This might be a propitious time to reassess where we have come since electing to be represented by a faculty union some 16 months ago. I preface my remarks with the confession that I am neither a union member, nor do I hold any sort of administrative appointment. I suppose this places me in what an earlier letter termed the silent majority (with apologies to Spiro Agnew and company).

1) The entire atmosphere on campus has reversed from a community of scholars working toward a common ideal to an industrial model pitting management against workers in perpetual conflict.

2) The level of acrimony on campus has magnified manyfold. Members of the administration, even those who continue to teach classes and carry out scholarly activities as we do are vilified. Department chairs, faculty as surely as we, are cast as enemies. Administrative and professional personnel, providing valuable support for much of what we do, have been alienated by what they perceive to be threats to their own jobs by the faculty union’s contract proposal. Perhaps most disturbing of all, ordinary faculty have turned against their brethren and question one another’s loyalty, integrity and intellectual honesty. Even students are personally attacking one another concerning this situation.

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3) Gag orders of various sorts have descended upon the University community, once a bastion of free exchange of ideas. Anyone that might be loosely termed and administrator is now prohibited by law from discussing certain issues with faculty or even mentioning them. Faculty and administrators alike are kept in the dark about the issues being discussed at the bargaining table.

4) The funds appropriated by the state for a salary increase, greater though we wish they might be, have been thus far refused and are in danger of being lost forever. This loss would be particularly disturbing as union membership and fair share dues will result in net salary cuts.

5) The level of polemics has reached absurd, and even offensive, proportions when faculty are equated with starved and tortured slaves of previous centuries, and we are informed that the faculty union would surely have the endorsement of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King were they only alive to say so for themselves. I imagine we will next hear that one side or the other has been blessed by some deity.

6) The only issue which there seems to be genuine consensus amongst faculty is that salaries ought to be higher. Why then are we told that after 16 months, the bargaining teams have yet to begin serious discussions on the issue, the openly one that truly matters most to faculty?

7) The SIU president has been criticized by some faculty for his K-12 background and a perceived insufficient emphasis on higher education. Yet at the same time, the union chooses as its national parent organization the National Education Association, with a history that is certainly no better in that respect. In fact, the union’s own mailings suggest that the NEA has little interest in higher education.

8) We are working at cross purposes. All agree that increasing University funding would lessen problems on campus. Since these revenues are tied to enrollment, some of us spent hours on the telephone attempting to recruit new undergraduates. Yet now we find some of our faculty colleagues undermining all our efforts:the picketing and public rancor will certainly result in decreased enrollment, exacerbating a difficult situation.

I submit that we are committing institutional suicide.

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