Dear HELU Members and Friends,
During our November 2024 General Assembly meeting, HELU delegates from around the country took stock of our current situation. Higher ed staff, student workers, contingent faculty, and tenure-line faculty from public and private institutions, from community colleges, state schools, and research universities, put their heads together to analyze the challenges ahead. The voices of HELU did not underestimate the threats to higher education and organized labor that are on the horizon but also expressed enormous resolve to continue organizing expansively.
As Rebecca Givan, the Chair of HELU’s Politics and Policy Committee, put it so well, we are now free to develop the most ambitious and uncompromising campaigns for higher education. It’s clear that the second Trump administration will deepen the polycrisis that has snarled together adjunctification, individual debt, institutional debt, soaring health care costs, deportations of undocumented students and workers, artificial intelligence replacing human labor, department and program cuts and closures, decertification of higher ed unions, campus administrators’ profound repression of workers’ and students’ voices, and federal dollars flowing to war instead of to education. It’s clear that these interlocking problems flow from federal and state disinvestment that has left our colleges and universities radically underfunded. It’s also clear that none of us in HELU is interested in hopelessness, dormancy, or quiescence.
Everywhere we look, we see organizing models that teach and inspire us. At the University of California, service, patient care, research, and technical workers from three bargaining units struck for two days over unfair labor practices. At the University of Connecticut, grad workers and tenure-stream faculty beat back austerity to save programs and jobs. At Portland State, four unions joined in coalition to demand that their Board of Trustees stop job cuts and treat unions fairly.
And HELU hosted two linked events on organizing campaigns in non-collective bargaining contexts. Higher ed activists from Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Washington shared with us their victories, struggles, and lessons learned. Event participants came away from the conversations with insight into successful organizing strategies and the confidence to pursue them even when the odds are stacked against us.
HELU’s National Coordinated Organizing Committee will continue working to build regional and state coalitions for bargaining and issue-based campaigns. Our Politics and Policy Committee will continue working on legislative and electoral strategies for federal and state reinvestment in our colleges and universities. I hope that your union will join HELU to advance this work and that you’ll contribute as a HELU delegate or at-large member.
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