Blog Post 12/12/16

With the holidays upon us, and a major resolution on Sanctuary just passed by the faculty, the AAUP managed a seminar of sorts on salary issues and we never really achieved the rest of our agenda on benefits. We did at the very end manage to send Matt Zucker (and Lee Smithey in absentia) for the success of the sanctuary resolution at the last faculty meeting of the semester.

Our focus on salary in the last two meetings has given us a much better idea of what is going on in the informal conversation on salary with the Board, and we have the most recent update on the doings of the ad hoc committee on salary, or the ongoing conversation with members of the Board of Managers on faculty salaries. Mark Kuperberg’s report was not very encouraging and it was unclear where we should go from here. It seems that the committee will be focused on our comparison schools and the percentage of total salary comparison; then there is the issue of whether we look at total compensation or salary plus retirement as the basis of comparison. It appears that the committee ignored our letter protesting the redistribution of incomes in such a way as to punish the 41 senior faculty members who through no fault of their own have been told that they will not be participating in future raises until their “overpayment” has been adjusted. We appear divided and uncertain as to where to go from here. I have begun to think that we might follow up on Matt Zucker’s suggestion of developing an escrow account for members of the faculty. We could then build a confidential file of actual salaries and with concrete data challenge the reports from the Provost’s office. I am going to move ahead with that idea in our next meeting and maybe get someone to explain how this works and what we can do with it.

We have definitely not moved ahead on the Child Care issue and I am concerned that we need to move into that agenda item at the top of our next meeting. Lynne Molter had prepared a report from the Benefits Committee and unless I hear from members to the contrary, I am planning on inviting Sunka to the next meeting so that we can have a better idea of where the Child Care agenda is heading. Perhaps we can get Bob Weinberg, the committee chair to join in the conversation. Again we will try to gather together the interested parties and if readers have ideas about faculty with children who would be interested in pushing this idea over then please invite them. We have a committee, but if they are bogged down and stymied then we need to put some weight behind them to get to the changes we want.

The next thing we need to discuss is the problem of reinstating our benefits from the 2009 cutbacks. I have asked Ted Fernald to put together some data on the child tuition policy of the college and the kind of goals we want the Benefits Committee to consider. We have left this item off our agendas for some time and it is time to get started on it. The college endowment recovered in 2010, yet some of the adjustments made in the face of the fiscal crisis were never recovered. We need to communicate this problem to the Benefits Committee and pursue the issue further.

I have been asked to set up our meetings on Fridays when there are no faculty meetings and so we will meet on Friday February 10^th 12:30 to 2 pm and I will announce a full schedule of AAUP meetings for the Spring. That will be four weeks into the Spring term, time enough to have classes going at a good clip. It is also one week before the first faculty meeting and two weeks before the Board of Managers meeting. It seems timely enough for us to discuss the issues we have outlined above and certainly time enough to get out any letters we might want to send before things go on the agenda. Again, I appeal to everyone to get faculty to attend the meetings. I will try to keep them short and change the agenda around so that we can get to the issues that affect everyone.

The faculty have to struggle to get their own issues on the agenda of the faculty meetings. Instead, in recent years, we have been inundated with reports from administrators where no action from the faculty is required and where we have little input. Reports from the Dean’s office endless hierarchy or the public safety’s relationship with the FBI make the point. We need an agenda that reflects faculty interests in the curriculum and in our own welfare. Often our welfare turns out to benefit the rest of the community so it is imperative that we get an agenda and that we push forward to get the administration and the Board of Managers to respond. I am going to recommend at the first meeting of Spring semester that new people go on the COFP and those folks come to meetings and report back to the AAUP. We need friends on all of the important committees and we need to unabashedly push the interests of the faculty through the institutions we have at hand. If you have ideas about how to make the AAUP more effective I welcome them. It has recently been suggested that we look into faculty with Green Cards and the problem of representation and documentation. If you see a job that can be done and you are ready to help make that happen please come forward. Right now we are suffering a bit from Matt Zucker’s success with Sanctuary because a new committee is forming and he has been put in charge of it. This means that we need to get someone else to step in and help out with the minutes.

So I am closing with my thanks to all who have helped so much this semester. To Carr who has ever been in the background, helping AAUP get going, keeping up the web page and just being there for us. Thank you Matt for timely minutes, they help us with the web page and meeting announcements. Thank you Lynne for being there, ready to push the agenda along and Mark and Rich for your invaluable under standing of the salary question and your willingness to give us your time and input. Finally special thanks to Judy who has done so much work on our invitation list, who helps send out the meeting announcements and provides her valuable experience as an emeritus faculty member. The AAUP is a team sport, please come on in and join us. Finally thanks to all of our many “Vice Presidents,” who have ideas and share them. I hope you enjoy happy holidays. mm

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