NEIUPI

The EIU chapter of UPI are entering mediation…some of their contract issues overlap with ours…

Faculty ready signs for picketing

By: By Shelley Holmgren/Administration Editor
Posted: 11/2/10

Signs that stated, “We already bleed blue, do we need to bleed red, too?” were spread throughout the Effingham Room of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Union on Monday.

Members of the Eastern chapter of University Professionals of Illinois gathered to create protest signs in support of the faculty and staff during the ongoing UPI/EIU and administration negotiations.

The demonstration, which will happen on the north end of Booth Library on Thursday, will take place in conjunction with the first visit from the federal mediator. This will be the first time that both sides will meet with the federal mediator since they first agreed a mediator was needed on Oct. 5.

Read more at DENNews.com…

One of our colleagues forwarded a story about SUNY that has interesting parallels to our own institution.

World Class on Planet SUNY

For an institution of higher education — especially one that wants to be in charge of its own destiny — the State University of New York has a lot to learn.

For starters, it could figure out how to stop hurting the very image that it says it wants to improve.

Here’s SUNY, full of conflicting signals about its financial state. There’s a system that seems to be on the fiscal ropes, in which a school like the University at Albany halts admissions to its French, Italian, Russian, classics and theater programs as a way to close its budget gap — a prelude, many expect, to eliminating those subjects altogether.

And in just the last week, we’ve seen SUNY’s landmark central administration building closed after a flood that insiders say might have been caught sooner if not for staff cutbacks that left it empty after hours. A laid-off security chief for SUNY had only recently told a state Senate panel that the cutbacks were leaving the building vulnerable.

Read more at the Albany Times-Union…

Within days of our administration requesting federal mediation, the EIU chapter of the UPI was requested to do the same. Here’s an article from the local newspaper describing the issues confronting EIU/UPI.

Disagreements call for federal mediator

Shelley Holmgren/Administration Editor
Issue date: 10/14/10

Representatives of Eastern’s faculty union and the university’s administration have agreed that a federal mediator is needed to continue making progress toward a contract.

Jonathan Blitz, UPI/EIU chapter vice president and chief negotiator and professor of chemistry, said both sides agreed that it is time to bring in a federal mediator after only minimal progress was made at the last negotiating session on Oct. 5.

Robert Wayland, chief negotiator for the university administration said, “the administration agreed to proceed with a mediator to try to make progress through bargaining.”

Members of the UPI hoped not to come to this measure, Blitz said.

Read more at Daily Eastern News…

If you did not have a chance to stop by the UPI tables this week to pick up the latest materials, please find attached to this email a comparison of NEIU faculty salaries to institutions identified by the administration as comparable to NEIU. You will also find a comparison of NEIU faculty salaries to other Illinois public universities identified as IIA (Master’s), with the exception of one, none were identified as comparable to us.

Using an AAUP report on faculty salaries, the percentile rating for NEIU faculty salaries by rank was estimated and compared to other Illinois public universities. The percentile rating by rank is especially revealing about how poorly paid the NEIU instructors are relative to the national figures for IIA universities…NEIU instructors are below the 10th percentile. Unfortunately, I did not find a similar study to use when estimating the percentile rating of NEIU Academic Support Professionals and can only conclude that their rating is probably similar to that of our Instructors.

The AAUP salary study also examined Presidents’ salaries compared to those of full Professors. Using the ratios computed in this national study, it appears that our President’s salary is 3.74 times greater than the average salary of an NEIU full professor.

Please participate in the nationwide survey on contingent faculty (non tenured) conducted by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce. You can access the survey at:

Survey of Contingent Faculty

More about the Coalition on the Academic Workforce appears below.

About the Coalition on the Academic Workforce

The Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) is a group of higher education associations, disciplinary associations, and faculty organizations committed to working on the issues associated with the deteriorating faculty working conditions and their effect on the success of college and university students in the United States. Specifically, CAW’s purpose is to collect and disseminate information on the use and treatment of faculty members serving full- and part-time off the tenure track and the implications for students, parents, faculty members, and institutions;

• articulate and clarify differences in the extent and consequences of changes in the faculty within and among the various academic disciplines and fields of study;
• evaluate both short-term and long-term consequences of changes in the academic workforce for society and the public good;
• identify and promote strategies for solving the problems created by inappropriate use and exploitation of part-time, adjunct, and similar faculty appointments; and
• promote conditions by which all faculty members, including full- and part-time faculty members serving off the tenure track, can strengthen their teaching and scholarship, better serve their students, and advance their professional careers.