My name is Gabriel Winantand I am a candidate for the position of Executive Committee Member in the AAUP Advocacy Local 6741 of AFT. 

I am running with the United Faculty for the Common Good (UFCG) slate to help bring the energy of the academic labor movement—and broader labor movement—into the fight for a renewed and democratized system of higher education. We all know the dangers that our professions and disciplines face: attacks on academic freedom, contempt for academic inquiry, and grotesque stratification of academic labor markets. While these do not emanate from one source or call for one solution, all have a critical economic dimension: academics are vulnerable because of how our universities have been undermined and privatized through fiscal austerity and increasingly corporate-minded governance. My goal is to bring my experience and knowledge from the labor movement to AAUP to help make it a fighting organization capable of rallying the university community against these attacks.

In particular, my hope for AAUP is to work to turn it into a broad umbrella for everyone interested in the wellbeing of American universities—faculty of all statuses and ranks, workers, students, and the broader public. At the moment, these constituencies are disorganized or, where they are organized, fragmented. While there has been a remarkable upswing in militancy and organization among students and academic workers (from debtors to student workers to adjunct faculty to postdocs to cafeteria workers and beyond), this phenomenon has no distinct organizational home or voice. Different unions, different occupations, divisions of rank and status and of public and private, and still other dimensions divide the forces that could together fight for a democratic university. AAUP can and should be a key site where these energies come together to advance a vision of a university that serves the common good of our society, by meeting the needs and demands of the students and workers who make campuses run.

I hope you will support me and my fellow UFCG slate members in this effort. For more on our slate and program, please visit: http://www.unitedfacultyforthecommongood.org.