POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

When I started to draft this post, I saw the daily newsletter from Reason, which has this teaser: “On Thanksgiving, Be Grateful for Property Rights.”

Really? In the current political climate, I doubt that property rights are the rights that most Americans are most concerned about preserving. I’m guessing that freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and voting rights would be at the top of most people’s lists.

On this Thanksgiving, I would like to take the opportunity to express thanks for the usual things—the love, support, and forbearance of my wife and our son, my reasonably good health (at least for an old, fat guy), and all of the comforts afforded by a decent salary (not high by most standards, even within academia and certainly not in comparison to administrative salaries, but considerably more than I ever expected to earn when I was completing graduate school). In short, I am thankful that I have somehow lucked out and continue to have a generally “nice” life. My father, who did not live to see me “amount to something,” would be very surprised—not shocked but very pleasantly surprised–at how my life has turned out. He had a lot of faith in me, though I seemed pretty determined to demonstrate that his faith was misplaced.

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will be all too aware that our CB chapter at Wright State has been involved in a two-year effort to get a fair contract in the midst of a largely self-created financial crisis resulting from the skewed priorities and reckless spending of our (previous) administration and Board.

I am currently finishing my fourth (and final) two-year term as the president of our chapter, and when the budget mismanagement became very publicly apparent about three or four years ago, the crisis coincided with major changes in the calculation of the pensions provided through Ohio’s State Teachers Retirement System, changes that gave faculty a great deal of incentive to retire by the end of the spring of 2015. We lost half of the twelve members of our executive committee to retirement and several more for other reasons. Aside from me, the four remaining members of our EC were all relatively new, having just one or two years of experience, and two of the four were taking on major new responsibilities.

I have to admit that I thought things might be taking kind of a bleak turn.

But that we are where we are today—with about 88% AAUP membership among those whom we represent and over 97% of our members standing together to reject a fact-finder’s report that would have gutted basic principles in our contract—is a testament to the collective efforts of the members of our EC, all of whom have coordinated elements of our contract campaign/strike preparation while continuing to meet their usual responsibilities as chapter officers.

Noeleen McIlvenna, our contract administration officer, has done a tremendous job as the overall coordinator of the contract campaign/strike preparation. She has made herself available, often very literally at a moment’s notice, for on-air interviews, and we could not have asked for a more effective spokesperson to express what we are fighting for. (She also is our chapter rep on the Ohio Conference Board and serves on the CBC Executive Committee.)

Gina Oswald, our Communications Officer, and Gretchen McNamara, our Secretary and Digital Communications Officer, have enhanced our communications to our membership, our presence on various social media platforms, and our coverage by regional media.

Sirisha Naidu, our Grievance Officer, and Geoff Owens, our Vice President, have coordinated our community outreach, enhancing existing connections and creating new linkages with other unions, political figures, and allied progressive groups across our region.

Cynthia Marshall and Bobby Rubin, our at-large NTE reps, have worked very effectively with student groups.

And Tom Rooney, our Treasurer, has not only managed our finances much more effectively than the university has managed its finances, but he has done whatever anyone has asked him to do—and much more. He and Gretchen McNamara have also been serving on our reconstituted negotiating team.

I would like to thank the four dozen or so chapter liaisons whom we have recruited, each of whom is responsible for following up with eight to ten members. And I’d like to give special thanks to the liaisons who are also serving on our strike committee. Two of these liaisons, Kate Ecoffon and john Martin have recently agreed to accept interim appointments as the at-large TET reps on our EC.

I feel fortunate to be surrounded by such committed, enthusiastic, and energetic colleagues. Because they are all younger than I am (which is probably less of a necessary revelation than I would wish it to be), I feel very optimistic about the future of our chapter, even as we are still trying to resolve the most challenging situation that our chapter has ever confronted. (The passage of Senate Bill 5 was pretty dire, but we were just a small part of a statewide effort to repeal it.)

I would like to thank our chapter employees—Connie Jacobs, Rudy Fichtenbaum, and Jim Vance—for their incalculable contributions to our efforts. (I am fairly certain that they have all put in many more hours than we have paid them for.) Rudy deserves special mention because, in addition to serving as national president, he has stepped in and resumed his role as our chief negotiator. And I would like to thank our chapter attorney, Susannah Muskovitz for her patience with us because we surely must be among her most bothersome clients.

I would like to thank the Ohio Conference Board and the member chapters for their support. And we owe a great deal of thanks to the national office for the support that it has provided. Specifically, Ben Ratliffe, Josh Lenes, Kira Schuman, Jamie Daniels, and Christopher Simeone have all spent time on our campus and have provided very some substantial assistance. Likewise, Paul Davis, Chair of the CBC, has come to the campus several times to help with planning and to speak at events, and Howard Bunsis testified at length as an expert witness during our fact-finding hearing.

Lastly, I would like to thank our retirees, our labor and other allies, and the regional political figures who have publicly supported us. In particular, I would like to thank Tom Ritchie and the leaders of the other unions in the Dayton-Miami Valley Labor Council for all of their very public support. And I am very grateful to Senator Sherrod Brown and to Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley for their letters of support, sent to our university administration and Board.

For those of you who are still reading, who have indulged my need to acknowledge my gratitude to more people than I can count, I would like finish by stating what must be very obvious. I don’t know what kind of contract we are ultimately going to get, but I do know with certainty that a chapter depends for its success not on any one person or small group of people. When we say that the leadership is not the union–that the leadership simply tries to represent the collective will and needs of our members–it is not just a truism. A union that is strong mainly because of the strength of its leadership is less easily sustainable than a union that can depend on the unity of its membership. To me, this sense of shared purpose is what AAUP is all about, whether one belongs to a CB chapter or to an advocacy chapter.

Although I have had to listen to a few members who could have done me a favor and kept their feelings to themselves, most of our members have been not just very supportive but very considerate. And some have expressed their appreciation so genuinely that I have been very moved by it—almost embarrassed to be receiving it. I will be thankful for those seemingly small but actually very meaningful moments for much longer than this one Thanksgiving.

I hope that all of you have a very nice Thanksgiving.