A MUST read for anyone interested in why the UW faculty may need than a union.

The story abut a great Seattle University faculty member living and dying on $18,000 is not unlike stories about our own adjunct faculty.  Even tenured faculty in the humanities at UW are paid ridiculously low salaries.

This is simply a matter of priorities.  Who sets the priorities for the UW?  The fact is that the words “shared governance” are largely meaningless.  The UW Faculty Senate is toothless, little more trhan a sounfing board for the decisions made by an administration that all too often is not made up of academics.  We need a functional Senate that can make academic decisions about how the University’s resources should be spent.

What make me cautions about about efforts to have a union at the UW is the race to the bottom in K-12 teaching.  This is especially true in high schools where unions, working as they must  for the majority of their members,  have fought against efforts by President Obama and Secretary Arnie Duncan to create a  more progressive pathway for promotion of faculty with more knowledge of content.  Superbly qualified UW graduates, even those with PhDs, are supposedly not qualified to teach in the public schools.  Even if these graduates go to the effort of getting a teaching credential, specialized knowldge does not make them competitive for public school jobs.

The same pattern certainly can affect higher education.  Read this story about how a ministry in Japan is trying to force that country’s universities to divest themselves of education in the humanities.

If we are to pursue a union, its job ought to begin with redefining the powers of the faculty senate!