Inside Higher Ed: Friending a Strike
When Oakland University, in Michigan, and the union that represents 600 of its faculty members failed to reach labor agreement last week, the professors went on strike and the university shut down — while representatives from the opposing sides went behind closed doors in downtown Detroit to negotiate. At the same time, a much larger and more eclectic group began discussing the issue in a space that had no doors — just walls.
Facebook walls, that is. Faculty officers from the Association of American University Professors (AAUP) created a group on the popular social networking site and began posting updates on the negotiations. They also started using the union’s Facebook fan page to post fliers, press releases, and links to media coverage of the strike. Supporters began leaving messages on the page’s comment wall. Others started chattering on the wall of the university’s official fan page. Soon, a student group devoted to the strike appeared on the social networking site and quickly acquired more than 300 members. Then a Twitter hash tag. Then another. Then a Flickr account. Then a YouTube channel.
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