On Monday, November 4th at 5:00 p.m. central, CFAC President Diana Vallera will be appearing with author and organizer Joe Berry in The Academic Labor Movement Now, a virtual event hosted by the UMass Amherst Department of History's Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series as part of their year-long series What Are Universities For? Struggles for the Soul of Higher Education.

This event will feature engaging and thought-provoking discussions on the history, drivers, and consequences of labor shifts in academia, as well as the strategies employed by instructors, students, and allies to effect meaningful change.

Closed captions will be available on Zoom and a recording will be posted to the Feinberg Series website within 48 hours of the event.

THE ACADEMIC LABOR MOVEMENT NOW

In recent decades campuses have relied more and more on contingent instructors and graduate workers who have little job security and often receive poverty wages. As the percentage of tenure-track faculty has plummeted, the number of highly paid administrators has expanded by leaps and bounds.
Who and what has driven these shifts? What are the consequences? And how have instructors, students, and community supporters organized to improve labor and learning conditions?
On November 4, join the Feinberg Series for The Academic Labor Movement Now. In this virtual event, historian and longtime adjunct Joe Berry will explore these questions alongside adjunct and organizer Diana Vallera, who recently led a successful 49-day adjunct strike at Columbia College in Chicago.
A public Q&A moderated by Cedric de Leon (Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies, UMass Amherst) will follow.

Joe Berry

Joe Berry is the author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education and the co-author of Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education. Berry is a union organizer, historian, labor studies scholar, and a retired contingent faculty member.

Diana Vallera

Diana Vallera is contingent faculty in the photography department at Columbia College Chicago, a union organizer, and author of a chapter in Fighting Academic Repression and Neoliberal Education. As president of her faculty union, she led the longest part-time faculty strike in U.S. history in 2023.

The tentative agreement has been ratified! On December 20, 2023, CFAC members voted almost unanimously to accept a new contract with Columbia College’s administration. For ease of reference, this presentation highlights all new and revised contract provisions, compared to those in the 2019-2023 contract.

support our strike fund

Our strike is front-page news! Please click here to read the full story about our union’s fight published on the front page of The Chicago Tribune on Friday, December 1st.

For a PDF, click here.

For a PDF of Representative de Buclet’s letter, click here.

CFAC's letter of support from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

what are people saying about our strike? Read media coverage here.

Write a letter to the board of trustees

Watch student testimonials from our town hall

Voices from the Picket Line

Video testimonials filmed and edited by David Moravec.

This footage of our demonstration at the President’s Brunch on October 21st was taken by Johnathan X. Webster.

Photograph by Michael Jarecki.

For a Word Document version of this FAQ that you can download and share, click here. Our thanks to Jerry Arkenberg for his contributions in making this FAQ.