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The latest on the EMU faculty strike: The calm before the storm

Update:
I just want to point out to all of the folks who have come across this page through a google search of some sort: I have several other entries about the strike, so you might want to visit my blog homepage for the most current news on the strike.

If you do a search for “EMU strike” or “EMU-AAUP” or “EMU Faculty Strike” or something like that, this is one of the pages that comes up highest in the search. So, given that lots of people are doing that sort of search right now, I thought I’d post something this morning– something quick since I need to get ready for the annual English department retreat, which starts in about an hour and a half.

Anyway, there was a rally at noon yesterday that I thought was one of the more organized one of these affairs that I’ve participated in. Oh sure, it’s theater, mostly a photo-op for the media, but we did a pretty organized march around Welch Hall, there were some decent (although somewhat hard to hear) pep talks, and I think we were able to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish: Channel 4 and Channel 7 were both there (though I don’t know if that means we were on TV), and the area newspapers were there, too. So some decent coverage.

I marched around the building a couple of times; my wife Annette, with her not great knee situation, opted out and eventually went on to her physical therapy appointment. My son Will walked with me though. While practicing for the picket, I noticed Tom Venner standing off on the side and watching us. Venner is the chair of the Art department and is on the bargaining team for the administration.

Just as a slight tangent here: I really am at a loss as to why the administration is being the way that they are here, at least based on what I’ve heard. There was a guy from the national office for the AAUP at the rally, and he said there (and again on WEMU radio this morning) that the administration here has been a lot more difficult to deal with than any of the other universities in Michigan that have been negotiating contracts lately. What I don’t get about all this is I know some of the administrators at the table right now, and my experience has been that they are good people. I mean, Hartmut Hoft is a really good dean; Venner was the chair of the search for a new department head in English, and he did a great job with that. So as far as I can tell, some combination of things must be going on here. Maybe folks like Hoft and Venner are just tools for other administrators, which begs the question of why John Fallon and members fo the Board of Regents seem to be getting a “pass” by the media and the union on all this stuff. Maybe it’s just the lawyer, Jim Greene, who doesn’t exactly have a reputation of being a warm ‘n fuzzy guy interested in a fair compromise. Maybe Hoft and Venner aren’t such good guys after all. I don’t know. But if being an administrator means you either have to be tool or a jerk to the faculty, then that’s a job I’m not interested in.

The guy from the national AAUP said something else worth mentioning here: the faculty is not asking for anything more than what all of these other schools in Michigan have received in recent negotiations.

Anyway, the rally was a fine event, and then there was the actual meeting/discussion/vote on a strike. There was really no talk at all about whether or not we ought to go on strike, and this is kind of interesting to me. As far as I can recall, this has always been a topic of discussion before; there was a lot more division about whether or not we ought to walk out during the last contract negotiation.

The only real issue talked about was when to strike and how a strike would work. There was some concern about what it would look like for us to strike during the student orientation that starts this weekend. The argument went that if we didn’t go to the orientation sessions, then students would only hear about EMU from administrators and it wouldn’t look good for parents and incoming students to see faculty marching around with picket signs. Well, from my point of view, you’re either on strike or you’re not, and quite frankly, I want parents and incoming students to see faculty with picket signs. We’re not going on strike to make the administration and the institution look good; we’re going on strike to bring attention to the fact that the administration and institution are treating the faculty poorly. Maybe faculty picketing will make us look bad; but I happen to think it will make the administration look worse.

As I type this, EMU-AAUP President Howard Bunsis is actually on the radio talking about this stuff right now, actually. He’s talking about a number of the things I’ve already mentioned, so I don’t have a lot to add. One of the thing that I think Howard has learned well over the last couple of years is how to talk to the media. He stressed what I think is actually true fundamentally, that faculty want to be back to work and want to be teaching, and, simultaneously, he minimized what I see as the reality, which is there’s no way faculty are going to work without a contract and it sure looks like the administration isn’t willing to make a deal until they see if we really will strike.

So we’ll see what happens here. I guess I’ll find out at about midnight or so….

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Academic Holding Pattern

When it comes to writing the generic “start of the term” post, I have a couple of problems. While our trip to Europe earlier this month was a lot of fun, it wasn’t exactly relaxing. It was more of one of those great “trips” that require a bit of a “vacation” for recovery. So in a sense, I have kind of been making that vacation now, even though I’ve been sitting in on the training sessions for graduate assistants that Linda AK is leading before she hits sabbatical and hands me the keys to the first year writing program store– more on that in a bit.

And then there’s the whole faculty union stuff. But that’s the subject of a different (tomorrow’s?) post.

In any event, even the threat of a strike casts quite a shadow on the beginnings of the term, especially when it comes to the advising and quasi-administrative work that is going to make up the bulk of my work this year– again, more on that in a bit. I found myself last night going through a backlog of email and telling students, potential students, and other advisees that I will be available next week– unless we’re on strike. That’s kind of annoying, and while I suppose the union negotiators can be blamed for some of this, I mostly blame the administration and I really REALLY blame the lawyer that the university hires to break negotiate with the union. I am certain that if this guy was not at the table, the folks from the faculty and the folks from the administration would have worked out a deal months ago. But the lawyers get paid by the hour, and they get paid to bring us to the brink, right?

Oh wait– I said that was going to be a different post….

Besides this academic holding pattern created by a combination of my body/soul forcing a post-trip “break” and the relative uncertainty of the start of the term, I feel like my non-academic life is in a bit of a holding pattern, too. Our son doesn’t start school until after Labor Day, and oh my, we are all soooo ready for him to go back to school. The Washtenaw County Rec Center, which is where I go to work out (when I go to work out) is closed until September 1, which has thwarted my plans to start getting in shape right after our trip.

Anyway, I know this hold will end eventually. And when it does, when the term really does start, I will begin what will be I hope a very interesting year as a sort of faculty/administrator. I have been the “writing program coordinator” in our department since January. My charges in that job are to more or less run the undergraduate majors in professional and technical writing and our graduate programs in professional writing and teaching of writing. In addition to that, I’m going to be the “interim director of first year writing,” which is what Linda usually does and which is more akin to what most people think of as a WPA. I’m the go-to person for the 120 or so sections of first year writing we have each term, I’m the one who has to do all sorts of miscellaneous paperwork and meeting associated with all of that, and I’m going to take over the teaching of the course our grad students take to get ready to teach first year writing. Linda is teaching the part that meets for two weeks before the term begins right now.

So thing number 1 on my agenda for next year: Don’t screw up the Interim WPA thing too badly. Given the great incoming students we have and the support I’ll be getting from some other folks here (along with Linda from a short distance away), I think this is a goal I will be able to meet.

Agenda item #2: read (and not write) some scholarship. There’s two basic reasons for this. First, with my various quasi-administrative roles, I just don’t know how much time I’m going to have to work a lot on new articles or whatever, God forbid a book. Second, as I elluded to in my earlier posts about my academic mid-life crisis, I kind of feel like that if I don’t have a “burning project” I just have to do, then it would perhaps be a better idea to not do anything for a while. So I’m looking forward to just reading stuff for a year or so.

Well, other than at least one conference presentation.

Finally, there is agenda item #3: Get in better shape. This is an annual agenda item for me, of course. But given item #2, I might actually have a little more time to do this one this year….

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“This is Jim Rockford– I’ll get back to you…”

Via Johndan’s blog comes this link to transcripts of the messages left on Jim Rockford’s answering machine. Ah, memories. The Rockford Files is one of those shows that, like Johndan I think, I used to watch all the time when I was a kid. I loved that show; Johndan said he learned everything he knows about firearms and driving from the show. Me, I learned everything about living in a trailer and the beach in LA from the show.

Makes me want to do some searches for The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

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Ferris State Settles; a predicition of what's to come….

As reported in a variety of places, Ferris State’s faculty have settled a contract right before classes began. According to the linked story, “The tentative agreement calls for a four year contract. The faculty would get a 2% raise the first year, and a 3% raise each year after. As for the health benefits, the school pays 90% the first year, and anywhere between 80% and 90% the following years.”

So, there you have it.

The issues are different between here and there– the health care scheme seems quite a bit different, for example– but here’s what I predict:

  • We will get a nearly identical deal– maybe an additional percentage in the first year, but around 3% for four years (though they’ve been talking about it being a five year deal for a while now).
  • We will get this nearly identical deal at the last possible moment. The only thing up in the air is what exactly the “last possible moment” is going to be. Will it be when the contract runs out– which is September 1– or will it be right when classes start on September 5? We’ll see….
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WordPress as a CMS

This looks pretty cool and promising: a series of posts/articles/ideas on how to use WordPress as a CMS, which is something I am particularly interested in doing as I figure out more ways to use WordPress in my teaching and with “publishing,” especially things like my soon to be available research writing textbook project. One could make the argument that if you want to use a CMS, you should use a CMS– like drupal or something. But the thing is I like and vaguely understand WordPress, and hey, why change now?

BTW, another cool thing about these tips/instructions: the web site bloghelper is written by a 20 year-old economics student in London.

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One Laptop Per Child to roll out this Fall

Via Kairosnews, this Linux news web site, this blurb at Arstechnica, and the One Laptop per Child homepage, here’s some pr-type info on the progress of the One Laptop Per Child initiative from MIT. The computer they’ve developed and are ready to test is called the CM1 (Children’s Machine 1), and it will cost about $140. The goal is to get them to kids in the developing world, but quite frankly, I think there are a lot of kids in places like Detroit who could use these things too.