facebook spring

I've just returned tonight from the California Faculty Association's 70th Assembly.

The California State University is in peril. My own campus, Stanislaus, is at the precipice of catastrophe. Terrible economic times are only the beginning of the story, and anyone who has paid attention to the trends in public higher education in the US over the past 20 years or more would be able to tell you that this is no sudden crisis. Public higher education has been systematically de-funded all this time. Our current depress/recession has only brought the whole thing to its horrific climax.

For longer than I've taught at the CSU, the state budget has underfunded its mission. Considering that the CSU's mission is to educate the citizens of California so they become productive, tax-paying members of society, this clearly makes no sense... unless you believe public institutions are ipso facto essentially and irretrievably corrupt... and you believe that increasing state revenues only creates more of the same corruption.

Corruption: you know, like teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, public servants.

This is not just a matter of the budget crisis that California, like every other state, is facing. This is what happens when a budget crisis hits an institution that has been fighting for its life for years.

Within the next 2 years, California will spend more on prisons than on all forms of public higher education.

The state's bizarre budget priorities are the major cause of the CSU's catastrophic condition. The CSU's astounding level of mismanagement is another.

So here's an interesting catch-22: The CSU desperately needs additional funding from the state. My colleagues' livelihoods, our students' educations, and the state's future economic health basically depend on better funding for this primary engine of California's economy. But CSU's management has demonstrated time and again that it is uninterested in either securing the CSU's future, or spending the ever-reduced funding the CSU receives wisely.

Nevertheless, the CFA works tirelessly to improve the standing of the CSU in the state, to make the case that the CSU contributes to, rather than costs, the state economy. We constantly seek new ways to send our message, to make our case, and to push the point.

This weekend, facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (or maybe worse), facing the worst possible budget outlook for the CSU, and locally, facing a quintuple crisis from the state and campus budget crises, the CFA launched a new campaign.

Facebook. We've launched a campaign to fight the catastrophe of the CSU, on Facebook.

I'm not being critical. I think this is a smart move. I believe using Facebook will create an ongoing sense of virtual CFA community, and may extend our connections to students and staff, and the public we ultimately serve. As they told us at the Assembly, Barack Obama's campaign used Facebook. It seems to have helped.

Tonight, I friended a number of CFA colleagues on Facebook, and I now have many more friends. I'll diligently check in on Facebook to read their status updates, their notes on my wall or theirs, read what's on their minds (TM), and swap stories, links, and tactics. It will be a good tool, they told us, for organizing.

My question is: how many of them will disappear from CFA in the next year?

And many of these are not the Facebook kind of friend, but actual friends (no insult meant to Facebook friends), actual flesh, blood, brains, and heart friends that I've strategized with and talked late into the night with, and laughed with and eaten and drunk with, and argued with, and fought with, and fought alongside. And I am sore afraid, they will Facebook their fight, Youtube their dissent, email their legislators, flashmob their campuses, and then they will disappear.

I love my union siblings. I wish them better fates.

relaxing and enjoying my shoes

I gots me new shoes.



Last Christmas, my loveliest gave me a pair of hot pink high tops from a sweatshop-free clothing company called, obviously enough, No Sweat Apparel. There stuff is 100% union made - including not only the people sewing stuff together, but the vendors who sell them the materials - all the way down. The pinks were a limited-edition breast cancer awareness and research item, and I really love them. I love them so much, I decided to look into getting a couple other pairs from No Sweat. Sadly, once I got to their shoes, I found that they are sold out of my size (which is 13) in any color but red and pink - which they are closing out. So I picked up two spare pairs of the pinks, and the red ones featured here.

They're dandy. They're also my MoJo shoes, as you might be able to read on the label. The tongue spells out the MoJo connection for you: Mother Jones, the great muckraking and activism rag. Brilliant!

And now I can put them on and declare to the world: I got my MoJo workin'! Even more brilliant!

proud to be union, plus, pain

Friday I cut class short, to drive us up to Sac ("The Town So Nice, They Named It Sac") for the CFA Joint Council meeting of the Lecturers and the Affirmative Action* councils. There was the usual dinner-n-speaker on Friday, then the all-day meeting of the Lecturers' Council on Saturday.

It wasn't a meeting chock full of epiphanies. For one thing, there's been a bit of turnover among the council personnel, which is good - new blood, even if it's not exactly young blood, is always a good thing. So some of the meeting's agenda was set with that in mind.

Plus, at this point, given the economic straits, given the impasse in the re-opener "negotiations" with the CSU on salaries (of which more in a sec), the proper focus is on technical matters of contract enforcement, and building the union's capacity. "Capacity building" is the new watchword, a broader notion than recruiting membership, because it involves recruiting activists, improving communications, creating political power - a large-scale, multi-layered, munificently-hyphenated effort.

I like it. I've been getting really upset about the coming economic apocalypse, and now I feel like I've got specific things to do. I'm starting with the spring. Actually, I'm starting this week.

So, okay. We came within a week of striking for the first time, but finally won the best contract in the history of CFA, two springs ago. We got raises that would give us salaries slightly more in keeping with other faculty in comparable institutions (and raises for the first time in years). Then the economy, predictably, tanked, and the CSU, predictably, re-opened the salary article in response. Their first offer was to eliminate the raises we bargained. Their last, best offer, tendered last week, was to eliminate the raises we bargained. That's CSU bargaining.

In any case, the CSU is saying that they have money, and could pay the raises, but there are "competing priorities" for spending the money. Which, I think, means "we could pay you the raises you bargained, but we're not gonna."

Now, I'm totally sympathetic to the needs of the staff, and the need to try to keep student fees lower. My problem with the CSU's move at this point is that once again, this public institution is refusing to be transparent, or even forthcoming, about its books. Someone this weekend put the absurdity and insult of it pretty well: not only is this a violation of the public trust, but it's also ignoring the presence, right here in the CSU, of expertise the CSU administration could consult about budget management. (Locally, the admin at Santa Claus is moving toward being more forthcoming, and relying on the expertise of a faculty-majority committee for budget advice.)

Anyway, back home Saturday night after a quick trip to a hoidy-toidy yarn store and the Sac IKEA, then off this afternoon for the Townsend Opera Players's production of The Magic Flute. Then back home, to grade papers. I'm pretty tired. And my wrist and little fingers on my left hand have hurt for three days. I think driving is aggravating my previous bout of carpal pain.

*"Affirmative Action" is not a legally recognized model for achieving diversity in public institutions in California, per a ballot initiative passed by voters many years ago. However, the CSU and CFA jointly put together a policy which continues to acknowledge affirmative action as an important value in hiring faculty and staff, and in enrolling students. I don't think CSU does a great job (and the numbers demonstrate that), but the population of CFA is sure getting more and more diverse and interesting.