Higher education is in crisis — business as usual won’t save it

Higher education is under assault. We need to organize and fight back. We need to unite all faculty for a higher education system that serves the common good. We need to focus on building labor power and solidarity, uniting faculty of all ranks and building coalitions with our other campus (non-faculty) colleagues, and expanding political power through coalitions with allied student, climate, and social justice organizations at the local and national levels, among others.

Where We Are At Now

Politicians, unelected boards of trustees, and wealthy donors are attacking our academic freedom to teach, research, and speak on issues ranging from race, gender, and sexuality to climate change and politics in the Middle East. In some states, our colleagues are facing virtual coups by right-wing federal and state legislators seeking to use campus diversity initiatives, critical race theory courses, or pro-Palestinian activism as pretexts to defund higher education, casualize labor, and control what can be studied and discussed in the United States. Our university leaders now operate our institutions as if they were for-profit corporations, searching for ways to cut costs, raise revenues, and orient the university to the dictates of corporate, governmental, and private donors. When coupled with decades of systematic defunding of higher education, this corporate ethos has led to the adjunctification of the professoriate, spiraling student debt, and the transformation of the university into a financial institution that often burdens if not harms students, workers, and local and global communities in its efforts to raise revenues and increase its endowment. 

Where We Need to Go

Against this anti-democratic and corporatized vision of higher education, we believe in the radical idea that higher education should serve the common good. It must be an incubator of critical inquiry, unapologetic dissent, and rigorous research free from political, donor, or corporate interference. Higher education should be a building block of a healthy democracy and an economy that works for all. It must be an engine for social mobility, challenging forms of systemic oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, age, (dis)ability, immigration status, or colonialism. Instead of focusing on vanity building projects or entrepreneur enterprises or increasing the endowment, it must invest in things that improve education—such as smaller class sizes and better pay and job security for faculty and graduate instructors so they have time and energy to focus on course development—and support all its faculty’s research programs, especially those that do not attract large industry or governmental grants. In universities for the common good, all who desire to attend an institution of higher education must have the right to do so without being subjected to decades of debilitating debt. All who work at them must be paid fairly and enjoy job security. And all need to have a powerful, collective voice in their workplace. As faculty for the common good, we must do more than defend what is left of shared governance; we need to strengthen it and expand it beyond the ranks of faculty. Democracy should not end when we walk onto campus grounds. 

What We Need to Do

The crisis of higher education is decades in the making and won’t be fixed with a business as usual approach. We need to focus on building labor power and solidarity, uniting faculty of all ranks and building coalitions with our other campus (non-faculty) colleagues, and expanding political power through coalitions with allied student, climate, and social justice organizations at the local and national levels, among others. We take inspiration from other grassroots and rank-and-file labor organizations—foremost Higher Education Labor United (HELU), but also those in K-12 education and other sectors, such as Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), and Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU)—that are focused on transforming their unions, local and national communities, and the broader political landscape through organizing and direct political action. Issuing declarations and reports will not save higher education. Only a commitment to organizing all faculty and building coalitions for the common good will enable us to create the system of higher education that we need.