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Seems like the grad employee strike at Michigan is going wall-to-wall. I would not want to be admin right now
Higher ed is due for a strikewave and the fighting K-12 teacher’s unions showed folks the blueprint. All that’s left to do now is organize
In so many ways, as @tressiemcphd pointed out on here the other day, the basic contract between universities and students has been broken. And it's been broken between universities and instructional staff for a long time. People have never been angrier
The neoliberal university has very successfully managed to play the different constituencies against one another in order to strengthen upper-level administrators' hands at every turn. This works well until it doesn't.
The COVID crisis has exposed many administrations' disregard for the people who have to live and work in universities and the surrounding neighborhoods. The fiction of universities as communities of care or shared inquiry has been strained past the breaking point
And I'm not for abolishing universities--not by a long shot. But I am certainly for abolishing this model of the university.
also important to note that this is a strike that makes the connections between badly misguided university policies on COVID and universities as heavily invested in policing: https://black-ink.info/2020/09/07/abolitionist-strike/
These policing demands aren't tacked on: they are crucial to analyzing how universities have prioritized "security"--a kind of security that's heavily underwritten by white supremacy--over safety.
If I'm not mistaken, it's the first "bargaining for the common good" higher ed strike of the COVID era and you absolutely love to see it
