Resources

Teaching Resources for Lecturer and Adjunct Faculty Strike

A strike by Lecturers and Adjunct Faculty offers a teachable moment for students. Regardless of discipline, it provides opportunities for student engagement in a real world experience in which basic questions of representation, power, and social change are playing out on our campus.

Below are online resources (short articles, audio and video pieces) that faculty members can use with students to introduce some of the issues related to adjunct faculty, changes in higher education, as well as background on the labor movement.  We encourage you to share them with students in the days leading up to the strike and integrate into your course..

Strike votes/walkouts

• Recent years:
  • http://loyolaphoenix.com/2018/03/non-tenure-track-faculty-to-luc-­-walk-the-walk/
  • CUNY faculty have worked without a contract for five years. Their strike vote was a step toward ensuring the city bargains in good faith.
  • Faculty in the Cal State System voted through their SEIU local to authorize a strike as part of an effort to hold the system to its values of public, affordable education.
  • From the UK, a statement on why strikes are necessary.
  • https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/5/uk_university_workers_enter_week_3
  • https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/7/after_victorious_strike_w_virginia_teacher
  • https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/7/we_won_teachers_end_historic_strike
  • http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/college/loyola-ncaa-tourney-run-overshadowing-big-problem-school-article-1.3889107

• Background
  • When Push Comes to Shove: Strikes in Higher Education

General Higher ed issues

• Films
  • Con Job: Stories of Adjunct & Contingent Labor
  • Ivory Tower: Documentary overview of corporatization of higher education
  • Professors in Poverty: Short film on adjunct issues.
  • Your College Professor Could be on Public Assistance
• Data/Opinion
  • What College Presidents Make
  • Academia’s 1 percent
  • Are Adjuncts the New Fast-Food Workers?
  • Crisis at the Boiling Point
  • The High Cost of Adjunct Living: Boston
  • The Just in time Professor
  • There is no excuse for how universities treat adjuncts
• Books on higher ed crisis:
  • Degrees of Inequality
  • American Higher Ed in Crisis

History, MLK 50^th Anniversary of Assassination and General Labor

• Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign by Michael K Honey (W.W. Norton 2007)
• History of teacher organizing: the Labor and Working Class History Association site.
• Why Unions Matter http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/lwp/whyunion.pdf