UUP assembles support for agenda

UUPers have been out and about on the state’s political scene, capitalizing on recent opportunities to garner lawmakers’ support for the union’s legislative program.

At one such occasion - UUP’s annual Legislative Luncheon - about 50 members joined President William Scheuerman to deliver the union’s message for additional state funding for SUNY to the 150 lawmakers and staffers in attendance. While the Executive Budget proposed a $55 million increase for state-operating campuses in 2001-02, the union believes more money is needed in order to rebuild the University.

“You’re here today to talk about the goals we want to achieve,” Scheuerman said to the volunteer lobbyists during a morning briefing. “UUP has a long-term program designed to replace the more than 1,000 lines we lost at SUNY since 1994 due to attrition,” Scheuerman said, referring to a focal point in the union’s political plan.

“The bottom line is you can’t run a University without adequate numbers of full-time academic and professional faculty,” he said.

For the first time in years, there seems to be some consensus among administrators about the need to further fund SUNY. Not only did the chancellor’s budget request state that the University needs more faculty lines - without specifying numbers - but the governor “has begun the conversation” to resolve the deficit at SUNY’s three teaching hospitals, according to Patricia Bentley, chair of UUP’s Legislation Committee.

“This year, for the first time, the governor said there’s a budgetary problem with the hospitals and also recognized their public teaching mission,” Bentley told the union lobbyists.

“There’s even some funding - $66 million - to deal with the shortfall, but the bottom line is we’re concerned that it won’t be enough to prevent layoffs and service care cuts,” Scheuer-man said. “The issue is more money; our goal is no layoffs.”

Scheuerman credited Bentley, Legislation Committee members and other volunteer lobbyists for their frequent visits to lawmakers, adding: “UUP is a real presence in Albany.”

The union’s presence is felt outside Albany as well, as volunteer lobbyists from Brockport and Binghamton to Farmingdale and Stony Brook continue to bring the union’s message to lawmakers in home districts.

“We’re reinforcing our Albany agenda at the district level by coordinating with legislators’ local staffs to ensure that UUP, SUNY and lawmakers are working in the communities to provide the best public higher education possible,” said Frederick Floss, chair of UUP’s Political Action Committee.

“These regional activities personalize our message,” Floss said. “SUNY supplies most of these districts with the high-skilled labor that is needed for New York’s neighborhoods to survive.”

During the briefing, Eileen Landy, Old Westbury chapter president and statewide VOTE/COPE coordinator, thanked the union activists for participating in the nonpartisan political action campaign. She reported that UUPers’ contributions for 2000 totaled nearly $121,500 - an 11 percent increase.

Several lawmakers addressed the luncheon crowd, and support for UUP’s legislative agenda came from both sides of the aisle. Senate Higher Education Committee Chair Kenneth LaValle (R-Port Jefferson) called the budget deficit at the SUNY teaching hospitals “the most important issue this year.”

His Assembly counterpart, Edward Sullivan (D-New York), said the state has enough money to “start investing in the future,” by having “the best colleges in the nation and the world. We’re not interested in second place.”

Showing a strong spirit of support for more full-time faculty lines and a resolution to the hospital shortfall, some 150 UUPers from the Stony Brook chapters were among almost 600 in attendance for a campus lobby day in Albany. Addressing the crowd in The Well of the Legislative Office Building (LOB), campus President Shirley Strum Kenny thanked UUPer Bill Godfrey and the two union chapters for co-sponsoring the event, noting that “this kind of cooperative effort we need to make on behalf of Stony Brook and the University.”

At Voice press time, UUPers were preparing to visit the LOB again for a Feb. 27 University Colleges of Technology (UCTs) showcase, which will enable lawmakers to see “what these fine institutions have to offer,” Scheuerman said. “We have to make sure the five technology campuses remain viable.”

The UCT showcase coincides with the NYSUT-sponsored Higher Education Lobby Day, another opportunity for members to present UUP’s political program to state legislators in Albany. This month, UUPers will join their K-12 colleagues for the unionists’ annual “Committee of 100” lobby day at the capital.

“Our agenda is incorporated into the Committee of 100 agenda and your presence is important in promoting UUP’s higher education program,” Bentley reminded the union’s volunteer lobbyists.

In testimony before the Senate Finance and Assembly Ways and Means committees, Scheuerman said the SUNY trustees “broke tradition” and finally began responding to UUP’s repeated argument that the University needs additional support.

Acknowledging that there “appears to be a sea change” in University financing this year, Scheuerman told state lawmakers that the governor’s fiscal plan for SUNY is still not enough. He urged them to “again act in the best interests of our great state University” by filling the holes left in the Executive Budget proposal and “completing the job of lifting SUNY out of a lengthy cycle of underfunding.”

The trustees’ $82 million budget request for 2001-02 would fully fund collective bargaining and inflation and partially support research and full-time faculty lines. While the governor proposed a “badly needed increase” for SUNY and identified full-time lines, contractual obligations and inflation as “priority needs,” his plan fell short of the additional financing required to make up for past years, Scheuerman said.

“With your support, SUNY has begun to rectify the brain drain” - the loss of 1,675 full-time academic faculty over the last decade - “but what is presently required is a specific timetable for SUNY to reach the goal of 70 percent instruction by full-time faculty,” he told lawmakers.

And, a campus-based, five-year operating budget plan - modeled on SUNY’s rolling five-year capital plan - could include “qualitative goals” like student-to-faculty ratios, targets for student services and the 70 percent full-time percentage, Scheuerman testified.

Qualitative assessments would be “one way to oblige the trustees” to uphold their priorities, he said, reminding lawmakers that SUNY is still getting “rammed” by the administration’s mechanistic funding formula that merely measures enrollments and other purely fiscal considerations when making allocations to University campuses. “In what has become an annual concern at UUP, we fear that the campus appropriations we discuss today and the legislative intent you provide tomorrow may have no meaning this summer, when these appropriations are redistributed under RAM,” Scheuerman said.

NYSUT also addressed the lawmakers. Speaking on behalf of Executive Vice President Alan Lubin, Peter Martineau, assistant director of legislation, pointed out: “After three stressful years for the hospitals and UUP employees,” the framework to solve the hospital deficit in this year’s executive budget includes ending the “ill-advised subsidization” of academic campuses by the SUNY hospitals and the recognition that the state has a “vested, public policy interest” that requires its financial investment in the hospitals.

“We see a light at the end of the tunnel, but we hope it’s not another train coming in the opposite direction,” Lubin stated, indicating that NYSUT will not fully support the initiative until it is certain the plan will avoid layoffs and health care service reductions.

In his testimony, New York State Public Higher Education Conference Board Co-chair Dallas Beal said: “It is our view that New York’s current climate of economic growth and budget surpluses makes this the right time to address this chronic underfunding of public higher education.”

Assemblywoman Deborah Glick (D-New York) questioned SUNY Chancellor Robert King about the administration’s dedication to the unique but beleaguered UCTs.

“The UCTs’ missions have altered; there are increased requirements regarding their offerings, to keep pace,” she said, referring to the colleges’ evolution from two-year agricultural to more technologically oriented campuses that now also offer some four-year degrees. Along with those increases, additional funding “for staff development and other needs during their transition period is important, because they offer things that aren’t available anywhere else,” Glick said.

Responding to King’s assurance that the University will provide funding to help these colleges through their transition, Glick said she’s “happy to hear there’s a commitment” to these schools.

King is also committed to increasing campuses’ private fund-raising efforts as a way to expand SUNY’s financial resources beyond state funding and tuition. Ivan Steen, Albany chapter president and UUP Legislation Committee member, noted that, while it’s “terrific there’ll be more of an emphasis on getting outside money for the University, those funds should be for extras” - for things SUNY can’t expect to get from tax dollars.

“The state has the basic obligation to fund SUNY, so it has enough funding to function as an excellent University,” Steen said. “We can’t cease to be the public - the people’s - state university.”

- Lisa Feldman Reich

Ad campaign bites into reality

Only in the world of advertising could chattering false teeth become the symbol for investment in the state university.

But the “unreal” teeth - in stark contrast to a “real smart” effort to make SUNY stronger - are the centerpiece of UUP’s annual legislative advertising campaign. The campaign, with print, television and billboard components, is designed to convince lawmakers to make SUNY a budgetary priority.

Following the unreal image of the false teeth and the real smiles of prospective students, the print ad reads: “Restoring full-time SUNY faculty positions. Solving the financial emergency at SUNY’s teaching hospitals. Ensuring every New Yorker’s access to a quality, public higher education. Real Smart.”

A quirky television version includes some other false images - including a cheesy wig and aluminum Christmas tree - but repeats the “real important” message from UUP that SUNY’s budget needs must be met this year. UUPer John Romeo of the New York State Theatre Institute provides the voice-over.

The ads, in various formats, are appearing in Albany, Binghamton and Buffalo and on Long Island. The campaign is scheduled to run through mid-May.

- Frank Maurizio

Political priorities

Rebuild the full-time academic and professional faculty:

- Over the last two years, the Legislature and the governor have begun to restore some full-time faculty lines.

It is time to do more. UUP calls for the additional funding necessary to achieve a Universitywide level of 70 percent full-time faculty.

- Since 1995-1996, SUNY has lost more than 1,000

full-time lines, while the percentage of part-time faculty has risen to unacceptably high levels (almost 40 percent of the academic faculty at the state-operated campuses).

Rebuild the fiscal foundation of SUNY:

teaching hospitals

- End the practice of “taxing” the teaching hospitals to fund campus operating budgets.

- Recognize the contributions made to health care education, biomedical research and public health by SUNY’s teaching hospitals and provide the funding necessary to safeguard them.

Fully fund campus budget priorities:

- Provide additional funding and faculty for the implementation of campus budget priorities, such as the four-year programs at the University Colleges of Technology, the new requirements for teacher education and the new general education mandates.

Restore an open and public dialogue at SUNY:

- Institute a five-year operating budget plan, modeled on the University’s rolling five-year capital plan, which would provide the opportunity for an open and public dialogue on the future of SUNY.

- Incorporate qualitative educational goals as part of the RAM formula.

Restore funds to the New York State Theatre Institute:

- Return all UUP members to full-time status and provide adequate staff for each department.

Pass the sweatshop code of conduct:

- Support legislation to ensure that products bearing the SUNY and CUNY logos are manufactured under healthy, safe and fair working conditions.

Political pronouncements

- Senate Higher Education Committee Chair Kenneth LaValle: “The hospitals are an important part of SUNY - and we must keep them an important part of the SUNY system.”

- Assembly Higher Education Committee Chair Edward Sullivan: “We will introduce legislation for a five-year budgeting plan for SUNY, so you’ll know how much you have to work with. Does that mean you can’t ask for more? Well, this is still America.”

- Assembly Majority Leader Paul Tokasz: “This budget will be a challenge. If we’re spending on (technology), we must fund full-time faculty lines.”

- Assembly Higher Education Committee Ranking Minority Member Jay Dinga: “There’s tremendous bipartisan support for SUNY in the Legislature.”

- NYSUT President Thomas Hobart: “We have to make sure full-time lines are totally restored and are actual, not optional.”

McCall seeks better trustee selection process

State Comptroller H. Carl McCall is calling for the establishment of a nominating board to recruit and screen SUNY and CUNY trustees before they are appointed.

He teamed up with several higher education advocates at a formal press conference in Albany to urge the governor and Legislature to improve the current process of selecting trustees.

“We need to make sure we have the best possible candidates,” McCall said. “They should be qualified. There should be some standard. They should be able to operate independently.” Trustee selections need to be based on merit, rather than political alliances, he said. “The governor and mayor (of New York City) essentially have the power to appoint whoever they want to control one of our most important resources - our public universities. Although the state Senate confirms appointees, we need change to ensure that decisions in the University are made on the basis of what is right for the students, not for the politicians,” according to McCall.

The state comptroller is asking for legislation that would require an extensive recruitment process specifying that anyone working for the governor or mayor would be prohibited from being selected as a trustee.

“We believe that, to be a good trustee, independence is essential,” McCall said. “We need to do better.”

Five trustees at CUNY have previously worked for the mayor, McCall said.

The comptroller said trustees have a “fiduciary duty to look out for the overall interests and long-term welfare of their institutions, which may be at odds with the wishes of a governor or mayor.” While New York has witnessed problems with its process, the issue of trusteeship is a national one, McCall said.

He welcomed to the podium Richard Novak, head of the Center for Public Higher Education Trusteeship and Governance, an offshoot of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

The process of establishing a screening committee, Novak said, is “what we have in some states for judges, and we think that process can work for trustees.”

Dallas Beal, co-chair of the newly formed New York State Public Higher Education Conference Board, said: “Even though this concept is not new, it’s time for New York to look seriously at this process.”

He added: “Recent events have caused many of us to question whether the SUNY and CUNY boards are still providing the independent guardianship intended when the systems were created. When trustees feel they cannot advocate for the system they represent because an executive who appointed them wants to cut public funding, or when a discussion over academic policies is driven by outside political concerns, I think it’s clear that we need a change in approach.”

Roscoe Brown Jr., the other conference board co-chair and chair of Friends of CUNY, said recent controversy at Hunter College clearly demonstrated interference from the mayor’s office in the appointment process for a president.

“That a former associate of the mayor was injected into the search process and appointed over the objections of the chancellor, faculty and students clearly demonstrates that political pressure is being applied in an inappropriate fashion,” Brown said.

The McCall press conference was the first joint appearance of Beal and Brown as co-chairs of the conference board. Beal is past president of SUNY Fredonia and the one-time president of the Connecticut State University System.

Brown, former president of Bronx Community College, is now director of the Center for Urban Education Policy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was previously director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs at New York University.

The conference board’s leadership team also includes UUP President William Scheuerman as vice chair and Louis Stollar, president of the United College Employees of FIT, as secretary-treasurer.

- Liza Frenette

2001 Winter Delegate Assembly
Delegates give generously to Mexican workers

Delegates to the union’s winter policymaking convention raised $1,400 in less than 15 minutes for struggling workers in the Mexican maquiladora factories.

Following an impassioned keynote address by Martha Ojeda, executive director of the San Antonio-based Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM), delegates answered her plea to aid Mexican workers in their fight for a union and for a fair living wage.

The delegates’ unwavering commitment to labor and union ideals underscored the theme of the 2001 Winter DA: solidarity.

Union delegate Charles Spector of SUNY Oswego set the standard for donations when he eagerly gave $100 to the cause.

Spector said he was compelled to donate because he has witnessed the devastation caused by sweatshop labor.

“I have traveled to Mexico and to South-east Asia, where I’ve seen a lot of these types of sweatshops,” Spector said. “It’s heartwrenching to see the amount of money the owners make and how little goes into the hands of the workers. It’s terrible. ... If everyone would reach into their pockets, we could make a difference.”

The collection bucket overflowed with cash collected from the 250-plus delegates, observers and staff members. Union President William Scheuerman threw in the extra dollars needed to bring the total to an even $1,400.

“Raising this much money in so little time proves that UUPers are willing to lend a hand whenever workers are threatened,” Scheuerman said.

This isn’t the first time unionists have joined the fight to improve the working conditions in the Mexican maquiladoras. Several UUPers have invested their own time and money to travel to the Mexican border - with CJM and the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition - to see firsthand the harsh realities the North American Free Trade Agreement has had on communities there. Another trip was scheduled as The Voice went to press.

Following her address, Ojeda joined Maureen Casey, international project coordinator from the state labor-religion coalition, in giving UUP chapters Mayan weaving samplers made by workers in Oaxaca, Mexico. The samplers were presented as a token of solidarity and appreciation for UUP’s ongoing support.

Meanwhile, the Solidarity Singers - a six-person band that includes SUNY Albany UUPer Lawrence Wittner - entertained delegates and guests with a number of union- and labor-inspired songs.

Delegates recognized Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver as this year’s recipients of UUP’s Friend of SUNY Award.

In accepting his plaque, Bruno promised to continue working with UUP and both houses of the Legislature to mend the structural deficit at SUNY’s three teaching hospitals.

Silver, who was unable to attend the Friday night presentation for religious reasons, prepared a video message for the delegation in which he, too, pledged his support for SUNY hospitals and the University Colleges of Technology.

- Karen L. Mattison

Keynote address: Organizer talks of painful work, life conditions

Mexican organizer Martha Ojeda is all hands when speaking: She clasps her fingers together nervously when talking about the poverty of Mexican workers; then she raises a hand in a storm of pleas for help. Later, she cups her hands, one atop of the other, in a moment of rest. “It’s in our hands that we can make it possible,” she said, requesting help from the unionists assembled at the 2001 Winter Delegate Assembly in Albany to hear about solidarity.

Her gestures are reflective of her involvement: Ojeda is the hands-on executive director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras. The former factory worker designs programs for organizing and educating workers, and leads delegations to the border to help raise consciousness about the realities of living and working in the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Her Mexican sisters and brothers work 48 hours a week for $45 and live with no electricity and no water.

Many workers are exposed to chemicals and solvents on the job, without any protection. Some babies are born with major deformities. Many of the workers’ homes are built on dumps.

“It’s not like we want the same style of life as you have,” Ojeda said. “We want to live with dignity. ... We’re not thinking air conditioning; we’re thinking rice.”

Showing slides that portray in color the dark living conditions of her people, Ojeda explained that their only drinking water is from a 100 percent polluted river; the people do not have money to buy water.

“You might think, ‘Oh, it’s so far away,’” she said. “‘Oh, it’s on the other side of the (Rio Grande) river. It can’t happen to us.’ ”

Driven from her country because of threats on her life, Ojeda said: “Solidarity is the word I heard when I crossed the border in 1994.”

Ojeda asked the delegates seated before her to recognize their sisters and brothers from the border.

“The same situation we have here is the same situation your ancestors were fighting,” said Ojeda, who started working in the factories when she was 15, first making medical apparel for Johnson & Johnson and then video and audio cassettes for SONY.

“We are the ones who produce; you are the ones who consume,” she said.

Eventually, Ojeda returned to high school. Then, with the support of her friends, went to law school to learn how to defend labor rights and to fight injustices.

- Liza Frenette

Geographic organizing is key to labor’s future

American workers are faced with a set of challenges that necessitate a more proactive, geographically centered labor movement, according to Immanuel Ness, editor of Working USA.

Ness, an assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College and a member of PSC/CUNY, spoke at UUP’s Winter DA as part of a forum on union solidarity. He said changes in the economy require an innovative approach to union organizing.

“We’re looking at organizations that are now reactive rather than proactive,” Ness said. “That has to change.”

Ness cited a world economy that depends more on privatization, subcontracting and part-time labor - key issues in higher education - all posing a stiff challenge to the union movement. The answer, Ness suggested, is for unions to organize geographically rather than solely by profession, as has been tradition.

“Labor needs to build a broader struggle, unifying around issues rather than just professions,” he said.

Re-energizing “moribund” central labor councils is the key to this geographic organizing approach, Ness said. And, he said, it’s been successful before.

“Labor councils in the early decades of the 20th century were effective in mobilizing on a geographic basis,” Ness said. He cited the general strikes of 1919 in Seattle, 1934 in San Francisco and 1935 in Minneapolis as examples of effective labor actions that worked “over jurisdictional boundaries.”

Ness credited AFL-CIO President John Sweeney with putting a renewed emphasis on geographic organizing. The AFL-CIO’s current “Union Cities” program is an initiative that, “at its root, overcomes some of the limitations of unions operating under the confines of their own professions,” Ness said.

According to the AFL-CIO, Union Cities is designed to create an ongoing support structure at the local level for the struggles the AFL-CIO’s national affiliates and local unions face each day. It challenges local unions to rally around a common agenda and serves as a blueprint for action, which evolved after months of talks with national and international unions, and with several hundred central labor council leaders throughout the nation.

NYSUT, UUP’s state affiliate, is an active member of the “New Alliance,” New York’s effort at geographic organizing through central labor councils.

“The jury is still out (on geographic organizing),” Ness conceded. “But the labor councils needed today are not the ‘old boy networks’ of the recent past. They must actually be organizing vehicles, uniting unions around common causes.”

- Frank Maurizio

Schools, communities must reject market ideology for public education

There must be an “unqualified rejection of the market ideology” if American public education hopes to survive, according to Michael Engel, a professor of political science at Westfield State College in Massachusetts.

Engel, who spoke during the academic delegates meeting at the 2001 Winter DA in Albany, said the institution of education has experienced a shift away from democratic values - those he claims encourage openness, creativity, social awareness and idealism - to a market ideology that fosters competition, individual achievement and economic growth. In the past two decades, bottomline economics has become the framework for education and educational reforms, he said.

“Ground has been entirely conceded and it’s now all about the market model,” Engel said. Public schools and universities are governed like businesses in which there is “an artificial consensus around pre-set goals of the administration,” he added.

UUP President William Scheuerman agreed. In his report to delegates, Scheuerman discussed the union’s struggles against the “corporatization” of the University: “The beancounters are calling the shots. ... Education has become secondary to the goals of efficiency.”

In his newest book, The Struggle for Control of Public Education: Market Ideology vs. Democratic Values, Engel attacks the increasing dominance of market ideology on educational reform initiatives, citing school vouchers, charter schools, contracting out and an over-reliance on technology and distance learning. He has written that advocates of the corporate model have used the “facade of progressive rhetoric” to win the support of federal and state policymakers. As a result, Engel contends that communities no longer control their schools, teachers no longer control their work and students no longer control their futures.

“The political, radical right has borrowed our ideas (on how to influence policymakers); that’s why they’re in power. We have to borrow them back,” Engel said. “It’s time to say, ‘We won’t talk market ideology because it doesn’t work: It’s bad for the kids and here’s why.’” If that doesn’t work, he suggested delegates run for political office.

Engel believes faculty unions can effectively turn back the clock to a time when community-controlled schools and democratic values were the norm.

According to Engel, the contest will be won or lost by the end of this decade. He marveled at the well-organized leadership and political clout of UUP, and he called on the union and its affiliates to challenge the powers-that-be.

Value-based education “may be viewed as Utopian, but it isn’t,” Engel said. “It has been a part of the Amer-ican ideal that goes back 200 years.”

- Karen L. Mattison

Internet will redefine teaching, learning

Online learning is a growing phenomenon that is destined to redefine the way teachers teach and students learn.

UUPer Robert Cole, an assistant professor of communication studies at SUNY Oswego, questions if online learning can improve the quality of higher education. Cole said two concerns stand out: the turning of higher education into a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace (see related story at right); and the lack of strong evidence that online teaching makes for good pedagogy.

Cole, a UUP delegate, is the editor of a new book, Issues in Web-based Pedagogy: A Critical Primer, which examines the theoretical and practical concerns associated with online learning. Published by Greenwood, the 400-page book is an edited collection of original research, in which contributors ask critical questions about teaching and learning through the Internet.

“There’s not enough research to be jumping in wholeheartedly,” Cole said. “There are a lot of questions, but not a lot of answers.”

Cole said the SUNY Learning Network is a good example of the advancement of technology. The network will soon top 20,000 enrollments with close to 1,500 courses. Five years ago, it had eight online courses and enrolled just 119 students.

The demand for distance education courses has fueled the perception that education is a product to be sold at the greatest profit margin, Cole said.

“Everything we’ve discovered about teaching - from the ancient Greeks to John Dewey’s progressive models to reflections on the pedagogy of the oppressed - highlights the personal contact that must take place if true teaching is to happen,” Cole said. “Teaching is a very human activity, and the less mediation that gets in the way, the better.”

There are those, however, who believe that online education is equally as effective as traditional teaching. A 1999 review of more than 350 studies by researcher Thomas Russell concluded that the extent of student learning is nearly identical - irrespective of the medium.

Nonetheless, Cole’s assessment of sound online pedagogy led him to this conclusion: “We just don’t have the kind of necessary evidence that comes from rigorous research to justify this tremendous shifting of limited resources.”

Cole isn’t alone. A recent telephone survey of 400 UUPers found that most members are skeptical about the quality of the education provided through distance learning. Close to 70 percent of the respondents do not believe distance ed courses offer the same quality as traditional courses, and more than 83 percent believe e-courses should supplement - rather than replace - traditional courses.

NYSUT locals focus on higher ed

The issue of part-time faculty - their overuse and abuse - has topped UUP’s agenda for years. Now that issue has a wider forum and a broader array of advocates.

Part-timers were discussed at length during the first meeting of the NYSUT Higher Education Council, a new coalition joining leaders from NYSUT’s locals that represent academic and professional faculty and technical staff employed at public- and independent-sector colleges and hospitals. UUP President William Scheuerman is council chair; NYSUT Executive Vice President Alan Lubin is liaison to it.

Peggy Barmore, assistant to NYSUT President Thomas Hobart, gave the new council its charge during a recent meeting in Albany:

“The council’s purposes are to provide a forum for discussion of the many professional issues facing higher education faculty and professional staff such as academic freedom, intellectual property rights and best practices for the uses of technology; to share information and ideas about labor relations and collective bargaining issues in the field of higher education and teaching hospitals; to develop legislative and regulatory goals; and to identify broad-based education, training and research needs in areas of special interest to higher ed members.”

“This is really a ‘common ground’ committee,” Barmore said.

One area of common ground is the use of part-time faculty, whose numbers have been growing at SUNY, CUNY and the state’s independent colleges as a way to cut costs. UUP representatives and others argue that an overreliance on part-time faculty threatens the quality of education available to students. They also contend that part-timers are routinely treated shabbily.

“There’s a tremendous need to improve the working conditions and salaries of adjuncts and part-timers,” said Pauline Kinsella of NYSUT’s organizing department.

Citing recent UUP contracts with the state, Kinsella added: “UUP really serves as a model across the country for organizing and representing adjuncts.”

Scheuerman responded: “Yes, use us as a resource.”

Kinsella also outlined plans for NYSUT to work with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to organize the unorganized on private campuses. AAUP and NYSUT are currently engaged in organizing efforts at Manhattanville College in Westchester County and Manhattan College in New York City.

Members of the council, representing faculty groups from four- and two-year institutions across New York, were enthusiastic about the council’s potential impact on higher education in the state. “We can broaden the discussion of what higher education is,” said William Perrotti of Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica.

- Frank Maurizio

UUPeople

Social scene: UUPer raises the curtain on human rights issues

It wouldn’t be hard to track down Samuel Kelley; he’s left a paper trail from coast to coast. The paper consists of newspaper reviews, screenplays and playbills.

By day, he’s known as a professor of communications and African-American studies at SUNY Cortland. By night, he is a playwright.

You could say he got his start as a - well, let’s just be frank, as a rooster. It was in a school play in second grade. (His sister, unbeknownst to him, kept the costume for years.) Now, Kelley has much to crow about. He has been reviewed in The New York Times and a host of other large metropolitan newspapers after productions of his plays on both U.S. coasts, and many cities in between. He has won the Joseph Jefferson Award for best ensemble performance of “Pill Hill,” the equivalent of the Tony for the Chicago theater scene. He was also the James Thurber playwright-in-residence in Columbus, Ohio.

The topics for Kelley’s dramas come from being in the barnyard, so to speak: He notices what is going on within himself and within the communities where he lives and works.

“Maybe I’m outraged by something I hear. ... I listen to people. I read stories and articles,” Kelley said. After some thought, he added: “I’m a playwright more than an activist. You might start out with an issue, but the characters emerge and you have to let them talk.”

“Driving While Black,” his most recent play, looks at racial profiling. It was performed last year at Cortland for the New York African Studies Association Conference, which he helped to organize. “White Chocolate,” which was so well received it was brought back by popular demand, is about a black professor trying to get tenure, whose daughter is in love with a white boy. “Pill Hill,” which has been staged numerous times, tells the story of six black men trying to lurch out of the ruts they are in - and just maybe make it to Pill Hill, the part of town where all the doctors and lawyers live.

“I Ain’t Got Time to Die” takes place in the early ’60s, when a young African-American is involved with student sit-ins, much to the consternation of his grandmother, who is helping him get through medical school. “In many, many black households, the grandmother plays a major role in providing for the grandchildren,” Kelley said.

Currently, he is working on a play about a woman obsessed with the spirit of Josephine Baker, a black entertainer and dancer. The heroine gets strip-searched at customs on her return from Paris, a practice which Kelley said happens disproportionately to African-Americans.

“I love the theater,” Kelley said. “It’s a great way to communicate with people about the arts and social issues.”

As a child who grew up in the heart of the Mississippi delta, Kelley and his siblings were raised by an aunt and uncle after his father died and his mother became ill. He went to college in Arkansas, where he earned degrees in speech and drama and acted in plays. At the University of Michigan, he earned his Ph.D. in radio, TV and film, and did his dissertation on actor Sidney Poitier.

“In my family, nine out of 10 kids went to college,” Kelley said. “We grew up on a rented farm, growing cotton and soy beans and raising livestock. We also grew watermelon, okra and cucumbers as cash crops. For poor blacks growing up in the south, college was the meal ticket out of poverty.”

- Liza Frenette

In the news

Laser lauded - A Simons Fellowship summer program at SUNY Stony Brook for high school students provided the impetus for the creation of a magneto-optical laser tachometer by Andrew Koller, son of SUNY Old Westbury’s Eileen Landy, a member of UUP’s statewide Executive Board.

The invention measures the speed of a turning wheel using laser optics instead of electronics, Landy said. The tachometer also enabled her son to become one of 30 regional finalists throughout the country in the Siemens-Westinghouse Science and Technology Competition. “His entry was based on work he did at the Stony Brook physics department laser lab,” said Landy, president of Old Westbury’s UUP chapter.

Along with other students who had competed for the fellowships, Koller worked with UUPer John Noe, who runs the laser teaching center. “I am so impressed by what they do with students,” Landy said of the Stony Brook fellowship program.

Koller was also named a semi-finalist in a recent Intel science talent search.

- Liza Frenette

Two studies by Albert Shanker Institute examine unionism, professionals

Despite stereotypes about unions, a large percentage of unorganized professionals would like to be represented by a union or some other type of “employee organization,” according to results of two new studies recently released by the Albert Shanker Institute.

The studies, which include a national poll of professionals by Peter Hart Research and a study of new workplace organizations by David Kusnet of the Economic Policy Institute, reveal that these workers are as concerned about the quality of work they do as the conditions under which they work.

They also want respect, a voice in decision making, better pay and a clear process for dealing with management that will enable them to live up to their professional values, improve the goods and services they produce, and make a contribution to society.

Copies of the studies, available in one publication, Finding their Voices/Professionals and Workplace Representation, are $10 each from the Shanker Institute at (202) 879-4401.

Nurses seek a union

Albany Medical Center nurses are launching a new campaign to unionize under the auspices of The Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (FNHP)/NYSUT.

Lynn Duggan, an FNHP/NYSUT organizer, said that, based on a strong response to the launch of a recent card-signing campaign, the union has decided to renew its organizing efforts with the more than 1,000 registered nurses (RNs) at the Albany hospital. Collection of authorization cards is the first step toward another union election.

Since last year’s unionization campaign - which failed by the slimmest of margins - the RNs continue to be concerned about high turnover rates, staff shortages and stressful working conditions.

Benefits: More retirement planning

I thought I’d take some time to talk about how you can continue benefits into retirement. Many of the benefits you enjoy as an active employee continue, but I want to stress those that don’t.

Health insurance: The following is a quick description of the three criteria you must meet to be eligible:

* You must have 10 years of eligibility in the New York State Health Insurance Program (NYSHIP). NYSHIP consists of the Empire Plan or one of the state-selected HMOs. If you were employed on a part-time basis prior to the current contract, and you were eligible for health insurance, it was counted during the time you were on payroll. This means 10 months of employment would only count as 10 months of eligibility toward health insurance. Fortunately, UUP was successful in the most recent round of bargaining in securing year-round coverage for part-timers who work two consecutive semesters and meet the eligibility criteria;

* You must be age 55 (or age 50 during an early retirement incentive); and

* You must be enrolled in NYSHIP at the time of retirement. If you have health coverage through a spouse and opted out of NYSHIP, the fact that you are eligible still counts toward the 10-year requirement, but you must be enrolled in NYSHIP as a participant or dependent on your retirement date.

Dental insurance: As an active employee, your dental coverage is provided through the UUP Benefit Trust Fund Delta Dental plan. When you retire (or leave state service), your coverage ends at the end of the month following the month in which you were last employed. For example, if you retire May 15, your coverage would end June 30.

At this point, you have several options. You can continue benefits under COBRA, which means you will have the same plan as the active employees, but you will be paying the premium. COBRA legislation allows you to do this for up to 18 months after leaving state service. You also will have the opportunity at retirement to participate in the GHI plan that is offered to all retired state employees. If you maintain UUP retiree membership (which you can only do if you were a card-carrying member as an active employee), you also may participate in one of three UUP retiree dental plans or the NYSUT retiree dental plan. Sound confusing? It is. To help, UUP has created a retiree kit that provides information about all the plans available to you. Note that enrollment deadlines apply to both COBRA and the retiree plans, so don’t delay.

Vision coverage: Again, you can choose COBRA, through which you can purchase up to 18 months of the same coverage you had as an active employee. COBRA legislation lumps together dental and vision coverage, so you can’t buy one without the other. If you don’t want to purchase COBRA, you’ll still be eligible for the Davis Vision discount plan if you maintain UUP retiree membership. This allows you to purchase a voucher toward discounts on glasses from a participating provider.

NYSUT benefits: If you maintain UUP retiree membership, you continue to be eligible to buy NYSUT benefit plans.

If you hope to retire this year, plan ahead. Call UUP at (800) 342-4206 for your retiree kit today.

- Gail Maloy

Legal assistance available at discounted rates

The need for legal help arises at various times, whether it’s related to buying a home, drafting a will or fighting a traffic ticket. NYSUT’s Legal Service Plan provides assistance for personal legal matters.

The most widely used feature of the plan is the unlimited toll-free legal advice. Many situations can be resolved by speaking with an attorney on the phone. Besides giving advice, these attorneys will make phone calls and write letters on behalf of participants. If a problem can’t be resolved by letter or phone, UUPers will be referred to a participating attorney in their counties. Plan attorneys charge $80 an hour or 40 percent less than their usual hourly rate, whichever is less.

Other features include a free simple will or update, free office consultations, Preventive Law Guide newsletter and guaranteed maximum fees for a variety of personal legal matters. The annual enrollment fee is $55. For those who are eligible for payroll or pension deduction and use this method, the annual fee drops to $49.50.

Optional riders for Elder Law services and for business protection can be purchased and added to the plan’s coverage. The Elder Law rider provides access to Elder Law attorneys who will discount their fees by 20 percent. It also provides a Legal Security Package, which includes a simple will, health care proxy, living will and durable power of attorney. The business protection rider provides legal assistance for members who have their own businesses, such as rental income property. Attorneys provide their services for business protection at the same reduced rates as those stated for the basic Legal Service Plan.

Retired members may choose between the Legal Service Plan and NYSUT’s Retiree Legal Service Plan.

For additional information, call NYSUT Member Benefits at (800) 626-8101 or e-mail to benefits@nysutmail.org.

Women’s History Month

The woman rebel: Margaret Sanger was a pioneer for birth control, contraception

Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer and advocate for contraception, was born in 1879 in upstate New York to a large Catholic family. Margaret’s mother, who gave birth to 11 children, died at an early age. Sanger attributed her mother’s death to numerous pregnancies, and these circumstances helped to convince Sanger that women needed information about birth control.

As a young woman, Sanger became a visiting nurse in the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. There she saw extreme poverty compounded by numerous children. For these impoverished immigrant women, Sanger concluded, “pregnancy was a chronic condition” that would remain that way until nurses, social workers and reformers could supply women with information about birth control.

In 1912, one patient won Sanger’s heart and caused her to dedicate her life to this cause: 28-year-old Sadie Sachs, a mother of three in very poor health. Lacking any knowledge of birth control methods, Sadie beseeched Sanger, “Please tell me the secret, and I’ll never breathe it to a soul. Please!” After an unsafe and illegal abortion, Sadie died. Sanger resolved to tell women “the secret.” During the next 50 years, she would relate the melodramatic tale of Sadie Sachs to audiences throughout the country.

But before Sanger became renowned as a birth control activist - while she still cared for immigrant women - she became friendly with the socialists, labor organizers and radical women and men like anarchist Emma Goldman and journalist John Reed. The experience of nursing taught Sanger about contraception, and her contact with the radicals exposed her to ideas about social change. These contacts helped this fiery, red-haired activist to find her way into the limelight, onto the picket line and before judges and congressional committees in order to press her beliefs about birth control.

A socialist friend asked Sanger to lecture to a group of female trade unionists in 1912. She was terrified; she considered herself unqualified to speak on the union movement. Though sympathetic to labor struggles of her day, she doubted her knowledge and ability to comment on them. So, Sanger spoke on the topic she knew best: health. The response to her talk was enormous. The general content, which dealt largely with sex and contraception, was published in New York Call, a socialist newspaper, as a column entitled, “What Every Girl Should Know.”

As a reporter for New York Call, Sanger covered the 1912 New York laundry strike. Though women and men on the picket line had similar economic concerns, Sanger found that their sense of the root of the problem differed. Like the male strikers, the women complained of being tired and underpaid. But the female strikers, according to Sanger, connected their plight with the fact that they had too many children for whom to care. Working women’s double burden of wage and maternal slavery became an emerging theme for Sanger.

She believed that, under capitalism, children suffered too. Another strike soon erupted in Lawrence, Mass. The result would be well known in the history of labor, for it was perhaps the greatest success of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Sanger played a major role in the strike, an experience which helped her to gain the knowledge she needed to become a superior propagandist.

Organizers asked Sanger to lead a highly publicized “direct action” that became known as the “Children’s Crusade.” More than 115 children of striking textile workers were put in the charge of this registered nurse. She brought them by railroad to New York City for temporary adoption by socialists. The ill-fed and ill-clothed children, ages 5 to 15, grabbed headlines and sympathies when they were met by hundreds at New York’s Grand Central Station. Sanger’s name became identified with the IWW’s Children Crusade and the celebrated Lawrence strike.

Sanger remained a labor radical for much of the decade and participated in several other IWW strikes. She began a newspaper in 1914, The Woman Rebel, opened a birth control clinic and fought laws against free speech and “obscenity,” defined at that time as information that concerned “the prevention of contraception.” Sanger became notorious to “respectable” men and women, but was largely respected by middle-class progressives and social reformers who began to understand the need for birth control.

But the success of her movement also compromised her radicalism. In the 1920s, Sanger joined with women’s organizations, social workers, reformers, doctors and scientists to promote contraceptive research and to pass legislation that would increase women’s access to birth control information. The birth control movement now pitched its cause as one of “racial betterment” and medical necessity, rather than as a movement to fight poverty and promote women’s rights. This was the way, Sanger believed, for the birth control movement to gain some measure of “respectability.”

Even so, birth control would not become legally sanctioned by the Supreme Court until 1965, only a year before Sanger’s death.

- Stacy Kinlock Sewell
(Stacy Kinlock Sewell is assistant editor of the Margaret Sanger Project at New York University.)

To the Point: Collective action works

By William E. Scheuerman
UUP President

Good things usually happen when people put their personal differences aside to work together toward a common goal. That’s what unions are all about in the first place, and it also explains why UUP is gaining in power and presence across the state. UUP is serving our members better than ever before because more UUPers are working together than ever before.

I could cite an almost infinite number of examples to document this point, but let me focus on just one, a very important one that has Universitywide implications.

Back in 1991, when the economy was extraordinarily bad and New York state was running massive budget deficits, SUNY wanted to impose parking fees on campuses that didn’t have parking charges. UUP fought off the parking-fee initiative by negotiating a contractual provision requiring SUNY to bargain new parking costs at every campus. In other words, negotiations would take place at the campus level on a campus-by-campus basis.

State budget deficits over the next several years encouraged the University to turn to parking fees as a source of revenue, and by the mid-1990s, the Univer-sity had opened parking negotiations at the Binghamton campus, along with several others.

At about this time, a UUP chapter leader asked us to agree to a proposal by campus managers that would force our members on that campus to begin paying a parking fee. The chapter leader asked the question during a time when SUNY’s budget was extraordinarily bad, and the question was raised in a logical and sincere way. After all, the argument went, all the other state unions were paying parking charges and SUNY needs the money. So why not just pay and get it over with?

My response was to say no. After all, our members had gone several years without raises and public universities should at least try to raise public monies. Besides, we never paid parking fees before, so why cave in without a fight? It was UUP’s policy to fight the proposed new parking fees - we were already engaged in a serious battle at SUNY Binghamton - and, as I pointed out at the time, if one campus surrendered without a struggle, arbitrators might rule against those campuses that do fight back.

Just recently, the battle over parking fees reached the arbitration phase at SUNY Binghamton. And guess what? We won! SUNY Binghamton cannot impose parking fees on members of our bargaining unit.

Here are some important details: In an interest arbitration decision, the arbitrator upheld UUP’s position that SUNY could not require members of our bargaining unit to pay an annual parking fee. In January 1997, after nearly three years of negotiations, the University had filed for interest arbitration, demanding a yearly parking fee of $144.47 for each UUP bargaining-unit member. At the hearings, which stretched over a four-year period, the arbitrator accepted UUP’s position on the issues of prevailing practice, ability of employer to pay and comparability.

The case clearly has ramifications beyond Binghamton, and UUP will use it as a precedent to rebuke new attempts by SUNY to impose parking fees on our members at other campuses.

We owe our colleagues at the Bing-hamton chapter a round of applause for their fine efforts. To Bob Pompi, Darryl Wood, Morris Budin (who came out of retirement to help us in this battle), NYSUT Labor Relations Specialist Gary Ruberti and all our other colleagues who helped make this victory possible: Thank you!

You showed us all that collective action works.