SIUC seems to be following a national trend to reduced tenured faculty and hire instructors on a per-class basis. Like other industries, universities and colleges have discovered that this pattern of hiring reduces overhead in the form of competitive salaries, pensions, and benefits. It’s good business but bad leadership, and it certainly doesn’t attract the quality of faculty necessary to develop the excellence in teaching, research and service we hear so much about.

Look beyond your own graduation and you’ll recognize that this debate is critical to our interests as students. Departments on this campus are increasing class sizes, reducing course choices or substituting teaching assistants and temporary instructors where nationally recognized faculty used to stand. The issue is more than what day you’ll graduate. It relates to the value of that degree after you graduate. Maintaining that value is the reason alumni invest in their alma mater and the reason we students may have to sacrifice some of our own short-term interests to get behind efforts to address the long-term.

Faculty are being treated as common laborers. And students are being treated as a commodity measured in terms throughput, retention and costs per unit. When we return to a real collegiate atmosphere, where leaders replace managers and the emphasis is on knowledge rather than the bottom line, the need for a union may disappear. In the meantime, even laborers and craftsman have a right to a decent living and a means of supporting their families commensurate with their talents and skills. Unfortunately we live in a system that often requires they band together to protect those rights.

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