In 2019, the Higher Education Inquirer began writing about the ruthless automation of academic work. We were looking for information on how the ideas of Frederick Taylor and his intellectual progeny (e.g. Harvard Business School's Clayton Christensen) resulted in an academic assembly line for low-grade higher education. A subprime education for the masses.
It was obvious that large for-profit colleges had been divesting in academic labor for decades, replacing full-time instructors with adjunct faculty. And they eventually replaced thousands of physical learning sites with exclusively online learning. Over time, content creators and other ghost workers replaced adjuncts. And the remaining adjuncts worked as deskilled labor. Shareholder profits, and branding, advertising, and enrollment numbers were more important than student outcomes.
Two years later we used the terms "robocollege" and "robostudent" to acknowledge the extent of dehumanization in higher education. We noted that this process was taking place not only at for-profit colleges, but shadow for-profits, mid-rung state-run schools--and even at more elite schools who were looking for increased profits.
Community colleges continue to dehumanize significant portions of their adjunct workforces with low pay and precarity. Online education makes it more alienating but more convenient for working folks.
Expensive public and private universities continue to use grad assistants, lecturers, and other adjunct instructors in high-tech lecture halls. Classes almost as alienating and unproductive as online instruction.
Over the last four decades, thousands of satellite campuses have closed across the US, making local connections less possible. Night schools at the local high school are a thing of the past.
For-profit Online Program Managers (OPMs) like Academic Partnerships and 2U recruit students for regional and elite state universities and private schools--hoping to profit from the growth of online education. But learning outcomes, completion rates, and debt-to-earnings ratios may be riskier bets for consumers choosing to take the more convenient and seemingly cheaper online route.
Studies indicate that medical school students in face-to-face programs fall short in empathy. So what can we expect from online instruction in education, nursing, psychology, social work, and other professions where empathy is necessary?
Where does the process of dehumanization stop in US higher
education? It's difficult to believe that an extension of all this automation, artificial intelligence, will make human existence more humane for the masses--not under our current political economy that values greed and excess.
It doesn't appear that accreditors, government agencies, labor unions, the
media, or higher ed institutions themselves are deeply interested in
countering these technological trends--or even in understanding its consequences. It could be argued that this new wave of education serves US elites well by delivering subprime outcomes: making the "educated underclass" easier to control and less able to compete.
Academic labor has had a few recent wins at a few brand name public universities but this seems less likely to occur where the labor supply is less valued.
The numbers of full-time faculty continue to drop at robocolleges. And where there are already few full-time faculty, US workers at Southern New Hampshire University and Purdue Global are being replaced by cheap academic labor working remotely from India. This itself may only be a stop gap as artificial intelligence replaces intellectual labor.
How about other private and state run schools in decline? Will they follow the same desperate path of dehumanization to stem the bleeding?
What lies ahead for online students? If student-consumers are merely present to acquire or upgrade credentials, why won't they use AI and other methods to escalate levels of intellectual dishonesty? For those who are unemployed or underemployed, is returning to online education worth the financial risk and the time away from work, friends, and family? Will their educational work be obsolete before they can put it to good use?
Despite more than a decade of enrollment losses, US higher education revenues were never higher than in 2021--the latest year for which the US Department of Education has released data.
This reflects the persistent notion that middle-class families will go into debt, sometimes deep debt, to send their children or themselves to private and public universities--to compete for a declining number of good jobs. It also reflects the willingness that the US Department of Education has to subsidize this debt.
While revenues have dropped at many community colleges, for-profit colleges, small private and public colleges, and regional public universities, the demand for an elite or brand name US education has never been higher. It's difficult to imagine things changing in the near future.
Within a couple of hours of posting my comments on the Department of Education’s proposal to create a list of programs with low financial value, I received multiple inquiries about whether there was a user-friendly dataset of current debt-to-earnings ratios for programs. Since I work with College Scorecard data on a regular basis and have used the data to write about debt-to-earnings ratios, it only took a few minutes to put something together that I hope will be useful.
To create a debt-to-earnings ratio that covered as many programs as possible, I pulled median student debt accumulated at that institution for the cohorts of students who left college in the 2016-17 or 2017-18 academic years and matched it with earnings for those same cohorts one calendar year later (calendar year 2018 or 2019). The College Scorecard has some earnings data more than one year out at this point, but a much smaller share of programs are covered. I then calculated a debt-to-earnings ratio. And for display purposes, I also pulled median parent debt from that institution.
The resulting dataset covers 45,971 programs at 5,033 institutions with data on both student debt and earnings for those same cohorts. You can download the dataset here in Excel format and use filter/sort functions to your heart’s content.
Robert Kelchen is a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville who studies higher education finance, accountability policies and practices, and student financial aid. All opinions expressed here are his own.
During several keynotes, podcast interviews, and panel sessions over the past two years, I have described how the Online Program Management (OPM) market was facing enormous pressures and would change dramatically. I took some heat in private conversations for overstating the case, but as the past 12 months have shown, it turns out that I understated the turmoil and change of the market.
With that in mind, it is time to update our two main OPM Market graphics that were last shared in the Summer 2022 update.
OPM Market Landscape
Market valuations of publicly-traded OPM companies have continued to drop, with 2U/edX, Coursera, and Keypath all down 75% or more from March 2021.
FutureLearn sold the remnants of its business to a for-profit system, and it now has the most obnoxious website of any OPM provider, past or present.
Byju’s, which (according to multiple media accounts) had been considering an acquisition of 2U/edX or Coursera, abandoned these plans to go off and deal with its own financial crisis.
Noodle acquired South Africa-based Hubble Studios.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on the OPM market, triggering (but not causing) official efforts to make massive regulatory changes.
As readers of On EdTech know, this last bullet is now the driver for market dynamics for 2023 and probably 2024.
As always, please note that this view is intended to give a visual overview of the market landscape and is not mean to be comprehensive in terms of vendors represented. This is particularly true in the smaller customer base and fee for service categories.
OPM Market Dynamics
When we first came up with the Mad Max graphic in 2018, it was intended to counter the golly gee, the OPM market is rich, well-funded, and growing like crazy coverage, or the flip side of these companies are all getting rich pulling profits out of the schools coverage that we saw in EdTech and national media through 2022.
This year there are two primary changes with the overall message of the graphic:
Online enrollments in the largest OPM market (US graduate schools) are no longer growing – they’re dropping and in structural ways. OPMs are still chasing those enrollments and tuition revenue, but the dynamics change when the target has its own problems.
The small threat from the Department of Education and its activist allies to the OPM market has become a major threat, with an all-out assault.
We still get a picture of a chaotic market that is not for the faint of heart, and one that is seeing consolidations and category changes, and these changes will continue. All of this in a Mad Max-style pursuit of college online course and program revenue (whether rev share or fee-for-service or a blend, and whether degree- or certificate-based).
Note the changes in the program revenue target:
as well as the central market threat from ED regulations, going after both revenue sharing and TPS status, all in the name of protecting the helpless:
with 2U being the chosen target to personify the regulatory actions:
We also see Pearson getting out of the OPM business:
Zovio’s crash:
and Byju’s flying away from the scene.
ASU+GSV Angle
Next week I (along with Glenda Morgan) will be at ASU+GSV, and I will be on a panel with Ryan Craig, Mike Goldstein, Katherine Lee Carey, and Toby Jackson. The session is titled “Decoding the Dear Colleague Letter – What’s a TPS?!”, scheduled for Wednesday at 11am PDT. I am eager to find out at the conference if the investment community is aware of the significance of ED’s targeting of the OPM market, at least for revenue sharing business models, and of the potential impact of TPS guidance.
Update 4/13: Added bullet on Noodle acquiring Hubble Studios.
[Editor's Note: This article first appeared in The Cheat Sheet, the free newsletter on academic integrity and cheating.]
Yesterday, academic cheating company Chegg took yet another major hit on its stock value after the market closed, a decline that continues.
Today, Chegg - which is shockingly listed on the New York Stock Exchange - tumbled below $10 a share. In February 2021, Chegg shares were worth more than $113. In just over two years, Chegg shares have lost more than $100 in value - an Alpine decline of more than 91%.
Yikes.
The panic retreat by investors was initiated by Chegg’s quarterly earnings (Q1 - 2023) which were, not good. The bullets, according to news coverage:
Total net revenue down 7% year over year
*Subscription services, which represent 90% of Chegg’s business, were down 3% year over year.
*Total subscribers were down 5.1 million year over year.
*Projected further, continued declines in revenue, subscribers, and profit.
The company and media blamed the decline on AI tools such as ChatGPT - the automated service that can answer academic questions faster than Chegg, and for free.
In the earnings announcement, Chegg’s CEO said:
"since March we saw a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT. We now believe it’s having an impact on our new customer growth rate."
Two things.
To start, The Cheat Sheet could have saved Chegg’s investors some serious money. Or, made you some, had you shorted Chegg. Back in Issue 68, I wrote:
… Chegg thinks their earnings will be essentially unchanged for 2023 vs 2022. I think they’re dreaming.
They were.
I’d repeated the wisdom of some smart readers who said early, early on that the likes of ChatGPT was going to be a Chegg killer. I agreed and told EdSurge exactly that, also in February (see Issue 193):
Some instructors have opposed companies like Chegg and Course Hero, as trying to get content related to the courses they teach removed can cause a headache. The chatbots represent a new headache, for teachers and possibly also for homework-help companies.
That whole business could be threatened by free tools like ChatGPT, argues Derek Newton, who runs The Cheat Sheet, a newsletter that covers academic dishonesty.
For Newton, the primary motivation of a student using homework-help services is laziness or a lack of preparedness. And so having a free alternative that can give answers to questions — like ChatGPT — could shrink the number of students who are willing to pay
In that Issue I wrote:
It’s too early to tell if ChatGPT will dent Chegg and its irresponsible ilk - but I can’t really see how it won’t.
And so it came to pass.
It is clear now that Chegg’s recent announcement of a partnership with ChatGPT (see Issue 203) was a desperate Hail Mary. And there’s no reason to think it will work, no reason to think Chegg’s decline won’t continue.
It also answers a question I’d been wrestling with for years - whether Chegg’s investors (see Issue 142) knew its core business was academic misconduct or not. This most recent investment retreat proved to me that they did. They only left when a better, more efficient cheater started eating their profits.
But a wise confidant and reader texted to say my question was academic - Chegg’s investors know now. He’s right.
When a free answer site takes away your customers, it becomes very clear very quickly what you’re actually selling.
Finally, a reminder that a collapsing valuation is not Chegg’s only problem.
As it happens, I checked in last week on the legal challenge by Pearson, against Chegg (see Issue 55). The suit is still active. And if Pearson wins, it could decapitate Chegg’s entire value proposition - selling the answers to questions they do not own. Chegg also continues to face investor legal challenges (see Issue 163). Since this recent stock evaporation essentially confirms that Chegg was a cheating provider all along, it’s hard to see how this recent news hurts investors’ claims.
In order to streamline the Higher Education Inquirer, we have removed the HEI archive from the right panel of the blog; information that could only be seen in the non-mobile format.
The HEI archive has included a list of important books and other sources, articles on academic labor, worker movements, and labor actions, student loan debt, debt forgiveness, borrower defense to repayment and student loan asset-backed securities, robocolleges, online program managers, lead generators, and the edtech meltdown, enrollment trends at for-profit colleges, community colleges, and small public and private universities, layoffs and closings of public and private institutions, consumer awareness and organizational transparency and accountability, neoliberalism, neo-conservativism, neo-fascism and structural racism in higher education, and strategic corporate research.
US higher education enrollment has been declining slowly and consistently since 2011. The downturn has been significant but small enough for the media and many people outside of higher education to miss this phenomenon.
Enrollment is down about 5 million students a year from its peak.
Source: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics
In 2026 and 2027 we expect a more precipitous drop: a result of declining fertility rates during the 2008-2009 recession.
So where does US higher education enrollment go after 2026? And will more people notice?
Overall, it doesn't look good if we take a look at state-by-state projections for high school graduates from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). Florida, Nevada, Idaho, DC, Maryland, Texas, South Dakota, South Carolina, and Utah may see few if any future declines. But 20 states are expected to have additional enrollment loses of 10 percent or more. Here's a list of the states that may be hardest hit in coming years.
Source: WICHE
These enrollment declines are in addition to the enrollment declines of 2011-2023 that all of those states experienced.
Enrollment declines after 2038 may also appear, a ripple effect of the Covid pandemic. Other future headwinds include climate change, internal and external conflicts, and economic disruption. Skepticism about the value of higher education has been growing for years. Crushing student loan debt has also fueled this skepticism.
With a few notable exceptions, enrollment losses have been restricted to
community colleges, for-profit colleges, small private universities and
regional public universities. At the moment, it appears that more elite schools will not be affected, and may actually profit from the decline of other schools. And as competition for good jobs increases, graduating from elite universities may carry more prestige value--at almost any price.
*The Higher Education Inquirer would like to thank Nathan Grawe for his assistance in this article.
Editors note: The Higher Education Inquirer thanks Hank Kalet for allowing us to reprint his substack Channel Surfing as a record of the Rutgers strike. Hank is a lecturer at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information. We encourage you to subscribe to his substack and visit the Rutgers AAUP-AFT and Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union twitter pages.
Post-Strike Diary: A Step Back and Some History The Fight Here at Rutgers Is Not Over, Nor Is It an Isolated Battle
I want to get back to first principles. Put the strike at Rutgers into the broader context of higher ed and contingent worker right. Connect it to the larger currents in the labor movement.
The 40 years starting with Ronald Reagan’s election were awful ones for labor unions. Union activity had already peaked when Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers and signaled to business that the era of labor peace on the employer side was over.
I worked in a factory in Trenton that summer. There were whispers that union organizing was taking place, but it wasn’t gaining much traction. Factory jobs were leaving the state and the Northeast and there was fear that management would close shop and move to Georgia, Alabama, or another anti-union state. Reagan’s action was the final straw, dooming the efforts, and setting in motion a frenzy of union busting we are still struggling to understand. (I’m working on a play about this moment.)
The 40 years that followed were mostly dark for the union movement, with some victories. Some of this darkness was brought on by the unions themselves, many of which had calcified and were either corrupt or overly cozy with management and politicians. Grassroots energy was dismissed and reform efforts short-lived.
The Covid pandemic shifted the terrain. Donna Murch, a union colleague and associate professor of history at Rutgers, has been making the case that Covid laid bare the vulnerabilities of all faculty members and all workers at Rutgers. Covid forced classes online with little assistance and no compensation for the work needed to make that happen. It put clinicians and lab workers in peril, requiring them to work through the pandemic often without proper PPE. It disrupted grad students’ research, even as their funding clock continued to tick.
This precarity was evident throughout society, a realization that led to union drives at Amazon, Starbucks, and other companies that relied on short-term and/or low-paid workers. Warehouse workers — many immigrants, some undocumented— often faced the worst conditions.
Those of us with a level of economic privilege were able to pay folks in the gig economy to do our grocery shopping and provide needed services, allowing Im us to stay home.
Unemployment shot up, wages stagnated with the economy, and the fascistic wing of the Republican Party — those most aligned with then-President Trump and opposed to vaccines, masks, and those who violently responded to the Black Lives Matter protests that spread after the state murder of George Floyd — cracked down and continue to crackdown on efforts to expand opportunity and inclusion.
This is the backdrop against which we have to judge the current wave of organizing and strikes — a movement that is gaining traction in ways we have not seen in a long time.
Seventy-one percent of Americans now approve of labor unions. Although statistically similar to last year's 68%, it is up from 64% before the pandemic and is the highest Gallup has recorded on this measure since 1965.
Union density remains an issue, though this is likely because of the legal impediments erected over 40-plus years of aggressive anti-union activity from both parties, abetted by a media infrastructure that has lost its connections to workers.
News coverage of labor is lagging badly behind this surge of organizing. The loss of labor as a beat has created a structural coverage deficit that, in practical terms, means reporters are reporting and writing stories with at best a limited background on labor issues and dynamics, including how labor law works and just how much power the bosses have accumulated over the years. The upshot is a series of stories throughout the press that boils nearly every labor dispute down to money, or that filters these disputes through an earlier lens in which each dispute is a singular event unrelated to the larger American economy.
The reality, as we discussed in my class today, is that the current wave of organizing is about more than money. It is about life conditions, workplace conditions, about safety and scheduling, and long-term job security. Starbucks workers want more control of their schedules, more regularity, so they can plan their lives. Amazon workers and others working in the new mostly unregulated warehouse industry want safety rules, regular breaks, sick time. The rail workers, who were thrown onto the tracks by President Joe Biden, want an end to the kind of scheduling that results in exhaustion and dangerous conditions — one of the many factors that resulted in the deadly East Palestine crash.
Adjuncts and grads at Rutgers and other institutions of higher education want raises. But we also want respect. We want job security — big raises mean little if we can be fired or laid off easily. We want a shift in values in higher ed away from the current model, which is more focused on creating a profit (big reserve accounts and endowments that can be invested to generate bigger reserves and endowments), on building sports empires, on turning faculty into grant chasers or replaceable cogs.
The framework in place at Rutgers is a start, but this contract fight is far from over. And even when this one ends, we know there will be more work to be done. This is the beginning of the transformation of higher ed, not the conclusion.
Post-Strike Diary: Rutgers Unions Fight On Historic Gains But Work To Be Done.
The strike is off, for now. But the efforts to remake Rutgers continues.
As I wrote Saturday, the unions representing striking workers voted to accept a contract framework in exchange for pausing the strike before it entered its second week. We paused to let students get back to classes. To let them finish their semester, their careers at Rutgers.
The framework includes a 14% raise over four years for full-time faculty, a 33% pay increase for grads over four years, a 25.5% bump for post-docs, and a 48% increase for adjuncts; multi-semester contracts for adjuncts, presumptive renewal of contracts, recognition of graduate fellows as grad workers, changes in grievance and evaluations procedures, and five-year funding for grads. The framework also includes elements of the “Bargaining for the Common Good” agenda: a $600,000 recurring Community Fund and the end of the university policy that prevents students from registering for classes or getting transcripts or diplomas due to unpaid fines and fees, and a Union-University-Community table.
Much of this is historic, but it’s still a work in progress. The clinicians, researchers, and professors represented by BHSNJ-AAUP have nothing from administration, and more needs to be done for grads, for students and the community, and for adjuncts.
That was the message Monday afternoon as about 100 picketers gathered and chanted, reminding the community and the press that the battle to end the corporatization on higher ed continues — both here in New Jersey and nationally — continues.
Picketers carried strike signs with the word “suspended” stapled above “On Strike.” We marched intro of Scott Hall on College Avenue chanting, “The strike may be suspended. The struggle hasn’t ended.” We did his despite the cold win blowing own College Avenue as students looked on. We have more actions planned this week, part of a rolling set of protests designed to keep our issues in front of the public and to maintain pressure on an administration that failed to take us seriously until we walked and the governor got involved.
I told NBC New York that we could reinstate the strike if management fails to play ball. A threat? Idle talk? I’ll leave it at that. But we’re not going away. We’re not backing down.
RU Strike Diary, Day 5 Ends With a 'Framework'
We have a framework for a deal and are pausing the strike that has shut down Rutgers University for the last five days. I’m being careful of the language. We don’t have a deal and we have not ended the strike. We have a framework. There remain a lot issues to address, but most of the big ones are settled. The framework takes us a long way toward our demands of equal pay, job security, better pay for grads, and making Rutgers a better neighbor. It is not a perfect deal. We wanted more. But I think we moved the ball far down the field. This is not the final battle, but part of a larger movement.
Cliches. Platitudes. Bromides.
But still accurate.
I think the deal is good for the workers and students involved, but I can’t say much about the details. The journalist in me bristles at this, but my role as a member of the adjunct faculty union executive board prohibits me from saying much more. This is in line with the week for me, a week in which I found myself on the other side of the reporter’s notebook. I’ve talked with more reporters this week than in my entire adult life.
I teach journalism at Rutgers as an adjunct. I became involved in the union effort in 2021 and have become more and more active. The more active I became, the more I learned about the inequities of higher ed. The more I learned about these inequities, the more I became involved.
This was the same for just about everyone I talked with all week. I spent five days on the lines in New Brunswick. It was hot. It was exhausting. It was thrilling. Turnout fluctuated and the size of the pickets on College Avenue varied from day to day. We probably hit 1,000 picketers on Tuesday afternoon, when the folks from Cook/Douglass and Livingston and Busch joined in a march up George Street to the administration building on the Old Queens campus (a small subsection of the College Avenue campus) and joined the College Avenue contingent in an emotional and forceful show of solidarity. Wednesday featured a wake-up tour of campus, while Friday offered a festive feel, even as talks were heating up in Trenton.
The larger experience was one of joy and unity. That does not mean everyone is happy, but we made massive gains and I think we need to acknowledge that.
The message I would offer to the public at this point is that academic workers are tired of being pushed around. We are tired of the corporate bent of higher ed, angry that universities have been coopted by big-time athletics, corporate-style governance and funding models, and that what should be their primary missions — education and research — have been sold off to funders who only care about how they can monetize their scientific discoveries.
We have watched as more and more teaching and research jobs have been remade as contingent, easily replaceable labor. We have watched as the humanities are decimated in favor of incredibly important STEM courses and programs, not because of academic need, but because STEM generates grant revenue.
Rutgers, like most American universities, operates as a corporation. Senior administrators, who often have a Master of Business Administration degree (MBA) with little or no experience in higher education, along with sports coaches who have the potential to earn the university money, are highly compensated while thousands of poorly paid educators and staff are denied job security and benefits. Adjunct faculty and graduate workers are often forced to apply for Medicaid. They frequently take second jobs teaching at other colleges, driving for Uber or Lyft, working as cashiers, delivering food for Grubhub or DoorDash, walking dogs, house sitting, waiting on tables, bartending and living four or six to an apartment or camping out on a friend’s sofa. This inversion of values is destroying the nation’s educational system.
This is why we have seen academic workers strike across the country, from California to Illinois to New York. The strike at Rutgers is part of this movement and, because of the university’s size and the fact that all three of its faculty unions walked out of class, might be the most important of these efforts. The University of California strike was larger, but as with all other walkouts it only featured mainly graduate students. The strike at The New School was about adjunct wages. At Temple, it was just grads. At Rutgers, I walked along side non-tenure-track professors, full professors, graduate students, undergraduates and allies from the area.
The framework — again, not a tentative agreement or a contract — goes some of the way toward addressing these issues at Rutgers and, if it is ratified, could stand as a model and the largest victory so far in the battle for the soul of the American university system.
RU Strike Diary, Day 4
Day four was a tougher haul. The heat had a draining effect on many of us, but we were out on the lines and we are committed to remaining out for as long as it takes to win the transformation we are demanding.
There are three unions on strike — AAUP-AFT, the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, and BHSNJ-AFT. We are negotiating together. Fighting together.
Our demands:
*Equal pay for equal work and job security for adjuncts like me; *A living wage and longer guaranteed funding for grad workers; *Recognition of grad fellows as workers who should be part of the union; *Job security for non-tenure-track professors; *Protections for academic freedom; *Control of schedules; *Wages that keep up with inflation; *An end to onerous fines on students and the practices of withholding class registration and transcripts and the sale of student debt to collection agencies; *A rent freeze on Rutgers-owned properties; *A community hardship fund; *Health care for all workers; *And numerous other changes in the way Rutgers operates.
Thursday featured numerous targeted pickets, which may have left the impression on College Ave that there were fewer people out. But we made joyful noise on Voorhees Mall and in front of Scott Hall, marched through the streets of the city to show solidarity with the community, marched on President Jonathan Holloway’s mansion in Piscataway, and on the homes of several members of the university Board of Governors.
Our pressure has had an effect. As our bargaining team has reported, the administration has been pushed significantly — by us and because of pressure for Gov. Phil Murphy. I’ve been critical of his public statements, but it’s clear he has contributed to at least some of the progress.
Make no mistake, however. We are winning this because we’ve out organized management, showed our commitment, and made the public case that we are engaged in a moral cause to bring equity to high ed, a message that is resonating beyond our campuses.
Day
3 went much like Day 2, with massive pickets and a powerful rally in
front of Winants Hall — home to Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway
offices. There were drag queens, music, and a festive atmosphere — but
hanging over it all was the specter of negotiations.
On Sunday
night, Gov. Phil Murphy summoned both sides to Trenton, using his office
to try to avert the strike — didn’t happened — and possibly get the
dispute settled quickly. We walked, knowing this was the backdrop and
brought hundreds upon hundreds of people into the streets — faculty,
staff, community members, and students.
The rest of this post will be
filled with photos, which should remind everyone how much energy and
unity there is and to help keep our spirits high as this stretches into
the fourth day.
A Good Exhaustion Prevented Me From Getting This Out Yesterday
The
word from the table is progress. It’s slow, but it’s happening, driven
by the power we’ve assembled on the streets of New Brunswick,
Piscataway, Camden, and Newark.
More than a thousand strikers
across the campuses is not something you ignore. And we’re planning to
grow our already robust pickets every day until this strike ends.
Several images stood out for me from Day 2:
The
massive picket that marched up College Avenue and circled the campus,
led by students and faculty carrying a banner declaring “Equal Pay for
Equal Work” — which has been the central fight of the adjunct union. Our
demands were centered in this amazing march, as was a push for equity —
for adjuncts, grad workers, students, and the community.
Rutgers
functions like a corporation in too many ways, chewing up and spitting
out vulnerable workers and the community in which it’s situated. It’s
real estate practices — buying up properties across the city and either
raising rents or gentrifying— are making New Brunswick unaffordable.
It’s why we’re calling for a rent freeze on Rutgers’ properties, an end
to predatory student fees and punitive actions when those fees and fines
go unpaid, and a community fund to help our neighbors.
We’ve been saying that this strike is about faculty and students and the university’s largely poor and immigrant neighbors, and we mean it.
Later
in the day came the mass convergence, when all of the New Brunswick
picketing marched to the entrance gates of Old Queens, the origin point
of Rutgers. Picketers from Cook and Douglass were joined by their
colleagues from Busch and Livingston and marched down George Street
through the center of town. They were joined by the Mason Gross School
of the Arts and Edward Bloustein school and marched to meet the College
Ave crew, creating a sea of picketers as we marched to Voorhees Mall and
a not-quite impromptu party/rally.
I’m not one for hyperbole or sentimentality, so when I say it gave me chills the reader should understand I mean it.
More
important, though, was the impact on the bargaining table. Our
colleagues there were buoyed by our show of strength, our joy, outer
commitment. And they are using it to their advantage. Management appears
to be buckling, and we plan to keep this up until we win a better
Rutgers, a kinder less corporate Rutgers.
RU Strike Diary, Day 1: The Inevitable Happens
This
is where it’s been leading since the beginning. A historic strike at my
alma mater. A school where I’ve taught journalism for 10 years. That I
think is one of the best and most underrated institutions of higher
learning in the country. From the beginning.
This is not what
anyone wanted, but it’s what had to happen. Higher ed is in crisis.
Rutgers is in crisis. We’ve been taken over by the corporate power
structure. Had a change in mission crammed down our throats. Higher ed
has become just another cog in the American oligarchy and Rutgers,
despite its proclamations to the contrary, has been doing its part.
Channel
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I
was at UBS Arena last night watching Bruce Springsteen when we — our
union’s executive boards — voted. I voted by proxy. It was unanimous. I
listened and shouted and sang as the man known as The Boss tore through a
catalogue of songs about working people. And the irony was not lost on
me. Springsteen singing of working class dreams as he allowed
Ticketmaster to drive up prices and BMW to offer exclusive parking.
Still,
as my phone was blowing up with texts about the now very real strike,
he broke into “Wrecking Ball” and the lines “So hold tight on your
anger, you hold tight on your anger / Hold tight to your anger, don't
fall to your fears” hit me like a truck.
We are angry. Tired of being disrespected. Tired of the neoliberal model of higher ed reducing everything to profit.
We’ll hold tight and fight. We’re going to win this.
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