labor movement, to rededicate yourselves to building that world. A world where all of us have enough. A world where all of us have the freedom to learn and think and speak our conscience. A world where there is bread but also roses.
🥖🌹🌹🌹
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We rise today as education workers, but we fight for a world in which our ability to work is not what determines whether we have the opportunity to learn.

It is not up to us to finish the task of repairing this world, but neither may we desist from it. So today, I call on you, my siblings in the

rather than as full-fledged humans. Sure, getting a job that pays a living wage is a reason people seek higher education, but it is not the reason higher education exists. These fields are where students turn to find art and love and beauty–the love of learning, the beauty of self-actualization.

academic programs in fields like modern languages, art history, creative writing, gender studies, and global studies (along with some teacher certification programs), to name a few. Cutting fields like these is just another entry on a long ledger of actions in which people are positioned as workers

sufficient to build that world. When they sang about bread and roses, they articulated the importance of a good life, a life in which art and love and beauty are important alongside a fair wage. That is what we continue to fight for today.

At Rhode Island College this spring, administrators cut 20

in the kinds of depersonalization and fragmentation that make it possible for us to see human beings as the other. These ordinary virtues help us remember the world we want to build.

The working women who marched before us over a century ago knew that money & even fair working conditions were not

It is we who have to save ourselves. Doing so does not necessarily require some kind of superhuman heroism. But it does require, in the words of the great thinker Tzvetan Todorov, ordinary virtues like caring & dignity: caring for those around us, building ties of connection, & refusing to engage

years ago, we will stand strong against this threat.

The “we” in that sentence has to be all of us. I hear all too often questions about who is standing up for faculty, who is standing up for working people, who is standing up for democracy. And the answer cannot be to wait for someone to save us.

school teachers’ First Amendment rights and restricted even freedom of thought. Today, we face a nation that similarly questions our integrity as teachers, intruding into our minds and our classrooms in search of a more homogeneous and pliable population. But like our students and colleagues sixty

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