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.
Erin Santana, a graduate student, made this clear during a rousing speech later in the day. “We built a coalition of academic workers unlike at any of our peer institutions across the country,” she yelled into a bullhorn. Three unions had joined together to strike—the AAUP-AFT, representing full-time faculty, graduate students, and post-docs; the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union; and AAUP-BHSNJ, which represents clinicians and researchers at the medical school. While there were cracks in our coalition over disagreements about bargaining and whether to pause the strike, Santana continued, “We will teach and learn and struggle alongside one another and in teaching and struggling, that is where the possibility of true solidarity is learned.”
That solidarity was on full display—a unity that expressed itself in the rewrite of Bruce Channel’s 1962 number one hit, “Hey! Baby,” that has become our unofficial strike anthem.
“He-e-e-y Holloway,
We want to know-oh-oh
When you’ll raise our pay”
It took us several years to get to this point—years marked by phone banking and meetings, conversations in classrooms, recruiting by organizers and members, and a series of smaller rallies and actions that both tested our strength and sent a signal to management that they were facing a united front.
Then came the strike. The faculty have never engaged in an organized work stoppage in Rutgers’s 257-year history. And as Santana pointed out, it was the largest public employee strike in New Jersey history, and the only strike (in what has been a run of academic strikes across the United States) that has seen all categories of faculty cancel classes and take over the center of each campus.
We had no reason in 2022 to believe we could do this, yet we did. We did it in the face of a threatened injunction from Holloway, the intervention of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, and the general uncertainty that any strike brings.
We struck because we have been without a contract since June 30. We walked off our jobs on April 10—283 days after our contract had expired—and stayed out until April 14, when a framework for an agreement was meted out at the New Jersey statehouse.
We won historic raises for adjuncts, large pay increases for graduate students, raises for all faculty, job security, changes to scheduling processes, and a number of other gains. Yet we were far from finished. More work needs to be done to address the needs of graduate students and the medical faculty, such as expanding healthcare coverage and addressing the safety and family-leave issues raised by COVID-19.
There was some dissension in the ranks when the strike was halted, which is expected given the size of our coalition. I think management was counting on that. But the April 20 action made clear what we have been saying throughout our organizing efforts: We are stronger together and we will stick together to win a contract that improves all of our lives.
As I’ve written at The Progressive and elsewhere, higher education sold out decades ago to corporate America and the banks, with the help of politicians from both parties who have been hostile to education. Funding has been cut dramatically, leading to a rising sea of student debt and a turn away from use of tenured faculty that has resulted in an epidemic of precarity throughout academia.
I teach journalism as an adjunct at Rutgers. I’m one of about 2,000 adjuncts at the university’s three major campuses in New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden. We teach a third of all classes, earn about $6,000 per class, and have to reapply for our jobs every year. Non-tenured, full-time faculty—who are essentially contract employees—and graduate assistants, who earn about $30,000 a year, teach another third of the university’s courses. That’s two of every three classes taught by contingent faculty, a number that is consistent across the country. This is a drastic change from the early 1980s, when most classes were taught by tenured or tenure-track professors.
Universities have embraced this employment strategy because it cuts costs and gives them corporate-style flexibility. Tenure was always problematic for these corporate types, and turning to the contingent model has allowed them to chip away at it. This not only creates economic uncertainty, but it makes meaningless the idea of “academic freedom,” a concept that is supposed to be central to the mission of higher education.
The faculty have never engaged in an organized work stoppage in Rutgers’s 257-year history. It was the largest public employee strike in New Jersey history. We had no reason in 2022 to believe we could do this, yet we did.
Higher education’s corporate model has been a disaster for its workers, and helped generate growing endowment and reserve accounts at Rutgers—money the university has invested in high-risk, high-fee hedge funds, as The Lever reports. These investments, rigged with stiff broker’s fees, have siphoned off money that should be earmarked for students and workers.
Rutgers also has significant property holdings, which it has been developing into new buildings on and off campus as it spreads deeper into the city of New Brunswick, expanding its footprint and forcing the largely poor and immigrant population to find new housing. Rents are rising, driven to a degree by Rutgers’s actions, which is why students and the community are seeking a rent freeze on university properties.
Every aspect of university life and work is affected. New sports facilities are built, even as students complain about mold and roaches in their dorms and many classrooms go unmaintained.
Daniel S. Morrison, a physician and teacher at Rutgers, worked on the frontlines during the pandemic, treating patients while he and his colleagues struggled to get hold of personal protective equipment (PPE). During this period, Morrison tells me, he couldn’t hug his daughter because he was afraid he could pass the disease onto her. The physicians, clinicians, and researchers who are members of the AAUP-BHSNJ deserve more than the disrespect management is demonstrating. They deserve raises and tenure protections like other faculty at Rutgers.
“In the hospital [during the early pandemic],” he says, “we were told we were healthcare heroes. We were rewarded with pizza.”
Pizza—not raises, healthcare, or full job security.
As we marched from Winants Hall to downtown New Brunswick, we heard from drivers and students who were going about their day. We saw this public support because we are the ones in the classrooms working with students and in the exam rooms with patients. We are workers and we are witnessing a shift in support for workers and for unions both here and around the country.
Our effort at Rutgers is part of a larger movement, and the gains we are set to win will set the bar for those who follow, and those in other unions and industries.