Join us this Friday for an important NTT organizing meeting! (July 17 3-4pm)

7/15/2020

Dear NTT colleagues,

Thanks to all of you who joined via Zoom last Friday afternoon, to help us keep connected and keep supporting our NTT colleagues at UMB.  There is much work to be done!  

We'll meet again this week on Friday, July 17 from 3-4pm, and hope to see you there! (contact the FSU office for Zoom info)

Keeping this email brief, we'd like to point to the new working groups that came out of our meeting, and to invite you to join them if you did not already.  Please contact FSU or one of the team-members via email if you'd like to join and help out!

1)  The Letter and Op-Ed Writing (and Media Outreach?) Team:

It was agreed that one thing we can and need to do is to change the public narrative, on and beyond campus, to get people to understand the issues at UMB, and get them to see why they should care about the (mis)treatment of NTT faculty, the lack of state funding for UMB, and the danger of degrading learning conditions at Boston's only public university--one that serves a majority working-class and "majority minority" student body.  If we can tell our stories--and get students to as well--we can win public support that we need.

Team:    Linda Liu (Sociology), Melanie Morgan (English), Tracy (and/or someone else from ESL or Academic Support), Sandra Howland, Joe Ramsey

Possible faculty with local media contacts: Rachel Rubin, Erin O'Brien, Joe Ramsey, WUMB

2) Researching class size and course listings

We also agreed that we need a better sense of exactly how many classes are currently unstaffed, and how many are full but TBD in terms of the professor.  (We may have other research tasks pressing too!)  

Team: Amy Todd, Rob Morray (Math), Tracy Brown, Linda Liu

3)  Outreach to Students, Student Activists, and Anti-Racist Organizers

We agreed that students are a key source of potential allies, and that especially in this current moment, the links between the interests of NTT faculty and UMB students--majority non-white, working-class, and first generation college students--are profound and potentially powerful.  Thus we want to develop a student outreach strategy in general (reaching out to student groups broadly) as well as targeted outreach to anti-racist student activists who have already shown interest in fighting UMB cutbacks.  

Volunteers/Contacts:  Tracy Brown & Joe Ramsey, Others needed!

4) UMB Faculty-Parent Alliance

We agreed that parents are a key source of potential support, yet mostly untapped.

Team: Amy Todd, Others needed!

5) FSU (and NTT!) Outreach to MTA

We agreed that having a sitd-own with MTA leadership could help us to make sure that UMB and NTT concerns remain at the forefront of our state-wide unions agenda, and that we can make sure that more of our concerned NTT colleagues are able to be involved in and can play a role in shaping MTA actions and strategy going forward.  

Team: Joe Ramsey, Jon Milman, Others?

We hope to help these teams come together, grow, and develop a plan for good work in our next meeting on Friday, July 17 from 3-4pm!  Please consider joining one of the teams, or proposing another one, or reach out to friends and colleagues who you think might be interested in helping out.

Together our union, and our NTT faculty, has a lot of talent, skill, and power.  It there's ever been a time to tap it, now is the time!

In solidarity and with best wishes,

Your NTT Faculty Staff Union Ex Com Representatives,

Tracy Brown, Academic Support & ESL

Caroline Coscia, Political Science, FSU Vice President

Monique Fuguet, Mathematics

Linda Liu, Sociology

Joe Ramsey, English and American Studies