Advocate Online

Organizing is the lifeblood of any organization. NEA has a proud record of speaking for its higher education membership, now nearly 100,000, since the dawn of collective bargaining in the academy. Traditionally, the overwhelming majority of these members have been full-time faculty teaching in the nation's public two- and four-year colleges and universities.

Our members and higher education itself have prospered from the efforts of our Association. But massive changes in how education work is done and who does it are well underway.

If our Association is to remain an effective voice for our members, we must aggressively organize those who are doing the academic work on our campuses.

For example, the fastest growing work classifications on our campuses include groups seldom represented by an academic union 15 years ago. Part-time faculty, education support personnel, and grad students now comprise a sizable percentage of the campus workforce and a growing proportion of our membership.

Their needs are sometimes similar to full-time faculty, but can also be different. To maintain our Association's strength, we must bring their interests into line with those of our traditional membership. We must organize.

While organizing new employees gains strength in general for an organization, internal organizing gains voice for those who are already members. A large percentage of current members are approaching retirement. Only through recruiting new members will our Associations continue to thrive. Yet, new members are too often not showing up on our membership roles or in our leadership cadres in the same proportion as they are arriving on our campuses. The solution: organize.

In locals that have agency shop, we often think we don't need to organize new members. But, as many local Associations have discovered, there's a big difference in going to the table with 50 percent of the unit as members compared with going to the table with 90 percent. Organizing is the difference.

Finally, higher education currently accounts for only about 4 percent of the membership of the NEA. We must grow and use our unified voice to advance our issues within the organization if we expect the organization to fight for us. When we speak with strength and clarity, the Association will support our concerns.

Barry Stearns, a counselor at Lansing Community College in Michigan, is the president of the National Council for Higher Education, NEA's higher education caucus.

I'd like to say!

Please allow me to answer Larry Spears's closing question in the December Dialogue: What kind of learning cannot be successfully achieved at a distance via technology?

As a member of the NEA and the American Federation of Musicians and a music instructor, I can say without hesitation that we are decades away from the technology that would allow us to effectively teach music performance classes in a distance format....

I don't know if life science is a liberal arts discipline or not. But the humanities in general and music in particular are, and now is not the time to question the fundamental importance of same-time, same-place human interaction in these areas of study.

—Thomas Tallman
College of DuPage

In the January Dialogue, both writers present good points, but neither addresses a central issue.

I have found that professors set the tone for classroom decorum. If they are consistently on time and behave in a professional, no nonsense manner, students rarely behave inappropriately. But if professors are less than professional, then students will follow their lead. Students take their cues from us.

—Sam Torres
Cal State University, Long Beach