BY PAMELA A. SCHULZE
Pamela A. Schulze, president of the Akron AAUP chapter, submitted the following open letter in support of the faculty at Wright State University, who are striking for quality higher education.
I am writing this letter as President of the University of Akron Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which represents 586 full-time faculty. I have been following the contract negotiations and current impasse that has resulted in a faculty strike. To my dismay, I have observed that the WSU administration has resorted to using its students as pawns: putting their education at risk, and frightening them with threats of withdrawal of financial aid, all in order to avoid bargaining with faculty in good faith.
Let me be clear: the faculty at any university is not a problem to be managed. The current strike at your institution is not merely the undesired outcome of a typical labor-management dispute. The faculty are quite simply the backbone of any university, and they are the key to student success. When faculty fight for better working conditions, they are fighting for better learning conditions for their students. Your openly hostile attitude toward the WSU faculty reveals your dismissive view of students, evinced when subs, adjuncts, and administrators are hastily thrown into classrooms, or classes are cancelled altogether, all destroying the good faith needed as a basis for shared governance.
Shared governance–an anathema to many a dysfunctional university administration– is necessary for any university to function effectively. The pattern of wasteful spending on the part of the administration presents an all too common case of chronic mismanagement without real consequence for managers. Instead, the Board of Trustees seeks to punish the faculty for the administration’s misdeeds. In the end, it will be the students and the community at large who will suffer because of the Board’s dereliction of its fiduciary responsibility to the institution.
It’s not too late to return to the bargaining table. The students, faculty, and the community at large are waiting.
Yours sincerely,
Pamela A. Schulze
President, Akron-AAUP
Media contact: Julie Cajigas, Vice President, Akron-AAUP| julie.cajigas@akronaaup.org
The greatest irony is that the administrators whose negligence, criminal oversight or outright abuse of resources led to much of WSU’s current crises, were hardly made to pay any penalty (let go with the usual golden handshakes that big-time swindlers always award each other, and offer lip service or phony excuses for exposed crimes- take a look at a famous name at Ohio State- a major-league swindler who served as President, and went on to be a President somewhere else). And here the faculty and students are indeed being treated as expendibles in the most cynical and openly hostile manner imaginable. BTW- I am aware that the Board of Trustees also at the University of Akron have likewise threatended closing important divisions and departments (including the Department of Physics- something unthinkable for a university even pretending to do science). Not sure what the outcome is on the protests there.