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Speaking OutUnions and Joint Decision MakingTiny Goddard College in Plainfield Vermont has prided itself, since 1938, on providing what its founding president, Royce Pitkin, described as education for real living through the actual facing of real-life problems. Pitkin's philosophy also produced a tradition of shared decision making and a strong sense of community at Goddard. But among the college's own most recent real-life problems has been an increasingly hierarchical structure, with more power concentrated in the president. The gap between rhetorical invocations of the Pitkin-era's town meeting-style of shared governance and the actual practice of leadership widened throughout the 1990s. In April 1995, an ad hoc group of faculty and staff began to discuss unionization as a response to this development. On November 17, 1998, this three-year effort culminated in the Goddard College full- and part-time faculty voting 46-4 to become NEA's latest higher education affiliate. Our basic concerns were, and remain, traditional: the need for enforceable contracts, a reliable grievance procedure, fair evaluations, due process during times of retrenchment, and a way to address the discrepancy between the inadequate salary and benefits of faculty and staff and the proliferation of new, high-salaried administrators. Nonetheless, everyone agreed that our unionization process should embrace Goddard's participatory principles. To its credit, the Goddard Board of Trustees did not refuse to recognize or bargain with our union, as many other independent colleges have done, by invoking the U.S. Supreme Court Yeshiva decision. This decision holds that faculty, because they participate in shared governance, are managers and their employers, as a result, not bound by the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act that require recognition of an employee union. Now, with both a union and a tradition of community at Goddard, we have the opportunity to embark on a collaborative approach to collective bargaining that fits Goddard's egalitarian principles and the faculty's commitment to shared governance. We hope that the college's participatory tradition will mean that together--union and employer--we can serve as a model for progressive employee relations in higher education, as Goddard has served as a model of progressive educational practices.
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I'd like to Say...Welcome to the Advocate's newest feature. Write to us at: Clehane@nea.org . . . . underlying Professor Symanski's argument against part-time participation in governance (October Dialogue) is the full-timers' fear of an erosion of their power base within the college. They think that if part-timers are involved in governance, the administration may play "divide and conquer" between the two factions of faculty. But this narrow attitude promotes the very erosion of power these full-timers fear, by encouraging the continuation of the current "caste system" of part-time vs. full-time. --Barry Edwards . . . Mary Ellen Symanski's objections to part-time faculty participation in governance (October Dialogue) need to be addressed, but they need to be addressed by strengthening the situation of the part-time faculty. Part-time faculty have every right to protection from the insidious politics Symanski fears. Part-time tenure might be one way to accomplish this. --Shirley Kahlert |
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