B (30:02)

Thank you, Rick. Glad to be here.

A (30:04)

Michael Pelias is a professor of philosophy at Long Island University here in New York. It's Brooklyn campus. He has been doing that kind of work, being a teacher for over 25 years, social and political philosophy in courses as different as film and philosophy, European philosophy since Hegel, philosophy of education, and indeed, interestingly, courses on the black radical tradition and a course on Post Catarina, New Orleans in the Light of Disaster Capitalism. He is, I believe, from New Orleans.

B (30:43)

Yes, I am.

A (30:45)

He's also been an activist for 23 years as a member of the executive committee of the Long Island University Faculty Federation, the union there. And he is a member of of the current negotiating team and he has participated in all of their struggles that he's going to tell us about since at least the early 1990s. So, Michael, welcome and let me begin by asking you to summarize why I brought you here. In other words, there was a very important labor struggle at Long Island University over the first couple of weeks of September. Tell us what it is and give us A context.

B (31:28)

Okay, I'll back up and kind of provide the context. We began our usual contract negotiations back in late March, early April, April of 2016. And we were charged as usual, to get a good contract. The previous contract, which was a five year contract, was a very minimal wage package of 0, 1, 1 and a half, 2, 2. So we decided it's time to, you know, step it up in terms of what you talked about earlier in your show, the real wages versus the nominal wages and, you know, at least help people deal with cost of living and, you know, take care of our new hires. We sat at the table for literally five months. We did not get anywhere. We put 25, 26 proposals on the table, all which I consider extremely reasonable. And they actually approved one, which was the duration of the non tenure track appointments. And that was the extent of the flexibility that management had during this contract negotiation. They came back to us with extremely low wage package, despite the fact that the President had said, the crisis at LIU is over. And they've been showing operating budget surpluses of nearly $20 million a year for the last two years. At least 20 million a year. So we're talking about a surplus that was at least $40 million. Our entire package, really, to put it in a different kind of context, was about $3.5 million over a three year contract duration. So we were asking for maybe about 10% of the actual surplus to go to the faculty. We didn't get anywhere. They would not move. We sat there all summer in a kind of charade. I call it kind of an attempt to, you know, play the mass game, a kabuki dance, with management so you don't get charged with an unfair labor practice, which is a euphemism for labor, is stuck by management's proposals. So anyway, we met on August 31 because the contract expired that day. Trying to hammer out at least some kind of agreement. We were informed that we were going to be locked out. The first time this has happened in a university in higher education in the history of the United States.

A (33:53)

Really?

B (33:54)

Best of my knowledge, yes. We've done a lot of research on this. There maybe was a little thing at Temple University, but I don't think they were locked out because of a late pandemic.

A (34:04)

You were literally locked out?

B (34:05)

Literally locked out. Effective September 3, which was the weekend before classes start. And the lockout lasted for 11, actually 12 days. A week ago, Thursday. Today, it was lifted. We went back to work.

A (34:24)

So lockout. Just so everybody understands, lockout means you're not allowed to go into the building where your office is, or to go into the building where you teach in the classroom, you are literally excluded from your job.

B (34:40)

From the job. And we would be charged if we did go in with criminal trespassing. We could go to jail in order to get books out of our office, meet with students that we may have in classes, things of that nature.

A (34:52)

Let me just quickly ask you the question. I'm sure people are asking one I remember reading, they also took away your.

B (34:58)

Health insurance during the time of the lockout. Yes. Health care was suspended. Of course, no wages were paid during this period. Yes.

A (35:09)

Okay, and what was done for the students who came to class on the first day for that day and for the subsequent days that were the normal semester time when the professors were all locked out, what happened?

B (35:28)

Well, the amazing thing, and to back up a little more, to provide a context, in July, early July, the university advertised for jobs. Not saying that these were jobs because of a lockout that may be coming or a possible strike. They did not advertise these jobs as such. They were advertised their positions available at liu. So they did try to create a group of replacement workers, but this was very minimal. And at the same time, they threatened administrators. You either go teach courses or you would be fired. So many administrators who were not qualified to teach actual courses. So for example, you'd have the joke was the dean of the Connolly College, the liberal arts school, who was A biologist, a PhD in biologist, was assigned to teach ballet. The vice president in charge of operations, who you know, is a woman that has been there nearly 40 years and a very important player in the history of liu, was assigned to do yoga. And then you had people teaching English classes who had no background in English literature, etc. So the students were faced on the first day of classes, which began September 7th. On the Wednesday following, well, convocation day was the 6th of Labor Day week. They were faced with replacement workers in the classroom and unqualified people.

A (36:58)

Okay, now before we go into it, how has it been, quote, unquote, resolved? Just so we know what happened?

B (37:06)

I don't really consider it resolved. We are continuing to negotiate. But the terms going after the lockout was lifted were that we would work on continuation of the old contract for nine months, which would expire May 31, 2016, 17. 17. Excuse me. Yes. And we would work on that nine month academic year, calendar year, and we would also be restored the health care and any out of pocket costs. However, we still would be docked for the days we did not work at school. So they actually paid the replacement workers. So we are being docked at least up to right now. This was part of the agreement. And so we've gone back to work effective September 15th, last Thursday, you know, one week into the semester. So one full week was lost. So these are the conditions. We will continue to negotiate. And also we have been assigned a mediator to maybe hopefully kick start the negotiation. I mean, that's like turning the ignition on and you're still in neutral, but you may know you're going to take a right or left turn.

A (38:17)

You know, at least let me be an economist for a minute, because that's what I do. If they're taking a week's pay, more or less from you.

B (38:28)

Yes.

A (38:29)

That's 2% of your annual salary.

B (38:32)

That's absolutely correct.

A (38:33)

Which means that the whole of last year's gain in your contract from before has just been erased.

B (38:40)

Totally erased. Right. And zero going forward. So most people are working on a minus two going forward into the extension May of 2017. This is one very egregious moment that has not really been discussed yet by the faculty, but they're going to be aware of it when they get their first paycheck at the end of this month.

A (39:03)

All right, so now let's analyze it. Tell me what's going on. Why is a university coming off of five years in which they gave the teachers raises less than what was necessary just to keep the same standard of living they had before, now wanting to stick it to the teachers even more? What's going. Why would a university jeopardize. This is a message to every professor. Go get a job someplace else. It's a message to every professor. Maybe look outside of academia. Maybe you're in the wrong place. It's a message of disrespect for what they do. It's a message of disrespect for what the students should be getting. What's going on? How do you help us understand this?

B (39:49)

Well, I think at one level, the board of trustees of LIU brought in someone who has no academic background, has no relationship to academic value, and especially no relationship to the humanities and liberal arts. You know, the cornerstone, if you will, in terms of building citizenship and creative descent, you know, and forming young minds, at least with the capacity to make, you know, good judgments about the world they want to live in. So they have created, you know, what I would consider an overall package of austerity. Right. In which the professors are the. But the other enemy to this or target, the other target is really the Students. The students, as you know, pay enormous amount of tuition. Liu's average tuition is about 30,000. It goes up to about 55,000 if you live on campus. And further, some of the graduate programs are 40 to 50,000. And most of our population at LIU Brooklyn comes from working class backgrounds. Average family medium income is around 80,000. You know, so they don't, they qualify for some aid, but very little.

A (41:06)

Many of them are likely borrowing money.

B (41:08)

Absolutely. You know, I think the average debt that they carry when they graduate is between 35 to $40,000 for an undergraduate degree. And we can talk later about the value of that. But so this is a war also on the students. You know, as I tell my students, you have been created as a new class of indentured servants. You know, you are not here to think, you are not here to learn. You are here to, you know, reproduce for the system and pay back your debt. And you know, I think they get it, but still, what choice do they have, you know, given the conditions that, you know, the economy dictates. And you know, as our friend Stanley Aronowitz framed it once, go to college or die, right? Is the mantra. So this to me has become an experiment. Liu case is very important on the national and even the international level as an experiment of how you first of all can disrespect and have absolutely no feeling for your faculty as educators by locking them out, taking hold of the university, thinking you can manage it on a makeshift shift of workers, right? Basically all part time laborers pay them piecemeal work. They got paid $500 for one class and they get paid $3,000 for the entire semester had we not gone back in. And so this has become part of, I think, an attack on the value of higher education, the value of professors, and is, in my opinion a neoliberal framework to create a new model of the university that's built on only the health science professions, entrepreneurialship, business models, and at best, professional schools, especially at liu, which is oriented mostly towards pre pharmacy, pre nursing schooling. And they're starting to create this kind of new model for these second and third tier universities. And another thing to remember, in this case, LIU is a tuition driven, 91.5% of its revenue comes from tuition. And there are many schools like this that are not endowment rich. Even though Liu's endowment has gone up about 30, 40% over the last two years, I mean, you know, basically reflecting, you know, stock market advances and portfolio advances, they still do not use any of those funds towards scholarship or encouraging faculty Development, et cetera.

A (43:45)

It does sound to me, and I'd like your opinion on this, it sounds to me like we're going back to the way higher education was before World War II, in that if you come from the elite, from the wealthy, you will go likely to a private college where your development, your overall development, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences is what the point of the education is, to make you able to analyze problems, understand the world, have a critical perspective. But if you don't come from those classes and if you can't afford or can't get into those universities, you're going to a higher education equivalent of what we used to call vocational schools. That the LIU is becoming an extension of the vocational training system, where the presumption of the business types who lead it is that all these people need to know is the technical details of whatever career they're going into. But being trained to be adult thinking citizens, we don't need them for that. That's a job for the elite and not for them. It undercuts the whole notion of a liberal education as a human right.

B (45:03)

Absolutely. And just to make one connection to today versus I think you're absolutely right, the pre World War II model in terms of the vocational training, the difference is today they are paying enormous amount of money and also to get this vocational and going into debt, which most of them not going to be able to pay back if ever. You know, at the minimum 10 to 15 years out there, if they get a really good job and probably the rest of their lives. I call it, you know, it's the.

A (45:34)

New educational tax, making the people getting. It's undercutting public education, the whole idea.

B (45:41)

Absolutely, absolutely.

A (45:42)

So how are, tell me how the professors, how are they reacting? How are the teachers, how do they understand this and what reaction is building among them?

B (45:53)

I think that the best thing about the lockout is it did mobilize professors. You know, we voted almost unanimously, right, not to ratify a very offensive and egregious contract. It might not have been so close had we gone on strike, voted to go on strike. So this had a way of mobilizing the professors and building a kind of militancy and solidarity that is not normally there. So this has been a good thing. The best part though of the lockout was the students. The students would gather together, built a small movement internally, asking for their real professors. And then they started. Every day of the lockout at noon, they would chant LIU professors locked out, students walkout. And they would march out onto Dekalbin Flatbush around all the buildings and Chad. Shame, shame on you, liu. And you know, this really created a really, a very different feeling at liu, where you have had basically apathy for so long a period of time. So this mixing of the students and the professors really came to be in a very solid way the last week. And I think it's going to continue. You know, there's always a problem with, once people go back to teaching, to their lives, that they no longer organize or get together in meetings. But I think because of this action, we will see a different kind of militancy at liu, and particularly in the union. You know, the union has a history of going on strikes. We are probably the most, more than any other academic union, been on strike, you know, in the last in its existence in 40 years. I've been on strike eight times in 40 years. So every five years you can kind of expect a strike from Liu. There was a strike over parity with CW Post, which is one of the main issues going forward. There was a strike over tenure. They wanted to get rid of tenure. There have been strikes, of course, over wages, over the reduction of health care.

A (48:00)

So let me ask you a question again, for me as an economist. Yeah. In the economics profession, one of the things we take as access axiomatic is that the United States as an economy, if it has a future in the world economy, has to compete whether it's with the Europeans or the Japanese and now the Chinese and so on. And that one of the key determinants of how well the American economy will be in the years ahead is the quantity and the quality of people emerging from higher education. The skilled, the trained, the sophisticated, the creative. What in the world would possess a country, knowing what I just said? Because it says it over and over again. Savaging its own colleges and universities in this way, disrespecting the teachers, making it less and less attractive to be a professor, giving students shoddier and shoddier education because of the pressures put on the teaching faculty and where money is spent. How do you help us understand how a society shoots itself in the foot in this way?

B (49:15)

Well, I mean, it's beyond any kind of rational imagination here. But on the other hand, you know, in the era of globalization, you know, the United States is, I think, ranked 30th by the UN in terms of education. And if you're a business person in the United States and you need a mathematician, you're not really going to go to the schools in the United States to recruit. So you have much more of a market now that it's going to go towards Singapore, towards, you know, India for technology. So, you know, besides the elite schools, I really don't think that the American system is really, you know, geared towards educating its populace. I think, you know, the philosopher, since, you know, I've read him for many years, Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse, once said, the educational system of the United States is the systematic moronization of its populace. And, you know, we're really living through that right now. I mean, it's not the fault, you know, you can tell your students, you know, you come in smart and you leave dumb. And this is a real problem as we go forward. And no longer is there a drive for knowledge. It's really the era of data. And as long as you can do data, and as long as they can still create minimum wage jobs around data mining and data interpretation processing, this will go on as a consumerist economy. But forget it. I don't think the United States is geared towards, as you pointed out earlier, the Pre World War II drive towards educating its populace for the production, you know, or for, you know, the production that's needed to make this country at least functioning again. So we're really dealing with a collaboration, whether unconscious or not. I think it's partially very conscious of the ruling class to, you know, not educate people at a certain level. The elite schools remain sort of unscathed, although I think the quality has gone down there as well. But that's another story about what technology and its impact on education has happened. But they don't really care about these second and third tier schools or about public education or education fundamentally as a public good, you know, it is not a public good, it is not an asset. And as one friend of mine said, why are they going after the assets of the university, that is the teachers? But this is, you know, like, you.

A (51:45)

Know, and it's very interesting historically because after World War II it was the demand of the returning soldiers who got the GI Bill, got a chance to go to school. That whole generation wanted their kids to get proper college educations, which that working class of America never had had before. They wanted it, they demanded. That's how public higher education really got going after World War II. Before it was a private affair. Is there any chance that a groundswell of students like those chanting at LIU is going to say, wait, you cannot devalue us and our prospects by giving us a lousy education. We won't tolerate it? In the same way that after World War II, the working class of America said, we're not going to tolerate only the elite going to college. You're going to create public higher education for all of us. And a major step in that direction was taken.

B (52:43)

I think there's a major awakening among students now. I think the debt situation has started this in their minds. What are they paying for? You know, are they living in the age of diminishing return on investment? You know, if you want to look at this as their temporal and their psychic investment in education. And I think they're beginning to see very differently than just the. Through the careerist model or that you go to school just to get a job, because maybe the jobs won't be there or the good jobs won't be there. So at least questions have been raised and we hope that this develops into a movement. I think there's leadership and as we know, the Occupy movement raised very good questions which we still are addressing. There's certainly some, some effects from that. The Black Lives Matter. And now maybe we have some kind of possibility of a fusion of these movements coming together along on the college campuses. This is very, very important. But there is, I mean, again, I want to say this administrative class, which is the bloat in the universities where most of the pay is going, you know, there are much higher salary at the top. And those who administrate, who are not educators, have really basically destroyed any notion of what higher education could be. And I also want to add that we as professors, especially at a place like Lau, whose mission is for first generation college students or second generation students, first time gone to college. First Generation Students, which was founded in 1926 for Jewish people who could not afford to go to school. This was liu Brooklyn was formed for, you know, Mike Gold's novel Jews Without Money. Basically, you know, that this mission has been there. Now this is being completely attacked and assaulted by this administration. And it's a battle cry for all of us. So my hope is, you know, if I can add, you know, my hope is that this executive committee of the union, which has some very good people, I must say, and people have really stepped up. If we can continue to put the pressure, you know, we continue to have, you know, interviews such this as a media presence, making people more aware, we can go back to the table and hopefully negotiate a better contract and maybe see this as a small victory for teachers and a way of both standing up and, you know, making this into a transformative moment in higher education. That is the goal that we have at this point.

A (55:24)

Just a final comment from me, if I could. I'VE been a professor all my life, too. And when we started, it was clear to us in the universities where I taught that the basic decisions about what was done in that university were made by collectives of professors. The 27 in the economics department. We got together, we discussed the curriculum. We discussed financially helping students. We were in charge. The administrators were under us in the sense their job was to do the administration subordinate to serving what the professors did. This collective power by those qualified to do it has been usurped.

B (56:10)

Yeah, totally.

A (56:10)

And we have now a university that copies the model, of course. Corporate enterprise with a board of directors at the top, typically having little or nothing to do with what the company does, telling everybody else what to do, paying themselves wild amounts of money, as if their control ought to be reimbursed, undermining the very function of what the university was. It's extraordinary.

B (56:34)

I'll put it in another context because you like things like this. The entire wage package for the faculty each year is less than what the president of the university makes one individual. The entire wage package.

A (56:51)

How many people involved is that?

B (56:52)

That's. The entire wage package is close to.

A (56:55)

600 people who make less than the president.

B (56:58)

Well, this is. The raise package is the equivalent. You know, the 2% raise that is on the table. Yes.

A (57:04)

Thank you very much, Michael. You've been very helpful.

B (57:06)

Thank you, Rick.

A (57:07)

And my pleasure to all of you. Here's another corner of the American economy and the world economy changing in ways we need to monitor and watch. I look forward to talking with you again next week. Your time now, baby but after a while gonna be my time, time My time, baby Thing gonna change.

B (57:39)

Change, change.

A (57:40)

Change, change, change, change.

B (57:46)

Thing gonna change.

A (58:00)

Sam.