On Increasing SUNY Revenues

Quick note that I'm working on a response to Kathleen Moore's Albany Times-Union story on SUNY's revenue issues that will take more than an x-twitter thread to develop, as it represents the media's first pass at digesting a SUNY report on Long-Term Enrollment and Financial Sustainability that was submitted to Governor Hochul and the state legislature last Friday (and that I am seeing for the first time right now).

Why should you care what I think about increasing SUNY's revenues?  Well, not only am I the Chairperson of the Fredonia University Senate and Immediate Past Vice President/Secretary of the SUNY University Faculty Senate and an active member of both governance bodies' Executive Committees, but I have also been intimately involved in developing their—our—approach to state budget advocacy for many years.  Many of the ideas first explored on this very blog, dating back to my first term as Senate chair (2009-2010), have made their way into official resolutions and statements from campus, and SUNY-wide, governance bodies.

As you probably can imagine, I'm incredibly hopeful that ideas we've been pitching for years and that I've been researching for decades—most recently summarized in a UFS Fall 2023 resolution and the Fredonia University Senate's website and online petition—have been incorporated into this report.  I'm worried about the consequences for Fredonia if they aren't, or aren't picked up and run with by Governor Hochul and the legislature.

After I digest some lunch, I'm diving into the SUNY report.  I'll update this post with my first pass at it before dinner!

UPDATE 1 (7:54 pm) [yes, after dinner]

On the whole, I would give SUNY's 80-page document/74-page report a solid B+, and probably an A- if I were feeling generous.  You'll see why I'm not by the end of this, but let's start with what's really really really good in this report—why it may well be the best piece of research, analysis, and writing to come out of SUNY System Administration in my 25-year-plus career at Fredonia.

(1) Start by reading the initial 3-page Executive Summary for yourself.

• Check out how economically it references so many items from the UFS's list of Public Good U metaphors that emphasize how well SUNY contributes to the public good and serves New York State:  anchor of community, foundation for democracy, platform for civic engagement, engine of economic development, pathway to the middle class and beyond, magnet for population growth and private investment, generator of creativity and innovation, seedbed for human health and flourishing, and catalyst for sustainable communities and ecosystems.
• Check out the places it refers to the same Rockefeller Institute report UFS has been using in its resolutions for years (Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Winter 2020, Winter 2019):  "According to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, SUNY’s economic impact in 2018 was $28.6 billion, or 1.9% of gross state product. For every $1 the State invests in SUNY, there is an $8.17 return" (Executive Summary, pg. 2; see also Report, pp. 54-55).
• Check out how effectively it updates language from Chancellor King's Summer 2023 State of the University Address and sets up the expanded rationale for SUNY's December 2023 state budget request, all organized in the form of a very short story that SUNY is on the move and, with the right support, poised to accelerate its progress.
• After you finish it, how do you feel about SUNY?  How eager are you to help SUNY get to the promised land by doing your part to "ensure its place as the nation’s leading statewide comprehensive public system of higher education"?

If you were a state decision-maker, how would you feel about the choice the Executive Summary presents you with (near its end but not at it)?

With no investment in resources beyond the committed increases in the State’s current financial plan, SUNY would face a $1.1 billion annual shortfall at the end of this period [the decade]. With reasonable, predictable, ongoing increases in resources, SUNY would instead face an $89.1 million annual shortfall, which could be readily managed through efficiencies, collaboration, and other actions. Reasonable, predictable, ongoing increase in resources could be achieved through (1) modest, differential tuition increases; and/or (2) modest, consistent increases in annual state operating aid. (Executive Summary, pg. 3)

Note the "and/or" (which the Times-Union headline writers missed):  it raises the question of what combination of public and private revenue sources SUNY should be running on over the next decade.  And since only the Governor and the Legislature control direct state aid, tuition, and indirect state aid (including the Tuition Assistance Program [TAP] and the Excelsior Scholarship), this is a very high-stakes and delicate question, particularly for Chancellor King and his team in SUNY System Administration.

(2) Consider what answers to this question are suggested and implied by the main report.

• Mix, Leaning Public:  "Building on SUNY’s longstanding reputation for excellence, SUNY will lead the nation in timely degree and credential completion for all students and provide the academic, financial, and wraparound supports students need to thrive" (2, emphasis added).  Great goal, which implies most likely a combination of direct state aid, indirect state financial aid, and redistribution of tuition—which some students pay at higher levels, some lesser, and some not at all—to help all students graduate and succeed (with the understanding that higher family income and wealth are correlated for most students with higher retention and graduation rates, although as the report carefully observes, those correlations often break down for specific student populations, such as many of the ones listed on page 2 of the Executive Summary and detailed on pp. 31-43 of the Report).
• Mix, Heavily Leaning Public:  Check out every time ASAP (Accelerated Study in Associate Programs) and ACE (Accelerate, Complete, and Engage) are mentioned in the report (see especially pp. 3-4, 31-32, 34, 69-70) and how often these CUNY-originated, highly successful and verified-effective programs are associated with "scaling up" or "making sustainable"; this is Albany-speak for turning one-time state performance funding into repeating direct state aid.  Depending on how quickly and at what scale the Governor and Legislature follow through on this, less tuition dollars will need to be redistributed to accelerate these proven programs.
• Mix, Slight Lean Public:  Check out how effectively the Report deploys statistics to support its overall point, most notably with respect to enrollment (pp. 24-30) and return on investment of direct and indirect state aid (pp. 23, 54-61).  The stats overall lean public because the vast majority of recent and proposed efforts to increase recruitment and retention cost money in the short run to implement but should end up being a large net positive over time; the more new state direct aid is put into these efforts, the larger the return on investment is the implication.
• Neither:  Check out how often a hidden, third thing intervenes—operational efficiencies that allow SUNY System and campuses to be more effective at what they do while saving money doing it.  These include academic portfolio optimization, operational collaboration, and addressing structural imbalances summarized on page 2 of the Executive Summary and explained at greater length on pp. 44-51, pp. 52-53/62-63, and pp. 63-65, respectively, of the Report. (Also note how comparatively vague or even incomplete these sections are, compared to other sections. More on this soon.)

(3) Consider how adroitly the Executive Summary and Report navigate the highly charged issues that have roiled national higher ed politics and policy in recent days, weeks, months, and years.

• Directly:  See pg. 1 of the Executive Summary and pp. 13-17 of the Report for specifics on race-conscious admissions; diversity, equity, inclusion; and antisemitism and Islamophobia.
• Indirectly:  See pg. 1 (on student success) and pg. 2 (on enrollment) of the Executive Summary, along with pp. 31-43 of the Report, for specifics on realizing the principle that "There is a place within SUNY’s diverse and dynamic system for every New Yorker, and we believe that for so many New Yorkers, claiming that place and capitalizing on it is the singular experience that can expand their horizons, better their lives, and cement their futures" (Executive Summary, pg. 2) and fleshing out the overall plan: "In order for every student to know there is a place for them at SUNY and a pathway to success once they get here, SUNY will continue to advance our four priority pillars—student success; research and scholarship; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and economic development and upward mobility—alongside an equally urgent commitment to excellence in operational and fiscal stewardship on behalf of the students and taxpayers we serve" (Report, pg. 1).  

Check this for yourself by searching the document for "place":  almost every single time this word appears on its own, it's for a very specific purpose!

OK, gotta take a break from this close read of the positives in the report to run an errand with the family.  More coming!

Update 2 (1/4/2024, 1:57 pm)

Please see Part 2.

On SUNY Fredonia's Program Deactivation Review Process (PDRP): A Teaser

Posting a link to my latest message to Senators as chair of the Fredonia University Senate.

After I get a good night's sleep and lead a meeting of the SUNY University Faculty Senate Governance Committee late morning tomorrow, I may have the energy in the afternoon to put Senate Executive Committee's approach into a broader perspective, as I see it personally—not only in my official role as spokesperson for Executive Committee and Senate.

Or I may wait until Executive Committee and Fredonia Cabinet have had more time to take further steps to fully restore trust.  It depends!

Clearing My Throat

All right, I'm back.

Why am I back?

Long story short, I need a way to express myself as an individual in ways that are clearly distinguishable from my official role as Chairperson of the Fredonia University Senate, and particularly from the messages I send to the campus and post on the website as Senate Chairperson.

Bottom line:  I need a space to explore ideas, rather than issue carefully calibrated statements.

But there's more!

Executive Committee has agreed the stakes are too high the rest of the academic year for me to freelance my official messages, so I won't put anything out as Senate Chairperson that hasn't been approved by the team—every member of the team.  We each need veto power over my official messages, down to the "line item."  If you've been following what's been going down at SUNY Fredonia, you'll understand why.  And if you haven't, well, CitizenSE will be my outlet for explaining things as I see them and taking action on my own when I think it's important enough to take my Senate Chairperson hat off and speak for myself.

For now, check out one of Executive Committee's attempts to influence Governor Hochul's January 9 State of the State Address, and consider signing and sharing our petition.

OK, back to the why.

Given that my term as Senate Chairperson ends on June 30, 2024, the countdown is on to when I lose the keys to the @FredUnivSenate x-twitter account and go back to using only my personal @CitizenSE account (which started as an offshoot of this blog).  So I need to reestablish that connection between blogger and x-twitter.

Now, on July 1, 2024, my three-year term as SUNY Fredonia's Senator on the SUNY University Faculty Senate will begin.  So I'll still be on the Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee.  But somebody else will be in charge of speaking for Executive Committee and the Senate.  And I'll be back in the much more comfortable role for me of advising, supporting, deliberating and strategizing with whoever that turns out to be.  Yet another reason to try building back some kind of audience for this blog.

It's also highly likely I won't be on the SUNY UFS Executive Committee by the time Fall 2024 begins.  I mean, it's possible SUNY Potsdam's Jan Trybula decides to run for another term and is elected Vice President/Secretary; in that case, I would still be UFS's Immediate Past Vice President/Secretary.  And it's possible that Executive Committee would choose me to serve another term as chair of the UFS Governance committee for AY 2024-2025, and that I'd accept.  But as I'm going back to a full teaching load next academic year, I'll have to think through the pros and cons and let folks know my decision before they even start seriously considering who should lead that committee next academic year.

In the matter of a few short months, then, my relation to both my campus governance body and the UFS will be changing.  So I need to change with it.  And that means getting back to this blog.

I don't think I'll use it as much as I did during my Fulbright year in Fukuoka, Japan (2006-2007).  Nor do I think I'll use it as much as when I was last Fredonia Senate Chairperson (2009-2010).  But who knows?

Anything that's too personal or too political, too raw or too hot or too spicy, overlapping too much with my roles as a faculty member and a union member (UUP Fredonia; UUP; NYSUT; beyond), too exploratory, too questioning, too tentative—that's the kind of stuff you might see here.

For the really personal and more playful stuff, I'm bringing Mostly Harmless back, too.  That's my after-hours, off the clock, non-work, not-professional blog.  When I get personal here, it'll be to make some kind of point.

Let's just say I'm going back to my roots.  And that means coming back to this completely outmoded platform.  I'm not on Tumblr, insta, or TikTok.  I'm not on Substack or Bluesky or however you spell them.

I'm back, baby!

Let's see what happens next!!

Hello, Hello...Is This Thing On?

 Might need to fire up the old blog again! Let's see if this works....

We're on the Move!

I'm happy to join Sandra Lewis, Idalia Torres, Dan Smith, and Anne Fearman in running for leadership positions on the Fredonia UUP Chapter's Executive Board from 2017 to 2019.  For more on our slate, please see our letter to Fredonia UUP members and our web site, which includes links to our candidate statements.

Here's an excerpt from our letter:

Now more than ever, we must organize together, stand together, and fight together with allies on and off campus to uphold Fredonia’s and SUNY’s mission, to improve our working conditions, and to support our students’ learning, engagement, persistence, and professional, civic, and personal success. 

My candidate statement is not as quotable, so I'll let you read it for yourself.  And please feel free to share any questions, concerns, demands, statements of support, advice, or other feedback!

Is It Just Me, or is Google Weird When it Comes to Guccifer 2.0?

How is it possible that a few posts scattered here at CitzenSE and on some of my other blogs last night led to their being more easily findable on google than anything Studio Dongo has posted on Guccifer 2.0 over the last several weeks?  Anyone who understands google search algorithms better than me, please feel free to explain!

I get that my blogs are older and have many more posts and that my posts cumulatively have many more views than anything he's done on his blog, but I've basically been neglecting mine for years while he's been using his to actively pursue an ongoing story that's received international attention, and he's raised important and interesting questions and connected dots in the process that I, at least, think deserve a much wider audience than my little social media experiment.

What gives, intertubes?

This Is A (Guccifer 2.0) Test of the Google Search System

Quick questions to my remaining readers:

• are you aware of the Guccifer 2.0 story?
• have you been trying to follow it?
• have you been able to find any good sources on it through google searches?

Just to be clear, I had not been aware of or following the story until one of my best friends started blogging about it in mid-June.  As he's been writing about his experiences going down that particular rabbit hole, I've started looking for other sources.  Not very hard, to be sure.  And I know that I've been on leave from blogging for awhile, but what ever happened to google's blog search?  Back in the bad old days, I was at least able to find a wide range of voices on almost any topic, no matter how obscure.  But when I search "Guccifer 2.0" on google, I get nothing interesting or new.  If I didn't know about posts like this, I would never be able to find them.

There's got to be more out there, right?  Are you there, google?  It's me, The Constructivist.

This will have been a test of the google search system.  This will have been only a test.

Yet Another Reason to Read Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird

Given my interest in fairy tales and fairy tale re-visions, Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird was at the top of my summer reading list.  I'm so glad I read this slim, sly novel for so many reasons, but the one I'll put the spotlight on here and now has to do with the evocativeness of Oyeyemi's Hawthorne allusions.

At first glance, the scene where 13-year-old Bird and her 15-year-old friend Louis Chen team up to challenge the classmate who wrote "LOUIS CHEN IS A VIETCONG" in yellow chalk to fight them at "the corner of Pierce Road and Ivorydown" in Flax Hill includes what some might see as a fairly conventional Hawthorne invocation:

After ten minutes, we decided, with a mixture of disgust and relief, that Yellow Chalk Guy (or Girl) wasn't going to show, and we were ready to leave when three hefty boys from the eleventh grade showed up.  These three didn't take lunch money; they were less predictable than that.  They might stop you and give you a stash of comic books, or they might rip up your homework.  We knew their names, but never said them in case it made them appear.  One of them was directly descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter; that one's mother had mentioned it at one of Grammy Olivia's coffee hours.  Mom says everybody immediately began to feel oppressed by their humble backgrounds because they'd forgotten (or didn't know) that anyone who's descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne is also a descendant of John Hathorne, the Salem judge who put just about as many innocent people to death as he could, so was it any wonder that Hawthorne was so good at describing what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night. (182-183)

Bird's mom is Boy, and she and everyone in her family knows a lot about "what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night," but she doesn't know that Bird and Louis are soon "caught in a circle of sniggering kids, without a single one of our so-called friends in sight," or that "the eleventh grader with the witch-hunter's blood," as Bird describes him, becomes the group's literal ring-leader, counseling "Patience, my friends, patience," as he refuses to allow the two friends to leave (183).  Fortunately, before they try to fight their way free, Grammy Olivia breaks the circle, leading Bird to reflect:

It put me in awe of Grammy Olivia's Saturday morning coffee hour, because that was part of the reason we went in peace--everyone's mother, aunt, grandmother, or great-aunt goes to Grammy Olivia's coffee hour.  Also Gee-Pa Gerald regularly plays golf with the Worcester's chief of police, et cetera.  Also Grammy Olivia's tone of voice offers you ten seconds to do as she says or the rest of your life to be sincerely sorry that you didn't. (184)

I won't go any further into this scene right now, because unpeeling some of its layers would give away too much of the characters' back stories and entanglements to avoid spoilers, but trust me that Hawthornean themes of family, descent, inheritance, and guilt invoked by this scene are at the heart of Oyeyemi's novel--in quite surprising and revealing ways.

And these themes carry over into the relationship between Bird and her older half-sister Snow, whose correspondence starts not long after this scene and eventually moves into trading stories (literally twice-told tales) about a figure they call La Belle Capuchine.  I'll skip the one Bird writes to Snow, which has a distinctly Chesnutt feel to it, and jump straight to the Snow's story, which might be read as a rewriting of "Rappaccini's Daughter," with a twist of "Earth's Holocaust":

La Belle Capuchine has a wonderful garden filled with sweet-smelling flowers of every color.  She plants all the flowers herself, and she tends them herself, and every single one of those flowers is poisonous enough to kill anyone who comes close to them, let alone picks one.  La Belle Capuchine is beautiful like her flowers, but she's a poison damsel.  She eats and drinks poison all day long and she can rot a person's insides just by looking them in the eye.  I don't think Mother Nature likes us much.  If she did, she wouldn't make the things that are deadliest so beautiful.  For instance, why does fire dance so bright and so wild?  It isn't fair.

So far La Belle Capuchine has ended the world seventeen times.  She does it by making her poison garden bigger and bigger until it's the only thing in the world.  After that she takes a nap.  But the world starts again from the beginning.  And every time a few days after the new beginning somebody comes across a beautiful flower and picks it.  That wakes La Belle Capuchine up, and then there's hell to pay.  I think we'd better get used to La Belle Capuchine, since she'll never be defeated. 

The End. (230)

Again, to close-read either this story or Snow's reading of it or Snow's reading of Bird's La Belle Capuchine story would be to give too much away to readers who haven't yet had a chance to enjoy Boy, Snow, Bird and its revelations for themselves.  So of course it's even more premature to use that close-reading to explore how and to what ends Oyeyemi is re-envisioning Hawthorne texts as much as she is re-envisioning "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty."

Consider this post, then, a promise to continue that exploration later!

I'm Baaaaaaack!!

Hey folks, my apologies for the radio silence for most of the spring semester.  I decided to keep a low profile after helping organize Fredonia's answer to National Adjunct Walk-Out Day for a variety of reasons:

• I was teaching over 30 novels, graphic novels, short story collections, and other books this semester and meeting regularly with students on their writing and other projects, so keeping up that pace required me to sleep whenever I could (yep, I'm really in my mid-40s now!);
• negotiations over the appointment, reappointment, and promotion of contingent faculty at Fredonia went into an even higher gear and I didn't want to come close to skirting our ground rules of keeping negotiations confidential while they were ongoing;
• thanks to an extension, the first draft of a  group-authored article on university-level shared governance I was working on got submitted almost in time;
• the election/appointment process for Chairperson of my department ground away this academic year and I chose to devote my time to meeting individually with all my colleagues after my department held an election and recommended me to the Dean to prepare for the transition and assemble my leadership team;
• I got appointed to a Title IX and Sexual Violence Task Force and an Academic Affairs Review Committee, both of which were (and are) vitally important and added to my time commitment;
• my younger daughter broke her forearm in two places on the same day my Nissan Versa's engine melted on the Thruway;
• I tried keeping up with as many new graphic novels as I could (including Saga, The Unwritten, Black Science, Morning Glories...) along with classics I missed by Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, and Kurt Busiek....
• I tried keeping up some semblance of an exercise schedule and family life outside work....

No wonder I needed to sleep so much!  But it all came together.  My students kicked much butt this semester, particularly in my Major Writers course on Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.  Negotiations concluded successfully and our new Handbook on Appointment, Reappointment, and Promotion goes into effect 8/1/15 (on which much more later).  The President appointed me Chairperson and the department approved new minors and restructuring of the major.  Imoto's cast came off and she's working hard to get full range of motion back in the joints of her left arm.  I might even find out soon if Nissan USA will replace an engine that didn't even make it to 50,000 miles in just over 6 years, despite consistent and quality service from my Nissan dealer in WNY.  Plus, I won an election to become the new University Faculty Senator for Fredonia, representing the campus on the SUNY University Faculty Senate and returning to the Fredonia University Senate's Executive Committee.

I'll close this post with my election statement:

I ask for your vote in this election for University Faculty Senator. I welcome the opportunity to represent Fredonia in Albany as a voting member of the SUNY University Faculty Senate. I am prepared to shoulder the official and unofficial responsibilities that accompany such a privilege. The former are defined in Fredonia’s and the UFS’s Bylaws. The latter can be learned only by experience.

As a former Chairperson of Fredonia’s University Senate, I have attended multiple UFS plenaries and UFS-sponsored conferences in the last seven years. I know many Campus Governance Leaders, Senators, and current and former members of the Governance Committee--and the UFS Executive Committee. And they know me.

They know that I can be counted on to do my homework, to pull my weight, to step up to the plate, to listen to and engage my colleagues with respect and care, to remain calm and constructive in the midst of chaos and controversy, to develop reasoned positions on complex issues, to generate innovative solutions to pressing problems, to use persuasion, diplomacy, and charm to move the body and its leaders to speak and act on behalf of SUNY’s mission and faculty, and, above all, to do what it takes to make shared governance and public universities work--better and better.

They know that I wouldn’t become Fredonia’s UFS representative only to stay on the sidelines. They would expect more from someone...

• ...who challenged a newly-appointed Chancellor to consider incorporating into her campaign for the power of SUNY Christopher Newfield’s case in Unmaking the Public University (2011) that robust state investments in public higher education were crucial to America’s post-WWII prosperity and expanding middle class.
• ...who pushed a then-President of United University Professions to risk opening a window of opportunity for strategic partnerships with new SUNY leadership.
• ...who encouraged UFS leaders to stake out common-ground positions that could bring all the organizations representing SUNY together to change Albany politics.
• ...who helped upgrade Fredonia’s Bylaws and helped Fredonia win SUNY’s first-ever Shared Governance Award.

If you don’t know me, I invite you to examine my c.v., web page, academic blog, and twitterfeed. If you don’t know what to expect from me, I invite you to find out from the Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee (on which I served from 2008-2010 and 2011-2014), the Executive Board of the Fredonia Chapter of UUP (1999-2006, 2009-up), and the English department (1998-up; Chairperson as of this fall).

If you know me, I hope you share my confidence that my decades of experience in department-level and university-level shared governance, as well as chapter- and state-level union service, will serve you well in--and keep you well-informed about--system-wide shared governance. I hope you trust me to bring your views and voices not only to the UFS but also to the Chancellor and Chairman of the SUNY Board of Trustees. I hope you’ll make me your advocate for affordable quality public higher education in Albany.

NAAW Reminder: Survey Wednesday

Survey Wednesday National Adjunct Action/Awareness Week at Fredonia 2/25/15
Please help the Contingent Faculty Subcommittee kick off their survey of contingent faculty at Fredonia, which gathers data on contingent working conditions and perceptions of campus culture to discern work patterns, compensation, working conditions, governance participation, and integration into the life of the campus.  It should help us all better understand the goals, needs, and desires of colleagues and instructors on appointments that are not eligible for tenure at Fredonia.
Dear Contingent Colleagues,

As you know, New York State law prohibits our participation in any job action or strike, so the organizers of Fredonia’s contribution to National Adjunct Action/Awareness Week wanted to come up with a constructive way to honor National Adjunct Walkout Day without participating in it.  Instead of walking out--something many adjuncts who aren’t represented by a union and are shut out of governance of their universities may well be doing today--why not provide key information to your union leaders and governance representatives so that they may better serve you?  Instead of risking your job, why not help us improve your working life?

This survey is for faculty on contingent appointments at Fredonia only.  It may be filled out any time before 5 pm on Friday, March 13, 2015.  It can be found at

https://docs.google.com/a/fredonia.edu/forms/d/1UXgV9NkPnRbRJNMDAPzWBITYNtoH-6as8ILy4dW_2j4/viewform?usp=send_form

This survey is anonymous and individual responses will NEVER be shared.  Only aggregate data will be made available.

Please take a small part of your day today--or any day before Spring Break--to help make a difference at Fredonia.  Thanks,

--John Arnold
Chair, Contingent Faculty Subcommittee

--Bruce Simon
Officer for Contingents

NAAW Reminder: Open Letter Tuesday

Open Letter Tuesday
National Adjunct Action/Awareness Week at Fredonia
2/24/15

It’s time to get personal! Please post on your office or dormitory door or bulletin board a statement on what National Adjunct Action/Awareness Week means to you, and consider sending it to The Leader or The Observer and/or posting it on a blog or other social media.
The personal experiences of adjuncts are too often dismissed or ignored completely by tenure-stream faculty and administrators.  Here is an opportunity to express the value of these colleagues to academic institutions.   Many disciplines regard ethnography and qualitative research as valuable tools to explore life experiences and valuable contributions to the world at large; personal stories and reflections can supplement statistics and allow for understanding and identification.  Quantification of contingency is important, to be sure, but so is thinking through the particular structures of feeling that arise from working in a system of higher education increasingly reliant on contingent labor, whatever your place(s) in that system.

Many contingent faculty have decided there is great value in sharing their stories and views.  Some, like James Hoff, Amy Lynch-Biniek, and Elizabeth Salaam, have been doing it on their own.  Others have responded to calls for papers (cf. Hybrid Pedagogy) or calls for testimony (cf. “The Just in Time Professor” [compiled by the Democratic Staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in January 2014]).

There are many organizations collecting such stories even now:

• Adjunct Action
• The Adjunct Crisis
• Adjunct Stories
• Conditionally Accepted
• New Faculty Majority

So why not take the opportunity to write a short piece that might take on a life of its own after being posted on your office or dormitory door or bulletin board, on your blog or Facebook page?  Why not explore what it means to be a student?  Or a tenured faculty member?  Or a contingent faculty member?  Why not consider the pros and cons of National Adjunct Action/Awareness Week relative to tomorrow’s National Adjunct Walkout Day?  Beyond better understanding the system, why not help the Fredonia community consider what will change it?

NAAW Reminder: Scarlet Letter Monday at Fredonia

Scarlet Letter Monday 
National Adjunct Action/Awareness Week at Fredonia
2/23/15
We are encouraging everyone on campus
to make and wear a badge like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter,
using your A to signify Adjunct/Ally/Awareness/Appreciation
all week—and beyond.
What Is an Adjunct?
An adjunct is a member of the faculty at a college or university on a contingent appointment type that is not eligible for tenure—an institution that guarantees academic freedom, due process rights, and peer review.  The implication from most dictionary definitions that adjuncts are unnecessary supplements does not apply to the growing number of faculty on contingent appointments today.  Organizations such as the American Association of University Professors, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, and New Faculty Majority, among many others, have been sounding the alarm that roughly 75% of all faculty appointments in the U.S. are contingent.  For more information and background, please see:

AAUP’s overview (2015): http://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency
AAUP's background facts (2015): http://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts
CAW's portrait (2012): http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf
CAW Members’ Policy Recommendations (2015): http://www.academicworkforce.org/statements.html
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 (2015): http://www.newfacultymajority.info/equity/

What Are Adjuncts’ Lives Like in SUNY?
Over decades of collective bargaining with the state of New York, United University Professions has made progress in improving the terms and conditions of employment and access to benefits for SUNY faculty on contingent appointments (see the latest Agreement for details), but there is still a long way to go.  Fredonia is one of the few campuses in the system to have set a university-wide floor for starting compensation for part-time contingent faculty (others include Cortland and Oswego).  UUP’s New Paltz chapter (http://www.uuphost.org/newpaltzwp/) has become a national leader in highlighting the value of contingent faculty members’ contributions to their students’ learning and success with their Mayday $5K Campaign and October 2013 forum on contingent employment.


If you see someone wearing a Scarlet A this week outside of their classroom,
please ask them why!

Fredonia's National Adjunct Awareness/Action Week Overview

February 23-27 is National Adjunct Action/Awareness Week.  To learn about the projects organized by members of the Contingent Employment Advisory Group of Fredonia's United University Professions chapter (a union body) and the Contingent Faculty Subcommittee of our Faculty and Professional Affairs Committee (a governance body), along with a firm caution against participating in any job action or strike associated with National Adjunct Walkout Day on February 25, please visit our overview.

We'll be sending out further information about each project each day of the week!

--John Arnold (Chair, Contingent Faculty Subcommittee) and Bruce Simon (Officer for Contingents)

Fredonia's Got Talent!

My students in Fantasy Fiction and Novels and Tales did some amazing work throughout the semester, and particularly at the end.  Unfortunately, most of them chose not to do web authoring projects, so I can't share their work here.  Fortunately, a good number did; here are links to their work:

• Alexandra Atseff, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone:  Book to Film [blog]
• Aubrey Cunningham, Fantasy Fiction [blog]
• Halie Degnan, Alternate Worlds [web site]
• Paige Jones, Fairy Tale Seamstress [blog on making of fairy tale dress for character in her fairy tale revision of Beauty and the Beast]
• Jessica Krajacic and Skylar Pratt, Fantasy Fiction and the Harry Potter Generation [blog]
• Kyle Roof, Harry Potter vs. LotR vs. GoT--Fantasy Fiction Club [live-action on youtube]
• Rhiannon Vercant, A Neapolitan Cinderella in Oz [animation on vimeo]
• Ashley Weinheimer, History of Magic School [blog]
• Kristal Zarczynski, Fantasy Blog [blog]

Please check 'em out while you're waiting for me to finish grading!

[cross-posted at Mostly Harmless and sf@SF]

Western NY State Legislators to Discuss SUNY's Prospects in New York State Budget at Fredonia

Fredonia, N.Y. - 21 November 2014 - Fresh from their successful reelection campaigns, New York State Senator Catharine Young (R,C,I-Olean) and Assemblymen Joseph Giglio (R,C,I-Gowanda), Andrew Goodell (R,C,I-Chautauqua) and Sean Ryan (D-Buffalo, Lackawanna, Hamburg) will be converging on the Fredonia campus on Friday, December 5, 2014, to participate in a panel discussion sponsored by the Fredonia Chapter of United University Professions.

Fredonia community members, students, faculty, professionals, administrators, and staff will come to McEwen 209 from 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m. to hear the panelists’ views on SUNY’s prospects during the 2015 New York State budget process. They will address such questions as:

• What do you see as the role of public higher education in the state of New York?
• What do you see as the role of the New York State Legislature with respect to public higher education?
• How is SUNY viewed by your colleagues?
• What kinds of investments in this generation of undergraduate students is the New York State Legislature prepared to make?
• What can students, parents, faculty, professionals, staff, and administrators do to help ensure that public dollars go to public higher education, both for operations and the capital budget?

This event is free and open to the public.