On October 18, about 25 members of CFT’s Universities Council met in Sacramento for a leadership training, Building Diverse and Democratic Union Governance.

The goals of the day included making union work more inclusive, avoiding biases, and being anti-racist, as well as addressing federal attacks on higher education, says Universities Council President Katie Rodger, who teaches science writing at the University of California, Davis.

Her predecessor, Mia McIver, held the first of these trainings last year, Rodger says, and she knew right away she wanted to do another one, which she hopes will be an annual event.

At the CFT Convention in March in San Diego, she and Vice President Rebecca Gordon and Secretary Tai Chang, sat down with CFT Training Director, Christopher Arellano, to look through last year’s training evaluations to plan for the one this fall.

“We decided to keep a few of the modules from the first version of this training, like defining bias and unconscious bias and how does that manifest in union work,” she said. “We didn’t want to make this a second part of a training because we wanted to invite people who might not have come last year, but also we wanted to encourage people who had been part of the first training to feel that there’d be a reason to come back.”

They expanded the agenda, Rodger said, to include first-hand experience of union leaders addressing issues of bias, something people said they wanted. They invited James McIver, president of AFT 1521, to speak.

People appreciated hearing from him about his story as a Black man in higher education, Rodger said, and how he’s brought experiences with discrimination into his work as a union leader.

The day of the training, October 18, was also a No Kings Day protest against the current administration. It was too late to change the date of the CFT training, Rodger said, so they decided to go join the throngs of people in the Capitol. CFT President Jeff Freitas was speaking at the rally and invited them to come on stage with him.

“We got to go stand with our signs, and we were all wearing CFT t-shirts.” Rodger said. “A lot of our participants thought that was pretty great.”

But even this moment pointed out the need for the training, said Chang. Some people who were not born in the United States were leery of going to the march, he noted.

“There were faculty who said, ‘I can’t go out there because I can’t risk it,’ so it was really real,” he said. “When we’re white and US citizens, we have a privilege, and we can just go out there and protest. We didn’t even think about that, and I’m a person of color. It didn’t occur to me that not everybody would feel comfortable going to the No Kings Day protest.”

Chang teaches Clinical Psychology at Aliant University, which has multiple locations in California, including Emeryville, where he works. With the current administration, some instructors on certain visas are affected as well as programs related to diversity, so the training is particularly relevant, he says.

“Those are some of the more pressing things we want to support folks around, in addition to diversifying and democratizing our unions,” he said. “The general goal is to make our faculty union representative of the faculty who teach at the universities.”

Rodger says she has been thinking about how faculty members are on the front line of federal attacks since Trump took office in January.

“I’m from the University of California, which we know has been in the direct cross hairs of the Trump administration, but so has private four-year higher ed,” she said. “I still think that you cannot have a discussion about racial equality and social justice and not talk about the fact that these concepts are under attack by the federal government. This is now an essential part of what we’re facing in our jobs, and the whole reason many of us are union leaders is to try to fight for what’s right, and fight for improvements in our jobs. These things at this point are completely intertwined.”

Rodger said at the end of the training, people got together with others in their local to talk about concrete ways to make the organization more inclusive.

“We were able to sit and brainstorm about how to create opportunities for people to get involved in both low stakes and higher stakes leadership opportunities,” she said.

Chang says he heard from others that they were glad for an opportunity to start having conversations about diversifying and democratizing the union, and they look forward to continuing working on it.

“This is meant to be a series of trainings,” he said. “This is something that we plan to keep doing and to build on.”