Front Lines of the Academic Precariat: LIU Brooklyn Faculty Still Locked Out

BY DEBORAH MUTNICK

Day 3 of the LIU lockout. Labor Day. I have been locked out of Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus by an administration that makes my colleagues and me feel like poster children for the neoliberal corporatization of higher education. We have lost our health care and other benefits, our pay, and our access to email and course management websites. On this Labor Day, we are unemployed.

The lockout is unprecedented in higher education. It is a union-busting tactic intended to bully the faculty into submission. Whether spearheaded by the board of trustees or the president, the lockout suggests, as one observer aptly put it, that we have “a bad actor at the helm.” True as this description is—affirming our experience at LIU over the past three years in particular—it would be a mistake to conclude that the lockout is simply the result of bad leadership.

Rather, we…