BY MIKE BUDD

“Don’t mourn—organize!”
Joe Hill, union organizer, executed 1915

There’s a lot to mourn in Florida (and elsewhere) right now, not only but especially in our colleges and universities. According to an AAUP preliminary report in May 2023,

academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history. If sustained, this onslaught threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state, with dire implications for the entire country.

Among the four main findings: “The Florida governor and state legislature are using their swift, aggressive, and ongoing ‘hostile takeover’ of New College of Florida as a test case for future encroachments on public colleges and universities across the country.” Administrators from top to bottom are often deeply complicit in these political attacks or have “explicitly supported them,” and risk becoming “pawns in DeSantis’s corrupt patronage system.” New Florida laws

taken collectively, constitute a systematic effort to dictate and enforce conformity with a narrow and reactionary political and ideological agenda [including destroying] college and university programs that serve minority communities and [banishing] from classrooms ideas and information about race, gender, and sexual identity that fail to conform to the prejudices of politicians.

Beyond higher education, Florida Republicans have passed a universal school voucher bill that will undermine public education; banned abortions after six weeks; banned gender-affirming care for minors; enabled adults to carry concealed weapons without a permit; authorized millions of dollars to punish immigrants; punished businesses that allow minors into drag shows; punished people who use public bathrooms that do not correspond to their sex at birth; lowered the threshold for the death penalty; started an unpopular feud with Disney; and on and on.

Facilitating this legal and political onslaught, and to further his presidential ambitions, DeSantis’s campaign has strategically dominated the twenty-four-hour news cycle in Florida with a constant, exhausting barrage of publicity and actions that helped him win reelection by nineteen points in 2022 after a very narrow victory in 2018.

For many of the targets of the right-wing hate offensive in Florida (and elsewhere)—anyone not white, performatively straight, conservative Christian, anti-public education and reactionary—the last few years have been exhausting and demoralizing. Near the top of the list of the targeted have been college professors. Many faculty are leaving or not coming to Florida. We don’t yet know how many, and may never know exactly, since the now-Orwellian state of Florida denies that there’s a brain drain. But many faculty are leaving or want to leave, looking for work elsewhere, retiring, know someone who’s left, and/or have recently been on a search committee that failed because so many qualified faculty don’t want to come here.  As the Guardian recently reported,

Andrew Gothard, the state-level president of the United Faculty of Florida labor union, predicts a loss of between 20 and 30% of faculty members at some universities during the upcoming academic year in comparison with 2022-23, which would signify a marked increase in annual turnover rates that traditionally have stood at 10% or less.

Whether we are leaving or staying, intimidated or not, this is what we mourn: the human damage that the statistics can’t capture. We are learning how fragile our institutions are, how vulnerable the quality education is that we have worked so hard and so long to build. Many of us have devoted decades of our lives not just on our own careers but to build our institutions, to make our underfunded public colleges and universities better able to serve all our students, including the many disadvantaged and underprepared ones. Our courses, our programs, our colleges only work because we do; we are the mortar that holds those inanimate bricks together. It’s not the administrators or the trustees or the donors, those who are out in front at commencement. It’s us, whose increasingly precarious working conditions are also our students’ increasingly precarious learning conditions. After half a century of neoliberal austerity in Florida and nationally, 75 percent of the faculty is now contingent in at least one way. We’ve been building these growing institutions with less and less support from the state and academic managers. We find ourselves as a faculty, represented only through our union, alone. We face powerful, malicious politicians and their sponsors, who are rightwing oligarchs. It’s intimidating, and those of us who are staying do not blame those who are leaving. But the increasing institutional damage and wreckage can be disheartening and demoralizing. Humane institutions are hard to build but easier to tear down.

But faculty in Florida (and elsewhere) are not just mourning—we’re organizing. The United Faculty of Florida (UFF) represents more than 25,000 full-time faculty at all twelve state universities and sixteen state colleges as well as 8,000 graduate assistants. Since its beginnings in the late sixties and early seventies, UFF has grown in response to the challenges of a right to work (for less) state and an often-hostile political climate. We have learned never to let a crisis go to waste and used several crises to evolve from a defensive organizational culture centered on bargaining and contract enforcement to a more balanced and effective union focused primarily on organizing and membership growth. Along with our large K–12 affiliate, the Florida Education Association, we are now facing our greatest crisis, a new anti-union law necessitating both a rapid transfer of all members to electronic dues and also minimum membership density of 60 percent in all chapters. With help from our national affiliates, NEA and AFT, UFF will continue to be fully mobilized until we are not just surviving but thriving again.

After World War II, the teachers’ unions developed an organic relationship with the civil rights and other progressive movements to help bring Florida into the modern era, marked by, in 1968, both a union-led statewide teachers strike and a new state constitution. This new constitution included the obligatory southern right-to-work (for less) provision but also an unusual guarantee of workers’ rights to collective bargaining, which helped to make fast-growing Florida somewhat different from the most reactionary states of the old Confederacy. On February 23, 2023, the Dream Defenders, one of the most important organizations coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement, called a statewide student walkout that was immediately endorsed by UFF, in protest against DeSantis’s attempts to ban African American Studies. This walkout led to teach-ins and marches all over the state, strengthening old alliances.  These progressive forces are gradually organizing into stronger coalitions of political and cultural resistance inside Florida.

At the same time, UFF is building affiliations outside Florida, including with the AAUP, since both are now affiliated with the national American Federation of Teachers (an affiliate of the AFL-CIO). In addition, UFF has joined Higher Education Labor United, a new and growing national organization of higher ed unions that aims to build “a higher ed labor movement wall to wall and coast to coast,” complementing the strengths of our different union affiliates with an industrial approach to the distinctive problems and issues of the higher ed sector.

We all have reasons to mourn. But whether we’re a part-time contingent faculty member at a community college in South Carolina or a tenured professor at a research university in California, mourning can contribute to apathy and disorganization. Joe Hill told us that it’s okay to mourn, but we need to move on to organizing.

Mike Budd is professor emeritus of film and media studies at Florida Atlantic University and is active in the United Faculty of Florida and Higher Education Labor United.