5/24/2011: I missed the AAUP/AFT union event Tuesday afternoon. Announcement here. The union’s facebook site is here. Adeline Bash’s ODE story here:
“It’s always gotten worse than I thought it would be,” Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said of his decade-long predictions that higher education was in danger. “This past year has gotten worse than I thought it would ever be.”
The rhetoric is a little overblown for my tastes. But the UO faculty union organizers have done more than spew. The best effort to uncover UO’s financial secrets is the recent union funded Bunsis Report, here. Impressive work. Here’s the cocktail party version:
Why isn’t the Senate Budget Committee digging up this sort of data?
The UO administration still has no coherent response to the numbers Howard Bunsis put together. (Other than, finally, telling Frances Dyke to leave, now. It took Provost Bean how many years to figure that out? Necessary but not sufficient, as those economists say.) And every day they don’t, a union becomes a more and more credible way for the faculty to exert some control over UO’s feckless central administrators. Or at least find out how they’ve been spending our money.
Hmmmm. Not so sure this would be advisable. After all, unionization of the classified staff has only served to leave them with substandard wages and an angry public ready to strip them of their retirement benefits. It has been years since they have gotten a salary increase, and I don’t think they are going to share in the increase faculty are about to enjoy. The “poor me” only goes so far.