Office Hours Higher Ed

For today’s podcast we’re sharing interviews with two student activists involved in Palestine solidarity organizing on their campuses. Instead of our usual format where we bring all of our guests together for a discussion, today we’re bringing you two interviews back to back. Our guests focus on the ongoing repression that activists are facing at their universities. As our listeners may know, anti-Palestinian repression on campuses...

In this episode, David and Laura recap the unprecedented wave of pro-Palestine organizing happening on U.S. college campuses over the past few weeks. We also discuss the repression these movements are facing from campus administrators and pro-Israel organizations (who have a long history of targeting campus anti-Zionist organizing). We talk about the role of universities in social movements, where this movement might be headed, and...

In this episode we speak with faculty and student organizers from three Florida campuses.  

In Florida, Republicans are attacking higher education on several fronts. In late October, Ron DeSantis and the chancellor of Florida’s State University system ordered college presidents to deactivate Students for Justice in Palestine on their campuses. This continues a longer trend, which our guests address, a trend of right wing attacks on...

This week David and Laura are flying solo for a "Faculty Lounge" episode. Our topic: ChatGPT and Us. How do we respond to ChatGPT as academic workers with a radical critique of higher ed? Using recent think pieces by Corey Robin and Steven Salaita as jumping-off points, we reflect on the lack of a collective labor politics in most writing on ChatGPT; the positionality of our working-class students and their alienation from the lear...

In this episode we speak with Mary Jirmanus Saba, Dana Ernst, and Sarah Abusaa. Mary, Dana and Sarah are grad student workers and union organizers with United Auto Workers 2865. In their union, Mary, Dana and Sarah organize for disability justice and their work highlights the intersectional nature of labor struggles.

As listeners to this podcast might know, in fall 2022, graduate student workers in the University of California syst...

Office Hours is taking the summer off! We've handed in our grades and logged out of our work emails until the fall! We'll be back in September with more episodes covering campus politics in the end times.

In this last episode, David and Laura give passing and failing grades to the best and worst of the last academic year. Spoiler: SCOTUS and college presidents are going to need to take the class again!

Some links based on our discu...

**Content Warning** for discussion of sexual harassment and assault. We do not include any graphic or detailed descriptions, but they are discussed in general terms throughout the episode.

Today’s episode looks a little different from our usual format. Laura talks with a good friend from UC Santa Cruz, K, about our participation in an organizing campaign against faculty sexual harassment and assault that ultimately led to the fir...

In this episode we talk with Conor Tomás Reed, an organizer and educator with a new book called New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University, out this month with Common Notions Press. The book is a people’s history of CUNY, the City University of New York. It follows students and faculty as they created new forms of radical education, including the formation of Black, Puerto Rican, and Women's Studies ...

In this episode we discuss an adjunct unionization campaign that took place at Seattle University, a private Jesuit college in Seattle. The campaign began in 2013 and won a majority vote to unionize with SEIU, but the Seattle U administration sued to stall the vote count. Then, when the votes finally got counted, the admin refused to recognize the union and threatened to take the case up to the Supreme Court. Facing an uphill battl...

Welcome to our first "Faculty Lounge" episode of Office Hours. David and Laura hang out in the faculty lounge, microwave a couple frozen burritos, look in all the empty drawers for forks but find only Splenda packets, and manage to track down some expired powdered non-dairy creamer for our vending machine coffee. Then we get cozy in our lounge chairs and chat about the state of higher ed. The main topics covered are the continuing ...

David and Laura talk about the fall 2022 faculty strike at Eastern Michigan University with Matt Kirkpatrick. Matt is an associate professor of English and held various leadership positions in EMU’s faculty union, which is AAUP. During the contract campaign and strike Matt was on the union’s negotiating team. In the interview we cover a range of topics, including the complexity of striking in a right-to-work state, how faculty push...

Laura and David discuss the recent UC strike with Magally A. Miranda Alcázar, a graduate student in the Chicanx and Central American Studies Department at UCLA. Maga was a participant in the strike and active in the rank-and-file movement to push for a No vote against contract ratification.

Interviewee bio:

Magally A. Miranda Alcázar is a doctoral candidate at UCLA, and an activist working at the intersection of gender, race, labor...

Laura and David discuss the recent UC strike with Magally A. Miranda Alcázar, a graduate student in the Chicanx and Central American Studies Department at UCLA. Maga was a participant in the strike and active in the rank-and-file movement to push for a No vote against contract ratification.

Interviewee bio:

Magally A. Miranda Alcázar is a doctoral candidate at UCLA, and an activist working at the intersection of gender, race, labor...

In this episode we talk with two faculty organizers at South Seattle College about building horizontal rank-and-file power within the faculty union.

Zahra Alavi teaches English Language and Adult Education at South Seattle College and is a member of AFT 1789.

Charlotte Brun is a faculty Librarian at South Seattle College and is also a member of AFT 1789.

Our discussion covers topics such as fighting for open negotiations, the dyn...

Today we're looking at an ongoing organizing campaign by students and faculty at Salem State University, a Massachusetts public college, to expose campus debt and resist austerity measures being imposed by the school administration. We interview two faculty members, Joanna Gonsalves and Rich Levy, who have been involved with the Campus Debt Reveal Project.

Interviewee Bios:

Joanna Gonsalves is a Psychology Professor at Salem State ...