As a union representing tens of thousands of academic workers, we are in a struggle against a decades-long effort to undermine the education and research mission of higher education. Administrators are abandoning the stated core values of their universities and instead joining with their investors to transform robust academic institutions into profit-making enterprises. This model rests on the labor of overworked and underpaid graduate workers who provide undergraduate instruction and bring in billions of dollars in research funding. The universities cannot operate without this funding, much of which is appropriated to feed bloated administrator salaries, vast unregulated slush funds, golden handshake severance agreements, and highly lucrative investor profits. At its core, this is an effort to disempower and repress students, workers, faculty and university communities in order to pave the way for university officers at the top to centralize power and extract maximum profit.
Graduate workers stand at the forefront of challenging the corporatization of higher education and rebalancing power on our campuses. Since 2021, 30,000 graduate workers across 11 campuses have united into UE, joining tens of thousands more student workers across the country who have formed unions in the largest student worker organizing upsurge in US history. We have organized, bargained, picketed and struck to win recognition for our labor, protections against discrimination and unfair discipline, real strides toward economic security, and safeguards for academic freedom. These steps represent critical progress toward transforming our campuses and higher education as a whole.
Graduate workers at the majority of large private institutions in this country are now unionized. Unions and administrations are forming stable, long-term bargaining relationships: reaching contract settlements, resolving disputes and creating permanent structures for dialogue and mutual respect. Recognition of collective bargaining rights for student workers is now a settled issue. But our work is only beginning. Our horizon is to reclaim the mission of higher education and to transform this sector so that it becomes the force for social good that it can be.
With the election of Donald Trump to a second term, our struggle enters a new phase. Trump’s right-wing supporters and billionaire backers seek to divide our society and scapegoat the most marginalized among us, normalizing racism, misogyny, transphobia and xenophobia in the service of transferring even greater power and wealth to the super-rich. Climate science — indeed all science — is denied because it threatens the further enrichment of a tiny group of billionaires. Education, including higher education, is a prime target for further defunding and vilification in the service of their agenda. Democratic norms, such as collective bargaining, are threatened and in their place a new authoritarianism is taking shape.
The question — just as it was in prior dark periods — is where will the leaders of our academic institutions stand? Will university presidents stand with Trump, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and the other ideologues seeking to carry out their extremist agenda? Will they remain silent as pillars of our democracy are dismantled and the progress made over past generations in civil rights, education, gender equality, and labor protections are erased in ways we could not have even conceived only a short time ago? Or will they join with their campus communities to stand together and defend what our predecessors fought for and won?
We know where we stand.
We will take whatever action necessary to defend our members, especially those most vulnerable to attacks in this period. We will fight for academic freedom and the right to produce research that advances humanity, irrespective of whether the products of that research pose inconvenient truths to those in power.
And we will defend the power of our union locals in the face of any employer attempts to opportunistically use the moment we are in to undermine the gains we have made and reinstate unilateral power in the institutions we work for. To make it plain: any university administration that seeks to roll back our collective bargaining rights will be met with a militant response from united memberships, up to and including large powerful strikes if necessary.
Unions have always been a bulwark against authoritarianism. Collective bargaining is a basic democratic right, a basic human right, and a hallmark of any democratic society.
And as the future of academia, graduate workers will join with students, faculty and staff to continue our fight to transform higher education in the service of humanity.