Gender and Race Equity
Deepa Kumar has long been involved in fighting for racial justice and gender equity. Along with four other female faculty, she filed a lawsuit against Rutgers University for its failure to honor the principle of equal pay for equal work. Watch the press conference with NJ senate majority leader Loretta Weinberg, who helped to pass the Diane B. Allen Equal Pay Act, one of the most powerful equal pay acts in the US:
Selected Media Coverage
Op-ed in NJ Star Ledger
November 30, 2020
Union Activism
Deepa Kumar was Secretary, Vice-President and then President of her union, the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, from 2013 to 2019. During this time, she worked to worked to make social justice and intersectional unionism central the vision of the union. Thus, in addition to bread and butter issues, Kumar took up important gender and race equity demands. Additionally, the union played an active role in defending immigrant students against Trump's attack on DACA and also in protecting faculty and grads against the Muslim ban.
In 2019, on the eve of a strike, the union won a historic contract victory on a number of fronts. This was only the second time in the union's 50+ year history when its members voted overwhelmingly to go on strike. See the details of the victory here.
Selected Media Coverage
NJ Record
April 19, 2019