BY DONNA MURCH

Tonight Rutgers AAUP-AFT will hold the first session of a new initiative we’ve been working on for months. In the tradition of Ella Baker, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the 1960s civil rights movement, we are setting up a Freedom School for political education and outreach.

Our first event on Thursday, November 12, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. features the brilliant activist scholar and Dartmouth history Professor Annelise Orleck. She will be discussing her new book “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising against Poverty Wages. (RSVP here for the Zoom link and say you’re going on Facebook here.) The urgent themes we will be discussing directly address the crisis we face as union members at Rutgers, where the administration has imposed brutal austerity measures, including laying off more than 1,000 workers since the spring—around 5 percent of the total union workforce.

The pandemic has disrupted both our ordinary lives and how we connect to each other as union members. To address this, these Thursday evening events are intended to build community, increase rank-and-file participation, and engage in popular education. Freedom School will be a virtual classroom and discussion space for union members, students, and communities beyond campus, with the goal of developing leadership and political consciousness for a new generation. We also hope these sessions encourage more rank-and-file members to participate in our union, which represents more than 5,000 full-time faculty and graduate workers at Rutgers University.

We invite all of you to join us this Thursday and for the discussions to follow every few weeks. Bring along your family and friends, too. Our next session, on Thursday, December 3, will feature our own faculty member and renowned investigative journalist Juan González and historian Johanna Fernandez.

Future Freedom School sessions will feature speakers from the labor and social movements, as well as from our Coalition of Rutgers Unions and the larger Rutgers community. We are launching Freedom School not only to build solidarity among our own members but across our coalition at Rutgers and in communities beyond our university—by creating a space for discussion, exchange, and mutual learning. The themes we discuss will inform our current struggles at Rutgers—and in all of higher education—for social, economic, and racial justice.

To join us on Thursday night, click here to get the Zoom link. Please tell us if you’re coming on Facebook and share the event on social media. And subscribe to the new Freedom School-Rutgers AAUP-AFT YouTube channel, where this and future sessions will be streamed and available for viewing later.

We hope to see you at Freedom School!

Guest blogger Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers University and executive board member and People of Color Caucus co-chair of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.