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Advocate Online
Speaking Out
Campus Equity Week Is for Everyone
Campus Equity Week/Fair Employment Week aims to alter the debilitating policies and practices that have resulted in half the nation's faculty being contingent, all faculty having excessive workloads, too many students being denied access to a quality higher education, and too many other students being processed through education factories rather than institutions of genuine higher learning—often just to run education on the cheap.
These destructive policies rely on silencing critics of "corporatized administrations," largely by crushing faculty power and destroying job security and tenure protections for more and more faculty in every successive generation. Administrators recognize this as a war of attrition, and Campus Equity Week/Fair Employment Week publicizes this recognition and its consequences.
Campus Equity Week/Fair Employment Week's three themes for 2005 are: Campus Unity, Fair Employment, and Quality Education. Faculty and staff working conditions and student learning conditions vary across states and provinces, but we are all united in efforts to enhance faculty job security and the academic freedom it produces, along with students' freedom of access to diverse ideas.
Some CEW/FEW activities will cast a spotlight on the excessive exploitation of contingent faculty, while other activities will connect this exploitation of one segment of the academic workforce to excessive workload and the weakening of shared governance for tenured and contingent faculty alike.
Some campuses will use this strategic week to solidify campus solidarity with student groups, staff organizations and other unions, while other campuses will join broader politica efforts to challenge local and national government policies that reduce student access, diminish faculty control over curriculum, and prevent or weaken collective bargaining.
Specific activities will range from mass events to local actions, including campus protests and rallies, testifying at legislative hearings, challenging administrative boards of regents and trustees, conducting educational forums on campuses and in classrooms, and engaging in creative activities that highlight the divisive efforts of administrators to turn faculty, staff, and students against one another to the detriment of all.
Please join us!
 Craig Flanery is the lecturer representative to the California Faculty Association Board of Directors. He is also a member of the North American Steering Committee for Campus Equity Week 2005.
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I'd like to say!
Your misguided perspective and analysis, "The Wrong Bill of Rights" (In the Know June 2005), provides compelling evidence that those who seek to ensure diverse perspectives in college and university classroom discussions are on to something.
Instead of engaging with the reasons and arguments of those with whom you disagree, you resort to inflammatory language and guilt-by-association tactics to dismiss their views, which you call "right-wing" four times—an insidious ad hominem since you never call any educator, activist, or public figure "left-wing."
The Advocate champions diversity in the classroom until those diverse perspectives turn out to be conservative ones. Then you present the issue as if it were a case of "right-wing efforts to politicize" and "control" the classroom.
Moreover, it is sheer hypocrisy to approvingly quote critics who decry "the cartoon version of intelligence . . . where everything is broken into categories such as conservative vs. liberal" when the Advocate is engaged in this very maneuver.
Ironically, this discussion appears in a special "critical thinking" issue. Far from being an exercise in thinking critically, it is a striking illustration of its absence.
—Steven M. Sanders
Bridgewater State College
Bridgewater, Massachusetts
Share your opinion
Write to the editor at: Clehane@nea.org
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