November 10, 2009. For roughly the past month UFF-FAU has been actively visiting both members and nonmembers in various departments to discuss their assessment of the university while encouraging wider faculty involvement. Despite cramped schedules and increased teaching loads, faculty was more than willing to discuss the decline of FAU: low salaries that increasingly deteriorate as the university fails to keep pace with inflation and the high cost-of-living; inflexible teaching schedules; increased student enrollment in individual classes; lack of research-support for tenured, tenure-track, and instructional faculty; the administration’s unilateral decision-making process by firing five tenured professors in Engineering (the three colleagues who fought through the Union were reinstated); its complete rejection of an independent arbitrator who assessed that FAU faculty deserved at least a 2.5% raise; and its failure to recognize domestic partnerships and provide adequate maternity leave. Needless to say, a majority of nonmembers joined the union on the spot realizing that things needed to change for the better, and quickly, as members reasserted their commitment to growing the union’s strength.
Throughout all of our visits, one underlying theme underwrote all of faculty’s complaints: the lack of community. Although the administration waxes poetic about the countless ways it cherishes its beloved “FAU community,” its commitment grinds to a halt once faculty inconveniently mentions the requisite financial resources to foster and sustain such community. While the administration pets and displays the faculty that tenaciously attempt to better the campus community, it simultaneously shatters this very community through a culture of fear, desperation, and secrecy where anyone can be fired at any given moment, where bloated administrative salaries strangle a livable wage for faculty and service workers, and where students lose valuable teachers, course offerings, and an intimate learning environment as enrollment swells to increase tuition but not the quality of campus life.
Unfortunately, we witness some of the symptomatic effects of this culture upon a few of our colleagues during our visits. As we discuss how the union can help achieve an independent, collective, autonomous faculty voice, some colleagues remain resigned to the fact that their voice does not matter, that they hold no control, that the fight has long since been lost even before it has begun. Other faculty fear retribution from some of their colleagues and the administration if they decide to join the union. Such symptoms not only reveal the emergence of a severely dysfunctional work environment, but also an atmosphere that suffocates learning and the sense of purpose that university life is supposed to instill. If we all eventually share this view, we become nothing more than a university in name only, sacrificing the ideals that brought us to this life in the first place. The union is here to make sure that this does not happen.
The union is here to remind the administration that the faculty is the university: we do the teaching; we do the service; and we do the research. Every time we fail to act, every time we allow the administration to make our decisions for us, we cede another part of our power and sacrifice the integrity of the educational mission that we have all worked diligently to maintain.
The union is the faculty. If we truly believe that we, not the administration, run the university, then we need to use the union to help establish a faculty-empowered community, as well as to secure and enforce our rights in a legally-binding way. The union might not yet numerically represent a majority of faculty, but it certainly represents their ideals: integrity, autonomy, and community. And as we continue to meet with faculty across campus the numbers will soon follow.