FA News (12/2/2017): A9 guide
December 3, 2017
Here’s the latest newsletter, featuring a guide to the Article 9 process.
Dear colleagues,
Here you’ll find an FA Guide to the Article 9 process. My apologies for sending it out on Saturday morning–especially as our VP, Segun Ojewuyi, just sent you a message about an IEA election next week. But there is a great deal of confusion on campus, and we wanted to get this sent out as soon as it was ready. A great deal of confusion was inevitable given the decision to try to push changes of this magnitude through all at once, as quickly as possible, at this point in the year. We hope our guide will limit the confusion.
I will highlight a couple of points.
1. The CBA doesn’t preclude any sort of meeting, written or oral response, letter to the Board of Trustees, etc. Rather, the CBA outlines the minimal requirements we bargained with the administration to ensure that proposals are adequately vetted by Faculty. So when the CBA says that one sort of meeting must take place, it does not mean that other meetings cannot also take place. Indeed, the whole point of this part of the process is to allow for consultation and deliberation among Faculty and between Faculty and administrators.
2. On two procedural points, our reading of the CBA differs from what I understand to be the administration’s view.
- On our view, the required meetings in this phase of the process (CBA 9.04) are joint meetings of all affected Faculty (i.e., all Faculty who would be housed in a new school) rather than meetings at the departmental level.
- On our view, the “appropriate administrator” to oversee this phase of the process is not a chair or director of one of the affected units but either the dean (if all units are within a current college) or provost (for mergers that cross college lines).
The logic of this is plain enough: if you are going to merge with someone, you meet with them first. And the administrator to run the merger process should be one who supervises all the Faculty involved in a given merger. As the “appropriate administrator” has certain duties outlined in the CBA, it is important to identify them clearly.
We will be in touch with the administration about these matters (you will see Vice Provost DiLalla cc’d above) and see if we can resolve them. We also have concerns about the administration’s implementation of the prior phase of the Article 9 process (CBA 9.03). Expect to hear more about that soon, but for now the goal is to implement the current phase of the process (9.04) as smoothly as possible.
In solidarity,
Dave Johnson
President, SIUC-FA
About Dave Johnson
SIUC Faculty Association 