We Need a Union

So now we are being told that under-enrolled courses will have to be taught on the off-load basis (meaning, for free and on top of the 3 courses per semester that we teach according to our contracts). This means that the administration is not doing its job and is not managing to recruit enough students (even though enrollments are growing each year) and the professors will be punished by working without pay. Got it? Professors will work for free because inept and hugely overpaid administrators can’t administer worth a crap.

You’d think that upon hearing about such an egregious violation of their work contract people would protest. Or at least, they would ask questions. Or just maybe they would say something along the lines of, “Huh? What?”

Remember that we are a state university and any attempt to change our contract officially would have to go through the state legislature. The administrators don’t want to follow the official procedure of changing the contracts (because that will involve having to do work, and they don’t like work), so they are sneaking a de facto increase of the workload by the professors with out complete compliance.

And nobody is making as much as a peep. This is why I am now convinced that we need a union.

Normally, the institution of tenure and the concept of self-governance are supposed to protect us from such abuses. The idea is that tenured professors are not afraid of losing their jobs and are free to speak out against obvious injustices and attempts to destroy the university. The problem with this seemingly good system is that tenured professors never do or say anything to oppose such things. I don’t know what it is they fear so much but the reality is that they sit there in silence while one egregious change after another is imposed on them.

Time and again, I (and 2 other untenured people) speak out and all we ever get in response is complete, deathly silence. There is nothing I can think of that would make people start using their tenure and Full Professorships for the benefit of the university and themselves.

So if we can’t speak for ourselves and defend our own rights, we need an organization to do that for us. We have a union that protects the rights of part-time instructors and university staff. Now we need the union to organize and protect people with PhDs, tenure, and Full Professorships.

Otherwise, we will all find ourselves staring at our contracts that specify a 3:3 teaching load while teaching 5 courses per semester. And that’s just the beginning. If you can sneak this kind of thing past people, you can safely assume they will swallow a lot more shit eagerly and contentedly.