Update: After Randy didn’t reply to my requests for an explanation for the delay, I sent a public records petition to Lane County DA Alex Gardner. An hour later I got a response from Dave Hubin’s public records office, offering to sell me these invoices and contracts for $235. It did not provide the required explanation of the denial of my fee waiver request – typical. This is costly for all concerned, and Geller and Hubin are betting that these delays and costs will discourage reasonable questions. Meanwhile UO has no problem spending tens of thousands of dollars on their “Around the O” blog and its efforts to make the administration look competent. Win $500 in prizes, the latest emails say.
11/12/2012: It seemed like a simple public records request:
I am asking for any contracts or invoices for legal advice or consulting, legal or otherwise, relating to the faculty union, from 3/20/2012 to the present.
The first bargaining meeting is next week. I’d sort of like to know how much of our money Geller is spending for competent legal advice. But it’s almost 3 weeks now and he is still stonewalling.
It’s funny, but when Harrang, Long, Rudnick and Gary wanted the DOJ to double the $432,000 they had to pay for a public records case they lost Geller seemed to have plenty of time to go through the invoices and contracts and write the court a brief favoring their claim. Maybe he should put his General Counsel Emerita on the job?
Since the Oregon bargaining law defines faculty as employees rather than managers (as NLRB interprets them to be), one would expect UO to obtain professional advice to negotiate faculty disciplinary provisions, &cet.
But, I wonder if the advisors have been consulted about whether faculty participation in joint governance (the basis of private university faculty being managerial (joint governance, policy-making) should be eliminated to be consistent with the Oregon collective bargaining scheme.
Since sharing managerial authority with employees is not a matter of economic compensation or working condition, I wonder if UO could “just do it” after considering any union proposals over the impact of the elimination on those things.
Just a thought.
Dave Frohnmayer and other recent presidents and Provosts have done all they could to destroy shared governance in practice at UO. This was a major motivation for unionization and the faculty union hopes to include enforceable provisions for shared governance in the contract as other universities have done. I don’t know if the strategy you propose above would be legal, but it would certainly raise a shit storm of national opposition from national faculty and academic associations that would cut deeply into UO academic reputation. No serious administrator would consider it for a moment, and Mike Gottfredson strikes me as a serious administrator.
I’m sure you’re right. The point is there is no obligation to bargain enforceable provisions for shared governance in the contract, as other universities have done, because shared governance concerns managerial matters. It is easier to gloss over the fundamental conflict, and that will undoubtedly be done, but it is intellectually dishonest.
Faculty unionization on its face is not consistent with shared governance. Shared governance is about a collective effort to consider the issues/challenges facing an institution as a whole, an endeavor that is at odds with efforts by individual interest groups to maximize their positions. Shared governance implies that the faculty are key participants in the running of the university, not employees who bargain for their rights. Yes, shared governance has been undermined in recent years, but unionization is hardly an effective response, as it means accepting that faculty are simply employees subject to management control whose responsibilities are amenable to contractual specification, and it means having to engage in the kind of fiction that is laid bare by the above exchange.
“Faculty unionization on its face is not consistent with shared governance.” That is exactly why I am offering to collect decertification signatures when the time is right. Stay tuned.
Who will be able to sign? Only those on the excelsior list?
No, anyone in unit at the time the petition seeking an election is filed.
Which will probably doom it. The union has (cleverly) already constructed a bargaining unit that excludes many of those not in favor of unionization (the reason, not “tradition”, the law faculty are out). So, if I understand correctly, decertification has to win 30% of the bargaining unit. In this, as well, in other words, the excluded remain voiceless.
Decertification has to win 50% + 1 of those voting. 30% just gets you an election.