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Speaking OutNew Unionism: Getting it TogetherOf the public four-year universities in Ohio, perhaps none has a worse reputation when it comes to relations between faculty and administration than Shawnee State University. Twenty years of the Old Unionism had made gains but at the cost of turning us into a Hatfield and McCoy campus. Not long after I took office as union president in January 1998, I read one of Bob Chase's New Unionism speeches and persuaded our executive board that New Unionism was worth trying at Shawnee State, especially since our former, unpopular president had resigned and our new president, Dr. James Chapman, expressed an interest in working to improve relations with the union. To encourage the growth of the New Unionism at SSU, our Association executive board invited Chase to campus to address faculty, president, administrators, and trustees. Such a session would have been unthinkable on our campus before New Unionism. The response on our campus to Chase's speech was better than we could have hoped for. Many who attended still speak glowingly, months later, about the impact the speech had on them. Today, one of the important problems we're working on, with our university president, is the heavy use of adjunct faculty. He has listened to our argument that adjuncts are paid much less than they deserve and that their working conditions must be improved if we're to avoid diluting the quality of education on our campus. In response, the president has assigned the provost to work with me to address the adjunct issue, which we are doing. This kind of cooperation wouldn't have happened in the past. We're finding other ways to cooperate to improve the quality of education. We're discussing enrollment caps for composition courses, for instance, and talking about the faculty role in governance. There are those both on the faculty and in the administration who feel the New Unionism will fail -- and who's to say they're wrong? Certainly, the New Unionism will be severely tested in the year ahead, especially when we begin negotiating a new contract. But there's never been this much hope on our campus. This leads us to believe that New Unionism has a better than even chance of working at Shawnee State, and, if it can work here, it can work anywhere.
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I'd like to Say...In the February 1999 Advocate, under campus activities, Florida Gulf Coast University is referred to as an "experimental tenure-less campus of the Florida State University System." This mischaracterization of our institution is often made based on uninformed news reports and administration wishes. In fact, currently some 20 percent of the teaching faculty are tenured or tenure-earning. Whether that number will remain steady or increase in the future is unclear. This incorrect information suggests the NEA does not understand the struggles of our faculty in relation to this issue. According to our collective bargaining agreement, the university can use nontenured appointments "in a manner which supplements, rather than supplants, the use of tenure-earning and tenured appointments." By maintaining the illusion that FGCU is tenureless, the Advocate has glossed over a serious concern the faculty have about the willingness of the administration to abide by our agreement. -- J. Michael Tyler |
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