Rutgers Is A 'Beleaguered Community'
Unions, Students Rallied Friday for a Better Rutgers. President Holloway Should Listen.
Editor’s Note: The post initially misidentified the third union engaged in our merger campaign. It has been corrected and noted below.
About 300 faculty members, staff and students filled the sidewalk area outside the College Avenue entrance to the Alexander Library at Rutgers, today, to demand fair wages and action by the university on the environment and housing issues in New Brunswick.
I was there with my union, PTLFC-AAUP-AFT, which represent adjunct faculty at the university (PTLs). Faculty and staff make the university run. We do the work and, adjuncts do the work for a lot less money than those who ostensibly do the same work.
We were there for We R Rutgers, a mass rally timed to coincide with university President Jonathan Holloway’s state of the university speech to the university and to make clear that Rutgers must change if it is to meet Holloway’s vision of a “beloved community.”
Rutgers is a public university, but essentially operates like a corporation. This is true for much of higher education today, but Holloway’s rhetoric attempts to pretend otherwise. Rutgers’ goal — under Holloway and his recent predecessors — is to generate revenue, while keeping its costs low. It does this by relying on contingent labor — on adjuncts (called part-time lecturers) who teach one in three classes at the university and grad students and non-tenure-track full-timers who teach at least another third. This is a massive effort historical shift tempered only by layoffs of PTLs during the height of the Covid pandemic.
At the same time, the university froze most union salaries by declaring a “fiscal emergency” that has proven to be overstated, while pocketing federal Covid relief funds and watching as its endowment grew to record levels.
Now, as we enter the 2022-2023 school year, workers at Rutgers are being forced to work without contracts, to watch as our salaries stagnate even as inflation is at levels not seen in decades.
Contract negotiations have stalled for nearly every bargaining unit. This is not a surprise. Management has turned to a former Chris Christie appointee to lead its efforts and employs the notorious union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis in an advisory capacity, which has long used the big stall as a central strategy elsewhere. In addition, the administration has ignored our card campaign to merge three faculty units into a larger, single entity — despite both the PTL and the Biomedical and Health Sciences of New Jersey1 units winning majority support from members. Management prefers the unions remain separate, because a divided faculty is a weaker faculty.
This was the backdrop for Friday’s action, an action made possible by a committed coalition of faculty, staff, students, and community members — which Holloway witnessed as he made his way into the library. Holloway stopped and listened to the speakers — and got an earful from PTL union Secretary Howard Swerdloff, a bargaining team member, who told Holloway that “people are angry” because of the delaying tactics. As the crowd chanted “Hey, Hey, Holloway, Rutgers needs a raise today,” Swerdloff told the university president that his appointment “raised expectations about what can be done,” and that Rutgers, under his direction, is “not heading in a good direction.”
Inside, Holloway told the University Senate that the university remains
committed to recognizing that everyone—every single one of us—has an important role to play in the success of the university. This does not mean that we will always agree on the right path toward that success, but it means that we will acknowledge our shared purposes even while understanding our differences of opinion.
He went on, however, to underscore differences of opinions — and to paint his critics as muffling the “truth” of Holloway’s “story.” These “critics,” he says are telling “their Rutgers story from a place of grievance.” It’s a classic straw-man fallacy, characterizing one’s unnamed opponents and their arguments in a way that allows them to be easily dismissed. “Grievance,” Holloway says, “organizes their thinking and their peer groups.”
This is disingenuous. His critics have legitimate grievances — from the pandemic’s emotional, educational, and financial impact on students and the administration’s failures to address these impacts to the second-class status imposed on Camden; from the overblown fiscal emergency to the unequal work-at-home rules imposed on staff and the widespread use and abuse of contingent faculty.
Holloway is right to call for us to “”work together to bring the culture of grievance to an end.” But rather than point finger at groups with legitimate grievances, he should look at himself in the mirror. It is Holloway who is telling his “Rutgers story from a place of grievance.”
It is why it is difficult to take seriously Holloway’s repeated use of the phrase “beloved community.” Rather, as Kenneth Sebastian León, an AAUP executive council member, told the crowd on Friday, the phrases “beleaguered community” and “belittled community” feel more accurate.
The groups out on College Avenue on Friday were not their out of a sense of grievance, but from a sense of commitment — to the university, to our students, to the planet. We see the possibility of a better world starting with a better university, a fairer university, a more equal university.
The corporate model may be good for the bottom line, but it is not good for the people who make Rutgers what it is and who will lead Rutgers into the future — the faculty, staff, and students.
Originally misidentified the union involved in the card campaign as HPAE.