All the “anti-racist” and “health promoting” universities are now terminating their faculty without cause (don’t laugh!). Keith Jones is the first eligible faculty member to be denied continuing appointment in five years. This termination is a disgusting attack on the Africana studies program, our university’s alleged values, and every working class member of our university’s community.
Our university pretends to have an admirable mission: they say, “Disrupting systemic racism is a pillar of UMass Boston’s approach to educating,” and, “We are intentional in cultivating antiracist values—in our curriculum, across our research enterprise, in the transdisciplinary scholarship we produce, and in the communityuniversity [sic] partnerships we build.”
Keith is the professor whose work embodies these values the most, not only through his curricula, but through his unwavering support of every single student that comes through his classroom. A large portion of the student body is working at least part time in order to further their education, a situation that comes with unique struggles. Keith’s office is a place where members of the student community can have these struggles seen, not through a sanitized counseling program with a month’s long waitlist, but through a heart-to-heart with a mentor. Firing him is a cowardly liquidation of what we claim our values are.
His termination comes at an unprecedented time in American history. Higher education has come under attack by the federal government, with a specific focus on dismantling antiracist curricula. A university “for the times” would stand strongly on the side of its workers and students, not cut staff in a way that would be celebrated by the Trump administration. This termination sends a clear message to the campus community: the administrators and the bosses of our university will not side with the community — they will side with the ideology of the federal government. It is a repugnant way to abandon the values of the workers and students on our campus.
Both Keith Jones and the university administration understand that, as Paulo Freire said in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
Keith Jones’ understanding manifests in antiracist curricula that equip students with the vocabulary and understanding they need to “dislodge systemic racism, a pillar of UMass Boston’s approach to education.”
The administration’s understanding manifests in the termination of professors that take the alleged values of the university off of the school’s website and into the classroom. The termination of Keith Jones makes it clear that the university’s administration is perfectly content with UMass Boston continuing to be a site of ideological reproduction for the state, in order to integrate the next generation into the present system.
The present system is one that detains and deports my classmates. It is one that drops bombs on school girls. It is one that funds a genocide. Keith’s pedagogy is always rooted in facing our material reality, and imparts lessons from history that give us the confidence to go out of the classroom and into the streets to change that reality.
This desire to change reality is what put a target on his back. Provost Joe Berger, who has a salary of $360,447, obscures the truth through vague language gesturing at a lack of funding by saying Keith’s — whose salary is less than 20% of $360,000 — termination comes from the need to “responsibly steward CLA’s resources and funding.” I believe that knowledge of the history of the labor struggle shows that this termination happened due to Keith’s unwavering support of all of the university’s workers.
The administrators of our university pay associate lecturers $5,800 per course, a raise wrested from admin after years of struggle, compared to $8,125 at UMass Amherst. Keith, a member of the Faculty Staff Union’s executive committee, has been at the forefront of this struggle. He fiercely advocates for worker’s rights on campus. No doubt this is what led to his termination, and no amount of flowery language about “stewardship” will hide the fact that his termination is another act of union-busting by the administration. These blatant attacks on the living standards of the people who make the university run need to be actively struggled against by workers and students alike.
The administration is about to commit a serious error, but I have faith in the community of workers and students on campus. I urge that community to organize themselves around the reinstatement of Keith Jones.