The strike at Temple, therefore, was not just about material benefits for graduate workers: it was also about the long-term structural nature of what the contemporary university will be. It was about exposing the precarity of everyone not just graduate workers but also adjuncts and even TT faculty under academia’s current system.
More than 50 years ago, Temple students flooded the North Philadelphia roads of Broad Street for hours to demand that the university be more responsive to African American issues. Their voices were heard. In 1971, Temple University established what eventually would become known as the Department of Africology and African American Studies, one of the first Black studies