Professor Perillo accurately described SIUC as a place where congeniality and mutual respect ruled and political squabbles rarely diverted our energies from doing our real work. But not now. The union has resorted to calling non-members an uncaring and uninvolved minority. Am I to join to avoid the shame? I am not so sure that as a non-union member I constitute a silent minority. About 200 faculty go to meetings, and according to some sources, a maximum of 40 percent are true dues payers. Perhaps, before writing this letter, I was one of the silent majority. I don’t know.

I do know that University governance and salary headaches are real and annoying, and the evidence is strong that administrative positions have increased while faculty lines have decreased. SIUC is still reeling from the PQP attack that caused program cuts and evidence of low faculty salaries and more part-time positions add to the misery. The faculty union is a monument to these annoyances, which were recently made even more stark by the ratio between professors’ salaries and what the new chancellor will take home. The administration has to address two ratios:close the gap between administrator and faculty salaries, and reverse the pattern of more administrative jobs and less full-time faculty positions. So far the administration posture is of aloofness and delay.

The union has to keep pressing, but so far the petty attacks on individual administrators (who all were fellow faculty not too long ago), the unnecessary hits on John A. Logan College (the faculty of which are often our former students), and the claim that professor lifestyles are seriously threatened by low pay (we’d all like a raise, but let’s be real) keep me from joining. And picketing and striking are especially harsh and divisive in a university community that had always nurtured the sweeter voices of reason and compromise.

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The fragile relationships that hold academies like SIUC together are being strained by insensitive administrative delay, confrontational picketing and strike talk. The daunting task of writing down most everything we do in a contract format seems an impossible task, given the current level of confrontation. Both sides must mature and get beyond this stage. The unpleasantness is diverting many of us from our real work.

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