NTTs on Strike (Links from 4/19)

We just finished day 1 of a two-day strike.  Here's what it looked like.

The building we were picketing, emptied by our labor action:

It takes two to tango, but you can definitely dance at our revolution!

Students join the picket line.

Noon rally on the quad side of the building.

The local newspaper made a video about the strike, which features both our president and lead negotiator.

The local newspaper reports on the first day of the strike.

Local news station WAND covers it, too.

The student newspaper gets statements from folks on the picket line.

One of this year's Guggenheim Fellows, who used to be Head of the English department, writes to the Chancellor and Provost.

And the Interim Chancellor sent out a second MassMail. Two in one day strikes me as something of a record, but I've only been NTT here since 2005, so I could be wrong.

I blog about that second MassMail.

(I blogged about and linked to the first one here.)

No doubt there's more, but I'm weary, and now I have another MassMail to write about before I sleep. Feel free to send me any juicy links you've got or post them in the comments.

UPDATE 4/20:

AAUP shares the NTFC Local 6546 press release.

Remaking the University covers the strike.

The Campus Faculty Association translates the Chancellor's MassMail for us.

I Do Not Think "Work with" Means What You Think It Means, Chancellor

"Thank you for your patience as we continue to work with the union negotiators to reach an agreement."

These words are from Interim Chancellor Barb Wilson to Illinois students, in an email that went out this morning. These words would lead one to picture a room somewhere on campus where right now campus administrators and union negotiators are sitting across a table from each other trying to hammer out an agreement that will get faculty off the picket line and back into their classrooms.  We in NTFC Local 6546 would very much like that to be the case.  But that picture is wrong.  Not only is it wrong now, it's been wrong for the past eighteen months.  

Well, no, let me correct myself: negotiations been taking place for the past eighteen months on campus, if by "on campus" you mean the at Fire Service Institute out on the edge of Research Park.  

So yes, that part's true.  But although we've had 29 scheduled bargaining sessions since October 2014, along with two mediation sessions and three side meetings, there have been no meetings between union negotiators and administration since the last mediation session ended on March 30.  

Well, no, let me correct myself.  Leslie Arvan, the U of I's Director of Labor and Employment Relations, who has been heading the administration's negotiating team, contacted our strike coordinator to complain that she had not received timely notification of today's labor action. Fortunately, our strike coordinator, in the course of doing all the paperwork required by state labor law, had hand-delivered the letter and obtained a receipt from Ms. Arvan's secretary. So we were able to clear that up.

Apart from that, and the letter Interim Provost Ed Feser sent to all members of the bargaining unit represented by NTFC, we've had no contact from the administration.  

So why can't we just wait until the scheduled April 27 mediation session?  Probably because our first mediation session went like this

"neither prepared remarks nor any proposals": this has, sadly, been the union's experience of negotiating sessions, even before the mediator was introduced.  We come with proposals ready to, you know, bargain, and the administration comes with nothing.

Well, no, again let me correct myself.  In eighteen months of negotiating, they've come to the table with enough in the way of proposals that we've been able to reach tentative agreements on thirteen items, most of them among the least significant issues facing the union.  They have yet to present proposals on three of the most important issues: evaluations, multiyear contracts, and reappointment notices.  The union has asked, the administration's negotiations say they have "no interest" in discussing these matters. The issue of compensation, which many people assume is at the heart of any labor negotiation, has yet to be broached at all.

According to today's article about the strike in the local newspaper, the News-Gazette,  

University administrators, however, say they feel progress has been made in the negotiations, noting that initial contracts often take months to hammer out.

The university has had "months" to arrive at an agreement. We're coming up on "years," particularly at the pace that the university has set.  When we've brought up that issue, the result was Rob Craddock, Assistant Director of Labor and Employee Relations, screaming in the hallway at our lead negotiator, that the union "doesn't get to bitch about the speed of bargaining."  So that's how that went.

It doesn't have to take so long.  In the interests of stewarding resources and limiting the time that both university administrators and faculty spend in the bargaining room, the administration could expedite matters by coming prepared with counterproposals.  In fact, they could avoid replicating the expense of contract negotiations by agreeing to the contract U of I administration has already signed with NTT faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

According to the News-Gazette,

Feser said the campus is implementing procedures established in 2014 to allow for multiyear contracts and promotional opportunities for nontenure-track faculty, based on merit and performance; and updating policies to provide a stronger voice for them in departmental and college governance.

That's odd.  At the bargaining table, the administration has professed "no interest" in discussing any of these things.

So who exactly is continuing to "work with" us?

Emailing My Students about the Strike, with Links (Updated 4/19)

UPDATE 4/20:

Here are links from Day 1 of the 2-day strike.

UPDATE 4/19:

Email from Chancellor Wilson to the students (4/19)
Student newspaper on "What You Need to Know"
Local newspaper reports beginning of strike.
Crain's Chicago Business reports the story.

My latest blog post on the strike.


UPDATE 4/18:

Local newspaper reports on the strike announcement.

NTFC Facebook post with strike announcement (they announced it other places, too--this was just the easiest version for me to find)

Strike Event Page on Facebook

Old news, but back in September, NTFC President Shawn Gilmore explained "Why a Union?"

UPDATE 4/17:

Here's an op-ed in the local paper supporting the strike.

Here's a Reddit thread on the student newspaper article about the provost's letter.

I'm still looking for formulations of the anti-NTFC position and not finding any.  Feel free to comment or contact me via the blogger contact form in the sidebar if you know of anything I'm missing.

Late-breaking Sunday story in the online edition of the local paper.

ORIGINAL POST: Here's the email I sent my students earlier today (4/16).

Hello all,

As I mentioned in class last week, it's looking like class will not be meeting this week, as I will be on strike, our planned speaker is also part of the striking union, and the English Building will probably be picketed. The union had been hoping that the threat of a strike would bring the administration to the bargaining table, but that doesn't seem to be happening (although it still might!).

Feel free to email me at [personal email address redacted] if you'd like to discuss the matter informally.  

You can read up on some of the issues involved in the following places, in no particular order:

This article from the News-Gazette

This letter to the News-Gazette from a faculty member opposing the strike.

This letter to the News-Gazette from a faculty member supporting the strike.

This article from the Daily Illini

This set of FAQs from NTFC Local 6546 (the union)

This Reddit thread

This WEFT radio interview with the union's lead negotiator and strike committee chair (interview starts around 4:45)

This long-winded blogger who has strong opinions on the matter.

The only formal statement that the university has issued since the strike vote was announced has been this letter from Interim Provost Ed Feser to the faculty members who make up the bargaining unit (cut and pasted here because I can't find anywhere it's been published).  If I can find any additional formulations of the univerity's position, I'll send a follow-up so you can get a fuller picture of the non-union view of the issues involved.

Dear Colleagues:

I am writing to you because you hold a position that is represented by the Non-Tenure Faculty Coalition Local #6546, IFT/AFT/AAUP. The NTFC bargaining team has said publicly that the membership authorized a strike last week and that it is considering a job action as early as the week of April 18. In light of these developments, I want to make sure that you have critical information regarding the current status of our negotiations for a first collective bargaining agreement. 

The campus has been engaged in ongoing contract negotiations with representatives from the NTFC since October 2014. The union recently requested bringing in a federal mediator. We’ve had just two mediation sessions so far and four additional mediation dates are scheduled (April 27, May 11, May 26 and June 11). We have reached tentative agreements on several key items and believe that further progress can be made at the bargaining table. We are disappointed that it appears the NTFC isn’t willing to give that process a chance. We have urged the NTFC representatives to continue mediation so that we may work together toward reaching a fair and equitable contract.

Since many of you have asked about rules regarding strikes, I want to clarify them here. While the University recognizes that, under certain circumstances, represented employees have the right to strike, it is equally important to note that individual employees also have the right to choose not to strike and to continue working. Employees who report to work during a strike will be paid by the University for their services, whereas employees who choose to strike will not be paid.

We value the contributions of specialized faculty members. We have taken major steps over the past few years to demonstrate our support, and we are committed to doing more to address your concerns and ensure that you can achieve your career goals.

We remain optimistic that if we work together we can find reach a fair and equitable contract.

Regards,

Ed

Edward Feser
Interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost

I HOPE I'll be seeing you on Tuesday, but if I don't, stay tuned for an announcement about your Week 6 assignment.  

Kirstin Wilcox

Update: shortly after this email went out, the student newspaper published a story on the Provost's letter.  Had it been available before I sent the letter, I would have included it.

I Do Not Think "Key" Means What You Think It Means, Provost.

If you're non-tenure-track faculty at the University of Illinois, you got an email from the Provost on Friday, with the subject line, "Announcement Regarding Specialized Faculty."  It says, in part:

The campus has been engaged in ongoing contract negotiations with representatives from the NTFC since October 2014. The union recently requested bringing in a federal mediator. We’ve had just two mediation sessions so far and four additional mediation dates are scheduled (April 27, May 11, May 26 and June 11). We have reached tentative agreements on several key items and believe that further progress can be made at the bargaining table. We are disappointed that it appears the NTFC isn’t willing to give that process a chance. We have urged the NTFC representatives to continue mediation so that we may work together toward reaching a fair and equitable contract.

"Tentative agreements" have indeed been reached on thirteen items, mostly boilerplate subjects like recognition and union/management meetings.  Most significant, or "key," has been an agreement on grievance, something members of the union have now that they didn't have in October of 2014 when negotiations started.  So there's that.

We've been at this eighteen months.  Most faculty work on nine-month contracts tied to the academic calendar, so in academic terms we're coming to the end of two years.

Several "key items" on which there are NOT yet tentative agreements are

• governance
• academic freedom
• evaluations
• professional development
• extra-contractual work
• appointment/reappointment rights
• promotions
• international faculty
• multiyear contracts
• benefits
• leaves
• compensation

In other words, almost all the difficult substance of a contract has yet to be bargained.

It would be difficult for NTFC and the administration to have arrived at tentative agreements on some of these subjects, as there have been no proposals from the administration on three that are most important to NTTs: evaluations, multiyear contracts, and reappointment notices. No administration proposals. None.

In case you're wondering: NTFC Local 6546 is asking for

• departments to create an evaluation structure for NTTs within a year of the contract
• 2-year contracts after 5 years of service and 3-year contracts after 10 years 
• timely notification about reappointment so that faculty can know whether they need to look for new jobs while there's still time to find one.  

The union proposes to keep benefits and leaves as they are. With so much unfinished business, the issue of compensation has not been otherwise broached.

The university has had eighteen months to bring their proposals on these issues to the table and they have not done so. The delay is puzzling: NTFC Local 6546 is asking for the same contract that has been negotiated at the Chicago campus for NTT faculty in UICUF. The length of time it is taking, and the lack of movement from the administration on some of the most significant issues suggests that their goal is not to arrive at tentative agreements, but erode the commitment of union members by running down the clock. They've had eighteen months to demonstrate otherwise, and they have not.

It is therefore difficult to know what the Provost means when he says, in the same letter

We value the contributions of specialized faculty members. We have taken major steps over the past few years to demonstrate our support, and we are committed to doing more to address your concerns and ensure that you can achieve your career goals.

There are two recent "Provost Communications" (#25 and #26), which give NTTs the collective name of "specialized faculty," recognize the desirability of multiyear contracts, and offer a path to promotion. They commit the university to nothing. It's hard to know what to say about Communication 26 in the absence of a union contract guaranteeing some of its terms. The proposed promotion structure demands of NTT faculty seeking promotion the same kind of work that earns tenure without offering its corresponding benefits, including increased pay and a multiyear contract, and without the institutional support that helps tenure-stream faculty earn promotion. Those who want to keep the tenure system, and the protections that come with it, at the heart of higher ed should think hard about which is more consistent with those goals: a unionized NTT faculty with a contract that spells out their role or a system of workarounds that will allow the administration to replace tenure-stream faculty with professionals who get no protections at all.

The administration's bargaining team has given the university community no reason to believe that four more scheduled mediation sessions will achieve what eighteen months of delaying tactics have not.

An equitable contract could have been negotiated long before now that would have brought university policy in line with the goals of Provost Communications 25. It's puzzling that the Provost professes himself "disappointed" by those of us who are trying to do that. The NTFC proposals are consistent with those Communications. The university's bargaining position is not.


(both images courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Top: French, 16th century, iron.  Bottom: French, second half 17th century, iron and steel.)

Academic Freedom 2.0

Steven Salaita is back in the news and our local paper continues to relish his downfall.  There must be readers who enjoy following his fortunes--most people I know are still wondering when AAUP censure will be lifted, mourning the demise of the American Indian Studies program here, and dealing with the brain drain as the combined effects of L'Affaire Salaita and the ongoing budget morass prompt humanities faculty who can go elsewhere to do so.

It's not over, though.  The questions that Salaita's unhiring raised remain unanswered, and it remains unexplained, "the nature of the line that Salaita crossed and the point at which he crossed it so that faculty have some clearer measure than "civility" to know when their passion, rage, ill-considered utterances, profanity, and political expressions become actionable."

One could continue to complain about this endlessly deferred conversation, except that the university has quietly and resolutely sought to end it altogether by eliminating the protections of academic freedom at the bargaining table.

The appointment letters that tenure-stream faculty read include boilerplate language affirming AAUP principles and promising that the university will adhere to them.  The appointment letters that most non-tenure stream faculty offer no such assurances, only a line in the accompanying "Notification of appointment that "This appointment is made subject to all applicable laws and to the University of Illinois Statutes, the General Rules Concerning University Organization and Procedure and other actions of the Board of Trustees. These policies are subject to change from time to time and the most updated version of the policies is applicable."

The Statutes do have an academic freedom article, Article X. However, "faculty" is presumed throughout the Statutes to refer to tenure-stream faculty, leaving NTTs without these protections. The Senate has crafted a set of revisions to the Statutes to make sure that TTs and NTTs count as "faculty" throughout the documents, but they are not yet approved by the Board.  Moreover, the university's bargaining team has shown a general disinterest and disregard in building minimal academic freedom protections into the contract for NTTs.  They seemed surprised that academic freedom should even be relevant to these negotiations and were accordingly unprepared to discuss it.

The future of academic freedom here lies not in in the fortunes of high-profile cases like Salaita's, but in the basic protections afforded to the faculty doing 40% of the university's teaching.  As tenure lines dwindle, the contract available to non-tenure-stream faculty becomes, quite literally, the bottom line.

Time to Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

It was probably the weirdest moment of my professional life to date: telling students in my "Career Planning for Humanities Majors" class that we probably wouldn't be meeting next week because I would be on strike.

They looked at me, nonplussed.  "NO WAY!" one blurted out.  Yes...way.

I scribbled my non-university email address on the board and said I'd be happy to email or talk with them about the reasons for the strike outside class, and I pointed them to a website and a stack of fliers they could consult for additional information.  Then we got on with the business of the day: another lesson in finding a professional post-graduation job.

My students see me, week after week, in all my dark-skirt/drapey-cardigan/colorful-scarf matronly professorial glory, dispensing hard-won professional wisdom, advice, and grades.  I am a lesser angel in their personal pantheon of authority that stretches all the way up to God and Mom. "Strikes" are something they associate with workboots and insulated hoodies, building workers and trades. Their bewilderment meshes with the cognitive dissonance many of us feel, finding ourselves preparing to strike.  

My graduate assistant gamely offered to take over next week's class.  Her graduate student union has a contract with a no-strike clause, so she has to put in her requisite hours working for me, whether I'm there to supervise her or not.  That would have been fine, except that the class for next week is organized around a guest speaker.  Our planned speaker worked for 30 years as a writer for an industrial corporation. For a variety of reasons, personal and professional, she decided to switch tracks.  She went to grad school and got the credential that now has her teaching courses and running a first-rate internship program in an adjacent department that draws on her deep knowledge of her writing field.  However, she and I, unlike my graduate assistant, have been working for nearly two years now without a contract.  She's part of the same bargaining unit.  The strike affects her, too, and I cannot in good conscience ask her not to withhold the same labor I'm withholding.

What students don't know is that much of the undergraduate faculty operates like the Wizard of Oz. If you pull aside the curtain on many instructors' and lecturers' labor, the edifice revealed is not the stable timeless wizardry of institutional respect, academic freedom, history and longevity, research support and professional remuneration.  These things, which are widely assumed to be funded by tuition dollars to sustain college-level teaching, are not there.  It's just a man or woman, with (in many cases) a nine-month contract, no guarantee of employment beyond the semester, a salary suitable for the entry-level jobs our students apply for with their brand-new BAs, a tenuous relationship with their home department, and no research support.

Unlike the Wizard, non-tenure-stream faculty still manage to deliver the goods.  It's a mighty amplifying system we have, here behind the curtain: love of one's subject, commitment to students, the knowledge that comes with the requisite graduate credential, and a willingness to behave as if the edifice were in place even though it's not.  These things go a long way to produce the college experience students seek at our institution.

It's not fair to the students, though, who think their rising tuitions are paying for genuine wizards with all the institutional power that comes with the role. It's also not stable, particularly as the support for wizards declines and the university's reliance on jerry-rigged smoke-and-mirrors illusions grows.  Is it "unprofessional" to go on strike, as some detractors may claim?  At the point where "professional" is only being sustained by willingness of faculty to uphold the illusion, the question becomes meaningless.

What Do Lieutenant Governors Do All Day?

Kentucky's executive leadership lives in a Richard Scarry picture book.  

In their Kentucky, every furry creature that earns a four-year diploma ought to wake up the morning after graduation and go to a building where the offices are labelled with jobs people do all day, and where those labels align with the words on the diplomas that they received.  

There are doors--whole buildings even!--that say "engineer," so that's a good diploma to have. Institutions of higher education in Kentucky can go on encouraging students to get diplomas that say "engineering."  

Search as much as you want over the Kentucky landscape, but there are very few doors, buildings, name-tags or even drawer labels that say "historian" or "French literature."  So diplomas that say those things are bad things to have students ought to stop trying to obtain them.  Silly bunnies!

The Richard Scarry world where diplomas and job titles neatly align does not quite track with the life experience of Kentucky's top elected officials.  The labels on their doors say "governor," but oddly enough neither Lt. Gov. Hampton, nor Gov. Matt Bevin have formal education in government or politics.  Lt. Gov. Hampton's  undergraduate degree is in industrial engineering.  She's done a lot of other things that don't obviously get labeled "lieutenant governor": serving in the Air Force as a computer systems operator, working for nearly two decades in the corrugated packaging industry, and earning an MBA.   

Governor Matt Bevin?  Even worse!  He got one of those unnecessary degrees in East Asian studies! Fat lot of good his fluency in Japanese has done him, eh?  Did he really need all that language study to enlist in the Army?  It sounds from his Wikipedia page like he didn't even get posted to Japan. Maybe he used it in that financial consulting he did in between leaving the army and taking over his family's moribund bell manufacturing business.  Those bunnies.  He could have just majored in some kind of engineering that would help him make bells.

However much one may dislike their politics, both Lt. Gov. Hampton and Gov. Bevin have served their countries, worked hard, and improved the businesses that have employed them. Both of them have a rich diversity of education and experience that no doubt informs their leadership.  They've made successful careers in politics without studying political science.

In the buildings where Hampton and Bevin do their work, they no doubt encounter offices with labels like "fundraising," "human resources," "data analysis," and "strategic development." They work with "project managers" and "content strategists" and "speechwriters."  It's hard to find an institution that offers any of those job titles as undergraduate majors.  However, even if the state of Kentucky could exclusively hire human resources managers who had studied human resources and speech writers who had studied speech writing, would they choose to do so? The criteria for selection is often not the label on the diploma, but the cluster of skills and experience for which the label is, at best, a directional arrow.

Much of a day's work gets done in a world that, unlike a Richard Scarry illustration, is rich in words conveying complicated concepts and difficult information. Every organization, including the state government of Kentucky, needs employees who can navigate comfortably in that world, who can manage in the absence of labels, who can adapt to unforeseen contingencies, who use the information at hand to figure things out as they need to and know where to look for additional resources.

Sometimes, the best person for the job is a history major.  Or a French literature major.  Or a, how you say, east Asian language major.