The Point: Not Just Academic
2/12/2026
This week’s Point was written by Jeff Melnick of the American Studies Department, and former vice-president of the FSU. As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.
It is a truism, but one worth repeating to ourselves, that we are living in particularly challenging times.
Our cities have become battlegrounds, citizens drafted into a battle with rogue forces of the federal government that they neither sought nor are fully equipped to fight. Our cultural and educational institutions are crumbling at an alarming rate—from the Kennedy Center (as we still call it) to [insert name of pretty much any college or university].
The economic and social advances of the period stretching from the New Deal to the Civil Rights era and beyond are being reversed, erased, and destroyed. All around us we see collaborators and appeasers, none of whom seem to learn the lesson that bullies never do get satisfied, that showing your quivering belly to them only gives them a soft and easy target. (For one example, see the shameful case of that fancy school across the river, which keeps trying to wave the white flag to the Trump regime and keeps getting smacked for it: just recently we learned that the Pentagon is cutting its military ties with "woke" Harvard no matter how relentlessly that school tries to accede to the demands of the federal government.)
Every day we wake up to another horror of government overreach and elite class capitulation (or outright collusion) and go to sleep with fears of what the morning news will bring.
And yet.
Through this tempest, the labor movement has been one of the few steady agents of strong resistance and a true beacon of hope. There is ample evidence (see here and here just for instance) that higher education unions are in a period of growth and increasing power. Gary Rhoades has recently highlighted how “graduate student workers, postdoctoral fellows, and contingent faculty have become the vanguard of a reorganized academic labor movement.” This higher ed work, taken together with a recently reanimated K-12 teacher and paraprofessional landscape, has given us plenty of reason for hope and plenty of resolve to keep organizing, agitating, and speaking out.
In recent days, we teachers and our unions have truly been on the frontlines of advocating for our students and the mission of creating an educated populace more generally. Nowhere has this been more dramatic than in the way higher ed and K-12 teachers’ unions have fought back against the grotesque depredations of the paramilitary goons of ICE. It has been truly heartening to see how labor unions and students have worked together to, stand up, fight back. Broad-based community efforts have focused on both the classroom and the courtroom. The protest against ICE has inspired important coalition work: a developing consciousness understands the ICE attacks on our community as targeting the most vulnerable among us. Immigrant workers and their children (and frankly anyone the fascist troops conclude looks like an immigrant) are being targeted and it is the job of union members to develop agile structures and potent strategies of refusal.
One immediate thing we can all do is join an emerging higher ed coalition campaign to Drop ICE which kicks off this weekend with a one-hour Webinar Sunday night, February 15, from 7-8 p.m. EST.
Here is a link to register for the event: https://www.mobilize.us/highereducationlaborunitedhelu/event/898549/
The ICE attacks are not only happening in Minneapolis and Portland—they are happening in our own backyard as well. From the ICE kidnapping of Milford teenager Marcelo Gomes Da Silva to the snatching of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk we have seen the assaults close by. This latter example reminds us that that the fierce crackdown of the past few months was very much prefigured by the terrifyingly disproportionate suppression of pro-ceasefire, anti-genocide speech which spread on college campuses in response to Israel’s sustained and brutal attacks on Gaza. Some major union leaders--Shawn Fain of the UAW comes to mind—called this out at the time, but far too many stayed silent. As more and more Americans have come around to belatedly supporting the goals of these campus protests, it remains incumbent on us all to learn the lessons of this moment—not least of which is that we must insist on accurate histories of our time being written and made accessible.
In that light, let us end with an encouragement to visit the exciting exhibit at our own Healey Library, a project that showcases work by five artists whose work was inspired by archival collections (including the records of the Boston school bus drivers’ union) held here. In addition to the discrete aesthetic value of these works, the exhibit—up until mid-May—also serves as a reminder that we must continue to collect, protect, and build on our shared legacies. In an era when malign actors in the federal government are purposefully trying to erase and obscure US history, including the history of working people in nearby Lowell, it is up to us to get the stories straight.
And let us finish by inviting you—by writing a Point blast of your own or simply pointing us to subjects you think we should cover—to share the ways you think labor unions, particularly academic ones, are rising to meet these painful times.
The committee for this year’s The Point currently includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu.