Fall 2018
In
this Issue:
Surveillance of Faculty and Student Activism
Directors and Faculty Administrators
National AAUP
Membership Site for SJU
November Chapter
Meeting at Staten Island:
Nov.
26, 2018, Common Hour, DaSilva 211
History of Past SJU Faculty Contracts Online
Why Join the SJU-AAUP? 21,000 Good Reasons!
Contract negotiations begin this spring, and faculty
are warmly encouraged to speak to their representatives in the AAUP and Faculty
Association (FA) about changes they would like to see. A number of suggestions
were made at the Oct 29 SJU-AAUP Chapter meeting (see below), and there will be
another chapter meeting on November 26 at Staten Island.
The
last contract, 2017-19, resulted in a number of improvements to faculty life,
particularly for tenure-stream faculty. These included jr.
faculty tenure clock delay for child & eldercare; jr.
faculty research leave requests, and support for jr.
faculty affordable housing opportunities. The adjunct insurance assistance
program ($1500 a year!) is still in effect. These innovations were unthinkable
20 years ago, and SJU-AAUP asks faculty to keep proposing new ideas to include
in future negotiations. The principal outstanding issue still on the bargaining
table is improvement in the administration’s contribution to health care for
faculty hired after 2003, and wage and teaching load parity in a number of
other areas.
______________________________________________________________________
Surveillance of Faculty and Student Activism
Over the past year, at least two faculty have been
summoned to appear before cabinet-level administrators over the political
content of their email and computer use. Both incidents were connected to campus
student activism since the fall of 2017, when some representatives of the
group, Students of Consciousness (SOC) began regularly speaking at SJC Faculty Council
and organizing other forms of political expression. Neither interrogation
resulted in further discipline, although both meetings centered on the faculty’s
role in campus life.
Many
universities across the country reserve the right to scan the communications of
any user of their computer property. In 2016, the faculty at the University of California
protested surveillance of their email but were unable
to block such use of university property.
The
administration apparently uses monitoring software to search all emails, texts,
wi-fi use, all SJU printer-jobs, and web searches. The software scans SJU’s
servers for sensitive material and keywords, such as words like “protest.” Commercially
available programs for employee surveillance include Teremind,
Veriato 360, and Interguard.
Although
it is understandable why campus security would seek to pre-empt potential
campus violence or sexual misconduct, these two cases involving faculty raise
grave doubts about the administration’s ability to use its power wisely. In one
of the cases at SJU in February, the administration misread the emails it
intercepted. They offered no apology for their poor ability to accurately parse
the prose of faculty communications that had nothing to do with advocating
campus demonstrations.
____________________________________________________________________
Women’s full professors’ pay at SJU
averages about $10,000 less than men’s, a shortfall that mirrors state and
national averages. The AAUP plans to address this disparity during the upcoming
negotiations.
Several
women full professors have sought salary
review over the past year. In consultations with SJU-AAUP union
representatives, it has become clear from SJU data that women full professors
make about $10,000 less on average than male professors in St. John’s College.
Campus wide statistics vary among our schools, but gender pay disparity shows
up at almost every level.
The data published by the
national AAUP tell a similar story: men average more than women even though the
salaries at the introductory fulltime lecturer and assistant professor
positions are close. With increases in rank, the inequality grows. For
religiously affiliated schools, the national average pay for men full
professors is $142K, for women $130K.
_____________________________________________________________________
The unions have an active grievance
filed with the administration concerning the interpretation of the clause about
early retirement benefits. The dispute centers on what portions of the premium
that university and faculty members shall pay, and what the expression,
“approved for early retirement” means. At present, the unions and the
administration disagree on the interpretation of the language, but we are
currently in negotiations to settle this dispute.
____________________________________________________________________
Directors and Faculty Administrators
In discussions over the spring semester of 2018,
both the FA and the AAUP have agreed that they will seek very few changes in
the existing system of “Faculty Administrators” and “Program Directors and Co-Ordinators.” This will come as a relief to most faculty but
it may be useful to explain some of the facts behind it.
There
are currently about 117 Directors and Co-Ordinators
who get stipends of between $1500 and $50,000 to direct various kinds of
programs and centers at St. John’s. These stipends are typically paid by the
Dean, although some are paid by the Provost and other sources. Many stipends
come with course reductions, and some faculty have two or more Director
stipends, and they may even simultaneously hold the position of department
chair. The unions have no control over these stipends, nor are they seeking it.
Despite the apparent financial inequalities such a system may seem to pose, both faculty unions fully support faculty
getting as much extra money as they can.
Rather,
the problem the unions have had with this system is its potential to upset
democratic faculty governance. In some professional colleges where the stipends
can be quite high, Director-members of the department standing committees (like
the P&B) might sway program decisions in line with the interests of their
Directorships rather than for the common good of the departments they serve.
But
in meetings during the spring of 2018, both unions agreed that more harm than
good would come from restricting the eligibility of Directors to serve on
department standing committees. The great majority of Directors are stellar
faculty who direct small and valuable programs for very little reward. Current
union thinking is that they should be treated as “normal” faculty in every
other way.
The
unions have also agreed that few changes should be made to the existing system
of “Faculty Administrators.” These are faculty who take temporary positions in
administration such as “Assistant Provost,” etc. These faculty maintain their
faculty status, but for the time they serve as administrators, they are
excluded from summer teaching, Merit/Recognition awards, etc. The political
limitations and scope of their faculty status are detailed in the 1996 “Bonaparte memo,” re-affirmed
by Provost Mangione in 2017.
One
outstanding question is whether such Faculty-Administrators should be allowed
to attend their home department meetings, even though the Bonaparte memo
clearly stipulates that they cannot vote in department meetings.
____________________________________________________________________
It is likely that there will be a streamlining of
Post Tenure Review (PTR) for the upcoming contract toward a simple
“satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” outcome.
During
the last contract negotiation, it became clear that both the administration and
the unions are unhappy with Post Tenure Review. On the administration side, the
process resulted in an extraordinary amount of “outstanding” decisions which
were accompanied by a cash award of $2000 to the faculty member’s base salary.
On the unions’ side, many faculty felt that the process was unduly burdensome
with paperwork and in-class observations. The observation work has been
particularly hard on chairpersons, whose list of additional responsibilities
seems to grow every month. As a result, the administration and the unions have
continued to explore a simplified review system during discussions of the
Labor-Management Committee in the Fall 2017 and Spring 2018.
_____________________________________________________________________
National AAUP Membership Site for St. Johns!
SJU-AAUP is very happy to announce that
the National office of the AAUP has created a new membership website
exclusively for SJU faculty. In addition to giving us reduced membership rates
(fulltime faculty rates of $204; adjunct rates of $51), AAUP allows faculty
members to store their credit cards for automatic annual renewals. Some bureaucracies
move slowly and this improvement has come after 12 years of our repeated requests
to the national office that our chapter needs a better membership system.
Why
join the National AAUP? So you can vote in the elections of our local chapter!
Join National AAUP here.
_____________________________________________________________________
October Chapter meeting at Queens
Upcoming November
26, 2018 Chapter Meeting at Staten Island, Common Hour, DaSilva 211.
In October 29, SJU-AAUP held a chapter meeting at Queens to
discuss upcoming negotiations and recent discussions in the Labor-Management
Committee, many of which are detailed in this newsletter. There was
considerable discussion of the question of faculty Directors.
During Q&A faculty asked whether
the new NY State paid family leave act would apply to St. John’s faculty (we
are not sure yet). Faculty also asked if the they could get early withdrawal of
TIAA funds during step-down retirement added to the new contract.
There is a chapter meeting scheduled
for Nov 26, 2018 at Staten Island at common hour. Please come and bring
questions and ideas!
____________________________________________________________________
History of SJU’s Faculty Contracts Online
The SJU website now has the history of all our
contracts in PDF online. This educational resource is
interesting in itself for its historical aspects. But it is most valuable when
it comes to interpreting the evolution of disputed clauses in our contract.
Although
the union presence at SJU is frequently taken-for-granted, it is important to
note that we were the first private university to unionize in 1970, a historic
achievement. This act led to our faculty-majority Senate, where university-wide
curriculum is decided.
__________________________________________________________________
Why Join the SJU-AAUP? $21,000 Good Reasons!
Many faculty members wonder why they should join
SJU-AAUP, or wonder what the unions have done for them as individuals recently.
These are legitimate questions. After all, all faculty get to vote on our
contracts, whether they are union members or not. And why the heck do we have two
unions? What sort of system is that?
The
first answer is that even through the two-union system is weird, it came about
because faculty life without a union or a Senate at
SJU was intolerable and led to a faculty strike in 1966.
After the strike, when it became clear that faculty demand for a Senate and
union were not going to go away, President Cahill sought to “break” the incoming
tide of faculty unionization by agreeing to 2 unions, which faculty could
voluntarily join, or not. The President hoped this divided,
voluntary-membership union system would keep faculty members fighting among
themselves. He was wrong, and after the NLRB approved the bargaining unit, this
2-union system became basically written in stone.
So,
the best reason to join SJU-AAUP is to support the 50-year tradition of faculty
governance at our school. Over 4/5ths of your $50 contribution to
our SJU-AAUP chapter goes to pay the legal costs of defending our contract and
faculty—the rest is mostly insurance and website. By supporting the unions, you
are directly supporting each other.
And
the second question, “what have the unions done for me personally?” has several
compelling answers. The first answer is simple: unionized faculty get higher
pay and benefits on average than non-unionized faculty, $21,000 a year
according to a recent essay in The Nation. For
$50, this is a large and personal investment, and faculty who think they could
do better without a union might be forgetting that SJU is a private religious
institution as well, where the pay and benefits are typically far below
national averages to begin with.
Second,
the alternative to faculty unionization, the “Please The Prince” model of faculty
reward, is not really a system anyway. Those who Please The Prince, get some
reward. Those who don’t, don’t.
Faculty who have been unjustly ignored during the AFAR process, or Research
Reductions, some significant areas of “Please the Prince” rewards, know what a
chaotic model it is. Although the unions can’t always address every injustice
at our university, we work for a model of democratic faculty governance (always
with limitations at a private university) as well as collective faculty reward.
So
please join the SJU-AAUP!
__________________________________________________________________
Executive
Council, SJU-AAUP
Chapter Officers:
President Frank Le Veness levenesf@stjohns.edu ext. 5720
Vice President Somnath Pal pals@stjohns.edu ext.
1633
Secretary John B. Greg gregj@stjohns.edu ext. 2053
(Corresponding)
Secretary
vacant
(Recording)
Treasurer Granville Ganter ganterg@stjohns.edu ext. 5617
Executive Council:
College of
Professional Studies
Catherine
Ruggieri ruggierc@stjohns.edu ext. 4385
School of
Education
John Spiridakis spiridaj@stjohns.edu ext 5591
Pharmacy &
Allied Health
Frank Barile barilef@stjohns.edu ext. 2640
Library William Keogan keoganw@stjohns.edu ext. 6721
Tobin College
of Business
Joseph Giacalone giacaloj@stjohns.edu ext. 7301
St. John's
College Fred Cocozzelli cocozzef@stjohns.edu ext. 5267
At Large Barbara Koziak koziakb@stjohns.edu ext. 5044
At Large Kathryn Shaughnessy shaughnk@stjohns.edu ext. 1454
At Large Charles Traina trainac@stjohns.edu ext. 6166