Welcome to the HoosLeft podcast, a show about Indiana politics, history, and culture from the unapologetic perspective of the Hoosier left. My name is Scott Aaron Rogers and I’m recording from Bloomington.
A couple months ago, my friend Alexa Scott joined me for an episode to talk about the exploitative business model of big-time college sports. We got into student-athlete organizing and potential unionization before delving into the capture of the entire higher education system by corporate forces. Whereas postsecondary education was free, or extremely affordable in the post-World War II era, by the late 1960’s - in response to antiwar student activism, and led by then California Governor Ronald Reagan (booo!) - conservatives began to roll back these subsidies. By the end of Reagan’s first presidential term less than 20 years later, federal grants decreased, student loans greatly increased, and education debt exploded.
Since 1980, in addition to reducing financial support to students, governments have also greatly reduced funding to public colleges and universities themselves. This has led to rising tuitions for a lower-quality education: fewer tenure-track professors, more and more classes being taught by part-time, poorly-paid adjuncts, and a greater burden placed on graduate student employees.
And at colleges and universities nationwide, those exploited grad student workers are organizing to fight back. In 2014, there were about 50 graduate employee unions at schools in the US. By July of 2023, that number had more than tripled.
In the fall of 2018, responding to Trump Administration attempts to tax tuition remission, grad employees protested across the country, including at my alma mater - Indiana University. A small group of participants at IU met after the protest on campus to begin thinking about forming some kind of graduate employee advocacy group. Here, the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition was born.
My guest today is Zara Anwarzai. According to her profile on PhilPeople, the online community for philosophers, Zara a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at IU Bloomington. Her main work is on the social dimension of skill and expertise, with broad interests in social metaphysics, cognition, evolution, language, and technology. She is also interested in connections between skill and technology in the realm of work and labor. With her interest in work and labor, it is fitting that Zara is active with the Coalition, serving as Organizing Coordinator.
In today’s conversation, we cover the history and mission of the grad workers coalition at IU, the sheer amount of work these students are responsible for, what their pay actually amounts to for all that work, the support they’ve received from their faculty supervisors, the lack of support they’ve received from administrators, hostility to labor organizing by the state government, the process of building solidarity among a diverse group, their goals for a potential strike, and coordinating with similar organizations at other colleges and universities.
First, if you find value in conversations like these, I could really use your help. As someone who recently suffered a tragic loss in my family, my entire perspective on life has changed. And now that I’ve known real grief, I feel called to make Indiana a place with less of that suffering, especially the kind inflicted by our lawmakers. So, I, perhaps imprudently, walked away from my job and have devoted myself full-time to the HoosLeft project. This work is dedicated to calling out the Republican supermajority, their financial backers, and others in their network that actively work to make Hoosier lives worse, those whose policies endanger our children through lax gun regulation, bullying queer youth, and poisoning our environment. I work to highlight these bad actors so we can replace them with more empathetic leadership, and also shine the spotlight on the Hoosier activists, organizations, and elected officials who are doing the hard work to build a more just, equitable, and compassionate Indiana for the next generation of Hoosiers.
But I can’t do this without you. I am driven to provide information and analysis you won’t get anywhere else in the Hoosier state. Still, all the passion and conviction in the world doesn’t pay the ever-mounting bills, and I’m falling behind. I could really use your financial support with a paid subscription over at scottaaronrogers.substack.com. For five dollars a month or $50 a year, you can help me push our state in a better direction, and help my family in the process. And even if a paid subscription doesn’t work for you at this time, you can still help. Subscribe at the free level over on Substack. Set your favorite podcast player to auto-download new episodes of the show. Rate and review the podcast on whatever platform you use. Follow me on social media at facebook.com/hoosleft (spell); I’m also now on Bluesky at the same handle. I’m personally at scottrog78 (spell) on Instagram, Threads, and the platform I refuse to call anything other than Twitter; and on Mastodon at scottrog78@hoosier.social. I’m now posting video, too. Full episodes on YouTube and clips on TikTok: the handle on both of those is @hoosleft. But, most importantly, share our message. Forward the articles to friends, family, and randos; don’t just like, but share on social media; hire a flock of messenger pigeons to spread the word.
With your investment, a full time HoosLeft looks like new content every day - I’m currently doing a series of profiles on Indiana’s most influential political donors called The Smoligarchs; it looks like full coverage of the 2024 election cycle in Indiana and beyond; and it looks like zooming out to see how the malevolent forces at work in our state function nationally and even globally. It might not be in my financial interest, but I do not plan on paywalling any content, because I believe in open access to information, and your support helps make that content freely available to all Hoosiers. But I desperately need your investment in order to keep bringing you meaningful content. To those who have contributed already, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I appreciate every penny and it means the world to me. And to everybody, thanks for listening.
Here’s my interview with Zara Anwarzai.
Once again, that was IU PhD candidate and Organizing Coordinator for the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition, Zara Anwarzai.
…she shouldn’t have to do this. We shouldn’t have to have this conversation. I’m glad we did. She’s brilliant. I like talking to people smarter than me. But… we, as a society shouldn’t be putting so many hurdles in front of our best and brightest. We should be clearing the path and supporting higher education. Of all kinds. Trades. Licensed professions. Mid career job re-training. STEM. Medicine. The Arts. History. Real, uncomfortable, honest history. Philosophy. And yeah, stuff like gender studies, and African diaspora studies, and Jewish studies, and Asian studies. These things all have value. As a culture, we should value continual learning.
We used to. If you look at the post WWII order and the GI bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act in response to the Soviets launching Sputnik. Now I know the benefits of these government programs weren’t felt equally in marginalized communities, but on the whole the NDEA was one of the most successful legislative initiatives ever. It educated a generation. And sure, it was aimed at the fields we now call STEM in the name of national defense, but not only that. We were also in a culture war against the Soviets, and we built and expanded all these great universities to expand the depth of human knowledge in all fields.
But an educated population began to see some of the painful truth about their country and protested to make it better. This made a lot of rich, white men uncomfortable, and they spent the next 50 years dismantling public education at all levels, but with particular ire for colleges and universities.
Through decades of defunding, what used to be a public good has largely become a private commodity, paid for with individual debt. This is the curse of neoliberal hypercapitalism, right? Everything for profit. Short term profit. And the responsibility falls on individuals. This keeps us financially broke and our solidarity with one another broken.
If our government spending priorities reflects our values, it is clear that our state, certainly - and our country on the whole - doesn’t really value education as an investment in the future, but as a tool for wealth extraction and social control. We’re increasingly being out-innovated by foreign adversaries and our poorly-educated population is literally a national security threat. Christ! 74 million people voted for Donald Trump.
We should be taxing the rich at post-WWII levels and pouring money into postsecondary education, making it free - or very low cost - to students. Trustees and university presidents shouldn’t be political appointees. We should be hiring a lot more tenure-track professors and a lot less adjuncts. Grad students shouldn’t have to do the work of faculty in addition to their own research, but if they do, they should be well-compensated for it. They shouldn’t have to organize and strike for fair treatment, but if they do organize, they deserve recognition and good-faith bargaining.
If, like me, you are a student or alumnus of Indiana University, consider contacting President Pam Whitten at iupres@iu.edu and telling her to give full union recognition to IGCW. Additionally, contact the university’s Board of Trustees at bdot@iu.edu and tell them the same. Are you a donor to the IU alumni association, foundation, or varsity club? Consider withholding contributions until the university recognizes the union and loudly make it known you’re doing so. Only through solidarity can we defeat powerful monied interests.
Thanks for listening. Again, subscribe at scottaaronrogers.substack.com. Follow me on facebook, Bluesky, YouTube and Tik Tok at hoosleft and on most other social media sites at scottrog78. If you want to reach me, send me a DM on the socials or email me at scottrog78@gmail.com. Until next time, this has been the HoosLeft podcast. I’m Scott Aaron Rogers. Love each other, Indiana.
HoosLeft #26: Rad Grads
Guest: Zara Anwarzai, Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition Organizing Coordinator
Subscribe at https://scottaaronrogers.substack.com
https://indianagradworkers.org
https://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/ronald_reagan_stuck_it_to_millennials_a_college_debt_history_lesson_no_one_tells/
https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2022/10/a-history-of-grad-student-labor-unions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_graduate_student_employee_unions
https://www.indianagradworkers.org/our-history
https://philpeople.org/profiles/zara-anwarzai
https://www.indianagradworkers.org/coordinating-committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act
https://www.demos.org/research/great-cost-shift-continues
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/debt-is-a-form-of-social-control
mailto:iupres@iu.edu
mailto:bdot@iu.edu
mailto:iualumni@indiana.edu
mailto:iuf@indiana.edu
mailto:varsity@indiana.edu
