Gov. Phil Murphy is angry. Or, that’s how he seemed during a press conference earlier today.
Murphy was finishing up a press conference for another initiative, when he was asked about the Rutgers faculty strike, which kicked off earlier today. Murphy asked — not ordered, as it has been portrayed — that union representatives and administration negotiators meet in his office with members of his staff, meetings which began earlier today.
“I’m not happy that it’s come to this. I am happy that we’re in the room together,” Murphy said. He then pointed to both sides as being responsible, declared that any settlement should not affect student tuition, and left.
That last part, about tuition, worries me.
It tells me he does not get what is happening here -- tuition is going up, regardless of how this contract is settled. It is the recent history of higher ed to grind its workforce into dust and charge its students for the privilege of being on campus. He may say he understands the plight of adjuncts and grad students — our precarity and poverty wages — but he sees this as no different than any other contract negotiation. He doesn’t see that what the three faculty unions at Rutgers are asking for is a reimagining of how faculty are treated, and that we are asking that our students be treated better along with us — through a freeze of rents for Rutgers’ New Brunswick properties, debt forgiveness for students who have accumulated the nit-picky fines charged by the university, and an end to the practices of withholding registration and diplomas and of selling off student debt to collection agencies. Our demands are about more than just percentage wage increases, which is how management portrays them. They are transformative and would create a different type of Rutgers, a better Rutgers, and a better New Brunswick.
Murphy’s gambit, accompanied by tough talk, strips the revolutionary nature of our demands from the public discussion — which was evident in some of the news coverage, though most of the reporting was quite good and comprehensive. Linking tuition to these talks, to us winning our demands that we be paid a livable wage and be given job security, makes us seem like the ones who would be driving up tuition and not management, not the corporate turn higher ed has taken.
Even as negotiations were taking place in Trenton, union members — joined by hundreds of students and community members — marched on picket lines at Rutgers’ multiple campuses, chanting slogans and showing our power. I spent the day talking to numerous reporters and fellow union members, saw at least one of my students out there in support, and talked with many others. While some of the press focused on students who are rightly worried, there is a story to tell about supportive students who refuse to cross the picket line.
What has to happen next is simple: we keep up the pressure, maintain the strike and pickets, create the kind of tension the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” tension that lights a fire under the feet of power, that scares those in power, and forces them to back off. That is what this strike is. A show of power. Our power. This is why we will win.