[lbo-talk] seems 99% sure

[Alan Rudy]

The court session last Friday was really interesting… the (quite
conservative) judge got pretty irked pretty fast and, within an hour and a
half called the lawyers into his chambers for a three hour engagement…  We
are now enjoined from a work stoppage but can picket  and hold rallies, etc…
until twenty days after the two sides finish their work with the
State-appointed Fact Finder, who is - by some accounts - finding more facts
on our side… however, the Fact Finder's findings are not binding and 60 days
after the end of negotiations recent laws passed allow the admin to impose
on us whatever they've been pushing for.  At the same time, the judge
effectively forced the admin to allow us to shift our co-pays from 5/10 to
10/20 thereby resolving the main "Oh my goodness, the health plan they want
is so expensive it'll break the university to pay for it!" argument just as
the Faculty Association had long said it would.  Some other minor things
were resolved in our general favor but many many sticking points remain.

The very best thing that came from all of this has been how many
connections, affiliations and associations have been built.  In addition to
the FA's strength, great numbers of local businesses dependent on university
salaries have rallied to our side and when we couldn't picket the faculty
union at Ferris State coordinated with the grad student union at UofM and
undergrads here and they picketed for us for a day.  Had we been able to
continue to picket deliveries to and construction on campus would pretty
much have ground to a halt.  Local newspapers have sought to write in
"balanced" fashion but usually start with problems tied to the admin's
stances, and the student paper - to pretty much everyone's surprise -
appears to be able to see through the fog: "They like us, they really like
us!"

What's clear most of all is that CMU is definitely a test case and winning
here is what conservatives really want so that they can build momentum
crushing faculty and teachers across the state.

I think it is very important to note that this is not a Research I
university… where Wojtek and Joanna's descriptions clearly hold - there's
not been a peep of support from MSU or faculty at UofM that I know of.

 These battles are not and can not be initially won at Research I schools,
they can and may be won "below" those lofty heights in places where students
matter a great deal more than cost recovery from external grants and patent
licensing and technology transfer.

As always,

Alan

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:45 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> This has been the trend since the eighties. I was at U.C. Berkeley since
> this "rationalization" of the university started to happen. Greatly aided by
> the gradual withholding of public funds from the universities.
>
> But "academic entrepreneur" is much to polite a name for it.
>
> Joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Wojtek S" <wsoko52 at gmail.com>
>
> Any new development here?
>
> While we are at this, it seems that universities increasingly turn
> into sweatshops in which academic entrepreneur characters attract
> paying clients and hire cognitariat i.e. workers (such as junior
> faculty or grad students) producing intellectual commodity for these
> clients.  Such academic entrepreneur characters not only benefit
> financially from these arrangements, but also seem to become very
> influential within the university system, while the cognitariat works
> for very little if anything at all.  It seems that both academic
> entrepreneurs and university administration is happy with this
> division of intellectual labor and does everything they can to keep
> the cognitariat in its place in that system.