If you haven’t already, you should check out the pics I posted of last week’s St. Patrick’s Day protest against Gov. Corbett’s cuts to education. If I haven’t said it enough already, I was incredibly impressed with the passion and energy of Kutztown’s students. They put together a powerful event that said in no uncertain terms: we will not stand for Corbett’s Cuts! One chant in particular stood out and will no doubt become the slogan for their continued protests: the future of Pennsylvania is standing RIGHT HERE!
At the event, I announced that APSCUF-KU would be sending at least one bus to Harrisburg on Monday, March 28th for APSCUF’s PA Senate lobby day. We will gather outside the State capitol with hundreds of other students and faculty from the 14 universities of the PA State System of Higher Education to make our voices heard. To make sure we are heard, I ordered a dozen vuvuzelas for the event. I would encourage my brothers and sisters from around the state to do the same or to bring their own “instruments” for an APSCUF Noise Band. I want to give credit to one of my students for putting the vuvuzela bug in my ear. One of my ENG 023 students is researching the history and use of the vuvuzela — it’s also called a grenade whistle (a bit shorter than the full-length vuvuzela) and has been featured on the Jersey Shore in addition to its well-known use during the World Cup.
Anyway, by the end of Thursday’s rally, we already had enough people to fill one bus…today we may very well fill a second. There are still some seats left, so if you’re from the KU community and you want a seat, contact the APSCUF-KU office asap. On April 6th, KU’s Student Government Board (SGB) and Association of Campus Events (ACE) will send at least four buses to Harrisburg for another PASSHE-wide protest at the State capitol. I am thrilled to see people pushing back. As I said in my interview last week on the Rick Smith Show, until Harrisburg begins to look like Madison, I have little faith in our elected leaders to do the right thing. When I hear legislators — Democratic and Republican alike — talk about “decreasing the amount of the cuts,” I become even more convinced that we need people in the street and at the Capitol every single day. The fact is, even the cuts are reduced to 25% instead of the Governor’s currently proposed 50% cuts, we are still talking about cuts that will fundamentally transform PASSHE — and not necessarily in the way that the Chancellor may have envisioned. The only appropriate response to what the Governor is trying to do is what I said at the St. Patrick’s Day protest: you don’t cut the future, you invest in the future.
The most encouraging aspect of KU’s St. Patrick’s Day Rally was the passion and energy hundred’s of students brought to Main St. But the day was more than a “day of rage.” Students used the event as an organizing opportunity to get more students involved and to organize for the next step in their struggle, in our struggle. I mean, let’s face it: the results of our efforts to resist Corbett’s cuts, will determine their future opportunities and, more general, their futures.
As amazing as the St. Patrick’s Day protest was, there was one thing that represented a significant disappointment. You’ll recall that last Tuesday, KU President Javier Cevallos held an open forum to discuss the impacts of budget cuts. Cevallos called for “unity” and suggested that we are “all in this together.” In support of his call for “unity,” Cevallos invited the presidents of all the unions on campus and the president of the Student Government Board to address the forum. It was a good move for the cameras, for sure. At the forum, I spoke briefly about Cevallos’s call for “unity.” I said that while I am all for “being in this together,” we have to be clear on what that means. In other words, I am going to fight to preserve higher education in PA and to defend KU and PASSHE against the Governor’s attacks. However, if “we” are going to do this “together” our administration is going to need to show some backbone and leadership too. That is, I am not willing to pretend that I, and my union, are on the same side at KU’s administration only do the grunt work and then get sold down the river when Cevallos decides to roll over and cut more faculty, staff, and programs. I made the same case later in the day at our APSCUF-KU Meet and Discuss.
As I discussed in an earlier post, I suspended the “normal” agenda of our Meet and Discuss meeting so that we could address the impacts of Corbett’s cuts. Here’s a small piece of that earlier post:
Over this past year, we–the APSCUF-KU Meet and Discuss team–have been pushing for the Kutztown University administration to articulate a coherent, transparent vision for the university. Such as vision does not consist of the kind of platitudes and hyper generalizations that our university president continues to articulate in public forums and in the local newspaper. A coherent vision for a university means that the administration has articulated a set of principles that guides decisions and the university. It also means a set of priorities that will determine how resources are spent, programmatic decisions are made, and which academic areas are considered “core” to the university. Such a vision is not self-evident, nor is it a by-product of the invisible hand of the academic market place. In the real world, people have to make conscious decisions and they need to take responsibility for those decisions. The absence of a coherent vision and an institutional leadership that is explicit about its priorities and guiding principles helps foster a dysfunctional culture–where rumor and half-truths stand in for principled discourse; where concern about the stability of one’s job is the white noise seeping into every office; and where one cannot distinguish between work that is critical to one’s individual success and the success of the institution from busywork or punishment.
As I lamented in that post, we — APSCUF-KU — have been pressuring the administration, president Cevallos in particular, to articulate a vision for Kutztown University that has some substance and that could withstand the demands of a first-year writing course’s requirements for detail and argument. At one point in our discussion, the Provost, Carlos Vargas, and I got into it a bit about the question of “leadership.” Vargas argued that I needed to understand that not everyone is a leader in the same way, that being confrontational (like I am) is not the only way to be a leader. I argued that I am not asking Cevallos to be “confrontational,” I’m asking that he fulfill the first item in his job description which says that he needs to develop a vision for the university. My argument was that Cevallos needs to demonstrate some kind of recognizable leadership, especially in this moment.
Corbett’s budget cuts presented Cevallos with an opportunity to “show us his leadership.” He had his public forum. The jury was out as to whether that forum was just another in a line of dog-and-pony shows, or if Cevallos was going to step up and put his administration behind defending public higher education in PA.
At first, I was encouraged when some of the student leaders who organized the St. Patrick’s Day protest told me that Cevallos had agreed to come to protest and be one of the featured speakers. The students agreed to move the protest from its original site — President Cevallos’s front lawn — to the front of Schaeffer Auditorium (right next to the president’s house). Apparently, there was some concern that holding the protest on the president’s front lawn could be misinterpreted as being a protest against Cevallos. From what I was told, the students agreed to move the protest because they didn’t have an investment in the front yard of Cevallos’s house, as long as the protest would still be highly visible from Main St.
The protest began and the numbers of students continued to grow. About 40 minutes to the protest, one of the organizers of the event, Manny Guzman, called everyone over to the podium set up for the event. People gathered around, but no sign of Cevallos. Speakers spoke, but no sign of Cevallos. The protest came to a close about 2 1/2 hours after it began. Still no sign of Cevallos. That’s right, despite telling students he would come to the protest and that he would speak at the protest, Cevallos was a no show.
I had to leave the protest early, because I had to teach. After my class, some students tracked me down by my office to let me know how the rest of the protest went and to ask me if they could put one of their signs on my office door. Then, they told me this story:
Toward the conclusion of the protests, students began to ask: “where is president Cevallos?” They had all expected him to be one of the speakers. Apparently, a rumor was circulating that Cevallos’s office had called some of the student organizers shortly before the protest to say he could not be at the protest, he had to be in Harrisburg. A couple of students didn’t believe this and went to his house and knocked on the door. Someone answered the door and told them he was not at home, but should check his office. The students went to Cevallos’s office. He was there. He came out, apologized and said he had a meeting with the Board of Trustees that he just found out about that morning. So, he didn’t show.
What the full truth of the situation was, I don’t pretend to know. What I do know is that president Cevallos had an opportunity to be a leader, to come out and help bring the KU community together behind the shared purpose of defending KU and PA higher education. That’s not even controversial. At least not among our students and the citizens of the Commonwealth who have come out 80% against Corbett’s cuts to school districts and 70% are against his cuts to higher education. Instead, Cevallos remained in his comfortable leather chair in his office.
So, to my counterparts at the Meet and Discuss table and readers of the XChange, I ask you this: If it is true that there are “different kinds of leadership,” what kind of leadership was president Cevallos exercising when he decided to tell students he would be there and then didn’t show? Call me abrasive if you will, but I’m having a little trouble understanding his leadership style. Please, enlighten us.
From a union perspective at some point a struggle becomes so critical, so dire that there is no space for the luxury of sitting on the fence; no place for misplaced, postmodern undecidability. You have to decide. We’re at that point. In the immortal words of Florence Reece, which side are you on?
Your point about leadership style is well put.
Confrontation is not the only workable method here. If you take at face value the positives ascribed to our president, he seemingly has enormous political capital to spend. According to our trustees, he has rock-solid backing from them and PASSHE. He is also apparently beloved by the students and a strong community leader.
If all this is true, he has all the necessary tools to protect the campus and the community.
But where is the will to lead? I was amazed to hear president Cevallos simply state that he had no plan at our mass meeting last week.
Before we can begin a discussion of proper style, present day circumstances require the president to abandon his aversion to risk.
The faculty and students are more than willing to build a bandwagon for our president. Hopefully, he will have the courage to climb aboard.
As the meeting schedule for the KU Council of Trustees was published on the KU website last fall and it clearly shows that a meeting was scheduled for Thursday, March 17, how can Cevallos claim he only found out about that meeting on the morning of the 17th? Is he not aware of when the Council meets? Does he not prepare for these meetings? Might he not have been telling the truth about why he did not join the students? KU gets absurdier and absurdier every day!!!