2026-2028 HELU Officers & Steering Committee
Officers
Chair
Levin Kim
UAW 4121
Levin Kim is the national chair of Higher Ed Labor United (HELU) and a graduate student worker at the University of Washington Information School. Their work examines the politics of border control within higher ed data infrastructures. Previously, Levin earned a B.A. in Drama and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan, and worked on the Ethics and Governance of AI project at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.
Vice Chair
Jenna Chernega
Inter Faculty Organization (IFO)
Jenna is the President of the Inter Faculty Organization (IFO), an independent union that represents the faculty, coaches, counselors and librarians of the seven Minnesota State Universities. She is also a professor of sociology at Winona State University, where she has worked for 18 years. In her spare time, Jenna enjoys reading, knitting, video games and fighting fascism.
Secretary-Treasurer
Evan Bowman
AFSCME Local 328
Evan Bowman is IT Chair of AFSCME Local 328, representing over 8,500 workers at Oregon Health & Science University. He is a proud union member for over 20 years, and father of 4 future union members.
Steering Committee
Clerical, Technical, and Research Staff
Meghan McGowan
Wayne Academic Union Local 6075
Meghan McGowan is a library worker at Wayne State University in Detroit. At present, she is an elected member of Wayne Academic Union‘s Executive Board and co-chairs their internal organizing committee. Meghan is most excited by workers’ rights and gardening, you can reach her about either here.
Community Colleges
Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela
Faculty and Staff Federation of Community College of Philadelphia, AFT 2026
Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela is one of four general officers (co-presidents, secretary, treasurer), at the Faculty and Staff Federation of Community College of Philadelphia. She serves as the secretary and is a tenured professor of English. AFT 2026 represents three bargaining units in one union: over 300 full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty, 500-700 part-time and Visiting Lecturer faculty, and almost 200 classified staff (everyone from housekeeping to secretaries to IT) are part of our nearly wall to wall union. Decades of disinvestment in higher ed put past union leadership on the defensive, but continued cuts and low wages are untenable. FSFCCP is moving from a service to an organizing model and using open bargaining and bargaining for the common good strategies in our current contract negotiations. Marissa is a single mother to the kiddo in the photo.
Full-Time Contingent Faculty
Joseph Ramsey
Faculty Staff Union (FSU/MTA/NEA)
Joseph G. Ramsey, PhD. (Joe), is Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies as well as the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he’s been a long-time activist and two-term Executive Committee representative for Non-Tenure Track faculty in the Faculty Staff Union (FSU/MTA/NEA). A full-time faculty member for over 15 years, Joe also chairs HELU’s Contingency Task Force (CTF), raising up the perspectives of precarious educators, while centering the problem of labor contingency as a more general threat to academic freedom and the common good mission of higher education. He can be reached at jgramsey@gmail.com.
Healthcare Staff
Carolyn Kube
United University Professions 2190
Carolyn Kube has been active in UUP for more than 20 years. She was elected to statewide Executive Board in 2011 and became statewide Vice President for Professionals in 2021. Kube co-chaired two UUP statewide committees, the Outreach committee and the Contingent Employment committee; the latter led the drive for changes to UUP’s constitution that enhanced the representation of contingent faculty and staff within UUP. Kube played a key role in helping negotiate new contracts between the state of New York and UUP. She also worked as a NYSUT PAC coordinator. Kube is a graduate of the University of Buffalo. She worked as a medical technologist at Stony Brook University Hospital for 32 years. In 2017, she earned her master’s degree in Human Resources Management with a concentration in labor relations and organizational change at Stony Brook University. She lives on Long Island with her husband, Bruce, and two daughters.
Non-collective bargaining advocacy organizations
I am honored to serve on the Steering Committee for Higher Education Labor United as
the representative from non-collective bargaining advocacy organizations. I am currently a
member of the board of Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education. I am also one of
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1904’s delegates to the Council of New Jersey
State College Locals for 2024-26. In addition, between 2000 and 2005, I organized graduate
employees with United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2110 in New York City.
As an associate professor at Montclair State University, I teach a wide range of courses
on the history of the United States, including courses on labor history, urban history, cultural
history, and public policy history. My first book, The Making of the American Creative Class,
examines the history of clerical, technical, professional, and creative workers in New York’s
media and culture industries during the middle decades of the twentieth century. My current
book project explores the history of Distributive Workers District 65 from the 1960s through its
affiliation with the UAW in 1979 and its eventual bankruptcy and dissolution in the early 1990s.
District 65’s support for graduate employee organizing at the University of California and the
University of Massachusetts beginning in the late 1980s provided a foundation for the
subsequent growth of UAW membership among the ranks of graduate employees, non-tenure
faculty, and researchers over the past several decades.
As a member of the HELU Steering Committee, I will do whatever I can to fight against
the efforts of the Trump administration to destroy higher education in the United States. I am
committed to building power for organized campus workers across all occupational categories.
In addition, I will continue to be a strong advocate for the reconstruction of higher education in
this country so that it serves the common good, with robust public funding, fair and just labor
conditions for all campus workers, tuition-free enrollment for undergraduates at public
universities and colleges, protection of free expression and dissent, and democratic institutional
governance.
Non-collective bargaining jurisdiction organizations
Emily Steinlight
AAUP-Penn
Emily Steinlight is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a founding co-organizer and current Vice President of AAUP-Penn, which fights for job security, academic freedom, better working conditions for all, and democratization of institutional governance. She has been active in her chapter’s labor solidarity task force to support unionization and contract campaigns on campus and to build coalitions across labor organizations at Penn and in Philly. She collaborated with members of many higher ed union locals, AAUP chapters, Debt Collective, and student organizations across the country to plan a National Day of Action for Higher Ed for the Public Good on more than 100 campuses on April 17, 2024, and she has served on the Day of Action Steering Committee and as chair of Outreach & Organizing. She has been involved with HELU since 2021.
Part-Time Adjunct/Contingent Faculty
Anke Wolbert
EMUFT Local 9102
I am a Part-Time Lecturer at Eastern Michigan University where I teach communication classes, in particular speech, rhetorical analysis, and intercultural communication. I currently serve as the President of EMUFT, AFT Local 9102, representing Full- and Part-Time Lecturers. During my time as Vice President, EMUFT merged the Full- and Part-Time Lecturer contracts, taking one small step towards a wall-to-wall union. I have served as bargaining co-chair twice since 2020, most recently in 2023 when we negotiated the merged contract. Our goals at EMUFT are to increase the visibility and treatment of lecturers, fight for pathways to full-time employment, and increase the solidarity and coalition of all unions on campus. Seeing and living the treatment of contingent faculty daily, I understand the urgent need for national action. The challenges we encounter at our campuses often cannot be solved at the local level, they require state and federal solutions.
Service and Maintenance Staff
not filled at this time
Not filled at this time.
Statewide Systems
Rebecca Givan
Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Rebecca Kolins Givan is General Vice President of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, the union of full-time Rutgers tenure track and non-tenure track faculty, grad workers, post docs and counselors. She is Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She was union President and Bargaining Chair during the 2022–23 contract campaign and spring 2023 strike. She is the co-editor of Strike for the Common Good: Fighting for the Future of Public Education (University of Michigan Press, 2020) and the author of The Challenge to Change: Reforming Health Care on the Front Line in the United States and the United Kingdom (Cornell University Press, 2016) as well as numerous articles on work in health care and education.
Graduate Student Workers
Presence O’Neal
Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF)
Presence O’Neal is a former classroom teacher and current doctoral candidate in Critical Education at the University of Oregon. She’s a steward and past President of the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF) AFT Local 3544 which represents 1,400 graduate employees at UO. As GTFF President, Presence organized with rank and file members and UO labor leaders to forward campus wide campaigns to protect international and queer workers targeted by federal attacks on higher education, to defend workers from receiving discipline for exercising their union rights, and to lobby legislators for more state funding for higher education workers. Presence knows that when higher education workers stand up for each other, there is nothing we can’t accomplish.
Undergraduate Student Workers
not filled at this time
Not filled at this time.
Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty
Bret Benjamin
United University Professions (UUP)
Bret Benjamin is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Albany, and a member of United University Professions, which represents 40,000 academics and professionals at the 29 state-funded SUNY campuses, health science centers, and hospitals. He is an elected member of UUP’s Executive Board and has served as UUP’s lead contract negotiator.
General Representative
Anne Balay
National Writers union
Anne Balay is the author of two books on blue-collar queers, and a member of the National Writers Union. Balay has worked as a car mechanic, a professor, a truck driver, and a union staffer. Currently, she organizes adjunct faculty in and around Boston. She’s an avid quilter, a desultory knitter, and loves to read and to share adventures with her grandkids.
General Representative
Shelly Baskin
ucw southeast
Shelly is the Finance and Operations Manager for United Campus Workers Southeast – CWA Local 3821, a wall-to-wall direct join union representing mostly public sector higher ed workers in the south. He is based in Murray, Kentucky and before joining UCW staff he spent 10 years as professional staff at Murray State University.