Advocate Online

NEA Affiliates in Action

Organizing
Full- and part-time faculty at Eastern Washington University (EWU) have become the second university faculty in the state to formally unionize under a faculty collective bargaining law the state legislature passed in 2002. Eastern faculty members voted this fall by an 88 percent majority, 338 to 46, for union representation by the United Faculty of Eastern (UFE), a joint affiliate of NEA and the American Federation of Teachers. UFE has existed for ten years and has successfully negotiated collective bargaining contracts with the EWU administration in the past. But the previous agreements were voluntary. UFE is now the official and legal bargaining representative for Eastern faculty. “The UFE is working to help Eastern remain a dynamic center for academic achievement in public higher education,” said UFE President Anthony Flinn. “We look forward to working with the Eastern administration as partners to carry out our academic mission.” Faculty at Central Washington University voted for unionization last June.

Campus Activities
Howard Tinberg, a professor of English at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts—and a member of the Massachusetts Community College Council, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and NEA—has been named Community College Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

This year’s winners, chosen in four categories: community colleges, baccalaureate colleges, master’s institutions, and Ph.D.-granting universities, were cited not only for their talent at inspiring students, but also for the time they spent helping other professors improve their teaching.

For more than 10 years, Tinberg has led faculty-development workshops and worked with other professors in a writing center that he helped establish at the college. He also serves as a mentor to his colleagues in his role as editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College, a national journal.

Contracts
Faculty at the University of South Florida (USF) overwhelmingly approved the first-ever contract negotiated between the United Faculty of Florida (UFF), a joint affiliate of NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, and the university’s Board of Trustees.

USF becomes the second university in Florida, following Florida Atlantic University, to successfully complete negotiations for a collective bargaining agreement since a reorganization of the state’s higher education system nullified a statewide agreement between UFF and what was then the Florida State University System.

Highlights of the University of South Florida agreement, which 98 percent of the faculty voted in favor of, include a pool equal to 5 percent of the bargaining unit payroll to be used for faculty salary increases, measures to ensure fairness in distribution of salary increases, language that preserves and expands the university’s and union’s commitment to academic freedom, and the addition of sexual orientation to the rights of faculty that are protected by the contract.

In Massachusetts, leaders of NEA unions representing community college, state college, and research university faculty testified before the Senate Task Force on Higher Education this December. Rick Doud, president of the Massachusetts Community College Council, testified that increases in tuition and fees amounted to a tax on students and that an alarming over-reliance on adjunct faculty was “a black eye for higher education in the Commonwealth.”

Patricia Markunas, president of the Massachusetts State College Association, told the task force that “the quality of the state college faculty and the quality of the state college libraries have been severely impacted by budget cuts and the breakdown of the collective bargaining process.”

Dan Clawson, president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, asked that the Legislature make restoring tenure-track faculty a top priority. “You can’t have a school without teachers, and you can’t have a first-rate university without a top-quality faculty,” he said.