When I joined my first meeting of Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE) in January 2021, I was a bit awestruck. The group's founder, Jennifer Mittelstadt, and charter members Eileen Boris, Marisa Chappell, Nan Enstad, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Lisa Levenstein, Annelise Orleck, and Donna Murch, were all historians I had long admired. I was also excited because I had been in contingent positions for nine years—as an adjunct professor, graduate teaching assistant, visiting assistant professor, and postdoctoral fellow. These experiences had made me desperate to see faculty and staff launch a coordinated offensive on austerity.
The first hopeful sign appeared in April 2020 when Julie Greene's LAWCHA presidential address, “Rethinking the Boundaries of Class: Lessons from Transnational Labor History and the Neoliberal University,” called on faculty to engage with Stuart Hall's framing of class and status to understand tenure as a mechanism that fractures labor solidarity. A second...
