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Higher Education

MIT Graduate Students Vote To Form Union

April 7, 2022 Max Larkin, Portside. , , ,
Graduate students at MIT have voted to form a union by a 2-to-1 margin. Organizers said the result was a response to the growing challenges facing students — who teach, conduct research and provide academic support on the Cambridge campus — and in keeping with the institute’s experimental spirit. Fifth-year doctoral student Lilly Chin leapt back into organizing to help with the get-out-the-vote campaign in the computer science department, one of MIT’s largest. “My phone was buzzing for five minutes straight: ‘Make sure so-and-so can get to the polls,’ ” Chin said. The count Wednesday happened quickly, but it was still “a little nerve-racking,” said Ki-Jana Carter, an organizer and fifth-year doctoral student in material science and engineering.

Debt Collective Day Of Action Urges Biden To Cancel Student Debt

April 5, 2022 Jacqui Germain, Teen Vogue. , , ,
The Debt Collective is upping the ante in their fight for full federal student debt cancellation with their Pick Up the Pen, Joe! rally and day of action today in front of the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, DC. The event comes roughly a month before the pause on loan repayments is set to expire on May 1. Some White House sources have indicated the Biden administration may move that deadline again or forgive some amount of debt, but regardless, the Debt Collective’s focus remains squarely on eliminating federal student debt in full. A broad coalition of more than 50 community organizations and labor unions from across the country are joining the Debt Collective in the nation’s capital to call on Biden to cancel all federal student debt through executive order.

An HBCU Roundtable On Violence And Accountability

February 26, 2022 Ko Bragg, Scalawag Magazine. , , ,
Historically Black Colleges and Universities, most of which are concentrated in the South, hold contrasting legacies as both safe havens for Black students and frequent targets of violence. Last week, Scalawag hosted a live Twitter conversation with journalists who are both current and former students of HBCUs to discuss the broader contexts they have experienced and written about around student safety. This is a conversation with renewed urgency: As panelist Adam Harris, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The State Must Provide, pointed out, there hasn't been a week in February this year without a bomb threat at an HBCU. The latest string of threats began in January at some schools, with at least 14 HBCUs reporting bomb threats on the first day of Black History Month. Two weeks ago, the FBI identified as many as six suspects—all juveniles—but no one has yet been publicly charged in connection with the threats, and no explosives found.

The Power Of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty As Working-Class

February 23, 2022 Helena Worthen, Working-Class Perspectives. , , ,
Just over 20 years ago, Michael Zweig published The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. At that year’s How Class Works conference at SUNY Stony Brook, academics from history, political science, labor and industrial relations, and other fields debated Zweig’s use of the term “working class.” Some thought it was a throwback to the 1930s or a tip-off that someone was a Marxist. But even at a conference attended by many academics from working-class backgrounds, no one pointed out that academics are working class. Twenty years ago, academia still seemed like a middle-class or even an upper-class job, even though that had started to change in the mid 1970s.Young academics expected that if they did “all the right things,” they would get tenure and live happily ever after.

Deepening The Higher Education Divide

January 21, 2022 Sherry Linkon, Working-Class Perspectives. , , ,
American mythology promises upward mobility, and college can provide an important first step up the class ladder. With the rise of the “knowledge economy” and the decline of industrial jobs and unions, some insisted that education is the answer to economic displacement. If you can’t earn a stable, living wage as a steelworker, go to college and become a nurse or a computer programmer. And if you didn’t make that choice, it’s your own fault that you’re struggling. After all, college was affordable, accessible, and varied. You could commute to campus, take evening classes, cover tuition with loans and grants, and work part-time or even full-time while you completed the degree that would transform your life.

Low Wages And Exploitative Conditions Are Sparking Graduate Student Strikes

December 19, 2021 Tyler Walicek, Truthout. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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.”
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