Andrew Ross: Let me begin on a personal note. My employer, when it’s not calling the NYPD to arrest me and my colleagues and students, is always actively encouraging me to retire. Last summer, NYU offered a sweet retirement package, and I thought long and hard about taking it. Everyone was saying it’s a good time to get out of higher education, especially younger faculty of color who have wondered what they’re getting themselves into over the last two and a half years. After some agonizing, I realized it’s also a very good time to stay in higher education because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in 43 years of full-time teaching, the university is not a site of truth but a site of struggle. Everything that we build, everything that we value, everything that we build of value has come about as a result of struggle, and that requires constant vigilance and maintenance work to preserve. So I decided to stay in the struggle, largely because of the upsurge of campus-based organizing over the last two and a half years.
Membership in the AAUP—the newly proactive AAUP—has skyrocketed. The FSJP national network came together very rapidly [after October 2023], with more than 130 chapters registered after only a few months. Nothing like it existed before, and there have emerged other networks against campus repression, like the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE), Scholars for Social Justice and, I would also mention, the formation of Higher Education Labor United (HELU). There are some overlapping constituencies among those networks and some scholar-activists have been doing double and triple duty. But I feel that the strength and depth of this kind of campus organizing is really impressive. In many ways, faculty, for the first time in higher ed, have been at the forefront, albeit with the thinnest participation from the senior tenured ranks.
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