Teach-Ins
UWUFF members and fellow travelers talk about strategies and tactics they are using to ensure a fair future for university workers.
April 17, 2020
Columbia People's Response to COVID-19: Organizing Against the University-Landlord.
May 1, 2020
Short- and Long-term Strategies for University Worker Appointment Renewals
The Union of Academic Student Employees & Postdocs at the University of Washington (UAW 4121) is mounting a multi-stage, multi-tactic campaign in order to address immediate issues of economic insecurity and inequity in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic while also laying the foundations for the long fight against austerity after this initial phase has passed.
The main elements of the campaign disucssed in this video are: 1) Coalition Bargaining, 2) Petitioning, 3) Departmental Organizing, 4) Political Action, 5) Union Contract Enforcement.
May 8, 2020
The Debt Collective: "If you owe the bank $50K, the bank owns you. If we owe the bank $1.3 Trillion, we own the bank"
Members of the Debt Collective and Corinthian 100 talk about different debt regimes wracking US education and concrete strategies for how to abolish them.
May 15, 2020
American Association of University Professors (AAUP): One Faculty Campaign
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has a long history as an organization seeking to improve working conditions, shared governance, economic security, and academic freedom for all those who teach and do research in our universities and colleges. AAUP’s One Faculty, One Resistance campaign provides models for pushing back on the neoliberal academy and supporting the rights of all faculty, including full- and part-time non-tenure-track faculty, and those who are on the tenure-track or are tenured. AAUP Executive Director Julie Schmid and AAUP General Counsel Risa Lieberwitz will present insights about campaign goals and tactics based on AAUP’s campaigns to unionize, collectively bargain, and strengthen shared governance in public and private universities across the United States. They will end with a discussion of how best to adapt these goals and tactics to the current challenges presented by the COVID crisis.
May 22, 2020
How Endowments Rule: An Analytical Toolkit
Endowments rule higher education directly and indirectly. Nominally non-profit, we are well aware that universities have “profit centers” and “cost centers,” and that these are often managed, at even the wealthiest institutions, with the furtive profiteering of tax-exempt accumulation. How do endowments rule, and how can that rule be challenged, if at all? The purpose of this teach-in is twofold. The first is to provide an accessible if technical overview of the profit-generating activities of the American university that begins (but does not end) with the management of endowments. While this portion of the teach-in will engage specific private university endowments, and examine the work of the influential Yale Corporation investor David Swensen, this analysis will be directed toward our second purpose: Identifying broadly relevant tactics and pressure points at public and private institutions alike.
The ultimate aim of this teach-in is to prompt conversations on the possibilities and limits of university-based reform. This bibliography of sources on endowments and university finance, both journalistic and academic, invites further discussion and collaboration.
July 24, 2020
Breaking the Silos at University of Michigan
"Breaking the Silos at University of Michigan: How contingent faculty's collective bargaining turned into a cross-rank, multi-campus coalition with students & ladder-rank faculty" presents the amazing wins made by "bargaining for the common good" in a long-format teach-in by a long-time Lecturer's Employee Organization (LEO) union member and activist. To learn more, check out:
October 23, 2020
Organizing at Liberal Arts Colleges: The Case of Ithaca College
Chair of the Contingent Faculty Union at Ithaca College (SEIU Local 200) talks about organizing contingent faculty for a union win, the recent announcement of faculty job cuts, and the possibilities of bargaining for the common good and leveraging anti-racism.