BY LESLIE BARY AND OLGA BEZHANOVA

Guest blogger Leslie Bary (AAUP) teaches Latin American literature and culture at the University of LouisianaLafayette. Guest blogger Olga Bezhanova (NEA/IEA) is in Peninsular Spanish literature and culture at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The “I” in this piece is collective, referring to experiences of both authors as well as to those of some other interlocutors in the U.S. academy and abroad.

“Can organizing mean organizing to reclaim the academy for all?” I wrote in here in November, earnest about organizing my AAUP state conference and local advocacy chapter. On my way back from the National Council meeting I was concerned that institutions in right-to-work states might be abandoned by an organization which, in order continue to fund itself, would have to prioritize collective bargaining far ahead of advocacy. I did not know that my university’s new Provost, the invited guest at the chapter meeting I was missing to be at National Council, had stood us up, or that our chapter would not meet again this year. If in the fall I had wondered whether I would need to simply accept that my district’s interests might be marginal to an AAUP now focused on collective bargaining first, by early spring I was wondering whether I should stop hoping for collegiality, let alone solidarity on my own campus. Had everyone become a perfect neoliberal subject, so invested in the idea of meritocracy that collegiality and solidarity were mere wisps of memory? Should I accept this reality and face it?

Then the West Virginia teachers walked off the job. Now a far more believable reality was staring me in the face. As we all know, it is crucially important to have strong, functioning labor unions. And the teachers’ success was inspiring, but almost more wonderful was the simple fact of the walkout. The strikers did not back down. They refused to be further mistreated and abused. They organized, united, and won. Now, if you have ever done any organizing, you know that making a logical argument, showing numbers, and proving points are not your main draw. Much more important are human relationships, emotions, trust, and feeling comfortable with people in individual units, and across the campus. It is very difficult to organize in an environment of mistrust, suspicion, and mutual dislike among colleagues. Collective action requires an enormous amount of trust among participants, and getting a group of atomized, alienated consumer-entrepreneurs, or competitive subjects of meritocracy to engage in any collective action at all is nearly impossible.

The vision of self as an island that is better off outside any collective process is formed slowly and by means we do not notice. The people who say “I don’t need a union. I can negotiate on my own behalf,” or “How do I know you won’t tell the dean what we have been talking about?” are guided toward this vision of self and others. There are many strategies to make workers fear and avoid each other. Nowadays, when departments barely meet, decisions are made administratively and collegial social life has all but fallen away, we sit alone and stare into our computer screens, being trained to defend ourselves against each other. We do not keep 45mm pistols in our desks yet, but we are armed with the perceptions and strategies garnered through microaggressions seminars, ethics trainings, gender parity tutorials, and more. These activities are said to make us more aware, fairer, more reasonable, safer–but their greater function, or larger objective is to make us detest and mistrust each other. We may say we “take what is good in them, and leave the rest” but this is delusional and well in line with thinking that an exceptional individual can bootstrap themselves out of ideological and intellectual processes to which we are all inevitably subject.

These training sessions do have an effect. Every exhortation to suspect and fear our colleagues has an effect. So does the academic advice suggesting that those who succeed, or at least survive in a cutthroat market and overheated tenure system, do so through unusual brilliance in combination with assiduous management of time. So do the presentations in Faculty Senate and to carefully composed institutional task forces insisting that entrepreneurialization and marketization are unfightable. Nobody is so exceptional that they rise above these divisive tactics, that are poisoning the workplace for all of us. This is what we need to resist. Unless we have a clear vision of all the anti-labor, as well as antiacademic strategies employed against us we will not be able to organize, much less win—whether it is a raise, in a union victory like the one in West Virginia, or the right to have our recommendations taken seriously again, in universities where academic decisions once made by faculty are now made by administrators and consulting firms. That is the reality we must accept and face.