Power Despite Precarity

It’s a Tuesday. This will be a zoom event put on by HELU focusing on Contingency. What follows is actually a message from Joe Ramsey, a Senior Lecturer at UMass Boston, who has stepped forward to chair the Outreach Committee of HELU. We are trying to encircle the precarity/contingency issue in all the ways that…

In our book, Power Despite Precarity (Pluto 2021) Joe Berry and I provide a summary history of the four major transitions that have taken place in higher education since its evolution into a national project after the Civil War. The fourth transition is the spread of contingency from about 1975 up to the present, when…

Stuck in a Two-Tier Jam Getting out of the two-tier jam that afflicts the vast majority of faculty in California Community Colleges can start by amending the CA Ed Code article that created the unique part-time temporary faculty tier. Only California has anything like it. Its impact on the community colleges has been terrible -for…

Yesterday (April 20) Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket blew up 20 miles above the Gulf of Texas, and today financial experts are explaining why this is just part of his strategy of “successful failure.”  Better to test something a lot during development than pay salaries to people for years trying to get something perfect before you test…

As of April 18, 2023, I decided to re-up my blog about the contingent faculty movement in higher ed. Because I’ve taken up the story back in my home state (as it were; I was a 1960s type) of California, and in fact because next week I get to visit back at my favorite teaching…

Update on California AB 375: Squid Game for Contingent Faculty (again) On October 8 Governor Newsom, fresh from surviving a recall, failed to approve AB 375. In his message to the Assembly, Newsom said it would “create significant ongoing cost pressures on the state and community college districts.”  Really? Turns out, it’s about access to…

This is post #3 in my newly re-activated blog about contingency in higher ed. When Governor Newsom vetoed AB375: “It’s not just your work that doesn’t matter. It’s your life.” Contrary to the hopes of community college contingent faculty in California, Governor Newsom vetoed AB 375 on October 8, 2021. This bill, which was supported…

Since our book, Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faulty Movement in Higher Education, Joe Berry and I have been increasingly engaged with the rising faculty and higher ed workforce movement. I should have been keeping a blog on this all along. It would have saved time. But now I’m going to just do…

This is my second post in reviving my blog. I’m focusing on the situation in California for part-time temporary faculty in the California Community Colleges. I have decided to take up this as part of my organizing work for HIgher Education Labor United (more about HELU later, but see below). The CA CC’s are huge;…

Yesterday John Govsky, long-time activist at Cabrillo College, wrote to Joe to say: Hi Joe, I just want to show you a resolution that I wrote. Today it has been approved by the CFT Part-Time Faculty Committee, and also by the CFT Higher Ed Issues Committee, so it will now go to the CFT State…