A group of senior faculty members and area education activists will be holding a teach-in Tuesday in the Student Union Ballroom as part of a national effort to generate support for increased higher education funding.

Members of the Massachusetts Society of Professors and others will touch on issues such as media coverage of higher education, race and equality, current legislation on immigration, taxes and economic hierarchies, health care, student fees and recent union debates.

The list of planned attendees include Sonia Alvarez of Latin American Politics and Studies, Dan Clawson, a sociology professor, communications professor Sut Jhally, Max Page in architecture and design and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell of Afro-American Studies. Three representatives from the economics department – professors Gerald Friedman and David Kotz and Ph.D. student Helen Scharber – will be on hand for the event. Others in attendance will be Jo Comerford, director of the Northampton-based policy think tank the National Priorities Project (NPP), Dale Melcher, the labor extension coordinator, and former Student Government Association president Malcolm Chu

The event will take place Tuesday from 11:45 a.m. to 4 p.m., with local events exclusively running until 2 p.m. When the local speakers are through, organizers will link to a live feed of the national teach-in going on in New York City and being led by labor and poverty activist and City University of New York professor Francis Fox Piven and philosopher, civil rights activist and Princeton University professor Cornel West.

Other speakers at the national teach-in – which has been titled “Fight Back USA” – will include economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, Heather McGhee, Washington, D.C. director of the social policy and economic equality think tank Demos, and Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest coalition of labor groups in America.

Teach-ins will be held across the country Tuesday, according to a release from MSP member Ferd Wulken. In the release, organizers of the event say it will seek to teach, with each speaker preparing one-page handouts detailing current trends and figures on sociopolitical and higher education issues. In addition, free lunch will be served until supplies run out for those attending.

The release also states that the teach-in is being sponsored by the departments of Afro-American Studies, Anthropology, Communication, CPAA, Economics, English, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, STPEC and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. The teach-in is also being sponsored by the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO).

At the national level, the teach-in is being supported by the AFL-CIO, the workers’ rights and union rights group American Rights at Work, the community development organization Center for Community Change, the City University of New York (CUNY), Demos, New York’s Judson Memorial Church, the custodians’ rights group Justice for Janitors, CUNY’s workers’ rights group the Professional Staff Congress, the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the anti-war and violence group United for Peace and Justice, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and the U.S. Student Association (USSA).

According to the national teach-in’s website, www.fightbackteachin.org, the event will rally students and activists at 185 schools from Alaska to Florida to Massachusetts. New England schools participating include Yale University, Southern Connecticut State University, the University of Connecticut, West Hartford, the University of Maine, the University of Southern Maine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, North Shore Community College, Smith College, Harvard University, Emmanuel College, Westfield State University, Salem State University, Wheelock College, Northeastern University, Williams College, Brown University, the University of Rhode Island and the University of Vermont.

The next day, the higher education activist group Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM) will sponsor a call-in to state and federal legislators urging them to better fund public higher education and encouraging officials not to make a college education more difficult to obtain financially. That event will occur from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Cape Cod Lounge, according to the release.

-Collegian News Staff