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'Hey! Holloway!' I want to know how the catchy Rutgers strike song happened.

Louis C. Hochman

and

Karen Yi

Published Apr 14, 2023

Modified Apr 17, 2023

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Students joined striking faculty members to bring music to an ongoing strike at Rutgers University, as demonstrators marched to university President Jonathan Holloway's office Wednesday.

Karen Yi/Gothamist

Louis C. Hochman

and

Karen Yi

Published Apr 14, 2023

Modified Apr 17, 2023

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“Hey, Holloway!” — We wanted to know: Where did that song come from?

The song is an unexpected earworm and the de facto anthem of the ongoing Rutgers University faculty strike, which entered its fifth day on Friday. On picket lines, outside the offices of university President Jonathan Holloway and in the streets of Trenton, faculty members and student supporters have been singing:

“Hey! Holloway! I want to know: Will you raise my wage?”

The riff on Bruce Channel’s 1961 hit “Hey! Baby!” first hit social media on Tuesday, when Eric Blanc, an assistant professor of labor at Rutgers, tweeted a video from a rally at Voorhees Mall on Rutgers’ College Avenue campus. Attendees playing percussion on frying pans joined others who singing into megaphones. Horns blared. The crowd bopped up and down, their arms waving in the air.

By Friday, Blanc’s video had been viewed more than 260,000 times.

Attendees say the song came together just shortly prior to the rally, as protesters marched Tuesday from Rutgers Cook/Douglass campuses to College Avenue, along George Street in New Brunswick.

Anna Rehberg, a music education student at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, said members of the brass department, some of them also in pep bands, were running through songs in their repertoire — including “Hey! Baby!” Rehberg said she and another friend started riffing on the lyrics, and the next thing they knew, their version was catching on.

“We had started this chant down the march down George Street, and then by the time we got there, it erupted into this full performance,” Rehberg said.

At the Voorhees Mall rally, school jazz band members led the crowd. And the chant has resurfaced over and over again since, across Rutgers’ campuses in New Brunswick, Newark and Camden.

“Everywhere you look, that's what they're singing,” said Brandon Mejia, a 20-year-old sophomore at Mason Gross.

He described the chant’s rapid spread through the protests as “just the embodiment of what music is.” Demonstrators began singing it behind him as he was interviewed by Gothamist.

“Music can just touch people's souls and move them in a way that sometimes just simple chanting might not do,” said Mejia, a tenor saxophonist who’s contributed to “Hey! Holloway!” renditions multiple times this week.

Three unions representing 9,000 faculty members went on strike Monday, shutting down many classes at a school that serves 67,000 students. Their key demands include better pay for adjunct faculty members — part-time lecturers who the unions say get paid an average of $6,500 for a three-credit course. The unions have asked for $10,000 for a course, and said in a Zoom call with members on Thursday night that they’d made “incredible gains” on their financial demands during marathon negotiating sessions at the State House.

The unions are also seeking more job security for the adjuncts, who currently must reapply for their positions each semester.

Mejia said he’s supporting the striking faculty because many Mason Gross teachers are part-time lecturers — “and a lot of us wouldn't be at the level we're at if it weren't for them.”

Both Mejia and Rehberg described music — particularly “Hey! Holloway!” — drawing crowds throughout this week’s demonstrations. Rehberg said the Voorhees Mall rally was one of the largest gatherings she’d seen at Rutgers for any activity other than a football game.

“It's really wonderful to see, and it's one of those reminders, as most of us are going to music education careers, of why we do what we do as musicians,” she said.

Gov. Phil Murphy said on WNYC’s “Ask Governor Murphy” call-in show this week that he’d be willing to consider extra financial support for Rutgers to help make a deal possible. Rutgers currently gets about a fifth of its $5.1 billion budget through state funding, and union members have said they estimate a proposal to pay adjuncts proportionately with full-time staff would cost about $20 million.

In an update to members on Thursday night, the striking unions said despite progress on financial demands, they’d made less headway getting more job security for adjuncts.

But union negotiators, in the Zoom call, also described “extraordinary success” securing more job security for non-tenure-track educators — including “presumptively renewable” five-year contracts for educators in their fifth appointments. Carla Katz, a negotiator for the unions, said that meant it would be very difficult to dismiss someone after a fifth appointment, calling the standard “extremely close to tenure.”

The unions have also sought to boost graduate student workers’ pay from $30,000 to $37,000. Several bargaining committee members said they regretted agreeing in a straw poll to increases that would fall several thousand dollars short of that during the first year of a new contract. That issue would be revisited, they said.

Negotiations and demonstrations were both continuing on Friday.

This story has been updated to correct the location of one of Rutgers' campuses.

Rutgers University strike

At a glance:

Unions for 9,000 faculty members walked off the job Monday.
The strike affects 67,000 students, across all of Rutgers’ campuses – in New Brunswick, Newark and Camden.
Rutgers’ president has put aside a threat of legal action to stop a strike, but only if talks keep making progress.
It's the first faculty strike in Rutgers’ 256-year history.
It's not yet clear how grades, graduation and other student activities may be affected.

Unions demands include:

Longer contracts for professors without tenure.
Multiyear commitments for part-time lecturers.
Pay parity for adjunct faculty.
A $15 campus minimum wage, including for students.
A freeze on student housing costs.

Tagged

education

new jersey

Politics

Louis C. Hochman

After about two decades in (mostly) New Jersey-focused commercial print, digital and digital-but-radio-adjacent news, Lou stumbled into member-supported news in early 2021, as the editor and CEO of Montclair Local. There, he (hopes he) expanded enterprise, brought more sophistication to digital storytelling and moved the nonprofit newsroom closer to long-term financial sustainability. He helped lead the Local to its fourth consecutive General Excellence award from the New Jersey Press Association — the NJPA's highest honor with judges noting the paper's work to strip away layers of government opacity, to hold power to account, to make news accessible for more members of the community, to share the stories and concerns of more facets of the community and to tell compelling stories across multiple media. He's excited to continue the same ethic — news as a public service — at NYPR as the New Jersey and suburbs editor, drawing on the extraordinary talents of reporters including Karen Yi and Nancy Solomon. Lou lives in Philly (that commute!) with his partner and their two cats, about whom and about which he speaks incessantly.

Karen Yi

Twitter

Karen Yi covers homelessness and poverty. She joined the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom in 2020. Before that, Karen covered Newark for the Star-Ledger and spent almost a decade working for newspapers in New Jersey and Florida. She grew up in Miami and has a dog named Cashew. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-589-1460.

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