Dadublogger

Dadublogger - Last week, in a note about my piece on Nick Coleman's column about school closings, King from the SCSU Scholars quipped "I'm not going to be the only edublogger in the NA for much longer, at the rate Mitch is going. ".

Thanks, King! But my only qualification as an edu-blogger is having two kids in school...

...or so I thought, until I read this piece in SCSUScholars, which brought back memories of the one semester I taught, as a community faculty member, at a MNSCU university.

One of my more interesting experiences was my exposure to the InterFaculty Organization (IFO), which is the MNSCU teachers union. When I signed on to teach, I was given the option; join the IFO as a full voting member for $112, or join as a "fair share" member for $100. I figured it was worth being a full member, if only because forevermore I could tell my DFL friends while debating "are you actually a union member? No? Well, i am, you scab!"

Now, I'm not clueless about the life of the teacher and the college professor. My dad has taught at high schools and colleges for the last 40-odd years, some of my best friends are professors, and I know it's not all easy. That being said, I doubt anyone's confused it with a sweatshop.

It was at faculty orientation that I learned different. The school's IFO steward - a skinny English prof who looked a bit like Don Knotts via James Taylor - visibly seethed with anger when he talked about the recent negotiations, teeth at one point gritted when he described the Regents' negotiations, as if he were Cesar Chavez addresing a band of Mexican farm laborers rather than a group of well-padded, ultra-educated Midwesterners. I looked around - the faculty were nodding along, although to be fair I don't know if they were nodding with him or nodding at him. I fully expected him to lead us in a Wobbly Woody Guthrie song before he left the podium.

All by way of saying, the IFO is not without its agenda, and those agendas fit comfortably with all our other teachers unions.

King from the Scholars reprints Scholar Dave's letter to the IFO regarding their current letter writing campaign:

I share with you my dismay at the stance taken by (and even the existence of) MnSCU. Since its inception I have noted:

• a serious "dumbing down" of academic standards toward mediocrity at what used to be our flagship state university here in St. Cloud,
• a growing siphoning of taxpayers' dollars away from our students to fund a largely redundant and ever burgeoning administrative bureaucracy in St. Paul,
• evidence of finger-pointing between the Chancellor's office and SCSU's Administration with respect to accountability for the settlement of lawsuits,
• a failure to establish quantitative goals against which progress can be assessed,
• an alarming and growing collectivist bias toward micro-managing our local affairs (down even to the level of seeking to design our university's transcripts),
• an apparent lack of respect for the unique talents and efforts that university professors bring to our profession, and
• an apparent unwillingness to bargain in good faith.

Over the past two weeks I have expressed these feelings in two separate e-mails that I sent to the IFO (action@ifo.org). My hope was that they would be added to you website's list of comments ...

My first question, Mr. Brown, is why have my comments not yet been posted?

Read the whole thing - and, in fact, if you're concerned with education at all levels, you owe it to yourself to read the Scholars daily.

Posted by Mitch at February 16, 2004 05:02 AM