Letter to My Colleagues [Part 1]

March 7, 2021

Bearing Testimony; Saying Goodbye to What Was; Coming to Terms with Now; Envisioning What Awaits Us 

The stress of living in the contemporary world has been well-documented by many, and worse, thoroughly experienced by every living person. Nonetheless, I feel a need to give testimony to my grief and worry about life at Saint Xavier University.

On one level, SXU’s problems pale in comparison with the multiple crises facing our society: there’s the pandemic, obviously, but the inventory is easy to summon in 2020-2021: our social unrest, our damaged natural environment, our polarized politics, our inability to remedy longstanding injustices, our impulses to hate, and more. On another level, SXU’s problems reflect dynamics in play that threaten higher education in particular and society’s well-being in general—namely, the growing pains, let us call them, of suddenly-rampant “technologized approaches not only to information, but to knowledge, and even social interaction,” all on top of, or underneath evolving notions of work and career. All of this has called into question the essentially medieval conceptions and traditions of a college education.  And on yet another level, SXU’s story is a heartbreaking drama (melodrama? case study?) all its own, with highs and lows of our unique accomplishments and failures–our distinctive dysfunctions, missteps, adjustments, and adaptations.

In bearing testimony, I will try to do so in a way that respects people’s levels of patience and their finite attention spans. I note that the matters in play are of crucial relevance to the SXU community: my contributions to the faculty resistance movement against what many view to be a runaway Administration require respect for the collective enterprise. Specifically, I must ensure accuracy and objectivity in stating (or certainly, attempting to represent) our collective complaints. But there’s also an element of self-pity and emotion in all my commentary on the SXU situation that I have to guard against. Part of me wants to cry out, “Hear my pain”—both because it’s my story and also because intertwined in that story are so many facts and occurrences that need to be part of the more public record for better decisions in the future. Also, on another track, I’ve seen so much heartache of colleagues who have left SXU, so often under psychologically traumatic circumstances. Families have been left broken and careers have ended; so many lives have been damaged by the yearslong turmoil at this institution. The voices of these many—if not silenced per se—are certainly absent. My emotional response to SXU’s transformation in recent years is not unique, and I feel parts of it need to be recorded for the welfare of others trying to make sense of just what has been going on. I’ll be relatively brief.

When I was first hired at SXU 25 years ago, I felt I had won the lottery. I was a graduate of a small liberal arts college, Chicagoland’s archdiocesan seminary, Niles College, which was a campus of Loyola University. So the chance—almost 20 years after graduation—to teach English at Chicago’s oldest Catholic university; the chance to have three of my five children become alumni of this institution; the chance to work with students who were becoming leading English teachers throughout the Southside of Chicago has been a fulfilment and payout far bigger than any lottery.

The breakdown in collective bargaining that I witnessed the past three years as a union leader was difficult for me—not only because it was a failure for me in the stances I had taken, but because the breakdowns were a failure in communication (central to my discipline), and those breakdowns occurred on so many levels, including that of friends and colleagues. The eventual weakened support for the union among some of my colleagues was unexpected, but it was ultimately understandable, given how isolated and essentially over-matched our small faculty group of negotiators were in the face of a deep-pockets campaign to weaken and delegitimize our good faith efforts in negotiation.

With the administration, the hardball tactics that came from a new president and her anti-union lawyer and law firms were not a surprise, or particularly unfair—at first. SXU had financial difficulties that all involved agreed were real (though correct information was not available to all parties). For years I had heard of anti-union rhetoric from Board of Trustees members, administrators, and colleagues alike. So, for the incoming administration to put a hand up to the union with hardline absolutes and preconditions to negotiation was, as colleague Peter Kirstein once said at a faculty meeting, well within the range of expectations for contract negotiations between management and a union.

Even so, SXU had never had such adversarial negotiations. In my 25 years as a faculty member, I had served on FAC for 12 years, and in that time, I acquired a lot of context and history in regards to the committee’s purpose, routines, and strategies. Much of that context involved close work with inspiring colleagues from a broad spectrum—Arunas Dagys, of course, but others too many to list, though I can’t resist summoning some names here: Don Cyze, Bill Peters, Tony Rotatori, Peter Hilton, Suzanne Lee, Richard Fritz, Darlene O’Callaghan, Flo Appel, Ann Fillipski, and of course all the current members of FAC. These colleagues respected the sacred trust given to them to vigorously represent faculty and university interests, and to uphold the confidentiality in working behind the scenes, researching its positions, and following through on principled advocacy. And the administration always made clear their respect of process—to treat the other side as worthy of dialogue and to convey, clearly, a commitment to the goal of reaching, at least eventually, an agreement that worked for both sides.

All this is to say that, even though the hardball tactics of the Joyner administration in regards to FAC were not, essentially, unfair in terms of the larger social context of labor-management modes of engagement, they were hurtful to me, as I looked on incredulously as dialogue not only broke down, but degenerated, on the part of the administration, into what many saw as divisive actions, misrepresentations of facts, stonewalling, inuendo, and even slander, as the university slowly wended its way to the May 28th, 2020 phone call when the Board of Trustees chair, with a quaver in her voice, formally announced its decision to withdraw recognition of SXU’s longstanding union.

“May 28th” is a date that has taken on the significance of a title for SXU faculty, a name for a traumatic moment in our history. For me, it was the biggest setback of my professional life. It’s a failure of Catholic mission. It’s a failure of what higher education should be all about—humane and informed and collaborative problem solving. I still view this setback, however, as something that can be remedied.

There are several other blog posts that need to be written to fill out the memoir started here. Entries on the following topics should be written to flesh out themes, facts, and implications of this posting:

  • The breaking of trust by the Administration [Specifics need to be listed].
  • The attempt to change the character of SXU through Administrative end-arounds of established governance structures.
  • The neglect by the Administration to address issues of bullying by administrators and faculty.
  • What SXU was for me as a beginning professor: Judith Hiltner’s mentorship [offered as an example of professional colleagueship and stewardship that is no longer possible in SXU’s divided, changing, over-worked, and disrespectful climate for faculty].

Additional posts on the SXU Crisis of Governance:

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