We are very much upon the holidays and finding a final meeting for the semester may prove difficult, however, I have been encouraged to try, so look for another reading week announcement. I had to make my annual Thanksgiving pie order so picked up some donuts, cider and few beers for the meeting. We don’t seem to get more than 25 people a meeting, but they are not the same 25, so perhaps we are making progress. Many told me the meeting time was not convenient, but I keep changing the time of the week so we shall see. I thought our conversation on the salary issue was developing and we are now getting more help from the committee. Certainly the faculty report on the salary was useful in moving the conversation along and we are now writing a letter to the committee and the Board urging them to follow through on the Committee report; and not on their plan to mortgage funds from 41 senior faculty members. We have more to do, and once this letter is out, and the official salary committee meets over the Board weekend, we can work more on developing our own plan for moving the “conversation,” onward.

We have also heard again from the Child Care Committee with two members from the group with us and a substantive note from the Committee chair. It was discouraging to hear that in a presentation to President Smith and Provost Stevenson, we learned that they saw no hope in getting a facility on campus and that in the Board of Managers there was no enthusiasm for raising money for such a project. Curious, that on a national level we have a discussion just beginning on child care credits, that in many of the liberal corporations we encourage students to join there is child care and that at many of our comparable schools and aspiring schools, there is some child care program. Yale University, Duke University, the big named universities go as far as providing child care up to 100% of the cost. Surely it has become a major benefit and for Swarthmore to have little more than a web page of information that we had to beg for is not fitting for a college aspiring to such lofty heights. We will continue to encourage our friends on the committee, and we look forward to hearing more suggestions on where to go from here. I suggested that, in the fall we dedicate labor day to having everyone bring their children to school, to bringing them to classes and we make a point of visiting the President and the Provost on the day. And we should not just bring our school age children, some of us have already raised children without any benefits, but ask our grown children to come ahead and remind everyone that the school excluded them from the last summer holiday and then stranded them on campus without any attempt to recognize the sacrifice. Let us hope the administration can come to its senses on this matter before next fall.

On a final matter we revisited the issue of benefits that were taken from the faculty during the 2009 recession. Along these lines we discussed Tuition Reimbursement for Children and the fact that the college has made no attempt to restore those cuts, much less bring them into line with other comparable schools. Ted Fernald will be preparing a statement on this issue for AAUP to pursue in the future and I encourage everyone interested to go ahead and get in touch with him. We also discussed the ad hoc committee on the Provost Search, which we are told has not met, and we are thinking that we ought to decide for ourselves what we would like to see in a Provost and organize a more meaningful discussion. We ran out of time, but we have letters to write and another meeting to plan.

We have some excellent ideas to develop at the next meeting. We will have another report on salaries and more on a plan to help reveal gender gap discrepancies. British companies will be forced to reveal their pay gaps in 2018 and it stands to reason that in the US companies will begin to address the issue. Swarthmore could be encouraged to get ahead of the game by publishing salaries by gender in their annual report on salaries. We already have it in the faculty minutes, perhaps, we can get them to do it this year. We have a committee working on this and welcome more ideas and suggestions to pursue this goal. Finally, Matt Zucker introduced the idea of Swarthmore College becoming a Sanctuary Campus and a letter is being prepared to bring before the Faculty sometime in the next few weeks. We did not have time to really discuss it, but will at the next meeting.

I look forward to meeting more folks at the next meeting and encourage you all to read our regular meeting meetings and plan to attend.

mm