Campus Equity Week 2013 @ SUNY Fredonia

Fredonia UUP Chapter Devotes Campus Equity Week to Honoring the Memory of Margaret Mary Vojtko

When Campus Equity Week is celebrated on college campuses across the country from October 28th through November 1st, SUNY Fredonia's United University Professions Chapter will be doing its part to advance the fight for quality and equality in higher education by holding a rally to honor the memory of Margaret Mary Vojtko on Thursday, October 31, from 12-1 pm, in the Amphitheatre (located between Maytum Hall and Reed Library).  Vojtko passed away on September 1st at the age of 83 after a 25-year career teaching French at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA.  But as Daniel Kovalik, perhaps the last person to talk to her, described the circumstances of her passing,

She begged me to call Adult Protective Services and tell them to leave her alone, that she could take care of herself and did not need their help. I agreed to. Sadly, a couple of hours later, she was found on her front lawn, unconscious from a heart attack. She never regained consciousness.

Meanwhile, I called Adult Protective Services right after talking to Margaret Mary, and I explained the situation. I said that she had just been let go from her job as a professor at Duquesne, that she was given no severance or retirement benefits, and that the reason she was having trouble taking care of herself was because she was living in extreme poverty. The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, "She was a professor?" I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.

Of course, what the caseworker didn't understand was that Margaret Mary was an adjunct professor, meaning that, unlike a well-paid tenured professor, Margaret Mary worked on a contract basis from semester to semester, with no job security, no benefits and with a salary of between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-credit course.

Too many professors are working under the same conditions as Margaret Mary across the country.  Campus Equity Week (CEW) was founded in California in 2000 and became a nation-wide event in 2001 in order to change those conditions and, in so doing, to restore institutional integrity and enhance educational quality.  By seeking public recognition that faculty employment conditions are student learning conditions and that equitable educational experiences for students require equitable institutional support of all faculty, CEW events have drawn new activists into the labor movement, helped provide training through information-sharing and community-building, increased press and public interest, and created strong incentives for local administrators and state and local politicians to become visibly involved with the issues--not to mention led to significant gains for contingent faculty, particularly those represented by unions.

In the State University of New York (SUNY), contingent faculty are represented by United University Professions (UUP), which has been able to secure health benefits, sick leave, and office space for most SUNY adjuncts.  However, the typical three-credit course salary for SUNY adjuncts is between $2,500 and $3,000 and Governor Cuomo and SUNY have refused to establish a state-wide minimum salary for SUNY adjuncts (unlike every other state employee).  Here at Fredonia, President Virginia Horvath, Provost Terry Brown, and Human Resources Director Michael Daley have been discussing a range of issues regarding contingency and sustainability with Chapter leaders, from compensation to length of contracts, from systematizing titles and ranks to compensating contingent employees for certain categories of professional service.  We are working together to ensure that what happened at Duquesne will never happen at SUNY Fredonia.  And we intend to succeed.

Please join us at the Amphitheatre at noon on Halloween to honor Margaret Mary!

Sincerely,

Fredonia Chapter Executive Board
Fredonia Chapter Contingent Employees Advisory Group

p.s.--For CEW stickers and buttons, please contact Fredonia Chapter President Ziya Arnavut or Officer for Contingents Bruce Simon!

For more on Campus Equity Week, see

• http://uupinfo.org/communications/uupdate/1314/131022.php
• http://www.aft.org/newspubs/news/2013/102513campusequity.cfm 
• http://www.campusequityweek.org/2013/ 
• follow New Faculty Majority on twitter @NewFacMajority (https://twitter.com/NewFacMajority
• for updates to our activities, see our announcement and come back to CitizenSE!

For more on Margaret Mary Vojtko, see

• Daniel Kovalik, "Death of An Adjunct," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (18 September 2013) http://www.post-gazette.com/Op-Ed/2013/09/18/Death-of-an-adjunct/stories/201309180224
• Gary Rhoades, "Adjunct Professors Are the New Working Poor," CNN (25 September 2013) http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/24/opinion/rhoades-adjunct-faculty/?hpt=hp_bn7

For more on the conditions of contingent faculty, see

• http://futureofhighered.org//wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ProfStaffFinal1.pdf
• http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf
• http://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts

 [Update 1 (10/30/13, 5:05 pm):  For more #CEW2013 blogging here, check out:

• http://citizense.blogspot.com/2013/10/campus-equity-week-issue-1-towards.html 
• http://citizense.blogspot.com/2013/10/campus-equity-week-issue-2-towards.html

 Next up is an open letter to Governor Cuomo that I'll be reading at the rally.]

[Update 2 (10/31/13, 4:01 pm):  Here's the open letter to Andrew Cuomo!]

[Update 3 (11/1/13, 1:25 pm):  Here's Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer's coverage of the rally.]

Recommended Look-Sees: Nathaniel Hawthorne Society and UUP Campus Equity Week Websites

Really just a "get ready for more from me here" kind of post, but have you seen the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society's new website (http://www.tamiu.edu/hawthorne/) and UUP's Campus Equity Week page (http://uupinfo.org/communications/uupdate/1314/131022.php)?  Lots of interesting things to come here starting 10/28 with CEW's kickoff...plus, I'm trying to complete a pitch for a 2-volume study of race and Hawthorne over the winter break, by which time I should have found out if I made the American cut for another teaching Fulbright in Japan....  (Long-time readers will recall I started this little ol' thing during my 1st Fulbright over in Fukuoka!)

Fredonia UUP Chapter Officer for Contingents May 2013 Newsletter: On Contingency and Sustainability

On Contingency and Sustainability
Bruce Simon, Officer for Contingents, Fredonia Chapter, UUP

Thanks for electing me to the first-ever Officer for Contingents position in the Fredonia UUP Chapter. I take my election as a mandate to continue working with other campus and chapter leaders to explore what could and should be done to improve terms and conditions of employment, university policies, campus climate, and departmental cultures for contingent academic and professional workers at Fredonia. It seems fitting for me to reflect on the significance of UUP’s move from chapter Part-Time Concerns Officers to Officers for Contingents across the SUNY system.

The UUP Constitution lays out how our union defines contingency in academic and professional appointments:

"Contingent Academic" members shall be those persons appointed to any academic position which does not prescribe eligibility for continuing appointment.... "Contingent Professional" members shall be those persons appointed to any professional position which does not prescribe eligibility for permanent appointment. (Article III, Section 2)

The Constitution also defines the membership and responsibilities of the Contingent Employment Committee (Article X, Section 1, Part i), a new statewide standing committee on which I serve, and requires that at least one Executive Board member be a contingent academic or professional (Article V, Section 1). These changes have been spurred on by UUP’s Task Force on Contingent Employment, by the statewide Executive Board, by our statewide officers, and by the delegates at our Delegate Assemblies. They are part of continuing efforts to bring our union into the 21st century when it comes to effectively organizing and representing all our members. They also bring us in line with best practices and recommendations from the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, the American Federation of Teachers, and the American Association of University Professors

I encourage everyone reading this to familiarize yourself with the above documents--along with more recent AAUP reports on stabilizing the faculty and strengthening governance and the SUNY New Paltz Chapter’s Mayday Manifesto--for nothing less is at stake in the matters they address than the sustainability of public higher education. COCAL, AAUP, and AFT have been national leaders in a global movement aimed at calling into question the sustainability of the generations-long shift toward majority contingency among university employees and particularly among the academic faculty. By creating the Officer for Contingents position at each chapter, UUP is better positioned to contribute to this movement and to represent and respond to the voices, needs, and interests of our colleagues in contingent appointments

Please rest assured that the Fredonia Chapter leadership is committed to precisely this project and has been taking concrete steps, with input from our Contingent Employment Advisory Group every step of the way, to put SUNY Fredonia on a sustainable path. (Indeed, the theme for this month’s Newsletter essay was suggested by Leonard Jacuzzo.) If you have suggestions for us, please don’t hesitate to contact me at brucesimon18@yahoo.com. I’ll be sure to bring them up for discussion and review by the Executive Board and the CEAG. Finally, there’s still time for academic faculty and professionals on contingent appointments to join the CEAG and play a role in shaping our strategies and tactics in the coming months. I look forward to being able to announce the results of our efforts and proposals in upcoming Newsletters.

Recommended Reading: On Open SUNY

Here's a recently-updated Phil Hill post at e-Literate on Open SUNY--it's a great intro to the recently-announced initiative by SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher.

I'm here at UUP's Academic Delegates meeting hearing from a panel on issues raised by Open SUNY, such as:

• academic quality/academic integrity
• pedagogy
• intellectual property/work-for-hire agreements
• extra service/workload/on-call-recall designations/compensatory time
• outsourcing
• who is involved in curriculum change, when, and under what conditions
• pace of change

Of course, UUP must be involved in discussions of any changes to salary, benefits, or other terms and conditions of employment, which are mandatory subjects of bargaining.  These include:

• change in length of workday
• increases in duties
• work-for-hire requests
• on-call/recall issues
• extra service issues

UUP is available to consult with members whenever there are changes in work life and is looking for ways to  collaborate with SUNY governance bodies, both state-wide and on different campuses.  Vice President for Academics Jamie Dangler recommends:

• forming chapter committees
• using chapter web sites and newsletters to engage members
• working with campus governance bodies
• developing positions on specific changes/issues
• developing guidelines for UUP representation on campus and statewide groups

Other ideas that came out of our discussions include:

• workshops/training
• what are legitimate and inappropriate standards/procedures for evaluation of online teaching? (UUP's Technology Issues Committee has a report entitled Best Practices in Online Learning that addresses this [available here], but may not adequately deal with evaluation of contingent faculty.)
• vulnerability of contingent faculty to be pressured into designing or teaching in Open SUNY
• increased workload that comes with changes in online learning systems
• UUP resolution/statement (Chief Academic Officers and Faculty Council of Community Colleges have made them)
• who profits from Open SUNY? (often with MOOCs, it's private corporations)
• conflicting definitions of "consultation" and management abuses of the concept (such as at CUNY)
• what's going on in other systems, states, and nations so we can help, learn, gain allies
• defining what's optimal, what's working, what ought to be happening
• thinking about how to connect with student groups to push for broader/better support for quality public higher education

Officer for Contingents Candidate Statement

I have decided to run for the new Officer for Contingents position on the Fredonia UUP Chapter Executive Board for several reasons:

1) As a former chapter Vice President for Academics (2003-2006), Membership Development Officer (2001-2003), and Department Representative (1998-2000), long-time Academic Delegate to UUP's state-wide Delegate Assembly (1999-2006, 2009-present), and current chapter Part-Time Concerns Officer (since 2011), I can bring useful experience, knowledge, skills, and networks to the important job of representing all the contingent UUP employees on campus, whether full-time or part-time, academic or professional staff.

2) As I reported last newsletter, I have been working with other campus and chapter leaders to explore what could and should be done to improve terms and conditions of employment, university policies, campus climate, and departmental cultures for contingent academic and professional workers at Fredonia (see citizense.blogspot.com/2012/12/putting-part-time-concerns-front-and.html for a link to that report), and I am seeking a mandate from the membership to continue working on that project.

3) Building on my history of working productively, inclusively, and constructively with a wide range of people on this campus on a variety of projects, I am eager to use this new position to advance the work of collective and creative problem-solving at Fredonia.

4) As a full-time, tenured faculty member, I know I have the job security, the academic freedom, and the institutional capital to advance the interests of the large number of my colleagues on this campus with very little of them, if any, and I feel a sense of responsibility to turn my privileges into opportunities on their behalf.

If elected, I pledge to work with the Contingent Employment Advisory Group, which currently consists of six contingent faculty members, to make sure that I'm regularly hearing from as many contingent UUP employees as possible and keeping every channel of communication open to anyone who has a question, concern, or problem. I pledge to work with UUP chapter officers, department representatives, and members to make serious and concrete progress on the matters that matter to contingent faculty and professionals at SUNY Fredonia.

Please see citizense.blogspot.com for more or email me at brucesimon18@yahoo.com or simon@fredonia.edu!

“Ready...Set...Go!” Shared Governance at SUNY Fredonia in a Time of Transition

Happy New Year, everyone! Hope you’re enjoying our first real winter in years as much as I am...or even more. With Rob Deemer and Reneta Barneva ably representing us at the SUNY-wide University Faculty Senate plenary in balmy Oneonta, it’s my duty and pleasure to welcome you back on behalf of the Fredonia University Senate to the start of what’s shaping up to be a momentous spring semester.

When Rob asked me to say a few words about the work of the Senate this academic year, the phrase “Ready...Set...Go!” sprang to mind. The way I see it, we spent late spring and summer getting ready, the fall getting set, and now shared governance at Fredonia is rarin’ to go.

Ready...
 
Rob, Reneta, Andy Cullison, our Governance Officer, and Saundra Liggins, our Faculty Secretary, and I logged a lot of hours from May through August preparing for the transition from President Hefner’s administration to President Horvath’s. We worked closely with former Senate Chair Christopher Taverna to ensure a smooth transition in Senate leadership, recruited new chairs to Senate standing committees (thanks to Justin Conroy and Guangyu Tan for leading General Education and Jeanette McVicker for leading Graduate Council), planned a late August Senate mixer/orientation, began an informal Senate self-assessment, started thinking and talking about possible revisions to the bylaws and restructuring of Senate committees, and worked closely with President Horvath as we started to assemble several search committees and implementation teams.

Search Committees

• Provost and VPAA
• Dean, College of Visual and Performing Arts
• Chief Diversity Officer

Implementation Teams

• Strategic Plan (input to Cabinet)
• Mission Statement Revision (joint)
• Baccalaureate Goals (joint)
• General Education Revision (Senate/Gen Ed)
• Campus Initiatives Roundtable (to facilitate communication and enhance coordination)

Set...
 
During the fall, we continued to work closely with President Horvath and Interim Provost and VP for Academic Affairs Kevin Kearns as we finalized search committees and implementation teams and sought approval from the Cabinet and the Senate. The Mission Statement revision team was designed to be the fastest out of the gates and, thanks to the leadership of Mike Barone and their hard work, they completed their work early, after having presented multiple drafts to the campus and the Senate. The Senate has also been looking closely at Planning and Budget’s Program Elimination/Reduction Report, deliberating on and approving bylaws revisions on the roles, responsibilities, and duties of Senate officers and the Senate Executive Committee and the administrative review process, and discussing course evaluations. Other work has been less visible, but just as important, ranging from governance leaders meeting with each and every Vice Presidential candidate and giving valuable feedback to the search committees to planning, deliberation, and communication efforts of Senate standing committees and the Executive Committee with a variety of individuals and groups.

Go!
 
So as we start the new year, all the activities of the past 8 months have prepared us to take major actions on a variety of important initiatives.

We are ready for Senate votes next month on

• Mission Statement Revision
• PERP (PBAC)
• Electronic Voting (bylaws)

We are almost ready for Senate votes next month on

• Course Evaluations Joint Task Force (joint)
• Shared Governance/Consultation Agreements and Processes (bylaws)
• Senate Committee Structures (bylaws)
• Academic Integrity Policy (Academic Affairs responding to task force lead by Kevin Kearns and David Herman)
• Environmental Studies Minor (Academic Affairs)
• Faculty Office Hours Policy (Academic Affairs)

And we can expect even more this spring!

• General Education Program assessment (Gen Ed)
• Contingent Faculty Subcommittee (FPAC)
• University Handbook (FPAC)
• Graduate mission, vision, goals (Grad Council)
• Campus Initiatives Updates
• Senate and Senate Committee Elections

So even as we keep our eyes on the state and SUNY budget, SUNY’s in-the-works resource allocation methodology, the Chancellor’s notions of systemness and the state of the state university, and new AAUP reports on financial exigency and the inclusion of contingent faculty in governance, we are confident that here at Fredonia, we will have finished fine-tuning our shared governance machine and will be ready to take it out on the road by the time the weather moderates.

I invite you to attend this spring’s Senate meetings in Williams Center 204 at 4 pm on February 4th, March 4th, April 8th, and May 6th. Have a great semester!

How to Do Things with Fairy Tales--and Literary Theory

I've already posted about my American Identities students' web authoring projects from 2012 over at the AI blog.

Well, for the final project in my How to Do Things with Fairy Tales course, two students chose the web authoring option this semester.  Check 'em out!

• Aphrodite's Edge http://aphroditesedge.tumblr.com/
• Hypertext Bluebeard http://bluebeardnovelstales.blogspot.com/

Several students chose the web authoring option in my Critical Reading course, as well:

• Feminine Criticism Blog http://peterfeminismblog.blogspot.com/
• Gender in Media http://christinascriticalreadingblog.blogspot.com/
• Institutionalizing Homosexuality http://chelseyray345.xanga.com/
• Presidential Speech Rhetoric http://presidentsspeak.blogspot.com/
• Teaching Mythology and Fairy Tales https://sites.google.com/a/fredonia.edu/jessica-rushlow-critical-final/
• x0 Mo [Gone Girl Sequel] http://x0-mo.tumblr.com/

Enjoy!

Putting Part-Time Concerns Front and Center

Yeah, yeah, it's been about a year.  Lots going on, no time to share it--the usual deal that comes with being involved with governance and union matters at the same time.

Anyway, this just appeared in the Fredonia UUP Chapter newsletter.  Even though the Labor-Management Meeting I mention below had to be cancelled due to a family emergency, I remain optimistic about the progress we're making.



***

About 15 months ago, I ran for Part-Time Concerns Officer for our chapter because I wanted to find out if leaders from labor and management at SUNY Fredonia could work together to identity specific problems and opportunities facing Fredonia’s hard-working contingent faculty and professionals and formally address them through our normal processes of negotiation, consultation, planning, and administration.  Could we generate practical ideas and imaginative solutions that would work for our campus and our members?  As we approach the home stretch for the fall semester, I’m happy to report that we’re making significant progress.

First a note on process.  In the initial months after my election to PTCO, I sought the input of a diverse group of campus leaders--including Tara Singer-Blumberg, Chiara De Santi, Robert Deemer, Idalia Torres, Ziya Arnavut, Kathleen Gradel, Julia Wilson, Timothy Allan, and Mary Cobb--who helped me develop and revise a set of questions aimed at enabling local UUP and administrative leaders to explore what could and should be done to improve terms and conditions of employment, university policies, campus climate, and departmental cultures for contingent academic and professional workers at SUNY Fredonia.  Building on an initial Labor-Management Meeting with then-President Hefner and his cabinet in April, the chapter team has had productive and encouraging discussions in our September and November Labor-Management Meetings with President Horvath, Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Kevin Kearns, and Director of Human Resources Michael Daley.  I’ve been impressed with the energy and seriousness with which all involved have approached our common challenges.  And I’m looking forward to our next meeting in early December.

So where are we making the most progress?  I can report that we’re actively working on

• developing a clear, consistent, and fair compensation scale for extra service by our contingent colleagues;
• developing a clear, consistent, straightforward model for calculating FTE for part-time faculty and professionals that’s easy to understand and to use for everyone;
• examining titles and criteria for qualified academic ranks available to contingent faculty and considering ways of regularizing them;
• examining the efficacy of official lines of communication with our contingent colleagues and developing ways to enhance it;
• exploring ways of better integrating and welcoming our contingent colleagues into departments and units.

Going forward, I’m working with UUP’s Vice President for Academics Jamie Dangler and members of UUP’s Contingent Employment Committee to collect local agreements from other SUNY campuses that might provide insights into best practices and possible models for us.  I’ve joined the Faculty and Professional Affairs Committee’s Adjunct and Contingent Faculty Subcommittee as an ex officio member to gain a better perspective on our own membership’s needs and interests.  And I’m working with our chapter’s Executive Board to form a Contingent Employment Advisory Group so that we may get specific input and feedback on our strategies and tactics in the months to come.  Thanks to everyone who’s already volunteered!  There’s still time to let me know if you’re interested in working with us.  Please feel free to contact me at brucesimon18@yahoo.com.

Kids These Days!

Check out what my students from my American Identities course have been working on this semester over at the American Identities blog when you get a chance.  The vast majority of the posts from this month are their Identification Projects, but I've also put up a list of the blogs some of them have created for their Final Projects.

Where to Begin?

Apologies for the radio silence the last several months here at CoSE.  Obviously there's been a lot going on, but between the end-of-last-semester rush, the lure of summer in a new town, and my new responsibilities on campus (I ran for and was elected Vice Chair of the SUNY Fredonia University Senate in the spring, effective July 1st), blogging here fell off my personal radar.  So here's a quick rundown of issues I haven't been commenting on but will try to be more diligent about doing so here in the coming months.

Et Tu, SUNY?

As my regular readers may know, I've been concerned about the possibility of retrenchment (layoffs of tenured faculty members by shutting down their department) at SUNY Fredonia for several years, and as Chair of our University Senate from 2009-2010, I took several steps to begin serious dialogues well in advance of any number of worse-, worser-, and worst-case budget scenarios that might face our campus.  Because my successor Dale Tuggy, the Executive Committee of the Senate, and the Planning and Budget Advisory Committee were doing such a good job last year continuing down that path, I basically decided to sit on the sidelines for the most part but also work behind the scenes on helping to improve the funding of public higher education in New York state.  Rather than simply update my older posts here, I wrote and spoke to state legislators and their staffers in both Chautauqua and Erie counties on many of the topics raised in them, sometimes by myself and sometimes with colleagues like Ziya Arnavut and Junaid Zubairi (to name just a couple).

To make a long story short, it's looking like all our collective efforts across the state have helped avert a worst-case scenario for SUNY Fredonia.  It appears that Governor Cuomo is not looking to cut SUNY any further (barring a future fiscal emergency that he and both houses of the legislature agree exists), that the fair, rational, and predictable tuition reform that was passed as part of NYSUNY 2020 legislation will help SUNY campuses begin to become healthy enough to get off life support, and hence that the worst of the crisis may well be behind us.  But--and didn't you know that word was coming?--that doesn't mean we're even close to getting out of the woods.  I'll talk about the Governor's war on public employee unions in a moment, but for now I want to focus on how SUNY turned this small victory into an even larger structural deficit for SUNY Fredonia this current academic year.  Here's what the Chancellor's Office came up with:

• Confiscate the reduction on the state's tax on tuition.  Yup,  we didn't see a penny of our students' tuition dollars that by every right should be helping to improve the quality of their education at our campus.  SUNY System Administration took them and redistributed them to other parts of the system.
• Divert state dollars we otherwise would have received to University Centers and Health Science Centers.  That's right--what we gained via our tuition increase for in-state undergraduates was more than wiped out by the nearly $1M we should have gotten but didn't because Chancellor Zimpher and CFO Monica Rimai believe other campuses needed to be cushioned from the 10% cut imposed by Governor Cuomo on all state agencies.
• In short, we were penalized for the very fiscal prudence, foresight, and planning that enabled us to ride out the worst of the crisis while minimizing pain to our students and faculty.  It seems almost like it was because we have well-run a Residence Halls program, a strong Faculty-Student Association, and have taken so many measures to cut spending and find cost savings wherever possible that we were singled out to bear this extra burden.

Fortunately, it looks like we'll be able to weather SUNY doing to us almost exactly what the state has been doing to SUNY--well, for this year.  But unless SUNY looks hard at how they treat the four-year campuses, we may yet face retrenchments at SUNY Fredonia.


Why Differential Tuition Isn't the End of the World

This leads me to my next point, a pragmatic argument for allowing the University Centers to charge more in tuition than other campuses in the system--provided that SUNY provides the legislature and Governor with a plan to gradually rebalance the distribution of state dollars away from the University Centers and toward those other campuses.  Because the doctoral programs and their research needs do cost more than the master's programs and their research needs at campuses like mine, SUNY has for a long time diverted more state dollars to the more expensive campuses and programs than to places like SUNY Fredonia.  But if by the next time NYSUNY 2020 comes up for revision and renewal more of the responsibility for funding research were to be covered by the federal government (which is better able to invest in basic research than cash-strapped states), I wouldn't be opposed to undergraduates at UB, Binghamton, Albany, and Stony Brook paying more for their educations than those at places like Fredonia, Brockport, Geneseo, Cortland, and New Paltz, provided they and other non-University Centers in the system were to get more of their fair share of state dollars.  The better able the University Centers are to support themselves via student and federal dollars, the more state dollars should be able to go to the rest of the system.  And if they happen to overshoot and price talented students out, then all the better for the rest of us who can provide them with a high-quality education at much lower prices.

What about UUP?

Now, let me be clear that probably nobody in my faculty and professionals' union, United University Professions, is very likely to agree with me on this.

There's a strong contingent in UUP who believe SUNY higher education should be tuition-free and 100% publicly-funded. There's an even larger number of my brothers and sisters who want to see tuition remain as low as possible, so as to ensure that SUNY continues to fulfill its mission of providing access to higher education for all NY's citizens. Most delegates look with great suspicion at the claims of high-tuition/high-aid advocates in SUNY's doctoral-granting institutions and across the country that the way to a great public university is to follow the lead of the University of Michigan and the University of California's state-wide administration.  In fact, virtually everyoneat every DA I've been to believes that differential tuition is a trojan horse for privatizing SUNY, helping richer campuses get richer, helping bigger ones get bigger, and putting the poorer ones in Darwinian competition against each other for their very survival. 

Certainly the two rivals for leadership of UUP, President Phil Smith and Vice President for Academics Fred Floss, have other plans and priorities.  While Smith has gone on record as saying that "UUP supports a rational, reliable, sustainable, and predictable tuition policy," he pledged at the spring Delegate Assembly that he won't put UUP's weight behind the current bills before the Senate and Assembly unless the legislature commits to raising the TAP limit to match tuition increases and SUNY leadership stops using language about the state taxing tuition.  At the fall DA I just left, he simply noted that UUP ended up supporting rational tuition.  Meanwhile, Floss, who narrowly lost in his bid to unseat Smith last spring, argued to me back then that UUP shouldn't even enter into the tuition debates, since they distract from the core problem of convincing legislators to commit state funding to SUNY and ensuring that the state continues to sustain labor protections.

In response, I would argue that once the legislature commits to maintenance of effort, stops reducing state funding every time they pass a tuition increase, and commits to supporting SUNY's mission, there'll be no need to criticize the way they have been systematically defunding SUNY over the past few decades, because they'll have stopped doing so.  If we can get a similar pledge from SUNY not to grow the University Centers at the expense of the rest of the system, I just don't see why differential tuition is such a dirty word.

In any case, right now every officer, negotiations team member, and delegate is united behind the common goal of fighting off efforts by the Governor's Office of Employee Relations to bully UUP into accepting massive cuts in our benefits during the current negotiations for a new contract.  And the DA just approved a vitally-important series of constitutional amendments that bring our union into the 21st century when it comes to ensuring representation of colleagues who are neither on the tenure track nor on the path to permanent appointment as professionals.  We created new subcategories of membership, "Contingent Academic" and "Contingent Professional," ensured that every chapter would have an elected Officer for Contingents, converted the statewide standing Part-Time Concerns Committee into the Contingent Employee Committee, and guaranteed at least one seat on the state-wide Executive Board to a contingent academic or professional.  It's all about making sure that the 40% of our members who are contingent employees have a seat at the table during the decision-making process of their and our union.

Speaking of which, I'm proud to report that our own Vice President for Professionals, Idalia Torres-Medina, will have seat at that very same table.  She won the seat on the Executive Board vacated by now no-longer-acting Vice President for Professionals J. Philippe Abraham, winning a 3-round election against three other worthy candidates.  More on this when I get back to Fredonia.  Time to get ready to hit the road again and leave Clinton!

Gearing Up for the UUP Delegate Assembly and the NYS Higher Education Summit

Hey all, CitizenSE is back in business! I've taken a long break from serious blogging on the funding of public higher education, especially in New York State, partly because I'm no longer Chair of the SUNY Fredonia University Senate, partly because I didn't have much to add to my previous writings on the subject, and partly because my family's move from Dunkirk to Hamburg and my adjustment to a new commuting schedule have forced me away. But we're hitting crunch time and it's about time I get back in the game, not least because I just got voted in as Vice-Chair of next year's Fredonia University Senate.

So expect a bunch of quick-hit but substantive posts from me in the coming weeks. In the meantime, check out my comment on SUNY flexibility and autonomy, consider the differences between SUNY's and UUP's advocacy organizations, and send me questions or suggestions for future posts.

Crowd-Sourcing Academic Peer Review: Sympoze

A colleague of mine in philosophy has started an on-line peer-reviewed journal called Sympoze. They're looking for peer reviewers in every discipline. Here's their FAQ page, where they explain how crowd-sourcing academic peer review works and why they believe it will fix the bugs in traditional peer-review. I've signed up as a reviewer and I encourage you to, too.

The AAUP Gets It: Investigating SUNY Albany

Check it out: the AAUP is investigating the decision to close programs at SUNY Albany. More power to them!

I look forward to the investigating committee's report. There are a lot of thorny issues involved with the role of faculty and governance in decisions to shrink rather than grow a university that are very difficult to get a handle on. Here's hoping the AAUP can make their very useful Red Book even more relevant today by identifying some principles and practices governance leaders and bodies can use--as well as things administrators should endeavor to avoid or face censure.

The AAUP Gets It: Saving Public Higher Education

Check out the AAUP's defense of public employees, collective bargaining, and public higher education. And get involved!

Groundhog Day Symbolism

Yeesh, reading about the new Governor's proposals for the NYS budget and for SUNY and CUNY, along with the responses from the usual suspects, make me wonder if I'm in Groundhog Day the movie or if the huge winter storm western NY seems mostly to have weathered with minimal disruptions is a better indicator of where the state and its public higher education systems are headed.