Oregon COCAL

Campus Equity Week 2009

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:40:22 -0700

Campus Equity Week 2009 is coming soon and planning for it is starting to get into “high gear”. Campus Equity Week (CEW) occurs every odd numbered year to highlight the inequity between contingent and tenure-track faculty and to promote two concurrent goals:

Achieving full equity in compensation for contingent faculty members.
Ensuring that 75 percent of undergraduate classes are taught by full-time tenure and tenure track faculty and that qualified contingent faculty have the opportunity to move into such positions as they become available.

AFT has posted links to resources on their AFT Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) initiative website. The link to the FACE web site, where these resources can be found is: www.aftface.org.

A National Voice for Contingent Faculty

Mon, 7 Sep 2009 13:36:38 -0700

Today marks the official launch of the new web site of the New Faculty majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Faculty, as announced on the adj-l.org listserv. It seems like a very appropriate day for such a great announcement, being Labor Day.

President Maria Maisto said it all in her announcement, as given below:

Dear Colleagues:

On this Labor Day I'm very proud to announce the official launch of the new web site of New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity. You can reach it at www.newfacultymajority.org or www.newfacultymajority.info. As many of you know, our organizing committee convened in February of this year following an open call on this listserv.? Our intention is and always has been to?be an? independent, national organization advocating exclusively for contingent faculty on a sustained basis. Here is our mission statement:

"NFM is dedicated to achieving professional equity and advancing academic freedom for all adjunct and contingent faculty in American colleges and universities through advocacy, education and litigation. NFM seeks the greatest possible degree of economic justice and academic freedom for all faculty and is committed to creating equitable, stable, non-exploitative academic environments that improve the quality of American higher education."

I invite you all to take a look at our site and to join NFM.

All the best,
Maria Maisto
President, NFM Board of Directors

How “Reasonable” is Reasonable Assurance?

Wed, 27 May 2009 19:51:56 -0700

Recently this writer received an email from one of the community colleges that avail itself of his talents. The email (see below) was the beloved annual Reasonable Assurance notices contingent faculty receives, so that the college can hide behind the law and not be required to pay the State of Oregon unemployment costs for any such contingent faculty member. That is what is meant by “required by law” in the notice, that is, the college is required by law to send you the notice to avoid the unemployment costs to the college.

In a way, it is a bit impressive that the college was able to come up with this little method of delivering the notice. It saves a ton of paper and the associated costs. Everyone gets the notice and cannot avoid its receipt, or the college gets instant notification of an error that it can correct. And, the college gets to ask you for an address correction! Rather clever, those administrators.

But back to “reasonable assurance”. Consider how reasonable is it that you will have an assignment next fall if Community College funding is as low as some estimate? “Reasonable” estimates are 15% cuts to state funding of community colleges. Most colleges have contracts with their full-time faculty that will cut contingent faculty first, unless the college cuts programs, then the cut full-time faculty can go to another department (if qualified to teach that subject) and bump contingent faculty out of classes. While it is true that some contingent faculty have a somewhat protected status (e.g. - “assignment rights” or “employee list status”), the newest and freshest faces in contingent faculty are typically the first to be cut. How is that “reasonable assurance”?

Between “reasonable assurance” and reasonable funding cuts, the word “reasonable” is getting stretched mighty thin in the State of Oregon.

************************************************************************************

“Reasonable Assurance” Notice:

DATE:           May 27, 2009

TO:                  XXXXX XXXXXXX
XXXX XX XXX XX
Gresham, OR 97030

FROM:            SE Credit Program

SUBJECT:      Notification of Reasonable Assurance of Employment for the 2009/10 School Year

As a part-time instructor at Portland Community College your employment may call for recess periods during the year. Following each of these periods we expect you will perform in the same or similar capacity for the college as you did prior to such periods. Due to this type of employment, the college is required by Oregon law to send this notification.

This notification is not intended to create a contract of employment nor to alter an existing contract of employment, if any.

If you have questions regarding your teaching schedule, please contact XXXXXXX XXX at 503-XXX-XXXX.

Delivery Note: This notification has been sent to your official PCC email box. If the email bounces back as ‘undeliverable’, a hard copy of this email will be sent to the physical mailing address listed above.

If you receive this as an email and notice this physical mailing address is incorrect, please contact your department so that they may update it for you.

Community Colleges as “First Responders”

Tue, 19 May 2009 08:06:07 -0700

A contingent faculty member of Mt Hood Community College (MHCC) and co-founder of Oregon COCAL, Teri Pastore posted a Guest Opinion piece on Oregonlive.com Friday May 15. This post is one of a series of posts from faculty and staff at MHCC.

Pastore writes, “ In the New Economy community colleges have been termed the first responders because their mission is to prepare students to thrive in an ever-changing world.”

Opinion:
Pastore is “spot on” when she writes about community colleges being the education resource for training worker. As a contingent faculty member, she has “walked the walk and talked the talk.” The down side to all this is that if community colleges are not fully funded, the result is less students educated. Already there is talk in the Oregon Legislature and in college board rooms of enrollment limits. And as usual, the burden of any cost savings needed to mitigate this will land squarely on the backs of the staff and faculty. Given recent actions in the Legislature, it does not seem our state leaders collectively understand Pastore’s theme. They seem “hell-bent” on funding community colleges at 15% less that the last biennium’s levels.

You can read Pastore’s piece at this link.

How to Lay Off Tenured Faculty Faster

Tue, 19 May 2009 07:45:51 -0700

The News Blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education posted on May 14 a piece titled “Community-College Board May Make It Easier to Lay Off Tenured Faculty Members”. This post is based on an article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporting on the decision of the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges to give college presidents the power to lay off tenured faculty with only a 60 day notice, using a 1981 law by declaring a “financial emergency”. There is a limited appeal process, but is unlikely to be effective for faculty.

Opinion:
It should be noted that if this law is used, the resulting erosion of tenured faculty may cause an increase in the abuse of contingent faculty. Some colleges may try to gain the favor of contingents by improving their conditions some, but this will only be temporary and the abuse will only be greater after the tenured faculty are significantly reduced.

The entire blog entry is shown below. The link to this post is here. Many of the comments are interesting reading. You can read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article at this link.

Community-College Board May Make It Easier to Lay Off Tenured Faculty Members
Community colleges in Washington State could soon be able to lay off tenured faculty members much faster than normal, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
At its regularly scheduled meeting next month, the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges will decide whether to declare a financial emergency — a move allowed by a state law passed in 1981 to deal with budget crunches. Such an emergency would speed up the process for laying off tenured faculty members in that they would get only 60 days’ notice of layoffs and the grounds on which they could appeal the decision would be limited, the Post-Intelligencer reported.
Washington lawmakers have cut appropriations to the state’s 34 community and technical colleges by 10.7 percent in the 2009-10 operating budget. And because of that, the statewide association of community-college presidents asked the board to invoke the law.
Sandra Schroeder, president of the American Federation of Teachers’ union in Washington, told the Post-Intelligencer that most community-college presidents had let her know that they did not plan to use the law, but there is still the threat that they would have “additional leverage that they didn’t already have” when it comes to laying off tenured faculty members. —Audrey Williams June
Posted on Thursday May 14, 2009

American Academic : The State of the Higher Education Workforce

Tue, 12 May 2009 07:14:37 -0700

Today, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) released a report on the condition of higher education workers, called “American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce”.

Key themes of this report include reports on the erosion of tenured faculty and the corresponding abuse of contingent faculty and the increase of professional staff (e.g. - registrars, counselors, and financial aid officers) with the vast majority of that increase as full-time workers. The following quote is from a post on AFT’s LeaderNet website (leadernet.aft.org).

"This is a critical moment for our country, when we should focus on investing, not disinvesting, in our public higher education institutions," says AFT president Randi Weingarten. "Both President Obama and the Congress have recognized that higher education is essential to our country's economic recovery, and a fully supported higher education workforce is critical to strengthening our institutions."

The entire report is available on the main page of this website in the Books and Articles section. It is downloadable as a pdf file.

From the Floor of the 2009 OEA Representative Assembly

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:28:14 -0700

In an uncontested election, Gail Rasmussen was elected OEA President at the 2009 Oregon Education Association Representative Assembly.

Rasmussen’s election is another historic election as she is the first African-American OEA President as well as the first Classified employee to hold the post.

Also elected was Hanna Vaandering as OEA Vice President. Vaandering is currently Region 1 Vice President. Karen Watters and Janet Sanders were re-elected to their positions as NEA Director and Education Support Professional Director, respectively.

A number of resolutions and bylaws changes were made at the RA, mostly to clean-up and clarify language in these documents. However, a new resolution recognizing domestic partnership rights was passed and an addition to resolution IV.18 Employing Part-time Employees to include providing benefits was passed. Also, a major clarification on the bylaws concerning the Judicial Panel was passed, after some modification from the floor.

Two of the new business items passed were from Zoe Boltak, a member of both Portland Association of Teachers and the PCC Faculty Federation and Academic Professionals (an AFT-Oregon affiliate). The first directs the OEA to research the possibility to create a union for community college part-time non-credit faculty. The second item directs OEA to communicate to government leaders in Salem that educators and substitute teachers are no different than the general populous when it comes to unemployment benefits.

More information is available at the OEA’s website, www.oregoned.org.

AFT President Randi Weingarten Calls for End to Contingent Exploitation

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:03:44 -0700

The LeaderNet website for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) published AFT President Randi Weingarten’s “urgent call for labor and management in colleges and universities to work together, on campus and in the public arena, to reverse the decades-long overreliance on and exploitation of contingent faculty members.” Weingarten was speaking last weekend at the 36th Annual Conference of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, sponsored by the City University of New York.

Weingarten spoke of the decades of abuse of contingent faculty and how contingency has many of the properties of piece work. She called for both faculty and administration work together to solve the problems of budget and staffing. Weingarten said, “We have to walk in each other’s shoes. Getting along, trusting one another, will lead us to engage in dialogue and find solutions.”

In recent years, a top priority of AFT is the Faculty and College Excellence campaign (FACE) which endeavors to increase the level of full-time tenure track faculty while improving the pay, benefits, and working conditions of contingent faculty. Weingarten with other AFT national, state, and local leaders have been working to this end.

To register for AFT LeaderNet and view the entire post, go to http://leadernet.aft.org/login.cfm.