BY HANK KALET

There has been a strike wave across academia that is altering the landscape for those of us who teach and work in higher education—and Rutgers is poised to join the party.

Strikes at The New School, the University of California system, the University of Illinois Chicago, and threats by faculty, adjuncts, and graduate workers at Fordham, NYU, Columbia, and elsewhere have been successful at improving the pay and conditions for workers, slowing the expansion of a corporate model in higher ed that has benefited Wall Street and harmed faculty, staff, students, and the communities in which we work.

I teach at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. I am a part-time lecturer—an adjunct. I am part of the most vulnerable class of contingent faculty. As I wrote recently in The Progressive, adjuncts at Rutgers—and at most institutions of higher learning—are woefully underpaid. We lack job protection and have to reapply for our jobs every semester, which leaves us in the most precarious of positions and at the mercy of management. We are not offered university-backed health insurance, and either must rely on spouses or state or federally backed plans. We also have little access to the basic tools of the trade (office space, office materials), deficiencies that can affect students.

Grad students, who are also contingent, lack many of the same protections, and are not guaranteed funding—even when a major national emergency disrupts their ability to conduct their research, as happened during 2020–2022 with the COVID-19 pandemic. Full-time faculty not on a tenure track—a growing portion of the teaching population— lack access to tenure, meaning their job protections are limited to the length of their contracts. Even tenured and tenure-track professors are subject to the indignities of the corporate university model, as budget cuts eliminate classes and automation strips them of control over scheduling and more and more time is spent seeking grants and external funding.

These are the issues that are driving Rutgers’ faculty during our current negotiations to replace the contracts that expired eight months ago. We are seeking to merge multiple bargaining units into a single unit, and are seeking nothing less than a transformation of Rutgers. We want an end to the corporate model and reaffirmation of the public university’s mission. Our contract demands would end contingency as it currently exists by creating a system of fractional and multi-semester appointments that could end the exploitation of adjunct faculty and affirm a commitment to the principle of equal pay for equal work. Adjuncts would become “fractional, non-tenure-track” faculty paid on the same scale as full-time NTTs. If we taught have the number of classes (or class equivalents) as a full-timer, we would receive pay equivalent to half what they are paid. We also are demanding long-term appointments for part-time faculty, a path to tenure for non-tenured faculty, health care, and other changes in the way all classes of faculty are treated.

Our demands have been met with dismissal and rejected by university negotiators, who have offered us wage increases that, frankly, are insulting and amount to a pay cut given the current rate of inflation. They have shown no urgency to get anything done, and it is clear to us that they are content to wait us out, hoping that doing so will weaken our resolve. Management tells us they are aware of what has been happening elsewhere, but they act as though they remain in the driver’s seat, and that there is little we can do to push back.

They are mistaken. Management has made it clear we will not win our demands without a fight. We will not win without our own show of strength, and our power is the work we do, is our labor. Without us, the university would grind to a halt. Without us, there are no classes, there is no research, there is nothing for administration to sell.

Students get this. Our demands have been endorsed by the student assembly, and progressive student groups are actively supporting us. They understand that changing the terms of our employment helps them. They get that better paid and better treated faculty improve their classroom experience. They get that the neoliberal university is the reason tuition continues to rise, the reason their room and board—both on-campus and off—is unaffordable and often unhealthy, and why transportation to campus and between campuses is frustrating at best. And it is why they have their own list of demands—demands we support.

We are at an inflection point. On Feb. 28, we open an official strike authorization vote that will run through March 10. A strike vote does not mean we will strike—no one wants that. But it means we are ready and willing to do so, that we are tired of administrative delays, underwhelming and often insulting offers, and an administration that speaks in platitudes but has done little to change the dynamic.

Rutgers has the money to address our issues, to pay adjuncts, grads, and non-tenure faculty what we are worth. Rutgers has the money to give its tenured and tenure-track faculty fair raises. It has the money, the power, and the responsibility as a public university to address student concerns over on-campus and off-campus housing, and to be a better neighbor in the largely low-income communities it calls home. It has the ability to include all of us in its governing decisions, to reorient Rutgers away from the neoliberal model and be the revolutionary force its marketing proclaims it to be.

Rutgers has the power to change, just as higher education has the power, but so far it has refused. That’s why I will vote to authorize a strike and why many of my colleagues will do so. We are prepared to withhold our labor to force the changes that need to be made.

Hank Kalet is New Brunswick campus vice president for the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union (PTLFC-AAUP-AFT), an adjunct instructor of journalism at Rutgers, and a journalist and poet.