SSW – Angelo Bonadonna's Blog

The Final SSW, Jane Austen, Silence, Communion, the Abyss, a Full Heart… [and an Unfinished Title :) ]

April 16, 2026

[Note: This entry, a challenging SSW session (incomplete like its title), was written (predominantly) in class on Thursday, April 16, 2026, in my beloved Jane Austen class, when nearly all the students were present and writing in peace.]

Here in my final SSW, I find myself staring at the blank page. Many thoughts … no thoughts. Where to start? Teaching Jane Austen … has brought me in touch with my past, through Gene Ruoff, and so many other large significances of my world. We ended class Tuesday with a proper focus—a glancing recognition of the Holy Spirit as the non-linguistic substance of pure communication. In my conversations elsewhere I spoke of the grief I felt for Austen as a woman, and broadening out, for all women who have suffered oppression, and will suffer oppression, as we keep finding ways to undo progress.

But there are hopeful glimmers. There’s redemption, even happiness, in local instances. Like Anne Elliot, we can snatch a good life out of the buzz in our ears, the confusion all around us. As for those making the buzz—a vain father, clueless loved ones, a world of distractions and agendas, often unkind ones—we can live amidst it all, be of service to it all, reject and yet not-reject it all—and be there, and be loving and kind despite all the misguided and hurtful aggressiveness bearing down on us.

Like Kenneth Burke at the end of Permanence and Change¹, I’m tiptoeing around the edge of an abyss, so worried. More nervous, perhaps, than loquacious. But yet, here I sit, in a roomful of cooperating fellow humans, who, despite great inconveniences all around, have placed themselves with me here, and write with me in silence. It’s really quite a remarkable thing.

What do I hope for the world? I want the peace herein experienced; I want welfare for all these good souls. Right now, I’m having one of those moments when, as it were, I rise out of my body and view, in a glimpse, the totality of eternity, and my role in it, out of time. How does all this happen? All this potential I have as a human being, a unique collection of cells in a soul that never was and never will be again, and that can be just about anything I choose it to be. At various points in my life, I’ve had this rising insight—this “spot of time” that my friend Marianne expounded on today via her friend, Wordsworth. I remember the first appearance of this spot for me was in fifth grade, when we were in line for something—and it occurred to me: my radical individualism. I rose out of my body and thought I was who I was… (not quite that, but something like that); I was unique; I could be me, whatever that was; I was existing as a unique individual. That entailed much—made me feel (even then!) I could start over, and do things.

Now, as I close off my teaching career, I have less time ahead of me to put all that radical individualism to work in the world than I did back in fifth grade. But I can still do something.

I’m grateful for the chance I’ve been given. We hang in the balance. Austen illustrates both how possible it is to overcome obstacles … and how fragile the whole endeavor is. If only, if only. It’s such a gift, what I’ve been given, what I can glimpse. I can’t go much further in the writing than this today. Possibly ever. I’m hitting the wall; there’s too much. Or it might be the upset stomach I’m feeling. Which also brings me back to Austen, as I imagine the agony of that final year of illness (read those letters of her in that last year, knowing what we now know; and then read that heartbreaking (but stoic) letter of her beloved sister, Cassandra, to their beloved niece, Fanny Knight). Poor, poor Jane. I’m grateful for the efforts she did expend under such circumstances.

I end the semester (the career) with thoughts of marvel, of gratitude, of frustration. All of it is suffused with grace—with mystery, with quizzicality. My students are here, I’m here, Austen is here. I hope we can continue on.

¹Here is the full final paragraph of Permanence and Change:

In these troublesome antics, we may even find it wise on occasion to adopt incongruous perspectives for the dwarfing of our impatience. We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made [sic] institutions—but beyond these tiny concentration points of rhetoric and traffic, there lies the eternally unsolvable Enigma, the preposterous fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. Our speculations may run the whole qualitative gamut, from play, through reverence, even to an occasional shiver of cold metaphysical dread—for always the Eternal Enigma is there, right on the edges of our metropolitan bickerings, stretching outward to interstellar infinity and inward to the depths of the mind. And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man [sic], there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men [sic] build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss. (Permanence and Change, 1935)

January 23, 2025

[Note to Reader: What follows is my first SSW (Sustained Silent Writing) entry from Spring Semester, 2025. The prompt for today was twofold: (1) a student Xavierite journalist had asked me to share some thoughts for an article she was writing about Meg Carroll, whose death last month had shocked and saddened the University community; and (2) January 23. The two topics pointed in different and similar directions, a happy/sad accident.]

Meg Carroll was one of “those” people—someone special, someone indescribable, someone widely recognized as a legend while she is alive, and someone puzzled over after she is dead: “Could she really have been all that she seemed to be? Why are there not more like her? How could she be gone?”

Meg was a friend and colleague in many and varied respects. At meetings, I often waited for her contribution, and when she spoke, I hung on every word. She threaded the needle of incisive criticism on the one hand, and constructive input on the other. She had historical context, and was able to trace out the past, often contradictory, practices and policies. That was the incisive part. But she was the ultimate team player, and always worked on practical solutions, usually volunteering to chair a committee or find student teaching placements in late December for January teaching assignments [this specific service being her last professional miracle, just days before succumbing to becoming an actual angel in heaven, rather than just a human approximation on earth].

Over the course of our decades working together, I came to know Meg in increasingly warm and affectionate ways, learning new things about her past—a past that was surprisingly connected to mine (as I discovered, just a few years ago, that we hung with the same crowd in college, even to the point that her first husband, unbeknownst to me at the time, was a classmate of mine in the seminary).

Meg was wise and talented, but most of all she was kind and generous. The love she drew to her from so many students and friends and family gave her an aura that was almost visible. She represents the soul of SXU in its best potential. She was one of a kind, but oddly, also, a simple incarnation of what one would expect of a professor and friend, if such things could be materialized from their ideal form.

We are left with the clichés, “The good die young”; “We won’t see the likes of her again”; “The world is a much smaller and lesser place without her”… and on it goes.

So today, January 23, is the start of a new writing notebook in Advanced Writing. As has happened the past few years, the start of the notebook experience coincides with Angelo’s cycle of January-February that dominates my psyche with increasing weightiness each passing year. This was to be my last year of notebook keeping, but now that I’ve delayed retirement an additional year, I still find myself in the flow of the old routines. Will I still keep a notebook after I retire in 2026? I should. I heard myself describing to my class the value and impact that the notebook experience has had on me, leaving me to ask of myself, my students, and everyone else: Why don’t we carve out regular sessions? Why is the 40-minute session such an unusual activity, especially if it brings all those advantages I spoke of?

Today’s remembrance of Angelo goes back to 1986, his year of birth. In 1986, January 23 was on a Thursday too. That thought threw me back to Wednesday, January 22, 1986, when the labor pains started … early in the morning. Then, after the birth, nearly a day later (I’ve left out many details!), I left the hospital; I went to Walgreens to buy the $5 (a lot of money back then) Super Bowl preview/program; and then I actually went to my morning class with Dr. Mary Thale at UIC. The class was my Alexander Pope course. There were only three of us students in it; coming from a 2:30 AM birth, I guess I was kinda showing up the other two guys (who Dr. Thale thought were slackers in general). I was Dr. Thale’s favorite, since in those days I was a full-on scholar luxuriating in my nightshift security guard gig at the Wrigley Building. Never before or since have I ever been able to complete my reading and other assignments with such diligence (I think the magic of the marble walls and wrought brass elevator doors created a positively Burkean scene: act ratio of possibility). Ah scholarship. I was in the zone as a student—soon to be in the zone as a parent, Ph.D. candidate, home-owner, husband, and citizen. Ah, the 80’s and 90’s, a heady time for me in my thirties, as solutions and possibilities beckoned.

Before the seminar, I did let the group know that I had just come from the hospital. Such good news. Dr. Thale commented about a friend of hers who had shared his reaction with her upon seeing his first child, just after his birth. Her friend said, “I saw myself dead.” (That’s the kind of class it was.) I was taken aback, but she went on to explain, in a way, I suppose, that makes sense, about the circle of life, the coming of the new generation, and thus the eventual departure of the old generation. The comment was the kind of news Garrison Keillor might have brought from Lake Wobegon, which is part of the reason, I guess, it stuck with me.

I didn’t expect to be thinking of Dr. Thale this morning. Whenever I think of her, I think of how very old I thought she was at the time. Grey-haired, wiry frame, and bespectacled, she seemed an archetypal English professor. An archetypal, old English professor. An archetypal, old, female professor. I learned today, however, that back then, in 1986, she was only 62. I found that out because, in Google AI-ing her this morning, I found her obituary. She died in October of 2008 at the age of 84. RIP, dear Dr. Thale. These days, as I eye my own retirement (I am now 67, five years older than the ancient Thale)—and reflect on 1986, and the meaning of my time in graduate school, with professors like Dr. Thale, and my beloved Gene Ruoff (who I also just recently learned has died), my thoughts swirl and interconnect. What should I be aiming at? What is my legacy?

I’ve never looked upon Angelo (or any of my kids) with the result of me seeing myself dead. That’s all good. I wish I could look upon Angelo (and Mary Thale and Gene Ruoff) and not see them dead too. They all accomplished much, and there’s much to relish in each of them, and all the other loved ones I’ve lost, we’ve lost. I do look upon the whole of everything with sadness. What is the point? What lasts? In such thoughts, I recall the truisms I’ve come to rely on: just make the most of the time, while you have it; “Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may” [Insert great Pope quote here!! Would I, were I still the scholar I was in 1986.]

The memories are the thing … I hope they stay. Even in so trivial a memory as attending Dr. Thale’s Pope class, and showing up my fellow classmates in passive aggressive ways, as was my wont, there is joy that sustains. Angelo, I wish you were here. But I don’t know: In a sense, you weren’t really there in that first dramatic week of your life, with the Bears winning the Super Bowl at age 3 days, and the Challenger exploding on that following Tuesday at age 5 days. But you were part of it then in your infant seat in front of the TV, and you were part of today, too, when we had the cake and told stories during and after the movie we shared in your honor. The shadows of your presence are with us each day. And the deeper parts, the person you were, stay with us, and grow, if only faintly. It’s a little more work these days to keep you right there, and it’s also just as easy to do so as ever. It’s a mystery. Happy Birthday, Ang!

Screen Salvation

September 26, 2024

Some are living with the apocalypse right in front of them. Others seem to be able to put it in their peripheral vision.

For the latter group, the apocalypse is something to be reminded of, as a caution, while they go about their lives, which have organizing principles and purposes that propel them and carry them along. These are the people who are raising children, doing essential jobs, basically, keeping the world on track amidst the hubbub of things. The former group, though, have been immobilized by the apocalypse. All has been lost, already, always already, and nothing is possible.

I put myself in the first group, because, I suppose, I feel I have experienced a loss so absolute that there’s no recovery from it, no way of pushing it to the side, no way of restarting and hitting my stride. That loss, of course, is Angelo. But death is something every human has to deal with; what I’ve experienced, everyone has, or will, in some version. Of course, everyone will experience it in a very personal, immediate way in their own death, if not through the loss of a child.

The apocalypse of a single death is as absolute, as devastating, for each individual as any other apocalypse, be it the Holocaust, a nuclear war, or end of the world through climate change or an asteroid strike. It’s weird to say that everyone will experience a loss equally as devastating as world-wide annihilation. But the stakes are high for each of us; rather, the stakes are beyond high; they are “all in,” always and everywhere. How does one function facing such an extremity? Clearly, we must learn to focus on other things.

This week I edited my screen saver. For some time, I had had only the Julie London quote about her singing: “It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of over-smoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.” Julie’s words were a friendly reminder to me, on a daily basis, of something I tried to describe some months back in my blog: “Such confidence, expressed with awareness and humility and precision. Not to mention, a good dose of sensuality, along with the promise of being together through it. The woes of the world would be lessened, I’m convinced, if we all just listened to, and spent time with, Julie London.” I would smile each time her words appeared on my screen.

I found myself this week needing, however, other reminders—or at least some glimpses of a non-apocalyptic lifestyle. I happened to come across St. Paul’s words, and it occurred to me that I needed to see them more often. I needed these words as an incantation, as an invocation to a better life than the one I had been living. Could this be my equipment for living, my distraction from the apocalypse? So I put them on my screen saver.

Then, with St. Paul and Julie London sitting there alone, I felt a need for some kind of connector—some statement that might round out the wisdom. These thoughts brought me to Kenneth Burke, and all the influence he has had on my life. That influence can’t be reduced to a single quotation, but his description of the “comic frame” in Attitudes Toward History does seem to partake of the Holy Spirit, on the one hand, and the humility of Julie London’s celebration of her voice on the other.

So, here’s my screen saver in its current iteration:

Saint Paul, on letting God in: “Brothers and sisters: Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed on the day of redemption. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.” Ephesians 4:30-5:2

Julie London, on her voice: “It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of over-smoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.”

Kenneth Burke, on comic forgiveness: “The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.” Attitudes Toward History, p. 41

Angelo’s Screen Saver

I now notice that my introductory characterization of two of the quotations could be debated. For instance, was Burke really speaking about “forgiveness”? Or was that a reading I had imposed? Was I progressing a step beyond “enlightenment” to forgiveness, possibly as a natural effect of understanding/misunderstanding, and contextualization, and the necessity of error for all? I want there to be forgiveness. Also: Was St. Paul talking about “letting God in”? Or was this my wish—the wish that I might be able to abide by Paul’s request not to “grieve the Holy Spirit”? Paul talks of the seal of God, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the fragrant aroma of Christ’s sacrifice in which we are all suffused and made beneficiaries (I do notice he imports the holocaust of Christ’s sacrifice in this otherwise upbeat message). To me, he implies that we are somehow resisting it all; I know I have resisted giving up my grievances. Are they not keeping God out?

I hope these words, my companions on my screen, can keep on casting a spell on me. I need to look away from the ultimate devastation at my feet and in my sight. Kindness, love, humility—and intimacy too—I hope the reminders keep me upbeat and moving forward. I hope I can learn to push the apocalypse to the side, at least for part of the day, for part of my days that remain.

Anxious Addiction to Apocalyptic Algorithms

September 12, 2024

Thinking about my car ride in, with the news clips of YouTube running their circuit through my phone playing on my car’s Bluetooth, I am comforted, and also disturbed, by the regularity, mastery, and devotion of the companions on my playlist: I’ve felt camaraderie in the apocalypse thinking all around me. What does one do with a sentence like that?

Trump. Climate. Pandemic. War. The end of higher education: Others are feeling the same absolute desperation I am feeling in these End of Days times. Fortified with new media, a modern person can “do apocalypse” in increasingly intense and coherent and focused ways. In the past, there was a time and space lag. As a pre-internet person in my youth, I would have to go to the library to find apocalypse thinkers; I would have to go back in time to philosophers and spokespeople addressing crises of such variety and tangential relevance that the overall effect would be muted and diffused. Each apocalypse was isolated from one another. Today, however, the immediacy, speed—and mania—of the YouTube algorithm has effected a true qualitative change.

Just 10, maybe 5, years ago, I would not have felt this camaraderie. Nowadays, the Unending Conversation is present to me in much more direct and constant ways than was ever possible before. The Algorithms of YouTube are now my conversations. The clips range from ten minutes to longer pieces, sometimes whole hours of programming. Most of the content is a single person like Ben Meiselas or Michael Popock speaking into his laptop camera offering commentary on the legal and political news of the day (or rather, that hour). There is a cycle of clips each day, including Colbert, Kimmel, and Stewart; there are the regular commentators—Joy Reid, Lawrence O’Donnell, Ari Melber. So it’s a lot of MSNBC, with podcasts by MSNBC contributors, Brian Tyler Cohen, Glenn Kirschner, Andrew Weissmann—and others like Tim Miller, George Conway, Sarah Longwell—even folks like Bill Kristol.

The forays are not dramatic, hysterical, or crisis-tinged. They are focused and reasoned. They have emotion and pointedness; they suggest a hope that discourse can matter, that rules can be followed, that intelligent, impassioned, linguistically-responsible involvement can be both practiced and sustained over time by individuals who bring both evidence and principled analysis to bear. I am hooked by these savants. I have not experienced such a thing in my nearly seven decades on this planet. It strikes me that such a mode of consuming/experiencing discourse has not been available to me—or anyone—prior to the onset of modern digital-social media. I’m in the throes of a wave that is sweeping past—a new, Addictive Alchemy of Algorithms. The clips come and go, with mini-ads I can skip after 5 seconds, with a fragility of the screen that can click away inadvertently because of my clumsy boomer fingers, but with such a wealth of endless content, that nothing is ever lost, or lost for good, though the clips tend to disappear in a way wholly against the grain of my essence, with my longstanding commitment to archiving and saving, storing and organizing. The YouTube interface controls the delivery and pacing, and it does so in a way that serves me. But I wonder if that sense of service is an illusion. Am I being pushed and shaped into something not of my making? Am I entrapped in an Algorithm of Compulsion?

I need to understand what got me here. I worry that I am on a trajectory that is fueling itself into deeper and deeper echoes of a chamber I may never emerge from. But I have felt so desperate. The Trump phenomenon of dishonor-cum-popularity has pulled the rug from me—and when I listen to my fellow sufferers, they seem both to offer a way out from the despair even while they plunge me more fully into the clutches of it. I have often advocated the value of a “purification by excess,” so my death scroll, perhaps, has purpose and method. But such a method always carries with it the danger of the opposite: complete pollution by the excess.

This mode of being, riding the algorithms of YouTube is a new way of consuming, living with, engaging in world events. I feel a need to get it right—to fix the world. As if it were up to me to fix things; as if I could. The Trump phenomenon has revealed how different I am (we are) from so many people around me, from so many people in this country, from many people I love. I need to make sense of it. I need to have hope that decency matters, that we share some basic agreements about who/what/why we are; that something matters.

At the bottom of all this—my immersion in the algorithms, my search for a new set of foundations for my psyche and family and students and community—lies my need for purpose and hope. Those are the things that have been taken away. The current threats are so far beyond what they ever have been. Not really: I remember growing up fearing nuclear obliteration—the end of human existence, with the Tuesday morning 10:30 AM air raid siren reminder, the fallout shelter signs, and Cold War chill in the air. But with the sixties, seventies, and eighties, we grew somewhat around and beyond that fear. In contrast, today the climate crisis is more insidious and visible at the same time. The hopelessness of this planet on fire is deeper—since no solution seems nearly comprehensive enough, and the march on our path seems inexorable.

Against the pull of the algorithms, I rely on the simple correctives of fresh air and real life conversations with people close at hand. I derive such joy in accomplishing minor service projects that make me useful and employed. I can envision a life of getting up, keeping active, checking things off. I need the balance made possible by the diffusions and disorganization of non-technologized modes of interaction.

In closing, I must never forget that there may be healthy technologized forms of camaraderie outside the algorithm. Somewhere between the dictates of YouTube and the comforts of people close at hand, I must find, collect, and curate those people and statements that can nudge me closer to a happier balance. Now is a good time to recall (and thank) Terry Gross and Ken Burns, in replaying a portion of their conversation that I had happened to save a few years back, just after the release of Burns’s documentary, The Vietnam War:

Terry Gross: I want to quote something that the media critic, James Poniewozik, wrote in The New York Times. This was in a review, a very positive review, of your series, The Vietnam War. He wrote: “The saddest thing about this elegiac documentary may be the credit it extends its audience. The series, The Vietnam War, still holds out hope that we might learn from history, after presenting 18 hours of evidence to the contrary.”

Ken Burns: I think it’s a beautiful sentence and I will hold to my optimism. I think history has made me an optimist, despite the fact that it shows you that human nature doesn’t change, that the same venality is present, the same abstraction of war is present, the same greed is present. But so is also the same generosity, and the same … love. And war is human nature on steroids. And so, it’s an eminently study-able thing. And we assume that it’s just all negative. In fact, the same electrons that war gives off, in all the instances that I’ve tried to tackle it, reveal as much about the positive sides of human nature, and maybe the reason why we … you know, none of us is getting out of this alive, Terry, and we could reasonably be assumed to be huddled in the fetal position. But we don’t. We raise families. And we plant gardens. And we write symphonies. And we try to make films, and talk about history. And maybe there’s something that comes from that … that sticks.

None of us is getting out of this apocalypse alive, Terry, but yes, that little garden over there is oh, so beautiful….

Labored Recollections of May 28 on September 5

I appreciated Kamala Harris’s Labor Day speech:

For generations in Detroit and across our nation, the brothers and sister of labor have stood together to righteously demand fair pay, better benefits, safe working conditions. And let me say, every person in our nation has benefitted from that work. Everywhere I go, I tell people: “Look, you may not be a union worker—you better thank a union worker. For the five-day work week. You better thank a union member for sick leave. You better thank a union worker for paid leave. You better thank a union member for vacation time. Because what we know is when union wages go up, everyone’s wages go up. When union work places are safer, every workplace is safer. When unions are strong, America is strong.“

Kamala Harris, September 2, 2024, Detroit, Michigan

I continue to struggle with my role as a union supporter. I have not recovered from the phone call, during Covid, when the president of SXU (Laurie Joyner) and the Chair of the Board of Trustees (Trish Morris) informed me (Chair of the Faculty Union), and Jackie Battalora (Associate Chair), and Robert Bloch (our lawyer), that the University would no longer recognize our union, and would immediately discontinue its current round of collective bargaining.

On a personal level, I felt responsible. The negotiations had been long and embattled. Both sides were dug in. All the dynamics of power plays and personalities in such dealings were in evidence, and the protracted process, over two years in duration, came to a fruitless end. The conversations of our team had featured some of the best of colleagueship among the membership, but also some of the folly of striving and advocacy, with missed steps, missed opportunities, posturing, misguided kinds of assertiveness and power plays, and the like, all too common in labor negotiations.

The stalled negotiations conveyed a failure of the university I have not yet recovered from. The failure was a breakdown in communication; it was a foregone conclusion, where each side remained at the end exactly where they had been at the start. Persuasion was not an option. In my classes I teach of the Platonic dialogue, whereby the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, whereby perspectives, in coming together and against one another, all add to and correct the limitations of any single one of them; whereby a new entity, a “synthesis,” is possible and sought after. I had belief in such a thing, but in this episode, the reality on both sides was entrenchment. Nonetheless, internally, to our collective, there was goodwill and hope—honesty and charity—conflict and forgiveness; there was a sense of necessity that we had to put on a strong front (did we?), and so the style of advocacy we employed, one that was highly adversarial, was more or less believed necessary by all involved.

From the perspective of our negotiating team, our adversary had no intention to engage in a Platonic dialectic. The administrators were new hires, brought in by a potentially well-meaning board who, after years of benign neglect and worsening conditions found itself panicked that the institution might not survive, and that the main problem was “that union”—even though this accusation was something more of a trope than a reality. The president brought with her a high-priced union-busting lawyer, and every interaction reinforced an antagonistic dynamic, with variation in subtlety and aggressiveness, but never any chance for an opening that might lead to a genuine collaboration or sharing of power.

It is perhaps a very common tale in labor negotiations. Over the course of our two-year negotiation, our faculty group met with experts in the labor movement, such being the joy of the academic life, that we were eager to learn of the principles and practices of the labor movement while we were engaged in the activities of it. On a personal level, though, I had always hoped we could “change the dynamic”—and find a way to recognize how distinctive and remarkable our 40-year faculty union had been—how pragmatic and moral and effective the union and administration had been in looking out for what worked best for the institution overall.

The Hippocratic Oath rattled in my head. I had stepped into the role of chairperson with hope of serving, of possibly maintaining or improving conditions that for years were incrementally, gradually, evolving in win-win ways. But under my watch the union had ceased to be.

For years our union had operated on a bubble. The Yeshiva Supreme Court ruling of 1980, which suggested that university faculty might be classified as “management,” and thus could not partake in union activity, was made soon after our union was certified by the NLRB (in 1979). Throughout our history, Yeshiva hung over our heads. But the beauty of SXU’s union was that both sides—from the inception—operated on the premise that our union was legitimate; we would engage in collective bargaining as if we had all the protections of the NLRA. Over the course of the union’s existence, in those moments where agreements became strained, faculty hesitated to file an unfair labor practice—i.e., to act as a typical union—for fear that the Yeshiva question at SXU might be called and the whole premise of collective bargaining might be upended. In a way, SXU had transcended the exclusively antagonistic methods of collective bargaining in a great “as if”—we did collective bargaining “as if” we were a union like the UAW, even if we never pushed the process with any of the harder hitting tools of labor law. While some judged us not to be a “real” union, the process of collective bargaining and the respect shown by both sides struck many of us as exemplifying an ideal, even a purified version of labor-management methods of problem-solving.

The Joyner administration found a powerful ally in Donald Trump who appointed union busting leaders to the NLRB. After a few unfavorable decisions to faculty unions, SXU made its move. Divided and demoralized—and in the throes of a pandemic—the union was sapped of strength, and the University made its move on May 28, 2020.

From the perspective of four-plus years later, I’m left thinking how unnecessary it was to beat down the faculty the way the university did. Our negotiations had functioned as a version of shared governance—as a vehicle to achieve some modest concessions on the parts of all parties—where, as one of our esteemed founders stated, neither side “gamed the system,” and all prioritized the welfare and sustainability of the institution, even if only from a perspective of self-interest. I realize that traditional unions had never operated this way—that concessions and benefits were all hard fought, with one or the other party, ultimately, dragged to the finished line, more or less dissatisfied or even embittered. I just wish SXU avoided the nuclear decision to subjugate its faculty, even if, ultimately, their victory was Pyrrhic and largely impractical.

It’s about attitude and perception. I’m grateful for Kamala Harris’s rousing speech, even if only for the way it promotes a mindset opposite to that of busting a union, for the way it suggests the idea, the value, of a union. Or rather, the value of an adversarial process that is not about demonization and conquest but rather dialectic and transcendence—and possible mutual benefit.