From Joe Ramsey, HELU Steering Committee member & Chair of the Contingency Task Force
On July 31, HELU’s Contingency Task Force (CTF) and the Debt Collective co-hosted a deep dive discussion into two related crises facing higher ed workers and students alike: debt and labor contingency. Around 50 people joined for two hours on a mid-summer evening for the latest installment of the Debt Collective’s Jubilee School. The full video of the event, “Breaking the Chains of Debt and Labor Contingency” can be seen here.
Often presented as both institutionally inevitable and as individually shameful, spiraling debt and rising labor precarity are in fact insidious products of policy decisions — including the underfunding and privatization of higher education. Together they are eroding the conditions that make genuine higher education possible. Yet these widely shared and intersecting chains of debt and labor contingency also have the potential to bring us together: as faculty, students, and workers, in new ways. Towards this goal, our event engaged central questions:
- How can we grasp the systems of debt and labor precarity that bind today’s academy in a way that can allow us to unleash potential for liberatory education, in the classroom and beyond?
- And how can our unions and pedagogical strategies help create alliances between students, faculty, and other campus workers—not by shamefully avoiding talk of our “delinquent” debt or “adjunct” status, but by placing them front and center?”
Speakers included Joe Ramsey, Chair of Contingency Task Force, Higher Education Labor United and Senior Lecturer (NTT) at UMass Boston, who addressed the pedagogical opportunities and challenges of discussing debt and labor precarity in the classroom. Jeri O’Bryan-Losee, a contingent staff member from United University Professions in the SUNY system, spoke about her extensive experience working with union members to get their debts cancelled via Public Service Loan Forgiveness, both as a means of serving immediate worker needs as well as building union community and power. The event was facilitated by Jason Wozniak of the Debt Collective, who presented an overview of some of the ways that debt is very much a labor issue, one that our unions and other organizations need to make more central to our common work.
HELU’s Contingency Task Force regularly organizes issue-specific events and discussions on zoom that tackle structural crises afflicting higher education. A vision of higher ed as a public good is at the heart of HELU’s mission, so understanding the student debt crisis is fundamental to HELU organizing, and the Debt Collective itself is an organizational member of HELU. For both organizations, the fight for full public funding of higher education and the reduction of student tuition costs are fundamental.
To be added to the contact list for future HELU Contingency Task Force events, email Joe Ramsey. To learn more about the Debt Collective, email Jason Wozniak.
Also check out the Debt Collective’s special Debt issue of In These Times here. (Subscriptions to In These Times are free to all union members! Get yours here.)