Oct 27, 2020, 7:35 PM
(From The New York Times) Across the country, the coronavirus is forcing universities large and small to lay off or furlough employees, delay graduate admissions and even cut or consolidate core programs like liberal arts departments in an effort to close widening budget shortfalls. By one estimate, the pandemic has cost colleges at least $120 billion, with even Harvard University, despite its $41.9 billion endowment, reporting a $10 million deficit. For many, that has meant months of cutbacks, including abolishing athletic programs, deferring campus construction and laying off administrative staff and cafeteria workers. Most of the programmatic suspensions are in social sciences and the humanities. “We haven’t seen a budget crisis like this in a generation,” said Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor who has been tracking the administrative response to the pandemic. “There’s nothing off-limits at this point.”
(From Inside Higher Ed) Racial justice has been at the center of campus debates and activism during the COVID-19 pandemic, as calls for increased testing and hazard pay increase among workers’ unions and legal experts. Yet lower-wage workers often are left out of those conversations, which tend to emphasize to an outsized degree the kinds of concerns among academic workers, according to Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, a faculty member at Georgetown University. Weightier decisions from a university, such as whom it employs and how it interacts with its surrounding city or town, could be taken more seriously, he said.
Beyond pay and benefits, many Black workers on college campuses say they want dignity in their work and to be treated with respect by their institutions, and those interviewed said they’ve found power in the labor movement and the unions that represent them. “What’s interesting today is you are seeing many more traditional union organizations embracing a platform that recognizes the need to build racial justice into a movement that seeks to build worker power,” said Táíwò.
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