SIUC faculty union leaders are questioning the dismissal of four term faculty members at Nakajo and are promising a full-scale investigation to determine the motives involved in their dismissal, faculty union vice president Bary Malik said.

Calling it the Nakajo debacle, Malik said the union is investigating the reasons why the faculty members were dismissed, whether their dismissal was legal and whether it conflicted with the doctrine of shared governance.

John Jackson, vice chancellor for Academic Affairs and provost,

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said declining enrollment at the Nakajo campus prompted the dismissals.

Jackson said the declining enrollment can be attributed to ailing Japanese and Asian economies.

Nakajo is no stranger to funding problems. Last March, SIU President Ted Sanders said the school could be closed. SIUC agreed to accept Yen rather than U.S. Dollars from the Pacific School Entity, the business organization that operates the school. This agreement saved the school.

We continue to struggle as have all universities, and most of them have all left, he said. We are one of about three universities left of dozens who went there in the 1980s.

There typically are 12 or 13 faculty members teaching at Nakajo. Four to five of those are core faculty from SIU who teach in Japan. Eight are term faculty who teach only English as a second language.

He said the ESL instructors contracts expire yearly and that four of the instructors did not have their contracts renewed.

He said traditionally SIUC would hire ESL instructors. He said, however, that negotiations with the Pacific School Entity over spring break concluded with SIU giving the Entity the right to hire ESL faculty.

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Faculty union president Jim Sullivan said the four dismissed faculty are not members of the bargaining unit but that they were paying union dues.

They are association members, and we feel we are obliged and want to do whatever we can do to help them in their professional plate, he said.

We are startled by the brevity and apparent callousness in which they were treated, and we’re looking into it and think President Sanders should do the same.

Both Sullivan and Malik maintain that Jared Dorn, director of Nakajo, gave too short a notice of informing these faculty that their contracts would not be renewed. Sullivan said the dismissals are indicative of a national problem of mistreating term employees. Jackson disagreed.

We gave them notice the 15th or 16th of March two months ahead of May (when their contract expires), he said. We have no obligation to give them any notice at all because the face of contract gives them notice when they are hired.

Jackson said there is little the union can do about the dismissals because term faculty are not a part of the bargaining unit.

Those faculty are not a part of the bargaining unit so there is nothing the union can do, and again and again the union keeps saying they don’t want term faculty, so if the union wants to make an issue of this, it’s a stretch.

Malik also said the union is investigating whether Dorn, who will become SIUC’s international director Aug. 1, acted with malice when determining not to renew the faculty contracts. He said Dorn may have acted in a retaliatory way when dismissing the employees because some of them had filed grievances against him.

Malik would not comment on what type of grievances have been leveled against Dorn.

We want to determine if the wholesale firing was a way to retaliate for those grievances, he said.

Jackson said the grievances had nothing to do with the dismissal. He said declining enrollment prompted the Pacific School Entity and SIU to determine the dismissals were necessary.

Because of the accusations against Dorn, Sullivan said his appointment as SIUC’s international director should be put on hold.

We should forgo any appointment of international director until the systems policies and procedures regarding faculty tenure and dismissal are investigated, he said.

Jackson said Dorn was revealed as the best candidate by the University and the search committee that named him. He said any postponing of Dorn’s appointment will have to be discussed at the bargaining table.

He was the legitimate product of the search, and we don’t plan to change that process, Jackson said.