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December 1999

Advocate Online

They're talking on campus...

On the Road

Action Line

In the Know

From Capital to Campus

NEA Affiliates in Action

Thriving in Academe

Higher Education News

Money Savvy

The Dialogue

Speaking Out

NEA Affiliates in Action

Adjunct faculty at Keene State University in New Hampshire have won the right to a union election, overturning a 20-year-old state labor relations board decision that had denied adjunct faculty collective bargaining rights.

The Labor Relations Board's decision notes that "the college would be hard-put to operate without its established cadre of adjunct lecturers."

The California Faculty Association has launched The Asking Campaign 2000, a four-month effort to ask 2000 non-members on the 22 campuses of California State University to join CFA by February 29, 2000.

CFA is coming off a recent statewide effort to win a new contract--and has a new agency shop law under its belt. The NEA affiliate is betting a significant proportion of those faculty asked will be willing to join the union.

The campaign will be campus-based and member-driven, with Asking Campaign 2000 kits provided by CFA.

More than 200 members of NEA's higher ed affiliate, the Massachusetts State College Association picketed the November meeting of the state's Board of Higher Education to protest lack of progress in negotiations that have dragged on for 20 months.

The protesters demanded the board drop a merit pay plan that would subject faculty to favoritism and discrimination, and also called the board to end its efforts to gut the contract's and due process provisions.

The Administrative Professional Association at Michigan State University has filed for arbitration over merit pay raises the university awarded in 1998, charging that the decisions on merit pay were arbitrary and capricious.

Some supervisors don't even know why the increases were awarded, because someone higher up the administrative ladder makes the decisions, according to the Association, and the higher ups have no knowledge on which to base the increases.

The university is also withholding information about the increases, the Association charged, and this prevents members from knowing what the increases are based on.

Overall, 1,250 academic professionals at Michigan State are affected.

The South Texas Faculty Association is one of a growing number of NEA higher ed locals going online with help from NEA. The local's new Web site, at http://stfa.homepage.com, is based on a Web site template provided free to NEA higher ed local Associations.

The South Texas Faculty Association, formed in 1998 to address faculty concerns about salaries and hiring practices, has other objectives as well.

Notes the new Association, "The STFA is a faculty advocate organization that believes giving our students the best education possible must entail giving our faculty a strong voice in college governance."

The Goddard College faculty has voted no confidence in the college's president and sent a list of grievances to the college's trustees.

The no confidence vote was 35-6. Both the president and the board's chairman dismissed the action, with the board chair blaming the faculty's recent unionization--the faculty voted for collective bargaining as an NEA affiliate last fall. He called the faculty action a negotiating ploy.

Mark Greenberg, one of the Goddard NEA leaders, called the claim ridiculous. "The current conflicts are part of the reason we unionized," said Greenberg. The faculty has accused the college of attempting to take away traditional faculty rights in academic decision making.

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