Perhaps you have to feel a little sorry
for the administrators at the University of Oregon. For at least a
generation, it's generally been a good career move to show trustees
that you can bust faculty and student chops at will; Miles Brand
parlayed his pre-Shock Doctrine wet work as president of UO in the
early 1990s into getting hired for more money than God by Indiana
University to kneecap the previously untouchable Bobby Knight. And,
not surprisingly, he went from there to being Executive Director of
the NCAA.
And yet, the UO
faculty finally unionized a couple of years ago after decades of
watching as their employee rights and powers of self-governance got
trampled.
And now – is there really no limit? –
from Corey Robin at Crooked Timber
comes word that U
of O grad students are on the edge of going out on strike. Just
in time to throw all the end-of-term grading into a cocked hat. That means that, for
every grad teaching assistant with grading responsibilities (and
unless things have changed drastically since I was in the business,
that's most of them), there are somewhere between, say, 20 and a
couple hundred students who may or may not get their final grades on
time. That's what we call a force multiplier
The issue at stake is unpaid leave for
illness or childbirth. The city of Eugene guarantees it for all city
employees, but the employees at UO have no such arrangement. The grad
students opened and reopened negotiations with a university whose
bargaining position fell just shy of running to the dictionary to
refresh their memory of the term "bad faith" before each
go-round.
Pity the administrators. Where do the
rabble think they are? Don't they understand that the University of
Oregon is a multi-platform entertainment provider operating as a
nonprofit corporation that, for historical reasons, is also empowered
by the state to award college credits?
As Erik
Loomis at LGM points out, the administration is handling
this in just about the most ham-fisted manner imaginable, featuring a leaked
memo to deans and department heads outlining strategy in the event of
a strike. Spoilers: It includes discussion of bringing in scab workers,
plus heavy reliance upon Scantron final exams and
indefinitely-delayed grade reporting. Again, I haven't been in the
biz for a good while, but I do wonder somewhat if the UO admin feels
embarrassment, as Loomis predicts. I would predict it's more like
mystification.
To their everlasting credit, a
dozen UO department heads and program directors have signed an open
letter promising that, while it's not their preferred outcome,
they will resign rather than implement any strikebreaking activities
the university might be contemplating.
Unless something surprising happens
during the holiday week, the strike begins on December 2.
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