Education

Graduate workers across the University of California have voted to transform their union. The Academic Workers for a Democratic Union slate swept all 10 executive board positions and nearly 60 percent of Joint Council positions in United Auto Workers Local 2865. The local is the largest graduate worker union in the country and the largest UAW local in the West, representing 12,000 academic student workers at nine UC campuses.

AWDU ran a hard-fought campaign against the incumbent leadership, which dubbed itself United for Social and Economic Justice. The campaign itself was tough, but getting the votes counted was even tougher. When it looked like USEJ might lose, the elections committee abruptly suspended the vote count last week and abandoned the ballots. Only in the face of marches, petitions, a sit-in in the union office, political pressure, and national media exposure did the committee resume the count.

AWDU won 55 percent of the vote statewide and up to 90 percent on some campuses. Its presidential candidate, Cheryl Deutsch, a second-year grad student in anthropology at UC Irvine, garnered 56 percent of 3,241 votes cast, a record turnout in a union where members have largely been uninvolved.

AWDU formed in early 2010 out of frustration with that lack of involvement and with the union’s absence from the movement to defend public education, which has at times been heated on UC campuses.

Without a doubt, today is going to decide the course of the struggle. The last two and a half days have been a pause, with folks moving into position for Tuesday while guarding their backs in case of any unexpected developments. Rumors of strikes have come and gone depending on what the collective sense is of who's in the lead and what the balance of forces is. The anxiety into Monday was in looking for some maneuvers or developments that would put one side in front of the other, a step forward by some local who to announce an action or a new position on the bill by anyone in the government, but basically everyone has just dug in and stayed the course.

When addressing the important question of scale--"how big or broad do we really need to be in order to start calling some shots in a meaningful way"--some of us on the left are fond of approvingly paraphrasing Lenin's idea that "politics is millions." ["Politics begin where millions of men and women are; where there are not thousands, but millions."]

This is a truism that few would contest, but it's also a good reminder of the real mammoth task at hand. Before we can realize the "another world" that so many will be imagining in Detroit next week, we have to think about what it will take to get there. When I think about this, I envision millions of people who identify with social movements and are directly engaged by them. We would be able to recognize this phenomenon in the conversations of strangers at a bar, the lyrics of pop songs, a politicization of sports, and so on. These people are from all walks of life and carry eclectic, diverse, and often contradictory political positions. The left is there, but only as a midwife to the struggle--leading by example and careful not to undermine its influence by mandating political orthodoxy on an array of points for every campaign or by exhibiting insensitivity to cultural and religious traditions that may have reactionary elements about them (as well as radical potential, in some cases).

It's official. Georgia has now joined the many other states experiencing an upsurge of student activism against budget cuts threatening the very nature of public higher education. On March 15, over 500 students from across the state rallied at the Capitol to demand that profound cuts, including an up to 50% fee hike and up to 4,000 layoffs of campus workers, be utterly abandoned and that new taxes be instituted to fund the public sector. From Dalton and Carrolton, to Savannah and Valdosta, students pledged to start branches of an emerging grassroots coalition, "Georgia Students for Public Higher Education" (http://www.gsphe.tk). The rally culminated with an electric mass meeting, where hundreds of students remained to discuss their ideas for "next steps" by bullhorn, making it clear that the fight was only beginning...

Photo courtesy of Josh D Weiss Photography

(For more photos, check out Caitie's slideshow here.)

On March 15, Georgia Students for Public Higher Education sponsored a state-wide demonstration at the capitol in downtown Atlanta. GSPHE was formed at Georgia State University in Fall 2009 to fight a $200 fee increase for university students. In March legislators announced plans for massive tuition and fee increases, as well as furloughs and layoffs of campus staff and faculty.

Below is a piece written for the emerging movement against fee hikes and budget cuts at Georgia State University in Atlanta. This version has been modified for the Solidarity webzine.

While most are busy analyzing the healthcare speech delivered to Congress days ago—a final push to promote the public option reform and put to rest challenges from the left and right—this piece

On December 16, New York State Governor Patterson proposed a total of $9 billion of spending cuts and regressive tax and fee hikes.

What does it mean to read with a child? How, as materialists, do we talk with our kids?

Lucy