[Usually around
this time I’d be sharing Fall Semester Preview posts. I’m on sabbatical, so no
teaching for me this Fall; instead I thought I’d connect Labor Day to issues of
academic labor this week. Leading up
to a special weekend tribute post!]
On two important
pieces of proposed legislation, and how academics can get more actively
involved in supporting them.
I’ve been
writing pieces
for my Saturday Evening Post “Considering
History” column every two weeks for more than a year and a half now, but one of
my favorites was this
one from March 2019, on both histories of public higher education in
American and contemporary threats to public higher ed (with my institution of
Fitchburg State University as an example for both topics). As usual I tried to
end that post on a more optimistic note, and when it comes to those issues
Massachusetts offers a couple particularly salient reasons for hope: the Promise
and Cherish
Acts, two proposed bills in the state legislature that would redress
funding inequities and disinvestments for both the secondary/primary and higher
education systems in the Commonwealth. You can read more about all their
details at those hyperlinks (among
other places) and of course come to your own conclusions on them; for my
purposes here, suffice it to say while no single law could engage all the
factors in either or both of these complex trends, to my mind these represent a
couple of very significant steps in increasing and equalizing educational
funding in Massachusetts (and as potential models for all states).
For most of my
life, including much of my professional life, I would have said that the best
an academic (or any private citizen) could do to support such pieces of
legislation (or influence any political debate or decision) would be to take
individual actions: calling a legislator’s office or if we were more ambitious meeting
a legislator in person; writing a letter to the editor or if we were more
fortunate getting an op ed published; and so on. Certainly there’s still value
in all those actions, and I’ve taken the first one (calling a legislator)
multiple times over the last few years (let’s be real, who hasn’t??). But over
those same years I’ve also become part of a scholarly organization, the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN), which is
dedicated to finding ways to connect scholars and their voices and work to
policymakers and legislators (along with other political, organizational, and
media contacts and conversations). After a few years of working with SSN as one
of their Members, for the last
two years I’ve served as one of the SSN Boston Chapter Co-Leaders,
and in that role have been particularly focused on finding ways to connect SSN
Boston and its Members to various legislative initiatives in the Commonwealth, including
the Safe Communities Act and
the Fight for $15 as well as
the Promise and Cherish Acts.
There are lots
of reasons why I believe an organization like SSN is valuable for any scholar
hoping to connect with and contribute to such conversations, including those
elements of community and solidarity that I highlighted in yesterday’s post on
other scholarly organizations (and perhaps even more so with SSN, as it’s a
given that every scholar who has joined is overtly interested in making these
kinds of public connections). But one of the best things about SSN is that its
goals are never simply to connect scholars with policymakers (or whomever), but
rather to create opportunities for scholars to share their ideas and research with
those audiences. In the coming year, one of the central goals that me and my
two co-leaders (Tiffany
Chenault and Natasha
Warikoo) have identified for SSN Boston is to create precisely such
opportunities when it comes to the Promise and Cherish Acts—to find ways to
connect both individual Members and the Chapter overall to not only lawmakers
and political figures, but to other organizations (such as Tuesday’s subject
the MSCA, for which Tiffany is the Salem
State Chapter Director) who are engaged in the same fight. The scholars and
research in that equation aren’t in any way limited to SSN Members or New
England-area folks, so if you have work that could help in these ongoing
political and social advocacies, please let me know!
Last Labor week
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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