate in one final push for student debt cancellation in the last week of the Biden presidency, our National Coordinated Organizing Committee sprang into action. Co-chairs Bret Benjamin and Anke Wolbert quickly brought together 15 unions and advocacy organizations representing more than 100,000 education workers to urge debt relief for borrowers over the age of 50 and borrowers from for-profit schools. HELU passed this structure test with flying colors, demonstrating that we can act nimbly to coordinate solidarity on an issue of high priority to our member unions.
That efficacy was possible because debt cancellation has been the goal of incredibly smart and sustained strategic campaigns. Those student debt campaigns didn’t start with HELU, and they didn’t happen overnight. Now HELU is in a position to launch similar campaigns so that in the future we can mobilize with even greater power across public and private institutions, across job titles and classifications, and across different geographic regions. Higher education is the site of massive political struggle, and higher ed labor has got to be the vanguard of the movement.
This winter and spring, HELU activists are leading workshops in six states to develop platforms, advance coalitions, and share concrete, tested strategies for winning political change. I hope your union will join these opportunities so we can connect with and fortify each other. At a moment when we could go quiet and dark, we must choose to build up and out.