COMMENTARY: Academic faculty or classroom influencers?
This week, the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union (PTLFC) is asking members and union organizers to spend time during classes to promote the union leadership's version of events surrounding the "historic strike" and contract negotiations from the Spring 2023 semester.
During these talks, the PTLFC representatives are likely to speak to students as though they are partners in students' struggles against unfair administrative policies. But it is important for students to avoid playing the role of a passive audience for the deployment of a strategic messaging campaign by thinking and speaking critically in response to these talks.
This week's PTLFC outreach is best thought of as a PR tactic that aims to build a connection between a brand and a target audience, because it does not encourage students to critique the messaging and does not aim to invite meaningful, democratic participation from students in the union's governance.
I hope to disrupt the mundane and commonsense appearance of these practices by suggesting the relationship between faculty and students and, therefore, between faculty unions and student bodies, should not be mediated by a faculty union's perception of its own strategic interests, regardless of how standard or authentic those interests might be.
When engaging in strategic marketing campaigns aimed at mobilizing support among students, faculty unions have an opportunity to shift the relationship between faculty and students to a strategic interaction between influencers and target audiences.
Students can be powerful allies for faculty unions during disputes with administrations, and the temptation will always exist for faculty unions to act on the opportunity to supply students with strategic messaging from sources that students trust to provide a critical education. But doing so devalues education and demeans the relationship between faculty and student.
Cultural studies-oriented educators should be particularly attuned to the contradiction generated by the phenomenon of university faculty developing strategic messaging about university politics for students as a target audience.
The critique of power embedded within cultural studies pedagogies is meant to provide students with the tools to engage critically with any institution with the power to affect their lives.
On campus, that means educating students about critical perspectives on the power and influence exercised by faculty unions as well as university administrations, along with the state and federal policy, cultural values and economic trends that provide the context for public antagonism between faculty unions and university administrations.
The cultural studies tradition loses its critical edge and lapses into marketing strategy when educators act on the desire to use our influence to convince students to be on our side. Faculty unions pursuing the interests of their members might be tempted to perceive students as instruments to use against administrations during important moments like contract negotiations.
But doing so risks betraying our commitment to critical education by replacing essential lessons about the complexity of university political economy with clickbait and catchphrases.
We can only use our collective power as faculty and students to demand transparency and accountability from the University administration if our unions provide a clear and consistent model for those demands through their theory and practice.
It is my hope that PTLFC leadership will spend time considering the differences between education and influencing, between students and target audiences, in order to create communication policies that clearly articulate those differences and provide a model for protecting students from being addressed as target audiences for strategic messaging.
David Winters earned a MA in Liberal Studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has been an adjunct instructor of communication and media studies at Rutgers since 2012 and served as a Board Member and Vice President of the Rutgers PTLFC-AAUP-AFT, local 6324 (2019-2021), Part Time Lecturer Representative to the Rutgers University Senate (2020-2021) and the New Brunswick Faculty Council (2020-2021).
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