From California to Chicago, A Call for Unionized Universities

by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. She has written extensively on labor, business, and urban politics, the subject of her 2013 Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics. She is currently working on a reconsideration of twentieth-century higher education entitled The Business of Education: The Corporate Transformation of America’s Public Universities.

Editors’ note: As of the morning of Tuesday, February 18, faculty at the University of Illinois Chicago are on strike over a contract dispute.

One of the twentieth century’s great public intellectuals, Tony Judt, once wrote:

By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, [or] Yale . . . though marvelous, they are not distinctively American; their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when like some pedagogical mirage . . . there appears . . . a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages . . . . A little over a hundred miles northwest across another empty cornscape there comes into view the oasis of Champaign-Urbana: an unprepossessing college town housing a library of over ten million volumes.

A hundred-odd miles further north lies another landmark in the American public higher education system: the University of Illinois Chicago. With 28,000 students, UIC is the largest university in the Chicago area, public or private. It is also the first major public university in Illinois with a unionized faculty—whose current battle with the administration puts UIC on the front lines of the present-day crisis in higher education, economic justice, and democratic governance.

The state research university, that hallmark of America’s egalitarian promise, is at a crossroads. Looming ahead is a market-oriented university ever more beholden to the whims of cost-cutting corporate benefactors. But there is an alternative path, toward a social democratic university responsive to the needs of students, faculty, and surrounding communities—that is to say, the public that actually owns these institutions. That way forward, recalling the founding mission of America’s great public universities, demands a unionized staff front and center....

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