Union Members at U. of California Vote No Confidence in System President

These were staff members, not faculty

This is the second no confidence report printed in The Chronicle this week. The other is at a Community College in Maryland. The job of the President IS NOT to please the union, no matter what employee group/s/ it represents. Any Trustee Board that responds, even in the slightest to a no-confidence vote from a union, should be dismissed as a Trustee. When that happens there are two big losers, the public, or in the case of an Independent College, the chief donars. The second big loser are the students. Too many Trustees regard trusteeship as akin to service on a country club board. They want peace, contentment and pats on the back for the harmonious state of affairs at the club. Never do they want to have their name associated with any disharmony or unrest. God forbid such a situation. So the integrity of the institution is allowed to be compromised in return for Trustee ego gratification whenever employee groups make public noise over their malcontent issues. Trustees who do not understand that trusteeship involves peridic structural and cultural change, financial downturns and their attendant fall-out are completely useless to the institution. Sometimes trustee work is very difficult, if not down and dirty. If Trustees are not ready to accept that fact they need to get out. If they don’t leave, the Trustee appointing authority needs to remove them. Trustees must come to realize that they are the management body of the institution. They have one, and only one, other manager on their appointed team. That person is the President. Together they form ONE cohesive team – a team that must remain united throughout any crises the institution may face. No union of any type is a part of that team, ergo should not have any meaningful impact on the management teams plan for institutional integrity, stability and survival. When unions issue votes of no confidence in the President it’s a recognition by the union that the Trustee board is weak and gullible – a Board highly likely to respond to their ploy. Wise up and stand up Trustees and do what needs to be done at your institution.

Lecturers and librarians, in the same union, did participate in the voting.

There is nothing preposterous about this, actually. The figures are accurate, and the feelings of frustration and helplessness are quite real across the campuses and across job categories. This is why:It goes without saying that we are grateful to have our jobs when so many UC employees and other Californians have recently lost theirs. We are grateful to work for the university, and to be able to continue to serve our students. It is for them, and for the citizens of California, that we have been moved to act. The university leadership, however, has failed the students, the staff, and the state’s population. When the budget shorfalls and need for furloughs were announced, most UC employees resigned themselves to what amounts to at least a 4% and more usually an 8-10% pay cut this year, on top of cutting all other services to the bone. It was the least we could do, given the state of emergency, we thought. Yet, in the very regents meeting where Pres. Yudof was granted emergency powers and furloughs were approved, pay RAISES were voted for administrators. The UC has a tradition of “shared governance,” in which the academic assembly and council (a legislative body made up of faculty representatives from each campus) make policy recommendations to the UC Office of the President. The recommendation of the Academic Council, following due consultation with membership, was some furlough days (2-3 per quarter out of the average of 10-12) should fall on instructional days, in order to bring attention to the grave crisis that the university is facing due to public defunding. For faculty, job performance is evaluated equally on three categories: teaching, research, and service. Yet we were told, at the last moment this summer after many of us had made up our course syllabi, that we would not be allowed to take ANY proportion of furlough days on instructional days. The expectations for our productivity in the other categories remains the same as well. This is not a furlough. This is a unilateral speed up–the same work for much less money and in less time.But most troubling of all, our students have seen an astronomical rise in fees–with fee raises both last year and again this year. The UC system that used to promise access, affordability, and excellent quality really does not exist any longer. The Regents, the University Leadership, the Governor, and the Legislature have overseen the destruction of one of the very best public universities in the world. We may survive, but it will be in a vastly different form, and one that will have troubling implications for the recovery of the California economy and for California’s tradition of innovation and cutting edge technological advances.

This was a small part of the UC system that voted. The CA papers are talking it up as if 96% of all employees voted no confidence. For the record, no tenure or tenure track faculty voted. We are not part of the union and any vote we would make would come through the academic senate. We’ve not had any indication that the senate will conduct such a vote. I’ve heard from a number of staff employees as well that they are not part of this union. No one in my department is even talking about this. Lots of press for not much reality. Even the chronicle does not seem to present the facts – the percentage of all employees involved in this “vote” and the fact that no ladder faculty were involved at all in the vote.