The Point: Confronting Silencing on Campus

10/10/2024

The week’s Point is written by Anneta Argyres, immediate past President of the Professional Staff Union and Director of Labor Extension at the Labor Resource Center.

As public education workers, we pay attention to how voices are silenced. Most of our concern is aimed at ensuring that we don’t contribute to the silencing of our students’ voices. This is true in the classroom just as it is true in advising sessions, or when helping students in the library, at the IT help desk, at the counselling center, at the One Stop, etc. As an institution dedicated to inquiry, and as an institution overtly conscious of the on-going and historic silencing of specific voices, this attentiveness to our individual impact on silencing students’ voices is essential for us to truly serve and support our students.

But we don’t always hold our university’s administration to the same high standards to which we hold ourselves. Too many of us have experienced being silenced during meetings with managers, where we’re told that our experiences and observations aren’t correct, that our historical knowledge doesn’t matter, that we simply don’t understand, or that we’re just afraid of change. Our first-hand knowledge of our students’ and our own needs isn’t seen as valid, instructive or useful. Instead, we’re expected to silently do as we’re told.

Now there’s another place where we are experiencing silencing -- the bargaining table. Many of the UMB unions have started to bring silent bargaining representatives to bargaining sessions, as a way of ensuring that the interests of a broad range of our members are represented, and as a way of making the bargaining process more open and transparent.  We’ve learned from our fellow unionists in MA and across the country that union members appreciate getting insight into the bargaining process and gaining better understanding of what gets in the way of reaching a negotiated agreement. Even though recent court cases brought by public sector workers in MA have upheld our rights to so-called expanded bargaining, management at UMB has not welcomed these silent bargaining representatives at our bargaining tables.  While some unions have agreed to rules and limitations in order to move bargaining forward, we all get the fundamental message that our administration wants our collective voice to be limited.

It's important to understand that our administration is making a choice when it responds to our silent bargaining representatives by demanding limitations, just as administrators make a choice when they refuse to take seriously the concerns and insights of their employees.  By contrast, the UMass Lowell administration chose not to set limits on silent bargaining representatives at their bargaining tables, and instead welcomed them into the bargaining sessions and moved on with bargaining over contract proposals.  Sadly, our administration chose to go down a different, more restrictive, path.

Recently Steve Striffler wrote in this space about the new campus protest policy. While MA general laws protect our rights as unionized workers to engage in concerted activity, thereby ensuring our collective voice cannot be silenced, the policy as written takes significant steps at silencing our students’ voices. Another choice made by this administration.

I don’t presume to know what steps we should collectively take to address this pattern of administrative choices. But I do know that we can’t be silent. If we don’t take some collective action, they will continue to make choices aimed at silencing students, staff and faculty.