Growing up as the son of two bilingual education teachers in Chicago, I developed an interest in languages and cultures. I was drawn to explore answers to big political questions—the very issues today driving debate and concern over the health of American democracy.
My dissertation focused on how voter turnout affects policy outcomes. And I can tell you, in my research and the overwhelming consensus of political scientists, ‘it matters,’ and we have evidence. The reason we care about who votes is because who votes affects public policy. Now, these latest efforts to restrict voting are about preventing poor people from participating. Overwhelmingly, they’re targeting underrepresented groups and minorities, and that will affect the shape of public policy outcomes. That kind of issue drew me into this work, and ever since I’ve focused on income inequality and poverty and their relationship to political participation.
Politics is about power. Solidarity, too, is about power, and we’re more powerful as educators, as workers, if we have solidarity. I’m working on building a relationship between different units on campus through our joint union council so we have more solidarity across our ‘neighbors’ in higher education.
Academic freedom is under assault. That’s clear—we’ve seen an example with the new law in Florida, and it’s happening at the K-12 level as well with this debate over critical race theory. I’m an academic and I have an idea of what the phrase means. We’re talking about history, right? Racism is embedded in the U.S. Constitution—just read it or read the notes that James Madison took at the constitutional convention. There’s no doubt about it, and yet there are serious efforts underway to undercut our academic freedom to tell the truth. That’s when you need our union.
A union is about more than bread and butter issues—although data show that pay and benefits are better at places that have a union. We also need to organize to ensure that our state elected leaders return to supporting public education, including higher education. It’s deplorable to see how we’ve stopped investing in the public good and shifted the burden to students and families. That shouldn’t be a partisan issue. We need to build solidarity to advocate for public support of universities if we want a more prosperous society, a more just society, and a better functioning democracy.
