What’s the status of the labor movement and of labor unions in higher education today? Have academic labor unions been trapped in the two-tier structure of higher education (between tenured and non-tenured faculty), and can they sufficiently transform the arrangements within higher education so as to bring about an end to that system?
In today’s Labor Day podcast we explore these questions with Mia McIver, President of UC-AFT, which represents non-Senate faculty and librarians working throughout the University of California system. She is a lecturer at UCLA, and received a Ph.D. in English literature from UC Irvine. During her graduate studies she held the Krieger Fellowship in Critical Theory.
*Eli mentioned in this episode Michael McHugh’s proposal for restructuring The New School in New York as a worker cooperative, i.e. a new model of “cooperative university”. He wrote a dissertation on the subject which can be found here.
**The foreword, co-authored by David Graeber and Andrej Grubačić, to the forthcoming re-release of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution — which James mentioned toward the end of the podcast — along with Grubačić’s thoughts on the sudden death of his friend and collaborator, can be read here. PM Press first published the foreword to the forthcoming book, along with Grubačić’s thoughts on Graeber’s sudden passing, here.