This Is Your Fight

My goal used to be landing a tenure-track job. Now, it’s unionizing adjuncts.

Image description: three hands clasped at wrists to form a triangle

“For professors to… forestall their own extinction, they must first become not only sociologists but also institutional historians of their own profession.”

— Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors

I wasn’t always pro-union. I started caring about unions as an undergrad, after watching Harlan County, USA for a liberal arts degree I’m still paying off. When I got to grad school, I was amused to discover that I belonged to the United Auto Workers union but took it for granted and did no more than show up to some rallies.

I didn’t come from a union family. My family came from the USSR and saw unions as elitist and corrupt. When I told my mom I got involved organizing contingent faculty at my university she screwed up her face, as if smelling something rotten. On other occasions, she took a different approach, pleading with me to keep my head down. And I couldn’t reassure her that her fears were unfounded. Retaliation for union organizing is real. As I write this essay, I read stories about union-busting attempts at Google, the company where so many of my students dream of landing jobs.

When SEIU first came to my campus, I didn’t want to get involved. “I’m pro-union, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in academia,” I told an organizer, signing my card after closing my office door for privacy. A few months later, I was on the organizing committee. With my fellow advocates, I sat in meetings with the university president and provost. We participated in roundtables, delivered petitions and met with local politicians. For this, some of my colleagues called us brave.

The reality was I was terrified. Seven years of academic casualization prepared me to pack up my mostly-empty office on the spot, but the more I organized, the more I wanted to stay. I was involved. Despite all my fears, I was bad at keeping my head down. Hence my mother’s advice.

Bad at keeping one’s head down doesn’t mean good at the long game. Since defending my dissertation in 2013, I’ve lived year to year, contract to contract. Investing in a place or a struggle longterm wasn’t something I allowed myself, logistically or emotionally. As our campaign dragged into year three, I had to contort my mind into staying motivated.

Organizing on top of a full teaching load, an additional part-time job, freelance writing and multiple illnesses had me spread thin. Often, it felt like my life consisted of work and disease.

There was something else that was particularly draining about organizing — the visibility, the feeling of being too loud and too much. My name was on campus-wide emails and flyers. There I was, saying “As someone who lives with a chronic illness, I rely on my job for affordable health care. It’s extremely stressful to not know if I’ll have employment next year.” The flyer hung in the hallway outside one of my classrooms; I winced seeing it on my way to teach.

Organizing forced me to tell my story over and over again. I had to be vulnerable about my disabilities, my poor immigrant background and my shattered career dreams. Like my fellow adjuncts, I had to admit to feeling financially insecure and disrespected. To do this, I had to unlearn years of keeping up appearances, of “faking it till making it.” Since “making it” never happened, “faking it” had become second nature.

I had spent years hiding my precarity from students. My colleagues knew about it, of course; still, it felt “impolite” to burden them with details and counter-productive to winning their respect. Coming clean meant absorbing feelings of sympathy, pity, irritation, and hostility. We organizers were regularly made aware that our emails were annoying and concerned with niche issues. We were instructed to get new jobs, ones where we’d supposedly be happier. We were ignored. And it was the combination of being exposed and unseen that drained me.

In organizing one learns that “fighting like hell” is not just about winning arguments and making people angry. Much of it requires the hard work of enduring, normalizing, and helping others to envision and act.

Management portrays unions as hostile, interloping forces. The reality is that faculty unions have long been part of the university. Professors at Howard University organized in as early as 1918, forming the first local higher ed union. In Professors in the Gig Economy, Timothy Reese Cain claims that “one-quarter of faculty and graduate students [are] in bargaining units.” Yet despite the relative prevalence of unionization in higher education, academics are taught to romanticize their work, to resist seeing what they do as labor. Advanced degree programs generally don’t prepare one for the work of maintaining and expanding unions — it conflicts with the “life of the mind” fantasy that continues to entice, despite the realities of the neoliberal university. Living these realities is not enough to give up the fantasy. I see colleagues everywhere struggling to carve out time for the mind, hoarding it against the onslaught of administrative duties, life commitments, and complications. Organizing, thus, becomes yet another duty and complication, distancing one further from the fantasy.

How do we get academics to recognize that labor organizing is their lane and that being in the lane requires fighting? For me and my colleagues, this continues to be the question.

“We organizers were regularly made aware that our emails were annoying and concerned with niche issues. We were instructed to get new jobs, ones where we’d supposedly be happier. We were ignored. And it was the combination of being exposed and unseen that drained me.”

We were able to get people to sign cards, petitions, open letters, and occasionally to show up to actions; but getting those same colleagues to commit time and put themselves at risk was another story. In her essay on organizing graduate students at Yale, Alyssa Battistoni writes “Like many women, for a while I managed to get by on likability; I was already good at a certain kind of emotional labor. But as the asks got bigger, I hit a wall: people might spend thirty seconds signing a petition they didn’t think mattered much because they liked me, but they weren’t going to piss off their boss just to stay in my good graces.” This all sounded uncomfortably familiar and not only because the organizing committee at my university was composed of white women and one man of color. Like Battistoni’s colleagues, mine “were already busy, so busy. They supported the union, they said, but they wanted it to leave them alone.”

Organizers in all sectors have to confront the challenge of inert and overburdened workers. Knowing this in theory was one thing, but hearing it as a refrain, straight from the mouths of workers in healthcare, transportation, sanitation, fast food, childcare and other sectors was equal parts comforting and daunting. This happened at SEIU’s Unions for All Summit, to which I traveled with another organizer colleague last October. There, she and I swapped struggle stories and strategies with union members and would-be members facing obstacles to getting a seat at the table.

At one point, we met in a small conference room with other academics in different fields, from different parts of the country. Most were worse off than us, including grad students threatened by NLRB’s latest assault on their right to unionize and adjuncts in “right-to-work” states who lacked benefits and earned less than $15 an hour. Angela, a contingent professor in Florida, told us that, the previous year, she earned $14,000 between teaching, being a pastor, and working other gigs.

Everyone in the room admitted that they thought repeatedly about quitting — deleting the group emails and chats to spend more time on family, health and, of course, other side hustles. The main reason for stopping was not having enough tangible support from peers.

Angela said that this was why she and her colleagues used the slogan “This Is Your Fight” in their actions. Everyone had to recognize that they had a stake in unionization. As I listened to her speak, I thought about my failure to convince union-friendly faculty (of all ranks) that they were part of the struggle. There was no way to simultaneously support unionization and be left alone. Not participating was upholding the status quo. A small number of my coworkers got this right away and used their job security to advocate boldly, at times dispensing with civility. But I also had colleagues who held out for longer-term contracts or promotions and feared attracting negative attention. I sympathized, up to a point. Maybe because I’d never been in a position where I could get a promotion or a merit raise.

More disappointing to me were the tenured or tenure-stream faculty who uttered some version of: “What am I supposed to say? This isn’t my decision to make. I too would love to be unionized.” What they were really telling us was that they didn’t want to be bothered about all this, and certainly not made to feel guilty. The implication that they weren’t doing enough was highly offensive to them, triggering what one of my friends calls “tenure-track fragility.” Other colleagues claimed neutrality, saying, “I’m not weighing in because I don’t want to influence adjuncts. I support them no matter what.” These colleagues suggested that there was no lane for them to pick, that this was our fight, even though adjunctification had long affected the entire university. Some faculty with permanent employment showed little awareness of any specifics regarding the unionization campaign happening on their campus. There were even those who invited us to meetings but then confused our organizing committee with a university committee or forgot our name altogether.

“There was no way to simultaneously support unionization and be left alone. Not participating was upholding the status quo.”

To be fair, the management culture of the neoliberal university makes it difficult to know about all the committees and initiatives. And yet, to simply ignore academic casualization is to tacitly support it. Supporting casualization means supporting the loss of tenure-track jobs and, with them, departments, fields and academic freedom. The last factor is rarely emphasized in discussions of adjunctification, perhaps because adjuncts are not seen as significant contributors to scholarship. Still, understanding and documenting such losses is not enough to stop them.

The longer I stayed in academia, the more aware I grew of the multitude of ways it discourages us from identifying as workers. As a grad student who taught her first class before taking her first seminar, I remember not knowing how to view myself. As the sole instructor of my courses, I was treated as a professor by my students. But this bit of prestige was coupled with a stipend that didn’t cover my living expenses. At the end of my first year, I had to open a new credit card just to pay the bills. The following year, I took out student loans, adding to my undergraduate debt. They were crucial in helping me pay for costs associated with my newly-diagnosed chronic illness, not to mention conference travel not covered by my department.

The rhetoric of teaching-as-calling obscures our labor. My organizer colleagues and I have been shamed for complaining about salary and reminded that teachers “are not in it for the money.” The flexible schedule and relative freedom to design courses, in some fields, also fuels the “life of the mind” illusion. I’ve encountered many grad students and faculty members who told me that what they liked best about academia was: “being my own boss.” One colleague who said this was paid per course and let go by the university the following year.

The titles, rituals and even costumes further give us the impression of elite status. Titles for adjuncts, as Herb Childress notes in The Adjunct Underclass, range from “adjunct” to “postdoctoral fellow” to “professor of practice,” “artist in residence,” and more. Together, these various monikers confuse students and non-academics. Some titles don’t even translate across institutions. Such titles ultimately “mask the unified underlying condition” of the academically precarious, as Childress states. At commencement, you can see a professor and adjunct dressed in regalia, sitting next to each other. You wouldn’t know that one is the other’s “manager.” Stratification and asymmetrical relations are everywhere in academia but I have actually been told, in a job interview, “I don’t see rank,” by the search chair.

“The longer I stayed in academia, the more aware I grew of the multitude of ways it discourages us from identifying as workers.”

Professors don’t recognize that their fates are wrapped up with those of other workers — in childcare, sanitation, fast food, and sex work. Tellingly, when one academic disclosed her side gig as a sex worker to her mentor, that mentor responded by retracting her letters of recommendation, thus sabotaging the mentee’s attempts to gain stable academic employment. The fact that this tenured faculty member wrote, by way of explanation, that “Academia and sex work are mutually exclusive,” only captures the extent to which academics fail to forge solidarity with those who engage in labor traditionally perceived to be menial, unskilled, or exploitative.

Solidarity is required for unionization to be successful, but the perks that universities offer to faculty members sustain the middle-class myth that makes adjuncts feel different from other workers in the labor movement.

You can’t organize without people, but to get people organizing for economic justice, you have to awaken their class consciousness and this can be tricky in academic spaces, where “prestige and prestige envy” make up, in Donoghue’s words, an “organizing category.” For universities, that prestige can take the form of athletic programs, medical centers and, of course, faculty members, who, Donoghue reminds, earn prestige through “research, publication, and tenure.” As institutions battle each other in “prestige wars,” faculty become “willing participants” and “prizes.” A prized faculty member is rewarded with power, salary, and respect within the university and the larger public sphere.

The middle-class perks that often come with university employment further distract from the pay and lack of security. If one has the time, one can enjoy the privilege of seeing world-renowned performers, filmmakers, writers, politicians, and more, often for free, on campus. Then there are the happy hours, cupcake parties, discounted chair massages, and gym memberships. Not every university has the funds to offer such privileges, but even those that do lean heavily on contingent workers.

Even while these perks sustained the middle-class myth, it was their inherently capricious nature that facilitated a feeling of shared solidarity among the workers across my institution. One of the biggest revolts I’d seen in the four years at my current university was when the administration decided to impose gym membership fees: faculty and staff united in a deluge of emails protesting the decision. That watershed moment of collective outrage and non-anonymous criticism left me frustrated.

Taking to social media, I asked: “Where was all this energy when it came to adjunct unionization?” Benjamin Balthaser, a friend and faculty member at another university, put into words what bugged me about the situation: “Faculty can often be more comfortable relating to the university as a site that facilitates their middle-class sense of self (as a result/proof of their meritocratic values and hard work); they are not comfortable relating to the university as workers who do not individually control the conditions of their labor. It runs counter to their entire training class orientation.” It was the potential removal of a white-collar perk that inspired so many to come together and take a stand against the administration. But for a longterm campaign, coming together was going to take a lot more than “replying all” to emails. What we needed was a reassessment of how we related not only to the university but to each other and to workers in other sectors.

The question of how we relate to each other weighed on me when I returned from the union Summit. I remember roaming the halls of a university building (no doubt collecting signatures for another petition) and seeing all the stickers and door signs that signaled allyship to LGBTQIA+ students, undocumented immigrants and other marginalized groups on campus. There were also door hangers expressing support for dining workers and adjuncts.

Allyship appears to be everywhere in academia, though certainly it’s more visible in some spaces than others. And yet, when one listens, for example, to BIPOC faculty members, one hears about the silence of self-proclaimed allies. White “allies” fail to speak up in department meetings to support their historically marginalized colleagues. Non-disabled “allies” complain about having to accommodate students or colleagues whose disabilities cause the slightest inconvenience. Coworkers with job security say “I’m sorry” when they hear that an adjunct’s contract won’t be renewed.

The “I don’t see rank” mentality fuels inertia more than it promotes sympathy and, more importantly, concrete action. This is one of the reasons why I regularly hear the phrase “I support you,” from colleagues who never did more than sign a petition. Reflecting on his experience in academia after losing his job for pro-Palestinian speech, Steven Salaita writes, “I was a tenured faculty member for 12 years and count myself among the complicit. I didn’t do nearly enough to support my contingent comrades — because I didn’t properly see them as comrades, something my position informally demanded.” I appreciate these words because they’re rare. In general, academics who benefit from the university avoid taking responsibility for their inactivity. And yet, it’s also true that individual shifts in perspective and behavior aren’t enough, as Salaita points out. Cultural and systemic changes must happen and this is impossible without organizing.

Part of the problem lies in the vagueness of the terms “support” and “ally” in the context of social justice work. Is allyship about feelings and attitudes or is it about concrete action? Does support entail being in agreement with someone or engaging in activity that involves time and risk, be it physical, social or professional? How much support is enough? Does the ally determine this or does the marginalized community? Allyship, as a political metaphor, suggests co-operation, fighting with. Allies are supposed to make your fight their fight. But it’s well known that, in practice, social justice allyship is often low-stakes and passive. Sometimes, allies come to dominate discussions concerning the groups they’re supposed to support. In both cases, there’s a failure of solidarity that makes forming a lasting coalition hard if not impossible.

“Don’t thank me, join me,” I once wrote on social media, only to immediately delete the post. I wanted my colleagues to see this message but I also knew it would push them further away. At the Summit, one of the grad students said something that struck me, “I stopped saying ‘thank you’ to people for participating in our actions.” He was white and male. That’s easy for you to say, I remember thinking, but I also knew he had a point. Maybe the next time a colleague thanked me, I would respond, “It had to be done,” or “See you at the next action,” instead of my usual “No problem” or “You’re welcome.” And instead of thanking someone for showing up, I would say, “Glad you participated,” or “Your presence makes us stronger,” as stilted as such phrases sounded. While sitting in that conference room, I told myself to write down these phrases and rehearse them so I wouldn’t be disarmed by gratitude while making photocopies.

Traveling home from the union Summit the phrase “This is your fight” stayed with me. I started to pen a list of principles:

If you’re a student, this is your fight. “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.”

If you’re tenure-stream or tenured, this is your fight. Adjunctification compromises academic freedom and shared governance. Greater reliance on precarious labor means fewer tenure-track jobs, fewer research collaborators, more tension within departments and universities.

If you’re academic staff, this is your fight. Unionizing adjuncts makes it easier to unionize staff. The constant turnover of adjuncts also means more labor for staff.

If you’re contingent faculty, this is your fight. No promises from the university to listen and solve the underlying problems “without third party meddling” will ever amount to a seat at the table. Without a mutually negotiated contract, the university can only implement top-down changes that are reversible at any moment.

If you care about the fate of all workers who are unionized, who are struggling to unionize, or who are fighting for 15, this is your fight. Unions have been weakened across the US. Making a union stronger by increasing membership helps all workers and builds political power.

I didn’t finish my list. When I returned, there was teaching and grading and a presentation in front of the faculty senate council. I was also the point person on a letter-writing campaign to the university president. Between courses and office hours I would receive emails or printed out letters from my colleagues, usually accompanied by the words “Sorry I didn’t do this earlier.” I accepted the letters and said “Thanks” before I could remember one of my new phrases, biting my lip when realizing it was too late for an alternative reply.

To avoid relying on likability, friendship and guilt-tripping, you must have uncomfortable conversations with your coworkers, Battistoni writes, citing organizer Jane McAlevey. These conversations, Battistoni learned, entail making it clear that winning a union without the active and consistent peer participation was impossible. These conversations entail “putting a choice in front of people and letting them make it instead of smiling away tension.” In my case, I also wanted to make my colleagues uncomfortable by getting them to see that there was no space for “the mind” in academia outside the framework of labor.

There was no way to have creativity and freedom or to manifest into existence a work/life balance by not answering emails, emotionally disengaging and refusing to give the university any more of one’s time. All this only deferred the problem, allowing our managers to continue making top-down decisions. We would have to let go of the fantasy that passion canceled out labor and find ways to collaborate instead of ingratiating and keeping our heads down.

Like Battistoni, I’m still afraid of asking for “too much.” My colleagues have long commutes, children, aging family members, illnesses, disabilities, gigs, other jobs. One of my colleagues already invested years fighting for a union at another institution. This person was burnt out because winning a campaign takes a long time and doesn’t mean the end to economic insecurity. Would I have fought for unionization twice, at two different universities? I couldn’t say. Would I have joined the organizing committee if I had small children and a two-hour commute? I couldn’t say, not in all honesty. And yet, as an organizer, I have to ask my colleagues to perform unpaid labor because that is what it takes to improve our conditions.

Even for me, there were times when union work seemed impossible and I had to dial back. When my immune system began attacking my kidneys, I offloaded some of my responsibilities. I still read union emails while recovering from a biopsy in a hospital bed, but I didn’t show up to meetings, didn’t say “yes” to making yet another presentation, didn’t put newsletters into mailboxes.

Casualization ensures that our lives are hard. Every added complication disrupts the delicate balance of survival.

And yet not picking a lane means staying on the sidelines, watching the spectacle, not entering the fight. What I still want to say to my academic colleagues of all ranks is: we “union people” are your people. We are you. This is your lane and your fight. To stand a chance of winning, we have to fight like hell.