The Mission Statement of Vassar College reads: “Vassar College is committed to working toward a more just, diverse, egalitarian and inclusive college community where all members feel valued and are fully empowered to claim a place in—and responsibility for—our shared working, living and learning. The College affirms the inherent value of a diverse campus and curriculum reflective of our lives as members of multiple local and global communities.”
What Rich Moser, American Association of University Professors (AAUP) organizer and Rutgers University historian, taught Vassar organizers and others about organizing in his Friday, Oct. 30 visit to campus will be hard to fit into a short editorial. Moser possessed some of the conviction and clarity of organizers like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Crystal Lee Sutton (portrayed as Norma Rae in the 1979 classic movie of the same title), but he seemed more exhausted than my image of great organizers.
His voice was tired, and he said that he can no longer speak to groups for long periods without becoming hoarse. But what I learned from Moser through talking with him throughout the day was that the slow work of organizing community members on college campuses often produces significant results.
When Moser spoke to a room of staff, union leaders, faculty and students in Rockefeller Hall, a number of us were struck by the nuanced nature of his critique of the corporatization of higher education in America.
He talked for thirty minutes on American social and economic history before getting to his central message. By the end of Moser’s talk, I sensed that many of us in the room believed Moser’s main argument: Vassar is not alone in our careening descent into a corporate style management with diminished democracy, diminished worker rights and diminished curricular diversity.
Moser is a serious intellectual who wasn’t afraid to talk in one line sound bites when he got to the second part of our meeting in room 200. Organizing was the topic some of us were eager to hear Moser discuss. Sound bites aren’t too popular in the circles that I run in here at Vassar.
Typical Vassar verbal contributions take between five to twenty minutes to deliver. The phenomenon of the long, wandering sound bite is common at our dinner table and in the various meetings I attend. The wandering sound bite is probably part of why I love Vassar.
It strikes me that part of the work that exists in helping Vassar remain Vassar is this: Even though we love discourse and complexity of argument, faculty, students and staff need to learn to create and embrace one-liners right now.
In order to move beyond the managerial rhetoric of inevitability, our community may benefit from developing some terse rallying points. “Social movements prosper by articulating alternative visions,” Moser said. Clearly such sounds bites aren’t enough to create a social movement, but community members who are learning how to become organizers might consider that framing rhetorical alternatives to the narrative of inevitability is central work for us. The inevitability of cutting the low cost labor force at Vassar breaks contract with our mission statement.
Perhaps we can work together to invent, reinvent and present our new messages in creative ways. We need anchors of language and rhetoric to keep us steady in the sea of seemingly rational economic talk. We need to be smarter and more creative than the managers who are hollowing out the college quickly, relentlessly and without any sense of humility.
To oppose “saving the institution” by cutting our most economically vulnerable community members will require memorable language and inventive phrases. We need all our writers, cooks, carpenters, dancers, economists, nurses, philosophers, sociologists, artists, psychologists, electricians and historians—everyone and her sister working around the clock.
Moser encourages organizers to let go of our engagement with power. Our interest in talking with the Vassar Board of Trustees and top administrators is natural; it’s seductive to be called in to express ourselves to people who hold the purse strings, and we probably do need to talk with these groups from time to time, but the bulk of our work needs to be organizing our communities at Vassar.
We need to help community members find ways to let Vassar become the Vassar that we imagine in our mission statement. We need to find tasks to share with others. Organizing is much more work than just doing the work ourselves.
We will also benefit, Moser said, if we leave the dancing numbers and narratives of mismanagement behind for the time being and find ways to act that move the institution forward toward realizing our core mission. Some of us will do that through official channels and AAUP meetings. Others will do it through demonstrations, public dialogue on employees’ rights, and attending Campus Solidarity meetings. We will benefit from talking with each other and respecting our different and shared methods of working.
Finding daily and weekly ways of pressing each other to help make Vassar’s mission statement a living document will have more benefits for our institution that anything else we can do.
We may want to attend staff coffee breaks on Thursday at 10 a.m. outside the bookstore each week. We may benefit from attending college-sanctioned meetings with greater regularity.
We may need to plan additional events and talk to each other outside our usual constituencies and communities.
China and Thailand are showing how the global economic crisis creates challenge in terms of developing new priorities. Look back and find something reliable to hold on to that still makes sense, they seem to say. When things are tough, invest in education! China and Thailand are investing significant resources into higher education during the economic crisis while American managers of higher education are divesting in the labor force and the teachers who allow liberal arts to flourish.
Moser helped me believe we can warm up this chilly intellectual environment and build vigorous dialogue. Recent administrative decisions to erode fair work practices and lay off the most vulnerable workers and teachers suggest a movement away from our mission statement. It will require vigorous citizenship to change the corporate style that has begun to shape our institution. Moser suggests that perhaps the Vassar community, with our history of concern for social justice, our powerful mission statement, and our room full of committed organizers, is up to the task at hand.
One liners don’t come naturally to me but here are a couple to try out for starters:
Turn the tides at Vassar: help make our
mission statement a living document.
Invest in labor, invest in education
Save jobs, share jobs, cancel layoffs
An economic crisis does not equal an in
stitutional identiy crisis.
—Judith Nichols, Adjunct Associate Professor of English, is a member of the Campus Solidarity Working Group and also a member of the developing Vassar Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
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