Around 50 people marched along Duke University’s East Campus wall last week while cars honked in solidarity. The group carried signs and a large butterfly puppet that kept getting stuck in tree branches and telephone wires, and protestors helped those with wheelchairs and strollers navigate bulbous tree roots and broken sidewalks.
“Money for jobs and education, not for racist deportation,” the group chanted.
“We work, we sweat, put 25 on our check.”
“If the billionaires keep funding ICE, my people stand up and strike. If the bosses don’t pay my rent, my people stand up and strike.”
Organized by Duke’s American Association of University Professors chapter, Sunrise Duke, the Union of Southern Service Workers, and other organizations, the event built on the findings of a financial report AAUP released last week that concluded Duke is in healthy financial shape and didn’t need to eliminate more than 600 jobs last summer. But more than that, the rally was a demand for a more progressive vision of higher education, calling for rehiring workers who lost their jobs, enhanced protections for immigrants, and a $25 an hour minimum wage (hence the chant).
“These walls are literal, but also figurative,” cultural anthropologist and Duke AAUP president Emily Lin Rogers said at the march’s endpoint just inside the campus wall at Main and Broad streets. “Duke divides us between the underpaid staff members who clean our classrooms and the faculty who teach in them, between the students and the precarious bus drivers who take them to class. And between its own wealth and the prosperity of the community.
“Meanwhile, Duke presents its austerity measures as a matter of protection against doomsday predictions of what is to come with this presidential administration. But with its preemptive cuts, suppression of free speech, and inaction around us, Duke is doing Trump’s bidding for him. The excuses end here, Duke. We are not buying it.”
Rogers pointed to the financial report to push back against Duke’s claims of financial precarity. It was completed by Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University and AAUP member, who relied on Duke’s public financial audits.
Last fall, Duke administrators estimated a $662 million loss over the next five years from the Trump administration’s increased endowment tax, Medicaid cuts, and attempts to slash research funding. Bunsis concluded the university has more than $14 billion in unrestricted assets that it could use to cover any losses, including parts of its endowment and operational reserves. And the biggest anticipated cut for Duke—a change to reimbursements for research costs associated with federal grants, which administrators estimated would cost the university $230 million a year—has been blocked by both the courts and Congress.
“We had the feeling when it was happening in the spring and summer that this was unnecessarily preemptive, that it was taking place before any of these threats were even close to coming to pass,” said Erika Weiberg, Duke AAUP’s treasurer and a classics professor. “It felt to us that it was an excuse being used to restructure the university.”
A Duke spokesperson said the university could not comment on Bunsis’ report because it was not involved in preparing it.
“We regularly share information about the university’s finances and outlook with faculty through the university’s shared governance process,” the spokesperson added. They also declined to respond to criticisms that the cuts were unnecessary.
Though the pain of the Trump administration’s cuts has been mitigated by Congress and the courts, the pain of Duke’s has not, other speakers said.
Margoth Erazo, a Honduran immigrant, told the crowd through a translator that she worked as a housekeeper at Duke for more than 23 years before losing her job when the Trump administration removed her temporary protected status, a designation that allows foreign citizens to stay in the United States legally when conditions in their homeland are too dangerous.
When a federal judge overturned that action in December, Erazo believed she’d be able to reclaim her job at Duke.
“They told me at an appointment with Duke Visa Services that I couldn’t continue working because Duke’s housekeeping had restructured their department, and they said my position didn’t exist anymore,” Erazo said. “I didn’t understand how such a large and wealthy place couldn’t have a space for workers like myself and others.”
Other speakers lamented that while Duke was quick to make cuts to its workforce, it has been reticent to take decisive action against the White House’s aggressive immigration raids.
A Duke spokesperson declined to respond to questions about protections for immigrants.
“I know that a better world is possible,” said Duke student Artivista Karlin, calling on the university to become a “4th Amendment workplace” by providing workers with guarantees that they won’t allow immigration enforcement to enter campus without a signed warrant.
Fear of immigration agents leading large raids, like those that killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, impact students and workers alike, Karlin told The INDY.
“We as students hold a lot of power to demand that a university do more to protect its workers, and we have to also recognize that the struggle that students face is the same struggle of workers, and throughout history has taken both students and workers to defeat authoritarianism,” she said.
The rally ended with the same message communicated in a slightly different way.
“Snap and clap and touch your toes, workers rights are on a roll, billionaires have got to go,” the Durham Labor Choir sang in a Chappell Roan rewrite.
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