Margaret West has worked for Edmonds Community College for 21 years, serving for more than a decade on her union’s executive board, and for most of that time serving under her American Federation of Teachers contract’s “Assurance of Employment” clause. She has joined administrators to testify on behalf of education funding and led the faculty bargaining team, according to Phil Ray Jack on AFT’s FACE Talk, in no less than six bargaining negotiations.
But shortly after she announced that she was the unopposed candidate for president of her local, and would therefore become the first part-timer to lead the unit, a dean with less than a year on the job terminated her.
Why? she asked.
“Because I can,” he replied.
This does lead one to wonder about the worth of the “Assurance of Employment” clause–it doesn’t seem to have modified the at-will relationship in this case. I’d like to hear more from Phil Ray Jack, or someone with close knowledge of the contract, about this one.
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Comments
This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under academic labor system, administrators, real institutional sleaze. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Doesn’t the AAUP have a clause that hadles a situation like this and, given the details given here, enough evidence of egregious abuse of a long-term contributer to the teaching faculty at the school to initiate an ethics investigation as soon as possible? If, by some strange omission, th AAUP has failed to set standards for faculty–even part-time long-term faculty–then that is a sign that the AAUP itself may be in need of serious reform, for to fail to make provision for such a member of the academic labor force would reveal an elitist, exclusionary, and ethically unjust splinter in it’s own eye: that it only seeks to protect faculty they consider tenured or having served in a capacity deserving tenure. The AAUP claims to be the watchdog to protect ALL educators in higher learning institutions, even graduate student teaching assistants, so I feel certain they must have specific, documented standards that govern how such cases should be handled, and I believe Margaret West sould contact them immediately and request an investigation.