Collective vision & collective bargaining

...This difference is striking because the new film otherwise follows the plot of the old closely...

...Anarchy is a luxury of affluence...

...A professional employee offers specialized, limited technical expertise which may indeed be the basis for a management decision, but the Second Circuit argued that Yeshiva faculty are "in fact substantially and pervasively operating the enterprise...

...1 would suggest that both presidents and professors are equally and mutually tyrannized by the anarchic character of the university...

...The problem with these goal statements is that they are so transcendent that no one knows quite what they mean or how they are to be attained...

...2) NLRB argued that because faculty act collectively, e.g., through departments, committees or senates, they are not managerial...

...The General was shown about the premises and toward the late afternoon attended a meeting of the faculty...

...The faculty unions were, of course, outraged...

...University officials protested that Columbia had never promised so grand a result...

...No one asks about the ultimate goals of a plastics plant since it takes so many fixed decisions to keep the technology in operation...

...If logically pursued only the Board would be management, since administrators are equally subject to Board review and almost every corporate manager in the country has a Board of Directors with power to overturn decisions...

...DENNIS O'BRIEN is the President of Bucknell University...

...The issue is rather like trying to decide whether a hippopotamus is a bird or a fish...

...The student countered by entering in evidence the inscription from Columbia's buildings referring to sapientia and sophia...

...The ends for higher education are among the loftiest conjured by the mind of man...

...Holy Mother Church," he'd once told a solemn assembly of reverend Mothers and Fathers, "is a fat ass...

...The experience of God has to be tied in with the experience of the jet engine," he would say...

...The conclusion is that they must be "tyrannized" by somebody, e.g., the administration...

...The import of this new insidiousness which the invasion has in Kaufman's film would seem to be that it is not really an invasion, but a part of the natural evolution of things...

...He was afraid we might turn our back on our dynamism, forgetting that the saints pray to us to create the mystical body on earth...

...In their own eyes they seem as powerless as the most oppressed untenured instructor...

...The NLRB has formally appealed the Yeshiva case to the Supreme Court, and one does not envy the Court's task...

...Finally, in the modern era of participatory decision-making, the important university committees will have new students every six months, new faculty every year, and even presidents only last an average of four and a half years...

...Lee Iacocca was at one time and is no longer employed by the Ford Motor Company, but for all that he was not an employee entitled to unionize with his fellow vice-presidents in order to bargain collectively with management...

...What I want is the More than this, he assured us, "mysticism and technology most exalted meaning...

...They present a kind of collective governance for which we tlave no ready models...

...There is a more fundamental problem underlying this court case than an exercise in legal semantics...

...In Jacobsen vs...

...One of the most common faculty comments about the Yeshiva case is that they don't "feel" that they make decisions about the university...

...There is no point in the original at which the alien vegetation, the pods, are mistaken for a plant species native to earth...

...Labor law is written with the assumption that there is some sort of distinction, however delicate, between worker and manager, but the facts of much of higher education would argue that management is harder to find than employees...

...It needs no deep draught of cynicism to confirm that characterization of almost all colleges and universities...

...He quotes Mr...

...Like his intellectual heroes, Pollock inhabited one all-inclusive environment which embraced both spirit and the world of nature...

...Since this conclusion is a startling reversal of current legal doctrine and faculty selfperception, it is worth examining the court's argument...

...They are "organized anarchies...

...Being introduced, the new leader arose and said how pleased he was to be there and what a pleasure it was to meet "the employees of Columbia University...

...Many enterprises are governed by the facts of their technology...

...has an undeveloped technology...

...In fact, before the invasion even reaches this stage, it has already begun in the form of a peculiarly jellified water so indistinguishable from ordinary rain that no one (except us) notices it at all...

...belong together...

...It is not a case of seeking advice from the geology department about water tables before starting a construction project...

...4) The final point that faculty are subject to the authority of the Board is the weakest of the arguments...

...The question before the court was whether in a mature, private university the role of the faculty in decision-making constituted a "managerial" function...

...and there is "fluid participation" in the decision-making structure...

...In The Chronicle of Higher Education Paul Connolly, an associate professor of English at Yeshiva, excoriated the Court's decision on the ground that if the faculty at Yeshiva were so free to manage the institution, why had they been forced of late to accept heavier teaching, reduced sabbaticals, postponed tenure decisions, and a host of other administration-imposed nastiness...

...Stunned silence...

...The court thought none of these grounds was sufficient...

...The hero, Matthew (Donald Sutherland), is a public health officer in San FranCommonweal: 52...

...I Screen CLONING AROUND INVASION OF SUPERMAN I N THE original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel in 1956, there is a clear distinction between Them and Us...

...9 . ." One is hard pressed to know how to apply that AAUP language when an AAUP bargaining unit is in negotiation with "management...

...but in the new movie, the invasion begins with the appearance of a beautiful parasitic flower which people innocently pick to wear in their hair or put in bud vases...

...These three components have joint authority and responsibility for governing the institution...

...I think he could have prayed in the new East Building of the National Gallery-- his kind of space...

...Like Sturzo, Pollock felt that for four hundred years Catholic intellectuals had been largely unconscious, abstracted from and athwart the central movement of history--and that meant profoundly out of tune with what God was doing in time...

...I N MY JUDGMENT, the Court's argument that faculty are not employees is much stronger than the NLRB's that they are--and yet no one can be quite satisfied with the outcome...

...Like the "open" middle ages he loved, he wanted to embrace the protean abundance of creation in all its diversity...

...THE ADVERSARIAL MODEL VS...

...This is the mark of the Christian soul, a soul that wants to be in time, to naturalize, terrestrialize itself...

...Is the faculty bargaining with itself as joint manager...

...At the same time, a balance is needed in the whole apparatus (the administration and/or the Board) to guard against original sin...

...In a unanimous ruling by the three-judge panel, Yeshiva University won an appeal against the National Labor Relations Board to the effect that its faculty were not employees under the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act...

...On the basis of the Court's arguments and my own experience in private education, I am inclined to agree with the summary conclusion: It is clear that the Congress when it amended the (National Labor Relations) Act in 1947, had no contemplation that it would be applied to professional faculties in private institutions of higher learning...

...Shrinking finances force choices--one falls back on the bottom line...

...The conclusion drawn was that the interests of the administration (putative management) and the faculty were at least coextensive if not identical...

...Collective bargaining becomes the alternative to collective vision...

...This made for a mind like Gregory Bateson's or Buckminster Fuller's, one that draws connections where you were sure there were chasms...

...Finally, a senior member of the faculty arose and said, "With all due respect, sir, we are not employees of Columbia University, we are Columbia University...

...The faculty are probably correct in feeling "powerless," but the proper understanding of that sense of frustration is not assisted by reconstructing the university on the labor/ management model offered by NLRB...

...Section 2 (1 l) splits an infinitive in stating that a "supervisor" must have authority "to effectively recommend.., action...

...The Court noted that there was really no legislative history which would clarify the matter of collective or individual decision-making and that the Board had been quite clear (NLRB v. Bell Aerospace) that a managerial group excluded from the bargaining unit exercised their functions as a "team" without for all that ceasing to be managers...

...Even professors might vote to sell the library to raise salaries--chopping down the Tree of Knowledge to get the fruit...

...In arguing its case, the NLRB stated four grounds for why faculty at Yeshiva were not managerial (1) faculty are professional employees, not managers, (2) faculty act collectively not individually, (3) faculty act on their own behalf not in the interest of the employer, (4) faculty are subject to the authority of the Board of Trustees...

...Like Teresa of Avila, he could see no conflict between devotion to God and thoroughly enjoying a hearty meal of fine partridge...

...He was a great friend of the Italian priest-sociologist and political leader, Don Luigi Sturzo, and they collaborated in writing Del Metodo Sociologico...

...In the first place, Yeshiva is a private university and as such labor relations are determined under federal legislation, namely, the National Labor Relations Act...

...In sum: no one in particular seems to be deciding what imprecise tools should be used to approach unknown goals...

...For ages, he thought, humans have been battling their way into time...

...The anarchic state of the universities is of relatively recent date, but what has brought matters to the point of collective bargaining is the financial crunch...

...Columbia, a student sued Columbia University on the ground that the institution had not provided him with wisdom...

...Surely someone should organize against that state of affairs...

...The three marks of an anarchy are: the institution lacks any clear definition of ends...

...Judge William H. Mulligan (a former Dean of the Fordham Law School) concluded that the faculty's role was just that...

...And it is the administration, paradoxically, that has insisted that the faculty is managerial and supervisory, in order to restrict faculty power . . . . " In short, if the Yeshiva faculty were to be declared employees, they would then be able to exert the very managerial functions which would preclude them from being employees...

...said it destroyed transcendence and he preferred many a warehouse...

...it is the professor of geology sitting on a faculty committee which is recommending an extension to the library...

...Two general points: first, an individual may well be employed by a corporation but not be an employee in the strict meaning of the National Labor Relations Act...

...We, the Yeshiva faculty, have had to insist that we are non-managerial and non-supervisory in order to organize ourselves into a body that can reassert its managerial and supervisory power...

...Pollock's Catholicism was not so much Roman as it was of a kind that predated the great 16th century schism in the western soul, and equally all those Cartesian divisions of mind...

...Faculty will prove no more canny than administrators, I am sure, in solving the basic financial straits of higher education, but at least the problem of allocating resources will be addressed by an authoritative voice...

...In Phillip Kaufman's new version, however, the distinction seems less clear...

...A second qualification of the Yeshiva ruling is suggested by an am&us brief filed by Commonweal: 50 several private colleges which introduced the notion of a "mature" institution to the discussion...

...Colleges and universities are not properly labor/ management institutions...

...The Court argued that there seemed to be scarcely any actual instance that could be pointed to where the Yeshiva administration did not accept faculty recommendations...

...Americans were a quantum jump in this process, and their experience required a new statement of the religious life, one adequate to a new form of contemplation and spirituality...

...Their governance is unique and has no counterpart in the commercial business models the Act was designed to regulate...

...The real problem with colleges is not who are the employees, but who are the 2 February 1979:51 managers...

...The common plaint of college presidents when they gather is that they can't really do anything on their campuses...

...The Yeshiva ruling is carefully restricted...

...What is needed is not faculty unionization as much as stable participation by duly authorized faculty in the basic decision structures of the university...

...Yet Pollock was nothing if not a transmitter and animator of a great Catholic heritage...

...State universities are governed by state laws which may or may not permit in some fashion the unionization of state employees...

...A nice rhetorical turn to play on a General of the Armies...

...The moon shot, he knew, was a profound psychic event, no less inner than outer...

...Whether that anecdote is true or not I have been unable to verify, but the claim of the legendary senior faculty member appears to have received unusual confirmation in a recent judgment of the United States Second Circuit...

...His God was not the post-Tridentine legal supervisor, but the self-expressive God of Bonaventure and the Oxford Franciscans (and of Edwards and Emerson, he claimed) who creates, out of sheer ecstatic love and joy--a poet's universe, fit for dreaming and making...

...It will not bring that future nearer if we insist that one of the few extant collectively governed institutions adopt the adversarial model of competing social classes...

...He had trouble worshipping in a neo-Gothic church...

...If Columbia wasn't offering sophia, why was it advertising it on every architrave...

...Bumble--"the law is a ass"--but goes on to accept the basic argument of the Court in a striking paradox...

...3) Perhaps the most fundamental point is whether the faculty act on their own behalf or on the behalf of the employer...

...Riparian appearances aside, I suppose it is more like a bird than a fish--but in truth it is neither...

...As long as presidents had ample funds to allocate they could permit institutions to ride off in all directions at the same time...

...He was buried in the earthy brown habit of Francis, the saint who hymned the sun--and the earth...

...the essential and overriding idea is that the enterprise is joint...

...SELF-GOVERNMENT 49 . 4 9 9 9 C o l l e c t i v e v i s i o n & collective bargaining I I DENNIS O'BRIEN O NE OF the longest running tales in academia is that of Dwight D. Eisenhower's initial day as President of Columbia University...

...And on his funeral memorial card was this statement of his on the Eucharist: "I don't want the most common meaning...

...In an absolutely sober argument, Michael Cohen and James March have argued that colleges cannot be regarded as being managed at all...

...This from a man who edited a book titled The Mind ofPius XII, a mind I think he deeply disliked...

...Everyone spends so much time finding out what the problems are that there is no time for solving any of them--and besides those problems are already history...

...Colleges are very low technology affairs (excepting science research) so that the level of tending is often not far above cleaning the chalk boards...

...The Court quoted an AAUP policy statement to the effect that it regards proper university governance to lie in shared authority among faculty, administration and Board of Trustees...

...A mature university is an institution in which there is firm historical precedent for faculty involvement in major decisions...

...The second general point is that managerial authority is not under the Act necessarily decisive authority...

...In some more enlightened age one could hope that more of society's institutions would move toward collective governance in which "workers" will participate in "management...

...1) In a case involving General Dynamics, the NLRB determined that even though an accountant in his capacity as a professional could "cause a change of company direction or policy which is based on his professional advice alone" this did not qualify him to the status of "manager...

...Semi-arbitrary judgments are made in order to balance the budgets, but these decisions win only minimal acceptance since the institution participates in no common goal...