Newsletter #104: The Political Economy of University Labor

Early this week, the Student Workers of Columbia, UAW Local 2710, announced a successful strike authorization vote, where 91.5% of voting members indicating, after extensive deliberation at the department and labor levels, that they were prepared to take action against the conjoined cost-of-living and authoritarian crises on the job. This step forward is significant, not in the least because Columbia University has been at the heart of Trump’s ongoing attacks on higher education: devastating budget cuts, demands to rework curriculum, efforts at detaining and deporting members of campus community and repressing organizing for a much larger layer of students and workers. (You can read a perspective on what the attacks mean and how to respond to them here). It is significant too, because, after the major strikes prior to Trump, including at University of Michigan, Dartmouth College, Boston University, the University of California, and elsewhere, strike actions had grown quiet on the higher ed front since the GOP’s return to the White House. Columbia’s strike vote might turn out to announce the start of a new, escalating series of ‘fight-backs’ on campus.

In light of this news, the Dig is publishing a newsletter from Mathias Fuelling, a recently graduated student-worker at Philadelphia’s Temple University. Mathias probes the larger political-economic coordinates for the expansion of higher education and the politically motivated attacks on it. We also encourage you to listen to our earlier episodes covering the struggles in higher education, including our discussions with Ian Gavigan from Higher Education Labor United, and an earlier talk with two leaders of the Rutgers University Strike, Donna Murch and Todd Wolfson. If you want to take a further dive, you can see a wider sampling of what we’ve recorded on higher education here.

The Political Economy of University Labor
By Mathias Fuelling

The Dig has recently done extensive work in analyzing the modern American university, and interviewing union and labor organizers engaged in the higher education sector, such as the interview with Ian Gavigan in September 2025. For *The Dig’s *newsletter, I wanted to expand on many of the points and arguments that Gavigan raises, with a focus on a university that I have extensive experience with, having finished my PhD there in the fall of 2025 and also taking part there in a graduate student strike in the spring of 2023. Temple University is a large regional state affiliated university in Philadelphia. Neither prestigious, nor looked down upon, Temple has a long pedigree, established in 1884 as a night school for workers by a Baptist Minister. Going by the size of the student body, Temple is the largest university in the state of Pennsylvania. Given the importance of Pennsylvania to the overall political balance in the United States, as well as Philadelphia’s regional economic and political importance as a bulwark for the Democratic Party, Temple University is of particular importance for understanding the broader dynamics of the crisis of higher education in the country today. Temple is also important as an institutional site for the fallout of deindustrialization in Philadelphia.

Since the 1970s, there has been a structural crisis impacting the forms of the welfare state, moving from a public good to a mixed public-private model, the key institutional characteristic of the neoliberal turn. Gabriel Winant has theorized and historicized this crisis and turn in his book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Winant studied the development of the healthcare and insurance industry in contemporary Pittsburgh from the postwar steel industry of the 1950s to the consolidation of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center system. Winant calls this process the creation of the “public-private welfare state.” What is key to expanding on that work is recognizing that there is a further aspect to this crisis, namely higher education as expressed in the university system. Hospitals, prisons, and universities, all since the 1970s, have undergone massive changes to manage a definite slacking in labor markets and the social crisis engendered by deindustrialization. Winant has shown this crisis and structural turn in the context of Pittsburgh. However, on the eastern side of the state of Pennsylvania, a similar turn took place with higher education, as expressed in Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. As Winant points out, one of the largest employers in Pittsburgh is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). For Pennsylvania as a whole, the fourth largest employer in the state is the University of Pennsylvania, ranking only below Wal-Mart, the state government, and the federal government. The University of Pennsylvania has more employees than the City of Philadelphia, in which the university is based. What is gestured toward here is the need for a further historicization and theorization of the breakdown of the New Deal order and the industrial system in urban centers and its connection to the development of the modern university system, in which higher education mutated due to the pressure conditions of a changing labor force and a surplus population that could no longer be absorbed by traditional fields. What Winant offered as theory and historical analysis of the deindustrialization in Pittsburgh and its development into the modern healthcare system of Western Pennsylvania, I propose a twinned account in Eastern Pennsylvania, centered on Temple University in Philadelphia. While the University of Pennsylvania offers a hyper corporate privatized example of the development of higher education in the last half century, Temple offers a more complicated and paradigmatic picture, given its imbrication with the state, its large student body, and its broader integration into the fabric of the economic and social life of Pennsylvania and NJ.

Temple over the course of the 20th century developed into a fairly stereotypical working-class university, catering more towards night school and part time schooling for the completion of professional degrees. Temple also had a historically large Black student body, given its location in the historically Black area of the city in North Philadelphia post the Great Migration. Temple was historically a hub of city activism and Black organizing. Temple founded one of the first Black studies programs and departments in the country in 1971. Temple however has also long operated in the shadow of its much richer and more exclusive Ivy League neighbor across the Schuylkill River, the University of Pennsylvania. Temple did reach R1 status as a university until 2015. The major turning point for the university was in the 1980s. During this period three major processes occurred - deindustrialization reached its zenith, the Gen X generation came of age, and the reforms of Ronald Reagan were passed.

These processes had two broad results: the Gen X generation had less high school degree job opportunities given deindustrialization, so they found their avenue in higher education as a surplus population that could not be absorbed by the American economy at this time. This is when enrollments increased dramatically at Temple and so did the corporatization of the university through individualized debt obligations, made possible by Reagan’s reforms. Temple made a decisive shift during this decade, moving away from a potential working-class oriented institution with a strong rootedness in the Black community of North Philadelphia, towards a striving model to become a big business. A key action of Temple during this shift was an increase in faculty hiring, both to boost its research credentials and to address the explosion in student enrollment. An accompanying phenomenon was increased labor disputes between the university and the faculty, as Temple put the squeeze on older faculty and younger faculty experienced more trying labor conditions than they were prepared for. Younger faculty, predominately those recently hired, were also more politically active and had active memories of the more radical actions nationally in the 1960s and 1970s. The result was a particularly bitter faculty strike, under TAUP (Temple Association of University Professionals) in September of 1990, a flashpoint for the changes the university leadership was instituting and the university’s future direction, as against organized labor power to prevent or at least mitigate this turn. The strike lasted 27 days and was ended by the faculty under the threat of a court injunction, filed by the university that ordered faculty back to work. The strike, occurring at the beginning of the fall semester, and mobilizing all of the faculty, had a major impact on the functioning of the university, and resulted in a severe drop in enrollment, which the university would not recover from until almost a decade later in 1999. This strike haunts the institutional memory of the university, as well as the memory of older faculty who lived through it, and those faculty who came to Temple over the ensuing last thirty years who have learned about the strike from those faculty who lost it.

The transformation of Temple over the course of the 1980s and 1990s was accompanied by a liberalization in the healthcare and insurance industries, financial liberalization, and a revolution in the real estate market and property valuations, the capitalist revolution from above of Reagan and Clinton. This is reflected in the modern composition of the Board of Trustees of Temple University circa 2023:

Leonard Barrack - former National Finance Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and former national vice chairman of AIPAC
Michael Breeze - a businessman who leads New Direction Capital, a digital CFO service provider
Patrick M. Browne - a former Republican state senator from 2005 to November 2022 charged with three DUIs and suspected of conflict of interest and even corruption regarding tax breaks given to businesses in Allentown, PA, who hired his wife as a lobbyist
Stephen G. Charles - the namesake of the new Charles Library on Temple’s campus, after he donated ten million dollars. Charles is the founder of Immixgroup, an information technology services company that works to facilitate government contracts with private IT businesses
Joseph F. Corradino - CEO and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust, a real estate investment company that specializes in shopping malls. PREIT recently went into temporary bankruptcy in the fall of 2020 and is now looking to rebuild its finances by moving into the apartment rental market
Nelson Diaz - a director of the energy company Exelon and its subsidiary PECO, making Diaz essentially the energy baron of Philadelphia
Judith A. Felgoise - a philanthropist and daughter of Leonard Abramson, a healthcare company mogul. Abramson in the 1970s founded a non-profit healthcare company called HMO of Pennsylvania with three million dollars in federal loan money. In 1983 Abramson took HMO of Pennsylvania public and re-named it U.S. Healthcare. In 1996 Abramson sold U.S. Healthcare to the insurance giant Aetna for just over eight billion dollars and then served on the board of Aetna until 2000. Abramson stepped down that year due to accusations of conflicts of interest involving himself and his daughters and son in law (meaning Judith Felgoise) getting paid millions of dollars by Aetna for doing business with the healthcare company during Abramson’s time on the board of directors
Deborah M. Fretz - a career employee of Sunoco, a major fossil fuel company with large operations in western Pennsylvania. She ended her career as the CEO of Sunoco Logistics Partners LP, now acquired by a company called Energy Transfers, a fossil fuel pipeline construction and logistics company
Lon R. Greenberg - Chairman and former CEO of UGI Corporation, a major natural gas and fossil fuel company that engages in fracking in Pennsylvania. Greenberg is also a board member of AmerisourceBergen Corporation, a pharmaceutical drug wholesaler/distributor which has come under severe public shame and has been sued by multiple states for its role in fueling the opioid epidemic via its irresponsible promotion of prescription painkillers. In early 2022 Amerisource Bergen settled with some states, agreeing to pay billions of dollars in fines. Philadelphia is the epicenter of the opioid epidemic on the East Coast. How many people who are addicted to opioids in the city have the origin of their addiction in the policies of painkiller oversupply by Amerisource Bergen, and thereby directly at the hands of Greenberg, as one of the leaders of the company? How many overdose deaths can be traced directly to Greenberg’s corporate policies?
Sandra Harmon-Weiss - a physician who later became an insurance company executive in Leonard Abramson’s US Healthcare and then Aetna after US Healthcare was sold to it
Drew Katz - an advertising executive who is the son of the late Lewis Katz, who was a major regional media mogul in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Drew Katz’s wedding reportedly cost over 1.5 million dollars
John W. Marshall III - a lawyer and healthcare/insurance executive
Christopher W. McNichol - a financier with Citigroup

Temple over the past few years, beginning in the year or two before the covid-19 pandemic, but accelerating in the pandemic’s aftermath since 2022, has been wracked by labor disputes among teaching and research employees. In the spring semester of 2023 the Temple graduate student union, TUGSA (Temple University Graduate Student Association), went on strike for six weeks, calling for an end to a tiered system of funding, the increase of the overall funding package, better healthcare, especially for dependents on graduate students covered by the TUGSA bargaining unit, and a more accountable and competent grievance and sexual harassment reporting process. While TUGSA won its strike, Temple retaliated by a round of austerity, cutting budgets and funding wherever possible, claiming that it had to do so to balance out the pay increases won by TUGSA. The broader labor struggle has now transferred onto the backs of the current iteration of TAUP, as it attempts to grow and use the power of the faculty to make serious changes to the function of the university. However, TAUP is caught in a struggle, as many faculty unions are, between the tenured and TT faculty, and the adjunct faculty. Tenured and TT faculty wish to retain their benefits within the system as the expense of the adjuncts and accuse the adjuncts of being too radical and demanding, and the adjuncts, while indeed more radical, are handicapped in their ability to leverage their power by their overall institutional disenfranchisement at the expense of the tenured and TT faculty. Adjuncts can leverage the withdrawal of their teaching labor, due to being the majority of instructional labor on any given campus, but this strength is also their weakness, as adjuncts are easily fireable and replaceable by other, more pliant, potential adjuncts. Tenured and TT faculty think they are preserving the prerogatives of academia by not diluting their bargaining power by allying too closely with adjuncts. This has been particularly the case at Temple University, where faculty organizing has repeatedly broken down into a factional dispute between tenured/TT faculty and adjunct faculty. Adjunct demands for more input on course load and size, along with insurance coverage, has been seen by tenured/TT faculty as equating adjuncts with them, and thereby lowering tenured/TT faculty. The challenge is how to bridge the divide between the two wings of teaching labor at the university, outside of the radicalized graduate student core.

Through Temple, we see a paradigmatic example of the labor crisis of higher education today. Pinning down the composition of university labor is not a matter of asking, “what does the university do?” Rather, it is a matter of asking, “what does the university not do?” Today universities are the monopoly capital institution par excellence, as opposed to the Big Five tech companies. Universities carry out medical research, they run hospitals, they invest in real estate, they operate as hedge funds on a financial level, they employ armies of service workers, they have their own police forces, and they carry out professional training that employers refuse to do themselves to save costs. The expansion of the university into a truly universal entity has brought with it an expansion of the labor force, particularly that of academic labor. But this expansion of numbers has not meant an increase in the power of labor. Instead, the more the university has monopolized, and academic labor grown, the more disempowered that labor has become. As capital has become more centralized, labor has become more diffuse.

The complexification of university labor, with its attendant hierarchy along lines of skill and general differentiation, produces the same coordination problems in institutions of higher education that the advent of the factory system posed to old craft and artisan organizations. However, this begs the question, what is the product that university workers jointly produce? This is partly a matter of prestige and finance - university workers produce a university educated labor force, which is to say that the product of academia is social reproduction itself, as social reproduction based on class and elitism. The other part is that the product is the continued existence and expansion of the university itself - more money, more prestige, more funding, more students, more faculty, more real estate, and more buildings. The university under the current model must grow or die. The 60s and 70s, more than any other period, a revolt within the university attacked its class status and its intellectual and material products. Not coincidentally, the first university union movement came out this period, with both faculty and graduate student labor organizations. Since around 2016, another revolt has taken place, this time done through union growth and work stoppages and less on the social reproduction of the university. By increasing labor power first, fundamental changes to the class dynamic of the academy can be won.

Like manufacturing during the industrial revolution, university employers have de-skilled the craftsman, in this case the tenured professor. Up until the 1960s, faculty at universities were part of a multifarious profession. They did research, taught courses, worked in clinics, and served on committees, among other things. This holistic craft, as a result of the neoliberalization of higher education, continues to exist, but not with any kind of majority, each task now broken up, siloed, and isolated into distinct jobs. The profession has also been cut up into various kinds of precarity, spread out among graduate students, NTT faculty, VAPs, guest faculty, etc…This follows the classical model of deskilling and the end of craft labor, as tracked by historians across most technical guild crafts in the 19th century. The labor crisis of academia is following the same pattern, but over a century later, as an ossified site of modernity. This, however, offers historical analysis as a primary site to look for tools and parallels of how to confront this crisis. The most immediate experience of modern academia is alienation - alienation of labor, but also alienation of purpose and meaning. This leads to an extraordinary organizing challenge, with two major components.

The first is the literal and perceived separation/distinction of the labor process. The physical isolation of different colleges, departments, and functions of the university. Often, different colleges are in different buildings, and departments on different floors, offices not shared. While this is not necessarily different from a typical workplace, even on the manufacturing floor, often, you at least have some workers that connect the shop-floors. In the case of the recent UAW organizing drive in Alabama, these were the quality control workers that went department to department. Finally, the distinction of the four main de-skilled positions (research, instruction, clinical, and service) within the NTT labor pool, creates further divisions. Much like the de-skilling process of industrial manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century, at the turn of the 21st century a de-skilling process was underway in academia. Temple University is a particularly useful example – a relatively large, high enrollment, with a high dependence on tuition and housing fees for its sustainability. A large operation, with hundreds of courses and labs offered each semester, the typical tenured professor is on a 2-2 course load and active in research. The majority are contingent faculty or Non-Tenure Track (NTT), a specific rank created by the university in the late 1970s and codified into TAUP collective bargaining agreements since the early 2000s.

The second major component is one of status and social respect. Tenured faculty, the ever declining number of craft employees, sees themselves as distinct from NTT faculty and graduate employees who have either yet to reach their position or do not have the bonafides. Tenured professors are not oblivious to the neoliberalization and corporatization of the university over the past 50 years. Nor are they generally fans of this process. But their solution is one of regression bred by their own institutional perspective. A return to the glory days of shared governance, where faculty had more decision making over the investments, direction, and curricula. While this possible future does seem better than the current system, the way to get there is by discarding their contingent colleagues. The problem is contingency, so we should get rid of it and invest in more tenured positions. However, they don’t want their contingent colleagues to get tenure, they would rather have freshly minted PhD’s from prestigious universities populate their departments, or, by osmosis, constrict the university to its previous, even more elite form. Less students would mean richer students, and the mass of high school graduates go back to trade school. Restriction over transformation.

On paper, this seems plausible. In reality, this is impossible. Tenured professors, often as a result of their prestigious positions, overestimate their labor power. Tenured faculty is undergoing a Norma Desmondification, trapped in the fantasy of their former greatness while the world around them has gone by. To continue the metaphor, tenured faculty can no longer show up to the studio and expect to make demands that will be heeded. They need their contingent co-workers to force university administrators away from the current, corporatized system. And no contingent faculty will ever fight with their tenured counterparts for a project of their own elimination. The solution is to organize on an industrial model, not a craft one. This way, currently tenured professors can win the shared governance they want and non-tenured faculty can escape their precarity with wages that ensure a dignified life. Tenure is just another word for job security. This is the organizing challenge.

As Harry Braverman has argued, what makes a system industrial is not heavy machinery and automation, but the de-skilling of labor. Higher education is going through its own industrial revolution. It requires an industrial organizing model. Academia is facing a labor crisis currently that is comparable to the interwar crisis of manufacturing, during which period the union movement was characterized by bitter and even violent clashes between craft and industrial union movements. Tenured faculty tend to favor a craft union model. However, doing so would weaken the totality of labor organizing in higher education. Industrial unionism, or at least the academic equivalent to it, is the only way to prevent a wholesale destruction of the system at large.

One ambitious strategy is to form an academic One Big Union - as we write, Columbia University is engaged in a lockout strategy, rotating out union member graduate students who would usually be teaching in the fall and swapping in non-union adjuncts. This serves to pre-emptively strike break, by removing the leverage that graduate student labor has over the university, namely their teaching labor. Columbia has turned to hiring outside labor to fill teaching. This strategy was also followed by Temple University during the TUGSA strike of 2023, with the university hiring outside adjuncts from other universities, or even technically non-qualified personnel, to fill teaching roles for courses that the graduate instructor was on strike for. The overall strategy here is to further degrade teaching labor in higher education as a whole, turning the entirety of the labor force to cheap and interchangeable contract labor, scattered across the country or even the world, and easily called upon and fired at will. The only true way to fight back against this is to create forms of union organizing in higher education that transcend a single institutional basis. University administrators already have an anti-labor vision that moves beyond their own institutions; it is time for academics, recognizing their role as labor within the university, to also take on this vision. One Big Union, composed of academics across multiple universities, ideally organized on a regional basis, would be able to coordinate labor actions across institutions, as well as protect academics across institutions from forms of strike breaking. For example, even a city wide union for academics and graduate students in the Philly metro area would be able to coordinate labor actions that could shut down universities and prevent the ability of universities to recruit outside labor from other universities to strike break. A further function of One Big Union would be to fulfill a basic sense of solidarity - such an organization could name and shame and blacklist academics and adjunct labor that engage in strike breaking and locks outs. Honor systems can only go so far, but honor and dignity are essential components of any civilized labor environment.

HELU or Higher Education Labor United, is a promising endeavor along these lines that is seeking to create a coalition of existing unions on the eastern seaboard in the northeast. What is necessary, regardless of the particular institution, is an industrial unionism model for academia, as opposed to a craft unionism. One Big Union, but only composed of the tenured or the tenure track would defeat the purpose of the endeavor. Union formation alone is not the entire answer, rather the form of unionization, and the orientation of unionization and organizing efforts towards totalizing solidarity, are the key issue. Temple University loves to advertise that Temple is one of the most unionized employers in the city, with upwards of 5,000 employees across the university represented by 11 different unions. Such union density however has done little to stop Temple’s lurch towards austerity, budget cuts, threats of department closures, and an overall squeezing of the faculty and graduate students. This is because all these unions have their contract bargaining periods at different times and are discouraged from cross union synchronization of contract negotiations. Organizing is not just a question of density, or a question of how coordinated the unions are at the top, but of the strategies they are pursuing and the depth of organization and the demands that they are fighting for.

The call for One Big Union historically was not just a call for amalgamation, but was joined also by slogans “to abolish the wage system,” and placed a high emphasis on direct action that would be more strategically disruptive in the given sectors were it took root, and looked to claw back more control over the labor process. Here too, our calls for amalgamation in the Higher Ed sector should similarly be joined by these other concerns if we want to adapt to the changing landscape. Union members at Temple are encouraged structurally to think of themselves as bounded by their unions - each union operating to control and protect its slice of the pie, but in the process being atomized by the administration of the university. Industrial unionism on a scale that is appropriate to the current crisis would involve the organization of all the unions at Temple coming together to form one bloc, which could challenge the administration and the Board of Trustees at every level. There is an essential need to launch serious joint bargaining efforts that brings together different workers across the university and its various unions, and aims at exerting more worker control over the powers of investment and university resources. The major organizational challenge at Temple then, as at all universities, is consciousness raising and building ties between unions.

Just as MAGA’s vision of reindustrializing the United States to the days of old is a pipe dream, so too is the return to a guild-based system of academia. The craft union strategy as advocated by blocs of tenured and TT faculty, not just at Temple but nationally, is at the service of the delusion that somehow the clock can be turned back to before the 1970s, similar to the MAGA dream of undoing deindustrialization. Yet the only way out of the crisis is forward. Attempts to re-create faculty governance along guild or craft lines would necessitate anti-democratic measures and a severe restriction of the university system and access to higher education nationally, as tenured and TT labor would increase their leverage by restricting the system. This is obvious when even the most cursory glance at the demographics of teaching labor at universities in the US reveals that a supermajority of all classes are taught by non-TT people, either adjuncts, visiting professors, or graduate students. Either all of this teaching labor is brought together to increase leverage, or it is shattered or done away with to the benefit of the minority of tenured and TT faculty. What then happens to the courses and students who are the main subjects of all that teaching labor? They simply would cease to exist. A craft guild model inevitably entails a restriction of higher education by limiting both the supply of teaching labor, the number of students allowed access to that teaching labor, and the number of institutions that employ that teaching labor. In the most apocalyptic scenario, the US could see a parallel to the university system of the late Russian Empire, in which in a society of hundreds of millions of people, there were only a handful of universities, and higher education was only allowed to the elite. The analogy to the US would be a university system composed solely of the Ivy League, and the rest of American society left to rot and the current strata of adjuncts and graduate students sloughed off into the wastebin and left to fend for themselves. Of course, this likely would increase the bargaining power and leverage of the anointed tenured and TT at these universities, but at what societal cost? In this comparison, we see that the dynamics of higher education are not isolated from the broader trends in the American economy, indeed is perhaps the most exemplary manifestation of those trends - labor is isolated and deskilled, pitted against itself along generational and class lines, the institutions are highly financially leveraged and invested in real estate and the medical industry, the real steering power is concentrated among a select group of capitalist overlords, the entire structure at the same time is highly imbricated with federal and state funding, while overall the sector is roiled by culture war battles. If you want to understand the modern American economy through one industry, there is no better place to look than the university system.