Education's Inflated Value: Your education is not more important than any other struggle

nodiplomacy:

I recently got into an argument with a professor online over the value of education and why people may still be politically sympathetic to "the cause," but simply will not ever cancel classes. This is the single most common reason given for why faculty and graduate students would not abide the strike.

First of all, I would like to say that I thought we kind of already made the choice to join the union to protect our individual liberties, so we should probably stand up for our fellow colleagues. Because when we are injured we would want our colleagues to stand up and defend us... right?

Here is my most important point: generalizing "education as more important than" creates a very slippery dichotomy that erases the labor people of color have put into building the university and making it run every day, including today. At the strike in my University, it was not surprising that most of the rally and the picket chants were in Spanish. In fact, if you participated and did not know Spanish, chances were that you understood about 20% of what was conveyed. The reason for this is very simple: most AFSCME workers are people of color, predominately Latino service workers. This reality is very specific to the University of California, and it is a reality that the University management exploits every day with unlivable wages, unaffordable health care, and blatant discrimination and intimidation. No, your education is not more important than the struggles of these workers; in fact, it does not even come close. Your education is not more important than the actual daily struggle of having to put food on the table, or having to tell your children why you don't have enough money to pay the rent. In fact, your education is not more important than any other struggle. It is simply not OK to argue that missing one day (or one week, or whatever that length of duration of a strike is) is comparable to the misery and pain of not earning a decent wage. It is also not OK to delegitimize a strike as unimportant or not a "real strike," because there was not a hunger strike involved. Let's set this straight - management has already proven that it does not care about its workers and its students, why in your right mind would you think they would care about your health? A hunger strike is a very risky form of protest, and I would not recommend it to anybody. It is largely contingent on whether you can get public awareness and sympathy to your struggles, and in a world where political struggles easily become marginalized and delegitimized (key word of the day), populism is a tough shot to guarantee your demands will be met without serious health repercussions.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 2, 2013 12:35 AM
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