A conversation about the struggle against neoliberalism in higher education with leading voices from the front lines.
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Higher education has been transformed over the last several decades. State funding has been dramatically reduced, tuition fees have exponentially increased, tenure track jobs have been replaced with adjuncts and graduate students, and staff have laid off and those that remain forced to work longer and harder for less,
The pandemic and recession have triggered an enormous crisis in this neoliberal model of higher education, putting not only jobs but entire institutions in jeopardy. This panel, organized by Spectre Journal, will address how faculty, staff and graduate students can organize and defend their jobs, programs, and higher education in the US.
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Panelists:
Tithi Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and the editor of the now classic study, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017). Her recent coauthored book includes the popular Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019) which has been translated in over 25 languages. She writes extensively on Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, Electronic Intifada, Jacobin, Salon.com, The Nation, and the New Left Review. She is on the editorial board of Studies on Asia and Spectre Journal.
Cinzia Arruzza is associate professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. She is the Vice-President of the New School AAUP chapter and the co-author of Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto. She is a member of the editorial board of Spectre Journal.
Kathleen Brown is a doctoral student at the University of Michigan in the department of American Culture and a member of the Graduate Employees' Union Local 3550. She helped organize GEO's historic 9-day abolitionist strike in September 2020 and studies 1930s transnational movements against fascism.
Henry Drobbin has been active in the Higher Education Labor Movement for the past 12 years. He held the title of Steward, Lead Steward, and Lead Organizer with The International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1205. Most recently, he worked with the Leadership of ACT-UAW 7902, AAUP, AFM 802, and IBT 1205 to form the New School Labor Coalition.
Nancy Welch(moderator) is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and a member of UVM United Academics AFT-AAUP. Her recent publications include the co-edited collections Unruly Rhetorics (with Jonathan Alexander and Susan Jarratt) and Composition in the Age of Austerity (with Tony Scott). Her essay "A Semester to Die For" and interview "Standing Together Against Sexual Assault at Dartmouth" were published last summer at spectrejournal.com
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Find more about Spectre: https://spectrejournal.com/
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/73y_TVExf_g
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More Episodes
Feb 25, 2021
Capitalism Is The Disease Mike Davis on the Coronavirus Crisis (3-31-20)
An online teach-in with renowned activist-scholar Mike Davis, author of numerous books, including The Monster at Our Door, In Praise of Barbarians, and the forthcoming Set the Night on Fire.
Fifteen years ago, in his prescient book, The Monster At Our Door, Mike Davis warned that a viral catastrophe was being cooked up in the toxic vat built by the combined dangers of global capitalist production, ecological devastation, and the intentional, politically motivated neglect of public services the world over. As coronavirus continues to spread, largely unabated, we are witnessing both profound acts of solidarity among working people, and the grotesque depths to which the ruling class is willing to sink for the sake of maintaining their profits. And these are only the early days of what will likely become a medical Katrina.
The pandemic has shown that capitalist globalization is biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure, and we can say for sure that such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples’ movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit health care. Doing so will demand an independent socialist design for human survival well beyond even a Second New Deal.
In this virtual teach-in, Mike Davis will offer his appraisal of the crisis so far, discuss the urgent need for international solidarity to end this (and future) pandemics, and take questions from our digital audience.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/xOp9G5hoQnM
Mar 1, 2021
After Bernie—Amidst Pandemic with Naomi Klein and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor(4-9-20)
Join Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Astra Taylor, and Hari Kondabolu for a discussion of what comes next after Bernie.
The current crisis is laying bare the extreme injustices and inequalities of our economic and social system.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6Gi5qGHRJ9c
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We are in a battle of visions for how we’re going to respond to this crisis. We will either be catapulted backward to an even more brutal winner-takes-all system — or this will be a wake-up call.
Ideas that were dismissed as too radical just a week ago are starting to seem like the only reasonable path to get out of this crisis and prevent future ones.
We need to use every tool that we have that allows us to hear each other’s voices, to read each other’s words, to see each other’s faces, even if it’s just on screens, to stay organized and stay connected. We have to create spaces where we’re able to deliberate and strategize about what it means to protect our neighbors, our rights, and our planet.
We have to have the confidence to say this is the moment when we change everything.
Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Leap, Debt Collective, and Democratic Socialists of America
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6Gi5qGHRJ9c
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Mar 1, 2021
Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (4-14-20)
Join us for the launch of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, a landmark literary collection of essays, poems, and prose that are a testament to the profound political power of defying shame. Haymarket Books convenes a panel of contributors from this powerful volume for a conversation on the personal-political fight for abortion rights.
With reading and discussions by:
Annie Finch, poet and editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion
Soniah Kamal, author of Unmarriageable
Desiree Cooper, writer and producer of the short film "The Choice"
Alexis Quinlan, poet and educator
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/V-tfKGuxbj0
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Mar 1, 2021
Covid-19, Decarceration, and Abolition with Ruth Wilson Gilmore & Naomi Murakawa (4-16-20)
How should abolitionists respond to the coronavirus pandemic? Join Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Naomi Murakawa for an urgent discussion of abolition and the pandemic.
How can we achieve urgently needed decarceration for the millions of people caged in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers?
Abolitionism doesn’t just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that’s already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Her forthcoming Haymarket Books title, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, is the inaugural book in the new Abolitionist Papers book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa.
Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/hf3f5i9vJNM
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Mar 1, 2021
Too Much Midnight with Krista Franklin, Mahogany L. Browne & more (4-19-20)
Haymarket Books, Bowery Poetry, and The BreakBeat Poets present: Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight
Krista Franklin will be joined by special guests Aricka Foreman, and avery r. young, for an event to launch her new book Too Much Midnight hosted by Mahogany L. Browne
While this event is free for all to attend, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to support the work of these artists. All donations received will be shared between the performers.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1460-too-much-midnight
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Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight draws on Pan African histories, Black Surrealism, Afrofuturism, pop culture, art history, and the historical and present-day micro-to-macro violence inflicted upon Black people and other people of color, working to forge imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions of liberation.
Featuring 30 poems, 30 artworks, an author statement and an interview, Too Much Midnight chronicles the intersections between art and life, art and writing, the historical and the speculative, cultural and personal identity, the magical and the mundane.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/t2KanIZv0O0
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Mar 1, 2021
Remaking Schools in the Time of Coronavirus (4-22-20)
Three leading voices in the struggle for education justice (Jesse Hagopian, Wayne Au, and Noliwe Rooks) discuss the remaking of public schools in the time of crisis.
What has this crisis taught us about the role of public schools in society?
What have we learned about what really matters in education during this time?
When we re-open schools, what kind of education will we have, will we demand?
The Covid-19 crisis has upended public education around the country. Join three radical education activists in conversation about what this crisis means for public education now and how moving forward we can continue to fight for the schools our students deserve.
Jesse Hagopian is an award-winning educator and a leading voice on issues of educational equity and social justice unionism. He is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine and is the co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives, and editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing.
Noliwe Rooks is the W.E.B Du Bois Professor of Literature at Cornell University and the author of Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education which won an award for non-fiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation.
Wayne Au is a Professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is a long-time Rethinking Schools editor, co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives and author of A Marxist Education: Learning to Change the World.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/rDnP663yEbM
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