HELU Blog

By Geoff Johnson, At Large member of HELU and President of the AFT Adjunct/Contingent Caucus At the AFT National Convention in Washington, DC on July 16-19, 2026, the Adjunct/Contingent Caucus will present a resolution calling for AFT to create model language and legislation for Due Process rights for Contingent faculty. This resolution is backed by […]

Helena Worthen with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, HELU individual member, historian of American colleges and universities, author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Inventing the Liberal University (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of Degrees of Liberation (SUNY Press, forthcoming). Listen to

The United Faculty of Florida (UFF) is a statewide union representing close to 10,000 public higher education workers in Florida. UFF has chapters in all public universities (12 in total). We have 16 chapters in the state college system and 4 graduate student chapters. UFF represents mostly instructional faculty and instructional support faculty. HELU asks: In

by Jenna Chernega, HELU Vice Chair and Chair of the HELU Politics & Policy Committee The Politics and Policy (P&P) committee is fairly large. I would guess that there are well over 20 people on the google groups list. Basically, we let anyone in who expresses interest in joining the committee, either when they join HELU

by Helena Worthen, based on an interview with Thomas Gokey, Organizer for Debt Collective, a HELU member labor organization, and active with the HELU Policyand Politics Committee HELU’s basic idea of centering the hoped-for transformation of the higher ed sector around labor means confronting opposition on multiple levels. One level is obviously collective bargaining, where

By Carolyn Kube, Chair of HELU Outreach Committee, Steering Committee member for Healthcare Workers and Delegate from UUP. HELU organizes local unions and labor organizations, not individual people, although individuals can join. This makes HELU organizing different from organizing people into a local union. The idea behind HELU is that by drawing the local unions

By Ian Gavigan, HELU Executive Director. HELU’s vision of higher ed organized wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast rests upon the idea that union locals are the starting point for an organizing strategy that builds power at the sectoral level in order to wage a national fight against our broken system of higher ed finance and governance.  On

by Brendan McGovern, UUP Binghamton Chapter President. May Day, observed each year on May 1, is one of the most important days in the global labor movement. Its origins trace back to the struggle for the eight-hour workday in the late 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of workers across the United States went on