The Million Dollar Question

Another plea to the collective wisdom of Blogoramaville, this one having to do with a faculty-professionals union's priorities. I want my half dozen regular readers to help me start a meme.

Like the California Faculty Association and the Professional Staff Caucus at CUNY, United University Professions is a union that represents all teaching faculty, from Lecturers and Visiting Assistant Professors all the way up to Full Professors, in our case in the SUNY system (where we're a bit different is that we also represent academic professionals). In that infamous comment thread at How the University Works, I criticized UUP's leadership for, in essence, failing to live up to PSC-CUNY's and the CFA's example.

Mayra Besosa, a full-time lecturer and former member of the CFA's bargaining team, recently explained why issues of contingent academic labor are at the front and center of the CFA's agenda and why faculty solidarity across ranks is so crucial. She doesn't get into that many specifics, but in Marc Bousquet's How the University Works, there's an aside that caught my attention and inspired the thought experiment I'm about to put out there.

One recent California State University contract--through which the California Faculty Association compelled the administration to raise tenure-track hiring by 20 percent annually over the life of the contract in exchange for concessions in their cost of living adjustment--is an eye-opening, and heartening, exception.... (57)

With that set-up, here's my scenario for Blogoramaville to ponder:

Pretend, for the moment, that you are represented by a faculty union (let's call it UUP). Negotiations for a new contract are around the corner. UUP leadership is divided between those who want to emphasize traditional bread-and-butter issues (salary and benefits the top priority in negotiations) and those who want to try a different approach (prioritizing the expansion of the tenurable faculty as a negotiating strategy rather than only as a lobbying campaign). So they work together to develop a survey and put the question to a referendum. The survey is designed to help them figure out the complexity of the members' views; the referendum to gain clarity on the level of support for the new approach.

With me so far? OK, I'm not actually going to develop that survey myself, but think of your rationale for your decision on the referendum as what it is designed to elicit. So what I'm looking for from you is your decision and reasoning behind it on the following question:

UUP is considering a new strategy for the next round of negotiations. We are willing to offer some concessions on our demands for improvements in salary and benefits if New York State will agree to incorporate key provisions of the AFT's FACE Campaign into the next contract. So, for instance, if the state commits to reaching a 75/25 tenured/tenurable faculty to non-tenurable faculty ratio, having 2/3 of students in SUNY classes at each campus taught by tenured/tenurable faculty, and acting on our long-standing demands for improving the compensation, security, working conditions, academic freedom, and professional development opportunities of the nontenurable, we'll be open to finding ways to help them pay for all this. Do you support this approach to the next round of negotiations? Why or why not?

This is what I'm calling the million dollar question. Here's hoping it goes far and wide and gets some interesting responses.

And yes, there is a backstory to my asking this. But no, I'm not going into it now. Oh, and since I am not even a member of my chapter's Executive Board any more--thanks to the slowness of mail to and from Japan--this post has nothing to do with the current tentative agreement that UUP members will be voting on soon. And very little to do with the recent election of a new UUP President.

[Update 2/19/08: For a cogent clarification of AFT's FACE Campaign goals in Washington state, check out the latest from Craig Smith.]

An Open Invitation to "Anti-hypocrisy advocate"

Whoever you are--whether tenured faculty, long-time adjunct activist, or someone else entirely--I was entirely serious when I invited you to guest blog here at CitizenSE over on that comment thread at How the University Works. So I'll restate the offer: I'll publish your review of Marc's book here--in the exact state you send it to me. I'll even post a response. You can call it a refereed and peer-reviewed electronic publication on your c.v., if you wish, but you don't have to out yourself to me or anyone who happens to drop by the obscurest blog on teh intertubes. Heck, if you want to join in on the polemical fun at the debate blog I founded and sometimes contribute to still, I'm open to that--that AAUP-NY silencing thing sounds like it deserves wider play.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I called you names, tossed off unfounded accusations and disparaging remarks, and concern trolled you. But if you can't take what you were dishing out, you may as well go back to commenting at Inside Higher Ed under different pseudonyms.

***

CitizenSE regulars, please lend me your critical distance! Was AHA trolling Marc? Was I too mean to AHA? Have Marc and I become the new good old boys as AHA accuses? Special bonus question: why do you think AHA rubbed me so precisely the wrong way? Oh, and congratulate Marc on his good news!

On Funding Public Higher Education, Part V: Service; or, Seizing the Levers

Take a look around your campus: do you have a union? an AAUP chapter? a college or university senate? Now ask yourself: who's in charge of them? what is their agenda? do I like it or not? could I do better?

The reason I ask these questions is a comment thread I've been participating on at Marc Bousquet's How the University Works. In the course of dropping an f-bomb, constructively of course, I tried to make the point that hypocrisy cuts both ways and organizing is the answer.

But the point that I want to make here is that tenure-track faculty need to stop treating service as the third wheel of the research-teaching-service triad. Sure, three's a crowd, but the sooner we think of service as the terrain for institutional activism, the better off we'll be, personally and as a profession. So do me a favor: read Marc's book, consider his arguments, and reflect on what you can do, individually and with colleagues in your department, division, university, and system (if you're part of one) to solve some of the problems he identifies in the places you can make the biggest impact.

And the point I want to make to the nontenurable majority is similar: if your university is like mine, there's a real generation gap in campus leadership among the faculty. Rather than turn it into another excuse to slag baby boomers, why not join in and take over the institutions at your campus from which you can best make change? If the leadership on your campus is anything like mine, they're eager to mentor newbies and give them serious responsibilities. And if not, well, that's why they have elections.

Unlike the wealthiest private institutions, most public higher education institutions really are constrained--by legislators afraid to raise taxes or authorize tuition hikes, by a history of failure to prioritize endowment growth, and much more--to exploit their part-timers and overwork their full-timers. Taking on more work--in an area least likely to improve your salary or status in the short run--may sound rather counterintuitive, to say the least. But unless administrators, legislators, parents, and prospective students are made aware of the quality of the work the faculty is doing and how much better we could do with more funding, their only demand is going to be for colleges and universities to cut costs.

More on that demand later.

We Interrupt This CitizenSE Hiatus to Bring You This sf@SF Public Announcement

For those of you who have been itching to see Samuel Delany's "significant distortion of the present" idea applied to George Stewart's Earth Abides, you've come to the wrong place. Go here, young geek! Or old geezer. Or whomever you may be. Westward, ho!

No Time

It may not have been the smartest thing I've ever done in my life to kick off a semester in which, over the course of its first few weeks, 6 candidates are coming to campus and 4 colleagues are coming up for reappointment/tenure--and in which I trade associate chair for university senator and co-chair of an active committee--by teaching two novels that I've never even read before. It's not that I'm not loving them--they were the exact right choices to start both classes--but my choice certainly doesn't make a week in which I'm also trying to get funding to bring a hopefully-soon-to-be-named writer to one class, finalizing colleagues' guest spots in another, setting up student teams for research/teaching projects in two, and nailing down the logistics of a campus talk by a former mentor of mine at Seinan Gakuin University any easier or less stressful. Which is why things have been quiet in these here parts for the past week. And threaten to be for the next two. Unless the urge to complain becomes too pressing again. Don't even get me started on the mystery ailments afflicting the Full Metal Archivist and me that are baffling doctors all over town, and, probably soon, out of town!

For the First Time in Ten Years

I'm teaching what used to be called Third World Literature, got renamed Non-Western Literature, and shall be renamed...what? Literature of the Global South? World Bank Literature? Postcolonial Literature?

Amazing Colleagues, Part II

With CitizenSE in danger of losing its status as the obscurest blog on teh internets, thanks to Inside Higher Ed, now is as good a time as any to pick up my series on the incredible people I work with where I left off last October--with our creative writers. James Thomas Stevens, author of Combing the Snakes from His Hair, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations, A Bridge Dead in the Water, Bulle/Chimére, and The Mutual Life, is one of the most impressive people I've ever met. It's not just that he's a fantastic poet, essayist, teacher, historian, and theorist--often simultaneously. Or that he has a gift for languages, a knack for research, a zest for connections, and a healthy disrespect for arbitrary borders. It's that you can always count on him to call it as he sees it--after seeing it from angles few others could imagine. His only flaw is an intolerance for science fiction--and a stubborn refusal to admit that Almanac of the Dead is a science fiction novel--but nobody's perfect, eh?