Campus Faculty Association Blog

A Case for Solidarity

2011-11-16T05:58:00.001-06:00

I just finished Michele Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2011) which is an eye-opening account of how the American judicial system perpetuates racism. Few, if any, can read this book without feeling enraged at the systemic discrimination that targets people of color as criminals and puts them in a hard-to-break cycle of imprisonment, poverty and despair. In addition to shocking statistics and heart-wrenching examples, Alexander points to the use of “divide and conquer,” as a successful (elite) strategy for undermining opposition and thwart solidarity across color lines. Ever since Reconstruction, if not earlier, powerful interests have used “white supremacy” as a strategy for preventing poor and working class people from forming class based coalitions. Often in exchange of a few token privileges, poor whites have been encouraged to prioritize solidarity across race over solidarity across class.

So what, you may rightfully ask, does this have to do with academia and the CFA’s causes? At first glance it seems presumptuous, even absurd to compare the academic fight for self-governance with those over institutionalized racism because the material outcome is so different. Nevertheless, at the core, the two causes share a common denominator.

Much like poor whites, professors are encouraged to consider their allegiances to lie with the “managerial” classes and reject forming coalitions with colleagues of lower professional rank (i.e. instructional faculty, academic professionals and graduate students) and other workers on campus. Universities insist on keeping a distinction between non-tenure and tenure track faculty even if their educational background and job descriptions are the same, giving the latter a sense of “superiority.” In a recent article, AAPU President Cary Nelson proposes to grant all long-term college teachers tenure at the percentage appointments they currently have. (“From the President: Reforming Faculty Identity,” Academe Online, July-August, 2011). This, he convincingly argues, would lead to a better educational environment for students and professors alike. The fact that this would create a single class of tenure-track professors with common concerns and the power to challenge their employers is obviously not lost on university administrations. Thus, it is in the latter’s interest that the often arbitrary distinction between college teachers’ job classifications is kept intact and that the tenure-track individuals are flattered into considering themselves superior.

Ideally, our solidarity should reach beyond academia, to include workers of all ranks. In a recent issue of Journal of International Communication Victor Pickard warns us not to view educational labor issues too narrowly but to place them in their proper social political context and make the appropriate connections. There is no denying that tenured academics enjoy a relatively privileged lifestyle. Their salaries and benefits are (still) better than those of most workers, on campus or elsewhere, but they increasingly share the growing concerns over work-place issues, wages and benefits with other workers, be they white or blue collared. Although a professor might make far more than the office support staff, her work-related concerns are still far closer to that of the staff worker than to the top 1 percent of income earners in America. “What befalls public school teachers and public-sector unions seems distant from our daily routines. But we should see these conflicts as data points of a larger pattern: the systematic impoverishment of public services and civil society institutions in tandem with the bolstering of corporate power,” states Pickard.

Our capital is largely of cultural value which puts us in a unique situation. We can use our knowledge and skills as outreach tools – letting others know that we belong to the 99 percent of Americans who share a common concern over a long list of eroding social goods and services. Our work-related obligations might be different from those of grade school teachers, social workers and firefighters but that does not keep our jobs safe or our benefits protected. Efforts to “divided and conquer” must be rejected to ensure that we and the rest of the 99 percent stand a chance of saving civil society.

SB 512 Threatens U of I Pensions

2011-11-09T12:51:00.000-06:00

On Tuesday a state House committee approved a pensions bill which contains a number of measures which seriously downgrade the pensions of U of I faculty and other state employees. Among these are:

*Creating a three tier pension system at the U of I which would reduce benefits for new hires
*Increase pension deductions for U of I faculty from the current 8% to 15% as from 2013. This would apply to anyone who wants the present, defined benefit pension plan. This rate could go as high as 17% after 2017.

This is a major attack on public employee pensions and committee approval means the bill can now be voted on by both houses of the legislature. This could happen as soon as today. The State University Annuitants' Association (SUAA), the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Education Association all oppose the bill. To read the SUAA press release on the bill click here. We urge you to contact your elected representative and make your voices heard.

A Story that Needs Changing

2011-11-04T14:05:00.011-05:00

On Monday, October 24, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted “The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in The American University,” a lecture by Christopher Newfield, professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Below is a post he has provided for the Campus Faculty Association Blog. His official blog can be found here.

"A Story that Needs Changing"

Public universities are being endangered by a false consensus about their problems and solutions. The consensus puts every academic activity in an austerity box, which makes it much harder for universities to imagine the educational upgrade our society and economy need.

I’ll offer two examples, and the first occurred last week in the Levis Faculty Center on the UI –Urbana campus. My comment here is not about what actually happened in the room. It is about the story arc that was pieced together by a reporter – I assume with impressive professional skill --from statements that seem to have been made.

On October 25th, the News-Gazette published an article about a faculty meeting with the new University of Illinois system president Michael Hogan. One goal was to discuss Hogan’s centralization plan, which would among other things create a single admissions system for the University’s three very different campuses – Urbana-Champaign, a mature and internationally distinguished public research university, Chicago, an important urban campus, and a regional campus at Springfield. It appeared that the enrollment centralization plan had not yet been presented to the chancellor of the Urbana campus or to faculty representatives. Faculty were worried that the plan was a done deal already decided by the new president and the Board of Trustees. The possible implications were clear: a major point of authority would be taken away from the campuses. Perhaps the Urban-Champaign campus would be leveled down by administrative means.

According to the story, when faculty expressed concerns about this lack of consultation, president Hogan asked if they wanted to go back to the days when UI was under investigation for corrupt admissions practices. He noted that state law “makes it perfectly clear the university is a single, common entity with a single seal, single president... single budget,” although, he conceded, the system has three “somewhat distinct campuses.” He added, “The president is the president.” When UI history professor Mark Steinberg told Hogan, “there’s a growing worry this is a board of trustees we have no influence over,” Hogan replied that the board is “incomparably better than its predecessors” and that they are engaging more with faculty than before. Hogan’s position appeared to be that the faculty had nothing to complain about, and that concerns about consultation could be laid to rest by invoking presidential authority.

At another point, Hogan noted that faculty would be asked to play a “big role” in identifying “programs that makes us distinctive and distinguished.” The reporter then cited Hogan saying that “this is a big university and it was built in an age of abundance . . . Now we’re living in an age of scarcity.” The faculty therefore would be helping the university “to decide whether it can afford to sustain all of its programs.”

The article does not mention anyone who described the practice and principles of shared governance at the University of Illinois. Nor does the article mention anyone that, on the question of academic programs, noted high rates of existing campus innovation or who called on the president and the Board to support upgrading educational quality.

Here we have a missing narrative, one that explains what has actually been going on in universities.

Faculty and staff struggle in a time of cuts to maintain quality, and students struggle to learn in larger classes with less help. Tuition goes up as public funding goes down, and yet, in this accurate story, faculty, staff, and students continue to innovate and try to upgrade with decreasing help from political, business, and academic leaders.

The News-Gazette article instead provided a familiar script. The presidential figure, Michael Hogan, affirms a constitutional basis for a unitary executive, places faculty outside of that, defines the era uniquely as a time of cuts, suggests that faculty had not sufficiently adapted to this plain reality, and defines their role as cutting their own programs. The narrative does not err by raising the issue of program changes, which would normally include elimination and consolidation. The problem is the false tale through which these changes are presented.

Here the executive is the bulwark against people who deny fiscal reality. Full governing partnership with the faculty would implicitly jeopardize this.

The News-Gazette article exists in ecology of such articles. The national discourse is the fuzzy sum of these inputs. As it happens, the next day the Los Angeles Times covered the new College Board report on tuition increases, where other standard elements were introduced. The headline was “California leads nation in escalation of college costs.” The piece began, “Steep funding cuts to higher education in California and elsewhere were significant factors in pushing average tuition and fees up 8.3% at four-year public colleges and universities nationwide this fall.” The causal claim here was explicit: states cut funding, and then universities raise tuition.

Lest readers believe that universities are being hurt by shortsighted legislators through no fault of their own, the narrative locates an expert named Patrick Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a reputable think tank based in San Jose, California. Callan told the reporter that the real issue is cost containment: “Universities still resist efficiencies, especially in adopting new technology and persuading research faculty to teach more classes. `There is a real lack of serious attention to productivity and innovation,’ he said.”

This article offers an operative back-story that animates the conflict in the News Gazette narrative without being present in it.

The claim is that faculty and staff not only do not innovate but are opposed to innovation. Sadly, the innovations they oppose, according to this tale, are exactly the ones that would save money while at the same time, through higher teaching loads, help students. This narrative offers the back-story that explains why public universities now require the strong executive that Michael Hogan came to UI to be.

Taken together, these two newspaper articles reinforce the current consensus on public higher education. Here are its key elements, including several that are not part of these two particular articles:

• Everyone agrees that higher education is a private good.
• As a result public funding is never coming back.
• Therefore we must give up on that and orient public universities toward downsized programs, relentless cost cutting, and higher tuition.
• Faculty and staff will resist all of these, so a university’s senior managers must be given the authority to impose efficiencies.
• These efficiencies must be enforced through productivity assessment, including bibliometric analytics for faculty promotions, educational efficiency as measured by degree throughput, and other Taylorist practices.
• None of this hurts educational quality, which will instead improve through tougher management.

These elements form a vicious narrative cycle, and for decades it has had the real-world effect of reducing resources for public education relative to the private elites (p 237). Faculty members need to redouble their efforts to fix this narrative, for the sake of research and teaching alike.

Introducing Our New Blog Editor, Inger Stole

2011-10-31T13:34:00.001-05:00

We are introducing a new blog editor, Inger Stole, who will be collaborating with Susan Davis in keeping us posted with CFA news.

Inger is a member of the CFA Communications Committee, and she not only has great ideas for writing about working and learning conditions at UIUC, but she’ll be doing interviews with faculty at unionized campuses.

Inger is Associate Professor of Communication at UIUC, and she is an expert on the history of advertising, war-time propaganda, and consumer culture. Welcome, Inger.

My past few days have been spent in the academic blogosphere where good news is a rarity, at best. Tales of expanded workloads, shrinking benefits, expanded class sizes, and elimination of “cost inefficient” courses and programs seem to dominate the discourse. All of these issues seem inter-linked in a race to the bottom for our working conditions and our students’ learning experiences. Demanding work conditions and stresses that traditionally have been part of adjunct professors’ burden are now trickling up to assistant professors. Those in more established careers have been less affected by the new “austerity measures” but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that tenure is a protection against future administrative quests for efficiency.

It is true that in Illinois, with its grievous economic situation, we never seem to be able to offset the dwindling income from state and federal sources. The administration is eager to show the Board of Trustees and Springfield that it CAN cut its way to a leaner University. The question is for whom and for what purpose. Programs that are less attractive to outside corporate funders are particularly affected by the ongoing “austerity measures” while the administration itself seems to have missed (or not read) its own memo about saving money.

As faculty members emphasized at the recent meeting with the President and Chancellor, many are frustrated by the lack of fiscal and decision-making transparency. We can only guess about the administration’s ultimate goals, but it looks as if the tough economic times have given it a golden opportunity to change the university’s future in much more privatized, corporate direction. Surely I am not alone is having noticed that no one from the administration promises better times, improved benefits, and better working conditions once the “economic crisis” is over. As Norman Denzin said at the faculty meeting, the administration offers no vision or dream for the public university, no big idea we can hang on to about education’s role in a good society. But I think we the faculty can offer one.

Only faculty, be they tenure track or non-tenure track, know what it is like to teach at this university. We are the closest to the students and their learning experience. It is up to us to push the academic administration to join a dialogue about public higher education and its future.

So, I hope this blog can be a place of meaningful discussion about learning and working at the UIUC, and what we can do to improve it. Techno-fixes in the form of “I-clickers” and other ways of digitally managing students are not the answer. Neither do we need to commission new (and costly) image campaigns. The people of Illinois already hold their public university in high esteem. Thus, we need to protect the institution and improve it through our own ways of taking back responsibility for its shape and direction, and make it financially affordable for students to attend.

What is happening in your school or department? What does that mean to your students? How would you improve it? What are you doing in the classroom or laboratory or community that helps your students learn, rather than merely pass assessments?

And specifically, I want to ask: what difference a union would make to faculty at all levels, and to the University as a whole?

Illinois Education Labor Relations Board Refuses UI's Application for a Stay

2011-10-24T10:40:00.003-05:00

Big News from Chicago!

The Illinois Education Labor Relations Board (IELRB) last week refused the UI Administration’s request for a stay in collective bargaining and contract negotiations with UIC Faculty United, the Chicago campus union that was certified last spring.

The board wrote:

We find that granting a stay in this case would be contrary to the public policy that supports a duty to bargain. In addition, we find that there is not a reasonable likelihood that the Employer will succeed on the merits. Therefore, the Employer has not shown “good cause” for granting a stay.

Congratulations to all who are plugging away for a contract that includes tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty! This is really good news. There is a duty to bargain.

What's Wrong with this Picture?

2011-10-13T08:30:00.005-05:00

"What's Wrong with this Picture?" is one in a continuing series of posts about academic life. Here, from Claire Potter's wonderful blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education, is a description of the work life of a new, tenure track professor...somewhere in Missouri, we think. What's wrong with this picture?

It was my dream to get a tenure-track job. However, I am only in my second year in a humanities department and my dream has become a nightmare. The semester is not even half over and I am exhausted. My classes are over enrolled by about fifteen students. I am behind on my grading: last week my students asked when they would get their papers back and I heard myself saying that I had left them on a bus and that the Transit Authority Lost and Found was closed for Rosh Hashanah. I barely have time to review the reading I have assigned my students. Confession? Sometimes I don’t even read it.

Every time I think I have protected a little free time someone schedules a meeting: worse, our university now uses Meeting Maker, so I get an email informing me that a meeting has already been scheduled and I am expected to attend. Not infrequently, I have already made a plan for that time — seeing a students, meeting with a colleague — and that something has to be rescheduled into whatever diminishing time is left in the week.

I don’t have time to go to the gym, or to pack my own lunch — two things I swore I would do this fall to maintain my mental health and not gain back the weight I lost over the summer. I see talks and events come and go and don’t do any of them because I am already scheduled to do something else or I am so tired all I want to do is go home. Worse, I have so much to do that I am not sleeping well and I forget things constantly. Keeping up with my writing? Ha! I have deadlines coming due that I can’t even imagine I will keep.

My partner, who moved with me so I could take this job, seems to think I’m not much fun either. Help!

Wow. What's wrong with this picture?

Friday at Noon

2011-10-13T08:27:00.001-05:00

Looking forward to Harriet Murav's talk on unionization, Friday at noon. Thai food available, too!

Ruin and Rebirth: Save the Date for Chris Newfield's Talk October 24

2011-10-09T13:59:00.003-05:00

The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in the American University

A talk by Christopher Newfield

Sponsored by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

October 24, 2011, Levis Center, 3rd Floor, 8pm

Why is the American university system in crisis? A central reason is the financial pressure put on colleges and universities by the "innovation economy," pressure which has led to rising student debt, less personalized instruction, and growing research funding deficits. The lecture shows that the leading response at public universities to this pressure -- large tuition increases and other attempts to replace public with private funds -- has made the budget problem worse. Now that we are stuck with a failing public university funding model that no one would have designed on purpose, how do we fix it? The bulk of the talk proposes as a solution a new public purpose (and funding structure) for universities, one enabling mass access to new individual capabilities for a "post-innovation society."

Christopher Newfield is professor of English at UC Santa Barbara and author of Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle-Class (Harvard, 2008). He maintains the terrific Remaking the University blog at http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/.

He is one of the most insightful current critics of the structure and prospects of American public higher education.

For background readings by Newfield you may go to the Unit for Criticism’s website: http://criticism.english.illinois.edu/2011%20Fall%20pages/Newfield_Readings.htm

The event is free and open to the public.

Coming Up: CFA President Harriet Murav Speaks on Unionization

2011-10-09T10:33:00.002-05:00

CFA President Harriet Murav will speak at the University YMCA at noon, Friday, October 14.

Her talk is titled “Verticalization and Unionization: What's Better for Education?”

Professor Murav explores “the national trend in university administrative practices, which rely on vertical models of assessment and outcomes, numerical evaluations, and other policies that fail to take into account the educational significance of face to face dialogue among students and professors, professors and their colleagues, and students with students.”

Unionization of the faculty offers the possibility of sounder ways of assessing teaching and learning in higher education, she argues.

This talk is part of the Friday Forum at the YMCA. Free and open to the public.

GEO Wins Tuition Waiver Decision

2011-10-04T18:00:00.002-05:00

The Campus Faculty Association congratulates the GEO on their victory preserving tuition waivers and affordable graduate education at the U of I.

CFA would like to see less money spent on avoiding contractual obligations, and more attention paid to the high-stakes hard work that grad employees do on our campus.

The following, from a GEO press release October 3, lays out the issue and the describes the independent arbitrator's decision.

"The Graduate Employees' Organization at UIUC has won a landmark arbitration ruling in a contract dispute with UIUC administrators over tuition waivers.

An independent arbitrator has ruled that an attempt by University of Illinois officials to reduce tuition waivers for some incoming graduate employees represents a clear violation of the contract between the union and the Illinois Board of Trustees.

Tuition waivers are a benefit of employment, which represent no cost to the University. Preventing reduction of tuition waivers will preserve quality of education at Illinois, organizers say, while protecting vital labor standards.

In November 2009, over 1,000 Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) members went on strike to prevent the reduction or elimination of tuition waivers for graduate employees. This was the fifth largest work stoppage in the United States in 2009. They GEO won contract language protecting tuition waivers for current and future Teaching and Graduate Assistants at UIUC.

In the Summer of 2010, the GEO learned of a policy change affecting tuition waivers for incoming graduate employees in several departments in the College of Fine and Applied Arts (FAA). Effective Fall of 2010, incoming graduate employees in these departments were no longer granted waivers for out-of-state tuition. Even with temporary scholarships, many Fine and Applied Arts graduate employees, earning between $7,000.00 and $9,000.00 per academic year, were left with additional fees totaling up to $1,000.00.

This change in tuition waiver policy was a clear violation of the GEO's contract with the Illinois Board of Trustees. In 2010, the GEO filed a grievance alleging a contract violation, while GEO members launched a public awareness campaign that included email and letter drives, communication with elected officials, testimony to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, and other events.

By attempting to charge incoming graduate employees tuition in clear violation of its contract with teaching and graduate assistants, administrators have cost the University of Illinois as much as $100,000.00. This is yet another example of flawed budget priorities at UIUC, where the most vulnerable members of the University community are frequently asked to shoulder the burdens of budget shortfalls.

After an arbitration hearing in mid-July, an independent arbitrator on September 20 declared the University's tuition waiver policy in violation of its contract with the GEO. The arbitrator ordered the U of I administration to make whole any harm done to graduate employees.

The arbitration victory marks a significant achievement for GEO members. According to GEO communications officer Rodrigo Pacheco-McEvoy, "not only does the ruling secure tuition waivers as a benefit of employment for graduate employees, which is absolutely necessary to maintain accessibility to public higher education at UIUC; it also helps protect the arts from budgetary cutbacks."

While the GEO has much cause to celebrate, the story of tuition waivers and the arts at UIUC is not over. The GEO is entering another bargaining year. According to GEO Co-President Miriam Larsen, "our members are fully committed to protecting the tuition waivers that make a high quality graduate education accessible to a diverse student body.” "

More information can also be found on the website at uigeo.org

Ralph Martire Speaks on the Future of Learning at the Y on Friday, September 30.

2011-09-27T11:26:00.003-05:00

Ralph Martire, Executive Director, Center for Tax and Budget Accountability,gave a great CFA-sponsored talk on pension funding last year. He's back this Friday (9/30) at the YMCA on Wright Street to talk about school funding and tax structure. Ralph is one of Illinois' best-informed experts on taxation and its effects on public education. He's accessible and interesting to talk with. Hope to see you there at 12 noon!

His talk "Improving Equity in School Funding," is part of the Friday Forum series, noon, September 30, University YMCA, 1001 S. Wright Street, Champaign.

The Fall 2011 Friday Forum Series "The Future of Learning; Is Public Education Under Siege?" will explore the relationship between education and society with special attention to the challenges of improving education in an era where budgets, politics, and ideology are central to the debate.

For more information see http://www.universityymca.org/friday_forum/

Contract for Lecturers at Eastern Michigan

2011-09-25T13:59:00.005-05:00

From AnnArbor.com

September 22, 2011

-- For Eastern Michigan University part-time lecturer Kay McGowan, it finally feels like her employer of 14 years is listening.

“Our voice has been silent for too long,” McGowan said of EMU’s part-time faculty, who teach 29 percent of classes on campus. “Now we have a say in some of the situations that affect us on campus.”

McGowan’s comments come after the EMU Board of Regents voted Tuesday to approve the first-ever contract agreement with part-time faculty.

About 800 contingent lecturers are represented by the new contract, which was ratified last week by the adjunct bargaining unit of the EMU Federation of Teachers. The contract increased and formalized pay and benefits for adjunct professors.

After 14 years of teaching anthropology part time at EMU, McGowan says the contract brings welcome stability.....-- Read the whole story at AnnArbor.com

http://www.annarbor.com/news/education/emu-board-of-regents-approve-first-ever-union-contract-for-contingent-faculty/

University of Illinois Spends Millions on Outside Counsel to Resist Collective Bargaining

2011-09-19T10:04:00.005-05:00

The University of Illinois continues to spend millions of dollars resisting unionization and collective bargaining.

Our unionized colleagues at Chicago, UIC United, have obtained financial and other records revealing that the University administration has spent millions of dollars over the last decade resisting unionization. The records were made available through a Freedom of Information Act filing.

In the past ten years, the UI administration has spent $3,282,414.14 on outside counsel costs for labor issues. This averages to over $300,000 per year. At the same time, UI has many on-staff lawyers who are paid very well, several of whom are assigned to deal with labor issues.

In the month of May 2011 alone the administration paid $24,583.75 to Clark Baird Smith LLP to try and defeat The UIC United campaign, which followed the legal process by filing a majority interest petition with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board [IELRB]. U of I continues to resist entering into a legally mandated collective bargaining with UIC United.

On September 15, 2011 the IELRB supported the ruling of an administrative judge and reaffirmed UIC United's right to exist and to represent tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty. But the administration has said it will continue to pursue its appeal through the courts. We can only imagine how much more expensive it will be to carry out that threat, not before a labor relations board, but in the courts of the state of Illinois. And what if they lose in Illinois? Will they go to the federal courts?

Faculty here at UI Urbana-Champaign wonder how that three million plus dollars might have been used to upgrade classrooms, maintain equipment, avoid furloughs, provide raises, lower or maintain student tuition, and bolster staffing support. $300,000 a year could go a long way toward improving the UI working environment and our students' learning environment, here and in Chicago.

President Hogan says he has a long history of working with unions. We hope that’s true. The UI’s resistance to UIC United makes us wonder.

The Campus Faculty Association is committed to transparency and wise use of public funds. We think unions can strengthen the faculty voice in the running of the university and fulfilling its three missions: education, research and public service.

Many thanks to our UIC United colleagues for their efforts, and many congratulations on their big win. We’re all for you!

Campus Faculty Association
campusfacultyassoc@gmail.com

Our Fall Reception and Membership Meeting

2011-09-18T14:24:00.003-05:00

Campus Faculty Association Invites All Faculty to:

Come meet and share ideas with:

People who organized the victorious union campaign at UIC

Hear what's happening with CFA this fall and how you can be involved

Munchies from World Harvest, soft drinks and inspiration guaranteed.

Date: Wednesday, September 21st

Time: 5-7 p.m.

Place: University YMCA

1001 S. Wright St

Bring a Friend!

Ralph Martire Slide Show 4-14-11

2011-04-20T13:44:00.007-05:00

To view Ralph Martire's power point slides go to our wiki, by clicking here. His main point was that the problem with the $79 billion deficit in our pension fund is a revenue, not a spending problem. There is little fat to cut out of our state budget. The only way to solve the deficit problem is to bring Illinois up to speed in tax revenue. For more, see the website of Ralph's organization, the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability www.ctbaonline.org

Come to CFA Forum on Pensions: "Who's Got Your Back?" April 14, 4 p.m. at University YMCA, 1001 S. Wright Street

2011-03-09T11:42:00.005-06:00

Guest speaker will be Ralph Martire, Executive Director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability in Chicago. Mr Martire is an expert on pensions and the Illinois state budget. He is a regular columnist for the Sun-Times and a technical advisor on budget issues to the Illinois state legislature. He has written and spoken widely on Illinois’s budget crisis. In our forum he will discuss:

• The state of Illinois’ pension fund
• Why Illinois is not a high spending state
• Why Illinois is not a high taxing state
• What needs to be done to guarantee pensions

To hear his dynamite video, The Illinois Budget Crisis in Three Minutes click here.

CFA and Graduate Education by Harriet Murav, Professor of Slavic Studies and Member of CFA Executive Committee, February 16, 2009

2011-02-20T22:42:00.003-06:00

My roles as a faculty member and as a member of Campus Faculty Association, are inseparable. The decisions that determine my capacity to work with graduate students as a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature-- are being made beyond my control. It is only through unionization that shared governance can be recovered, and a voice in fundamental issues governing the academic workplace, including graduate education, can be had. There is no clearer evidence of this basic fact of our academic life than President Hogan's decision to pursue restructuring in the face of our own Academic Senate's rejection of his proposal. We now have two new Vice Presidents whose raises alone could fund six 50% TAships, which is two more TAships than one of my home departments currently holds.

Our lack of control over our own academic future as providers of graduate education clearly emerges in the new campus-wide assessment of doctoral programs that comes right on the heels of the block grant competition; why similar data and narratives (including student accomplishments and placements, for example) have to be submitted to a committee whose charge is obscure is not obscure to any thinking faculty member. Provost Wheeler's charge to the doctoral assessment committee includes language about determining "the strengths and weaknesses of each program" and a statement about a plan for the "dissemination of best practices for doctoral education and possibly further analysis of some programs" in academic year 2011-2012. Don't the awards made in the competitive block grant distribution of ay 2010-2011reveal what these best practices are? Well-meaning individuals will be unwittingly caught up in an allegedly consensual process that will lead to the termination of certain programs: "further analysis" leads only in one direction. Faculty serve in good faith on many committees, but without the right to collective bargaining, we will never have a voice in graduate education or any other dimension of the academic workplace.
While doctoral programs on this campus are undergoing an unnecessary review, the newly created Professional Science Master' is not. This new terminal master's degree was developed with a $450, 000 grant from the Sloan Foundation. Its staff includes a director on a 12-month salary, plus other, additional positions. Three programs are already available in the Professional Master's Program; according to the Graduate College website, more are on their way. The Professional Science Master's Program is the only graduate program, as far as I can tell, that has advertising on the Graduate College Website. Graduate College handles the marketing and recruiting of these students. Most other doctoral programs use their own faculty to design recruitment materials without help in human or financial resources from Graduate College. The PSM graduated 9 students in December 2010. They paid approximately $30,000 for their sixteen-month program; they were not required to write a master's thesis.

How does this new and expanding program fit our University's stated mission as a land-grant university to serve as a "preeminent public research institution?" Consider the word "public." Does the PSM serve the public? How many recent college graduates in the state of Illinois have $30,000? Consider the words "preeminent research institution." The graduates of the PSM did not write a thesis. What is their relation to research, except a business relation? Our preeminence as a public research institution could be undermined by such programs, which are growing in number, and gaining even more rapidly in symbolic weight as the new model for graduate education.
None of this would matter so much if the threat to traditional graduate programs, particularly, but not exclusively, those in the humanities and interpretative social sciences, were not so pressing. Pushing the horizon of new knowledge means pushing the horizon of knowledge that does not translate into dollars. The humanities and arts are at the core of the university's mission. With the help of TAs, thousands of IUS are generated, but the tuition dollars are not credited back to the units who generate them. Programs in the humanities, unjustly smeared as the welfare queens of the university, are underfunded and "analyzed" whereas new programs that have no relation to the public mission of this university are the new darlings of the campus. We as faculty have no access to the information that would tell us how much revenue the alleged revenue generating programs consume. That gift of knowledge comes only with unionization and collective bargaining rights.

We lack fundamental information about revenues and resources at this campus; we have no place at the table where decisions are made, in spite of the advisory committees on which we serve, and in spite of the Academic Senate’s best efforts. There is only one way to overcome these problems: work with CFA for collective bargaining rights for tenure and non-tenure stream faculty.

CFA President Kathy Oberdeck's speech to the General Meeting of September 13, 2010

2010-09-16T09:15:00.002-05:00

Welcome

Thank all of you for attending today’s membership meeting and for supporting CFA. It’s an honor to serve this organization because Campus Faculty Association brings together teachers and scholars from all over campus, and I get to know the people who really make this place work

Reviewing the Past Year

For this meeting in particular we come together at a historical moment when these questions are more critical than ever. The University of Illinois has been through a year of crises and changes—crises over the integrity of leadership and the arrival of a new president, crises of academic labor relations in the form of the GEO strike, crises in budgetary shortfalls accompanied by rapid-fire administrative fixes. This made for a very busy year for the Campus Faculty Association. Over the last twelve months, our members helped draw attention to the need for new administrative leadership and for more democratic processes of decision making on campus. We have marched with the GEO to maintain the salary and tuition waiver support that compensate our excellent graduate students and make graduate degrees accessible to the wide diversity of students—from across a range of ethnic, gender and class backgrounds—whom a great public university should serve. We have responded to mandatory furloughs with teach ins, Senate resolutions, research, rallies and mass lobbying in Springfield. These actions demanded more transparency in budgetary decision making, and speaking out to the Legislature on what kind of funding is needed to keep quality education accessible to the citizens of Illinois. As importantly, they were aimed at enlarging our own membership to include more faculty from across our campus who are concerned about the conditions of their teaching, research, and service. They see the Campus Faculty Association as an important vehicle for making faculty voices heard in decisions that affect those conditions. Our membership grew by 40% through these important initiatives, through the work of members with academic organizing experience who helped some of us think more strategically about how to talk to members about organizing, and because many of you went out and talked to your colleagues, cross-disciplinary associates, friends and neighbors about your concerns about the University and how the CFA can help.

Toward the Future: Collective Bargaining and the CFA

For this year, it is our top priority to make the Campus Faculty Association visible and available to an ever wider circle of University of Illinois faculty of all descriptions—full and untenured, faculty from the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities, faculty of color, women faculty, single and partnered parents, senior faculty on the verge of retirement, to name just a few. As you’ll be hearing a little later from our organizing committee, we welcome and urge more and more members to have these conversations with colleagues, friends, neighbors and acquaintances about the CFA’s purposes. CFA will grow only through your efforts and it is vital that CFA grow.
We’re also here to discuss a revision of the statement of purpose contained in our Constitution, and also to be featured in our website and recruiting literature, that will help convey to more of our colleagues what we’re about. That statement of purpose restates principles the CFA has been committed to for decades: a democratic University in which faculty have a meaningful voice through shared governance; the defense especially of those who might experience discrimination because of race, gender, disability or sexual orientation bias, among others. It also poses an open process of collective bargaining to ensure our ability to defend faculty’s individual and collective welfare in the areas of economic compensation, academic freedom, the integrity of our teaching and research, the fairness of University policies as they apply to diverse faculty and students, and the capacity of this university to offer the quality higher education that we consider the foundation of a democratic society. This revised statement of purpose will signal to potential members our commitment to a strong faculty voice in University decision making, but can only be meaningful if we expand our membership to a proportion of the faculty that would make CFA representation of faculty interests a reasonable claim.

In addition to getting on your radar a number of events planned to expand our membership and familiarize faculty with some of the benefits of collective bargaining, we wanted to start the semester off with this meeting to talk face to face about what many of us might hope and fear about collective bargaining and why we need it. What do we mean by “an open process of collective bargaining”? To some, collective bargaining conjures unsavory images of self-serving union bureaucrats meeting in inaccessible chambers with top-level administrators to hammer out decisions on pay and conditions to which union members will be asked to conform. Certainly, this is hardly an attractive model for an organization that takes as its main rallying cry the democratization of university structures that make decision on increasingly corporate, hierarchical, and opaque models. But this image of collective bargaining it is not born out by the examples of collective bargaining closest to home—examples like the GEO, where a large negotiating committee represented union members in bargaining sessions with University administrators. It’s also an image of collective bargaining that’s inconsistent with our own view of the range of issues that could be bargainable—not just salaries and benefits, important as they are, but also issues of academic freedom, working conditions, and transparency.

Others worry that collective bargaining will commit them to a strike on questionable pretexts, potentially imperiling their sense of duty to their students. These are understandable concerns, fully congruent with our statement of purpose’s declarations of commitment to the quality education we believe this University should offer. But the collective actions that provide teeth to collective bargaining can take a variety of forms, and none of them would be approved without a vote of the membership.

Another pressing question is, WHY collective bargaining? Don’t we have shared governance? What about the Academic Senate, the stewarding excellence teams that involved faculty and administrators in reviewing possible budget streamlining, and our individual contributions to a host of departmental, college and campus level committees where we look after the curricular, research and service missions of the university, often at the expense of our own research and writing agendas? As a current or recent participant in all of them, I have great respect for these various venues for faculty involvement in making and executing University policies. But we can find a lot of evidence that they are not sufficient to secure University of Illinois faculty a voice in the decisions that affect our conditions of work and our commitment to the University’s core missions of teaching, research, and public service. I want to give a few examples from recent and ongoing CFA activities to illustrate this.

Much of our growth last year came because faculty were upset about a sudden and, upon inspection, rather ungrounded decision on mandatory furloughs. CFA actions on common Furlough days helped to raise important questions about what sort of funding the University has and where it is being spent. These efforts have matured into a report, currently on our website and reported to the press, of remarkable rises in the numbers of administrative positions and the salary figures devoted to them over the last six years. This is an important context for many recent concerns. The general trend toward administrative top-heaviness affects the way the university responds to problems like the budget crisis. They turn to furloughs instead of caps on runaway academic salaries. They offer a system of project teams to identify plans for streamlining that was overwhelmingly staffed by administrators rather than regular faculty. The University maintains structures of funding through the University of Illinois Foundation that can allow the continued financial connection between an off-campus academy ungoverned by ethics of open research and academic review AFTER the university had agreed with the Academic Senate to sever such ties. And Administration has also been able to pressure the Senate, with a few critical questions from CFA members, endorse the growing corporatization of the university by granting the President the title of CEO. Collective bargaining at other universities has managed to fight at least some initiatives that compromise faculty governance in these ways, and grievance procedures to address not only salary issues (many of us are not getting raises, which compounds the economic effect of fuurloughs while administrative salaries go up) but issues of academic freedom, governance, and working conditions.

In April many of us got on the bus to join more than ten thousand educators at all levels to lobby our legislative representatives in Springfield with respect to the funding that’s needed to provide quality public education at an affordable price. We invited administrators to join with us, but they seemed to prefer other channels of correspondence with legislators that they tell us are active but the substance of which we never hear. Faculty governance in a truly public university demands that FACULTY represent to the public the faculty missions of teaching and research we spend our days, and nights, undertaking, and their importance to the public. Collective bargaining agreements elsewhere have included effective legislative relations programs.

The GEO has for many of us been a model of effective and democratic academic organization, and also of the community outreach to make good on our institutional promise of teaching, research and service. Many CFA members walked with the GEO last November and learned a lot from their determination to maintain tuition waivers that enable many grad students from minority and working-class background to contribute to the mission of higher education and, as we know, enable us to attract the most talented and exciting graduate students from these and other backgrounds to maintain the fine reputation of both our graduate programs and the undergraduate teaching to which these students contribute. But now the waivers that were at the center of the GEO’s strike are under threat again, as cashed-strapped departments especially in the arts and humanities have resorted, with higher administration approval, to lowered base-rate waivers in order to keep their graduate programs afloat at all. This is a complex issue with many dimensions. It raises questions about the commitment of the University to attracting and keeping quality graduate students in the humanities and arts, it exposes the pressures on quality education in a variety of departments that find their teaching assistant budgets slashed while a variety of inticements to profit-generating graduate degrees and department funding tied to on-line course development are dangled before them. We also have growing numbers of non-tenure track faculty often entailed in these shifts, and their interests need attention and voice as well. Faculty need an independent organization that can assess and address these many transformations of the education we offer, and sustain the opportunity for education in the all-too-quickly disappearing capacities for critical thinking, civil discussion, and reasoned argument, made available to a wide public. We need the strength in numbers to be that organization.

JOIN US

We can do this with a purpose that invigorates our colleagues and a commitment to engaging them in that purposes that brings more members in. Before we break for some small group discussions about your views of how effectively our new statement of purpose supports those goals, I want to mention briefly some upcoming plans for this semester that are intended to help us move forward on this agenda, and some specific ways for some of you who want to get more involved. THIS FRIDAY, Sept. 17, our organizing committee is meeting to make plans for a fall organizing campaign, discuss communities of faculty to which we can most effectively direct our efforts. As Siobhan Somerville and Clarence Lang from the organizing committee are going to explain shortly—WE ARE ALL ORGANIZERS AND EVERYONE IS INVITED TO COME TO THIS MEETING. It will be held at noon, Friday Sept 17 in 210 Illini Union.

Organizing IS our main priority—but while I’m on the topic of things your CFA could use help with—we also have an communications committee, currently very snazzily headed up by Harriet Murav, that needs more help to get our messages out. And we have an open position of Equal Opportunity Officer for someone who wants to help organize our initiatives on issues of minority, gender, and sexual orientation discrimination and bias.

The next week, the BOT will be meeting on the Urbana campus at the I Hotel. The GEO is already planning a rally to tell them about our concerns about tuition waivers, salaries, and other issues they will be addressing. EVERYONE IS URGED TO ATTEND THIS RALLY, and let the BOT –to which the CFA continues its fight for faculty representation—know that the CFA is watching and listening.
OCTOBER 7 is a NATIONAL DAY of ACTION for education. The labor coalition of this campus is planning a public action for that day that you should keep your eyes out for our announcements of those events.

Finally, in NOVEMBER we will be having another CFA members event—to which interested potential members will also be welcome---on the benefits of collective bargaining, where we plan to have speakers from already organized Illinois campuses like SIU and EIU. We’re working on scheduling that around the schedules of the speakers we’re seeking, but we hope it will be an opportunity to further the discussions we come up with today about our new statement of purpose and its focus on collective bargaining.

So I’m going to turn things over for a few minutes to Siobhan and Clarence to talk about organizing, and then to small groups of you to talk about our statement of purpose. We’ll come back to have a presentation on the dues issue that you were notified about—obviously all this organizing and expansion takes resources, and you’ll hear about our own budgetary crisis in providing those. For now, though, let me turn things to Siobhan and Clarence. Thank you.

,

Pasted from

CFA Response to Ikenberry's Work Group Report

2010-06-30T11:23:00.000-05:00

The CFA applauds efforts to streamline administration and procurement costs in order to commit shrinking university resources to core missions of teaching and research. But we also see much to give faculty pause in recent announcements about the report of President Ikenberry’s Administrative Review and Restructuring Work Group and impending plans to implement its recommendations.

• The centralizing of “human capital” strategic plans and monitoring procedures according to new business models engineered from above are of particular concern, especially as they will affect all academic personnel and staff and the vital educational missions they support.

• The focus of IT investment in on-line learning environments while classroom technologies in a number of sectors of the university continue to lag also needs faculty input.

• The coordination of Foundation and alumni fundraising relations with little mention of the importance of key faculty research objectives and departmental connections threatens to strangle communications to potential funding sources of the most important, ground-level activities of teachers and researchers.

• The spectre of new “consulting” firms coming in to advise the process raises further concerns about the voice faculty will have in shaping these important changes; not to mention the extra expenses to be incurred in implementing them.

The Working Group is right that communications programs provide a broad range of services to connect with and inform the many and varied stakeholders of the University…” Put in a more education-friendly form, it is vital that transformations of university procedures actually facilitate the free exchange of ideas among faculty, students, staff, administrators, alumni, fundraisers and the larger communities we serve.

Observing that President Ikenberry has been charged by incoming President Hogan to move forward quickly in implementing the Working Group’s recommendations, the CFA looks forward to substantial faculty input on the implementation process, which seems, from the list of working-group members, to have been lacking in the formation of the Working Group itself. As a voice for faculty communication throughout this process, the CFA stands ready to investigate and address the faculty’s many vital interests. Please join us.

Kathryn Oberdeck
President, Campus Faculty Association
June 25, 2010

Peter Brown on adjuncts

2010-05-14T15:53:00.003-05:00

Check out this post by Peter Brown on adjunctification of higher ed and why adjuncts deserve a living wage and job security (among other things -- I'm not doing the article justice).

Great Day in Springfield on April 21st!!

2010-05-03T13:06:00.001-05:00

Lobby Day in Springfield is an annual tradition for educators to meet and greet state lawmakers and have their voices heard. But this year Lobby Day was inflected with a real urgency as 15,000 teachers, staffers and school workers converged on Springfield to express their frustration with Illinois’ unprecedented budget crisis and the threat of cuts to education at all levels. CFA members decided to take our fourth and final furlough day on April 21 in solidarity with Illinois Education Association and other U. of I. campus unions, and so we got up early and got on the bus.

Lobby Day was surprisingly fun, in large part because of excellent IEA organization that got us and our banners there comfortably, with plenty of donuts and coffee. We enjoyed a huge march and rally, addresses by state leaders, and visits to lawmakers’ offices inside the stunning Capitol building. We met and congratulated our allies (in the CFA's case, Mike Frerichs) and faced heated if not well-reasoned resistance in discussions with our very pressured opponents. Illinois Education Association members gave everyone lunch with amazing efficiency.

For CFA members who had not participated in lobbying before, this was an eye-opening event. Not only did we speak face-to-face with central Illinois State legislators about the importance of a fair tax increase, but we felt surrounded by and connected to many other kinds of people who work helping, teaching, counseling and supporting Illinois students from preschool to graduate school. We were reminded that as University of Illinois faculty we are part of a much larger structure of public education that is, ideally, a structure of opportunity and personal advancement for everyone in the state. At least that's what I felt. Rather than production workers in a credential factory, or ivory tower technocrats, we‘re connected to educators across the state as we try, in straightened circumstances, to help students learn and grow. While it's true times are hard in Illinois, it's also true that the opportunity for a strong public education, up to and through university, should be expanded not narrowed. I'll be in Springfield next year, and for as long as it takes.

Professor Susan Davis
Department of Communication
CFA Executive Committee Member

Organizing 102: Common Furlough Action Day #3!

2010-03-31T20:46:00.003-05:00

Join us on April 6th at the university YMCA for Organizing 102, the next common furlough action day! After the success of Organizing 101 at the February teach-in, we decided another "class" in the series was necessary. There are no pre-requisites in order for you to attend, though!

The event is straightforward, yet crucial to our success. From 12-1 those of us with organizing experience will moderate discussion and train attendees on how to organize. From 1-2:30 we plan to go out and do the organizing: write the emails, set up the meetings, and talk to our colleagues. Doing can be a lot more scary than talking, but we won't have success, and we won't grow, if all we do as a union as talk. Finally from 2:30-3 we will debrief (with cookies, of course). There is a chance we will shorten this event so that it doesn't overlap with an AAUP event on the tenure process.

I look forward to hearing your thinking on the kinds of topics you want to see covered in Organizing 102. Don't work on your furlough day, organize to affect change... and most importantly, bring a friend!

CFA Brown Bags on March 31st

2010-03-28T12:15:00.003-05:00

Attend CFA Organization Building Workshops March 31st

What: CFA Workshops addressing organizing among the under-represented in the CFA, namely:

• contingent faculty,
• untenured tenure-track faculty
• women, and
• people of color

When: March 31st 12:00-1:30
7:00-8:30 (same program as 1:00 for those not free during the day)

Where: University YMCA 1001 S. Wright St.

More info contact: Kate kclancy@illinois.edu or Siobhan: sbs@illinois.edu

New on Kritik

2010-03-22T15:51:00.001-05:00

I (KBHC, Kate Clancy) am the most recent author in the Kritik blog series "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough." My piece is entitled "Teach your Children Well" and I hope you check it out.

2010-03-21T08:31:00.001-05:00

Join Us in Springfield on April 21st for Higher Education Lobbying Day!
Let the legislators hear your voice in support of democratic public higher education.

Free buses will leave Champaign-Urbana at 8 a.m. Contact the CFA Office Co-ordinator for details campusfacultyassoc@gmail.com

Or sign up for a spot on the bus via our on-line petition by visiting http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bustospringfieldapril6/

Shared Faculty Mission at UIUC?

2010-03-11T18:13:00.001-06:00

On March 4, 2010, the Campus Faculty Association sponsored an event titled “The University’s Core Mission: Are We Really All in This Together.” The event was attended by faculty from six different colleges (ACES, Education, Engineering, FAA, LAS, Law) and the University Library. Those who attended the event discussed the contributions faculty make to the university, our community, and society. We discussed how the University of Illinois is different from a technical school, liberal arts college, or a job training center, and what it is that makes this university great.
Our discussions revealed some differences across disciplines. For example, the work of some faculty focuses on immediate contributions to society whereas others do work whose greatest contributions may only be appreciated in the future. More importantly, our conversations also revealed significant commonalities. These commonalities, and our discussions of them, helped clarify the components of what we believe is the university’s core mission.
Our discussions led to the drafting of a Shared Faculty Mission Statement, which is divided into two parts: (a) a description of our shared contributions; and (b) implications of our shared contributions for the future of the university. The version available on this blog is a draft version, which has been circulated to panel participants and is now open for comments from the University faculty community. Please post comments on this site (if you can) or e-mail comments to campusfacultyassoc@gmail.com. The final version of the statement will be transmitted to the University community, the president, the Board of Trustees, state legislators, and the public.

Shared Faculty Mission Statement

Shared Contributions

• The core contribution made by all faculty is to use their intellects in creative ways to generate knowledge, insight, beauty, wisdom, and practical products and applications that will make our campus, our community, the state of Illinois, and the world a better place in which to live.
o The ways in which faculty do this are remarkably varied. Here are only a few examples. Some faculty will create music that no one may be able to appreciate immediately, but which may be admired by thousands or even millions in years to come. Others may delve into agricultural production and consumption or engineering problem-solving with the goal of producing knowledge or other tangible products that will have an immediate impact, either locally or internationally. Other faculty do research, whether on the culture of a distant land or the biology of bees, that may not have an immediate impact, but which will prove to be remarkably useful at some future point in time for reasons we cannot currently even imagine. Many of us produce knowledge about our fields (be they in education, history, or the sciences) that is used to address inequities related to racism, sexism, or homophobia. But we also do research on topics that may attract little attention from the public at large, until and unless they have had the opportunity to participate in learning activities that excite new curiosities and interests.

• Through their teaching in the classroom, laboratory, and studio, their advising, and their sharing of their own creative work with students, faculty teach undergraduate, graduate, and professional students how to think critically, communicate effectively, engage the world around them, solve problems, and be thoughtful, productive citizens of this community, state, country, and the world.
o We teach 700 students at a time in some large survey courses, but we also give one-on-one training in skills that cannot be taught any other way. We teach students to appreciate chronologically, geographically, and culturally distant worlds they have never imagined, and the problems of people next door with whom they will need to work as fellow citizens. We train them in reading, writing, focused attention, collaborative work, and creative thinking they will need to succeed at work and with their neighbors – these are skills they will use to make their local communities, the state of Illinois, and the world a better place. We counsel our students with regard to the prospects of our professions and the skills they need to succeed there, and we grade their work in order to help them assess the level of their own skills. Finally, we instruct and learn from our colleagues across the globe through conferences, journal articles, and presentations, so we are able to bring the wealth of our fields’ knowledge to Illinois.

• Faculty help graduate and professional students reach an exceptional level of excellence in order to carry on, refine, and apply the knowledge that we create and disseminate. We work in labs, offices, classrooms, clinics, and libraries where graduate and professional students are trained and make vital contributions to the University and community.

• In addition to sharing their knowledge and skills with students, faculty engage in community outreach. The contributions made by faculty are not limited to the University of Illinois campus.
o For example, we talk to community groups, elder hostels, primary and secondary school classrooms and teachers about what our knowledge means to them. We reach out to many communities of lifelong learning and engagement. We provide free consultation and services. We serve on professional, business, and community organizations, from the local level to the international.

Implications of Shared Faculty Contributions for the Future of the University

• Given that the core contributions of faculty revolve around their ability and willingness to be creative, it follows that the key to a successful university is the establishment and maintenance of an environment that permits that creativity to flourish. This means that ideas must be able to flow freely — in research projects and applications of research; between faculty and students, among faculty and among students; across our global professional networks and down the street to a local reading group.
• Because we value the diverse ways in which we pursue, disseminate and apply knowledge, we value above all the varieties of creativity that the university promotes. For example, engineers and their students benefit from the opportunity to learn the skills of communication and group process from humanities and education professionals; humanists and their students benefit by the presence of scientists, engineers and policy specialists who are transforming the material foundations of our social, cultural and artistic networks. The different fields represented at the University of Illinois form an interdependent institution that cannot survive without supporting all of its parts. While groups of relatively homogeneous scholars and professionals, whether humanists at a liberal arts college or engineers at a technical institute, can make valuable contributions to society, the realization of the full potential of a university, as described above, depends on the ability of all fields to flourish.

• Given the diversity of contributions made to this common purpose by faculty who are experts in so wide an array of scholarly fields and teaching endeavors, we need shared governance to make sure that resources are distributed fairly, and that the contributions made by faculty in different disciplinary fields are judged by standards of value appropriate to those fields. Shared governance helps to preserve the clear, consistent, and permanent lines of communication among all members of the University community which are essential if we are to appropriately represent our respective contributions to our shared mission.

Opportunity to comment on budget

2010-03-10T13:37:00.000-06:00

Governor Quinn has established a website with budget information, updates, and an opportunity for comments. Since there are likely to be many comments advocating cuts in education and opposing any sort of tax increase, members may wish to voice their opinions, or at least check out details regarding the budget. You can access the official web site and provide comments at the following url:

http://www2.illinois.gov/budget/Pages/default.aspx

March 4 "Day of Action" success!

2010-03-05T09:42:00.003-06:00

... And the media thought so, too, even if they sometimes didn't get the whole story:

Daily Illini

Channel 3

Channel 15

Channel 17

CNN

RSVP - March Forth on March 4th

2010-03-01T14:49:00.002-06:00

Please sign CFA's new online petition! Then pass it on. Then attend the March 4 events and bring a friend or colleague.

CA judge says NO to furloughs!

2010-02-26T22:46:00.004-06:00

Less than a week ahead of a National Day of Action to Defend Public Higher Education, called first by state university workers in California (and organized here at UIUC and UIC by a coalition of campus unions and student groups), a judge orders an end to furloughs -- and back pay -- for thousands of union employees in California!

Read more right here.

To help spread the word on facebook about March 4 here at UIUC, click here.

A few important links

2010-02-25T09:05:00.002-06:00

First: Nine layoffs in University of Illinois Facilities. I thought we were suffering through furloughs in order to avoid layoffs?

And second: Central Michigan University NTTs form union. This is great news for contingent faculty across the country. Nice work CMU!

Universitas

2010-02-16T13:53:00.004-06:00

by Megan McLaughlin, CFA Pres.,
[delivered at Feb. 15, 2010, Teach-In/ Common Action Day]

Universities originated in medieval Europe—as guilds (something like a union) of scholars, who banded together for self-protection and self-regulation. The word “university” comes from the Latin word universitas—which means something like ”the whole,” or, more concretely, “all of us.” I hope you will excuse this little excursion into my area of expertise, medieval history. The point I am trying to make is simply that universities have always been groups of people with a shared love for knowledge and teaching, working together to promote those goals. A university is, by definition, a unifying force, bringing together those with shared values. The real tragedy of the current situation is not the fact that “all of us” need to tighten our belts, but the ways in which it is dividing us from one another. Whatever else this Common Furlough Day and the three others that are scheduled for later this spring do, I hope that they can remind us of our underlying commonalities and our desperate need to work together to save the university and public higher education in Illinois.

Having called for unity, I am now going to say a number of things that will sound pretty divisive. My excuse is this: most of us are already thinking these things. So the time has come to say them out loud and take action to correct them, so that we can restore our common purpose. I would like to preface my criticisms by saying that they are NOT intended as a personal attack on either President Ikenberry or Chancellor Easter—both honest and honorable men. The two of them have inherited a mess not of their making. But if that mess is largely the fault of the State legislature, it has certainly been made much worse by the actions of the university administration over the past ten years. So now it is up to Ikenberry and Easter to correct their mistakes and help us get the university back on course.

One of the buzz-phrases of the administration’s response to all financial problems over the last few years has been “shared sacrifice.” When the furlough policy was announced, President Ikenberry emphasized that he and other highly-paid administrators were taking ten days of furlough, while the rest of us were only taking four. I applaud that action—I really do. But does anyone here believe that sacrifice is ACTUALLY being shared? Budget cuts are clearly hurting some folks much more than others. The ones suffering the most are our students whose tuition goes up and up and up—apparently without end--and the hourly workers on campus, some of whom have been laid off, while many others have had their hours, and thus their wages cut. Faculty members and academic professionals have seen salaries that don’t keep pace with inflation, and now actual pay cuts (the term “furlough” is, of course, just a euphemism for “pay cut”), but we’re not really hurting—at least not yet. But what about the administration? Are they making their share of the sacrifice?

The answer is: it’s hard to tell, because we don’t have budget transparency at this university. We desperately need information about the budget that we can trust, and we just don’t have it. Worse, years of secrecy about university budgets have eroded any trust we may once have had in administrators. Yet in the current crisis, we are apparently expected to rely on those same administrators to bring us out of this situation with both our finances and our values intact. How can we do that when the administration’s track record is so dubious? These are the folks, you will remember, who gave us the Banner system and Global Campus.

Given that history, I decided last week to do a little preliminary reconnaissance in the budgetary jungle, looking, in particular, at administrative costs as they’ve changed over the past ten years, between budget year 2000 and 2009. This is a very complex subject, and I am about as far as one can get from being an expert in this area, but I would like to share some preliminary results with you. Let’s start with administrative salaries. It turns out that our Chancellor’s salary rose nearly 70% during the period in question. That of the Vice President for Technology and Economic Development (on whom more later) rose about 38%. This in a period when salaries for graduate employees, academic professionals and permanent faculty, for contingent faculty and hourly workers, were stagnating.

But there’s much more to the story than that. Not only are administrative salaries growing rapidly, but the number of administrators is multiplying. The Office of the Chancellor had ten administrators associated with it in 2000; by September, 2009—when service workers were already being laid off—there were nineteen, and the total amount of salary money designated for administrators in the Chancellor’s office had tripled. Things were even more exciting in the office of the Vice President for Technology and Economic Development. It was a new office in 2000, with only two administrators associated with it; by 2009, there were 37. Spending on salaries in the Office of the Vice President for Technology and Economic development increased ELEVEN-FOLD between 2000 and 2009. Just a month after furlough language first appeared in our contracts, the Board of Trustees approved paying out over $4,000,000 in total salaries to that office—in other words more than one fifth of what the university originally claimed it expected to recoup from its furlough policy (their numbers have since changed). Now frankly, I just don’t see the “shared sacrifice” in these figures. Of course, I’m only a medieval historian, and not an accountant, and I don’t know much about the finances of higher education. Perhaps cutting back on administrators and their salaries wouldn’t really help very much in our current crisis. One thing I am pretty sure about, however, is that INCREASING administrative spending, especially at this rate, is not going to do the trick.

That’s why the Campus Faculty Association is forming a new “Faculty Watchdog Group on Administrative Costs.” The Executive Committee of the CFA is overstretched at the moment, and none of us is a financial expert—so please, if you do have any expertise in these areas, considering helping us with this important endeavor.

Let me now turn briefly to the subject of “shared governance,” in particular as it relates to an issue I am calling “mission creep.” Long, long ago—back before 1999—the mission of the University of Illinois was threefold: teaching, research, and service. That’s what faculty were hired for; that’s the basis upon which they were given raises and awarded tenure. But in 1999 rumblings began to be heard in certain quarters of the administration about a “fourth mission”—economic development. At first, apparently, this was seen as just one form of service, fitting into the traditional threefold mission model. Gradually, though, it took on a life of its own—as witness the creation of the Office of the Vice President for Technology and Economic Development. So far as I can tell, the faculty were never consulted about the addition of a new, fourth mission—it just occurred. And of course, if they were never consulted, they could play no role in defining “economic development.” Does it, for example, mean “development from the bottom up”—programs for empowering the poor to get ahead economically? Does it mean support for small businesses, the ones that produce most of the jobs? Don’t be silly. For the administration, “economic development” means providing resources for corporations—preferably big corporations of the type that you find at the Research Park, or high-tech start-up companies that will take technologies developed at the U of I and make them profitable.

Well, it would have been nice to be consulted about whether we wanted our university to take on supporting corporations as a new mission. But it would have been even nicer to be consulted about the next step, which involves re-allocating scarce resources, in a cash-strapped university, away from programs that don’t serve this bogus fourth mission. Allow me to quote from the budget request currently before the state legislature. The Budgetbook submitted in November, 2009, repeatedly lists four missions for the university, the fourth being “economic development. It then states: “The University of Illinois must [add] capacity in the areas of highest enrollment demand and those of greatest economic development promise. It is essential that additional reallocation accompany these incremental advances . . .” In short, more money will be provided not only to programs with high enrollments (fair enough, perhaps), but also those of “greatest economic development promise.” And that money will be taken from other programs, which presumably offer less economic development promise.

Now this is not entirely new. For as long as I’ve been at the U of I, professors in some fields have been paid more than professors in others. But it was never an explicitly and publicly stated policy; and it never threatened our research and teaching, it never threatened our STUDENTS the way it now does. Under this new policy, if you’re a student in engineering or business administration, you’ll have to pay a higher differential tuition, but you’ll get relatively small classes, more teaching assistants, the latest in classroom technologies, state of the art laboratories, and extensive career counseling services. On the other hand, if you’re a student in social work or special education, in history or English or mathematics, in theater or ethnomusicology, you’ll have more trouble getting advice about requirements because your department only has one advisor for hundreds of majors; you’ll have trouble getting the class you need to graduate because a professor has retired and hasn’t been replaced; you won’t be able to finish your term paper because the library is closed during the only times when you’re not working two jobs to pay for college; and you’ll have to get your letter of recommendation from a professor who only knows you as part of a class of 150.

This is not in the future—it’s already happening, right now. But that doesn’t make it acceptable. A university is—by definition—all of us. We can’t allow a small number of misguided administrators to distinguish the worthy few from the unworthy majority. For make no mistake about it, most of the faculty on this campus will fall into the unworthy category, the category of those who don’t have much “economic development promise,” those who “merely” educate our students to be informed, engaged citizens and productive members of society. It’s time for our colleagues in the senate to take a stand against “mission creep.” It’s time for the rest of the faculty to support them by writing to the administration and the board of trustees about this pernicious policy. It’s time for students to reassert their right to a world-class, affordable education. And when April 21 rolls around, it will be time for all of us to get on the bus to Springfield, to insist that the legislature properly fund OUR University.

American Universities as Hedge Funds?

2010-02-03T10:22:00.003-06:00

We'd also like to direct your attention to the following story at Huffington Post by Bob Samuels: How America's Universities Became Hedge Funds. A few notable quotes:

When journalists asked the UC president, Mark Yudof, how the university could lend millions of dollars to the state, while the school was raising student fees (tuition), furloughing employees, canceling classes, and laying off teachers, Yudof responded that when the university lends money to the state, it turns a profit, but when it spends money on salaries for teachers, the money is lost....

To understand how both public and private research universities have gotten themselves into this mess, one needs to understand five inter-related factors: the state de-funding of public education, the emphasis on research over instruction, the move to high-risk investments, the development of a free market academic labor system, and the marketing of college admissions. These different forces have combined to turn universities into corporations centered on pleasing bond raters in order to get lower interest rates so that they can borrow more money to fund their unending expansion and escalating expenses.

Do go read the whole thing. David Swenson and others are implicated in this move, and many major universities, including the UC system, Harvard and Yale, are all doing the same stuff.

And as someone who is an alum of both Harvard and Yale, and a former organizer for Yale unions, I want to say the union movement at Yale was critical of Swenson's tactics from the beginning. From a Yale Alumni Magazine story in 2005:

Perhaps because Swensen prides himself on his integrity, he bristles when critics come after him. Student activists have accused Yale of investing in oil and timber operations that are environmentally irresponsible. Others, including a U.S. senator, blamed Yale for backing a hedge fund that planned to pump, export, and sell water in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Yale's unions, in particular, have targeted the university, saying it is needlessly secretive about its investments. "They're doing a fabulous job of making money, but what are the social and environmental costs?" asks Ben Begleiter '04PhD, who works for the group that is trying to organize a graduate students' union. Two years ago during a union strike, eight retired employees seeking higher pension benefits occupied Swensen's office overnight. They refused to believe him when he tried to explain that he had no sway over their pensions.

Farallon is the hedge fund many universities use, and it is important to consider not only our own personal costs -- loss of raises, furloughs -- that have come from higher ed financial mismanagement, but the social costs. This is a report from 2005 sponsored by the Yale Unions showing Farallon's support of Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in the country. It details Farallon's relationship to CCA, but also the human rights abuses that occur within the CCA's prisons.

The BUNSIS report

2010-02-03T10:19:00.003-06:00

If you would like to read the in-depth report on the overall health of the University of Illinois system, there is now a link to the pdf for you to read.

This study was commissioned by the UIC United Faculty Organizing Committee, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT). It has somewhat more detail about UIC finances because it was commissioned on our Chicago campus. The study was prepared by the AAUP's national treasurer, an elected office held by Howard Bunsis of Eastern Michigan University. Dr. Bunsis has a law degree and a PhD in accounting. He specializes in analyzing university finances.

What do we do with 'furlough' days?

2010-02-03T08:27:00.004-06:00

Organize! Many colleagues report being pressured to schedule phony "furlough" day in advance. Well, your union - the Campus Faculty Association - is calling for "common furlough days" to demonstrate the impact of these ill-conceived cuts to the University's core mission of education and research - and to use the day for a different kind of service (than the kind Administrators would choose) to that core mission: to fight for it, as only the people who get this job done every day can.

So, mark your calendars:

Feb. 15
March 4
April 6
April 21

There will be a planning meeting on Feb. 9 (see previous post below) for all concerned faculty to discuss these and other actions through which faculty at UIUC can begin to take back some influence over the running of the University.

Tues. Feb. 9
7-9pm
University YMCA
Lower Level, Rooms K-1 & K-2

This meeting is open to anyone who cares about the core mission of the University and wants to work together to improve it, resist these shortsighted cuts, and reclaim the excellence that the University of Illinois community prides itself on. But it is NOT FREE! If you attend, you will be expected to engage, participate, and give of your time and energy, your '2 c', yourself.

Please come and bring a friend - or two - or three ...

latest from AAUP

2010-01-28T17:07:00.002-06:00

from Cary Nelson, AAUP President (and longtime CFA member) and Howard Bunsis, AAUP Treasurer

The State does have a fiscal problem, and it has been solving the problem in the short term by delaying payments to vendors, and now the State is delaying the appropriation for higher education.

Moody’s downgraded the State of Illinois debt in December of 2009. Fitch, another ratings service, gave Illinois an A rating on 12/30/2009, and put the state on a watch list for a possible downgrade as well.

The reason for Illinois’s fiscal problem is that income tax receipts have been lower than expected. The size of the problem for the 2010 budget is $2 billion, which is approximately 7% of the State’s General Fund budget.

Looking further in the future, there has been talk of budget holes in the $12-$13 billion range. The current governor wants to raise the income tax rate on those earning more than $250,000 per year, and a democratic candidate for governor wants to implement a progressive income tax system (instead of the current flat tax system). Every Republican candidate for governor is against a tax increase.

What is the response to this?

1. What is the State likely to do? The State appropriation is only 16% of the total revenue source for the UI system. There may be a 6% reduction in the appropriation. The appropriation is only 16% of the UI system’s revenue, so in terms of total revenues, the 6% reduction will reduce overall UI revenues by less than 1%. This reduction is not large enough to lead to furloughs.
2. The UI administration, in its budget documents, at times implies that the State appropriation funds the entire academic mission at the UI, which overstates reality. Administrators often argue that “this” money can only be used for “this,” and “that” money can only be used for “that.” However, the reality is that the UI system is one system, not a General Fund only system or a State Appropriation only system. That is why an analysis must focus on the health of the entire system, and not some component of the system that the administration claims is out of money.
3. The State is not considering eliminating the entire appropriation; they are considering delaying payments to the UI system. These payments are going to be repaid at some point. Note that the rating agencies did not rate the State bankrupt or junk; they gave the State “A” ratings, which is the 3rd highest rating for both Moody’s and Fitch. If the rating agencies believed that the higher education appropriation would NEVER be paid back, then the rating would have been much lower (such as the Baa2 rating given to the State of California).
4. What about the current cash flow problem caused by the delay of payments? Michigan faced this exact situation about 18 months ago, when the State delayed 2 months of the annual higher education appropriation. In Michigan, like Illinois, the state funds between 15% and 30% of the public universities’ total revenues (note: this percentage is over 65% in California). Not one public institution in Michigan asked the employees to give back salary money, nor did the administrations at these schools give back their salaries. All that happened was that the universities used their existing cash reserves to deal with the short term problem, and then were made whole when the full payments were made about 6 months later (it was 6 months from the time a payment was delayed to when it was repaid in full by the State). Now, is Michigan in worse shape than Illinois? Absolutely.
5. What should the UI do in response to a short-term cash flow problem?
6. a. The first thing would be to use existing reserves. The Moody’s viability ratio measures how many months of reserves an institution has in relation to total expenditures. If we omit the UI Foundation (which is a very conservative approach), the UI system had approximately 12% or 2 months of reserves as of June 30, 2008. The standard recommendation is to have between 5% and 15% of reserves. Note that these reserves are 12% of total expenses. Therefore, a reduction in a few months of the state appropriation should easily be handled from current cash reserves, which are significant.

b. If the administration claims they have no cash reserves, they can borrow short term money to guide them through this period. Borrowing money is not a long term solution, but this is a short term cash flow problem. The UI system still has a very strong credit rating.

c. Any reduction in spending should not come from the employees, but from administrative costs and administrative spending.

d. The reserves of the UI Foundation should be used to help with any short term cash flow problem. The UI Foundation has over $1 billion in assets; any temporary shortfall can be borrowed from the Foundation, and then repaid when the State pays the appropriation. It is not advisable to use Foundation dollars, but since they will be repaid in a short time, it is a solution that is preferred to reducing the pay of current employees.

e. The last option, after the above three have been exhausted, would be to ask the UI system’s employees to accept a temporary reduction in pay. When the administration gets the appropriation back from the State, then the pay reduction should be paid back to the employees, with interest. Let’s be clear: the 6% decline in the annual appropriation may be a permanent reduction. However, this small reduction is not nearly large enough to support any furlough. Consider this: if the UI system is receiving a temporary decline in the appropriation, then any reduction in pay should be temporary and should be fully refunded.

Faculty input needed Feb. 9!

2010-01-27T13:41:00.003-06:00

Now is the time...

OPEN MEETING FOR CONCERNED FACULTY

Concerned about furloughs?
Voluntary pay cuts? Budget cuts?
What's at stake? What can we do?

Please join an open meeting for all concerned faculty.

Feb. 9, 2010
7-9pm
University YMCA
Lower Level, Rooms K-1 & K-2
1001 S. Wright St.

Bring your ideas for discussion with other faculty members:

Transparency and shared governance in a time of crisis
Collaborative responses to furloughs and budget cuts
The future of accessible public higher education
Preserving the research mission of the U of I

Sponsored by the Campus Faculty Association and concerned faculty across campus.

concerneduifaculty@gmail.com
campusfacultyassoc@gmail.com

More on "furloughs"

2010-01-15T15:31:00.000-06:00

From CFA member Lauren Goodlad, blogging at Kritik.

Cut administration, corporate welfare first

2010-01-15T15:08:00.002-06:00

Scorching new letter to the editor by CFA Executive Committee member:

Before we implement furloughs that will cause considerable hardship, we should reduce the costs of activities outside the research and teaching missions of the university.

We continue to increase administrative positions, for example, often at high salaries, even as cuts undermine these missions.

How can we implement furloughs fairly if it comes to that? First, acknowledge that these are substantial wage cuts following several years with tiny or no raises. We have fallen further and further behind. Now wages – along with travel, research, and other funds – are being reduced. Cuts in academic units continue to diminish the quality of undergraduate and graduate education.

Second, acknowledge the vast salary gaps between faculty and the proliferating number of highly paid administrators. The university's plan to exempt workers earning less than $30,000 and assess a small number of top administrators a higher number of furlough days is a modest effort in this direction. If the number of impacted administrators were increased, it would be possible to exempt a greater number of the lowest paid.

This crisis draws our attention to some misplaced priorities and a conversation that is long overdue. We should reduce our bloated administration and the charity we practice toward private corporations in the research park. We cannot afford the costly corporate policies implemented over the past decade.

The human costs could be reduced if we invested our limited resources where they are needed most – in teaching and basic research, not huge administrative salaries and support for private corporations.

JIM BARRETT

A Pay Cut Masquerading as a "furlough"

2010-01-14T18:14:00.002-06:00

Dear Colleagues:

Pay cuts (masquerading as “furloughs”) are on the way. The Campus Faculty Association believes:

(1) if we must have furloughs, they should be more progressively tiered. The administration has made some effort in this direction, by exempting those who earn less than $30,000/year, and by singling out a small number of highly-paid administrators for the greatest number of furlough days. A greater number of days off for those with the highest salaries will yield the greatest financial returns for the university. Moreover, it is clearly unreasonable to expect an adjunct instructor who makes $32,000/year to take the same amount of time off as a tenured colleague who earns $200,000/year. In some other universities with similar budget problems, the number of “pay cut days” is being calibrated with increments of—for example—$20,000 in salary. Such an arrangement would be somewhat more difficult to implement, but much more equitable than the current plan."

(2) if we must have furloughs, they should be taken in such a way as to demonstrate to students, their families, and the public the educational “costs” of the budget crisis. If the impact on teaching is disguised, then the legislature has no incentive to restore even the limited contribution they now make to the university’s budget. While many colleagues will feel ethically and professionally bound to teach their classes, it is possible to do this in ways that publicize the university’s budget crisis. One possibility is to use “furlough days” to engage in alternate forms of teaching; another is simply to announce on a given day that one is teaching without pay, and then state on the University "Furlough Days Taken" form that "I was too busy to take a furlough." Please contact us with your creative responses to the furlough situation (and read our blog—address below—for other people’s ideas).

(3) though the university’s cash crisis compels sacrifices from all of us, calls for pay cuts as “shared sacrifice” ring hollow in the absence of real shared governance. The process culminating in the announced furlough policy cast faculty as subordinates rather than partners. We instead must shape what we are sacrificing for. Financial transparency, including explanations for rises in administrative costs amidst shrinking resources for teaching and research, would be a key step in that direction.

Now is the time for faculty to take action to protect their own interests, as workers, as professionals, and as the beating heart of the university.

We encourage our members to join us in “collective furlough/action days” in order to demonstrate the effects of the furloughs to students, the media, and the broader public. Exact dates will be announced shortly.

Our intention is to use these days to strengthen the faculty response to the budget crisis and issues of equity on our campus. Common activities might include lobbying the legislature, a teach-in on the increasingly corporate character of the university, and, most importantly, devoting any furlough time to organizing a union that will be able to resist these and future cuts.

In the meantime, any and all of the following will help:

—Write to administrators about furloughs.

—Discuss furloughs in your units, to develop responses to this threat. Language authorizing furloughs is now a permanent part of our contracts. CFA senate members will work in the senate to produce a unified faculty statement regarding the furlough threat.

—Contribute your ideas about how to resist the administration’s current furlough policy, including efforts at surveillance and intimidation, to the CFA blog: http://campusfacultyassoc.blogspot.com.

—Use the media to educate the public about the impact furloughs will have on higher education in Illinois.

—Help us organize. If you would be willing to organize or host a recruitment meeting for your unit, please contact Kate Clancy (kclancy@illinois.edu) or Jim Barrett (jrbarret@illinois.edu).

REMEMBER, A UNITED FACULTY IS A POWERFUL FACULTY!

PLEASE SHARE THIS MESSAGE WITH YOUR COLLEAGUES TO BUILD A MOVEMENT TO PROTECT OUR UNIVERSITY!

Sincerely,
Megan McLaughlin, President
for the Campus Faculty Association Executive Committee

Talking "furloughs"

2010-01-13T10:45:00.002-06:00

Interesting discussions among CFA members of UIUC's coming "furloughs" abound. Look for a plan of action any day now that is a joint effort of some of these. And in the coming weeks you might also see Kritik, the blog of UI's Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

Also, for an edifying read on "furloughs" in nearby state, check out this law prof's blog.

What to do on those furlough days

2010-01-10T15:22:00.002-06:00

[Removed at the request of the author. - RB]

CFA approaches Legislators on HB 4706

2009-12-31T15:30:00.002-06:00

CFA President Megan McLaughlin has requested a meeting with State Reps. Jakobsson and Rose and Sen. Frerichs to discuss the proposed tuition benefit cut. The meeting is currently being arranged via email because - in other cutback news - Prof. McLaughlin's office telephone is scheduled to be removed.

Watch this space for more!

Will we lose tuition waivers for our kids?

2009-12-21T10:22:00.003-06:00

Unfortunately, this is a valid question for workers at the University of Illinois. The News-Gazette reports that legislation has been introduced to get rid of the fifty percent tuition waivers that Illinois employees can use for their children if they work here for seven years or more. They write:

State law allows employees who have worked for one of the Illinois' public universities for seven or more years to receive a 50 percent waiver of their children's tuition costs.

Employees would lose that benefit if legislation (HB 4706) introduced earlier this month by state Rep. Dave Winters, R-Rockford, is eventually signed into law.

"I think a lot of the universities have been using this as part of their compensation package," said state Rep. Naomi Jakobsson, D-Urbana. "Taking away a part of their offer is not something I can support."

Randy Kangas, director of the UI system's office for planning and budgeting, said 942 of these tuition waivers were issued in fiscal 2009, totaling $3,981,600 of revenue the university never realized.

Most of those, 722 waivers, were issued for students at the Urbana-Champaign campus, erasing $3,254,800 that would have been added to the campus' budget.

UI officials are saying they will need time to discuss the bill with state representatives before they develop any particular position.

Jakobsson and UI spokesman Tom Hardy said they had not spoken with Winters to determine his motive, and Winters did not return several calls from The News-Gazette to his offices on Friday. But Jakobsson said there might be a better way if it is a budget issue.

"If we stop giving legislative scholarships, it would add more than" the $4 million, Jakobsson said.

Every year, each of the state's 177 legislators are permitted to issue up to eight years' worth of full tuition waivers to students wishing to attend any of the state's universities. The only prerequisite is that the student live in the legislator's district.

The program has drawn scrutiny over the years – from The News-Gazette and other news organizations – after some legislators were found to have been giving the scholarships to children of political contributors. A bill introduced by Jakobsson to kill the program was defeated in 2003.

Eliminating the program "would be a better way to find $4 million," Jakobsson said. She added that she opts not to dole out the tuition waivers.

A bit miffed, I tweeted:

University of Illinois officials want to take away employee benefit of tuition waivers for our children

And linked to the News-Gazette story. Janet Stemwedel, Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University and also known as the ever-clever Dr. Free-Ride of Adventures in Ethics and Science, picked up on the story and wrote a blog post herself:

Some universities (public ones and private ones) offer tuition waivers to family members of their employees. Where they are offered, tuition waivers are a part of the compensation package that is usually meant to be a counterweight to a salary that is lower than one might have liked. Health insurance and pensions (where they exist) work this way, too. If the benefit is not offered as part of the compensation package, the potential hire might (or should) sit down and calculate what those additional costs (to buy insurance, save for retirement, pay for a child's college education) will be, and whether it is plausible to cover them on the salary being offered.

Tuition waivers may not be a big deal for potential employees who have no children (and have no intention of having children), but for those who do, they may be part of the calculation of whether one offer of employment is better or worse than another. They might also be a data point in sussing out whether a university is a family friendly work environment.(emphasis mine)

I think her point about the tuition waivers helping to create a family friendly environment is an important one. Illinois prides itself on creating a good environment for families -- they have a great dual career program, are generous with their tenure rollbacks, and in my experience treat parents and non-parents, dual hires and regular hires equally. This is part of the reason getting rid of these waivers would be such a big mistake for Illinois.

And finally, Chad Orzel, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College who writes at Uncertain Principles weighed in on the topic, because of a comment on Dr. Free-Ride's post regarding whether waivers are fair to folks without kids:

It takes no time at all for the "Tuition benefits are unfair to people without kids" argument to pop up in comments. This is, as always, pretty stupid, because the same logic leads to thinking that health insurance benefits are unfair to people who don't become catastrophically ill. Tuition benefits are basically kid insurance-- it's a commitment to employees of an educational institution to compensate for lower salary, guaranteeing that even though they are not being paid as much as they might earn elsewhere, should they have children, they will be able to provide those children with a good education.

And that's the real problem, here. In a sense, the current employees of the University of Illinois have already "paid into" the system-- they have worked for less for the last several years, and planned their investments, with the understanding that their children would be provided for. In the absence of the benefit, they might have chosen to work elsewhere, and they certainly would have handled their finances differently.

....

This general class of problem is not unique to academia, of course. You see the same thing in the business world-- businesses who have traded generous benefits for lower salaries, who find themselves strapped for cash, and start attacking the benefits of their employees (or, worse yet, their retirees). This was a big part of GM's problems, for example. Sadly, the solution always seems to end up screwing the employees, who have less money and power.

....

In the general case, I have essentially zero sympathy for managers and administrators who paint their institutions into this kind of corner. They made the choice to buy employees off with generous benefits that they didn't think would end up costing them anything, and while it looked great on the balance sheet in the short term, it's blown up in their faces long-term. They deserve to sweat and squirm for a bit, but they should not be able to renege on their commitment to their employees. (emphasis mine)

So, what do you think of the possible repeal of our tuition waivers for our children? What should we be doing about it?

Inmates dreaming of running the asylum

2009-12-16T12:32:00.002-06:00

The News-Gazette outdoes itself in its December 10 editorial salvo against University of Illinois faculty presuming to inject themselves into their corporate-dominated Board of Trustees.

The editorial evokes a Churchill barb. It stumbled over the truth (faculty’s centrality to concepts of “shared governance” distinguishing universities from other institutions and propelling them to world leadership), but picked itself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened. Leave aside its apparent unawareness of faculty representation on trustee boards in other states. If the core mission of a university is teaching and research, a faculty presence on the Board of Trustees offers insight from those who actually perform those functions. Even when the editorial dismisses faculty as mere employees, it shortchanges evidence that the expertise of worker representatives on corporate boards (mandated in many OECD countries) can contribute to an efficient and cooperative corporate culture.

The News-Gazette is in good company. Ousted trustee David Dorris declared that “The last thing we need is a faculty member on the board.” The last thing? How about trustees who misuse their insider status or whose qualifications had more to do with their campaign contributions to Governor Blagojevich than their educational contributions? The citizens of Illinois, along with UIUC community members cast as asylum inmates by their local newspaper, have much to gain from Rep. Jakobsson’s and the Campus Faculty Association’s proposed reforms, and much to lose from taking seriously the News-Gazette’s superficial treatment of this issue.

- Mark Leff

[published in an edited version in today's News-Gazette, i.e. without the clever "inmates" reference to the N-G's own editorial of Dec. 10 - ed.]

Faculty reps on BOT, and what it's like without

2009-12-14T16:12:00.002-06:00

The CFA Proposal to Select and Diversify the Composition of the University Board of Trustees has two main elements that have been incorporated into the pending legislation, HB4688:
1. Inclusion of faculty as Trustees and
2. Establishing a Trustees Selection Task Force TRUST Force) to receive and review nominations and make recommendations to the Governor. Membership on the TRUST Force would include the chairs of the three campus senates, three acknowledged leaders in education from outside the University of Illinois and four additional persons with impeccable integrity. The credentials of all members of the TRUST Force should be made public to substantiate their requisite experience for this important role.
This call for change embodied in the CFA's proposal is perhaps best stated in former University of Illinois President Stanley Ikenberry's thoughtful essay entitled "Uncertain and Unplanned: The Future of Public Higher Education", Policy Forum, vol. 17, Institute of Government Public Affairs, University of Illinois, Champaign, 2005. Ikenberry wrote, "Public college and university governing boards need to reflect the diversification in 'publics' to which they must now be accountable and responsible. A fresh vision of public university governing structures, consistent with public interest, consistent with the emergence of new stakeholders, and reflective of a clarified 'state-public university partnership' or 'social contract' needs to be crafted."
A prime reason for inclusion of faculty on the Board of Trustees is the knowledge they would bring to the table. Higher education is faced with complex problems and wonderful opportunities. Faculty are arguably the constituency that is most familiar with both. As the U of I goes forward it would be a shame, if not foolish, not to include that expertise in the governance of the institution.
In addition, faculty grants contribute more money to the university than State appropriations, yet faculty have zero say in university governance.
Some of the best arguments in favor of having faculty representation on the U of I Board of Trustees also include what has taken place without such representation:
1. Failure to request and obtain appropriate resources from the State of IL over decades, even in times of economic prosperity (source: report of the North Central Commission on Higher Education)
2. Failure to educate IL legislators and IL citizens on the merits and activities of the U of I so that they would champion funds for the University
3. Interference with appointments and 'questionable' awarding of contracts
4. Admissions scandal
5. Politicization of the Board - Pay to Play: Recent past Trustees contributed more than
$585,000 to former Governor Blagojevich
6. Transfer of university property to the U of I Foundation that was subsequently sold to donors at below market value
7. Contracts that negate U of I policies. Examples: Contracts with Triple Canopy, Blackwater, and the Academy on Capitalism
8. Silencing dissent
9. Golden parachutes to 'team players'
10. Increases in tuition while at the same time approving tens of millions of dollars to the Research Park .
11. Imposition of a Fourth Mission on the university, "Economic Development", arguably, at the expense of the university fulfilling its traditional three missions: teaching, research and service.

- Stephen Kaufman

Dear Editor:

2009-12-13T17:30:00.007-06:00

Your [News-Gazette]December 10 editorial chiding state Rep. Naomi Jakobsson for proposing faculty representation on the U of I Board of Trustees greatly misrepresents the role of our University's faculty. I doubt you would publish such an editorial about a proposal to add doctors to the governing board of a hospital. You certainly would not show such disdain for the doctors staffing that hospital, likening them, as you did in this case, to inmates of an asylum. Faculty set curricula and work to pass on the special knowledge of their field to their students. Trustees and administrators do not, and indeed cannot, tell faculty how to do this.

As with any great university, members of the U of I's faculty already play a major role in the administration of the academic enterprise. Were they mere employees, faculty would not fund the organization in which they work. In reality, more than a third of the money coming to the University is brought to our community and state by research grants obtained by members of the University's world class faculty. Direct State appropriations, on the other hand, amount to less than eighteen percent of the University's budget; this year, the State has failed to supply even that small share of the money needed to run the University. It will be left to the faculty to shield students from that failure.

In your editorial you say "shame on state Rep. Naomi Jakobsson", but in fact, the shame is on you: The many members of the University faculty living in the community you claim to represent and the readers who buy your paper all deserve editorial opinions that are at least minimally informed.
-Peter Loeb

Reforming the Board of Trustees

2009-12-06T16:18:00.003-06:00

CFA's proposal to reform the UI Board of Trustees has been introduced (in slightly altered form) by Naomi Jakobsson as HB4688!

This proposal, which the CFA had been working on for months BEFORE the "clout" scandal broke, seeks to establish a "TRUST force" made up of representatives from various constituencies - faculty and others - to select a BOT with an interest in the University's core mission: education and research.

And more!

GEO pickets shut down ...

2009-11-17T14:51:00.002-06:00

Today around 1pm GEO shut down its picket lines to announce that the UIUC had agreed to the central demand that was driving the strike: tuition waiver security. The strike is still on until the appropriate GEO body can vote, but for now the pickets are suspended.

The GEO had planned a general membership meeting this evening to hear the progress of negotiations, so we should hear a result one way or the other soon. Faculty support of various kinds - department resolutions, canceling classes, picketing, etc. - has been important to this effort, and faculty should remember what can be done together. GEO is an inspiration to us all!

To the editor:

2009-11-13T11:16:00.000-06:00

In recent days, University of Illinois administrators and spokespeople have made statements suggesting that graduate students are threatening to go on strike because they are not being given the raise they have requested at a time when “other employees of the university did not receive any raises at all this year” ( http://www.provost.illinois.edu/geo_negotiation_notes.html) .

I believe it is important for the university community and greater public to be aware of a very different perspective. In fact, some top university administrators, including Richard Herman and Chet Gardner (who ran the now defunct Global Campus, which will never recoup the millions of dollars the university invested in it), have received extremely generous raises. It is also worth noting that even though university administrators argue that they cannot afford to pay graduate student employees a living wage, the university paid attorneys $400,000 to represent it at the panel investigating the use of clout for university admission.

The reason graduate student assistants are threatening to strike is that the university administration has failed to negotiate in good faith with the graduate student union. For example, whereas the graduate student union presented the administration with a proposal on the first day of negotiations, university administrators did not present a counter proposal until 4 days before the old contract expired, and their proposal called for a 3 year wage freeze.

Howard Berenbaum

Dear Editor...

2009-11-13T10:51:00.002-06:00

[Submitted to the News-Gazette this morning by one of our Executive Committee members - ed.]

As a member of the Campus Faculty Association at the University of Illinois I support the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) and their strike for a better contract:

In recent years we've heard a lot from the U. of I. administration about their goal of creating better jobs for Illinois. Now, in the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, University leaders seem committed to lowering the wages and working conditions of some of their hardest-working employees. Despite the administration's sketchy figures, most graduate teaching assistants make below the university's own minimal figures for what it costs to live in Champaign or Urbana. Good jobs for Illinois?

The University has been starved for state funds for more than a decade. Staffing has been reduced, buildings neglected, equipment is out of date and there are not enough janitors to clean the classrooms properly. Students sit in classrooms with broken furniture and trash on the floor. Most faculty members work more than 60 hours a week, and we are about to be told to take unpaid furlough days. Meanwhile, the administration pours millions into public relations, consulting firms, stadium sky-boxes, bonuses for disgraced administrators and ill-advised gambles like the Global Campus.

Driving down the wages and raising the tuition of the teaching assistants, who provide nearly a quarter of instruction to U of I undergraduates, might make for a good corporate bottom line -- but is not going to encourage the state legislature to better fund the University. It's not going to improve undergraduate education, or draw excellent graduate students to Illinois.

Susan Davis
Professor
Urbana-Champaign

CFA helping find alternate classroom sites

2009-11-13T00:23:00.003-06:00

In the event of a grad employee strike next week, GEO is requesting that faculty show support by canceling classes. For those who feel they cannot do that, or can only cancel some, CFA is helping find alternate venues. Arrangements depend upon date and time, class size and other needs, and availability, so we can make no guarantees. The information [here attached as a "comment"] has been sent to all CFA members, but we can also assist others.

CFA supports GEO

2009-11-11T20:05:00.002-06:00

A strike by the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) is likely to start as early as Monday November 16 and will impact many of the classroom buildings in the heart of the University of Illinois. This is a legal strike produced by the intransigence of university negotiators over the course of seven months and by provocative actions such as the continuing threat to eliminate some tuition and fee waivers. After working for several months without a contract and facing little if any movement in negotiations, GEO has finally decided that it must strike in order to protect the interests of its members. For these reasons, the Campus Faculty Association (CFA) supports this strike. We urge our members to honor the GEO picket lines and to support the GEO in any or all of the following ways:

Buttons, posters, and verbal expressions of support. (Both buttons and posters are available through the GEO and CFA office on the second floor of the University Y on Wright Street.) Please do not under-estimate these symbolic forms of support for graduate employees, undergraduate students, your fellow faculty, and administrators.
Letters of support for GEO, to the DI, deans, the provost, the NG, the Board of Trustees, etc. (Please see the attached for contact information and relevant data.)
Department resolutions, especially with clear statements that the department will not report on grad employee activities or retaliate in any way. Many units have already passed such resolutions.
Cancel your classes, especially if they are in picketed buildings. If you feel that you cannot do this for ethical reasons, arrange to move your class to one of the venues listed on the attached sheet. (This latter option will take some advance planning.) Other options would include providing on-line postings of lecture outlines and course assignments; employing pod casts; etc. The main point would be to stop business as usual and find some way to express solidarity with the GEO in terms of your own teaching routine.
Join in the picketing of your own building in order to demonstrate support and to bolster picket lines. (You can simply show up or coordinate your actions by contacting GEO).

We also have a document suitable for posting and will shortly post details regarding available off-campus spaces to hold classes, should faculty feel this is necessary.

CFA members who still have questions regarding the on-going negotiations and the long process that has precipitated this strike may find further information at the CFA Facebook site (to be linked -- we're almost done with it!) and the GEO website.

On UI "furloughs" ... that is, pay cuts

2009-11-05T15:37:00.000-06:00

For more than 35 years now, the Campus Faculty Association (CFA) has been working in the interests of faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The past year or so has been a particularly difficult time for our campus – the admissions scandal and related problems, severe budget cuts in the units with more to come, the threat of a strike by graduate employees, and now the prospect of "furloughs" (that is, pay cuts) coming in the spring semester. The union has been working on this issue through established governance bodies, publicity, and also by beginning to map out a strategy for faculty in the event of such furloughs.

This blog is intended to be a space where faculty let us know their thinking regarding this particular issue and their ideas for how to respond. In order to prepare for this threat, we ask CFA members not only to share their own thoughts about it – both on this blog and on the UI site – but also to pass the blogsite URL on to colleagues who might also take part in this discussion. We all hope the financial crisis will not come to this drastic measure, but it is wise to plan. Please discuss the issue of furloughs with colleagues and encourage them to take part in this planning.

– Jim Barrett, History