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Ponderings of the President
by Ira Lansing Welcome back. We have some new faculty, who have joined us since last January and in addition, there are some managers who have chosen to advance to the faculty. I would observe that with the movement of these three managers, we are left – at the academic dean level or higher – with just one manager in this District who has a history and a memory of more than one year. The implications of this on contract negotiations and contract management are frightening. Every one of you, whether you have been here 30 years or are new to the District, has a better understanding of our contract than those who may be your supervisors. I can say this even for those of you who are new hires, because your every working day is a reflection of the collective bargaining agreement and your contractual rights. Your assignments, your work schedule, your duties, your office hours, your ouside-of-the-class or counseling or library obligations are all reflected in the contract, and designed to give you the most individual freedom and flexibility. Will your supervisor be aware of the language and know the options associated with your employment? Will he or she impose her own perspective or interpretations? Will the response: "Well, that was before I came here" become all too common? Watch out – "before I came here" was only last year!We are already seeing an administration and a Board of Trustees that is quite comfortable with ignoring the contract and labor law when it suits them. Already, they have trashed the UPM side of a quid pro quo sidebar that would have helped the laid off faculty in the Children’s Center. Already, they are ignoring collective bargaining and unilaterally creating faculty assignments out of "business necessity." Governance peoposals that had been fully reviewed and accepted by all parties have been unilaterally abandoned. They have chosen to bargain with voice mail messages to faculty and staff and letters to the IJ editor from their Information Officer. And in all of this, the attitude is one of "appreciate what you are being offered and take it." The motto from last year: "Together We Can Make Great Things Happen" is fine, until you or the contract gets in the way of "we." Then "we" will move forward, regardless. In an all too Schwartzenegarian style, faculty have become the problem. But this union – United Professors of Marin – has been known to take radical actions. When we were first formed, back in the late 70’s, we chose to represent not just full-time faculty and not just credit faculty, but part-time credit and non-credit as well. At that time, only one other local in the State had done the same. In the 80’s, when the District attempted to blackmail UPM into dropping a landmark lawsuit involving the 50% Law by laying off 86 teachers, counselors and librarians, this Union fought back and overturned every single layoff notice issued by the District. In the 90’s when the District claimed that low enrollment was jeopardizing the local finances, UPM deferred a raise that was contractually owed to us, created and single-handedly managed a student recruitment schoarship fund that, through increased enrollment, brought in over a million new dollars to the District in just one year. After that year, the District thanked UPM, but did they continue the program we had started? No! Now, in this new century of labor relations, and a new era of Basic Aid funding, what responses will UPM have? What responses will YOU have? We are witnessing a time of increased revenues to the District. Last year ended with over $1 million MORE from property taxes than expected. This year’s projected budget and revenues are the largest in the history of the College of Marin. Have you in your departments or have you in your salaries, seen one penny of this? I have been told that faculty members are buying supplies out of their own pockets to keep their classes going until the end of the semester, because the District claimed they did not have the money. We are indeed the problem, in their minds, not the solution. We must show them different! But it cannot happen because of what I do, or what our Chief Negotiator Paul Christensen and the bargaining team do; or because of what Arthur Lutz, your Grievance Officer does; or Theo Fung, our Treasurer; or Deborah Graham, our Budget Monitor; or Carla Zilbersmith, the Newsletter Editor, or the dozens of other members on Union-District committees. All of our actions are successful, because when we are doing our jobs, the District knows that we are representing YOU and that we have your support behind our statements. We cannot do it without you. It may sound cliché-ish, but there is a "U" in "United Professors of Marin". We need your help and support. We need your collective actions. Without that from you, it cannot and will not happen. If not from you, then right now, you may as well settle for the reality that all the good things we had, well, "that was before you came!" Have a productive semester.
Teacher Unions Join Boycott of Wal-Mart August 11, 2005, Los Angeles Times The two largest U.S. teacher unions joined a "back-to-school" boycott against Wal-Mart Stores Inc., targeting one of the year's busiest shopping seasons to protest the retailer'labor practices. The 2.7-million-member National Education Association, the biggest U.S. union, and the 1.3-million-member American Federation of Teachers are teaming with the United Food and Commercial Workers in urging shoppers to buy school supplies elsewhere, the UFCW's Wake-Up Wal-Mart group said The unions held rallies in 32 cities, demanding that the company boost its wages, expand health benefits and adhere to child-labor and discrimination laws. Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart called the protest a publicity stunt and said that its low prices helped educators an students.Shares of Wal-Mart fell 38 cents to $48.84.
HIGHER EDUCATION ACT: STOP THE RAID ON STUDENT AID The following article was taken from the August 29th edition of AFT’s online newsletter The AFT is launching a letter-writing campaign to let legislators know that pending renewal of the Higher Education Act could affect access, fairness and affordability--the very foundation of public education. Activists and others are on high alert since the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and the Workforce made final changes to H.R. 609, the College Access and Opportunity Act of 2005, the House version of the reauthorization. As it stands, this bill threatens not only affordability and access to education but also academic freedom. AFT-backed amendments—to increase the maximum Pell Grant, protect students from fraud and abuse at for-profit colleges, and strike "academic bill of rights" language threatening academic freedom—were defeated by Republican leaders. AFT members have another chance to make a difference, however, as the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee begins its mark-up of the bill on Sept. 7. This is the time for constituents to tell Congress what's most important for education in this country: more grant aid, less expensive loans, no government intrusion on academic freedom, and checks on fraud and abuse at for-profits. In addition, any savings to the HEA rendered through the committee should be kept within HEA for needed education expenditures. To write to your senator and the chair of the committee considering the HEA, visit the AFT Legislative Action Center . Further analysis of what is happening to student aid, through HEA, is available from highered@aft.org .
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College of Marin Faculty Protest at President's Convocation UPM are a faculty with strong opinions and often, divergent interests. Every instructor seems to have a different opinion about how to improve the College and every instructor seems to define the chief problems we face through the lens of his or her own departmental concerns and interests. And yet, in speaking with many faculty, one unifying thought emerges: tremendous dissatisfaction with the current administration and board. Here are some of the concerns that have been reported: Many faculty understand that there is more to the decreasing enrollment at CoM than the changing demographics of the county. Quite simply put, students will not attend a college, which does not offer the courses they want or need. The more classes and sections of classes that we cut, the more our students are driven to other institutions like Santa Rosa and the more out of District students from the East Bay and San Francisco decide to stay at their community colleges since the CoM district is now "no better" than the district from where they were commuting. Many faculty are confused as to why decreasing enrollments, fewer and fewer sections of classes, fewer part-time faculty, retiring full-time (and not replaced) faculty, fewer classified staff, less janitorial services, and so on and so on, require more managers. Many faculty wonder why "streamlined services" have placed larger and larger obstacles in the paths of instructors trying to create brochures (which will let the community know what we are doing), obtain instructional supplies (for which they now pay out of pocket in order to get them in a timely fashion) or allow visitors to park (remember when the families of dead servicemen were ticketed during the remarkable Faces of the Fallen exhibit?). Many faculty are frustrated at the animosity expressed over the 50% law, which Vice-President Al Harrison, a long-time colleague of President White’s, refers to as "an obstacle to education." It is hard to comprehend the idea that we are being led by someone who does not believe that at least 50% of our funding should go towards budget items pertaining to learning in the classroom. Some of us have the crazy idea that learning in the classroom is what school is all about. Many faculty are outraged that faculty salaries have declined 4.8% over the past 3 years, while the District’s revenues have risen 10.8% and their reserves have grown 40.5% over the same three years. Faculty are astonished by the fact that in 3 years we have gone from being in the top 3 of the Bay 10 in salary compensation to number 54, and that we earn far less than faculty in the other 2 Basic Aid Districts in California. In three years. New faculty could not consider buying a home in Marin County on just their CoM salary. It would be unthinkable. And so faculty are also concerned that we will become a college of freeway flyers and full-timers who live hours away and therefore must limit their involvement in the life of the college. Many faculty had high hopes when Fran White was hired. Upon the President’s arrival, there had been a shifting on the Board and a new president who spoke of communication and togetherness. Contract negotiations began over a year ago and spirits were high. UPM made some concessions to the District and the mood was congenial. The result: we are now facing the prospect of impasse. Upon the President’s arrival, she had been told that faculty were concerned over the infestation of consultants and that we felt willing and able to provide many of the services for which the College had employed outsiders. The result: we are now hemorrhaging money, which is going to the ubiquitous consultants. Upon the President’s arrival, she was told that new buildings would be wonderful, but that if we didn’t have adequate custodial services, and more than one carpenter, electrician, etc, those new buildings would deteriorate in appearance within a year. The result: some Departments were told that if they wanted janitorial staff for their "after hours events" (held during night class hours) they would have to pay the custodial overtime out of their department’s operating budget. Although this has not come to pass, the decision was extremely damaging to morale. Finally, many faculty are concerned about the eerie echoes of national tactics resounding through our campus. The oft- repeated slogan "together we can make great things happen" has the feeling of the Orwellian newspeak, which we hear so often on the national news. There is a cognitive dissonance between words and actions, which lead one to believe that the "we" in the slogan is the royal "we" and that "we" of the faculty have no say at all. "We" are, after all, college professors and are less vulnerable to manipulation through language. Words are powerful and should not be carelessly bandied about. We must all demand of the President that she be true to the words in her convocation speech and to start by hosting some genuine question and answer sessions – open forums, to which all faculty are invited - not just a small audience of admirers. Then we must move beyond our mere words and attend these sessions. We must attend Board Meetings. We must insist on being active participants in the future of this college. The College of Marin is blessed with an exceptional faculty. Students from all over the country report back from the august institutions they now attend and tell us that the quality of the education they received at CoM is every bit as good and sometimes better than at their new school. The faculty at College of Marin is the crowning jewel of the institution – without whom; there is no College of Marin. We must fight for our units, fight for our departmental budgets and fight for fair benefits and wages. We must fight for the respect and fair treatment of our classified staff, without whom, our lives would be even more challenging. If we can work together to do all of this, then indeed we can make great things happen. Connecting the Dots
They tell the story that after the Columbia disaster two and a half years ago, NASA administrators commissioned engineers to develop alternative back-up plans for all systems in future space-crafts. One area of concern was the onboard intercom system, by which the astronauts communicated with one another. If this system malfunctioned during flight, communication among the crew members would be disrupted, leading to possible confusion. So to eliminate this possibility, NASA decided to provide an alternate communication system – a ball-point writing implement – so that the crew could write messages to each other in case of emergency. It turned out however that the problem posed significant technical challenges. Ball-point inks degassed and leaked in zero gravity and would not dry properly. So NASA hired a team of contract specialists to research the problem and develop an instrument that would write in orbital conditions, and they allocated two and a half million dollars for the project. The consultants worked diligently for two years, but they were unable to produce a reliable writing instrument, and so, as the time for the next shuttle launch approached, the NASA project administrator telephoned his counterpart at the Russian space agency and asked what type of writing instrument the cosmonauts would use if their intercom failed. To which the Russian replied, "Our cosmonauts will use a pencil." A pencil! How ingenious! No moving parts, no development delays, and they only cost fifteen cents. The modern pencil is one of the great innovations in the history of technology. Lead (graphite) pencils were used as far back as the time of Leonardo Da Vinci and were first mass-produced in Nuremberg, Germany in 1662. But in America, it was a certain John Thoreau who started manufacturing them in Concord, Mass. in 1821 when deposits of graphite were found in nearby New Hampshire. And it was none other than John’s son, Henry David Thoreau, while working in the family pencil business, who was responsible for significant improvements in the manufacture of the pencil. It’s perhaps fitting that the author of Walden was involved in the development of a device that is the prototypic symbol of efficiency, frugality and simplicity. A look at the pencil might be instructive, because it suggests that not all problems need be solved by using new and expensive hi-tech equipment. Take for example the problem that we are having at the College of Marin, where a major predicament is our loss of student enrollment. Our administration is attempting to reverse this trend and is spending huge sums of money for new facilities, new signage, a hi-tech management software system and expensive technical consultants, in the hope that these measures will make our school more attractive and inviting to students and will help increase our student population and restore our once envied reputation. But H.D. Thoreau might suggest that our administration has chosen the wrong remedy, because the solution to our enrollment problem might be, like the pencil, much simpler and far less costly. Offer more classes! Hire more faculty to teach them, and pay the faculty a living wage! Large numbers of students would be attracted to our college if we offered a more comprehensive program, taught by instructors whose morale was high because they were fairly compensated. So why can’t our administrators see that it is programs and faculty, not technology or architecture that will draw students and save our school from oblivion? Because administrators don’t like faculty. They see us as troublesome – too independent. We’re not compliant or easily controlled. We demand decent working conditions and reasonable wages, and sometimes, we even protest noisily (which management really hates.) Technological devices don’t do that. Buildings don’t do that. They don’t make trouble. They work 24-7 and never need time off to attend a friend’s wedding or a relative’s funeral. And they certainly don’t organize and demonstrate for higher wages. So management would prefer to eliminate or de-emphasize the role of personnel and replace us with technology and architecture. And this anti-worker attitude is evident in our Contract negotiations, where our administration’s stance is patently anti-faculty, anti-union, and in the end result, anti-student. Many years ago, Walter Reuther, who was then president of the United Auto Workers, was invited to the opening of a brand new Ford crankshaft plant in Dearborn, Michigan, where the manufacture of crankshafts was so automated with robotic machinery, that there were no workers at all in the facility. It was a management’s dream. At the ribbon cutting ceremony, Henry Ford II, (all smiles) turned to Reuther and quipped, "Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay your union dues?" To which Reuther replied, "Henry, how are you going to get these robots to buy your automobiles?" Our administration’s under-investment in faculty, and over-investment in technology and construction is doomed to failure because it is the faculty, not the technology, which attracts students and which can restore our college to its once coveted eminence. Like Walter Reuther, we might ask the Henry Fords in our administration and on our Board of Trustees, "now that you’ve spent all your money and energy on fancy buildings and hi-tech devices, are you still interested in having anyone teach your classes?"
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