LIU lockout: US professors and students seen as disposable commodities

Students and faculty members at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus will finally return to business as usual on Thursday after a historic 12-day lockout ended shortly after midnight.

Over the last two weeks, around 400 LIU professors were locked out of their Brooklyn campus by university administration, with unqualified fill-in instructors making a farce of classes. A bitter labor dispute between university administrators and faculty members was at the root of it.

Although it is over for now, the disquieting significance of what unfolded will live on.

The lockout – thought to be the first of its kind in the US – not only signals a worrying turn for the value placed on professors as disposable commodities, but highlights the extra hurdles faced by working-class students of color as they seek to fight their way to the American dream.

Nichia McFarlane is one of them. Just before she graduated high school, the now 24-year-old Brooklyn native ran away from what she calls a difficult home. She has been supporting herself ever since: after high school, she worked two jobs full-time, and simultaneously enrolled at Long Island University as a full-time student.

At first, McFarlane says she was lost, and was tempted to drop out. But when she took an English course, things started to click. She says the professors she met at LIU changed her life.

On Monday, two of her English professors embraced her in tears. Last Friday, McFarlane, who is only two semesters away from graduating, withdrew from the university.

McFarlane says after the lockout was announced, and after she realized courses were not being taught by the qualified professors she had been looking forward to, students received emails from the administration saying their time to un-enroll without incurring a financial penalty had been shortened. She had to make a split-second decision that very day, and withdrew.

“As they were locking out faculty, they were trying to lock in students. It felt like a con or a scam. I don’t want to think that about the university that I am going to.”

Now that the lockout is over, McFarlane is not sure whether she will transfer, or re-enroll next semester. “It’s not something I want to do any more,” she said on Thursday morning about attending LIU. The dispute has left her with a bitter taste in her mouth.

McFarlane has won essay awards within the LIU English department. Somewhat auspiciously, yet tragically, the last essay she gained academic star status for was one reflecting on the importance for women of color to empower themselves within higher education settings, despite often being barred from doing so based on societal norms.

The lockout was orchestrated and led by LIU administration and its president, Kimberly Cline. Members of the Brooklyn faculty and LIU’s administration had been in talks over a new contract, and as school was set to begin, they had not yet reached an agreement. With the lockout ended, contract negotiation (which is now involving a mediator) has been extended until May.

“Employers have a right at certain points during collective bargaining to impose a lockout. It is a mirror image of employees’ right to strike,” explains Brishen Rogers, a professor of law at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Rogers says one of the few other big symbolic lockouts in recent memory is Ronald Reagan’s lockout. The firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981, which successfully broke unions, was widely seen as a watershed moment for the growth of neoliberalism.

The comparison could well be telling. At the heart of this lockout lie bigger questions beyond faculty-administration relations. The lockout appears to be a symbol of the corporatization of American higher education as a whole – where professors are no longer treated with standalone value, but as disposable commodities.

This is the case for Kathryn Krase, a 41-year-old associate professor of social work at the Brooklyn campus of New York’s Long Island University. On 1 September, Krase became a tenured professor: an increasingly difficult feat in today’s academic climate.

Celebrations were painfully short-lived.

At one second past midnight, on 3 September, with barely a day’s notice to allow them to grab personal belongings and make any kind of arrangements, Krase and all 400 of her Brooklyn campus faculty colleagues were locked out of their own university by administration amid a labor dispute. Barred from setting foot on campus for the last two weeks, they have had no access to email, online coursework platforms, or student class lists. More concretely, from one day to the next, their salaries, benefits and healthcare were cut off.

Whether or not they will be compensated for their 12 days of temporary redundancy has yet to be decided.

Jacob Remes, a labor historian and a New York University professor, says that in the second part of the 20th century, education in the US slowly went from being seen as a sacred path towards creating American citizenship to being framed in a more instrumentalist way as a “good investment”. The combination of this with high university tuition means that we now have a clear market approach to the entire sector.

In the context of LIU, this means “that not only are professors seen as disposable, students are too”, he says. “There is a broader trend of thinking of students as customers and as what the university does as selling degrees. Once you start doing that, it is very easy to see everyone as disposable, students too.”

Many on and off campus have started speculating that the treatment afforded the Brooklyn campus, a majority minority, low-income campus, would never have been afforded its suburban twin.

“Our school is largely a minority school, and many of us do not have financial means. This is part of why this is not moving fast enough. That, coupled with the fact that most of us are students of color. It seems like we are disposable, like we are just not that important,” says McFarlane, the star English student.

The lockout certainly seems to speak to the longstanding divide in the US between education standards for urban, lower-income, and more demographically diverse communities, and suburban, better-off, and whiter communities.

LIU has two campuses, welcoming just under 10,000 students a year each. The Brooklyn campus, where the lockout of faculty took place, is a distinctly diverse place, where around eight out of 10 students identify as non-white. Many are first-generation college attendees, come from working-class, or immigrant backgrounds, and work full-time on top of attending classes full-time, says Srividhya Swaminathan, a professor of English at the university.

The LIU Post campus is suburban, better off, and majority white (although, to be fair, not overwhelmingly so). The contrast between the two campuses is stark. While LIU Brooklyn is in the heart of bustling, densely populated Brooklyn, LIU Post is situated on the plush 300-acre estate of a cereal magnate, along an area of Long Island known for its opulence, sometimes named the Gold Coast. This area was most vividly brought to life in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

“This is the kind of two-tier system that we see again and again in American life,” says Rogers, the Temple law professor. “We have always seen a greater investment in public education, public infrastructure and services in whiter, wealthier areas.”

Ben Saunders, a professor of psychology at LIU Brooklyn, says that he feels the campus in Brooklyn is effectively funding the suburban Post campus, echoing critiques long made over the centuries by black public intellectuals: that communities of color are systematically plundered to support unrealistic standards of living for whiter communities.

With students not receiving proper instruction in their first days back at school in Brooklyn, but still being required to fulfill exorbitant tuition demands, this certainly seems truer than ever.