Belabored Podcast #114: Striking the Ivory Tower, with Harvard Workers
We speak with two Harvard workers, Kecia Pugh and Anabela Pappas, and UNITE HERE organizer Tiffany Ten Eyck about the ongoing strike at the country’s most elite university.
Winter 2024
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Why We Still Need the “University of Innovation”
Jeffrey Williams’s article “Innovation for What? The Politics of Inequality in Higher Education” (Winter 2016) is generally on target about one of the disturbing trends in our ever-more-commercializing culture, but I have some reservations about what he didn’t say. While …
Making College Free Could Add a Million New Black and Latino Graduates
Bernie Sanders’s plan for higher education would go a long way toward improving graduation rates, raising incomes, and lowering unemployment among millennials—African Americans and Latinos most of all.
Innovation for What? The Politics of Inequality in Higher Education
Today’s embrace of “innovation” in higher ed advances the interests of the business elite over those of educators or students.
The Promise of Title IX: Sexual Violence and the Law
The campaign led by Title IX activists has shown why we need remedies outside of criminal law to fight sexual harassment and promote equality, as much in the workplace as on campus.
Why Free College Is Necessary
Higher education can’t solve inequality, but the debate about free college tuition does something extremely valuable. It reintroduces the concept of public good to education discourse.
Generation Debt
Education is a human right. Anyone willing and able should be able to attend an institution of higher education irrespective of their ability to pay for it.
The Case Against Free College
Without an overhaul of how we understand student benefits, making college free would boost the wealth of college attendees without any egalitarian gains.
Uber for Tutors?
The race to build the biggest and baddest on-demand tutoring platform is on. But is this just another case of “old wine, new bottle” from Silicon Valley?
Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus
The #FergusonSyllabus has organized a disparate population of scholars and students into a virtual movement using Ferguson to frame how struggle has shaped American history.
Belabored Podcast #53: Art, Academia, and Labor Struggles in Abu Dhabi, with Andrew Ross
As activists shine a spotlight on labor abuses surrounding the Guggenheim and NYU’s expansion to Abu Dhabi, Belabored speaks with Andrew Ross about global labor struggles and the role that the arts and academic communities can play in transnational movements for social justice. Plus: Sheryl Sandberg’s latest “Lean In” fail, Jeff Bezos as the World’s Worst Boss, Uber organizing, and more.
The University and the Company Man
Not so long ago, the social contract between workers, government, and employers made college a calculable bet. We built a university system for the way we worked. What happens to college when that social contract is broken—when we work not just differently but for less? And what if the crisis in higher education is related to the broader failures that have left so many workers struggling?
NYU Victory: A Catalyst for University Organizing?
Earlier this week, members of the GSOC (Graduate Student Organizing Committee) -UAW bargaining unit at New York University voted overwhelmingly (620 to 10) for union recognition. The result means that GSOC is (once again) the first graduate-employee union at a …
Interview with an Adjunct Organizer: “People Are Tired of the Hypocrisy”
The debate over the working conditions for adjunct faculty was recently reignited by the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a longtime adjunct professor at Duquesne University who was fired in the last year of her life and died penniless. Moshe Marvit talks to Dan Kovalik, a labor lawyer who knew Votjko and has helped to publicize her story.
The Emergent Academic Proletariat and Its Shortchanged Students
Contingent faculty constitute an academic proletariat, where a lack of workplace control, negligible job security, and prevailing low wages define the conditions of employment. In response to these conditions, previously solitary academic laborers are joining together in an attempt to speak with a collective voice.
