First Principles of Shared Governance, Part II: The Vision Thing

Every set of bylaws, no matter how seemingly dry, arcane, or limited to procedural matters, articulates a vision and enacts a theory of shared governance and consultation.  At SUNY Fredonia, we've spent a good portion of the last 5 years trying to work out just what that "vision thing" is and should be.  Our current Bylaws are the product of multiple revisions (in advance of approval by University Senate, ratification by the Voting Faculty for each set of substantive revisions, and sign-off by the President for each set that affects consultation).  By no means are they perfect, but at least we are trying to make them consistent, both internally and with respect to a theory of shared governance that I haven't seen clearly articulated elsewhere.  So let me try to identify what it is, what it's not, and what its implications for shared governance seem to be.

What It Is

The Preamble to our Bylaws makes reference to an underlying theory of shared governance by recourse to a pair of similes:

The Policies of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York establish a framework for shared governance and consultation at SUNY Fredonia (and throughout the SUNY system) and our Bylaws function as a constitution and operating system for institutional communication and decision-making that involves the Faculty and its official representatives.

What does it mean to think of bylaws as something akin to a constitution?  One way that's been quite pertinent to my own thinking about the question is that a constitution's primary function is to provide a framework within which disagreements can be aired, vetted, debated, and eventually resolved.  The only consensus it presumes is a shared commitment to resolving disagreements within the framework established by the constitution, including the means for amending it.  In the same way that all branches of the U.S. federal government are subject to the U.S. Constitution, and that state laws must be consistent with it, so, too, are the President and her designees (~the executive branch), the University Senate or other predominant official governance body for a college or university (~the legislature), and any other official governance bodies, like Standing Committees, Affiliate Committees, and academic departments are at SUNY Fredonia (~the states), all subject to their college's or university's bylaws.  The analogy isn't perfect, of course--for instance, with no equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court, power is more concentrated in the hands of the President of a campus than it is with the President of the United States--but it gets across the high stakes of the procedures our Bylaws lays out for how institutional communication and decision-making will be handled on our campus.  With those stakes in mind, our Bylaws err on the side of overspecificity; our goal is to provide everyone involved with as clear a picture as possible of how the overall (political) system is supposed to work.

Why do we do this?  I won't take you through a line-by-line reading of our definitions (although see in particular how we define "Faculty," "Shared Governance," and "Consultation" in Article I) or our run-down of the Faculty's powers and functions (Article II, which I think is our most important innovation), but I will point out some peculiarities inherent in being a campus in a state university system that includes a statewide union which represents all faculty and professionals in the system (United University Professions, or UUP).

For one thing, the Policies of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York might be better compared to the U.S. Constitution, while the SUNY Fredonia Faculty and University Senate Bylaws might be better compared to a state constitution.  Everything we do has to be consistent with the BOT's Policies, as well as with the system-wide policies and procedures approved by the statewide University Faculty Senate and signed by the Chancellor.

For another, it means the current Agreement between United University Professions and the state of New York, which focuses on terms and conditions of employment and establishes what is subject to negotiation rather than consultation, also sets bounds on what the system- or campus-level shared governance process can achieve.  When UUP asserts its exclusive right to bargain on behalf of the faculty and professionals it represents, the most any governance body can seek to do is advise both labor and management on that matter.  By the same token, unless management agrees to negotiate with UUP on any matter other than terms and conditions of employment, UUP can only advise the official governance bodies on the SUNY Fredonia campus.

This is where we probably reach the limits of the "constitution" analogy's usefulness, and where it might be more useful to turn to the "operating system" simile.  For another way of thinking about bylaws is that they function in a similar way as an operating system in a computer does:  they allow the parts of the computer (~the university) to work together, act as an intermediary between hardware (~the people and resources of the university) and programs (~the functions of those people and resources), provide a platform for application software (~the range of things universities do), and need to be working for users (~administration, academic faculty, professional staff, students) to make the computer (~university) do anything.  Without a clearly-identified process for, say, approving a new degree program or a revision to graduation requirements in an existing program, well...you get the picture, right?  Bylaws help allow the orchestration of a variety of concurrent decision-making processes essential to the operation of the university.

Consider, as well, one of the major projects it's taken leaders from the administration, the Senate Executive Committee, and the Fredonia UUP Chapter almost a year to plan:  updating and improving our University Handbook.  This entailed developing a process for deciding who reviews, revises or creates, and approves which policies.  While in theory some policies are purely administrative, others require consultation, and still others require negotiation, in practice that meant multiple meetings to determine which were which and build trust, so as to reduce the odds of turf battles arising down the road.  We're just about ready to start divvying up the actual work of policy review, revision/creation, and approval.  By clearly defining shared governance and consultation (Article I) and clearly identifying different levels and processes for shared governance (Article II, Section 3), the Fredonia Bylaws helped make it easier for the leaders of different groups figure out how to work together.

Perhaps an overly simplistic way to treat the "operating system" analogy is to think of the system of shared governance instantiated by the bylaws as a car that needs to be tuned up or overhauled periodically so that the driver can use it to get somewhere safely and quickly.  Our process of revising the Fredonia Bylaws between 2008 and 2013, and particularly during the 2012-2013 academic year, has enabled faculty and administrators to better trust the vehicle and trust each other to play our appropriate roles as we take it for a spin.

To move from similes to theory, then, one underlying principle that animates the Fredonia Bylaws is that the most unproductive conflicts--and those most important to avoid--come about because of a lack of agreement over what kind of shared governance activity is necessary in order for a given decision to be legitimately made (and by whom).  Our Bylaws draw on BOT Policies, a landmark statement by the SUNY Chancellor, and principles articulated by Middle States and AAUP (all of which we quote extensively from in Article II, Section 2) to enjoin the President and the representatives of the Faculty (which is typically the Executive Committee of the University Senate) to reach procedural agreement on every kind of decision where consultation or input from the Faculty (whether through a faculty meeting, the Senate, standing or affiliate committees, academic departments, or other bodies delegated by the Faculty to consult or give input) is warranted.  By limiting the possibility and scope of procedural conflicts, the Fredonia Bylaws enable all of us to focus on substantive matters.

What It's Not

It should be clear by now that we are trying to strike a middle ground at Fredonia between two extreme views of shared governance.

One puts the administration firmly in the driver's seat.  Since everything that bubbles through shared governance processes is ultimately advisory to the campus President--is at heart a recommendation to the President--some argue that this makes the activities of official shared governance bodies nothing but a rubber stamp or road block for decisions the administration has already made.  You see this conception of shared governance in arguments for or expressions of both administrative and faculty cynicism.  "Shared governance is a medieval relic inappropriate for the modern world of higher education."  "Why should we take shared governance seriously?  The administration will do what they want anyway."  "The key to managing faculty is getting them to believe they came up with the policy themselves."  "Faculty are too indecisive, complacent, and self-interested to govern themselves."  "Administrators are too manipulative, dishonest, and careerist to be trusted."  It's this conception of shared governance that leads too many faculty to become disengaged or disillusioned.  It's this conception of shared governance that leads too many administrators to scheme how to bypass or bamboozle official governance bodies.

The other extreme either puts the faculty firmly in the driver's seat or casts the administration as the faculty's chauffeur.  One problem with this mode of shared governance--which as a faculty member I admit I find more attractive than the other extreme--is that it tends to presume that "the faculty" will always speak with a united voice, that given time clear majorities will emerge on any and all issues, that the faculty will in fact have an infinite amount of time to arrive at consensus.  Absent the bogeyman of the administration to rally support for or against a particular position or solution, however, how consistently will the faculty be able to arrive at decisions in an efficient, fair, and collaborative manner?  Another problem with this conception of shared governance is that it runs the risk of turning official governance bodies into shadow administrations, with all the duplication of effort, turf battles, second-guessing, and mutual recriminations that seem to go with that territory.  Furthermore, the more powerful leaders of official governance bodies become, the more distant they are in danger of becoming from everyday faculty, the more everyday faculty are prone to start treating them as quasi-administrators.  And given that administrators have to manage faculty and make personnel decisions, to the extent that faculty take on these roles, whether or not they have those titles (or salaries!), they, too, will have to make judgment calls where there are valid arguments on many sides of a question or issue and competing goods and interests at stake.  It's truly difficult to imagine how a large and complex enough college or university would function with just the President and the Faculty doing it all, no matter how nostalgic some of us may be for those good ol' days.  And believe me, I've tried!

Implications for Shared Governance

So the moral to this version of Goldilocks is what exactly?  Let's identify a few morals:

• Your bylaws are a useful tool for engaging in serious discussions across roles, positions, and lines of responsibility about the meaning of shared governance and consultation on your campus and the principles and values underlying the policies, procedures, practices, and systems that enable institutional communication and decision-making.
• Revising your bylaws can provide opportunities to revisit, review, and rejuvenate agreements and ground rules for interactions between the President and the Faculty.
• Going through the bylaws review, revision, approval, and ratification process can therefore increase awareness, build trust, and limit the odds and scope of conflicts over proper procedures, allowing everyone involved to focus on what's best for the institution and what best helps it achieve its mission.
• It may be a pain and painstaking process to figure out how to come to agreement on what kind of shared governance activity is warranted for which kind of institutional decision, but it saves time and headaches down the road.
• Always look to adapt rather than adopt models from other institutions or principles articulated by national organizations.  It's more important that faculty and administrators at your institution go through the process and come to agreement on a framework for approaching procedural matters than it is to hold out for every last detail of your ideal external model.  Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good--or at least the better.
• If your President is ever resistant to good-faith efforts to improve the bylaws on your campus, look for windows of opportunity, such as when planning for a major university-wide accreditation agency site visit is in the works, when a President is close to retiring and interested in leaving a legacy, or when a President is new on the job and looking to establish good working relations with multiple campus constituencies.

All that said, bylaws are always a work in process.  They depend for their validity on the confidence campus constituencies have in them.  When legitimate objections are raised, and thoughtful revisions are proposed, they need to be carefully vetted, debated, approved, and ratified.  This fall and spring, the Executive Committee proposed and the Senate approved two more sets of Bylaws revisions, the latter of which are going up for a ratification vote shortly.  And just in the last week a procedural debate has bubbled over onto our faculty listserv.  More on these topics in later posts!

First Principles of Shared Governance, Part I: Buckle Your Seat Belts, Kids!

I'm heading out to Albany in the middle of next week to be on a panel with SUNY Fredonia University Senate Chairperson Rob Deemer and Governance Officer John McCune at the SUNY Voices 1st Annual Conference on Shared Governance.  Its theme is "Shared Governance for Institutions of Higher Education in the 21st Century:  Beyond Stereotypes"; my focus will be "Improved Shared Governance through Strong Bylaws."  I've been playing a lead role in upgrading the SUNY Fredonia Faculty and University Senate Bylaws off and on ever since I was 1st elected Vice Chairperson in 2008, but we developed, approved, and ratified the most comprehensive set of revisions to the Bylaws last year.  Since I have only about 10 minutes to summarize our emerging vision/theory of shared governance, survey the most significant changes to the Bylaws in the past 5 years or so, and identify as-yet-unresolved questions, I thought I'd better use Citizen of Somewhere Else to work through my ideas and provide some perspective on the debates we're currently having in departments and on the Senate at Fredonia.  My girls are just about done with Japanese school this morning, though, and we have a birthday party in Fredonia to get them to by 2, so this post will have to serve as a heads-up to come back here the next week or so, check in on my progress, and weigh in in comments!

Heraldry in Ned Ward's "A Trip to Jamaica"

Taking a break from governance/union/funding matters to make a note of a surprisingly racialized heraldry reference in Ned Ward's A Trip to Jamaica (1698):

A Man under this Misery, may be said to be the 'Scutchion of the Island, the Complection of the Patient, being the Field, bearing Or charg'd with all the Emblems of Destruction, proper, supported by Two Devils, Sables; and Death the Crest, Argent. (488)

This version is from Carla Mulford's anthology, Early American Writings, and follows upon a sarcastic portrayal of the unhealthy effects of a Jamaican diet on travelling Europeans, including "The Dry Belly-Ach," which "takes away the use of their Limbs, that they are forc'd to be let about by Negro's" (488)--who are, of course, the "Two Devils, Sables" referred to above.

There's a connection to both The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn here, but what kind of connection is the question I'll leave hanging for now...and just bemoan the fact that I heard about this conference in searching for my older posts here on the topic!

What SUNY Fredonia Needs from New York State's Leaders

The SUNY Fredonia Administration, Student Association, University Senate, and United University Professions and Civil Service Employees Association chapter Executive Boards issue the following urgent appeal to western-region and state-wide leaders as the New York State budget process enters its end game.  We agree the following legislative priorities would benefit our campus, our students, our local community, our region, and our state.

Enhance and Invest in SUNY State-Operated Campuses

• increase state funding for SUNY’s operating costs
• fully fund all contractual increases
• fully commit to maintenance of effort
• provide relief to campuses for winter emergency utilities charges
• develop a short- and long-term solution to the hospitals crisis that avoids harm to the academic and teaching mission of SUNY and its medical schools and two-year and four-year universities
• increase capital funding to repair, maintain, and enhance SUNY’s infrastructure
• support full funding for Fredonia’s NY SUNY 2020 proposal
• engage and support SUNY Fredonia’s START-UP NY plan
• think of SUNY if one-time funds become available

Commit to Quality, Access, Affordability, and Student Success throughout SUNY

• invest in New York’s students, maintain SUNY’s affordability, and reduce student and family debt by taking concrete steps to reverse the chronic state underfunding of SUNY’s operating costs
• adequately fund SUNY’s opportunity programs
• extend the DREAM Act to undocumented SUNY students
• invest in current students and veterans as strongly as the Governor has committed to offering higher educational opportunities to prisoners
• if we’re going to do Open SUNY, ensure that it does not compromise educational quality and access, shared governance, or the mission of SUNY

Contacts
Ziya Arnavut, President, Fredonia United University Professions arnavut@fredonia.edu
John Baughman, President, Civil Service Association Local 607 baughman@fredonia.edu
Robert Deemer, Chairperson, SUNY Fredonia University Senate deemer@fredonia.edu
Virginia Horvath, President, SUNY Fredonia horvath@fredonia.edu
Antonio Regulier, President, Fredonia Student Association regu0674@fredonia.edu
Bruce Simon, Western Region Co-Coordinator, UUP Outreach Committee simon@fredonia.edu
Idalia Torres, Western Region Co-Coordinator, UUP Outreach Committee torres@fredonia.edu

For more, see our joint statement!

Here's the list of leaders our letter and statement went out to electronically.  Anyone who wants to help us out by making calls or sending emails, we'd welcome the support!

The 4 Men in the Room
Governor Cuomo, https://www.governor.ny.gov/contact/GovernorContactForm.php, 518-474-8390
Jeffrey Klein, jdklein@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3595
Sheldon Silver, speaker@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-3791
Dean Skelos, skelos@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3171

Higher Education Budget Conference Committee
Deborah Glick, glickd@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4841
José Rivera, riveraj@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5414
William Colton, coltonw@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5828
Amy Paulin, paulina@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5585
William Barclay, barclaw@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5841
Michelle Schimel, schimelm@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5192
Gary Finch, finchg@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5878
Kenneth LaValle, lavalle@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3121
James Seward, seward@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3131
Joseph Robach, robach@nysenate.gov, 518-455-2909
Mark Grisanti, grisanti@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3240
Toby Ann Stavisky, stavisky@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3461

Other State-Wide Leaders
John DeFrancisco, jdefranc@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3511
Herman Farrell, Jr., farrellhassembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5491
Liz Krueger, lkrueger@nysenate.gov, 518-455-2297
Robert Oaks, oaksr@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5655
Andrea Stewart-Cousins, scousins@nysenate.gov, 518-455-2585

Other Western Region Legislators
John Ceretto, cerettoj@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5284
Jane Corwin, corwinj@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4601
David DiPietro, dipietrod@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5314
Patrick Gallivan, gallivan@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3471
Joseph Giglio, giglioj@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5241
Andrew Goodell, goodella@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4511
Michael Kearns, kearnsm@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4691
Timothy Kennedy, kennedy@nysenate.gov, 518-455-2426
Crystal Peoples-Stokes, peoplesstokesc@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5005
Michael Ranzenhofer, ranz@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3161
Sean Ryan, ryans@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4886
Robin Schimminger, schimmr@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4767
Raymond Walter, walterr@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4618
Catharine Young, cyoung@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3563

[Update 1 (9:33 am):  I'm reading on twitter that budget bills are being printed on education and higher education.  Trying to find out how often they get amended on the floor....  Follow me @citizense for breaking news.]

[Update 2 (12:34 pm):  Here are some links to articles and blog posts coming out with highlights of the budget:

• Capitol Confidential Overview
• Capitol Confidential:  No Raises for Management-Confidential

Waiting for specifics on SUNY.]

[Update 3 (12:42 pm):  The New York Times article doesn't add many details but is good on context on pre-k and charter schools.]

[Update 4 (1:35 pm):  TWC has what they tweeted was a full budget, but looks like highlights to me.]

[Update 5 (1:47 pm):  The Albany Daily Gazette has a few more details, but SUNY remains off the radar.  Hasn't come up in conference call yet, either.]

[Update 6 (1:55 pm):  Lots of details in this lohud.com post, but still nothing on SUNY mentioned.]

SUNY Fredonia Coalition to Issue Urgent Appeal to Western NY Legislators and State-Wide Leaders on NYS Budget

More on this tomorrow, but here's a sneak preview of what's coming out of the Wild West on the New York State budget's end-game!

And here's the first of many cover letters.  Pass it on!

28 March 2014

The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of New York State
NYS Capitol Building
Albany, NY 12224

Dear Governor Cuomo:

Thank you for the work you are doing to ensure that New York once again has an on-time budget that reflects the commitments of the state and responsibly ensures the future of New Yorkers.

The attached joint statement, which we have also sent to Western New York and other state-wide leaders, clarifies our priorities and asks for your support as the New York State budget process enters its end game. In the name of the administrative, governance, and union constituencies at SUNY Fredonia that we represent, we call on you and other leaders to support these 11 action items aimed at

• enhancing and investing in SUNY state-operated campuses;
• committing to quality, access, affordability, and student success throughout SUNY.

These themes and action items have emerged during months of discussion, debate, and decision-making. We are proud to speak with one voice, united in our commitment to the future of New York by investing in this generation of college students, and we urge you to join and support us.

http://tinyurl.com/mflrc2p

We look forward to continued good work with you and our state leaders as we all make the critical choices for New York’s future.

United Academics Negotiating a Minimum Wage for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty

Check out the highlights, details, draft, and final agreement of United Academics' new contract with the University of Oregon.  Check me if I'm wrong:  I'm seeing a tentative agreement to establish a floor of $36K for non-tenure-track faculty and a firm agreement to establish a Joint Committee on Equity and Floors that will be "responsible for establishing appropriate salary floors for all bargaining unit Non-Tenure-Track Faculty classifications, ranks, and units" (Article 26, Section 4). 

As UA emphasizes,

One major goal of the CBA is to stabilize and regularize the non-tenure-track faculty positions at the UO and to reduce reliance on adjuncts to those situations that are truly of a temporary and limited duration.  This initial reclassification process is meant to have units examine all their current adjunct positions and reclassify those that should really be Career NTT positions.

We anticipate that over 400 adjunct faculty will be considered for this reclassification to Career NTTF, and many will be reclassified soon.

The administration has been working with unit heads on the initial adjunct reclassification process and held a training workshop on this issue on November 7.  A UA Implementation Committee is also working closely with the administration to ensure this process is conducted in all units in accordance with the intentions of the CBA.

 Stay tuned as their contract implementation continues to unfold!

MLA's Open Access Online Journal Profession Addresses Campus Equity Week Themes!

Somehow I had missed the memo that the Modern Language Association's Profession has become an open-access online journal.  And that in October they published several essays that deal with the very issues of contingency and sustainability that we've been focusing on here at SUNY Fredonia.  I haven't yet had a chance to read what look like very interesting and important essays:

• Michael Berube, "Avenues of Access:  The 2013 Presidential Forum"
• Joshua Boldt, "Free-Market Faculty Members"
• Beth Landers, "Contingent Labor:  National Perspectives, Local Solutions"
• Maria Maisto, "Addressing the Scarlet A:  Adjuncts and the Academy"
• Robert Samuels, "Reinventing Access:  Free Public Higher Education, Quality Instruction, and Job Security for All Faculty Members"

.  But at the pace I'm going with grading and consulting on student final projects this semester, I may be able to respond to them over Thanksgiving Break.  If not, winter break, so stay tuned!

Campus Equity Week in the News, Western NY Edition

Check out Gib Snyder's story in the Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer on the Halloween rally at SUNY Fredonia for Campus Equity Week.  My open letter to Governor Cuomo got picked up by the SUNY Fredonia student newspaper, The Leader, as well.

An Open Letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo

Note:  This is the fifth in a series of posts I'm doing here at Citizen of Somewhere Else for Campus Equity Week.  Previously I've written on Margaret Mary Vojtko, equity in compensation, equity in ranks/titles/contracts, and Campus Equity Week and The Scarlet Letter.  Today, I invite the Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, to live up to his own rhetoric, to follow through on his professed values, and to put the power of his office behind campus equity in the State University of New York.

Happy Halloween, Governor Cuomo!

Tomorrow, the Day of the Dead, is the two-month anniversary of the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a professor who taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years but died in abject poverty after being fired without any severance pay or retirement benefits.

How could this happen?  Margaret Mary was an adjunct, a part-timer, a contingent faculty member.  The names change, but the facts remain the same.  She was one of far too many across the country who make up what Gary Rhoades has called academia's working poor.  Just like she did, the overwhelming majority of them are working hard for their students' futures without job security, health benefits, a living wage, or union membership.

Here in western New York, just a few hours from Pittsburgh, we are gathering today to honor the memory of Margaret Mary, to celebrate her commitment and her sacrifice, and to reflect on the meaning of her life and death.  Here, today, we are asking you to recognize that her teaching conditions are her students' learning conditions, to accept that campus equity is more than a labor issue--that at its heart are academic quality and institutional integrity--and to act on those understandings.

We do this because it appears from your actions during the protracted and difficult negotiations between your representatives and the union that represents SUNY's faculty and professionals, United University Professions, that you believe your political future depends on casting yourself as the defender of New York's taxpayers against lazy, greedy state employees and their power-hungry unions.  Despite her cancer and her poverty, Margaret Mary never missed a day of class.  Despite her hard work and dedication, she never made more than $25,000 per year.  And she never lived to see Duquesne recognize the union she and other contingent academic workers voted for--and for which they're still waiting.

The circumstances of Margaret Mary's life and death demonstrate how much of a difference union protections can make.  Thanks to the hard work of faculty and professional activists since the founding of SUNY, along with the wisdom and good sense of your predecessors in the Governor's office, faculty members in contingent appointments on SUNY campuses can earn health and retirement benefits.  In SUNY, only about 45% of the faculty and professionals are working on contingent lines (compared to about 75% nation-wide), while only about one-third of professors are teaching part-time as adjuncts (compared to about half across the country).

But when UUP came to you in the latest round of contract negotiations and said, "it's not enough that we're not the worst in the country--we're New Yorkers, it's time we become the best," you ignored us.  When we proposed that a minimum wage for adjunct faculty of $3,000 per course would be reasonable, you refused to negotiate.  In fact, I've heard from several sources that near the end game of negotiations earlier this year, you threatened to take benefits off the table if UUP continued insisting on keeping a minimum wage for adjuncts on the table.

It's hard for me to square that action with your own words when you succeeded in pushing the New York State legislature to raise the state minimum wage:

A reasonable minimum wage increases the standard of living for workers, reduces poverty, incentivizes fair and more efficient business practices, and ensures that the most vulnerable members of the workforce can contribute to the economy.

Well, yes.  But apparently that doesn't hold true for this class of state employees--the only ones who are working without a floor under their wages.  Why don't adjunct faculty deserve the same deal as any other worker in New York state?  Why do you think it's ok for the most committed of them to their students' success to be vulnerable to being paid less than the state-wide minimum wage?

Given your intransigence on that first, minimal step toward campus equity, it probably should come as no surprise that you apparently believe it's ok for someone with the same qualifications, experience, and responsibilities as another person to be paid a fraction of their salary for arbritrary reasons (such as appointment type).  But wait.  In a June op-ed that you wrote in support of the Women's Equality Act, you rightly called pay inequity "inexcusable and absurd."  At Vassar a couple of days later you stated:

Today is about values, and principles, and stating the obvious, and having the courage to stand up and tell the truth about the obvious. That’s what today is about. It started in January when we did what’s called the State of the State address, and stood up and said to the people of the state of New York, ‘Here is the truth. The truth is we discriminate against women in society in this state and in this country, and it is pervasive, and we haven’t admitted it, and it goes on every day, and it’s a shame, and it’s wrong, and it’s immoral, and it’s unethical, and it has to stop, and it’s going to stop in the state of New York, and then it’s going to stop everywhere.’ That is the truth.

Is it really that difficult to understand that contingency and casualization are also women's issues and human rights issues?  Across the country, between 51% and 61% of contingent academic workers are women.  In some disciplines, female adjuncts outnumber male adjuncts by ratios of 2 or 3 or 4 to 1.  I know you care about your daughters just as much as I care about mine.  How can you turn right around and discriminate against other fathers' daughters who happen to be state employees on contingent appointments in SUNY?  I implore you, listen to your own words, Governor!

Think about it:  if anyone is best living out your own education agenda of putting students first, it's SUNY's contingent faculty.  But how can SUNY continue to attract the greatest teachers if we are relegating more and more of them to contingency and casualization?  Chancellor Zimpher is tirelessly telling and retelling the story of SUNY as the little (economic) engine that could to anyone and everyone who will listen.  But who is doing the real work of making that engine run?  Who is making sure students stay on task, push themselves, and discover what they are interested in and capable of?  Who's in the classroom every day, giving them a pat on the back or a kick in the butt (as needed)?  Contingent faculty are doing this work--the work of workforce development, of developing an educated citizenry--every bit as well as their tenure-stream colleagues. 

Let's turn to more recent initiatives in which you've chosen to invest your political capital.  Part of your support for resort-style casinos is that they'll provide jobs to New Yorkers, revitalize local economies across the state, and provide new revenue streams for education.  I just heard a story the other day on public radio about a stalled contract negotiation for casino workers in New York City that was settled by arbitration.  The terms of the agreement will see many workers' salaries triple from the start to the end of their contract.  Some will be making $60,000 per year in a few years.  It was described as providing entry into the middle class for thousands of workers.

Imagine if you were to do something like this for the 16,000 contingent employees working in the SUNY system today.  The American Association of University Professors has pointed toward successful examples across the country of converting contingent appointments to some form of tenure.  Just imagine the economic impact in towns and cities across the state if thousands of SUNY's hardworking contingent employees were offered less precarious appointments and more equitable rates of compensation.  But why just imagine it?  You could work with Chancellor Zimpher on a proposal to modify the Policies of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York to make it possible to enact AAUP's recommendations.

I've heard you repeat the phrase, "self-policing doesn't work," when it comes to cleaning up Albany and making ethics matter in the capitol.  You didn't accept self-policing when you helped stop the legislature's slow strangling of SUNY by refusing to accept their decades-long practice of cutting back on state support of higher education whenever they authorized a tuition increase (and often when they didn't).  But when it comes to SUNY's treatment of its own contingent employees, apparently you think self-policing can work.  Well, we're trying to make it work here at SUNY Fredonia--and I include the Fredonia administration in that "we."  President Horvath, Provost Brown, Vice President Schillo and others are putting their careers on the line to set an example for the rest of SUNY and the rest of the country.  They are taking on the issues you didn't have the courage to deal with yourself.

Governor Cuomo, I'm sure you're like the rest of us who have pondered the circumstances of Margaret Mary's death and thought, "There but for the grace of God go I."  You may have even thanked God that Margaret Mary worked for a Catholic university in Pennsylvania rather than a public university in New York.  Well, God may work in mysterious ways, but it's up to us here to reflect on our own complicities and responsibilities and to do what we think is right.  You've shown over the course of your political career that you have it in you to be a courageous leader who takes on big issues and solves tough problems.  Your leadership in providing disaster relief in central New York, where I grew up and got my education, and in downstate New York, where my parents grew up, were educated, met, and fell in love, is yet another example of your promise.  Well, what contingent employees have been facing for decades in SUNY has been a slow-motion disaster.  What will you do to relieve their suffering?  What will you do to restore their dignity?

On November 1st, All Saints' Day, many faithful around the world believe that the spirits of the dead return to the living and that it's the responsibility of the living to greet them demonstrations of love and respect.  What kind of offering should we make to Margaret Mary's spirit?  That's for each of us to decide.  But what if you were to honor the work contingent faculty do to help provide paths to the middle class and ways to wealth for New York's SUNY students?

• What if you were to pledge to compensate adjunct faculty for teaching on the two days they'd otherwise have to cancel classes under the terms of the Deficit Reduction Program you forced on them?
• What if you were to urge SUNY to put more contingent faculty on longer-term contracts, so that they don't have to go off and on health insurance over the course of a year?
• What if you were to find a way to ensure that all contingent employees in SUNY become eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, so that they can at least get out from the burden of debt for the advanced degrees they have earned--and which your own actions are devaluing?
• What if you were to offer them the same tax relief as you do to employees hired under the terms of your own START-UP NY program?  What if you were to exempt them from local and state income taxes?

Do it for Margaret Mary, Governor.  Do it for SUNY's 16,000 undervalued contingent employees.  Other Governors have helped do the heavy lifting that makes it unlikely any long-time SUNY adjunct will suffer and die like Margaret Mary did.  What will be your contribution?  What will be your legacy?  What record will you be able to point to when you seek reelection...and beyond?

Campus Equity Week and The Scarlet Letter

Just wanted to mark the confluence of Campus Equity Week and The Scarlet Letter on "wear red Wednesday."

The office of the scarlet letter on some campuses is to prevent contingent faculty from participating in shared governance, despite the recommendations of the AAUP to the precise contrary.  More generally, the organizers of Campus Equity Week want to turn the "scarlet A" from a mark of shame for adjunct faculty (abatement or even a badge of servitude?) to a badge of honor.

Let's hope the rest of us react better than Hawthorne's Puritans or even his narrator did to Hester!

[Update 1 (10/31/13, 4:03 pm):  Here's Joseph Fruscione in Inside Higher Ed.]

Campus Equity Week Issue #2: Towards Equity in Ranks, Titles, and Lengths of Contracts for Contingent Faculty

Establishing a university-wide floor for starting compensation for contingent faculty who are paid by the course or credit hour is a necessary first step toward achieving campus equity, but it is not sufficient in and of itself.  Recall the major extant definitions of equity:

• NCTE: Compensation, per course, for part-time faculty should never be lower than the per-course compensation for tenure-line faculty with comparable experience, duties, and credentials.
• AHA/OAH: Fair salaries, proportional to tenured and tenure-track faculty compensation for comparable teaching, advising and service work.
• AAUP: Positions that require comparable work, responsibilities, and qualifications should be comparably compensated.
• AFT: Part-time/adjunct faculty should be paid a salary proportionate to that paid full-time tenured faculty of the same qualifications for doing the same work.

Equity, in all these examples, requires those with similar credentials/qualifications, experience, and responsibilities/duties/work to be compensated similarly.  This is where the diversity among contingent faculty matters a great deal.  Some are newly-minted Ph.D.s, while others never intend to seek a terminal degree but have decades of experience in college and university classrooms.  Some are brought in temporarily to replace a faculty member on leave, some are brought in to teach specific courses for which they have specific expertise or experience, while others are essentially permanent hires regularly and repeatedly contributing to programs that (purportedly, at least) couldn't afford to stay afloat without them.  Some would love to compete for a tenure-track position were it to open up in their institution, while others wouldn't want to run the risk of losing the work they do have or add research and/or service obligations to their existing work load.  (See the recent reports by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce and the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education for more details and specifics.)

Given that diversity, a more substantive step forward than a university-wide floor would be to establish a system of ranks/titles for contingent faculty that allows for promotion/advancement, comes with compensation floors and/or bumps, and leads to lengthier contracts and/or adjustments of teaching load in light of changing professional obligations.  Such a system should allow contingent faculty sufficient choice to pursue the kind of rank/title that makes sense for them at each contract renewal, with criteria for the various ranks/titles clearly laid out and consistently and fairly applied.  While the Policies of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York seem to preclude following through on AAUP's call for conversion to tenure without first modifying the Policies, there is room to develop a more rational, consistent, transparent, and equitable system of contingent (or "qualified," in SUNY-speak) ranks/titles on individual SUNY campuses.

That's exactly what the leaders of the Fredonia Chapter of United University Professions have called for at SUNY Fredonia.  Building on the successful negotiation of the Handbook on Appointment, Reappointment, and Promotion (HARP), which specifies that "This Handbook...shall remain in full force and effect unless modified by written, mutual agreement of UUP and SUNY Fredonia administration" (IB, p. 8), Provost Brown and Chapter President Arnavut have agreed to form a joint task force consisting of eight members, which will be charged with reviewing UUP’s proposals in light of best practices in the SUNY system (such as at Stony Brook, Cortland, and Farmingdale) and nation-wide, with the aim of proposing specific revisions to HARP IV (pp. 32-35) by a date (to be determined) in 2014. The Fredonia Chapter Executive Board envisions that the joint task force will be formed and charged by Provost Brown and Chapter President Arnavut when the schedule of HARP review, revision, and approval demands it or when negotiations on establishing a university-wide floor have ripened, whichever is sooner.

Stay tuned for updates on these matters!

Campus Equity Week Issue #1: Towards Equity in Compensation for Contingent Faculty

Paying part-time contingent faculty substantially less than other faculty in other positions that require comparable work, responsibilities, and qualifications is arbitrary, unsustainable, and unfair.

Every group that has ever studied these issues has concluded that the end goal should be some form of equity.  For instance:

• NCTE: Compensation, per course, for part-time faculty should never be lower than the per-course compensation for tenure-line faculty with comparable experience, duties, and credentials.
• AHA/OAH: Fair salaries, proportional to tenured and tenure-track faculty compensation for comparable teaching, advising and service work.
• AAUP: Positions that require comparable work, responsibilities, and qualifications should be comparably compensated.
• AFT: Part-time/adjunct faculty should be paid a salary proportionate to that paid full-time tenured faculty of the same qualifications for doing the same work.

SUNY Fredonia is not alone among colleges and universities in being a long way from achieving this kind of campus equity.  The only real questions remaining are:  what form should that equity take? how close can we afford to get to it right now? what long-term plan can we develop for achieving it?

While different campuses might answer these questions in different ways, Fredonia should take its cue from the contract governing terms and conditions of employment for faculty and professionals in the SUNY system.  According to the 2007-2011 Agreement between the State of New York and United University Professions, the salary minima for every full-time rank are:

• Instructor: $32,945
• Lecturer/Assistant Professor: $37,706
• Associate Professor: $44,608
• Professor: $55,283

Supposing that a 4/4 (24-credit) teaching load is the normal full-time course load for faculty who do not have any service or research expectations (and hence that tenure-stream faculty with lower teaching loads than 4/4 are replacing the courses they otherwise would have been teaching with their service and research), then we arrive at the following minimum rates of compensation per credit hour for each full-time rank:

• Instructor: $1373/credit hour
• Lecturer/Assistant Professor: $1571/credit hour (+$198/CH or +14.4%)
• Associate Professor: $1859/credit hour (+$288/CH or +18.3%)
• Professor: $2303/credit hour (+$444/CH or +23.9%)

When the 2011-2016 Agreement is published, expect those minima to rise about 2%.  However, for the purposes of establishing a university-wide floor for starting part-time contingent faculty compensation, the Lecturer’s minimum is most relevant, as Lecturers are not required to do any service or research.  It is difficult to understand what would justify the difference in compensation between a full-time contingent faculty member with a Lecturer’s appointment and a part-time contingent faculty member with some other rank or title.  Supposing Lecturers receive higher compensation because of a real difference in their expertise and hence in the kinds of courses they are assigned to teach, how large should that premium be relative to a minimum for starting part-time contingent faculty members?

How have other SUNY schools answered that question?  For the 2011-2012 academic year, SUNY Cortland’s university-wide floor was $863/credit hour, according to the most recent version of their Handbook for Academic and Professional Part-Time Employees that we could find.  At Cortland, then, Lecturers received a premium of $708/credit hour, or about 82%!  In March 2013, SUNY Oswego’s Provost announced the following university-wide floor agreement:  $950/credit hour (retroactive to the start of Spring 2013), $984/credit hour (effective Fall 2013), $1018/credit hour (effective Fall 2014). Currently at Oswego, then, the premium is $587/credit hour, or nearly 60%!  (At Oswego, by the way, an adjunct hired in 1992 made $770/credit hour; in March 2012, the Oswego UUP Chapter pointed out that if that amount were adjusted only for the rate of inflation over the previous 20 years, an adjunct hired in 2012 would make $1249/credit hour.)

When you consider that the 2007-2011 Agreement posits a premium for full professors relative to starting assistant professors of $732/credit hour, or about 46.6%, then equity starts to cut both ways.  The lower you set the university-wide floor for starting part-time contingent faculty, the more unfair the Agreement seems to those in the tenure stream!

Nobody doubts SUNY salaries are low across the board.  After all, the Modern Language Association recommends a floor of $2363/credit hour for the 2013-2014 academic year, which is more than the current floor for full professors.  The Mayday $5K! Campaign proposes a floor of $1667/credit hour, which is more than the current floor for assistant professors.  Clearly SUNY, the Division of Budget, and the Governor would have to agree to raise compensation rates for all faculty if they were to accept floors this high for part-time contingent faculty members.  But there's nothing stopping individual SUNY campuses from deciding on their own, right now, to set their own university-wide floors at some fraction of the $1571/credit hour floor for full-time lecturers.

As campus leaders work together to determine what that fraction should be, they should keep in mind that the national average for part-time faculty compensation is about $996/credit hour, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Adjunct Project.  In 2010, the median for contingent faculty in the Mid East was $1000/credit hour, the median for contingent faculty represented by a union was $1033/credit hour, and the median for contingent faculty represented by a union and working at Master’s-level institutions was $1200/credit hour, according to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce’s June 2012 Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Workers (p. 11 and Tables 24 and 25).

Also worth considering is what percentage of the overall campus budget, of the budget for Academic Affairs, of the adjunct budget, and of the fixed adjunct budget it would cost the campus to move to different university-wide floors in a given year and/or over several years.  Every estimate the leaders of the Fredonia Chapter of United University Professions have run suggests that doing the right thing for the most vulnerable and underpaid members of the bargaining unit and university will have a miniscule impact on these budgets.

Further Resources

SUNY

• SUNY Cortland, Handbook for Academic and Professional Part-Time Employees
• SUNY Oswego Provost Memo, “Adjunct Base and Extra Service Funding” (8 March 2013)
• SUNY Oswego UUP Chapter, “The Case for Increasing Adjunct Salaries” (26 March 2012)

Unions

• SEIU's Adjunct Action campaign (2013): http://adjunctaction.org/

Professional Associations

• MLA's resolution (2011): http://www.mla.org/pdf/clip_stmt_final_may11.pdf

Other Organizations

• AAUP’s overview (2013): http://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency
• AAUP's background facts (2013): http://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts
• NYS AAUP's blueprint (2013): http://www.nysaaup.org/library/profile_21st_century_presidency.pdf
• CFHE’s principles (2011): http://futureofhighered.org/principles/
• CFHE’s report (2012): http://futureofhighered.org//wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ProfStaffFinal1.pdf
• New Faculty Majority's website (2013): http://www.newfacultymajority.info/equity/

Essays

• Michael Berube's address (2012): http://www.mla.org/blog?topic=146
• Gary Rhoades’s op-ed (2013): http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/24/opinion/rhoades-adjunct-faculty/?hpt=hp_bn7

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.