ORGANIZING ALMA MATER:
Aman, Kenneth
ORGANIZING ALMA MATER KENNETH AMAN Strike on New Jersey campuses On November 18, local #1904, the branch of the American Federation of Teachers which represents the faculty, librarians and...
...bound to affect many other public employees in New Jersey, since the salaries of all state employees have lagged seriously behind those of other workers...
...Some college teachers have a newfound sense of commitment and militancy...
...assistant professors —for whom a Ph.D...
...But would their personal interests be hurt by supporting it...
...The settlement, such as it was, was almost an anticlimax...
...Organized strikes by faculty unions have been very rare...
...economy, but in its way the teachers' strike was significant...
...What is to prevent a cutting back of minority enrollments...
...Some wrestled with the grand issues: was it moral to walk out and insist upon better salaries when every day's newspaper brought more reports of layoffs, or of people desperately trying to meet the pressures of inflation...
...Even at the New Jersey state colleges membership in the faculty union is not particularly high, perhaps 50 percent at Montclair State for example...
...With all the murkiness, some students decided to become involved...
...Instructors now make a bit more than $10,000...
...Other faculty members let their decisions rest on whether or not they felt they could stand the personal financial pinch...
...Legislators and administrators are already arguing that budget pressures require cutbacks...
...Few could maintain the light-hearted mood for long...
...The walkout did not exactly steal the thunder from the miners' strike and its dark possibilities for the U.S...
...With rumors of imminent detenuring, massive cutbacks in student aid and jumps in tuition, faculty and students are running scared in most states of the U.S...
...Students met, argued, broke up in indecision...
...After battling the state for well over a year, the union finally was granted a 6 percent increase in salaries last February...
...This refusal was in clear violation of the present contract which calls for negotiations to begin October 1. It was not difficult to decipher the state's motivation...
...Individualistic college faculty members found it difficult to accept the discipline and decision-making procedures members of other unions take for granted...
...A new strike for February is a distinct possibility if negotiations break down...
...The State of New Jersey is scarcely used to recognizing faculty much less to making important concessions...
...The call for a strike authorization vote at the end of October came as a distinct surprise to most of the faculties...
...Perhaps the whole issue would go away if we simply continued teaching in the old familiar style...
...There is one new component...
...A few hard-nosed students apparently were willing to run over a picketer or two...
...The state of New Jersey faces a record budget deficit of close to seven hundred million for the present fiscal year...
...Faculty tend to become tightly nestled in their own departments, at home there and blissfully ignorant of the rest of the campus...
...historians and mathematicians got to know each other for the first time...
...In New Jersey nothing much is settled but it is at least clearer that much is at stake...
...Philosphers discovered the music department...
...A union meeting was hastily called...
...For young faculty members saddled with debts from graduate school, sometimes with children and mortgage payments, the loss of even one paycheck can be a fearsome thing...
...Would tuition payments go up, for example, to help pay for higher salaries...
...Student leaders tried desperately to straddle the fence...
...On the other hand, the faculty and students have surprised themselves by their willingness to stand together...
...he was arrested...
...No one seemed to know what to make of the strike, or quite what to do...
...The state finally agreed to negotiate, but nothing was promised...
...One faculty member at Trenton State lost his temper and shoved his fist through the windshield of a student-driven car...
...for their pains they came off as politicians (like state officials, administrators, and union leaders...
...Now it became crucial to force the state to support higher education for the poor, to hold down the level of tuition...
...Giving in to some faculty demands might mean giving in to the perhaps even more urgent demands of other groups of state employees...
...Nor was this ambivalence totally free of snobbery...
...Most students felt at least some sympathy with the strike...
...is now virtually mandatory—start at about $12,000...
...The strike has pushed these issues to the fore and they will not be so easily dismissed...
...Still, once the strike began, there was a high percentage of young, low-paid instructors on the picket line, while many full professors in the $25,000 a year bracket crossed the picket lines...
...Shouldn't there be more protection for faculty with unpopular political views...
...The issue of faculty salaries receded...
...This was enough for the faculty...
...ORGANIZING ALMA MATER KENNETH AMAN Strike on New Jersey campuses On November 18, local #1904, the branch of the American Federation of Teachers which represents the faculty, librarians and certain other personnel of the eight state colleges in New Jersey, went out on strike...
...In fact, the very existence of faculty unions is a fairly novel phenomenon...
...This is the New York metropolitan area, where the cost of living is increasing at a faster rate than it is nationally...
...The first day, students wandered about the campuses, enjoying the sudden respite from classes...
...There are small, militant groups of faculty members who are determined to force the union to go beyond simple bread-and-butter issues of self-interest, and to face up to substantive issues of educational policy...
...But this particular sentiment and warning struck a sympathetic chord among many of the striking faculty...
...This, as opposed to the clear undermining of the strikers' efforts by every faculty member who chose to teach...
...Still, they will never be quite the same again...
...For the first time, faculty and students are united in opposing tuition increases and the issue of no tuition hikes has become a union demand...
...This strike was Kenneth AMAN is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy/Religion at Montclair State College in New Jersey...
...Walking a picket line was a new kind of educational experience...
...He stressed that it was being closely watched across the country both by union organizers and by administrators...
...When it became clear that the strike would happen, faculty members were faced with an unaccustomed and unpleasant decision...
...No one seemed to take the strike vote too seriously...
...The vote was 2-1 in favor of authorization for a strike, but there were definitely faculty members who voted "yes" simply to give the union leadership more leverage, never thinking they would actually be asked to walk a picket line...
...Yet there was something ominous about picket lines, empty classrooms, teachers attempting to teach three or four students...
...Faculty salaries have not come close to matching the increase in the cost of living...
...More important, a radicalization began to occur right on the picket line...
...On some campuses there were more students than faculty on the picket lines...
...The vast majority were relieved to get back to things familiar: teaching, preparing lectures, committee work...
...The stakes in the dispute were large...
...Given the comfortable individualism usually characteristic of college professors, many doubted that a faculty union could ever get it together in an all-out strike...
...Some students attacked the striking faculty as being only interested in money...
...The place and time were unbelievably bad: New Jersey, well-known for its lackadaisical attitude toward higher education (47th nationally in per capita aid), in a year when unemployment was nearing 9 percent...
...others argued that unless the faculty took a united stand, the power of the state in education would become overwhelming, undermining the position of student as well as of teacher...
...College campuses of course have been closed down before, but the impulse was usually either political or local (for example, arbitrary dismissal of certain faculty members...
...None has ever occurred with anything like the scope of the New Jersey strike...
...Should the present trend toward more vocational programs in state colleges (often a ploy for class-oriented education) be allowed to continue...
...By delaying negotiations the state hopefully could either freeze faculty salaries altogether or grant minimal increases...
...I am not just a truck driver" was a sentiment I heard more than once...
...Most faculties are still represented by more genteel (and more local) professional organizations—if they are represented at all...
...the faculty were told that the state was refusing to negotiate the contract for the next academic year...
...After experiencing energetic student support on the picket lines, faculty attitudes began to shift...
...At the very beginning of the strike, Bob Neilsen (in charge of the fledgling college wing of Shanker's AFT) underlined the crucial nature of this strike...
...In general, the assurances of national support from the AFT were more depressing than morale-boosting...
...Significantly, very large numbers of faculty simply did not vote...
...Anyone interested in the direction of higher education was also likely to be concerned...
...Some pointed to the moral responsibility to teach the classes they had agreed to teach...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 13
