This post is a part of the Blog's 2023 APA Conference coverage, showcasing the research of APA members across the country. The APA Central Conference session covered in this post was co-organized by the the APA's Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy and the American Association of Philosophy Teachers.
The landscape for organizing in academia has changed drastically over the past several years. In 2022 and 2023, we’ve seen a wave of strikes, typically resulting in significant material gains for faculty, adjuncts, post-docs, and graduate workers, including at Indiana University, The New School, Temple, University of Michigan, Rutgers, and across the entire University of California system. In the first four months of 2023 alone, over 50,000 graduate workers across the country went on strike, won union elections, launched union card campaigns, or filed for union recognition, including campaigns at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Stanford.
To assess the meaning of this wave of organizing for philosophers, the AAPT-APA Central Teaching Hub hosted a panel on union organizing at the 2023 Central APA meeting in Denver, Colorado. The panel was coordinated and chaired by Alida Liberman. Claire Lockard, Matthew Smith, and I were the panelists. We came prepared to talk about organizing basics, make a case for why it’s important to organize the academic workplace, and share insights from campaigns we had each been involved in. When we found ourselves in a room of supporters and organizers, both new and seasoned, the session began to feel far more like a meeting of co-conspirators than a traditional philosophy talk. (Maybe all philosophy talks should feel a bit more like this.)
Together, we converged on several insights. The first was the extent to which organizing in academia can help grow and support the broader working class. Not only does organizing anywhere promote the cause of worker power everywhere, but being affiliated with a national union means that you contribute dues that could be used to organize the next workplace. Academic institutions are large, and the fruits of your organizing efforts at your university could directly support workers at a nearby warehouse or factory as they gear up to fight their own fight.
A second notable point of our conversation focused on organizing in states with limited or no collective bargaining rights. With participants from Texas, Indiana, and Ohio, we talked about how impactful and fruitful organizing can be, even when your employer refuses to recognize your union or enter into a bargaining relationship with you. While lacking a union contract can mean that past gains are unsecured and future gains are uncertain, it also affords organizers greater flexibility in the demands they make and the tactics they use to get there. For example, when the Indiana University administration refused to recognize or hold an election for the graduate union—despite a supermajority of graduate workers signing union cards—graduate workers went on strike to demand union recognition, resulting in a massive 45% increase in the base rate—the first campus-wide raises in 10 years.
Perhaps the most significant insight we landed on was this: Organizing academic workplaces is critical for ensuring that universities fulfill their educational missions.
It is uncontroversial that higher education is under threat. Classroom funding is being cut, classroom sizes are increasing, and secure teaching and research positions are increasingly scarce. As it becomes harder for faculty, postdocs, and graduate workers to teach and research, it also becomes more difficult for our students to learn. Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.
If we want our schools to be spaces for world-class teaching and research, then perhaps we ought not leave their fate in the hands of university administrators. After all, educators are best equipped to know what resources are needed to effectively teach students. As philosophers and educators, we recognize the value of having enough graders to provide thorough feedback to students on their written assignments, the value of smaller, discussion-based seminars for advanced students, and the importance of instructors with enough job stability to support the longevity and growth of our departments. Increasingly, administrators are short-term employees, detached from the universities they serve, with little understanding of the classroom. It’s critical that philosophers assert our knowledge and right to insist on the processes, practices, and expenses essential to the functioning of our departments and programs.
Organizing helps us as academic workers articulate and protect what matters most to our teaching and research conditions. When faculty members in a department collectively demand a cap on the number of students per instructor, they can establish a department standard that ensures fair teaching loads for current and future faculty and reasonable learning conditions for all of the students in the department. When departments across the university make a uniform declaration that they cannot responsibly cope with mandates to curb expenses, the university administration cannot pit departments against one another on the basis of their compliance or non-compliance. A union organization and a union contract is critical for academics to have the resources and means to communicate with each other to decide joint policies from the bottom up. While higher education is under threat, the outcomes of those threats are not predetermined. They depend on us.
As organizing efforts in academia become more widespread, so does the transmission of organizing knowledge, resources, and networks. If you and your coworkers are thinking about organizing, consider reaching out to a union or association with a history of organizing academic workers (United Electrical Workers, United Auto Workers, American Association of University Professors, American Federation of Teachers) or contact the official email address of an academic organizing campaign near you, which are typically available on their campaign websites. Many philosophy organizations are well-positioned to vocally and materially support ongoing efforts, for instance, through donating to strike funds or making statements of support during campus organizing campaigns. The AAPT’s recent statement of support during the Temple University strike is a good example of this.
Both within our workplaces and across them, we are stronger together.
Acknowledgments: Thank you to Alida Liberman and Claire Lockard, both for their comments on this piece, and for their work, along with Matthew Smith, in making this panel so interesting, fruitful, and enjoyable.
Zara Anwarzai
Zara Anwarzai is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Her current work focuses on expertise and skilled action. She has additional research interests in collective action in contexts like workplace organizing and climate change, as well as interests in the philosophy of technology.
