What The Hell America!

On Thursday, March 27, non-tenure-track faculty at Wellesley College went on strike.

Wellesley, a women’s liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, boasts such high-achieving alumnae as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Madeleine Albright. With its mission of educating “women who will make a difference in the world,” the college broadly presents itself as a progressive institution committed to feminist and social justice values. Its approach to bargaining a first contract with its non-tenure-track faculty, however, tells a different story.

Non-tenure-track faculty formed a union in 2024 affiliated with United Auto Workers called Wellesley Organized Academic Workers (WOAW-UAW). The union represents 30 percent of all faculty and 40 percent of all courses taught across the college. Despite a common perception that non-tenure-track faculty work exclusively in short-term positions, more than 40 percent of WOAW-UAW members have been teaching at Wellesley for more than ten years.

Among other issues, the 121 members of the union are fighting to maintain a four-course workload, which has been a standard for the past several decades but which the college is attempting to raise to five courses; to set a standard for a minimum level of compensation in line with the pace of inflation since Wellesley froze starting salaries in 2008; and to establish just cause standards for the college to deny faculty reappointment.

The college has attempted to break the strike by asking students to reenroll in courses taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty in order to earn credit for their coursework this semester. It has also proposed a tiered system in which current bargaining unit members could retain their four-course teaching load while new hires would be required to teach five courses. So far the union has refused this offer that would pit new hires against existing faculty.

Jacobin deputy editor Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino, a graduate of Wellesley College, interviewed WOAW-UAW organizing committee members Annie Brubaker and Jacquelin Woodford about the strike.