Graying Professoriate (from the Chronicle of Higher Ed)

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Sun Sep 12 16:25:24 PDT 1999


On Sun, 12 Sep 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> subscribers? I think that the Graying of the Professoriate is obviously a
> consequence of fewer tenure-track jobs and more dependence on adjuncts
> which have been a hiring trend for the last couple of decades. What should
> be the response of left-wingers in academia to this? Yoshie

Organize a radical, membership-run, socially-aware union. Period. If you already have a union, get involved with the thing, get elected to its board and push it to the Left. As we say in the grad union movement, today grads, tomorrow profs!

Incidentally, the GTFF here in Eugene, Oregon just won a settlement with the University. We ran a mongo campaign, with media, rallies, mass petitions, lobbying, faculty and undergrad support, plus lots of networking with OPEU, the public sector union here. Bottom line is, they caved -- the University is nearly doubling their contributions to our health insurance, plus they're beginning to subsidize coverage for summer adjuncts as well as partners/dependents of grads, for the first time ever. We had to trade minimal salary increases to get this, but it's still a 10-12% boost in total compensation over two years, the largest annual increases grads have gotten in the history of this union. Unions work!

-- Dennis



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list