Editor’s note: The following is Barbara Bowen’s speech during a celebration of renaming the PSC union hall after her.
I was hesitant about accepting this honor because there are so many other people in our union who should also be named. One of the things you are privileged to see as union president is how much work other people in the union are doing. I literally did nothing alone. More important, nothing I did as PSC president would have had any meaning or any power if it had been just me. The union’s power is the membership – when we are organized.
Barbara Bowen (right) and PSC President James Davis (Credit: Pat Arnow)
I’m enormously grateful and I’m moved by this gathering of a beloved community – I think we can use that beautiful name for the bonds we created through our shared vision and shared work. But an individual name tells only part of the story. When the PSC offices were at 61 Broadway, we had the chance to honor two of our past principal officers, Cecelia McCall and John Hyland, by giving their names to conference rooms that saw hard use. But the other past officers, especially the longest-serving, Steve London and Mike Fabricant, and many unsung PSC activists, deserve a room of their own. Let that be this room. Let’s make it a room that honors the power I had the privilege of representing, the power we developed together. I hope I can accept this honor not only in my name, but in the name of everyone without whom the work would have been impossible.
COLLECTIVE ACTION
All the PSC accomplishments you’ve heard about tonight were the product of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people. Some took years to achieve. And some, like adjunct health insurance, were possible only because the whole PSC membership supported putting their own gains at risk in order to make a gain for others. What’s extraordinary is that PSC activists have sustained a commitment to change – in our work lives, in CUNY, in our city and beyond – for more than 30 years, starting with the founding of the New Caucus. That commitment continues, in the fight of the current PSC leadership for a contract that makes advances in job security and equity, and their work on deepening the union’s community alliances and leverage in Albany. Very few unions have been able to sustain a progressive agenda, or a political analysis rooted in the Left, for so long – especially in a political climate as hostile to the Left as the current one. The question I bring to tonight’s wonderful event is, What has sustained so many of us doing so much against such odds for so long?
The answer can’t be unanimity on politics. Five minutes in any meeting in this room would tell you that. Then what explains the kind of solidarity that leads some members to knock on a hundred office doors to gain support for a contract demand that will largely benefit others? What explains the sustained work of chapter chairs and grievance officers, delegates and advocates that lies behind every single gain we have made and every one we tried for and haven’t yet reached? Why have some of the activists in this room invested mind and heart in the PSC’s work for three decades or more?
My first answer comes from the night the New Caucus won the union-wide election in 2000, when some of us were baby unionists. I realized at that moment that I was in the presence of many people who had spent their lives in radical political movements: movements against war, against racism, against misogyny and homophobia, against capitalism. The shaping presence of Left politics among faculty and staff is one of CUNY’s most closely guarded secrets: There’s no room in CUNY’s boosterish official image for the truth that the University would not have survived without the intellectual energy and self-sacrifice of staff and faculty on the Left. You only have to watch the film The Five Demands, about the student takeover of City College in 1969, to see that some of the most courageous CUNY workers and students in that fight are the same people who formed our caucus 30 years later.
ALTERNATIVE VISION
We have sustained a history of fighting for change as we fight for wages and hours – or of understanding the fight for wages and hours as part of a bigger fight for change – because both unions and public universities hold out the hope of an alternative way of organizing the world. At their best, they give us a glimpse that another world is possible – unions as organizations of workers’ struggles for justice and beauty, as the site of relationships between people that cannot be replicated anywhere else. The convergence of the hope embodied in universities and unions explains at least part of why so many of us in this room are old friends and old comrades. It’s the exhilaration of being able to work for another world that keeps us in this fight.
WHY WE FIGHT
We’ve found CUNY as a place where that fight can be waged. That’s why we stay. That, and the irreplaceable bonds you form with other people when you dare to expose your heart and your dreams in a political fight. Our name for CUNY as “the people’s university” captures some of those dreams, but CUNY is not the people’s university. Like every university under capitalism, it ultimately serves capitalism’s aims by reproducing the labor force and naturalizing the dominant ideology. One thing that becomes inescapable when you are PSC president is that the obstacles we and our students confront daily – from inadequate salaries to leaky ceilings – are not unavoidable. They sabotage – and are meant to sabotage – our students’ chance of a serious education and a good life. CUNY is impoverished because those in power want it to be impoverished. But that doesn’t mean that our radical hope is a mistake. On the contrary, we can maintain hope and acknowledge the role of the University under capitalism at the same time. We live in that contradiction the feminist theorist bell hooks expresses when she writes that “the academy is not paradise, but learning is a place where paradise can be created.”
It seems important to say in this newly named room that we should not underestimate the importance of the dream of a people’s university. For many of us, that dream fuels our work at CUNY and in the PSC. Yes, the University and the cruel economic system of which it is a part work against us and our students every day. But we should not apologize for or relinquish the radical hope and alternative vision of CUNY that undergirds the PSC’s best work. Living in the contradictions is better than succumbing to cynicism or retreating to the myth of a private life. One thing I love about having a union hall as the room named for me is that it’s a space for public life.
A PLACE FOR WORKERS
My wish for this union hall is that it will be a place where challenging and radical ideas about learning, power and workers can be tested and flourish. The work has already begun; we can see it in the hundreds of hours already spent here by the union’s bargaining team and allies to carve out a contract, in the many meetings, large and small, hot and cool, held here every week.
This is a terrifying moment in both American and global politics. We urgently need unions not only to demand workers’ rights but to offer an alternative to the ideology and the savagery of racial capitalism. Donald Trump’s fascist agenda would never have been able to attain the glamour it has for millions of workers if unions had offered a more compelling vision of mutuality and freedom. Nor would we be stuck in the dead end of capitalist non-solutions to the climate crisis or the wars in Ukraine and Gaza if anti-capitalism had gained strength. There is no time to waste. My wish for this union hall is that we bring to it our deep solidarity and the confidence in radical possibility that keeps us fighting in the PSC. Let it be an inspiring place for those hammering out a contract agreement, a comfortable place for those who will spend the last nights of the contract negotiations sleeping on its floor, a supportive place for those practicing for direct action and risking arrest, a welcoming place for those summoning the courage to stand up and speak for the first time, a warm place for those who gather to celebrate victories and regroup after losses, a capacious place for all the work that can be done only by people together.
We know that unions are not paradise, but perhaps this union hall is a place where paradise can be created.
Barbara Bowen is the former president of the PSC and a professor of English at Queens College.
Published: October 29, 2024
