My Response to Holloway
The Rutgers President Offers a Weak Defense of an Insulting Contract Offer
Let’s strip away the pretense. Contemporary higher ed financing is built on exploitation. It exploits students through exorbitant fees and rents. It exploits staff members, by excluding them from discussions from their working conditions even as they face health and safety threats. It exploits full-time faculty — tenure track and non-tenure track — through an elaborate grant system that pays for research but funnels the results into the corporate economy, and by chipping away at tenure protections and research time. It exploits the surrounding communities by siphoning off tax dollars without providing anything in return to its mostly underpaid neighbors. And it exploits part-time faculty by using us as replaceable cogs and permanent scabs, paying us far less than we are worth, providing us with no security, and then telling us we should be satisfied with what we have.
Rutgers University is a part of this damaging model. It has embraced corporate-style management, privileging the generation of “profit” (in the form of free reserve balances and its massive endowment) above all other values.
President Jonathan Holloway’s letter to the Rutgers community yesterday only underscores this. In his letter, Holloway perpetuated the lie that Rutgers is facing a financial difficulties. The university, he says, “must balance the fair compensation of our employees with the impact on our students and their families.” We agree. It is why we question the massive salaries handed to sports coaches and administrators. It is why we demand a change in priorities at Rutgers, a change that would eliminate contingency and pay everyone fairly and equitably.
Holloway focuses on the the paltry offer made last week by management — an increase of 10.75% over four years that he says is “consistent with the most recent four-year contract, negotiated in 2019.” That was four years ago. We are negotiating in 2023 at a time of record inflation, in the shadow of a pandemic that shut the university, at a moment when higher ed workers are pushing to transform the academy, to significantly raise pay for underpaid adjuncts and grad students, and to once again make teaching at this level a profession that allows us to pay our bills. Offering us average raises of less than 3% at this moment is, frankly, insulting.
Holloway also ignores the other key demands: for job security for adjuncts, NTTs, and grads; an extension of funding for grads; more control over scheduling for those in the classroom; greater protections for academic freedom; and a reorientation of university priorities away from its investment and real estate portfolios and back to the classroom.
Holloway acknowledges the strike authorization vote taking place as I write this, but he makes no comment on why this vote is taking place or why it is about to be approved. Instead, he talks about “both sides” being “deeply committed to Rutgers’ success,” as if somehow he is above this discussion, above the fray and not a direct participant on one side of these “negotiations.”
If you want to avert a strike, President Holloway, you can. Stop with the pablum. Negotiate in good faith. Pay all of us what we are worth. Fix what is broken at Rutgers.