Category: Life at SXU

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 28^th, 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 28^th” 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:

• Choosing for SXU: An open call for faculty to resist our current Administration (March 16, 2021)
• SXU Faculty Vote on Faculty Voice: Call for faculty to vote down a controversial bylaws revision (February 25, 2021)
• The Parable of the Farmer and the Mule: An indirect comment on the Administration’s unbending austerity approach after a year of negotiations (February 21, 2018).

February 27, 2021

I feel called upon to comment on the proposed bylaws change under consideration for a faculty vote tomorrow (2/28/2021), since the proposed change affects the Faculty Affairs Committee (FAC) that I served on, at various points, for 12 of my 25 years at SXU.

Many colleagues lack access to information about FAC and the significance of the proposed change. Many are unaware of the research and advocacy regularly performed by the committee, or the variety of collegial ways the committee has represented faculty concerns to the Administration for so many years. I wish I could convey just how urgent it is for a committee like FAC to exist at this point in our history.

I want to reframe the dynamic that has developed between FAC and the Administration in recent years. It’s become too adversarial—born, in part, no doubt, by the very nature of the labor-management paradigm we’ve operated under. For many years the paradigm was otherwise. Dare I call it collaborative? collegial? cooperative? We were pulling in the same direction. It sounds a bit Pollyanna-ish to say it: both sides sought agreements that best worked for the institution as a whole. Before I go too far in this direction, however, I should state that I remember past negotiations, and I need to be careful not to overly polish a patina of gauzy nostalgia over the “good old days.”  Things back then were essentially adversarial too. But there’s adversarial and there’s adversarial. When the current administration closed the door more or less completely on back channel conversations and other strategic kinds of communications and maneuvers—when every communication had to be processed through a lawyer and only in the context of formal meetings—both sides withdrew and became hardened.

We need to approach one another and soften some of the hardness. Faculty critics like me need to acknowledge that the Administration—and I do believe this—may have good intentions. Those intentions are to pursue a path that they believe in with conviction—if not always with the best information or the soundest premises. Their agenda will best ensure viability for the future—in their view. They are not selling us off for parts, or greedily exploiting crises for advantage. Perhaps we did have some need of re-focusing, of cutting fat, of trimming budgets, of reallocating resources, of upgrading the physical plant, of branding or re-branding our mission. I can grant and respect all that. And I hope the Administration can grant and respect that those of us who have objected, have done so in the name of balance. How much is too much cutting? too much rebranding? too much reallocating?

To both sides: Have we given in to adversarial pressures to such an extent that the goal of balance has been lost and neglected?

Recommendations Toward Balance

Put simply: faculty need a specialized, dedicated group to develop the most salutary approaches to workload, conditions, and benefits. Whatever the committee is called, it needs many of the things FAC had long enjoyed: access to financial information; a seat at the table; allowances for the specialized nature of its work; a collection of colleagues with past knowledge and expertise; a representative structure; and accountability to its members.

Put simply: faculty need an agreement, in writing, that is binding—contractual. We need a CBA. The CBA has been described variously by individuals, depending on which side of the adversarial dynamic you found yourself on. It’s either what has doomed or saved SXU. I would eulogize the CBA—not, I hope, in the sense of a eulogy for something that has died, but rather in the old rhetorical sense of “praise.” There is much to admire in the document, which has been a living, evolving kind of “organism” over the years—pruning excess, growing new limbs when needed, holding onto basic essences, clarifying specific new conditions, codifying new possibilities, and on and on. As a document, the CBA has been responsive to changing circumstances, and it has provided a stable foundation on which to build a work-life at this institution. Though it’s odd to say—there was a kind of “elegance” to this living, evolving document, in that, as a contract stipulating minimums of compensation and basic conditions, it possessed a certain leanness of character. It set out a baseline for how we build our mission and programs and faculty and overall community.

When the pandemic struck, the Faculty Affairs Committee had a lot more power than it currently has. We had a CBA that guaranteed faculty specific and relatively generous compensation for doing the kind of things we all wound up doing without extra compensation—teaching online. Though the union could have insisted on the letter of the contract being followed—and demanded that faculty be compensated according to the provisions of the CBA, the committee never once alluded to or “threatened” (if we’re still locked into the adversarial mode) to require the University to adhere to the online compensation provisions of the then-current CBA. We willingly (and without being asked) proposed to forgo those and other provisions. And the institution survived, as faculty, staff, and administration all worked with flexibility and resolve to find a workable way in a crisis.

I raise this episode simply as an example of how FAC has worked with the Administration—in this case, yes, but really, on multiple crises over the years where either the contract had to be opened to recalibrate promised provisions or to negotiate continuing, anemic provisions in the context of prolonged fiscal precarity. Through it all, the dedicated, specialized, and entrusted committee worked with the Administration as an equal partner—with a shared goal of finding solutions that were balanced, fair, pragmatic, and sustainable.

Given the challenges we have all experienced in the past year—and given the trust the faculty have demonstrated though sustained, flexible, and effective performance of teaching and other duties—now is not the time to weaken faculty voice and shared governance through a dimunition of the Faculty Affairs Committee. Rather, the committee needs to preserve its role, as stipulated in the bylaws long before the formation of the SXU Faculty Union, “to serve as the Faculty’s designated representative for negotiations with the Administration for salary, fringe benefits, and working conditions.”

Each day the farmer would marvel at the work his mule accomplished in the fields—plowing the soil, pulling wagons, removing stumps, and generally contributing to the welfare and efficiency of the farm.

Then the farmer had an idea: “If I wasted less money on grain and oats to feed the mule, I could increase the efficiency of the farm exponentially.”

So he decided to cut the daily portion of the mule’s feed by one quarter. The mule still went to work on the reduced rations, pretty much as always, though with some extra words of encouragement from the farmer. In all, the mule seemed to adjust to the change with little or no sign of discomfort.

And so the farmer persisted with the new regimen for an entire week.

Then the farmer had another thought: “Since my first adjustment went so well, and I’m saving all this money on feed, why don’t I eliminate even more wasteful expense, and reduce the mule’s feed by an additional quarter?”

And so it was done.

For the first day on the new diet, the mule seemed a little angry and sluggish, but he eventually got the usual work done.

The farmer continued to have ideas about efficiency. Week after week, he made adjustments, till finally one day, he went to his barn to feed the mule. He entered the barn carrying his handful of grain to feed directly to the mule out of his hand. When the farmer entered the stall, the mule looked at him, looked at the handful of grain, looked back at the farmer—and proceeded to topple over, dead on the spot.

The farmer, in amazement and frustration, exclaimed, “Damn! Just when I had him trained!”