BY HANK REICHMAN

Today, after nine days on an “illegal” and “unauthorized” strike, West Virginia teachers won a powerful victory when Republican Governor Jim Justice signed legislation passed earlier in the day that will raise salaries of not only teachers but also all state employees by 5%, the largest single pay hike for public employees in the state’s history.  Both the House of Delegates and Senate unanimously approved the bill.  Separately, the governor agreed to set up a task force to address the state health insurance program on March 13.  Last week the House approved a 4% increase for teachers, but the Republican-dominated Senate balked.  Justice, who initially swore that anything more than 1% was simply impossible, by the end was telling teachers, “I’m an educator, I believe in your purpose, I believe in you, and I love our kids.”  Geez, I wonder what changed his mind?

I’m an educator, I believe in your purpose, I believe in you, and I love our kids. pic.twitter.com/vcjy6z0Jgt

— Governor Jim Justice (@WVGovernor) March 6, 2018

“At the end of the day, I think right won out,” Justice said.  “Not that the unions won or the Legislature won or I won.  It’s the idea and the premise that we ought to invest in education and let education be an economic driver for us.”  Funny, how he never spoke about this idea and premise before.  It wasn’t Justice or any other politician who did this.  As thousands of West Virginia teachers assembled in the Capitol this morning chanted, “Who made history? We made history!”

Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, said the deal was a “huge breakthrough” for school employees and for doing what’s right.  “You have a story here, a modern-day story, of labor solidarity on an issue that is irrefutable,” she said.  “That for teachers to stay in our profession, for bus drivers and support staff to stay and do this work, we need a livable wage, and we need the conditions in schools that we can help kids thrive.”

One shadow hanging over the agreement were statements by Senate Republicans that the raise will be financed by some $20 million in cuts to general services and Medicaid.  If this victory for public employees comes at the expense of those on Medicaid or in need of services — many of whom may well be teachers, members of teacher families, or friends of teachers, not to mention high school or college students — it will mark yet another effort to pit the interests of working-class people against each other.  Many teachers had supported financing the raises with taxes on the state’s fossil fuel industries.  In particular, Democratic state Senator and Congressional candidate Richard Ojeda, a favorite of the striking teachers, had proposed such methods.  The teachers and their supporters should continue fighting for such a program.

[UPDATE: Apparently they will. Here’s what teacher and union activist Emily Comer told Jacobin:

. . . many teachers have expressed their worry that this might be funded through cuts to Medicaid and other essential services.  If that’s the plan that they want to push, it goes against the stance we’ve taken from the very beginning.  Our message has always been that we want to reverse corporate tax cuts. We want to raise the gas severance tax so that we can prioritize the needs of the people of West Virginia who are struggling.  We have demonstrated through action that our priority is to take care of our kids who are living in poverty.

The legislature has made it clear that they are not interested in helping poor people.  They are only interested in working for their wealthy donors.  So I think that our next step in this movement should be to unite not just with other teachers and public employees, but with the families of our students who are living in poverty.]

The West Virginia walkout has already inspired similar movements elsewhere.  West Virginia ranks 48th among the states in teacher salaries.  Oklahoma ranks 50th; teachers there have now gone without raises for a decade.  And as in West Virginia Oklahoma teachers do not enjoy collective bargaining rights and strikes are forbidden.  Yet the Oklahoma Teachers United Facebook group, which is organizing for a walkout, has quickly gained 40,000 members.  The state has 41,000 teachers.  Although Oklahoma teachers have been lobbying the state legislature for a pay raise, the most recent bill that could have achieved that result — which it would have done by giving them a $5,000 annual pay increase — was defeated last month.  Rank-and-file teachers from around the state met in a planning session in Tulsa last week.  They are considering walking out in early April, timing the action for a week of required testing.

“I don’t know how long it’s been since Oklahoma has had a mandate to force legislators to do what they want them to do,” Larry Cagle, an organizer of the group, told BuzzFeed News.  “We have a mandate for a strike.  We have the tiger by the tail.   We’re going to force this on the union and on the superintendent,” he added.  “Teachers are ready—they are chomping at the bit.”

“People are talking about ‘strike’ now out in the open, and that’s been a change,” said John Waldron, a teacher and local union delegate.  “The groundswell right now is pretty loud.”

“Historically, public-sector strikes have tended to come in waves,” Georgetown University historian Joseph McCartin told Bloomberg News. “Teacher strikes have tended to breed more teacher strikes.”  From 1945 to 1950, there were around 60 work stoppages by teachers around the country, many mounted without official union backing or legal protection.  At the time, said McCartin, schools were underfunded and classrooms increasingly crowded.  Teachers felt left behind amid quickening private sector wage growth in a postwar economy.

In this context of growing teacher militancy I came upon an op-ed piece published last week in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.  “Why are Louisiana universities so powerless in Baton Rouge?” asks Robert Mann, who holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.  He recounts this history:

Long ago, when I worked at the Capitol, I would hear rumblings about trimming LSU’s funding.  That talk never went anywhere because of the assumption that if the governor or the Legislature messed with LSU, its students, faculty and alumni would descend upon them with pitchforks waving and torches blazing.

State leaders, fearful of the roar of the LSU tiger, instead gave the school and other state universities ample funding.  Then, in 2008, Bobby Jindal became governor and we learned that the Fighting Tigers were really paper tigers.

As Jindal and lawmakers attacked state universities and slashed their funding, nothing much happened in response.  The alumni associations and university foundations did not organize their members to descend on the Capitol to fight the cuts.  There were some scattered protests by students and faculty, but the cuts happened anyway.

Then-LSU Chancellor Mike Martin spoke up about the way Jindal was hurting his university.  Jindal’s staff dressed him down and later ran him out of town.  Others lost their jobs for speaking out.  Soon, the message was clear: Keep quiet and go along or we’ll fire you or cut your budget even more.

With that, Jindal’s path was largely unimpeded.  He and Republican lawmakers intimidated, attacked and undermined higher education leaders during this eight-year reign of terror.  They did so because, as they began, few people stood up to their bullying in a forceful and effective way.

And this explains why, in the current session of the Louisiana Legislature, higher education officials have little power or authority to demand of legislators the resources necessary to restore their schools’ funding.  They are inheritors of the sorry legacy of higher education from the Jindal years, which is the diminished stature of their institutions.

A similar story can be told in many other states, perhaps in every state.  One after another the supposed “leaders” of our public higher education institutions have cravenly capitulated to political assaults on, first, their budgets, but then their faculties, their students, and their very missions.  Take, for instance, the current crisis in Wisconsin, where administrators at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point plan to eliminate 13 academic programs, primarily in the liberal arts.  If carried out, the cuts could result in the layoff of tenured faculty members.  This is a clear product of the university administrators’ ongoing accommodation to the years-long political assault on higher education in that once-progressive state led by Gov. Scott Walker.

The pattern was analyzed well by Christopher Newfield, in his essential book, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.  Newfield identifies multiple factors behind the decline in support for public higher education, but he begins with a failure of leadership in our universities themselves.  In lockstep with politicians and profit-seeking corporate managers, university administrators, he argues, oversold the private benefits of education and downplayed higher education’s role in serving the public good.  In doing so, he asks, “what did university officials do to the status of their own universities?”  He identifies three effects:

First, university managers tied their institutions to a declining private good: middle-class salaries. . . .  Even after the financial crisis, public universities stayed hitched to a corporate economy that was no longer delivering for their graduates.

Second, university leaders undermined their ability to deliver the emerging private good, which was not standardized job preparation but creative capabilities on a mass scale. . . .  Wealthy private universities and liberal arts colleges got the message and proliferated seminars and, later, design labs to make learning both active and individualized.  They increased their costs alarmingly, but they also increased the value of the human capital they produced.

Meanwhile, public universities were stuck defending their costs without stellar educational products to excuse them, and endured cuts in state appropriations while claiming to be successful cost cutters. . . .

Finally, in failing to make the strong case for their social, non-market, and indirect benefits, public university managers weakened their case for public funding.  The key feature of public funding is not that it comes via taxes from society as a whole, though that is the sole workable source, but that it does not require privatizable returns as a justification.  Instead, public funding evaluates itself through largely nonmarket and public benefits. . . .

. . . [P]ublic university leaders know perfectly well that their quality depends on public funding and public support.  The downplaying of the public good is less ignorance than “willful blindness” . . . .

This is what has happened to key senior managers within public universities.  Their claim that the voters now saw the university as a private good was willful blindness — a comforting excuse for the failure of the university to appeal to the public, a failure that stemmed from its refusal to deploy mainstream economic findings about education’s large public benefits and say how they overshadowed individual and corporate gain.

What is to be done?  For one thing, as Newfield recommends, it’s long past time to stop retreating from the public good.  “The fact that higher education is now set up to be rivalrous and excludable is not a reason to enforce the ensuing market framework,” he writes.  “It is a reason to set up higher education differently — as a public good.”

As Louisiana’s Mann puts it,

It’s not that the current higher education leaders don’t know how to fight.  They surely do, although it sometimes seems they lack the heart to speak out forcefully or the moxie to encourage students and faculty to storm the Capitol.  It’s, rather, that they seem to believe they don’t have an army capable of waging war.

From my vantage point at LSU, it’s clear higher education leaders long ago gave up the idea of fighting in the streets to save their institutions.  Instead, they seem to believe fighting in the halls of the state Capitol — and on the editorial pages — are their only options.

But events in West Virginia offer a different option.  It was the mass mobilization of teachers — often supported behind the scenes by administrators and school boards — that not only won a raise but, most important, began to change the conversation.  “I refuse to accept that our colleges and universities cannot fight effectively and couldn’t recapture some political capital their schools surrendered in 2009 and 2010,” writes Mann.

How different would Louisiana be today if those who ran our colleges and universities 10-12 years ago . . . had not capitulated?  How different would it be if those defending their institutions had not seen themselves as lobbyists but as public advocates?  What if they had rallied students, faculty, staff and parents to storm the Capitol, week after week, and injected fear into the hearts of lawmakers?

“Put another way,” he concludes, “imagine if higher education had been as effective at demanding resources from lawmakers as were the large corporations that extracted billions from Louisiana government during the same period.”

“Will higher education ever really fight to defend itself or will it roll over again and just keep passing along the rising costs to students?” Mann asks.  The answer may depend on our willingness to learn from and follow the lead of those tens of thousands of courageous West Virginia teachers who stood up for themselves, their students and their communities — and right smack in the heart of what too many condescendingly dismiss as benighted “Trump country.”  I’m not sure our administrators, trustees, and other so-called educational “leaders” are totally hopeless, but they clearly lack the will or even perhaps the ability to stand up for themselves, much less their faculties and students.  So, as it was for the teachers in West Virginia, the solution — the future — is in our hands.  If we lead, others will follow.