Getting Right To The Point

5/18/2020

Colleagues,

This week I am going to get right to The Point: please read and consider signing this document—a letter in support of laid-off instructors at UMB which will be sent to the campus upper administration. 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeJPvg2uLUCPdkLNgw1KiMJZJWsi3ykyu46KT5vNCtIsc4Nbg/viewform

Keep in mind that the Commonwealth has a $3 billion dollar “rainy day fund” and the UMass system has considerable reserves.

*The proposed layoffs are devastating for both faculty and students, especially as Fall enrollment remains strong

*UMB should be planning to lower – not raise -- the student/faculty ratio for Fall 2020

*The university's fiscal health remains sound compared to the other UMass campuses

*UMass Boston has yet to do what universities across the country have done and cut the salaries of upper administrators

Department chairs have been directed by upper administration to “Never slip and call this a layoff” nor to “speak of this…as a kind of ‘pink slip’” (See here for coverage:  https://bit.ly/3g2Tghh). Managing the rhetoric of non-reappointment is very different from developing a sustainable and ethical way forward in the midst of this crisis. The bottom-line is that more than 200 faculty who stepped up this semester to minimize the disruption caused by Covid-19 on our students are now unemployed.

Please read our colleague Clarissa Eaton’s powerful and evocative “A Casualty of COVID-19 Employment Cuts Speaks Up,” just published in Inside Higher Ed, for one response to these cruel austerity measures (https://bit.ly/2Tb6TRB).

This is your union: please send your stories and ideas to fsu@umb.edu as we advocate for NTTs and all our members in these trying times.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Melnick

Graduate Program Director, American Studies Department

Communications Director, Faculty Staff Union Executive Committee

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