Trevor Griffey
@TrevorGriffey
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Historian, Lecturer at @UCLA & @UCIrvine , FOIA user, Vice President of Legislation for @UCAFT . Support #CollegeForAll
Long Beach, CA
Joined April 2013
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Pinned Tweet
"The 'Army of Temps' in the House of Labor: How California’s Public Sector Labor Unions Struggle to Resist the Deprofessionalization of College Teachers", from 2024 book, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History.
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If you think self identified left workers will naturally join a union or refuse to cross a picket line, you're wrong. Even people who ideologically support social movements need to be organized, and many will say no at first to sacrificing anything for others. Especially faculty.
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@jules_su
While people are celebrating him for having a conscience, his reply is a public cry for help against a culture of bullying. I hope that this event gets people at Baraboo to think beyond this as a one off incident, and something that may be reflective of a hateful school culture.
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Higher ed parable:
@UCIrvine
built a subsidized housing community for faculty. Because faculty don't have to vacate after they retire, it has increasingly become a retirement community with little space left for junior faculty. The average house price in Irvine is $1.5 mil.
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What is the neoliberal university (or college), where did it come from, and what should be done about it? A Thread.
#highereducation
#capitalism
#neoliberalism
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.
@TheNewSchool
is one of the most exploitative private schools in higher ed today. Charges $50k/ year in tuition, and 87% of its faculty are low wage temps earning about $4,500 per course. Solidarity ✊ with striking
@UAW7902
members demanding change.
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This is a big deal for Evergreen. Its students voted for this 15 years ago after Rachel Corrie's murder, but its Board simply refused to take up the issue and a wave of repression followed both on campus and off.
The Evergreen State College (school of Rachel Corrie) agrees to divestment
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.
@UCAFT
just won multi-year contracts for all
@UofCalifornia
lecturers after their 1st year of teaching, rehiring rights, 20% raises over the next 4 years, and a $1,500 signing bonus! Incredible statement about the power of workers when they organize and threaten to strike!
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How bad is
@UofCalifornia
's latest salary offer to
@uaw2865
@sruuaw
? In 1998, before a strike for UAW's first contract, they earned $14k/ year. Adjusted for inflation, that's $25.4k/ year today-- less than baseline in UC's offer. And that doesn't address rising housing costs.
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@AOC
When can we talk about the relationship between eliminationist discourse in right wing media and the rising threat of right wing domestic terrorism?
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A thread 🧵 on all the ways that
@UofCalifornia
is relying on faculty to break the
#FairUCNow
strike by
@uaw2865
/
@sruuaw
. Faculty: do not fall prey to these tactics! Refuse to do struck work, and consider not submitting course grades for classes with striking TAs and graders.
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Tenured college faculty: if grad students or non tenure track instructors are on strike at your school, please don't use your bully pulpit to publicly 1) undermine union demands or tactics; 2) amplify divisions between union members, or 3) encourage strike breaking and scabbing.
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UCLA in chaos. Students and workers are fed up with the violence against the students, the cancellation of in person classes, the closure of the libraries, the emerging police state.
In a BruinAlert sent at 4 p.m., UCLA announced that classes have been moved to remote instruction for the remainder of the week. Royce Hall and Powell Library will also remain closed until Friday.
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Irvine Mayor withdraws police from UCI, criticizes UCI's handling of Palestine solidarity encampment.
HUGE move by Mayor Khan, who also visited the encampment today where she spoke with students and faculty and to show her support for students rights to free speech and assembly.
Elected officials, take note!
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There are a lot of things that tenured (and some tenure track)
#faculty
can do to resist the decline of
#tenure
. This thread focuses on ways to formalize the hiring and retention of
#adjunct
faculty and other
#lecturers
in your department and at your school.
#highereducation
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When
@UofCalifornia
talks about "continuity of instruction" during a strike by
@uaw2865
, what they mean is that they expect faculty to scab and pick up the work of graders and teaching assistants if the strike goes on more than a few days. We at
@UCAFT
refuse to do that.
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Just super bizarre to get emails from admin pretending the biggest strike in the US isn't happening at
@UofCalifornia
. Happy Thanksgiving! Check out this talk next week! A faculty member won an award! Please pay no attention to the thousands of people picketing for living wages!
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One of the great things about this moment for labor is the rejection of concession bargaining and two tier systems.
Over 30,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente plan to go on strike this Monday
Workers call Kaiser's contract offer "a slap in the face" & ask how things could have gone so sour at what was considered the nation's best union-management partnership
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The
@uaw2865
@sruuaw
strike at
@UofCalifornia
shows how different job classifications for essentially identical work allows schools to pit college teachers against each other. A 🧵 on the problem, which requires industrial instead of craft union organizing to address.
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UCI had no violence, no threat to safety or property, no obstructed walkways, no classes prevented from meeting. A banner hang from a building was used as a pretext to deploy riot police already at the scene, kick everyone off campus, cancel classes, make arrests, then lie.
A message from UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman about today's challenging campus events.
Full statement:
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University of California TAs and graders currently earn more money per course than the lecturers who supervise them, and soon they'll earn more than 3x what 15,000 CSU PT lecturers get, and 5x what 30,000+ CA community college adjuncts get per course. Time for faculty
#payequity
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Incredible that a tenured faculty member at
@IndianaUniv
could be suspended, without due process, for this.
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It is cruel to expect people with PhDs to both teach full time for poverty wages to make ends meet, while writing a book on the side, in order to be eligible for the few remaining career college teaching jobs. It privileges the independently wealthy, while stigmatizing teaching.
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.
@Harvard
has 3,100 non tenure track faculty and fewer than 1,500 tenure track faculty. Awesome that the NTTs are unionizing.
🚨BREAKING: 3,100 professors at Harvard University are forming a union as
@HAWorkers
and seeking to join
@UAW
.
This is the largest union filing of the years so far.
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The
@UofCalifornia
is not being honest with the state legislature about how it is paying for salary increases for TAs and RAs represented by
@uaw2865
.
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Please watch: the amazing Hannah Appel at
@ucla
breaks down the privatization and financialization of public higher education on the
@uaw2865
@UAWUCLA
picket line.
#FairUCNow
@HigherEdLabor
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Classes already over at USC. Graduation happens Friday off campus. The encampment is not large enough to disrupt on campus, school specific graduation events. This is a pointless, sadistic exercise.
Officers in riot gear have arrived on USC campus.
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Super dangerous precedent for free speech and academic freedom: Columbia considering whether to treat a media interview as a form of discriminatory "harassment" of students and colleagues, and thus grounds for termination of a tenured professor.
.
@Columbia
's President Denounced Her Before Congress. Firing Could Be Next.
Law professor Katherine Franke has long been outspoken in her support of Palestinians. Now, after House Republicans and her university president called her out in an antisemitism hearing, she faces
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How
@UofCalifornia
pays its lecturers, or "non-senate faculty", as little as possible, and less per course than graduate students. Here's a short explanation of how it gets away with it.
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Don't let this pro-worker, pro-strike moment in the U.S. go to waste. If you're in a union, organize a strike threat as part planning your next contract campaign. If you're not in a union, consider organizing one. Organizing is hard, but you'll have a lot of public support.
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@terry_renaud
Thank you for tweeting about this. Your institution may be uniquely wealthy but the practice of firing non tenure track faculty to prevent them from acquiring seniority or even a sense of moral expectation to continued employment is widespread.
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If the 48,000 workers represented by
@uaw2865
,
@UAW5810
and
@sruuaw
go on strike next week, as seems likely, there are about 70,000 workers at
@UofCalifornia
who, because they are represented by unions, could be fired if they refuse to cross picket lines. A short 🧵on why.
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These are not contradictory positions:
-a 4 year college degree should not be a prerequisite to obtain a stable, living wage job;
-robustly funded public higher ed is an important public good that can facilitate humanistic inquiry and not just job training or nation worship.
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Law professor who earns $200k/year, who sat on the board of his faculty union, was so irate that his union bargained pay cuts to avoid layoffs during COVID that he not only resigned his membership but sought to have the US Supreme Court abolish public sector unions.
The Supreme Court yesterday denied cert. to U Mass. Dartmouth law professor Richard Peltz-Steele who challenged exclusive representation in public employment as alleged violation of his First Amendment rights. Here is a link to the First Circuit decision:
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Another case of manufactured austerity: Democrat Governor and Democrat legislature in Connecticut are running annual $700 million budget surpluses, plan to cut taxes this year. Meanwhile
@UConn
is planning for devastating budget cuts to cover $70 million annual shortfall.
As the U. of Connecticut joins a growing list of public flagships across the country struggling with financial cuts, faculty say a proposed 15-percent budget reduction would likely threaten the existence of graduate programs across the university.
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The success of the
@uaw2865
strike at
@UofCalifornia
partly depends on student organizing. Most undergrads are not going to class or joining picket lines. A grade strike--UAW's most powerful weapon-- would force them to take sides. Only organizing can direct their anger at admin.
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Afterthought: I understand that Deans are unlikely to cough up extra $ for instruction when faced with departmental opposition to their manipulative labor exploitation schemes. But protest is better than fatalism. And what's the point of academic freedom if you don't use it?
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3) When neoliberal universities raise enrollment and/ or tuition but do not significantly invest in teacher salaries or small class sizes, they redefine higher ed around tracking and providing students services, not student learning. This decreases retention, increases predation.
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Up to 48,000 academic student employees, postdocs and student researchers are on strike at
@UofCalifornia
. It's the largest strike in the U.S. right now & the largest teacher's strike since COVID. Their campaign for living wages could change higher ed & the labor movement.
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1) The neoliberal university (or college) is an institution of higher education whose governance is primarily organized around increasing revenue, even when it is a non-profit or public institution. All other functions are secondary.
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@jackrpruett
@Georgetown
Then ask them what % of their faculty are tenure track. If it's less than 60%, ask why they expect you to go into debt to teach college when even an elite private school charging $50k year in undergrad tuition relies so much on low wage temp teachers.
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4) All faculty in your department, including non-tenure track faculty, should have the opportunity to review and formally respond to evaluations of their teaching.
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3) Relying only on student evaluations of non-tenure track instructors is inadequate. Their teaching should be observed by colleagues, and evaluated according to written standards shared with them before the school year begins.
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@APSAtweets
.
@APSAtweets
is not the first academic professional association to be called upon by
@unitehere
to not cross a picket line. It should have followed the lead of
@The_OAH
in 2005 and moved its meeting-- or shifted online -- despite the significant costs.
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Here is a thread to help people understand the growth of the
#gigeconomy
in
#highereducation
in the U.S., or what Kim Moody calls the “proletarianization” of college teachers.
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@jrivanob
A Civil War general for the North who, though not radical, supported Reconstruction. Surprising.
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Much of what higher education administrators see as the future of their industry is just good old fashioned labor exploitation: outsourcing, deskilling, automation, work increases and speed ups, and replacing career positions with temp jobs. The rationale: customer satisfaction.
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4) Neoliberal universities treat enrolled students not just as sources of tuition, but as captive markets for services (especially housing and food) or for advertising (for tabling, job and school fairs, for-profit vendors, etc.).
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This is a real show of solidarity. For many tenured UC faculty, just one month of being on grade strike could cost them $10k+ in income if admin comes down hard on them. The more make this sacrifice now, the more likely it is that UAW will get a fair contract.
There are moments I'm very proud of some of my academic affiliations, particularly Gender Studies at UCLA.
@uaw2865
@UAW
#FairUCNow
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Think of all the money labor unions give to politicians, mainly in the Democratic Party. And yet at the federal level, even when Dems control Congress, not only is new labor law off the table, but enforcement of existing labor law remains insufficient.
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If a department hires a lot of low wage temp teachers, and is funded based on total students served, tenure track faculty research is subsidized by exploiting other teachers. This is partly why composition instructors have long been the foundation of the academic labor movement.
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@lhfang
Because most of the anti woke crowd is anti left, and Israel has been controlled by the right for decades.
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Here's how California politicians cynically pretend to be progressive to get endorsements and money from supporters: vote for bills they don't support, knowing Governor will veto, then do nothing to override veto. If not, prevent hearings from even happening, so no vote record.
I wrote about the confounding situation in California where a gubernatorial veto hasn't been overridden by the legislature in 43 years, making the governor a super-legislator and distorting what the state can accomplish:
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The
@uaw_4811
strike is inspiring new forms of labor activism at
@UofCalifornia
:
@uc_faculty
at
@UCLA
, which is a faculty association and not a collective bargaining agent, files an unfair labor practice charge related to the strike.
The UCLA Faculty Association filed an unfair labor practice charge against the UC for its treatment of faculty during the Palestine solidarity encampment and its aftermath.
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1) Tenured faculty should ask to receive regular (at least annual) reports on what % of courses, and what % of students in their department’s courses are taught by non-tenure track faculty.
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8) Neoliberal universities operate like for-profit employers. Their highly-paid managers both increase their employees’ workloads and use automation, subcontracting, and union-busting to reduce labor costs.
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UC faculty: don't scab. Don't change assignments or sections to eliminate TA labor, do the work of or submit grades for striking TAs.
If you are a lecturer and are pressured to pick up work struck by grad students, contact your union immediately for advice and support.
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10) Familiarize yourself with how much non-tenure track faculty are paid at your school and in your department. If it is less than the MLA’s recommended minimum salary, publicly advocate for a raise for your non-tenure track colleagues.
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The rigged juridical process
@WestVirginiaU
set up for academic departments plead for their continued existence is sadistic. It also highlights the fundamental hollowness of shared governance without budget democracy.
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Gutless abstentions/ non-voting.
BREAKING:
@UCLA
Academic Senate rejects censure and ‘no confidence’ vote on Chancellor Gene Block for handling of pro-Palestinian protests. w/
@jaweedkaleem
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UC strategy for repressing the UAW strike: threaten faculty, divide grad students, bank on undergrad student apathy, and stall bargaining in the hope that sympathetic news is buried by the next big thing somewhere else. If all else fails, plead poverty, pass buck to politicians.
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Nearly all the criticism of
@CTULocal1
is not about COVID safety, but about whether workers should have any say over their workplace's safety. No one objected when California school admin announced returns to remote instruction this month. But when workers decide, watch out...
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9) If your college Dean expects your department to hire and fire “just in time” professors at the last minute, and refuses to give those teachers contracts until after they begin teaching, publicly oppose this practice.
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5) Neoliberal universities are focused on acquiring property and renting it to others-- particularly land, buildings, patented or copyrighted intellectual property, and their brands. Biotechnology and athletics play larger roles in this system than they did before.
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7) Where non-tenure track faculty are eligible for health benefits when they teach a certain number of classes, tenured faculty should ensure that their departments’ hiring policies maximize the number of faculty who receive benefits.
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2) When your department hires new non-tenure track instructors, ensure that it uses a formal application process. This requires: a regional job posting, application, formal hiring criteria, and a teaching contract before school starts.
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5) There should be a formal process in your department for the retention of non-tenure track instructors: notice, application, and evaluation criteria shared with instructors in advance.
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23) There is, in my opinion, no single radical anti-capitalist response to the rise of the neoliberal university, other than to see its current legitimacy crisis as indicative of broader social crisis that ultimately requires a revolution to resolve.
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12) If non-tenure track faculty in your department are only hired on a term-to-term basis, advocate for them to receive annual or multiyear teaching contracts.
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The left has nothing like Fox News, Liberty University, or the Koch brothers. Corporations have far more power than unions. Right wing think tanks vastly outspend their opponents.
Still: a majority of Americans support social democratic policies championed by Warren & Sanders.
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13) Though some non-tenure track faculty want the opportunity to attend department meetings, do not allow your colleagues to make unpaid departmental service a job requirement for adjuncts.
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The rollout of the
@jacobinmag
youtube channel begins with Vivek Chibber's critique of "liberal identity politics" and "critical race theory"? This feels like left wing culture-wars trolling, is hardly conducive to building a big tent movement.
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11) Prevent your department Chair from taking away a course from an adjunct instructor at the last minute to give to a tenure track instructor. Protest when this happens, and push for policy changes to end the practice.
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15) Ultimately, there’s only so much that one can do to improve
#adjunct
teaching lines. Most ongoing adjunct positions should be upgraded to full-time, teaching tenure track, or tenure track—which I hope to write about in the future.
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6) Tenured faculty should establish rules in their department for determining how to assign classes to non-tenure track faculty (including for intersession and Summer terms), and work to lessen workload and schedule inequalities.
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UC is simply not going to offer anything near a living wage to grad students unless
@uaw2865
@sruuaw
escalates its tactics and either
@UofCalifornia
regents or CA politicians step in to avert a lost academic term for undergrads.
#FairUCNow
UC called a bargaining meeting at 12:10 a.m. to present a UAW 2865 proposal that, at the first step 90 days after ratification, pays teaching assistants $24,990 annually, teaching fellows $29,661.50, and associate instructors $26,182.50.
#FairUCNow
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Yesterday the Palestine solidarity encampment at
@ucla
was entirely peaceful. Putting an organized counter protest right next to it is not about speech (it's easy to meet elsewhere). It's about provoking conflict for social media, then calling on police to end the encampment.
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Grad student instructors don't just serve as teaching assistants and graders for college courses. They also serve as faculty, especially during summer. At
@UofCalifornia
, courses with UC grad students serving as instructor of record make up about 20% of undergrad credit hours.
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I personally attended the last
@UofCalifornia
Regents meeting at UCLA. Regents chair Perez's description of the ejection of the public from the chambers when Palestine solidarity activists disrupted proceedings is totally inaccurate!
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Important op-ed by Mia McIver at
@UCAFT
and Levin Kim at
@UAW4121
that argues that the
@uaw2865
strike highlights the need to develop a broader vision for the higher education labor movement via
@HigherEdLabor
.
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Individual
@UofCalifornia
departments, including staff at the
@ucla
Physics Department, are reaching out to their undergraduates, offering them money to scab for striking TAs and RAs by proctoring and grading final exams. Undergrads should refuse to do this!
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6) The focus of the neoliberal university on developing intellectual property enmeshes it within “cognitive capitalism”, or the “information economy”, through “technology transfer” of knowledge into products.
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24) One radical analysis that I find provocative is Sharon Stein’s argument that modern higher education is a “colonial structure” based in racial capitalism that must be “questioned, dismantled, and hospiced, so that new possibilities can emerge.”
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2) As part of their search for new revenue, neoliberal universities invest heavily in marketing to solicit new students, donations, grants, and partnerships with other schools, governments, or businesses.
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7) According to Slaughter & Rhoades, universities' cultivation of captive markets and monetization of scientific discoveries generates a network of hybrid organizations whose blurring of lines between school and business produces “academic capitalism.”
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Ironically, because of these no strikes clauses in union contracts, tenure track at
@UofCalifornia
-- essentially the only non-union faculty in CA's public higher education system-- have more rights to engage in sympathy strikes than faculty represented by labor unions.
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Afterthought: This thread is not even close to comprehensive. One big question it doesn't answer is: what are the functions of neoliberal universities? Whether producing workers, consumers, citizens, indebted subjects etc, I left this question to others, and/ or for another time.
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Lack of solidarity with
@uaw2865
from
@UofCalifornia
Academic Senate demonstrates how badly all faculty need labor unions. In its Nov. 23 message to division chairs, the AS does admin work for them, warns Senate faculty to submit course grades or risk having their pay withheld.
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Union Coalition at
@UofCalifornia
condemns the school's investment in
@blackstone
$BX. Public education needs funding that doesn't depend on driving up rents of school teachers, students, staff and surrounding communities.
@CFTunion
@CaliforniaLabor
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This is a totally and completely unnecessary escalation intended only to remove any bystanders from accidentally witnessing or protesting a police crackdown on nonviolent protesters.
zotALERT: All UCI classes are canceled for today 5/15/24. Staff are advised to work remotely for tomorrow 5/16/24.
Please continue to avoid the protest area.
For more information please visit
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UCLA has already pushed classes online for the rest of the week. What if they just called off the cops tonight and spent the next 2 days trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Palestine solidarity activists? This is a leadership failure.
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The $700 million lawsuit settlement that
@UofCalifornia
is selling bonds to pay for would have funded at least 3 years of raises for ~50,000 grad student employees. Instead, UC is talking about permanently restructuring undergrad education by reducing ASE positions.
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14) If your school depends upon activity-based budgeting, and your dept is encouraged to hire non-tenure track faculty to qualify for new tenure track lines, you are being encouraged to kill your own profession. Publicly criticize this practice, and demand more $ for instruction.
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@ass_deans
Also don't forget to solicit faculty input after the decision has already been made.
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For decades, most protests and strikes at
@UofCalifornia
have been in violation of campus codes of conduct. Hell no unions don't pay for permits for amplified sound on strike. Most student activists don't either. UC usually backs down. But on Palestine solidarity, no tolerance.
“UCI is committed to free speech.”
So much so that they’re handing us violation notices before our rally today even begins…
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