Rutgers' Uprising at The Progressive
I Have a New Piece Up at The Progressive on the Strike and Its Aftermath
I have a new piece up at The Progressive that you can find here.
On April 20, about 300 faculty members, students, and staff assembled on the small lawn area in front of Winants Hall at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It had been less than a week since we suspended our strike of 9,000 faculty members that had shut the university for five days.
Sitting on what is called the Old Queens campus, Winants was once a dormitory, but now houses the university’s administration, and it was hosting the university Board of Governors’ quarterly meeting. Winants represents Rutgers’s history.
The governors are not involved in Rutgers’s daily operations, but they do hold sway over its purse strings. We had a message for the board (and by extension, university President Jonathan Holloway): While we may have suspended the strike, we are not going away.
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I was on the Valley Labor Report this week talking about the Rutgers strike and contract actions as part of a conversation with an organizer at the University of Alabama. Alabama is a right-to-work state, which means there is no official state recognition for unions. That isn’t stopping them from fighting to create better working conditions for academic workers there.
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It has been a strange few weeks for me, acting as a spokesman for the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union and speaking on camera. I made numerous appearances on TV and in the press, including in a column by national columnist Chris Hedges. This has given me a perspective I think would have been useful earlier in my journalism career. Most of us only get to ask the questions. We don’t fully understand the impact that the questions might have on those we interview. Every potential journalist probably should spend some time being interviewed so that they can be better interviewers going forward.
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I also want to thank The Higher Education Inquirer for cross-posting my daily strike updates.