A Battle for the Soul of the University

This summer, the California Faculty Association reached impasse in bargaining a successor contract with the California State University System. On the surface, this campaign may look like just another wages, hours, and conditions of employment conflict between labor and management.

For example, the administration wants to double the amount of compensation dollars that goes to merit pay, has offered a pay package that the union considers inadequate, and, for good measure, refuses to make concessions on noneconomic issues.

As important as these issues are, CSU faculty believe that we're involved in a much larger confrontation: We see the university's intransigence as a thinly veiled attempt to use the collective bargaining process to alter the ability of faculty to participate effectively in the governance of the university.

The most important issue for us is compensation---but with a twist. The merit pay system proposed by the university bypasses any meaningful peer review process and places the decision-making power squarely in the hands of the presidents of the 22 CSU campuses.

This merit pay scheme would alter the power relationship between faculty and administration, and it threatens the entire tenure system itself by taking compensation out of the tenure equation.

It may be tempting to ignore these larger concerns about who makes decisions and how they are made with a "show me the money" attitude, dismissing what appears to be the rhetoric of labor-management disputes in favor of concrete results that "you can take to the bank." I urge you to reconsider what is at stake.

Think first about the plethora of outside agents attempting to redefine the university. Think about how the faculty workload has increased, the many tenure-track positions that have been lost to the increasing overuse of exploited temporary labor, our academic programs that are threatened, the divisiveness caused by ill-conceived merit pay programs, and the disrespect of faculty opinion on basic academic questions. Only then add the fact that the faculty deserves to be compensated for its work at least as well as prison guards. (In California prison guards recently won a 12 percent pay increase while faculty are offered 2.52 percent.)

Campus presidents, backed by boards of trustees, argue that shared governance is an obstacle to cost-effective administration. They say that our insistence on being consulted in governing the university stands in the way of "executive management" of this multi-billion dollar "corporate enterprise."

This is where the issue of who decides merit pay comes to the fore. Quite simply, the campus presidents believe that, through control of compensation dollars, they can control the faculty. If the president decides how much a faculty member will be paid, the faculty member, in their view, will most likely be inclined to follow the president's agenda.

In the California State University System, the next weeks and months are critical in determining if the faculty union can withstand an administration intent on increasing its power and control of the university at the expense of shared governance.

With the help of CSU's academic senates, our friends in the legislature, and community leaders, we in CFA will resist all efforts at reducing the role and influence of faculty in the university.

We hope faculty across the nation will join us in taking on the challenges raised by administrations attempting to unilaterally redefine the university.

Terry Jones, associate professor of sociology at Cal State Hayward, is president of the California Faculty Association, NEA's largest higher ed affiliate.