Higher Education

Low Wages And Exploitative Conditions Are Sparking Graduate Student Strikes

December 19, 2021 Tyler Walicek, Truthout. Organize! Higher Education, Labor Unions, Student Activism, Worker Rights and Jobs

Many graduate students find themselves caught between these multiple fronts: burdened with past student debt, earning sub-living-wage pay in their present work and facing dwindling future opportunities. Universities have grown over-reliant on graduate students and other contingent faculty to maintain a pool of low-cost labor. But an upswell of organizing activity in the last year indicates that graduate students have been emboldened to take a collective stand against the precarity and untenable conditions that mar the academic experience in the U.S.

Cancel Student Debt Now

December 18, 2021 Mike Pappas, Left Voice. Resist! Debt, Higher Education, Joe Biden, Student Loans

Student loans: many of us have them, all of us hate them. Over the past several decades, the student loan bubble has only continued to increase, now totaling around $1.7 trillion according to Federal Reserve estimates. There have been growing calls for the Biden administration to extend the moratorium on student loan repayments that has been in place since the beginning of the pandemic. Nevertheless, repayments are set to restart on February 1, 2022, at a time when over 3.3 million people in the U.S. have fallen into poverty during the pandemic; Covid-19 continues to spread throughout the US; and the Omicron variant threatens to bring a wave of new cases peaking as early as January, according to CDC estimates.

Columbia Student Workers Defy University’s Strikebreaking Threats

December 15, 2021 Jesse Thomas And Daniel De Vries, WSWS. Resist! Columbia University, Higher Education, Strike, Worker Rights and Jobs

Last week saw a sharp escalation of the strike by 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City, which continues in the face of strikebreaking threats by the administration. In an effort to shut down the walkout before finals, the university warned striking student workers that it might replace them in the Spring semester if they remained on strike beyond Friday, December 10. Columbia workers rejected this attempt at economic blackmail and held out on the picket line. A poll conducted by the Student Workers of Columbia union (SWC) bargaining committee found that 87 percent of union members and nearly 77 percent of supporters of the strike wished for the strike to continue.

The Ivory Tower Is Dead

November 30, 2021 Davarian L. Baldwin And Sam Klug, Dissent Magazine. Educate! Gentrification, Higher Education, Tax Breaks, Worker Rights

Davarian L. Baldwin’s recent book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, offers an insightful examination—and stirring critique—of the role of universities in the political economy of U.S. cities. In this interview, Baldwin shines a light on how institutions that define themselves as key contributors to the public good have entrenched new forms of urban inequality. Understanding the meaning of higher education in American life today requires seeing the university from the perspective of the workers it exploits, the residents it displaces, and the people it polices. Sam Klug: You claim that many major cities have not just embraced the eds and meds economy but have actually become company towns for large institutions of higher education—what you label “UniverCities.” How do universities exercise this kind of control?

A Stain On The George Washington University Name

November 22, 2021 Unkoch My Campus. Educate! ExxonMobil, Fossil Fuels, Higher Education, Koch Brothers

Our newest report, “The Regulatory Studies Center: A Stain on the George Washington University Name,” delves into the Koch and ExxonMobil funded RSC, which has repeatedly acted as a front for fossil fuel interests with a history of using GW’s name to provide credibility to climate deniers, fossil fuel cronies, and other discredited backers of pseudoscience. The report, written by UnKoch My Campus Student Organizer and GW student Jake Lowe, highlights a number of instances of climate disinformation and details how the RSC has played a role in promoting a deregulation agenda that benefits its donors.

The Hypocritical Oath

November 22, 2021 Collette Harris and Mike Pappas, Left Voice. Organize! Capitalism, Health Care, Higher Education, Medical Education, Student Debt

The end of medical school is a moment that, for many medical school graduates, is several years — sometimes several generations — in the making. After four grueling years the graduate is ready to officially get that “MD” behind their name. But what else has the four years of medical school done for the soon-to-be physician? As previously discussed, medical school is not an apolitical environment in which “medical knowledge” is simply passed on to each student. Mechanisms are put in place to condition students to be less likely to question systems of power. Overall, the medical school structure serves as an indoctrination system. By the time they graduate, medical students are forced to take on massive amounts of student loans — the average medical school graduate has around $250,000 in student loan debt — which serves as a form of economic control and coercion.

Student Loan Payments Resume Soon, But Working Borrowers Aren’t Ready

November 18, 2021 Ayelet Sheffey, Business Insider. Educate! Higher Education, Pandemic, Poverty, Student Loans

On February 1, 2022, the relief student-loan borrowers have had since the start of the pandemic will be stripped away and they will be thrown back into repayment — whether they're ready or not. And most of them are not. The Student Debt Crisis Center, in partnership with Savi — a social impact technology startup — released the results of the fourth installment of the Student Debt x COVID-19 series on Wednesday examining the impact of the pandemic on student-loan borrowers. It found that although student-loan company communication to borrowers has improved since June, 89% of fully-employed borrowers say they do not feel financially secure enough to resume payments in a few months. One in five of the respondents said they will never feel financially-secure enough to restart their student-loan payments.

Wealthy Liberal Arts Colleges Are Exploiting International Students

November 15, 2021 Olivia Wood, Left Voice. Educate! Exploitation, Foreign Students, Higher Education, Worker Rights and Jobs

Language assistants at Grinnell can be asked to work up to 20 hours per week, although it’s unclear how many hours are actually scheduled for the typical student worker. However, if someone worked 20 hours per week every week for the full academic year (nine months) at $12/hour, they would still only make $9,072. Even including the value of room and board, which the language assistants receive for free, their income is still only $23,470 for the year — about $5,000 less than what is considered a living wage for Poweshiek County, Iowa, where Grinnell is located.

Fightback Against Israel Lobby’s Antisemitism Smear Of UK Academics

October 26, 2021 Jonathan Cook, Mintpress News. Resist! Anti-Semitism, Higher Education, Scotland, Zionism

Glasgow, Scotland - Hundreds of international scholars have begun a fightback against pro-Israel lobbyists who have been scoring increasingly high-profile victories on UK campuses as they seek to curb academic freedoms under the guise of stamping out antisemitism. Glasgow university officials have found themselves in the eye of a storm this week, accused of “capitulating” in two separate cases that have undermined academic research into the activities of Israel and its supporters. More than 500 scholars from around the world, including a Nobel prize winner, Royal Society fellows, and former and current presidents of major academic bodies, signed a petition delivered to the university this week in protest.

Howard University Sit-in: A Struggle For Democracy At An HBCU

October 22, 2021 Jamal Rich, Black Agenda Report. Resist! Black America, HBCUs, Higher Education, Student Activism

On late Tuesday, Oct. 12, Howard University students began staging a sit-in demonstration at the Blackburn building in front of the historic Yard. Students brought sleeping bags and food and began demonstrating and making demands that the university protect their health on campus. In the past month, as students returned to the school after more than a year under COVID conditions, a Twitter video went viral showing a puddle of water filling the floor of a kitchen in a dorm room. Later reports confirmed pooling water in students’ closets and bedrooms as well. The university responded to the apparent lack of maintenance and upkeep, saying, “There have been rooms in select residence halls that were affected by mold growth.”

A New Deal For Eds And Meds

October 6, 2021 Ian Gavigan and Jennifer Mittelstadt, Dissent Magazine. Organize! COVID-19, Health Care, Higher Education, Worker Rights

Now, organizers who have built power at the local level are beginning to unite nationally. Earlier in the pandemic, higher education workers had to struggle for survival mostly on their own. The battles, even when successful, took place in isolation; each group of workers in each separate institution, system, or state focused on its own specific setting, even though the problems are national phenomena demanding national solutions. In recent months, organizers have shifted their attention. They recognize that to reconstruct higher education as a public good—one that converts adjunct, outsourced, part-time, and precarious jobs into full-time, well-paid, dignified, stable positions at scale; one that ends the student and institutional debt crises; and one that rebuilds in the interests of students, workers, and communities—they must fight and win at a national scale.

I’m Fighting For Ethnic Studies So My History Won’t Be Erased

September 22, 2021 Adam Hudson, Truthout. Create! Education, Ethnic Studies, Higher Education, Racism

Last year, as a massive uprising against systemic racism swept across the world, activists fighting for Black liberation and racial justice put radical demands against institutional racism on the table, such as abolishing and defunding the police. Another key step toward challenging institutional racism is the push for ethnic studies and teaching about systemic racism in U.S. schools. I am part of that fight in California. Last year, Pittsburg, California’s school board passed an ethnic studies resolution and tasked an ethnic studies committee with implementing curricula for the school district. Pittsburg is a working-class, ethnically diverse city in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded initially as a coal mining town, one of the main employers is the USS-POSCO steel mill.

Book Argues That HBCUs Are Owed Reparations

August 24, 2021 Keenan "higz" Higgins, NewsOne. Create! Education, HBCUs, Higher Education, Reparations

The idea of reparations for Black people as restitution for the slavery of our ancestors is a conversation we’ve been collectively having for decades now — many different points have been made as to when and how money is actually distributed. With Adam Harris’ new book, “The State Must Provide,” that conversation is brought up once again, this time directing those funds towards the education system at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The author, an HBCU man himself from Alabama A&M University, was inspired to make the argument after he saw the stark differences between his own predominately Black campus and the University of Alabama in Huntsville — a PWI university with a small fraction of Black students in attendance.

Graduate Student Researchers Seek Union Representation

June 23, 2021 Katherine Swartz and Gabe Schneider, Cal Matters. Organize! California, Higher Education, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

In one of the largest public employee organizing drives California has seen in over a decade, some 17,000 graduate student researchers at the University of California may soon become union members. Student Researchers United, a committee of graduate student researchers, filed a petition for union certification with the California Public Employment Relations Board May 24. Organizers say they are seeking better wages and healthcare benefits, written protections against harassment and discrimination and a formal grievance procedure. They’re also calling for more legal and political support for international student workers, and an end to irregular or late pay.

Barbara Bowen Passes The Torch

June 18, 2021 John Tarleton, The Indypendent. Organize! Higher Education, New York City (NYC), Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

It was the spring of 2000 and neoliberalism was flowering all across the land when a contingent of unabashedly left-wing professors at the City University of New York running as the New Caucus won control of their dormant faculty union. With the left excluded from power almost everywhere and most of the labor movement in a decades-long slumber, the New Caucus’s victory at the largest urban university system in the country marked a rare breakthrough. The newly elected leaders of the Professional Staff Congress had been protesting the defunding of CUNY for years. In March 1995, some of them donned their academic robes and joined 20,000 CUNY students in an unpermitted march near Rudy Giuliani’s City Hall that ended with mounted police charging into the crowd on horses.

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