{"id":9237,"date":"2023-02-16T00:00:51","date_gmt":"2023-02-16T05:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=9237"},"modified":"2023-02-19T00:24:14","modified_gmt":"2023-02-19T05:24:14","slug":"faculty-unionization-and-the-legacy-of-blackburn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/02\/faculty-unionization-and-the-legacy-of-blackburn\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty unionization and the legacy of Blackburn:"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>o commemorate Labor Day in September 2022, Howard President Wayne Frederick sent an email to the entire Howard Community. It begins:<\/p>\n

Throughout global history, and all through American history, there has been tension between so-called labor and capital, between employees and executives. Here is a simplistic example that illustrates the point: Who deserves credit for the construction of a house? Is it the architect who designed it? Or the workers who built it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now that we have grasped the simple concept, Frederick can lay it on us: \u201cAs we commemorate Labor Day this year,\u201d he mused ecumenically, \u201cwe would do well to acknowledge that the classification of labor and capital is both a real distinction and a false dichotomy\u2026 The truth of the matter is that the architect and the workers deserve equal credit for the construction of a house.\u201d Credit, in this instance, clearly does not mean pay.<\/p>\n

Frederick\u2014one of the highest paid university presidents in the Washington, DC area with a salary<\/a> of well over a million dollars\u2014may have felt particularly compelled to muddy this distinction between labor and capital in the Fall of 2022. Just that spring, the distinction had no doubt felt palpably real for him, as non-tenure faculty threatened a strike with the broad support of students, tenured faculty, and alumni that would have effectively shut down the campus. The strike threat was effective: it sparked the first good faith bargaining the administration had done with non-tenure faculty after three years at the table. Non-tenure faculty won the first collective bargaining agreement ever negotiated for full time faculty on the campus.<\/p>\n

This historic victory is inextricably bound up with the heroic actions of Howard undergraduate students and, more broadly, with a deep, longstanding imbrication between the Black radical tradition and a history of struggle at Howard.1

One cannot fully understand the faculty union\u2019s victory without seeing it in relation to student protest, specifically, the occupation of the Blackburn building that occurred in Fall 2021, just a few months before the contract was won. The Blackburn protest\u2013which wound down undramatically with a non-disclosure agreement and no public details on tangible outcomes\u2013was seen by some as a relative failure, especially held up against the long tradition of struggle at Howard. But Blackburn must be understood in relation to what it inspired and the conditions it created. The administration\u2019s retaliatory actions make it all too clear that they themselves understand this connection. Labor and student activists would do well to heed it too.<\/p>\n

Blackburn\u2019s demise: The non-disclosure agreement<\/h4>\n

While the protest was the product of persistent tensions and decades-long underinvestments, the acute events that lead to Blackburn began in the summer of 2021, when Howard\u2019s Board of Trustees made the sudden decision<\/a> to remove affiliate seats for students, faculty, and alumni. These affiliate seats were a vestige of the shared governance reforms that were fought for in the 1960s. But they had been under threat for years, as the board has increasingly shaped itself in the model of private-sector corporations. Announcing the removal of the affiliate positions over the summer, when much of the university was on break, was undoubtedly timed to dull the reaction. Unfortunately for the administration, the announcement was quickly followed by another acute crisis: the post-COVID-19 return to campus after virtual instruction in the 2020-2021 academic year.<\/p>\n

Reopening a university campus after more than a year of dormancy was a challenge everywhere, but Howard\u2019s aging and neglected infrastructure made this challenge particularly acute. A COVID preparedness plan had been formulated, but many of the milestones had not been reached. Responding to a groundswell of faculty concern, the week before the semester began, the Faculty Senate called an emergency meeting and voted unanimously for a resolution to allow faculty to choose their teaching modality.<\/p>\n

The COVID preparedness crisis opened up the question: Where, ultimately, did the leadership of the campus lie? The administration rejected the Faculty Senate\u2019s resolution. But they were not able to compel faculty to teach in person. The Senate had a standing vote of no confidence in the administration since 2018, citing \u201cdefaults in administrative leadership, fiduciary responsibility, and decaying infrastructure.\u201d Notwithstanding the resolute actions of Faculty Senate leadership, the faculty\u2019s refusal to be compelled to return to in-person instruction was less the outcome of an organized and directly confrontational push than the product of the awakening of individual survival instincts among instructors. While heroic, the Senate resolution was not a movement. At the same time, it threw the tenuousness of the administration\u2019s authority into harsh relief. Here was Frederick\u2019s \u2018so-called\u2019 tension on display: labor and management.<\/p>\n