2024-2026 HELU Officers & Steering Committee
Officers
Secretary-Treasurer
TJ Acena
AFSCME Local 328
TJ is a rank-and-file member of AFSCME local 328, representing healthcare and academic staff at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. He’s pursuing a masters in labor studies through University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Steering Committee
Clerical, Technical, and Research Staff
Sean O’Brien
Wayne Academic Union Local 6075
Sean O’Brien is an academic services officer at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. His (unfinished) dissertation research is on labor organizing in the comic book industry. Throughout his academic career, he has served in three different unions and led two contract negotiations. The highlight of these negotiations was the equivalent of a 16.5% raise for graduate workers over three years. This was the largest percentage raise in the state of Michigan that year. Sean started working with the Higher Ed Labor United coalition in the summer of 2021 as it formed, serving as staff and on numerous committees.
Sean’s family served in unions for three generations, including members in IUEC, CWA, and the UAW. His partner’s family are multi-generational members of Ironworkers Local 25. He currently serves on his community’s City Commission. Outside of academia, Sean regularly travels to Japan for martial arts training and translates as a hobby.
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
Aimee Loiselle
Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE)
Aimee Loiselle serves as a delegate for Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE), and she’s a member of CSU-AAUP. After several years in multiple contingent positions, Aimee is currently an assistant professor of history specializing in women’s labor and global capitalism at Central Connecticut State University. In 2021, Aimee helped organize the Labor and Working-Class History Association plenary and July Labor Summit that laid the foundation for establishing HELU. She continues to fight at the campus, state, and national levels to restructure higher education funding and tie it to specific labor provisions. Her recent book, Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class, discusses women textile and apparel workers’ struggles for control over both work conditions and cultural representations (UNC Press, 2023).
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.
Student Workers
Jesús Fernández
TUGSA-AFT Local 6290
Jesús Fernández is a PhD candidate in Spanish at Temple University. He writes on how middle-class hegemony appears in Spain as a product of an aristocratic and degrading self-perception, especially visible in comedic cultural products. He has taught languages and carried several administrative positions inside the Spanish department where he also was a TUGSA steward. As an organizer he has been involved with TUGSA for a long time. He took part on the six-week strike that ended with an historic contract for grad workers. Previously he helped organize the Liberal Arts and internationals as himself. Currently, he is an official in TUGSA where he’s focusing all his efforts into building a wall-to-wall labor coalition at Temple. He firmly believes that organize labor should have a leading role in the democratic mass movements yet to come, and he’s fully committed to build a coast-to-coast coalition for a Higher Education for all.
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.