NEWS & EVENTS (BenOrtiz.com)

[Photo Detail: CCC Board Meeting 11-4-04:
My cat Sneezer seizes the microphone from Chairman James Tyree and Chancellor Wayne Watson – Sneezer managed to meow in Union support before CPD rushed and took down the cat.]

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"Your life insurance has been cancelled by admin .... so, you know ... don't die."
--Advice from the picket line

Friday, November 5, 2004

Much has come to pass since the last report, as I expected to wake Wednesday in a city over-run by flesh-eating zombies under epic carnage raining down from the heavens in scumbuckets filled with dirtbags of excreta, viscera, and sickly-smelling handywipes.

And such has – in a figuratively, magically sick way – pretty much come to pass.

“We’ve got BUSH…we’ve GOT Bush…”
--Revenge of the Nerds

OK, it’s not all bad news. Bits of TV coverage from Wednesday’s Millennium Park Candlelight Vigil and Thursday morning’s picket of the CCC Board meeting seemed fair, if sparse. And hired PR hands are smoothing over the rough edges of the Union’s info insurrection, with regular e-mail blasts and ads in local radio (WBBM AM, WLS AM, WSCR, WMVP, WPMX, WAKE, WBEZ) and print.

But a rally at CCC Board Chair Tyree’s office this morning and campus pickets today have been pulled back – it sounds like conciliatory negotiations might be afoot, as the strike takes a Friday off.

Nonetheless, reports describe a really contentious Board meeting yesterday morning that provoked confrontations over public access and the arrest of a student. Details about the scuffle between a Malcolm X student and security, with subsequent arrest, are spotty, but the Union claims its lawyers are on the job to defend the student who was trying to get into the meeting despite arbitrary Board restrictions.

The Union also called on Tyree and Watson to be present at negotiations scheduled for Friday, but the two shrugged off the invite, opting as usual to send Board lawyers to the table. (These lawyers, by the way, make more per hour than tuition for a City College class or two.)

For a taste of the Board meeting, I’ve pasted below an especially eloquent address given yesterday by a Harold Washington teacher.

At the meeting, Board members also threatened to cancel classes that are on hold because of the strike, and students tell me the summer semester is also in danger of cancellation. Obviously, the dirty tactics continue, as one Truman humanities adjunct had her paycheck-deposit reversed by admin for unspecified reasons, this after a dean barged into her class with threats against supporting the strike.

I don’t suppose anyone out there needs extra help around the yard for a few bucks? “Do you have a vacancy for a backscrubber?”

POST-SCRIPT: "Dirty little duchy of decadence" has now become my favorite term of reference for the downtown CCC Board bunker.

--B

Address to the City Colleges Board
Peggy Shapiro, Harold Washington College
Distinguished Professor 2004

"Chancellor Watson, Chairman Tyree, Board, and Colleagues:

The last time I was here it was to receive an award as Distinguished Professor and the time before to demonstrate some outstanding developments in my FL/ESL Department at HWC. Since then I have received $3.22 worth of mail from the same administration that once honored me now telling me that I was under-worked, overpaid and greedy. So obviously I have some questions, and since you appear to have all the answers, let me ask you.

The administration boasts that 70% of classes are covered by adjuncts. These adjuncts are educators who can earn a maximum of $8,000 a year with no benefits, who are rarely independently wealthy, who need to teach at 3-4 institutions in order to pay their rent, and who usually don’t have the time to stick around to advise students, develop curriculum, or participate in committees, and who usually move on in a short time for a real job or at least a real salary. Paying so little for educators? What are you so proud of?

You say that we have a financial crisis, and it certainly seems so. Since Chancellor Watson took office, my department has suffered over 66% decrease in its budget and our college lost all its counselors. We buy many of our supplies with discount coupons and out of our own pockets, often because we get better deals retail than we do through "Board-approved" vendors. With such enormous cuts in services for students, how can we afford to pay our chancellor a salary higher than that of the Mayor of Chicago or the governor of Illinois?

You want to increase my health insurance premiums almost 400%. ($834-$2,818) and increase my deductions another $2,000 a year. If we are forced to increase health insurance premiums, shouldn’t the process begin from the top down? How can you justify totally free health insurance for top administrators and their families for life since this is not Enron but a public sector job? Isn’t there a value to moral leadership?

I am not speaking theoretically. I just hired a talented young teacher at a salary of $38,000. With our residency requirement, he needed to move into the city and now pays higher rent, but he doesn’t get the housing allowance that you get. We also require that he spend $5,000 a year for additional graduate courses. Now with your proposed increase in his class size and almost 10% of his gross salary going to medical insurance, how can I keep him? And if he leaves how can I hire the best and the brightest to replace him?

When I started at the City Colleges, the Central administration was housed on one floor of what is now Harold Washington College. Now you occupy 14 floors of prime real estate across from the Sears Tower and according to your directory, employ 286 people. Most of your Central Administration departments are duplicated by the same, not more efficient, departments at the local colleges and your other responsibilities are outsourced for multi-million dollar contracts with American Express and Sync Solutions. Central Administration is a place where no education takes place, yet it gorges itself on a larger share of the budget than any of the colleges.

My final question is how can you justify paying part-time professionals $7-9 dollars an hour, paying our nursing faculty for only one of every two hours they teach, increasing class sizes, and raising health insurance premiums to an unbearable burden? If this costly building and its seven-million dollar administrative payroll were to disappear, who would notice? In other words, we must make the choice: a bloated administration or quality education? I CHOOSE EDUCATION. What do you choose?"

Posted by Benjamin at November 5, 2004 01:58 PM