BY WAVY THE BEAR
Hi! I’m Wavy the Bear, senior stuffed brand ambassador at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn! The nice folks at the AAUP liked the story about “managerial techniques” and “academic freedom” that I sent them for their journal, so now I’m “blogging”! Can I get a “wow”?!?
I wrote that story back in January. Boy, writing made me tired. Afterward I thought, time to go someplace warm for spring break and relax! I got all set to go . . .
Well, you know what came next. I’ve been a quarantined bear since March. So here’s a Wavy update!
So the bosses have been having lots and lots of Zoom meetings about when it’s safe for everybody else to go back to work. I thought Zoom would be fun—Zoooooooom! But all that Zooming made my head hurt.
The bosses also spent a lot of time helping to make the spring semester extra awesome—like making online classes bigger, so every class could be like a great big party! The more the merrier, right?
But I was a little scared. What if budget cuts meant that all the managers—maybe even Stuffed Ambassabears!—had to take a pay cut? But we all had a good laugh about that idea, and the bosses decided to fire lots of part-time faculty instead.
Then they had more meetings about how to avoid the word “fired.” Somebody suggested we just say “non-reappointments.” Smart! I didn’t even know that was a word!
But then I started hearing funny news from other universities. Some people who called themselves “graduate student workers” were protesting how their universities were firing people and planning to reopen. They said it wasn’t safe or fair. I like things that are safe and fair, so I got curious to know more.
I asked the bosses: How could someone be a student and a worker at the same time? They just grunted and reminded me that bad little ambassabears who ask too many questions get put away in the storage closet forever, so I just put on a cute hat and stopped talking. But I think it’s like, when universities need people to teach a lot of classes for not a lot of money, they hire their graduate students, so they are workers, kinda. But then when they try to start a union, the bosses say: Oops, you are actually students so you don’t need a union . . . like a magic trick!
I was also confused by how the university bosses would say that graduate student workers were selfish for not wanting to die on the job, because they were supposed to serve the students. But weren’t the student workers also . . . students?
And what was really weird was that a lot of faculty—you know, those shouty people who are always like “social justice, etc. etc.!”—didn’t really seem to support those graduate student workers who didn’t want to die on the job either.
Like I was talking to my buddy who’s the ambassabear at the University of Michigan. Goooooooo Wolverines!
He said that when the Graduate Employees’ Organization went on strike for a safe and just campus, the university president went to court to make them go back to work. And a lot of faculty said okay, or just said nothing. One graduate student said something on Twitter, the place where people put photos of me.
Now my head hurts again . . . so I guess I’ll just end by saying how I feel. Faculty people complain about managers, but they don’t seem to be doing a lot to help part-timers and graduate student workers who are fighting. That makes me kinda mad.
So I guess Wavy’s choosing sides.
Which side are you on?
Guest blogger Wavy the Bear is a pseudonym for faculty members who maintain the satirical @kingsbear1 Twitter account featuring an alter ego of the Wavy the Bear who appears in the @CUNYkcc Twitter account.
Read the complete volume of the 2020 Journal of Academic Freedom at https://www.aaup.org/JAF11.
