Category: Life at SXU

From the Archives: An Early SSW; A Close Encounter; Family, Friends, and Enemies

March 31, 2021

[Potential spoilers! If you’re not caught up on your Gunsmoke episodes (as of April 27, 1958), go listen to “Squaw.” Then come back here!]

Email to Colleague Suzanne Lee, April 8, 2016

From: Angelo Bonadonna <bonadonna@sxu.edu>
Subject: Yesterday’s Encounter
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2016 08:53:11 -0500
To: Suzanne Lee <slee@sxu.edu>

Hi, Suzanne—it was good seeing you not once, but twice, yesterday!

I want to share with you a little outcome of our first encounter yesterday. Each week with my freshman writing class, I engage in an exercise I call SSW—silent sustained writing (the sibling of SSR). Yesterday when we met, I was on my way to class, and so you made an appearance in my lead-in to my writing session, which I’ve entitled “Miraculous Intrusions of the Day.”

The whole thing brings me a big smile (and some tears as you’ll see if you read on), and I’d like to share it with you. Thank you for being part of the miracles in my life. Let me know if you want me to track down and send you an MP3 of the Gunsmoke episode in question. :)

The writing is not complete or particularly polished, but it does, at the end, touch on grief, and attempts to admire a simple and genuine portrayal of it in the Gunsmoke program. On that level, I want to say again, I’m sorry for […] the sadness around much of our experience these days. But anyway—it was nice seeing you! —Angelo

Here’s the SSW I attached to Suzanne’s emaill:

Miraculous Intrusions of the Day
April 7, 2016:  
 
So much happens in a day that is unexpected. I never would have guessed that I’d be telling Suzanne Lee about George Bahumas running up to me from behind and knocking me down—and how, (at least for the surprise factor), she reminded me of him, though as she said, she hoped there’d be a different outcome than the two of us fighting in the grass. [Comment from 2021: The fight with George Bahumas, (my oldest childhood friend), was the only real, Western-style, fist fight of my life. This was true in 2016, and, somewhat surprisingly, it is still true in 2021, given the the events of the past 5 years at SXU.] 
 
But my surprise conversation with Suzanne is not what I planned to share today. I came to write about another unexpected miraculous intrusion of the day, the Gunsmoke episode, “Squaw,” that I heard on the Old Time Radio station during my morning commute. It caught me by surprise. I’ve never been a Gunsmoke fan, though the show does have some powerful claims on me. The TV version was a favorite of my mother, and I have such warm, simple memories of her watching the show in the basement (?) while she cooked. I have such a devotion to Bonanza, and I think some of the qualities of that show correlate, obviously, to Gunsmoke. Then there’s William Conrad, the great radio actor, maybe the greatest radio voice of all time, but someone destined to become TV’s “Cannon”—such a step down from the Matt Dillon he wanted to play on TV, after giving life to the role on radio. All these, and other, ideas are swirling as I was driving down this morning, listening to “Squaw.” By the end of the show, the tears are welling up in my eyes, unexpectedly. And the tears well up now as I write this. Why? 
 
I’m reminded of King Lear, and the way Shakespeare was able to create a genre—the family drama—a category of experience so powerful, so unique, so important—and so likely to be neglected without the writing and art form, as propelled by a great innovator and artist. King Lear is a tragedy—not of civic matters, or personal ambitions, or tempestuous romances—but rather of parents and children, and their inability to figure out life’s complex ways of putting us in simple, necessary, and fundamental relationships. “Squaw” told of a family conflict, father and son, culture and culture, boy and mother, boy and step-mother—and on all levels, from Freudian sexual motivations, to anthropological confusions, to race relations, to 1950s mores, to fairy tale romances, to current xenophobias, and many swirling dynamics in between—the story strikes a chord.  
 
The boy’s father has remarried—to a Navajo squaw, and the boy is now acting out, getting into bar fights in Dodge. So Matt gets involved, and he and Chester make a visit to the boy’s father. It turns out that the father has married this woman according to Indian custom (where the man “purchases” the woman from the father; note to self: really? is there any accuracy to this thread? is this a case of 1950s racism? but that’s another concern), but he has not married her legally. The boy is living in the shame of being a “squaw man.” His father has disgraced him. The woman is the same age as the boy. So there’s also the narrative of the dirty old man living with the young Indian woman. And one suspects the boy’s attraction to his step-mother causes no little stir to the mix of emotions—the strong hateful emotions he feels towards his new mother. 
 
So Matt and Chester make their trip. They find a woman there—both very beautiful and young, and they further find that, though she can barely speak English, and the father can barely speak Navajo—the marriage is one of genuine love. Kudos to the narrative art of the writers—to “condense” that effect, that impression, in a few verbal exchanges. But the power and authenticity of the love come across to us after all these years and differences, and the woman, in her broken English expresses hope that Matt and Chester will come again—and be fed by her. The sense of hospitality—and the promise of family life is complete in the very brief scene.  
 
Matt prevails on the man to come into town on Saturday to have a legal marriage performed. This will help alleviate the son’s angst—or part of it—or so Matt hopes. 
 
But just what is the nature of the son’s problem? He is very deluded, it seems, about his own motivation—and near the story’s end, after all the horrible tragedy of the family drama has unfolded, Matt Dillon makes the observation about what the son thinks was his motivation. Matt calls out his rationalization explicitly. In doing so, he suggests that the boy was struggling with a mix of perturbed, dark, swirling confusions—about sexual desire, cultural bigotry, family loyalties, the father-kill motive, self-hatred, an Oedipal relationship with his birth mother, and a violence born out of frustrations of efficacy.  
 
So many ideas here—but the tears, I’m sure, stemmed from some simplicities—simplicities of portrayal of the love between these two different people, the father and his new wife who could barely speak to each other. Then there was the portrayal of the grief (spoiler, sorry) of the woman for her dead husband, killed by his own son. The portrayal of grief was twofold. Again, I don’t know the cultural accuracy of the portrayal here, but I do feel the respect that was captured. The woman grieved in a song…and in a way that would not have been offered if it were not genuine. And then there was the knife and the blood—and Matt Dillon’s sleuthing of the crime scene, in part, through his explanation of the widow’s severing of two of her own fingers as an expression of grief for her loss of her husband.

More perspective from 2021

Suzanne Lee was one of those dear friends a professor is blessed to have as a colleague. At every phase of my career at SXU, Suzanne was there—teaching, working on committees, writing articles together, collaborating on teams, and helping me and others adjust to new realities in programs and institutional politics. When she became dean, I felt the School of Education had a chance to recover from its disastrous period of rudderless drift it had endured after the long, slow, and neglected decline of the prior dean. And when Suzanne became provost, I reveled in Rick Venneri’s hallway comment to me, delivered in a nod, with a smile and that confidential gravitas of his, “She’s a straight shooter.”

After Angelo died, she and her partner, Judy, appeared on our doorstep with a pecan pie. I was not there—the family was not there—but sister-in-law Jane was, and she relayed to us later the whole episode—how concerned the visitors were about the pie getting to us, how much they had hoped to be there for us. We couldn’t be there because the whole family had flown to Thailand to recover Angelo. And it now occurs to me: have I ever conveyed to Suzanne how much her gesture of kindness meant to me then, and how much it still means to me now?

It’s hard to blame President Joyner for what happened to Suzanne Lee—i.e., her departure from the university. The two apparently were friends and respected each other. But of course, Suzanne is gone, her career truncated too early at SXU. Whether or not it was Suzanne’s choice to leave, I hold Dr. Joyner responsible, in part, for creating an environment where so many careers have ended prematurely because of, in my view, her flawed vision of who we are, what we should be doing, and how we might position ourselves for growth.

It’s appropriate that, in relaying my impressions of Suzanne’s encounter of April 7, 2016, I thought of childhood memories with George Bahumas. Suzanne’s act was so child-like. She literally ran up behind me—quietly—and put both hands over my eyes, so as to say, “Guess who,” without ever saying it. Can you imagine? How did she have both hands free—wasn’t she carrying anything? Could such a thing happen in the 21th century, with all our sacred notions of “personal space”? Could such a playful encounter occur between a dean and a faculty member ever at SXU?

Update 2021, Looking Back Again, on Angelo, through Suzanne

“Miraculous Intrusions of the Day,” Version 2, would go even deeper into the Angelo archives—before 2008, his year of graduation. Suzanne and I were having a conversation in the second-floor hallway by the stairwell, and Angelo approached to meet up with me for some reason (or maybe not? Maybe it was just one of those chance encounters, where we wound up falling into a conversation because we happened to run into each other? I’m not sure…).

As Suzanne and I conversed, in that animated way we had, I could sense Angelo looking on, maybe too intently, in my peripheral vision. When we finished and Suzanne left, Angelo looked at me, with that grin of his—I mean that really characteristic grin of his that is best described by Virginia Uphues in the documentary (at the 45:29 minute mark).

“What?” I said.

Angelo’s response was destined to become one of my favorite memories of him:

“She digs you!”

And that smile. And then, of course, my smile, because I did not expect him to say that. I didn’t feel a need to explain that I wasn’t Suzanne’s type. It was true that she dug me—and I dug her. Suzanne and I had such a friendship, one filled with sparkling eyes on both our parts and lots of inappropriate language (mostly on her part). Angelo’s observation was one of those moments where you see your kid has not only grown up, but is celebrating a kind of adult thing—here, love and friendship—in a way beyond the silliness and worry of the family drama (to get back to Lear and Gunsmoke). Angelo, in his natural hippie-speak, was being himself, capturing a truth, celebrating his dad, inhabiting the chance moment, but not letting it go till the love was communicated. I put it in the category of another comment he had made a few years earlier, where, after I had driven through the night on the last leg of a long family vacation, he commented (sensing, no doubt, my need for validation of my driving prowess), “You’re a warrior!”—a statement he made without irony, and one that caused (and still does cause) those suffusions of the heart that the recipient (till now) doesn’t talk about. Such power we have for one another as family and friends in affirmations like these. So seldom, it seems, do we (or I at least) use this super-power. It came spontaneously and naturally to Angelo in moments.

I think now of my trollish ways of interacting with loved ones, and I want to do better. And I’ll try.

Choosing for SXU

March 16, 2021

[Note: The entry below comments on the ongoing labor and governance crisis that has beset Saint Xavier University the past 5 years. Like many institutions of higher learning, Saint Xavier is at a crossroads: after years of tight budgets, failed Administrative initiatives, and deepening questions of identity and purpose, the SXU Administration has taken decisive action to cut costs and refocus the institution in controversial ways, namely through measures to weaken the faculty union, reduce the number of tenure lines, reduce academic requirements in general education (a move which would facilitate further reductions in faculty ranks), and reallocate resources in ways the Administration thought best, but with reduced faculty input. The post below is an open appeal to faculty colleagues to resist the Administration’s attempt to revise faculty bylaws against the express wishes of the faculty as represented in a faculty vote in which nearly 90% of voting members rejected an Administrative-led rewriting of faculty bylaws to reduce the role of the Faculty Affairs Committee, which has served as the faculty union for over 40 years. See the previous entry for more context on the faculty vote taken on February 28, 2021.]

Choosing for SXU

Faculty have a choice. We can support the current Administration in their efforts to lead the university as they think best. Or we can critique that leadership, resist it, and opt for a different path. I am writing to advocate for resistance and a different path—but to do so properly and fairly, I need to clarify my motives and my past involvement in resistance.

Since President Joyner’s arrival at Saint Xavier University, I have been one of her most persistent and vocal critics. I have written to her personally on many occasions, voicing concerns on many matters, including strategic planning priorities, morale issues, and, as tensions heightened, statements she had made that I and others believed to be slanderous about the faculty. Aside from my direct appeals to her, I have critiqued Dr. Joyner’s leadership at both public and private faculty meetings. At multiple meetings of the Board of Trustees I have provided evidence of the wrong path I believed our university to be pursuing. I have enlisted my daughter, an SXU alum, to produce a documentary that told part of the story of the University’s anti-labor practices and the dangers posed to our mission by our current course. As Chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee (the committee designated in the bylaws as the faculty’s representative in negotiating salary, compensation, and workload with the Administration), I posted numerous updates to the faculty listserv that identified some of the obstacles and unfair practices of the Administration in negotiations. I have spoken from the head and heart—providing access to documents and events that call into question the good faith of the negotiations on the part of the Administration; I have shared, time and again, my worries about the morale of the faculty who have been beaten down, in my view, much like the mule in the Parable of the Farmer and the Mule.

I have persisted in my critique not as a result of a vendetta or cantankerousness or ego. Rather, I’ve tried to honor the trust the faculty placed in me to represent them. As I have professed to FAC colleagues time and again: We mustn’t let our efforts of the past many years be for naught. We have invested so much of ourselves representing faculty concerns and pursuing agreements that would benefit the university. A healthy, fairly-treated faculty is the best safeguard of our collective academic mission. FAC’s efforts—the behind-the-scenes negotiations; the monitoring of university finances; the contextualizing in AAUP and other relevant frames of reference for stances that would benefit faculty in appropriate and balanced ways; the institutional memory we preserved and consulted; and the corrective opposition we attempted: I’ve been motivated by a belief we mustn’t leave this infrastructure behind.

All that notwithstanding, I have long felt that the challenges and dangers facing SXU should not be framed in terms of the “President Joyner problem.”

All sides can agree that SXU’s challenges are bigger and longer-in-the-making than the actions by President Joyner and the Board of Trustees. I worry about the distraction caused by framing SXU’s challenges in terms of the current Administration (president, interim provost, or board). Personalizing the threat in terms of Dr. Joyner or other individuals feeds into an unhelpful demonizing dynamic on both sides. I have long said to my colleagues on FAC and others that I believe that Dr. Joyner may have good intentions—that she pursues bold (though often disguised) power moves out of a sense of, or commitment to, pragmatic and benevolent tactics of control— “Do it my way, and it’ll work out.” She seems to think she knows—not only patterns of change occurring in higher education, but also the strategies for best positioning the institution in terms of those changes. My critiques of Dr. Joyner have been that she doesn’t really know the character of SXU (which was the source of so much of the institution’s resiliency in the past). I have criticized her poor listening (not once during the three years in which her Administration negotiated with FAC did she ever meet with or invite discussion with FAC or its leaders). And, most important of all, and most relevant for our current moment, I criticize the subversions of governance she employs to pursue her good intentions.

Since the day the university withdrew recognition of the faculty union, our community has needed a full discussion of the meaning and significance of the action. That discussion has not taken place, despite repeated calls for it by many faculty members.

There are many misconceptions about what led to and followed the University’s May 28th action to withdraw recognition of SXU’s faculty union. Many faculty (and administrators), for instance, are unaware that the Faculty Affairs Committee is not simply the same thing as our faculty union. FAC is a committee that is charged with duties and rights granted to it by the bylaws of the faculty. The committee predates the formation of the union, and—whether we have a recognized union or not—the bylaws assign to the Faculty Affairs Committee the sole responsibility of representing faculty in matters of salary, compensation, and working conditions.  The removal of recognition of the union simply means that the union’s legal protections through the NLRA and NLRB have been called into question (and in ways which may be answered by legal means that have not yet run their full course). In any case, the committee’s representative function, as inscribed and protected by the bylaws, can only be removed by an appropriate bylaws change—something which has not occurred.

The Administration has characterized their bylaws changes as “editorial cleanup,” or updating our documents to reflect our new reality, or in other ways to suggest minimal significance. But there are at least three offenses—of the highest significance—to shared governance in play here:

  1. The Board’s unilateral rewriting of the bylaws to remove the representative function from FAC (and assign it to Senate or other faculty groups) represents a substantive change in governance structure, and one that was attempted without any involvement of faculty voice;
  2. The revision process did not originate, as nearly all prior faculty bylaws/handbook changes have, from the faculty, but rather followed a top-down process to which faculty were not privy; and
  3. The Board’s recent choice to ignore the faculty vote on this change (when a vote was finally conducted) constitutes an explicit contradiction of the amendment provisions clearly delineated in the bylaws, the institution’s governing documents which hold authority over all constituents of the institution—even the Board, which has been entrusted to honor the institution’s commitments as delineated and prescribed.

Closing Thought on our Current Context

We find ourselves in a time marked by unusual stress and anxiety on matters of existence, health, and welfare. Many faculty are fearful that if they do not go along with our Administration, SXU will be imperiled, and its chances for rebounding fully from its economic crisis of the pre-Joyner years will be damaged. Since the start of the pandemic, faculty, along with all other constituents in the university, have focused on matters of survival, creative adjustment, and generous sacrifice to keep the institution functional. Unfortunately, through every turn of adjustment and sacrifice, the Administration has continued its drumbeat of crisis, the need to cut costs, and the urgency to reshape the character of the institution.

So, we have seen reductions in tenure and non-tenure track faculty lines; eliminations of general education requirement; pressures to close programs (despite financial analyses that show either limited, no, or negative monetary benefits); and now a brazen attempt to subvert and refashion governance structures, in terms of a lie or mistake about just what is being changed in the bylaws and why.

All of this, plus a climate of division and anxiety—which many believe to be deliberately cultivated by the Administration for strategic purposes—have led us to uncertainties about our institution and our resiliency going forward. But faculty have a choice. We can choose to own our mission and reclaim the character and promise of Saint Xavier that many of us remember and cherish.

We need to talk more about this.

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:

SXU Faculty Vote on Faculty Voice

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.”

September 18, 2019: Ella, the Abyss, and Distracted Purpose

Is Ella Fitzgerald singing “You’re the Top” on the way in enough?  The ride was smooth, the traffic light, and the whole prospect of the day regular.  It was Wednesday in its best, most balanced sense—not hump day, a thing to get over, a thing to persevere, a thing to struggle with.  No, it was Wednesday in being ordinary, not too stressful, not too packed—just there in the middle, with some buffer.  Last week I was preparing for and dreading a Board of Trustees presentation on Wednesday.  How different is this week, as I’m relatively caught up, and the only FAC action for today is a union meeting—but one with no presentations or arguments, just listening. So I get to go and just be, not push, not struggle, as everything just is what it is, and let’s all try to come to terms with it.

Ella’s silky-smooth singing typified the promise of the day.  The car did too.  The car has been running so peacefully, still like brand new, its quiet electric motor propelling me across town, as though in other-worldly, pollution-free, effortless gliding.  And then there’s the Cole Porter factor.  How does Indiana produce a Cole Porter?  If ever there is evidence that the world is insane, and potentially delightfully so, it’s in that fact—that a breezy, urbane, sophisticate like Porter could spring out of Indiana.

Amidst all this pleasure and easiness and mild contradictions, I find myself contemplating, yet again … the abyss.  What is the meaning of it?  Existence. Why?  What will save us?  And if we get saved, what’s the point of it all?  Why is there an Oba Chandler?  And how can anyone be happy again, knowing that such a being is a possibility?

[Side note:  Maybe my students will save me.  Here it is 8:37, and so many of them just walked in … late … driving me crazy … distracting me, just as I was peering into that abyss of existence.  They’re annoying … but they’re good too.  They’re here. They will write.  Some will write well, and some will be transformed.  I have to let them find their way a bit.  I have to be patient.  Okay, back to the abyss.]

I should be happy these days.  Besides silky Ella on the smooth ride in, and the joy of Cole Porter emerging out of Indiana, I’m in the best shape I’ve been in in years.  The new lifestyle agrees with me, and it doesn’t feel all that unnatural or difficult.  I should be eyeing a long steady prospect ahead:  years of the new routine, years of living well, years of dodging a bullet, years of repeated pleasures, minor challenges, significant successes, accrued living progressing forward, with happy camaraderie, and a general aura of blessing.

But that abyss weighs heavy. It’s there to the side, or over on top, and it doesn’t seem to allow a moment’s peace.  “The stakes are so high” it seems to say over and over.  The roots of existence and hope are exposed and vulnerable and rotting because of this abyss, which I summarize thus in a bullet list:

      • Donald Trump
      • Laurie Joyner
      • Climate change
      • Death
      • The designated hitter
      • The Faculty Affairs Committee (or its quixotic efforts)
      • The stress of living, which, regardless of the basis for any individual, will always ratchet itself up to wherever it wants to ratchet itself

I keep searching for a rhythm and routine, a purpose and procedure to rest in and exert myself in. But I think I’m looking for a mode of “eternity” in this quest, a “beyond-the-threat-of-danger-and-loss” life that won’t pull the rug from me (just as I was beginning to stand up).  In these days of health and comfort and stability—and really, that’s what I’m experiencing—I find myself unable to relax and settle in because that abyss seems ever ready to pounce.  What is the point of this or that endeavor, when it’s going to end, when you’re going to be hurt, when you’re going to lose something ever-so-needed for basic subsistence?

My prospects are as good as they have ever been (possibly better—but then, with Ang gone, can’t really say that), so maybe I’m just “growing up”—realizing the transience of all these incredible blessings of existence.  Why does it have to be so good … and so temporary?  I wish I could stop dwelling on the darkness, the moment after it ends and then continues on forever on its way.

The thing that helps me is Ella, my students, and so many very little connections with people—family, friends, colleagues.  We touch each other in trivialities, and we take one another out of our spirals, be those spirals an abyss, an obsession, a mistake, a bad habit, a distraction.  We need the distractions of one another to stay properly distracted.  A distracted, purposeful life (please note the irony: one must be distracted to be purposeful, for if you aren’t distracted, the power of abyss thinking would take over your whole being)—a distracted purposeful life can be highly pleasurable, rewarding, and beneficial to the common good. Is that a rock of certainty enough to build a life on?  Ella?