Some faculty union members call the administration’s December counterproposal, inadequate, short-sighted, antiquated, regressive and authoritarian.

However, not all faculty share their scrutiny as some non-union members say they have not been following the contract-negotiation process between the administration and the faculty.

Meanwhile, administrators are not responding to the association members charges, saying such discussion should be done at the negotiations table, not in the public.

The SIUC Illinois Education Association/National Education Association turned over their more than 90-page contract proposal in June. Five months later the administration responded with a 32-page proposal. Both proposals are available on the faculty associations homepage, (siuc-faculty-assoc.org).

Jim Sullivan, faculty union president, said the administration’s proposal not only fails to address faulty concerns, it also takes away some faculty rights currently spelled out in the employee’s handbook.

At best the employee’s handbook was very conservative and purely advisory with no legal teeth, Sullivan said. But it was the result of decades of language building around policies and procedures.

Now the current administrative counterproposal doesn’t even acknowledge those understandings.

Union member and former faculty negotiating team member Mary Lamb, said the administration’s counterproposal does not contain provisions about sexual harassment. She further said the administration’s proposal to cap research at one-third of faculty members’ assignment time and requiring faculty to have greater office hours is unreasonable.

Currently, each department chooses the maximum amount of hours of research for faculty.

Lamb also said placing faculty on the 11-month contract proposed by the administration further makes research difficult.

Whoever wrote this proposal has no contact with teaching and research at all, she said. The two consequences of this are brain drain and that teachers no longer have the opportunity to conduct research and are not able to keep up with the nuances in their field of teaching.

This leaves us unable to recruit good faculty.

Administrators will not discuss the faculty reaction and these issues. They say such discussion belongs at the bargaining table.

All I’ll really say is that we are getting dangerously close to conducting negotiations in the press, said Tom Britton, an administration negotiating team member and vice chancellor for Institutional Advancement. And that is something that the University and the association have agreed not to do.

As a part of defining ground rules in March, both the administration and faculty agreed not to discuss issues in public.

Margaret Winters, spokeswoman for the administration, also refused to comment on the proposal but said that she too was concerned about negotiating in the media. She said she became concerned after reading a Friday Daily Egyptian letter to the editor from Lamb.

Sullivan said the faculty realizes what the boundaries are when speaking publicly.

The association has a right within legal limitations to express faculty reaction to the proposal rendered by the administration, he said.

And for Al Melone, an association member and professor in political science, that reaction is anger.

This proposal is a one-way street, he said. You can’t have a 33 percent cap on research if you are seriously devoted to maintaining this University as a Carnegie II research institute.

We should be working together to become a better University, not working to make this the largest community college in Southern Illinois, Lamb said.

Lamb said that the proposal could be an effort to create a management-induced strike. She said Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson, the law firm which partly represents the University in contract negotiations, has a history of such union busting.

Seyfarth & Shaw is one of the largest labor law firms in the nation and has a history of representing management in union negotiations. Seyfarth & Shaw represented the SIU administration in the faculty’s failed attempt at unionization in 1988. Some faculty leaders claimed the firm used delay tactics to help defeat popular support of the union.

They may be trying to break the union by creating a management-induced strike, she said. The technique is to make an unacceptable offer so that the union strikes before their membership is solidified.

An ineffective strike would be the end of everything and a carte blanche to the administration to do whatever it wants to faculty.

Though some faculty are angered by the proposal, some faculty said that they do not have the time to follow the contract negotiations saga and would not comment.

Gordon Bruner, an associate professor of marketing, said he simply has not had time to follow the negotiations process.

I understand the concern and frustration of faculty, but I’m not an anarchist and I’m not going to throw my students out of class and go marching in the streets, Bruner said. A lot of us didn’t go in this job for the great pay, and a lot of us here are just too busy teaching to follow this.

Only if you are really angry do you have the time to read documents and attend all those meetings.

Don Perry, an associate professor of marketing, has not been following the negotiations because he intends to retire within a year. However, he said the University will be best served by developing a mutually beneficial contract.

For a University so concerned about its place competitively speaking in the state of Illinois this is the wrong time to show that it cannot function in a cooperative way, Perry said. This disruption or the inability to compromise will have heavy negative effects on student enrollment and resources.

Sullivan said both sides must meet more often if such a compromise is to be reached.

It is far from being too late to revive an attempt at interest- based bargaining and the creation of understandings, he said. We absolutely need to meet more often and in bigger chunks of negotiating time to create movement toward one another in the bargaining process.

There have been two negotiating sessions in the last two months. The next session is Friday. Sessions average up to six and a half hours each.

Sullivan said that since the administrations counterproposal was unveiled in December, bargaining has been painstakingly slow. He said, however, that concluding negotiations by March is still possible if both sides work together.

Our negotiating team will do whatever it takes to get a tentative agreement by March 1, even if that means working 74 hours around the clock, he said. The $64,000 question is whether the administration is willing to pursue a full and reasonable comprehensive agreement by March.