Free City! Reclaiming City College of San Francisco and Free Education for All

Public education is a main target of the assault on the public sector; recently corporate education reformers have expanded their agenda to include the open-access community colleges, which enroll 40 percent of U.S. college students. City College of San Francisco was threatened with closure for resisting this policy agenda. The faculty union, students, and community groups led by people of color waged and won a five-year battle to save it. Although not unscathed, today the college is open, accredited, and free. In the continuing war on working-class community institutions, this struggle offers valuable lessons for coalitions of labor and social movements.

Lay Activism and Activism Intentions in a Faculty Union

Prior conceptual work on union renewal places activism in a central role. Understanding of activism’s antecedents, however, remains limited. This study uses a sample of faculty union members at a large public university, thus providing considerable diversity in work settings within a single employer organization. Using survey and archival data, this study explores the role of selected contextual factors on faculty labor activism. A tentative but interesting finding is that linkages to other activists appear to be a stronger predictor of individual activism than does departmental membership density. That is, it seems that “subcultures of apathy” can exist in even high membership density settings and that social ties to activists may spur members to heightened levels of activism.