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Two weeks ago today, APSCUF President Ken Mash announced publicly that without a contract settlement, our union will go on strike October 19. During the press conference, President Mash made the point that among other misrepresentations going from the Chancellor’s Office to students and the press was a claim that we had rejected negotiating dates.

I wasn’t happy about the distortion and dashed off a letter to the Chancellor, to which I never received a response–not even the canned form letter other people received for writing their own letters to him. So I thought I’d post it here, to see if maybe that encourages some consideration his part. Feel free to share around if you like it, and to ignore it if you don’t.

Chancellor Brogan:

I write as a West Chester faculty member and, as you’d find out soon enough if you care, a member of APSCUF’s Mobilization Committee that’s working to prepare our faculty in the event that a strike becomes necessary.

Although I’m doing everything I can to make sure our faculty are prepared to strike, I still very much hope a strike doesn’t come to pass. When we say, as President Mash did this morning during his press conference, that it’s a last resort, we really mean it. Unfortunately, what we hear coming from your office is making it difficult for even the most optimistic of us to remain that way. In particular, although this sounds like a trivial detail, it was deeply disheartening to learn this morning that our team had proposed five dates for negotiations sessions to your team, and had gotten no response, while your team proposed dates they already knew were unavailable. That problem became even worse when somebody told the press our side “was refusing to negotiate” as a result. That’s incredibly disrespectful.

The substance of the contract issues aside, I hope you can understand why news like that is very unsettling. Our negotiations team–our whole union–is committed to settling a fair contract, and when your team shows what seems like so little regard for even the simplest details, it’s hard for us to believe that your people are as engaged in the process as we need them to be.

Even though roughly a year and a half of meetings and discussions haven’t resolved the contract issues, most of us believe three and a half weeks of genuine negotiating could end this. But it can’t while your team is proposing sessions on days they already know can’t happen, refusing to respond to requests for others, and blaming us for being unwilling. 

As a whole, the faculty are deeply committed to the students and the institutions that make up the system. We’ve heard you acknowledge this more than once over the years, for which we’re grateful. Now we just need the small group of people you send into the negotiating sessions to act like they understand it too.

In hopefulness,

Seth Kahn, PhD

Department of English

West Chester University

A quick (well, you know) musing from your friendly APSCUF-WCU Mobilization Co-Chair on the way into the holiday weekend before the Strike Authorization Vote–

Yesterday, I had a conversation with somebody in the hallway about getting people to sign up for work we need done over the next months: staffing the voting tables, making themselves available for rallies and picketing, making phone calls and writing letters, and so on. We commiserated for a minute about the herding cats problem that lots of us academics use to describe ourselves.

But I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and think it’s somewhat more complicated than that. I haven’t done formal data collection on this, but anecdotally I know that many of us are drawn to the profession, along with our interest in our disciplines, because faculty work offers more autonomy than almost any other job I can think of. While we rightly get mad at the “They only work 17 hours” trope, it is true that many of the hours we work each week are flex time. We have more decision-making authority over our teaching and research (and even our service) than most people have over their job responsibilities. Yes, we’ve earned it and in many cases paid a dear price for it (years of grad school, student loans, all the financial/emotional stresses that come with those, and more). Nonetheless, it’s one of the features that distinguishes our jobs from most others.

Which is why at moments where unity and solidarity are at a premium, like right now in our contract negotiations/strike preparations, it’s that much more important for each of us to remember that we chose to become faculty, and we chose to become union members, and we therefore need to choose to commit to the solidarity it will take to stand strong for our students, our colleagues, our campuses, and our system against system management that claims to have a monopoly on all those in spite of their continued failure to fight for us and even alongside us instead of against us as they all too often do.

Well, if the people who run our state system were trying to get the new semester off on a sour note, they sure found a way to do it.

In a letter addressed to PASSHE students, Chancellor Frank Brogan makes a claim that I feel compelled to respond to before the semester starts–my goal here is to help APSCUF faculty think about how to respond when students accuse us, faculty, of not looking out for their interests should we have to strike.

Chancellor Brogan says:

We can only hope that APSCUF recognizes the potentially devastating impact that a strike would have on our students.

Yes, Chancellor Brogan, we understand. We wish you understood as well as we do. We’re the ones who work with the students and faculty across the system every single day. We–the students and the faculty–are the people who do the learning and the teaching that give the system, and hence your office and your staff, any reason to exist. We know our impact because we see it every day: in the classes we teach, in the clubs and services we oversee, in the advisees we mentor; in the athletes we coach. Our impact has been steadily and widely positive and productive through often challenging circumstances. We want to work in an environment that allows us to continue having our positive impacts for years to come

The implications of a strike could, in fact, be devastating. That’s why nobody on the APSCUF side wants to do it. On the other hand, if it takes a strike to make PASSHE understand that we’re not going to sacrifice the integrity of our system or our campuses, that’s a positive implication.

In other words, a strike doesn’t have to happen; all it will take to prevent one is for PASSHE to get to work bargaining in good faith like they should have been doing for more than 400 days now. And if a strike does happen, it will be because APSCUF believes that’s the only way to convince PASSHE  to bargain in good faith. We know better than anybody in some office in Harrisburg what will happen to students if we strike. The people who are gambling blindly with our students’ learning conditions aren’t us.