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 hopeful sign came in the summer of 2020 when Orleck, an undergraduate adviser and career mentor, mentioned SFNDHE. It was the action I had been waiting for—tenured faculty linked in a national effort to do the tough ongoing work to restructure US higher education.
Mittelstadt started SFNDHE as the pandemic exacerbated every crisis. Administrators furloughed faculty and staff, cut permanent positions, did not renew contingent contracts, and eliminated departments. Labor exploitation, racial disparities, and student debt intensified even as campuses received millions of dollars of CARES Act funding.
The action began immediately. SFNDHE launched a partnership with AAUP and AFT to promote the New Deal for Higher Ed (ND4HE), a national campaign to educate and mobilize faculty to demand state and federal funding reform. Boris and Orleck edited a ND4HE-themed Spring 2021 issue of Academe , which led to a webinar series that reached hundreds of people.
In addition to this union campaign, Mittelstadt and Levenstein collaborated with Suzanne Kahn at the Roosevelt Institute on a white paper titled “A True New Deal for Higher Education: How a Stimulus for Higher Ed Can Advance Progressive Policy Goals.” Five SFNDHE members wrote a brief for Bernie Sanders and won the inclusion of key labor provisions in his updated College for All (C4A) bill. The brief became a tool for organizing higher education workers across categories, campuses, and regions. Members Colena Sesanker of Gateway Community College and Jennifer Miller of Dartmouth College made the case for C4A, with the labor provisions, in the New York Times and New Hampshire Union Leader .
To reach more colleagues, SFNDHE worked with Will Jones, Peter Cole, and Keona Ervin on an opening plenary for the 2021 LAWCHA conference. The group also joined with Rutgers AAUP-AFT to convene a July Higher Ed Labor Summit by contacting dozens of union locals. More than fifty unions and associations participated in creating a Vision Platform with shared goals and a commitment to organizing together.
This summit led to the creation of Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), a coalition that now includes SFNDHE and over a hundred unions and associations. In the short term, HELU pushed for labor protections and funding for both two- and four-year institutions in the congressional budget reconciliation. In the long term, HELU is building a nationwide labor movement to demand and win changes on our campuses and in state and federal policy.
SFNDHE is expanding its projects and partnerships beyond the initial demand for federal funding. We are a group of educators and scholars committed to transforming US higher education so that it can fulfill its potential as a social good and as an engine for economic and racial justice and democratic community power. SFNDHE functions as a catalyst and facilitator as well as a commentator. We seek to move ideas into actions. Members produce articles, talks, panels, and digital media to shift the public conversation and build pressure for change. In addition, we endeavor to connect, foster, and align efforts of advocacy organizations, labor unions, and activist formations for greater impact. SFNDHE's working groups for 2021–22 are Legislative Outreach / HEA, Fair Labor and Worker Alliances, Budget and Finance, Racial Justice, and Regional Diversity and Outreach.
In the fall of 2021, SFNDHE members spoke at the Texas Council of Faculty Senates and published a piece about higher education labor organizing in Dissent. We have formed partnerships with members of Scholars for Social Justice and the Debt Collective to convene an event about higher education budget and finance and with the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) campaign to engage faculty senates in the fight for academic freedom. In 2022, the Legislative Outreach working group and ND4HE will consider a plan for a possible reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA). And although rulemaking through the Departments of Labor and Education is an arduous process, SFNDHE hopes to pursue new rules regarding contract and contingent employment. As an independent group with nationwide interests, we invite proposals aligned with our mission.
