Executive Committee Member #2:
Heather Ferguson
Claremont McKenna
I am an Associate Professor of Middle East and Ottoman History at Claremont McKenna College, am a founding member of the team that established an AAUP Claremont Consortial Chapter in 2020 and have served as secretary, President, and now Vice President of that Chapter. I am part of the United Faculty for the Common Good (UFCG) slate and endorse our collective statement. I can not emphasize the importance of this slate enough, as it represents active and engaged participation in the core principles of AAUP combined with techniques of coalition-building used to establish a slate that brings together candidates from 8 states, from large and small institutions, and from public universities and elite liberal arts colleges. Collectively, our slate embodies the diverse political, legal, and institutional dynamics across the landscape of higher education in the U.S. and commits to grassroots organizing as a key to face new challenges.
We fiercely believe that the tactics that embrace the language of shared governance are not enough to meet the challenges we face in the corporatized landscape of higher education. Our UFCG slate seeks to defend academic freedom and free speech within institutional dynamics that have outsourced power to trustees and donors. The consequences of this now well-established pattern is particularly felt after Oct. 7, when the “Palestine Exception” to free speech jeopardizes us all regardless of ideological commitments, rank, or status, while we also acknowledge the grave precarity of contingent faculty and staff in teaching positions in this moment.
We also insist that what we have been doing is no longer enough, and that we need to fight rigid hierarchies of power and representation in whatever form that they appear.
Our slate presents a vision of collective action that we need in this moment, and I am proud to work toward direct political action via the AAUP-AFT advocacy local 6741.
Join us and help us build higher education for the common good.
Biographical Information
Heather Ferguson is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. She helped found the Claremont Consortium AAUP Chapter in the Summer of 2020 and has served in that chapter as Executive Committee member and President and currently serves as the Vice President of the chapter. The unique features of a 7-institution chapter demand persistent efforts to organize across difference and to build consensus to unify our efforts to defend and protect. Within the chapter, Ferguson participated in campaigns to support student and dining hall staff unions, helped advise as our consortial library staff unionized, worked to reinstate benefits stripped during the pandemic, and helped spearhead a working group specifically focused on supporting contingent faculty even as we fight the escalating adjunctification of the curriculum.
In addition to campus and consortial organizing efforts, Ferguson is the Faculty Co-Director of Claremont McKenna’s Open Academy Initiative, which aims to ensure constructive dialogue across difference. She lives in Upland, California with her partner, her father, one lap cat and one demon cat, and four rowdy chickens.