Organizing faculty in Florida: An interview with Paul Ortiz

Dr. Paul Ortiz, a professor of labor history at Cornell’s ILR School and a former board member of the Institute for Southern Studies, joined the Southern Labor Studies Association’s Working History podcast to discuss the history of higher education labor organizing in Florida and Dr. Ortiz’s work in higher education labor organizing. Until last year, Dr. Ortiz was a professor of history and director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, where he spent fifteen years. Dr. Ortiz is also the past president of United Faculty of Florida-UF and has organized with the United Farm Workers, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, and other labor organizing groups.

Paul, welcome to Working History and thank you for being on the podcast with us. First, I wanted to talk a little bit about what it's been like to work and organize in Florida over the last several years.

At the University of Florida, there's a long history of the administration sabotaging intellectual freedom, both of the students as well as the faculty and the staff. This goes back to the founding of the school, and there are many examples where Florida ends up in the national spotlight as being an opponent of academic freedom, back to, I think, the earliest administration of the 20th century. There was a young professor of economics and history who openly questioned the wisdom of the South seceding from the union—this is very early in the 20th century—and he wanted to make it clear he was pro-white people. He said, I'm not trying to question the importance of having white people in charge of the system, but I don't think secession turned out well for the South. He was gone from campus within about a week. A  local citizens committee approached the president of the University of Florida at that time and told him, Look, you can take care of this matter. Or the citizens, the good citizens of Gainesville, who are very affluent, very wealthy, will take care of it for you, and you really don't want us to take care of it. Basically, what they were threatening was violence. So this young professor left very quickly after questioning, just questioning, Southern secession. Again, he wasn't critiquing white supremacy. He wasn't critiquing black disenfranchisement. 

I remember one time [labor historian] Bob Zieger and I were asked to give a series of academic freedom talks on campus and off campus, and so we just went to the university archive and especially looked at the student newspaper for examples. We weren't even using digital archives, we were just randomly searching the newspaper. We found all these amazing cases—I shouldn't say amazing, but just really shocking, astonishing and sad cases. In one case, the University of Florida fired a faculty member in the early ‘20s for criticizing President Warren G. Harding. And that seemed odd because this was during the time the South was solid, pro-white Democratic Party, and Harding was a Republican. Why? Why would they fire him? But the idea was faculty were supposed to stay in their little, narrow spaces and avenues. If you teach math, you teach history, you just teach those topics. Stay away from politics. Don't speak out loud. 

But it got even worse in the 1950s because at that point, UF went after LGBT faculty and students. The university set up a system in cooperation with the state. Public universities, instead of looking to their students and serving their students and their immediate communities, they're looking to the state for their authority. There’s a word for that. It's called fascism. Instead of serving the students, the broader communities, the faculty and the staff, you have decided to set up a system whereby if you were a faculty member and you were suspected of being, back then, homosexual or lesbian, anyone could report you to the campus police. And the chief of the University of Florida Campus Police we have basically bragging about this. He would call that suspected faculty member or staff member and he would say look, you have a choice. You can either come to my office for questioning, or tomorrow, there will be a headline in the Gainesville Sun, which is a local daily newspaper, saying that you're a homosexual. 

This shows the power and the ways in which media, capital, public institutions, the state, work together to police intellectual freedom, to make sure that people didn't question the state, to make sure that you and I, walked straight, literally and figuratively, to make sure we didn't rock the boat, and we stayed in our narrow lanes. 

Fast forward to when I arrived at University of Florida, that pattern had been set. See, history matters. And when I arrived at University of Florida, I noticed very quickly that the faculty were very cautious. The staff were very cautious. Even the students were very cautious about what they said, how they acted in public. They didn't even necessarily even realize this. Now, I don't want to romanticize how things are outside of Florida, because they're bad and they're getting worse. 

The one force that stood in opposition to the power of Ron DeSantis and the power of this reactionary administration was the United Faculty of Florida . I want to emphasize the importance of trade unionism to maintaining intellectual freedom in the state of Florida. There's a reason that all universities in the Florida system, all the 12 major universities, are unionized among faculty, many among grad students as well. And the reason gets back to what we were talking about earlier — generation after generation of state and administrative and corporate attacks on intellectual freedom. 

The faculty in Florida finally, in the late 60s and early 70s, unionized with other faculty throughout the state. This was a statewide union campaign. We benefited greatly from the 1968 Florida teachers strike, K-12. One of my former students, Jody Noll, is writing a brilliant book right now on the 1968 Florida teachers strike, which for the Deep South was a game changer. That strike resulted in being able to get collective bargaining for public employees into the state constitution. If you compare Florida to North Carolina, where collective bargaining among public employees is actually illegal, it is a big deal. But every time Caesar gives something, he takes something back. So we got collective bargaining enshrined in the state constitution thanks to the militancy of the K-12 teachers. However, the state took away our right to go on strike. So that was a huge gain, but also a big loss. 

The United Faculty of Florida is organized into chapters, and I was the president of the chapter at the University of Florida for a number of years. I served on just about every committee. But the most important thing about the union is we had each other's backs, and we finally were at a position I felt, about the early 2010s where, when the administration would attack a faculty member, other faculty would stand up for that person. That's the most important thing that the union did.

 We did other things. I mean, we saved gender studies. Our university was just going to give, was just, was in the process of dismantling the Gender Studies Department, if you can imagine this, because, as they put it to us, Governor DeSantis doesn't like women's studies, and a bill had been read in the early in the state legislative session a couple of years ago calling for the abolition of gender studies in all of the public universities in Florida. But that was just the first reading, and the administration panicked—but the panic was based on its historical practice of just kowtowing to whatever the state told them to do. So the union called the administration at University of Florida and said, to hell you're canceling gender studies. If you want to do something that radical, we have a collective bargaining contract. We have a union contract. You have to negotiate that. We're not going to argue with you over the facts or the case. We're not going to argue over whether you think gender studies is good or not, or whether Ron DeSantis likes gender studies. We don't give a damn what Ron DeSantis thinks. We're a union. We're a collective body of people, and we signed a contract with you guys that binds both parties, that binds the administration, that binds the faculty, and you can't eliminate a department without negotiating that through us. 

And the response of the administration was very instructive. They said, well, thank God the union called, because we just want to let you know that no one in the administration at the University of Florida wanted to abolish gender studies. It's just that we felt we didn't have any choice. And so now we can blame the union, and we're not going to abolish gender studies. Our response was, please blame the union. We're saving gender studies. 

I came up through the labor movement. As a younger labor organizer, I read a lot of literature about social movement unionism versus contractual unionism. And I was one of the social movement unionism people, and I was like, don't fall for business unionism. And I have critiques of business unionism, but I saw firsthand in Florida what it meant to have a union contract and what it meant to not have a union contract. I can't tell you how many peers would call me across the country on non-union campuses saying, Well, you know, Professor Ortiz, I just don't think I can teach Toni Morrison this year. I think that's just out of the question, because her books are banned K-12, and so I better not teach her. That's how I've come to appreciate how social movement, unionism and contract and collective bargaining really do work together.

Could you go back to that Florida teachers strike—what was it about that teacher’s strike that was able to secure public sector collective bargaining in the state constitution?

Jody Noll is really the expert on this question. It was the statewide nature of the movement that really put the fear of God into the state of Florida. They had a statewide insurrection on their hands. There was uneven community support, but there was enough parent and community support that the state was pushed to the wall, and they felt like they had to. 

It's always so important to think about the historical conjuncture. You know, there's a growing anti war movement. There's growing campus movements, the labor movement is in a period of deep militancy across the country, all the big unions have, you know, major reform movements going on at that time. And I think that the state felt that. And Jody will really suss this out in his forthcoming book on the 1968 Florida teachers strike. But I think at this point it's kind of like Florida in 1968 and now and onward, is kind of like a micro-version of the United States in the 1930s or even the 1960s where collective bargaining is something that the state doesn't really want to give but as Franklin Roosevelt says to his very affluent comrades in the ruling class: Look, I like capitalism. You like capitalism. But here's reality, there's millions of people in the street, and we either give collective bargaining, unemployment, social security, or else we may not have capitalism anymore. We may have either socialism or fascism. 

So there's a similar kind of dynamic going on in Florida in the late 60s and early 70s. It’s easy to forget the vibrancy of the social movements of that time. The women's movement was very strong in Florida. Actually, Gainesville, Florida, where UF is located, it has one of the first all-service women's reproductive health centers in the entire country, and some of those organizers are still here with us. That's been the strength of the Florida movement is the ways in which I feel like faculty, staff and students have been able to draw on these really rich prehistories. 

It sucks not to be able to strike, but there are a lot of things you can do, short of striking, if you can get people to work together. The most important thing, whether you have a contract or not, is to have each other's backs. Last night I was up til three in the morning writing letters for people across the country, including the Stephen Thrasher case. His classes have been canceled. He’s not allowed to teach because he stood in support of his Northwestern students. They were being savagely attacked by the police, and because he stood up for the students he himself was physically beaten by the police, and then they turned around and accused him of obstructing the police. Now, as labor activists, we know this is a time honored tactic among the cops. Unfortunately, they will charge us with obstructing the police by just simply asking a question. And unfortunately, too many of our progressive comrades have accepted what these local administrations have said about the pro-solidarity, pro-Palestinian protests, and they've kind of sat out this struggle, in many cases, putting so much pressure on students and high school students. You have elder activists who are saying, “oh, it's too complicated. I don't want to get involved. Palestine, Middle East, who can figure it out.” I'm like, what the heck? This is where faculty and staff and students are the strongest, is when we come together. If you're attacked, and I hear about it, my job is to not to shrink and say I hope that I'm not attacked. My job is to go to you to say, what kind of support can I give you?

When these directives started coming down from Ron DeSantis in Florida, how did UFF respond?

Well, we have a clause in our contract which basically says every time the President of either the union or the or the university wants to call the other party, then the other party has to answer. We used that right away. But I think the bigger thing we relied upon was community labor support. If your union wants support, you have to show up for other people's struggles. You have to be out in the community. If there's a living wage campaign, if there's an affordable housing campaign, if there's a woman's reproductive rights campaign, your union has got to be there. And number one is, it's the right thing to do. But number two, when the wolf comes for you — and the wolf came for us, and it wasn't just DeSantis, it was [Rick] Scott before him — we have always been able to try to make a point of showing up for other struggles. There's kind of a short list of crisis issues in Florida that we try to show up for and then when we got into trouble, especially after DeSantis was elected, people showed up for us — the labor councils, faith-based groups, the students. We made it clear that when we talk about academic freedom for faculty, that we're talking about it equally importantly for students. Students have the right to major in whatever major they want to pursue. We know Ron DeSantis despises anthropology, he despises sociology, he despises women's studies. He's called them out by name, he said. He said to a bunch of rich people, why should a Florida truck driver have to pay for women's studies? The rich people got a real laugh out of it. The truck drivers could give a care. They're too busy working. 

But when the wolf came for us, we were able to essentially go to our comrades in the broader community groups, NAACP, ACLU, some of the usual suspects, and they were there for us because we were there for them. Unless you engage in that kind of solidarity and reciprocity, then you might as well not even try to unionize, because you're just not going to get the support. It isn't just about me or you or us, it's about all of us. 

Looking ahead to the next five or ten years of faculty organizing, of campus organizing, what do you see coming down the pipeline? What should organizers be looking out for? What should unions be looking out for?

I'm very hopeful. I mentioned earlier, I think, that I get frequently called to talk to faculty and graduate students at different universities and even systems across the country who are beginning or midway through union organizing campaigns. That's why I'm hopeful, because we're getting organized. 

When I started trying to sign up faculty to join the union back in 2008 they would often tell me, oh, Paul, that sounds like a good idea, but I'm not a worker. I'm management. Now you don't have to make that strong argument anymore. Everyone is getting organized. Higher education is really on fire. So number one, keep the momentum going. Number two gets back to you what you and I were talking about earlier. Don't isolate yourself from your broader community. As soon as you start thinking about organizing yourselves, whether you're grad students, undergrads, staff, or faculty. Think about your broader community. Think about what your university takes from your broader community, whether it's private or public. Because our universities get much more out of our surrounding communities than we give back to them. That's a critical dynamic that we often forget. 

And then the third thing is to have each other's backs. Remember the concept of pattern bargaining that the UAW  did a great job on in the ‘30s and after World War Two, and then fell away from, and now is getting back to. It doesn't matter what model you have, whether it's a UCW model, where everyone is in the same bargaining unit, but even if you don't have that, don't bargain in isolation. The first contract is your most important contract. Build on that, but always make your bargaining public by any means necessary. Invite people in the community. Invite all of your potential members. Don't allow administrations to do what happened at the UAW in the 50s, where they started making bargaining private. That was a disaster. That's why the UAW fell apart. That's why this new leadership when they open up bargaining to public audiences, it was a game changer, because you get to see firsthand what capital thinks of you as a worker, whether you're a student worker, a faculty worker, a custodian, when you when you open those bargaining sessions up, it is the best education you could possibly ask for.

In closing, organize, organize, organize. I asked about 10 different legal historians, what role does academic freedom have in the US Constitution? And they say, well, at best Paul, it's ambiguous. The Constitution is very ambiguous on academic freedom. As an organizer, what I take out of that is if we want academic freedom, if we want intellectual freedom, we have to fight for it collectively. The state's not going to do it for us, and our institutions, and the courts, are not going to do it for us. So we have to fight.