The following statement was sent on February 5, 2026.

Welcome back!

As we begin our teaching assignments for the new semester, we want to update our members on the challenges we face over the next few months. This semester is shaping up to be one of the most consequential since our victorious 2023 strike. 

Our contracts expire at the end of June, and based on the results of the bargaining survey, we are setting our priorities. We face the uncertainties of a new governor, a new university president, and a harsher labor environment than we faced in 2023. The economy is weaker, and our funding sources are at risk; we already are hearing rumblings that the university plans to “tighten its belt” — likely at the expense of Lecturers. We will need to show strength and unity in order to preserve what we achieved last time, and work to build on it.

At the federal level, we have been witnessing an unprecedented looting of public institutions that affect us, like the National Institute of Health, which funds university research. There’s plenty of money for ICE but little for science, health, or education. The Department of Homeland Security’s FY2026 budget is reportedly $332.72 billion, larger than most countries’ entire defense budgets. There’s massive funding for building a vast network of “detention centers” and for “surging” heavily armed paramilitaries into our cities. 

We watch in horror as ICE and the Border Patrol racially profile, brutalize, and disappear people of color, invading people’s homes without warrants, and pepper-spraying, beating, and even murdering protesters. Here at home, ICE is actively terrorizing our neighbors in New Brunswick (six detained just last week), Camden, and Newark. 

This, of course, is part of a larger agenda of bullying and resource theft by the administration that includes a takeover of Venezuela; threats to seize Greenland; threats to invade Panama, Cuba, and Colombia, and to make Canada the 51st state; and his appointment of a “Trump Board of Peace” to supplant the United Nations and occupy Gaza.

Why is it important that we, an academic trade union, also speak out on “foreign policy” matters like these? They may seem unrelated to higher education and Rutgers, but there is a causal link between Washington’s actions on the world stage and their authoritarian behavior at home. As John Quincy Adams warned in 1821, if the United States went “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy… flashing … the murky radiance of dominion and power…the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” Today’s enemies of “liberty” are also aligned against our academic freedom to teach our students as our expertise would dictate. They are part of a global right-wing movement that demonizes immigrants, jeopardizes our community and our international faculty and students, and detests an educated civil society wise to their looting and criminality.

We must speak out because this extremist movement is an existential threat to our livelihoods and our democracy, a right-wing movement driven by what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

We must speak out, King said, “for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls ‘enemy,’” here and around the globe, because all of us are threatened by this extremism.

Because universities and unionized labor, like the free press, are important centers of civil society opposition, we in academia are prime targets. Already, universities are caving to Washington’s blackmail: silencing and firing faculty and staff; eliminating Middle Eastern, gender, and ethnic studies departments; purging their websites (including Rutgers’ website) of any mentions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” If we don’t defend our institution, who will?

The freedom to teach, to research, to learn, even to live, is at stake. We must stand together as never before. 

The union makes us strong! Please keep up to date on union doings at our events calendar, and join us at a Town Hall or union social event this spring. 

In solidarity,

Executive Board of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union