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How to have School Spirit: Unions, Solidarity, and Creative Writing
I remember being a senior in high school and reading Marina Keegan’s essay, “The Opposite of Loneliness”. I had heard people’s nostalgia about their “college days” or the “college experience” but Keegan’s idea of what she had felt at Yale was the first that I really aspired to.
“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. ”
-Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness
We spend a relatively brief amount of time as undergraduates yet for many of us it can be a space of transformation and momentum. Our “college experience” is a part of our lives through which we grow, learn, and actively share collective energy that we acquire in a nuanced way.
So what actually makes a University feel like the opposite of loneliness? Undergraduate students, graduate students, professors, staff, dining hall workers, janitorial staff, and of course the towns that Universities exist in, do the actual work of cultivating the college experience and creating a meaningful environment. Without the work of students and faculty who consistently build vibrant communities and student organizations, it would be impossible to attract prospective students and donations. When people visit campus to determine if they want to come here, you give them a tour of student activities, the dining halls, the nearby city, and academics- you don’t simply have them meet an administrator to talk about the endowment.
But if students, faculty, workers, and surrounding cities are what sustain a university’s reputation and profit, then why are administrators given free rein to contribute to gentrification, use the endowment for unethical investments, and fail to provide adequate benefits or salaries for faculty and workers?
No matter how affectionately we wear our school spirit, university administrative decisions are increasingly determined by accountants and lawyers (rather than faculty governance boards, worker councils, student representatives, or long term university members). Administrators and Board of Governors members seem to only see assets or expenses instead of an actual community that deserves a voice in university matters and recognition as stakeholders. And while the corporatization of the public university has been a major issue that unions and students have been pushing back against for decades, the pandemic has only made it worse.
At Rutgers University, where I am a senior, our administration has the money to not need to make departmental cuts due to Covid. As a state university, we did not see drastic changes in enrollment or government funding. We also have a $1.5 billion endowment, and this is the exact type of crisis that calls for tapping into it.
Yet, Rutgers has announced over 1,000 layoffs including dining hall staff, mental health professionals, librarians, part-time lecturers, and departmental-level administrators. Graduate students are facing threats that the administration will not be extending their research, which effectively acts as a layoff by stopping their funding and benefits. Ultimately, students (many of whom are experiencing financial crises) are being asked to pay the same tuition while the classes that they love and the employees that are essential to the university are being cut.
And yes, education as a whole in this country is underfunded—we see this with both K-12 schools and universities— but administrators can protect themselves while unions have to consistently advocate for the bare minimum. In fact, as unions pushed back against layoffs, Rutgers administration hired Jackson-Lewis, a notorious union-busting law firm, which cost millions of dollars that they simply could have spent on sustaining the actual livelihood of Rutgers community members. They continue to now hire administrators and managers while declaring a hiring freeze for faculty and staff. To lay off adjunct faculty while prioritizing administrators feels like false advertising for the value of education that Rutgers is projecting to students.
Part-Time Lecturers (Adjunct/Contingent faculty) teach over one-third of undergraduate classes at Rutgers but are paid as little as $5,500 per class without benefits. You may not realize which of your professors are adjuncts because they put in the same amount of work and are asked to perform at the same level as non-adjunct faculty. Lindsay Zafir explains the historical trajectory of adjunctification in her article “Organizing the Neoliberal University”.
“It’s a well-worn line in the rap for any academic union: three-fourths of all faculty in the United States are contingent laborers. And well-worn for a reason. It’s an astounding number, especially when compared to the number of contingent faculty fifty years ago — roughly three percent.
This remarkable reconfiguration of labor in higher education coincided with the influx of more diverse groups of students and workers on college campuses in the latter half of the 20th century. At the same time, state disinvestment and subsequent privatization of public universities transformed higher education into a private commodity rather than a public good. As a result, women and people of color disproportionately fill the ranks of contingent faculty while the makeup of the tenured faculty (largely white, majority male) has remained relatively unchanged since 1969. “ -Lindsay Zafir, The Forge
Fighting the privatization of public universities, along with calls for making Academia equitable and fair to more diverse faculty who previously were not represented by the university, entails a large quantity of work. Adding a broader discussion of how universities like Rutgers push contracts that create luxury apartments for students in surrounding cities or displace local middle school students to warehouses (read about the Defend Lincoln Annex Coalition in the references below), is an even more extensive conversation.
For students, these conversations may require redefining how we show school spirit by using our voices to advocate for faculty and worker unions and the cities that we have entered and taken up space in. It also means fighting for our own voice in the Board of Governors/Trustee meetings and decision-making processes, as we are the biggest population at the university and we have a real ability to determine the reputation of the school. We should be vocal in defending the people and spaces that make us feel the opposite of loneliness, especially when they are made vulnerable by the university that is funded by our tuition and school spirit.
The Creative Writing Department at Rutgers is a space that is truly vital to my experience here and it is currently being threatened by a 20% budget cut. Getting to know strangers through their creative work is one of the most underrated ways of experiencing connection and community. I’ve met my best friends in my writing classes and have felt seen as a person in ways that will always stick with me. The department is mostly taught by PTLs whose salaries only take up 0.8% of the school’s total budget, yet somehow cutting PTL classes for Creative Writing was chosen as the best way to deal with the pandemic. By treating this department as sacrificial, it feels like the work of Creative Writing and Creativity is being deeply underrated by the university.
But you don’t have to take just my word for it- I’ve created a google form asking for testimonials from Creative Writing students at Rutgers which received 72 responses in one day, and then passed 150 responses within five days. Many students talked about creative writing as one of the ways they were able to cope with personal traumas and mental health. They also, regardless of their academic discipline, described the creative writing classes as their favorite courses that they truly looked forward to and felt the most engaged in. All of the responses signaled that Creative Writing classes should not only be saved, but given more recognition and funding.
We should be honest about what creative writing sustains at Rutgers and what it empowers students to do whether it be through improved writing skills or overall community connection. We should value PTLs for how they are inspiring students to be creative despite the state of the world and the bleakness of corporatization and climate crisis. We should safeguard these wonderful parts of the university because without them many students would have no place to believe that creativity is important to academia and that their thoughts matter. I encourage everyone to read the anonymous responses here and to follow the campaign on Twitter: @norulayoffs!