hearts starve as well as bodies.

some very quick reflections on my new job as a full-time organizer.

Dear friends, Romans and non-Romans, people from all parts of lands we divide artificially with borders: welcome to 2025, and the rear view of the first semester in 10 years I haven’t worked in academia.

I have been pondering that I initially set this up as a weekly-ish writing endeavor and then proceeded to drop off the face of the Earth in September. On September 3, I started working as an internal union organizer in higher ed in the Boston area. It was the first day of classes at many an area university, including Boston University, where grad workers had been on strike since March. I arrived on the picket line at noon—in the blazing sun, which was a novelty after years waving a sign in the frigid English rain. The campus police were out and raring to go, and we nearly had an unfair labor practice (ULP) on our hands before the semester’s kick-off rally had officially begun. I spent the afternoon in Zoom meetings huddled away inside spare classrooms in what I think was the Religion department, listening to lawyers and organizers talk rapid-fire about things I’d arrived in the middle of, trying to keep up while also dealing with residual jetlag since I’d moved back to the US just a week prior. The lunch I’d brought congealed in the bottom of my backpack, unconsumed. Driving away from campus in rush hour traffic, I was the human embodiment of a deer in the headlights. I think I tried to cook a proper meal when I got home. What on Earth was I thinking. What on Earth had I gotten myself into.

I regret to say the cooking and eating of proper meals hasn’t really improved, and I don’t have a different animal metaphor for my current state (maybe Bear With a Faulty Hibernation Mechanism). Because organizing jobs are so variable in their hours, our staff union contract contains a provision where we get a $1,500 “bandwidth payment” if we have to work an obscene amount in one quarter…which I hit in early December. But I’ll say this, with the clarity of biting wind on a January day: I really do like the work that I do.

But perhaps I should explain, first, what my job is.

Many unions use an external organizer/internal organizer structure. The external organizers help workers form a union; internal organizers help them sustain it after they settle their first contract. I’m in the “sustenance” category. What that looks like day to day: investigating potential violations of workers’ rights (so, so many potential violations), yelling at administrators about potential violations of workers’ rights (again, so many violations, and I’ll drop the “potential” here), helping workers organize, brainstorming campaigns with workers, doing ongoing political education, setting up skills trainings, talking to workers, making sure workers are heard, communicating with workers about ongoing union activities, facilitating meetings, compiling notes from meetings, following up after meetings, creating and sharing resources, keeping when2meet in business—and oh yes, bargaining all successor contracts after that first one.

In short, this job is far more demanding physically, cognitively, and emotionally than any academic job I have ever had—and, it is better. Let me try to square that circle.

I want to note, first, that I was a grad worker—pretty much every grad school job there is, I did—and then a “permanent” (similar to tenure-track) faculty member. I never had to teach a 400–person class or commute between three campuses in three different states in the same week—all things the workers I currently organize with have to juggle. Academic jobs are so wildly stratified that it makes little sense to speak of a singular job description. The full professor with whom I used to work who solo-taught one class a year in his exact area of specialization and refused to shut up about how easy teaching was can sit the fuck down. (So, too, can the department chair who, while certainly overworked, also took home a quarter of a million dollars. The grad worker who taught your class that one semester made $22k that year. I digress.)

Anyway! I had a pretty damn smooth sailing faculty job by the end of it. Now I go to the bathroom and come back to five new emails, all of them full of semi-urgent problems that require careful reading, an empathetic response, and often a phone call. Which is not to say that it’s helpful to play Hard Job Olympics, despite the fact that I’ve done so several times in this post to exorcise some residual Previous Jobs Rage. It is just to note that there are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of muscles to build and strengthen, and also I am tired.

And, even though I am tired, and even though I work longer days at this job than I ever did as an academic (possibly excluding the heavy coursework years of grad school, which feel like a haze), it is such a better fit for me.

First, it’s challenging in ways that I think are good for me. I consider myself introverted, and that and my little ASD brain mean my instinct is always to send a long email (or write a long Substack post) rather than have a face-to-face conversation. And there’s a time and place for the former, and also, anything anyone tells you is a universal strategy is most definitely not! Academia rewarded my tendency toward individualism and encouraged me to disconnect from everyone except my very narrow research area (which, what does that even mean, and that should tell you something about academia’s alleged commitments to “interdisciplinarity”). By the end, my permanent/tenured faculty job challenged little except my patience and poker face. By contrast, organizing invites me every day to push myself and find surprise and joy in cultivating connections, and that’s a plus. I don’t always make the choice that leads to stronger relationships, but I make it more often than I used to, and I’m learning I can do things like talk on the phone spontaneously without having a full-blown panic attack. Imagine!

Second, I still get to support people. I love working with graduate workers: most of them haven’t bought fully into academia’s obsession with rank and decorum, and it is so simple to be authentic around them. I always felt a little like an infiltrator in faculty settings, but grad worker settings are places where I can pay my experiences forward. If I can convince a graduate worker that no, her supervisor’s refusal to mentor her should not be normalized, then I’ve had a successful day. I still get to work with undergrads, who are such staunch allies in their instructors’ fights for fair wages and working conditions. And I am learning so much about the work done and lives lived by contingent faculty, by teaching-only faculty, by faculty at institutions that are truly financially struggling. I completed my PhD at an R1 and then taught at the UK equivalent of an R1, and much as those institutions would like to pretend otherwise, academia is vast and varied, even on the same campus. To continue learning without any expectation to win a grant or publish a paper about what I’ve learned—just the opportunity to contribute to the shared project of bringing people together to build better things—is an immense privilege.

Third, I get to wrestle with my internalized classism, in that I am both not a secretary and extremely good at being a secretary and I resent this combination a little bit. Logistical work is profoundly undervalued in academia, even as the wheels of the university threaten to fall off whenever the one person in a department who actually knows how to reserve a room goes on vacation. I paid my rent in grad school by being a version of that person, honing a skillset that a professor once told me “reflect[ed] well on the institution” (gag). And, despite my direct experience with how valuable this skillset is to a wider team (that’s academic individualism’s cue to knock), I still envisioned that I would eventually “earn” the right not to have this be the primary skillset for which I was valued (cue the capitalism!). At least half the work of organizing is actually organizational—it’s great if you can get people to show up to a meeting, but when and where is the meeting and who will bring the snacks—and when I ask workers what they need, a frequent response is “someone to do the organizational work.” Since faculty are often the ones asking this, it’s a fun little PTSD moment for me. But it's okay! I’m working on it, and besides, this work is not lesser. It’s necessary, and more people should learn how to do it, and a good way to make that happen in the longer term is to model doing it well.

A worker told me that I am more militant than their previous internal organizer, and while I can’t judge the veracity of that claim, it felt right to that worker and it feels right to me. What are we not doing if we are not agitating relentlessly for a better world. Things are burning and the horizon is thick with smoke; I have no time for civility on the way there, especially when that civility only serves the boss. And perhaps that’s dramatic, but when you think about what guaranteed higher wages for grad workers mean—their implications for the power trips academia relies upon, their whispers of freedom from exploitative supervisors (#notallsupervisors, but the system will incentivize what it will incentivize) who have tied grads’ work to their worth to the entire structure of their lives—well, you have a threat that shakes the foundation of an entire institution. You have a building block that beckons the construction of something otherwise. Something better.

I repeated somewhat similar lines as an academic, but from within the ivory tower, they rang hollow, pretty words without substance. Outside of that tower, I feel there is the possibility I might actually align my values and actions with those ideas. That alignment isn’t perfect, I mess up all the time, and I’m still having to push myself to make the decisions I know will be taxing but also center the collective care on which liberation is built. But that is the journey, and the work—and as I am no longer a professor, I am no longer expected to have all the answers (bless).

I have lots more to say, and I have enough of a handle on my job now that I think I will try to write more often (famous last words), but I will end for now on the closing lines of “Bread and Roses,” that traditional labor tune:

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes.
Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.