On Building Solidarity Wall-to-Wall and Border-to-Border in PA Higher Ed

The “Wall-to-Wall and Border-to-Border” riff is lifted from our siblings/comrades at Higher Education Labor United, which APSCUF has supported and I’ve been active with from time to time (and will be more so, I hope).

Right now, I have some thoughts related to Governor Shapiro’s budget address this week and the pending proposal (such as it is) to merge PASSHE with the Community Colleges. None of those thoughts is about the prospective policy, which as of yet isn’t actually a policy (that we know of). Sure, I have thinky-thoughts about what I know, but those aren’t salient to the points I’m making here.

Right now I’m thinking about how APSCUF siblings can start today to get ourselves and each other ready for the kinds of solidarity we’re almost certain to need at some point with our community college faculty colleagues, as well as the AFSCME, SEIU, PSEA, AFT, and other unionized staff/workers across the state (and the non-unionized ones too!).

Two things I hope we (as APSCUF siblings) can be getting in the habit of being good about, and they’re really kind of the same–

1. Some of you have heard this before. No matter what happens with the Governor’s… idea, we need to be more careful all the time about how we talk about our AFSCME siblings and problems on campuses. To put it simply, they’re as understaffed and overworked as we are. That’s not to say you shouldn’t alert someone when there are problems, but please be careful not to sound like you’re accusing the current workers of slacking or doing a bad job. As one of the leaders of the WCU AFSCME unit put it, “Every time you tell management how much we suck, you’re telling them to outsource our jobs. Please don’t do that.”
2. As we start reacting more audibly to whatever the Governor says and whatever happens as a result, we need to develop better working relationships with our community college colleagues/siblings. It’s not unusual for four-year faculty to have some [ahem] opinions about them [e.g. because they don’t all have terminal degrees, and some of them aren’t especially research active (which, y’know, if you’re teaching 5/5 or 6/6, you probably aren’t either), they’re something less than we are]. If you’re somebody who thinks along those lines, all I’ll say for now is, their job is different from ours, loaded with challenges that are different from ours, and every bit as important as ours. This is not a debate I’m interested in hosting on the blog or anywhere else; if you want to talk shit about our colleagues, you’ll need to do it in your own space.

Given the relentless attacks on higher ed all across the US, we’re going to need to stand firmly with people who cut the grass at WCU; clean the bathrooms at Butler County Community College; serve food at Delco CC; work as department secretaries and in the Registrar’s Offices at, well, everywhere; and teach at CCP, and on and on. They deserve our respect as people regardless, as workers whose livelihoods are as precarious as ours (and often more), and as union siblings. 

Keep your eyes open for news and organizing opportunities as the merger plan develops. But even if we never need to mobilize fully around this specific issue, we all need to have better habits about the way we think and talk about and talk to our own.