Resisting the Spider Web of Pandemic Opportunism

ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we discuss the ways in which COVID-19 created a different kind of pandemic opportunity for faculty, students, and staff to resist the expansion of neoliberal policies and practices in higher education. We highlight student actions across the nation;labor actions by campus essential workers;the increasing unionization and mobilization of graduate students, faculty, and campus staff responding to risky management decisions in the COVID context on top of pre-pandemic attacks on workers’ dignity, autonomy, and wages. We argue these emergent waves of collective action can be understood as resistance to racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism, and part of the larger fight for the soul of higher education against the opportunism, austerity, sacrifice, and disposability politics that aim to put profit before people. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.