By Ira Lansing
As I write this, Northern California has just gone through torrential downpours, flooding and mud slides. Hopefully as you read this, the weather has been kind to you, or at the very worst, the situation is being taken care of with minimal inconvenience.
Recently, I was on campus to deal with some Union issues and I had occasion to enter my office in the Science Center. Faithful readers of this column will recall that at various times—depending on the season—I have described my office as a sauna, refrigerator, hot tub and mushroom farm. The conditions are the result of the main exterior wall of my office facing the back of the Woodlands Market, which is in the direct path of nearly every rainstorm that enters Kentfield. I will add that it also provides a glorious unobstructed view (unobstructed since the 45-year old eucalyptus tree toppled over a few years ago. Yes, it fell in the "right" direction, much to the regret of some of my students) of Mt. Tamalpais. However, because of the rain assault on the outer wall, my carpet often has more water content than it should. Over the years, the District has gone through various attempts at fixing the problem. It affects all offices on that side of the building, but as this recent series of storms revealed, the degree of success varies with the weather.
My intention is not to dredge up old problems, but to remind those of you whose working environment at the College of Marin has been impacted upon by the storms, that you do have certain rights and responsibilities under the law and the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Most simply put, you are entitled to a "safe" work environment. The definition of "safe" may be somewhat subjective —unseen growths are a little harder to demonstrate than 4 inches of mud. However, if you deem your working conditions to be unsafe, report this condition to your manager supervisor, request an alternate work place and do not put yourself or your students at risk.
Realize that the District is probably doing all that it can to correct the obvious problems, but they may not be aware of all of them and it could take time for other safety issues to develop. Also, the District is in an interesting position of needing to fix problems in the short term that will be corrected by multi-million dollar bond construction in the near future. At least we hope they will be corrected by this expenditure.
So what do you do when you show up and things are not in working condition? If it is your office and you are a permanent employee, you are contractually guaranteed "someplace comparable" to what you previously had. If you are temporary, well, you were never really guaranteed any space—but still required to hold office hours; how’s that for a paradox? Whatever you had before was fortunate and will hopefully be accommodated somehow.
If your classroom or other working area has been impacted, assess how feasible it is to continue in the same area. If this is not possible, again, notify your manager, request an alternate location and wait to get the space. How long do you wait? All I can say is that you do not put yourself, or your students in an unsafe environment, so you wait. Where do you wait? Any place on campus that is safe. That is, you do not go home. One good place to wait, along with your students, would be outside the office of your supervisor. If that gets too crowded, send some over to the office of the Vice-President of Academic Affairs. She is brand new to the District, so I am sure she would like to meet you. And of course, if all else fails, Fran White would love to say hello to you at the start of the new semester.
Once again, I certainly hope that all possible repairs will happen before you ever read this column, but in the event that they have not, you now have some ideas of how to proceed. And if you have returned and all is normal (whatever that may mean), then at the very least, this column can be held over your head to provide you some minimal shelter from the next storm.
Welcome back, stay healthy and stay informed.
n Open Letter to the Faculty regarding Modernization and our Lack of Representation on Significant Decision-making Committees.
Let me first say that I am delighted that we have this generous Bond Measure to allow College of Marin to be renovated, renewed and become once again the place
students will choose to attend. But the modernization process has not, as yet, been driven by an overall campus-wide Vision designed by the Faculty, Students and Staff who use the facilities.
I have participated in the EMP and many Modernization
meetings last semester and have serious concerns about the
power structure and the representation on all committees in the
modernization process.
1) Structure --Two committees—Facilities Planning Committee and
District Modernization Committee—have overlapping charges, meet relatively infrequently and appear to follow rather than direct the consultants—Swinerton and Steinberg. Furthermore it is not clear which committee really has the power to oversee the Modernization and so perhaps neither Committee is really able to control and direct it.
2) Representation: Membership on the Modernization
Committee and its Sub-Committees is disproportionally
structured with Administration and Consultants severely
outnumbering Faculty and Students :
- The District Modernization Committee is composed of 6 Administrators, four of whom are new to the District and may not have a keen awareness of our needs, 5 Consultants (who should not be sitting on the committee and making decisions. How can a consultant be supervised if he has several voting seats on the committee charged with supervising his work?), 1 Faculty and 1 Student
- Modernization Sub-committees each have: 4-9 Administrators, 2 Consultants 1 Faculty and 1 Student.
Many Faculty share with me the belief that the following structural changes need to occur immediately:
1) A single committee should be formed that proportionally represents all relevant groups and should be configured similarly to the Ventura College FOG—Facilities Oversight Group—model. This includes:
Facilities Director-1 member
Maintenance and Operations –1 member
Task Force Chairs— Fine Arts Project-Faculty
P.E.Project--Faculty
StudentServices--Fac/Classif
All other Project Chairs
Faculty Senate President
Classified Senate President
Faculty member, Architecture Department
Faculty member, Interior Design Department
This single committee should meet twice a month and
all decisions should be filtered through them
2) Sub-committees should be reconfigured to have a large proportion of faculty and students, they should be chaired by Faculty and should by no means be permitted to make any decisions without FOG agreement. As it stands, Swinerton planned to have subcommittees make all decisions on Interiors and Exteriorsand Site over the Winter Break, a plan only changed in late December.
3) Consultants should be at meetings when appropriate but they should not be voting members of any Modernization Committee nor should they Chair any of them.
As I wrote in a to Fran White and presented to the Board in December, our committees have mandated charges. The Facilities Planning Committee is charged "to assure faculty, staff and student involvement in the planning, design, construction, and upkeep of college owned facilities. and the execution of major capital facilities projects such as . . . a Facilities Bond Measure" and "to act as the participatory governance representative for the planning and execution of capital projects." Yet this committee met for the first time in mid-November and has not as yet been able to do any visioning for the whole College.
The District Modernization Committee is charged: "to set the
guiding principles and ensure compliance with the District’s Facilities Master Plan," yet the District has as yet developed no list of guiding principles and has set forth no Facilities Master Plan with which to comply.The laws clearly specity that participants in the shared governance process and not consultants shall be the guiding forces in the modernization process . But the two committees charged with establishing guiding principles and assuring involvement in planning have not yet involved themselves in an overall vision for the college. Nor have the college community—Faculty, Students, Staff, and Community members—had an opportunity to create a campus-wide vision for the whole college.
Our consultants Rob Barthelman of Steinberg Architects and Elizabeth Tucker of Swinerton Construction Management have both clearly stated that Swinerton would be developing"initial concepts" for whole project during the Winter Break.
These construction managers and architects are inappropriately taking on an educational and policy making role by developing concepts for the college in isolation from the Shared Governance procedures. By allowing physical plant renovation consultants to create and control our Facilities Master Plan, we are unwisely giving free rein to a horse without showing him the path we want him to take.
It is the whole college community who should according to the state legislative mandate, be envisioning how the campus should function and look.
As I told our President, she is at the helm of this great project, and should modify the direction we have been taking and take an in-house visionary approach to the modernization. If she does so, she will be much appreciated for her efforts in supporting a college-wide visioning. Each person who is part of our college community, those who have a stake in the outcome of modernization—the students, the faculty, the staff and the community—would like to feel that he or she, not outside consultants with a lesser stake in the outcome, is recreating our college and realizing its potential. We need to take back control of our project for the benefit of us all and then we will know that together we have made things happen."
By Carla Zilbersmith
On Friday January 20, UPM ushered in the new semester with a highly informative general meeting. Several items were discussed all of which are important to you. If you had to miss the meeting, here are some of the highlights:
In November you should have seen an increase in your paycheck. This is the first of several pay raises you are to expect thanks to the new contract. If you recall, we received a 1% pay raise retroactive to July 2004, a 6% pay raise, retroactive to July 2005 and an additional 6% raise effective July 2006, as well as a bonus of 3%, retroactive to July 2004 in a separate bonus check and a retirement savings bonus to be divided as a dollar amount among all of the 100 salary steps.
Next week, faculty should be recieiving additional monies and then a separate check again on or around February 7th. The savings from retiring faculty have yet to be agreed upon, but will make it’s way to the salary scale eventually. If any of this is confusing to you, you are not alone. Make sure to check with someone in payroll if you are uncertain about any checks that appear in the mail. Thanks go out to UPM’s Mike Ransom who has figured out a way to calculate all of this bounty.
Another negotiated item in the latest contract is the district-initiated shortened calendar. Although the shortened calendar has been agreed upon, the District apparently missed the deadline for approving the new calendar with the State. We will therefore be operating next fall under the old calendar, however it is not yet clear how this will impact Flex week. Once again this is very confusing since what we have negotiated cannot be put into place for the time being. Stay tuned for further updates.
In other news, the District will be cutting coordinator units. How they will make their decisions and how many units will be cut is anybody’s guess, but one Dean has stated that he has been charged with cutting 30% of coordinator units. Please be advised that while management can cut your coordinator position, they cannot reduce or increase the units without going through the Union. In other words, if you and your Dean come to an agreement about a reduction in the number of coordinator units ( and presumably coordinator duties) and you do not include the Union in these negotiations, management is direct-dealing with you and subject to a grievance.
UPM is going into binding arbitration over a grievance filed by one of our part time faculty. Details about this case are featured in Arthur Lutz’s column on Page 3 of this newsletter.
That’s all the news from the general meeting. Have a great semester.
Connecting the Dots
Arthur Lutz
Bobble-Heads
Corporations also have bobble heads. They’re called yes-men – men and women who mindlessly nod in agreement with the decisions made by their superiors regardless of whether the decisions are kooky or hokey or unreasonable or unethical. And there are yes-men in our government, and yes-men in our military. And there are yes-men (and yes-women) here at the College of Marin.
But there are also those who refuse to be bobble-heads and who have the courage to shake their heads no and speak out against injustice and incompetence when they see it.
Hugh Thompson was such a person. Mr. Thompson was the Army helicopter pilot during the Viet Nam war who rescued civilians during the My Lai massacre. He died this month in Alexandria, LA. He was 62 years old.
In its obit, the New York Times wrote that on March 16, 1968, Chief Warrant Officer Thompson and his two crewmen were flying on a reconnaissance mission over the South Vietnamese village of My Lai when they spotted the bodies of men, women and children strewn over the landscape
.Mr. Thompson landed in an effort to determine what was happening and came to the realization that the civilians were being massacred by American troops. He touched down near a bunker in which a group of about 10 civilians were being menaced by American GIs and ordered his gunner and his crew chief to shoot any American soldiers who opened fire on the civilians. He radioed for a helicopter gunship and waited while the few civilians who were still alive were evacuated, and then helped his crew chief pull a boy from a nearby irrigation ditch and flew with him to safety.
When he returned to base, Mr. Thompson told his superiors what he had seen. "I threatened never to fly again," he said. "I didn't want to be a part of that. It wasn't war."
When Thompson returned home, he testified before Congress and at the court-martial of Lt. William Calley (the only soldier to be convicted in the massacre,) but as a result of his testimony he received death threats over the phone and dead and mutilated animals began appearing on his porch. Undeterred, he continued to speak out about the moral and legal obligations of soldiers during wartime. He did not speak out because he expected rewards, but because it was right. Shortly before he died, Mr. Thompson told The Associated Press "If you’re thinking of doing the right thing, don't look for a reward, because it might never come."
There are many people who have done the right thing without expecting or receiving rewards. There are the heroes and heroines of the labor movement who were murdered so that we might have the benefits that we all enjoy today. And those during the McCarthy era whose lives were destroyed by the blacklist because they refused to act as informers. And those who died in the Civil Rights struggles fighting for dignity and equal justice under law.
And there are also people of conscience here at the College of Marin who have done the right thing by speaking out against incompetence and deceit, and while these abuses may not rise to the level of a My Lai, some of our faculty have also paid a heavy price for their outspokenness. Just this month our Union is representing one such unit member who was dismissed in retaliation because she refused to act like a bobble-head and nod yes to management ineptitude. The case is presently in the hands of an arbitrator, but whatever the outcome, bravo for people like her who have the courage to speak up and try to make our college a better place to work and learn. Our union will continue to actively support these unit members when their contractual and free speech rights are violated.