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 it affects higher ed workers so naturally the first step is to bring people together. There is so much going on (strikes, for example) that we decided to schedule this in June, which gives us 2 months to plan it and argue out in committees all the best arguments about contingency and how it affects workers, students, society, etc etc. Can we be trusted to do this? Yes.

Here’s Joe Ramsey’s message (I have to keep saying both his names because otherwise people will assume any “Joe” I am talking about is Joe Berry).

Dear HELU Outreach and Contingency event organizing team,

It was good seeing you all yesterday, and great to hear everyone’s ideas for what we want to make happen with this HELU event (or event series!) on Contingency.

Below is a draft summary on points of agreement (including one new suggestion from me not stated at meeting) following yesterday’s meeting.  I’d like to share it more broadly with our HELU network once we have a zoom link for next week’s meeting, so please let me know if there’s anything that needs to be added or changed.  And let me know what y’all think about giving Joe B and/or Helena a speaker slot to overview the essence of the “Inside/Outside Strategy” please!

Best,

Joe

Draft summary of where our HELU Contingency event(s) planning is at

*The focus of the first event will be strategies and solutions for making progress towards abolishing the unjust tiered system of faculty labor in higher education.  *Our event is not to be presented as hostile to working for incremental gains within the existing tiered system, which we also support, but as creating space for a more transformative horizon of possibility to emerge in theory and practice

*Our event is not to create a “venting” space for NTT adjunct grievance (valid as those grievances are), nor a restatement of the widely known problems, but will focus primarily on ideas, models, and experiences about strategies and proposed solutions for more thoroughly upending the tiered inequality in higher ed.

*We have tentatively scheduled this first event for Tuesday, June 20, 7pm EST (4pm PST)

*Title is TBD

*Our goal is a two-hour event that includes roughly 4 presentations, and prioritizes at least one full hour of moderated open discussion, allowing for questions, debate, and participation from attendees not formally listed as speakers

*Tight and focused moderation will be key, considering how emotions can really roll on this topic.

*We are hoping to have a presenter representing the following strategic approaches and/or recent union experiences: 

    1)  Recent Rutgers experience –  Uniting all campus academic labor to support the lowest paid adjunct faculty.  (“Leveraging unity to raise the floor”)  Possible Speakers: Amy Higer or Bryan Sacks from Adjunct Union + Someone from the full-time/TT Rutgers union?

     2)  California Community College contingent efforts – Learning from the “Vancouver” model, abolishing the 2-tier system ; speaker: John Govsky

     3)  Possibly a presentation on the Metro Strategyapproach? TBD

     4)   New JR note:  I think it would be great to have Joe Berry and/or Helena Worthen give at least a brief presentation on the Inside/Outside Strategy, which seems essential. 

*We have decided to form a working group to focus on this event organizing, and that will meet and discuss separately, so Outreach can also address other topics in our biweekly meeting.

*The Contingency event working group will meet again next week, Wednesday, May 3, from 1-2pm EST via zoom.  

*We are hoping to hold a second event in July (and possibly a series that goes beyond that) with our second event expanding the view of contingency to include other campus workers (graduate students, possibly undergraduates as well, staff) and possibly off-campus contingent “gig” workers as well.