THE PERSISTENCE OF CRISIS: WORK HARDER OR FIGHT BACK

Earlier today I posted this to AAUP’s Academe Blog. Here’s the first few paragraphs. If you want to read the full article, click on the link at the bottom of this post. Or, go to the full article now by clicking here. 

At my monthly department meeting yesterday, the department’s representative to our University Senate gave his report on their last meeting. As part of his report, he told us some of the concerns our university president, Javier Cevallos, expressed about a recent drop in enrollment. Cevallos’s remarks before our University Senate echoed a statement he released in October 2012 in order to explain another $3 million shortfall:

Budget Shortfall 

This fall semester, Kutztown University is facing a problem of serious magnitude.  For the second straight year, the university has experienced a drop in enrollment.

Almost 300 students have made the decision not to come back to KU to continue their education for this fall semester. While we realize many of our sister institutions and private universities within our region are facing the same situation, the drop we are experiencing this year is much larger than we have had in the past.

Upon learning of this, we immediately identified the students and called them to determine their status and/or reasons for not returning.  Although we are still evaluating the information we have gathered, it is evident that we need to become more effective at retaining our students.

As I stated at our opening day gathering, each student we lose seriously impacts our budget.  With only 20 percent of funding coming from the commonwealth, and with our operating budget based on our year-to-year enrollment, the student body is our lifeblood.

As a result of this enrollment loss, we face a shortfall of $3 million on top of the reductions we have already made.  I have decided to cover this gap with carry over funds on a one time basis to meet the deficit in the current year.  Although this is only a temporary solution, it will provide us with time to thoughtfully consider base budget reductions, beginning next year, in the context of our mission.

I want to stress the importance of our role in student retention. We all need to go above and beyond to assist our students in persisting and graduating from KU.   It is crucial to the future of our university and the region.

I urge you all to put our students first, and do whatever you can to make KU a place they will take great pride in.   It is really going to take each and every one of us to help KU overcome this challenge in the future.

This story of “fiscal crisis” has been the norm at Kutztown University for most of the ten years I have worked here. Cevallos’s latest visit to the University Senate was ostensibly, in part at least, to report the university’s findings after gathering information about the reasons why students did not return to Kutztown University. He reported that most of the students who did not return were from Philadelphia and most of those were African-American and Latino students. Not only has the loss of students impacted KU’s budget, Cevallos expressed concern that the loss of these particular students has also hurt the university’s diversity – which has been a focus of his administration as well as a “performance indicator” that figures into the PA State System of Higher Education’s funding formula. Two key reasons Cevallos offered for the decline in enrollment were 1) the possibility that West Chester University – a sister institution located closer to Philadelphia with train service from the city; and, 2) a drop in the amount of financial aid students were receiving. Funding crisis. Diversity crisis. Sister-university-stealing-our-students-crisis.

Read the full article here

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That was then…and it still is…UNION!

Last night — actually, VERY early this morning — I was searching to see if there were any videos posted by media or individuals of APSCUF’s protest at the PASSHE Board of Governors meeting yesterday. One of my searches brought up a video interview I did for a project some of my colleagues did a couple years back: Union Stories: Kutztown. I did the interview on October 14, 2010, back when we were still working under our previous contract. Now, more than two years later and 19 months without a contract, the story I told in that interview still holds up…for the most part. After two rounds of deep budget cuts, having to fight like hell to prevent our local administration from gutting programs and faculty, and little promise that we can expect anything different for the near future, I hear the edge in my voice when I tell the short version of the story in the 2010 interview. I have a creeping feeling that I am trying to convince myself of something…or that my narrative no longer matches my experience. That’s hard to write, actually.

Coming across this interview was good timing in one respect at least. I was having a conversation with someone a week or so ago who wanted to know why having a union contract was so important to me. I got asked a version of that same question by a FOX 43 reporter yesterday at the APSCUF protest in Harrisburg: “What’s the big deal with working without a contract?” I’ve had versions of this conversation with scores of people over the 10 years I’ve been at Kutztown University. I can’t even begin to count the number of people that wondered why the hell I was going to take a job at Kutztown when I had other offers with lower teaching loads and, in one case, a significantly higher starting salary and in the city I lived in at the time. I had then and have now several reasons. But, one reason stands out above all the rest. I took the job at Kutztown because of the union, because of APSCUF. If Kutztown did not have a unionized faculty, I would have never taken the job. Period.

I’ve tried to make the case for several years that if our contract continues to erode, if our working conditions deteriorate even more, or if we strip away protections and quasi-equity for temporary faculty, then Kutztown – PASSHE as a whole – will not be able to hire AND KEEP quality faculty. We will go elsewhere. That’s sad and infuriating to me. It’s an injustice to the student body we teach and to the mission of the 14 universities that make up PASSHE. But that’s the game that the Chancellor, the Chair of PASSHE Board of Governors, and PASSHE as a whole is playing. They want to strip away quality and leave in its place a degree factory – a State-owned version of ITT Tech or the University of Phoenix.

When I watch my “Union Stories” video now I am keenly aware of why I chose to come to Kutztown, why I am fighting like hell to protect and secure a good contract for ALL faculty, and why I may ultimately end up having to leave. But the game is not up yet and the fight is not lost yet. So, back to work. Here’s the video:

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16 Months without a Contract: Let’s Go Grocery Shopping 2

I ran the numbers a different way and turns out the news just gets worse. This time, I did the graphic with percentages. APSCUF members are now in the 16th month without a contract. As each month rolls by, our paychecks buy less. What does that look like in the real world? It means a 5.2% pay cut every time we go to the store.

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Monday we get to see what the Chancellor thinks of PASSHE faculty

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PASSHE brings divide-and-conquer strategy to negotiations

This past Saturday, APSCUF posted the following negotiations update on its blog:

APSCUF and PASSHE negotiators met Friday, September 14, at the Dixon Center in Harrisburg.  The Chancellor’s team passed a proposal on retrenchment language and made suggestions for future bargaining sessions. APSCUF caucused and responded to their proposal in writing. The two sides reconvened and failed to come to agreement on the language, but agreed to session definitions for the next two times: on Oct. 5th APSCUF will present on curriculum, class size, and distance education and on Oct. 22nd the Chancellor’s team will discuss temporary workload and concessions on retiree health care.   There was neither discussion of nor progress made on the Chancellor’s team’s demand for concessions on distance education, active and retiree health care, and temporary faculty workload.

There is so much packed into this statement, but I want to focus on one issue in particular: temporary faculty workload. It seems that PASSHE negotiators have learned their lesson from our last contract fight. During our last round of contract negotiations, temporary faculty issues were front and center. The issue that got the most attention was the raising of the cap on part-time, temporary members from 7% to 25%. Pretty significant, no? I am sure that some members of our negotiating team that worked on that contract would take issue with my characterization. For example, our negotiators argued that our previous contract had NO CAP on the TOTAL number of temporary faculty members. So, for example, as long as a State System university kept the numbers of part-time temporary faculty members below 7%, that university theoretically could have a faculty that was 60% temporary – as long as 53% of that faculty were full-time temporary faculty. I concede the point. It’s true, the 25% would be the first time the total number of temporary faculty would be capped and 25% is still significantly below the national average, which is between 40 and 60% depending on the study and institution. However, by refusing to distinguish between part-time and full-time temporary faculty, a State university could now turn 25% of the faculty into part-time adjuncts – effectively stripping away any pretense to job security and effectively eliminating their health insurance.

When it came time to sign the final agreement, the State System threw in the fact that the one-time cash payment faculty would receive in year one of the contract (instead of a cost-of-living adjustment) would NOT be given to temporary faculty members. There are several versions of how that happened – and, frankly, I don’t know which version is the most accurate. Suffice it to say that, for many temporary faculty members, that felt like the second slap in the face for that contract. First, the university can now turn your job into piece-work. And, just to make sure you don’t think you are a crucial part of the work of the university, we’re not going to give you what your tenure-track or tenured colleagues are getting, no matter how long you’ve been here.

On my campus, temporary faculty were up in arms. Several were so disgusted, they wanted to leave the union. Many more just retreated to their offices feeling they are totally on their own – best to just “shut up and teach” (a phrase that a temporary faculty member expressed to me at the time) and hope they have a job next semester. From the perspective of the State System administration and Chancellor Cavanaugh: Mission Accomplished. Divide-and-Conquer.

Well, we’re now facing round two in Chancellor Cavanaugh’s Divide-and-Conquer strategy. This time around he’s leading his team to cement a two-tiered faculty system by going after temporary faculty workload. PASSHE already requires faculty to teach a 4-4 load – that is, four classes per semester. By any reasonable measure, we already have a heavy teaching load. The Chancellor is proposing that we up the load to 5-5 for temporary faculty members. He is attempting to hold out the carrot that in exchange for a heavier teaching load, temporary faculty will no longer be evaluated on their teaching, service, and scholarship – they will only be evaluated on their teaching. The Chancellor is trying to drive a permanent wedge between temporary faculty and their tenure-track and tenured colleagues. The Chancellor drove the first spike in during the last negotiations and now he is seeking to bring the hammer down once again, turning a crack into a fissure. The move is an attempt to get tenured and tenure-track to be narrowly self-interested and say, “well, at least I don’t have to teach a 5-5 load.” The move seeks to play on the fear that if we don’t accept such a two-tier system, then everyone will suffer. The move holds tenure-track and tenured wages, medical insurance, and workload hostage, threatening to destroy them all if permanent faculty don’t offer up their temporary colleagues up for sacrifice. This is the world we are living in now folks.

But let me open the workload issue up a little more. While it’s true that full-time temporary faculty would see their workload increase by 25% (without any increase in compensation), the consequences of moving to a 5-5 load are much more serious. Take my department, for example. We have a total of 41 faculty members, eight (8) of which are temporary faculty members. Only one of those faculty members are part-time. If you turn those positions into full-time-equivalent (FTE) positions, we have 8.5 faculty positions teaching a total of 30 classes. If the State System turns a 4-4 FTE position into a 5-5 FTE position, our department will not have 6 FTE temporary faculty positions instead of 8.5. And since there is no such thing as a half-person in the real world, you are talking about two people losing their jobs – not exactly a model of job creation in a down economy.

But, it gets worse. Let’s say that a particular university takes a slightly different approach. Let’s say that a university administration – perhaps even at the direction of the Chancellor – tells all departments to keep all faculty schedules as they are and not increase the temporary faculty load to 5-5. Such a university president might even come out and try to sound all benevolent by saying “we don’t want our temporary faculty to be overburdened…we want them to be able to really focus on their classes.” Sound good? Well, guess what? While my department might be able to keep the number of temporary faculty constant (that is, to keep seven temporary faculty on a 4-4 load and one temporary faculty member on a 2-2 load), ALL of those faculty are NOW CONSIDERED PART-TIME. That is, they will lose their FULL-TIME status and with that, they will LOSE THEIR FULL HEALTH CARE BENEFITS. That’s right, instead of just cutting 1.5 FTE faculty positions, a university could cut health insurance for ALL TEMPORARY FACULTY MEMBERS by doing NOTHING. 

So, while Chancellor Cavanaugh may want us all to focus on different workloads for temporary and permanent faculty, his proposal is an attempt to pull the rug out from under ALL temporary faculty members and rip away even the smallest scrap of job security.

Frankly, the only reason we are able to keep the high-quality temporary faculty we have now is because they are paid on scale with tenure-track faculty (well, almost, they do not receive steps as they should) and they receive the same benefits. The temporary faculty members in my department, for example, can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their tenure-track and tenured colleagues. The only reason the vast majority of these highly qualified temporary faculty members do not have tenure-track jobs is because of the job market. And we all know that story. If you constrict the job market, the competition for any single job increases. That’s a pattern that has held steady for the past several decades. Competition for academic jobs is already intense. The Chancellor’s plan not only rips away job security for temporary faculty members, it further constricts the academic job market across the state for ALL higher education faculty. Earlier this year we saw the Chancellor call upon university presidents and faculty to unite and help stave of Governor Corbett’s 20% cut in higher education. He played the role of a PASSHE advocate, a uniter. Well, just a few short months later, we learn that same Chancellor is wielding his Divide-and-Conquer hammer, going after the same people who have helped deliver the high-quality education he touted before the Pennsylvania House and Senate.

The message I have for my APSCUF brothers and sisters comes from a sign that has been carried through the streets of Chicago this past week: “Enough is Enough.” Ya Basta! We have to see the Chancellor’s proposal for what it is: to divide us so he can weaken and conquer us all. We have to begin to think of our current contract fight in the same terms the striking Chicago teachers see theirs: as a fight for the future of public education. If you think of this contract fight only in terms of “getting mine,” we will all lose in the long-term. We cannot afford to lop off limb after limb and think we can be effective for the long haul. I for one will not sell out my temporary faculty colleagues for the same reason I will not sell out my tenured colleagues: we are in this together. This is a fight for the integrity Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education. And it is a fight for our futures and our children’s future.

Enough is enough!

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Budget Cut Protest @ Shippensburg

Check out the Shippensburg’s student newspaper’s article and video on the recent APSCUF-SU protest against Corbett’s cuts:

APSCUF Rally Draws Crowds Against Cuts

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December Issue of Raging Chicken Press is (Finally) Here!

Wow. It has been quite an amazing month and the December issue of Raging Chicken Press reflects the kind of month it has been. It’s also pretty clear that we are already bursting at the seams, ready to expand our site into new areas. I am going to spare you my end of  year reflections until next week sometime. Suffice it to say that we’ve got big plans for 2012!

Here’s a breakdown of the December issue:

• Kevin Mahoney | Raging Chicken Press Interview with Noam Chomsky (yes, that Noam Chomsky)
• Wendy Lee | “Fracking is a Variety of Environmental Rape Abetted by the Law: Governor Corbett’s Pennsylvania, Inc.”
• Dustin Slaughter | “Occupy 2.0: ‘Defending the Everyday Aims of Life’ While Persisting in a Police State”
• Rick Smith Files | “Privatization in Three Parts” (Featuring interviews with labor attorney, Irwin Aronson; State Rep. Scott Conklin; and Marcie Boyer, nurse and member of SEIU District 1199P  in PA in State Prison system)
• Sean Kitchen | “Battlefield USA: From Occupy Wall Street to Guantanamo Bay”
• Kati Sipp | “Some Thoughts on Getting Arrested…”
• Aaron Barlow | “Diane Ravitch on the Failure of High Stakes Testing in Two Parts”
• Sean Kitchen | “The Free University: Brought to You by Occupy Kutztown”
• Caitlin Turner | “Occupy Everything”
• Lee Camp | “You Can’t Pepper Spray a Mental Awakening”
• Lee Camp | “Is Occupy Wall Street Having an Effect?”
• “Rob” | “Sean Hannity Show: #OWS are ‘Morons, Idiots, Stupid'”

As you can see, it’s quite an issue. A great way to close out 2011. Raging Chicken Press will be taking a little break over the holidays. Our next issue will be published the first week of February. While we will not be publishing a full issue until then, I will be using the opportunity to fill you in on our plans for 2012.

One reminder: it’s still possible to be eligible to be selected from our subscriber list to receive this months “Must Read.” This month’s book takes its inspiration from our Chomsky interview: Noam Chomsky’s, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order as well as Hopes and Prospects (that’s right, another double give-away). To be eligible, all you need to do is enter your email address in the subscription box on the right-hand side of our main page and click “Subscribe” by Monday, December 19th. That’s it and it’s free. I’ll announce our lucky subscriber next week.

That’s it for now. Hope you dig the issue!

Bread and Roses,

Editor Zero, Kevin Mahoney

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Calling all progressive musicians and song writers: Raging Chicken Press song contest

Like to write music? Progressive? This might be for you:

The November issue of Raging Chicken Press will be out soon (hopefully by Monday–we’ve been a bit sick here).  I know, the waiting game sucks.  Well, Raging Chicken Press has got something for at least some of you to do while you are waiting for the next issue.

Raging Chicken Press announces its first ever song contest! More specifically, song parody contest. Frankly, if I had the musical talent, I would have been on this over the summer. But, we all have to accept our short-comings. So, I thought this would be a cool project to push out to fans and friends of Raging Chicken Press.

Have you ever seen Disney’s version of Robin Hood? Well, I loved it as a kid and now my three-year old son loves it too. As I was watching it over the summer, I began to see the possibility of repurposing some of the songs on the soundtrack for our current struggles against right-wing attacks on collective bargaining, public education, social services, and our democracy. I began to think about casting our “beloved” governor, Tom Corbett as “Prince John” the “phony King of England.”  In particular, I was thinking about the song “The Phony King of England.” Listen to this song and replace “John” and “England” with “Tom” and “Pennsylvania” and you’ll get the idea:

Got it? If you check out Chris Priest’s repurposing of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (see below) you’ll get the sense of what we’re thinking about here at Raging Chicken Press.

So, we’re going to try a little experiment: We are calling on readers and friends of Raging Chicken Press to submit parodies of the song “Phony King of England” to Raging Chicken Press. All entries will be posted to Raging Chicken Press and readers will have a chance to vote on the best version. The top three entries (if we get that many) will receive their choice of t-shirt from the Raging Chicken Press store.  The winning song will also receive Raging Chicken Press’s “Must Read” book of the month.

Here’s the rules:

• Song must be a rewritten version of the “Phony King of England” that appears in the video above
• Song should replace “John” with “Tom” and Tom should refer to PA Governor, Tom Corbett. Likewise, “England” should be replaced with “Pennsylvania”
• All entries must be recorded in MP3 or .wav format.
• All final recordings must be loaded up to YouTube. Ideally, the final video should include images to political protest against Tom Corbett and the PA Republican’s austerity budget and other attacks upon working families and the Commons.
• Once songs are uploaded to YouTube, an email should be sent to ragingchickenpress@gmail.com including a link to the video, the name(s) of the song writer(s), and contact information including email and mailing address.
• All entries should be submitted by November 29th.

Entries will be posted to Raging Chicken Press as they are received. Voting for best parody song will begin on November 30, 2011 and the winner(s) will be announced in December issue.

Any questions? Send email inquiries to Kevin Mahoney, Editor Zero, Raging Chicken Press @ ragingchickenpress@gmail.com. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

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Building Progressive Networks–Looking Ahead for Raging Chicken Press

With work on the November issue of Raging Chicken Press already underway, I wanted to take the opportunity to share with you some of the plans we have for Raging Chicken Press in the upcoming months.  The current form of Raging Chicken Press – a monthly, independent, progressive web-based publication – only scratches the surface of what is possible to do at this moment. In many ways, I view the publication of Raging Chicken Press as the launching pad for a much more ambitious project for networking progressive media, advocacy and direct action training, and materially supporting social movements. The Occupy/99% Movement, to echo the Zapatistas, has opened a crack in history that opens new possibilities, new imaginations of our collective futures. And we have seen an explosion of DIY efforts to renew and rebuild what we might call a social movement infrastructure–the kind of infrastructure that can help sustain our movements in the years and decades to come. I’d like to think that we can learn from the right-wing in this country did: they spent decades investing in an infrastructure of media, think tanks, and publications. From Wisconsin, to Ohio, to Pennsylvania, we are seeing how those investments have paid off. The commons is being systematically disassembled. But, finally, we are seeing the birth of a movement with the power to roll back the right-wing attack.

Raging Chicken Press plans on being around for the long haul. And to do that, we are taking steps to make our work sustainable.  The Raging Chicken Store, while a small operation, has earned Raging Chicken Press enough to pay for our hosting costs and associated services.  This coming February. Raging Chicken Press will be at the PA Progressive Summit in Philadelphia.  Next summer, Raging Chicken Press will be attending Netroots Nation in Providence, RI to learn from the experience of other media activists and to deepen our political networks. This spring, Raging Chicken Press will take on its first intern. We are working to provide at least three paid internships a year beginning summer 2012. In short, a lot is going on.

Our most ambitious project will be related to raising funds to help Raging Chicken Press on a sound financial footing.  In the next couple of weeks, Raging Chicken Press will be putting out a fundraising appeal through Kickstarter.com. Rather than being forced to rely upon advertising or smaller fundraisers, we will attempting to raise $20,000 through this amazing, community based fundraising tool. While some readers have already begun to donate to Raging Chicken Press though our PayPal donation button on our site and we thank those donors immensely.  However, we recognize that our expenses will soon out pace what we are able to raise through small donations and the Raging Chicken Press store.

I can’t begin to thank all the people who have written me to say how excited they are about Raging Chicken Press. With this kind of support we will be able to build a strong independent, progressive voice for PA and beyond. For now, keep reading and consider contributing to the November issue of Raging Chicken Press!

 

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Ideas for Occupy KU

Over the past several years I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of projects faculty and students could organize around that would have meaningful impacts on the university and the community. During my first two years at KU, I was the faculty adviser for a group of amazing students who wanted to found a chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops. In less than a year, the students researched the history of USAS, of KU’s licensing agreements, and the range of tactics students could use to persuade the university to join the Workers Rights Consortium–an independent group that monitors textile factories around the world and organizes against sweatshop labor. The short story is that the students convinced the university to join the WRC and for a period of several years, you could be assured that if you were donning the KU logo on your clothing, that you were not supporting sweatshop labor. One year, President Cevallos even mentioned the university’s WRC membership in his opening address — even though he never acknowledged that it was STUDENTS who responsible for the university signing on. I just checked the WRC web site only to find that Kutztown is no longer a member of the WRC. It just goes to show, once the spotlight is turned in a different direction, the university will ditch any stated commitment to human rights.

Anyway, the fact is that students’ activist made a tangible, concrete change in the university. If that student organization had continued after a couple of the key organizers graduated, we might still be able to say our KU apparel was not made in sweatshops. In the light of the current recession and budget-cut mania, I’ve been thinking about the kind of things we could do locally that would have real, tangible effects and that would provide some degree of mutual aid to our communities. Ever since the Occupy Movement exploded on the scene, I’ve been having conversations here and there about just this issue. And today’s Occupy Kutztown rally was an encouraging place to begin a conversation about organizing locally and retaking a piece of the commons. With that in mind, here are some projects you will be hearing more about on the XChange in the coming weeks and months. Here are some concrete things we can demand our university does:

• For starters, 50% of all food served in the dining halls and other locations on campus should be locally sourced from family farms
• 75% of all university supplies should be manufactured in Pennsylvania, when possible, at union shops. This includes office supplies such as paper and pens as well as larger items such as desks and walkway lighting.
• All new building projects should be build using union contractors from Pennsylvania.
• Space should be set aside on campus for a farmers’ market
• All university banking accounts should be moved out of “big banks” and relocated to community based banks in the area.

These are just some places to start. The basic idea is that changing these policies at the university would have positive, concrete effects in our communities. They will help sustain and create jobs. I can’t wait to begin organizing around these issues. It just feels good to start having this kind of conversation.

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October issue of Raging Chicken Press on the way…and some thoughts on Occupy movement

Hey all,

just thought I would pass on the info. Next Raging Chicken Press out this coming Monday.

K

We are living during an incredible moment in history. Finally, after years of taking it on the chin, sucking it up, and keeping heads down a movement is emerging, giving oxygen to the deep embers of rage that decades of class war have left in the hearts of Americans. The financial collapse, the trillions of public dollars to bail out Wall Street criminals, and the relentless destruction of the fabled American middle class have finally led to a visceral, collective, and material cry of ENOUGH! The Occupy Wall Street movement was initially dismissed through cliché talking points by Mainstream commentators. Since Occupy Wall Street began on Sept. 17th the numbers of people joining in this collective act of resistance has only grown. And spread. Occupy groups have sprung up in over 274 U.S. cities.

What will the Occupy movement become? Will it be the spark that will transform into the kind of social movement capable of wrestling the power away from a handful of billionaires and their political cronies in Washington? We shall see and Raging Chicken Press will not only be there to cover what’s going on, we will be taking part in helping build this movement. We are well aware of a range of critiques that have emerged about the composition of the Occupy movement, its insistence upon consensus as an organizational principle, the claim of representing the “99%,” the fact that the movement did not begin occupying Wall Street with concrete set of demands, the list goes on. This movement cannot shy away from such critiques. However, Raging Chicken Press believes that the Occupy movement has opened a crack in history that offers the concrete possibility for collective deliberation–a democratic process for constructing communities of resistance that move beyond the politics of factionalism and ideological purism–especially on the left. The stakes are too high. The future will belong to those willing to get their hands–and their ideologies–dirty in this workshop of resistance.

The October issue of Raging Chicken Press will be out on Monday, October 10th.  Raging Chicken Press has been lucky to have one of our contributing bloggers, Dustin Slaughter of the David and Goliath Project, on the ground in NYC, Boston, and Philly. The problem we have faced in covering the emergence of the Occupy movement has been that events are moving along so quickly. This issue will feature several of Dustin’s reports as a kind of time-elapsed journal.

In the October issue, we will also introduce a new series: The Rick Smith Files. If you haven’t listened to the Rick Smith Show yet, click here and get started right away. It’s activist fuel. Beginning with the October issue, Raging Chicken Press will feature transcriptions of at least one of Rick Smith’s interviews with activists, labor leaders, policy analysts, and authors who have made it their business to stand up and fight back.

As for the rest of the issue, I’m going to keep you guessing for now. 🙂

I want to encourage all readers of Raging Chicken Press to become an email subscriber. As an email subscriber, you will receive an email when new content is added. Subscribing is easy. On the right-hand sidebar you will find our subscription widget. Just enter your email and click subscribe. It’s really that easy.

I hope to see some of you at the Occupy Philly action this weekend. The action begins tomorrow, Thursday at 9am @ City Hall. Look for the Raging Chicken t-shirt!

Kevin Mahoney

Editor Zero, Raging Chicken Press

 

 

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First Issue of Raging Chicken Press is Out!

The wait is over.  The first full issue of Raging Chicken Press is set to launch.  We’re going to call this one the July post-Corbett-PA-GOP-draconian-budget-signing issue.  Catchy, huh?

Our first issue includes the following contributions:

• Kevin Mahoney, “Kutztown University, Shock Doctrine, and Snake Oil Tales”
• Wendy Lee, “An Open Letter to Governor Corbett”
• Seth Kahn, “[Self] Pep Talk”
• J. Rizzo Mertz, “Plan to Renew Pennsylvania: A New Hope”
• Aaron Barlow, “No More Teachers?”
• Christina Steffy, “Don’t Want to Accept Responsibility? Blame Teachers!”
• Lee Camp, “You’re Not Alone OR Fighting Back is Bad for Ratings”

If you like Raging Chicken Press, sign up for an email subscription on the right-hand side of the site.  If you’d like to go the extra step and help support our work, check out this post with info on how to offer your support.

Welcome to Raging Chicken Press! 3-2-1…here we go!

 

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“Let’s Take Apathy Out To The Shed And Shoot It In The Face” – MOC #45 by comedian Lee Camp

I love this guy.  Not for anyone who considers politeness and civil discourse to the only mode of political engagement.   Go get ’em Lee.

 

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Class, Family Income, Higher Ed: Infographic

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Video/Photo Montage from March 28th Rally in Harrisburg

The first major Harrisburg rally in opposition to Gov. Corbett’s budget cuts took place on March 28th.  The rally was spearheaded by students from Shippensburg University and supported by APSCUF.  APSCUF-KU sent four buses filled with students and faculty. Here is APSCUF’s video/photo montage of the event:

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Labor Rally against Corbett’s Cuts: TODAY, May 3 @ 1pm Harrisburg

Dear friends of the XChange,

If you are a reader of this blog, you already know about today’s Rally for a Responsible Budget in Harrisburg.  This rally is being spearheaded by the CLEAR Coalition for PA, of which APSCUF is a part.

Here’s the official call for participation from the CLEAR Coalition web page.

Join us on Tuesday, May 3rd from 1:00-2:00 in Harrisburg on the front steps of the State Capitol. We are expecting thousands of people to come out and stand up for a fair state budget. The buses are full so, but please join us by drivng yourself to Harrisburg to stand with us!

APSCUF-KU is not sponsoring buses for this trip in part because the CLEAR Coalition has organized buses around the state.  All you had to do was sign up and you could have taken a bus for free.  KU faculty members were informed of this rally a while back by our State APSCUF president, Steve Hicks through direct email.  I am hoping to see some of my colleagues there today.  I know that several of our AFSCME brothers and sisters will be there.  I  know that many students will be there (despite the fact it’s finals time).  This will be our last major rally before the end of the spring semester.

So, if you haven’t committed already, consider driving out today.  Follow this link for driving directions to the State Capitol from Kutztown.

If you cannot attend the rally, take a few minutes and check out the CLEAR Coalition’s web page for very useful action-oriented budget information such as a Budget Took Kit:

PA State Budget Facts

Reckless Cuts vs. Closing loopholes

Expanding the Pie, Revenue options

If you can’t make it to the rally and are sick of hearing about the budget, then I wish you a great end to the semester, a summer of relaxation, and the hopes we’ll all have jobs come the fall.

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Don’t want to accept responsibility? Blame teachers!

Does anyone value education anymore? It really seems that way. I understand this country has its budget problems and every industry must make sacrifices, higher ed included, but honestly in a world where you can’t really be competitive without a college education, why is education one of the first things to go? Who looks at a budget and says, “No, education doesn’t need funding”? What happened to the times when this country realized it had to invest in education in order to be great? What happened to education being seen as an investment? And what happened to teaching being seen as a honorable profession?

I think I’ve found the answer – teachers at all levels of education have become easy targets for politicians who want to blame them for budget problems. Many teachers are fortunate enough to have a union that protects their jobs. The protection of this union allows teachers the ability to stand up for themselves. Employees that don’t belong to a union can’t stand up for themselves for fear of being fired. But teachers can, and thankfully they do because they are often standing up for their students as well. If an administrator wants a teacher to take a major pay cut but the administrator gets a raise, a teacher calls out the administrator. When programs are getting slashed but money is being spent frivolously, a teacher says something. When support services won’t be there for students, teachers stand up. They do this because they have the power to make their voices heard, and they are using that power for the good of their students. Good teachers are never just fighting for themselves, they are also fighting for their students; a good educator should do this as well, regardless of whether or not that educator has the role of “teacher.” Yet some how this gets turned around and rather than seeing teachers as advocates, the government is making them out to be greedy millionaires who want to line their pockets with your tax dollars.

Hmmmm….if that’s what teachers were doing, wouldn’t they all be politicians? After all, aren’t politicians the people that have taken jobs that were supposed to be civil service positions, things you volunteered for to serve your community and if you were paid it was a modest salary, and made them into career positions that eat up tax dollars?

This is the reality, yet some how it’s been turned around to say that those few bad teachers that stick out in people’s minds stand for every teacher. None of them want to do any “real” work, because we know that the pressure to make sure students actually learn something that will make them productive, successful citizens isn’t real work. We  know that spending 8 hours a day teaching multiple classes of 2o-30 students and then having papers to grade at home isn’t real work. We know that having a job that requires lesson plans and always reading up on your topic isn’t real work. When you get into higher ed, we know that the pressure to publish and be a scholar in your field in addition to teaching isn’t real work (and those scholars certainly don’t help attract students to your institution, so it’s not like they are doing anything for the university community), and we know that having your students be able to be in constant contact with you via email which means that you teach 24/7 isn’t real work. We know that working the equivalent amount of hours as someone who works 40+ hours a week 52 weeks a year but condensing those hours into less than 52 weeks a year isn’t real work, and it’s anything but intense. We also know that doing work when you’re not officially teaching so that you teach effectively isn’t real work. None of that is real work, right?

But here’s something else that I’m sure no one considers real work. Being more than just a teacher. And by that I mean you are also a mentor. You are also a positive role model. Your classroom may provide the only stability some of those students have in their lives. You’re also who students come to when they are vulnerable, when they tell you they couldn’t complete a paper because they had to bail a parent out of jail, or they got kicked out of their house, or they are living in a shelter. Or finding out that a student is being abused and knowing that you have an obligation to report that. I’ve had those realities, and this is only my first semester teaching at a college. I’m dealing with adults. Many teachers deal with these problems with minors, which puts even more of a burden on the teacher.

Teachers are more than teachers. We do the work of educators, counselors, administrators, disciplinarians. We become more than just someone standing up in front of a room lecturing. We become people that are charged with the emotional and physical well being o students in addition to their academic well being.

And we do it all while we are under appreciated, while jobs are being taken away, while class sizes are exploding out of control and the time of the year when we work is dedicated to nothing but work. And we get blamed for everything because we speak out. We aren’t afraid to say if our working conditions are terrible and that our pay is ridiculous for what we have to do. The sad fact of life is that no one wants to do a job they don’t get paid well for doing. Why should we not want to get paid well for a job that requires continuing education throughout our lifetime? Why shouldn’t quality candidates be attracted to this field? If you don’t attract quality teachers, what’s the point of even having a student spend time being educated?

Teachers aren’t saying they want everything while everyone else suffers. But they are saying that if the administration deserves it, then they do. At least that’s what I think they are saying. If your boss deserves a raise, so do you. If times are tough, then no one gets one. In this time when everyone has to make sacrifices, then EVERYONE in EVERY INDUSTRY must give, not just teachers in education.

But why look at the reality? Let’s just blame the teachers. They don’t do any real work anyway.

-ChristinaSteffy (MsLibraryGoddess)

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one more appeal to GET ON THE BUS tomorrow for Harrisburg

Earlier today I made one last appeal to faculty to GET ON THE BUS for tomorrow’s NAACP rally in Harrisburg.  The theme of the rally is “Save Public Education in PA.  This will be the first rally  in the current budget battles that faculty from higher education will join their K-12 colleagues and students from all levels of public education in PA  on the Capitol steps.  There are still seats available.  Students, faculty, and community members are welcome.  If you want to join, send an email to apscufku@kutztown.edu asap!  If you like to procrastinate, you can just show up in the parking lot behind Beekey tomorrow morning!  Bus leaves at 8am.

Here’s my email to faculty:

Dear colleagues,

I want to make at least one last call for faculty to join the NAACP rally in Harrisburg tomorrow.  The theme of the rally is “Save Public Education in PA.”  The rally will consist of a march of public school children on the Capitol, speakers representing all aspects of education – K-12 and Higher Ed.  Our work has already made a difference as several key Republican legislators have been calling for a reduction — if not elimination of Corbett’s education cuts.

APSCUF-KU still has seats left on tomorrow’s bus to Harrisburg.  If you can make it, please join us.  We keep on hearing the call for “shared sacrifice.”  Let our sacrifice be our time in making our voices heard publicly in the State Capital!  In a time when the dominant argument among politicians and the media attempt to keep us afraid and NOT raise our voices (keep your head down and be good), we need to resist such cynicism.  After all, we’ve been working our tails off all along and that hasn’t been a sufficient argument to prevent us being the focus of budget cutting and public attacks.

As I’ve said on a number of occasions now, Pennsylvanians have taken it on the chin over and over and over again.  Solid industries have given way to casinos.  As faculty and educators, we are in a relatively privileged position. If WE are not willing to speak out, who will?  Should we punt the ball to out of work Steelworkers?  Should we punt the ball to our students?  I don’t think so.  We need to lead by example.  We often seek to instill in our students a critical consciousness and a willingness to be active citizens.  What does it say to our students if we are not willing to fight for our profession and their education?  What does it say that we’re willing to miss a day (or days) of class for a professional conference but not a rally to defend public education?

But, it’s not too late.  APSCUF-KU still has seats on the bus. We are leaving bright and early tomorrow morning @ 8am from the parking lot behind Beekey.  We hope you will join us.  And if you can’t make it, we hope that you will support your colleagues who can.

Reserve your seat on the bus: contact APSCUF-KU secretary, Karen Epting, at 610-683-4277 or email her at apscufku@kutztown.edu.

**DRIVING YOURSELF?**

If you can’t make the bus and are considering driving yourself, you can find parking at the River Street garage or surrounding streets. For information on location and cost of River Street garage go to http://www.harrisburgparking.org/

I hope to see you there!

Best,
Kevin Mahoney

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just what does a retrenchment notification look like?

I am sorry that my posts have been minimal over this past week.  It’s the end of the semester here in universityland and I have been trying to catch up on my grading and end of the semester work.  The bulk of my “free” time has been spent getting the Raging Chicken Press site up and running (participation still welcome!  looking for writers!).

As XChange readers will know, last week APSCUF Presidents at the 14 state universities (PASSHE) received notification that university presidents will be pursuing another round of retrenchment this coming year.  In other words, we will be looking at more faculty jobs lost, programs cut, and services limited.  Once again, Corbett’s budget cuts are the motivating factor here, although I suspect that PASSHE will be using “crisis” to reorganize state universities with or without a real budgetary shortfall.

Most of us don’t ever see one of these “intent to retrench” notices, so I thought I would share it here.  Here is a copy of KU President Cevallos’s “intent to retrench” memo sent to APSCUF-KU president Paul Quinn last week:

Cevallos Retrenchment Letter

I would also like to remind all readers of the XChange that we will be forced to say good-bye to six (6) faculty members as a result of KU administration’s previous round of retrenchment.  We will also say good-bye to the Advising Center, the Theater major, the Nursing program, and the Early Learning Center.  We’ve also just learned that the KU administration has not renewed the contract of one of our coaches who was active in getting PASSHE coaches their first union contract.  Assistant Coach for Women’s basketball, Steve Hahn, is the latest casualty of the adminstration’s budget ax.

At this point, no one is safe and the administration has refused to provide a specific articulation of its priorities and goals, which would presumably be used in any coherent retrenchment plan.  Instead, we continue to get nothing but empty generalizations that you could find on any university web site in any state in the country.

I’m keeping my eye out for rats leaving the ship.

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Raging Chicken hits the streets

For those XChange readers interested in working to build a progressive, independent, “glocal” media site, here’s an opportunity:

Click on the image above for the pre-launch post.

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