By Richard Levy, Brad Hubeny and Dan Mulcare | Dec 14, 2020

Furloughs for faculty, librarians and support staff are incredibly harmful to students in so many ways. As such, they are bad policy per se.

However that, there is a particularly insidious angle to what has happened at Salem State University. Because he arbitrarily and unilaterally decreed all faculty and librarians members take a furlough outside the legal contract process, President Keenan is breaking the law. Instead of uniting the campus during this uniquely stressful year, President Keenan instead chose to violate Mass General Law 150E, undermining an already overworked faculty and librarians’ ability to adapt to pandemic teaching and leading to an unfair labor practice complaint with the Department of Labor.

Along with violating labor law, if the furloughs are legitimized, then a precedent is set for President Keenan and the Board of Trustees to ignore the faculty contract, and any other contract, at will. These are not idle concerns: at their May 27 Finance Committee meeting, some trustees questioned why the board must abide by the contract in the first place. This precedent could lead to not only to further non-bargained furloughs for faculty and staff, but also to layoffs and retrenchment in a manner that disregards bargained agreements. Once Salem State sets this precedent, it opens the gates to management at other public institutions of higher education, public K-12 schools, those who work for mass transit, fire departments, police departments, and any other Massachusetts government institutions.

In short, decreeing furloughs undermines both the rule of law and the ability of unions to function as unions.

There is an additional question as well. Should the commonwealth pay unemployment benefits for illegal and unneeded furloughs when Salem State has enough money in its reserves to pay faculty and librarian salaries? Is it even legal? Given that President Keenan and the board have not prioritized advocating for increased state funding for public higher education, it is ironic (if nothing else) that they now demand that the state pay part of the salaries of faculty, librarians, and staff — at a time when they are legally prohibited from doing ANY university work, whether it be teaching, preparing for classes, advising, connecting with students, conducting research etc. If Salem State is later found to have violated the law, it will still have profited by only having to repay faculty and librarians the difference between what they received from unemployment and what they should have received were there no furloughs.

Read the full article on The Salem News.

By Cherry Lim | Sept 8, 2020

Columns share an author’s personal perspective and are often based on facts in the newspaper’s reporting.

Education can be the great equalizer in our socially unjust society. And I’ve seen firsthand – through my family and now in my career – the critical role community colleges play in creating opportunity for students across our Commonwealth regardless of language, race, or income level.

When my parents arrived as refugees in the 1980s, they knew limited English. But in taking English classes at Bunker Hill Community College, they were able to give my brother and me more opportunities than they had. Today, I work at Bunker Hill Community College as an Academic Coordinator, helping students from all different backgrounds succeed every day.

Funding for community colleges has changed drastically since my parents attended Bunker Hill Community College. But as our state and higher education executives issue reactionary cuts and reopening plans in response to COVID-19, the future of community colleges, not to mention our students’ futures, hang in the balance. We need our public higher education leaders to do their jobs so future Bunker Hill students, and community college students across our Commonwealth, can continue to get the same high-quality education my parents had.

Accessible, affordable education opportunities – like those for over 10,000 students at Bunker Hill – have proven time and time again to be the backbone of the economy during a recession. However, while Massachusetts is often touted as the most educated state in the nation, we’re 26th in the country in funding public higher education. This underfunding from our local and state governments threatens to cripple our campuses at a critical moment, and our college leadership is failing our staff, faculty, and students in not advocating for more resources.

In the midst of a global pandemic and economic recession, Bunker Hill Community College is stuck. As an academic advisor for English Language Learners, students have confided their struggles to me. While I’ve joyfully met my students’ children and families for the first time, I’ve also shared in the sadness when students confide that they don’t have internet at home or face financial aid restrictions.

Investment in community colleges from government and public higher education leaders could restore critical opportunities for these students and stabilize our economy. Yet our leaders haven’t provided the resources we need. Instead, it’s fallen to my colleagues and me to fill the void left by recent cuts, so our students don’t get left behind. We’ve spent countless hours on video, phone, and email working with our students and their families. We’ve loaned out hundreds of Chromebooks and we’ve delivered hundreds of pounds worth of food. While we take pride in our solutions, we also know we’re fighting an uphill battle. Our leaders have shown they would rather cut support services for students than advocate for the funding we all deserve.

This funding is all the more urgent in light of COVID-19. Our campuses need more funding to ensure a safe return to campus. Unlike our private, four-year counterparts, Bunker Hill Community College simply lacks the resources to maintain the highest standards of safety in the face of a disease we still do not know much about. Even at our satellite campus in Chelsea, one of the cities hardest hit by the pandemic, staff are being asked to return to campus to see students, but haven’t been provided the necessary PPE. By opening campus during this tenuous time without the appropriate resources, we’re not only exposing our most vulnerable populations at the college, but our communities as a whole.

There will be some folks out there who believe that education should be one of the last priorities to fund right now. In a time where unemployment claims are at record highs, the argument goes, we cannot afford to fund public higher education at the same levels as the last 20 years.

But our public higher education system is a driver of opportunity, equity, and employment that benefits our entire region. We may live in uncertain times, but education has, without fail, increased wages for all who pursue it. Our leaders, who never shy away from praising the resilience of our students, pass the buck when it comes to getting those same students the resources, support, and funding they need to continue their education safely and successfully.

Now, more than ever, public higher education leaders must recognize that an investment in our students is an investment in our economic future.

Cherry Lim is an AAPI Academic Coordinator at Bunker Hill Community College.

Read the full article on The Patriot Ledger.

By Merrie Najimy and Max Page | Aug 27, 2020

‘We can’t cut our way out of a pandemic’

Massachusetts Agrees that public higher education has always been one of our calling cards, providing access to high-quality learning for students from all walks of life, regardless of income, language, or race. The education our students receive informs our future for generations to come. We teach our students to value science, health, and most of all, each other — so why do our funding policies tell a different story?

Since the start of the pandemic, public colleges and universities across Massachusetts have made debilitating cuts and instituted widespread furloughs and layoffs. The University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees recently laid off 500 workers — many of whom are essential in maintaining safe, functional campuses. The university has declined to rehire hundreds of adjunct faculty and furloughed 3,000 more educators.

This situation is mirrored at public higher education institutions all across Massachusetts. From our small community colleges to our state universities, campus executives are cutting the very staff and resources that make our Commonwealth’s public higher education system one of the best in the nation.

It’s becoming clear the consequences of the proposed cuts will both damage the futures of our most vulnerable students and jeopardize the standing of our entire public higher education system.

A few examples provide a stark look at the human and educational costs of these cuts:

• UMass Amherst, the system’s largest campus, has told departments to make $30 million in cuts or else face potential layoffs. [News outlets reported 780 furloughs are planned for this fall.]
• Springfield Technical Community College is closing seven certification programs including student certificate programs with a 90 percent post-graduation employment placement and laying off 21 tenured faculty from those programs.
• UMass Lowell has failed to recall 28 percent of the adjunct professors for fall, and has increased the class size and course load of other faculty. Furloughs, salary reductions, or workload increases apply to all employees. One hundred full-time campus staff positions have been eliminated with additional layoffs expected, even as the Uuiversity has added a third shift for cleaning and maintenance. Nearly 1,000 total jobs have been cut, including teaching assistants, graduate employees, student employees, and other workers.
• Salem State University imposed four weeks of furlough for professional staff, proposed a 13 percent pay cut for faculty and librarians, and is planning to downsize its instructional staff.

Who are these cuts affecting most? Most often, the students who can least afford to lose. Students who are the first in their families to go to college. Students who speak different languages and come from different backgrounds, but share the same dreams of a bright future for themselves and their families. Students from low-income communities who rely on campus jobs, housing, and support services to reach their academic and career goals.

Public universities are an essential launchpad for underserved students. Bunker Hill Community College serves a population that is 67 percent students of color, many of them first-generation college students. Similarly, UMass Lowell’s student population is 32 percent first-generation college students, and 40 percent students of color. Springfield Technical is one of only three Hispanic-serving institutions in Massachusetts.

We can’t provide an equitable education for all students while simultaneously dismantling our most accessible campuses. We can’t cut our way out of a pandemic.

The choice between cutting staffing or educating students is a false one. Some of our universities already have the necessary resources set aside for just such a moment. The UMass Foundation’s total portfolio in 2019 was $973.3 million — more than enough to preserve staffing and programs. Our state also has the resources to preserve and protect public campuses, by increasing funding and filling the holes left by this crisis. No campus needs to go it alone.

It’s time for public higher education administrators to get creative. It’s time for executives like UMass President Marty Meehan to use his influence to push for increased funding — rather than cuts. It’s time for the leaders of our public higher education institutions to stand with faculty and staff to develop a robust health and safety plan that includes adequate PPE and free COVID-19 testing.

In this critical moment, it’s time for all of us to defend and invest in the future of our Commonwealth, instead of cutting it to the bone.

We urge President Meehan, Higher Education Commissioner Carlos Santiago, Gov. Charlie Baker, and leadership across our public higher education system to work together to preserve and protect the quality of higher education in the Commonwealth. To act thoughtfully, with an eye towards the future, before it’s too late to safely and smartly reopen campuses across the state. We are committed to providing a high-quality public higher education in Massachusetts to empower our next generation of scientists, teachers, and critical thinkers. We believe that Massachusetts agrees.

Merrie Najimy and Max Page are, respectively, the president and vice president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which represents more than 18,000 workers on Massachusetts public higher education campuses.

Read the full article on CommonWealth Magazine.

By Anthony Szczesiul | Aug 25, 2020, 1:45am EDT

As anyone who lives in the Merrimack Valley region of Massachusetts knows, the University of Massachusetts Lowell has undergone a complete transformation over the past decade. The most noticeable difference is the campus itself, with over a dozen state-of-the-art buildings appearing over the years. These physical changes have kept pace with UMass Lowell’s tremendous rise in the national university rankings, emerging as one of the top public universities in Massachusetts.

However, in the face of a global pandemic, UMass President Marty Meehan and the UMass Lowell administration have forgotten that it’s the people, not just the buildings, that are essential to our university’s future. UMass Lowell needs to preserve its workforce if it is to emerge from this pandemic with its core educational mission, and its core values, intact.

The UMass Lowell community of workers includes the university faculty such as myself, along with the hundreds of staff members charged with supporting and promoting all aspects of student life and wellbeing. These workers provide students with critical resources outside the classroom: guidance on academic and career paths, advice and support on financial aid options, a rich array of extracurricular opportunities, and much more.

The workforce includes the graduate student workers and part-time faculty members who earn too little and do too much, but who show up every day because they believe in the ideals and value of higher education. And our campus wouldn’t be whole without the university police who respond to emergencies, the food service workers who feed the students, staff, and faculty, and the maintenance and trades workers who keep the campus clean, safe, and welcoming for a full educational experience especially now, as the university prepares an eventual return to campus.

As a whole, we make the university’s core values and mission possible. Ten years ago, when current UMass President Meehan was Chancellor of UMass Lowell, the university outlined these values in our 2020 Strategic Plan, which named five “Pillars of Excellence” that have guided our work over the past decade. Chief among these pillars is “Entrepreneurial Stewardship,” which claims that an “entrepreneurial approach to stewardship of human, physical and financial resources (would) … be the hallmark of UMass Lowell’s approach to building a healthy and sustainable future.”

When the 2020 Strategic Plan was initiated, there’s no way anyone could have predicted that the timeline would culminate in 2020 with the challenges of a global pandemic. Still, “entrepreneurial stewardship” would suggest that the university draw on its greatest resources — its human resources — to overcome the many new challenges we face. The university has a wealth of faculty expertise on issues of public health, work environments and safety. It also has world-class engineering faculty who are trained to engineer solutions to complex problems, and it has a staff of skilled maintenance workers and tradespeople who can put these solutions in place.

Instead, UMass President Marty Meehan has chosen to go it alone, taking the “austerity” route with top-down, corporate-style decisions, and with personnel cuts that will have a profound effect on both student education and campus safety. President Meehan’s actions have disproportionately damaged our workforce and eroded the trust between the university and its community of workers. At UMass Lowell, a five-day furlough of one of our maintenance and trades workers only saves the university about $800, but even as the union was working to negotiate alternative ways to achieve comparable savings, the administration began unilaterally laying off its workers.

These same “essential workers” also had to pressure the university for months for appropriate protective equipment during the pandemic, even as the university’s Advancement Office was producing “River Hawk Face Coverings” as a fundraising strategy. These actions have damaged the uniquely collaborative, can-do culture that had become a hallmark across campus over the past ten years. They have also jeopardized the talent and resources our campus will need most to navigate a safe passage through the challenges of the pandemic.

It is easy to take pride in one’s stated values when times are good, but it’s more important to act according to these values when times are challenging. Instead of whittling away at the university’s greatest resource, Marty Meehan and the UMass Lowell administration need to listen to faculty and staff and work with us to secure the resources we all need to keep our campus safe and preserve its future.

Anthony Szczesiul is a professor in the Department of English at UMass Lowell, researching American poetry, 19th and 20th century American literature, and Southern literary and cultural studies.

Read the full article on the Lowell Sun.

By Jenny Adams | Aug 23, 2020, 6:56pm EDT

University and college administrators have long fantasized about online instruction.

Here’s how the fantasy goes: professors create online courses, the school owns these courses, and the school sells them again and again.

Some university and college administrators have used COVID-19 to make this fantasy a reality. As UMass Amherst cancels in-person classes and instruction shifts online, the administration has helped us transform our courses. At the same time, it has used the pandemic to lay-off “nonessential” workers, often claiming that there is insufficient work to go around.

I’m a faculty member in the middle of shifting my teaching online, and I’m here to tell you: there are no nonessential workers and there is still plenty to do. For starters, putting my courses online is a team effort. Librarians have spent hours tracking down articles for course pages. Information technology support staff have traded in their summer vacations to build up our remote teaching capabilities. The center for teaching staff has surpassed itself to provide training for online instruction. When I open Zoom to meet my first class later this month, I will be the only teacher on the screen. But in reality, many people will have contributed to that moment.

Nor is it just courses that take collective labor. Recreation center trainers have created online workouts so that people can stay healthy at home. Cleaning staff still keep our buildings clean so faculty can access resources in their offices. Maintenance crews still make sure that the buildings don’t fall apart and that students will have a campus to come back to.

And speaking of coming back to campus, some of our students are doing just that.

Some never left and remain stranded from countries they can’t access. Others will escape unstable living situations to seek the structure and stability of college. Even those who do not return need the support of a learning community that also looks after their personal well-being. Those resources also take human labor. Student psychological services, legal aid, career services, and advising all require human resources. Those parts of campus have become more important, not less, during this pandemic.

My university, like most others, functions like a body. We are interconnected parts working together with one goal: to teach, mentor, and nurture our students. So far, my university administration has carefully tended to this body. They have put in countless hours to care for its members and recognize each for their hard work.

At the same time, a few in the UMass system and in our State House have used the pandemic to push for amputations. We already have a level budget — we don’t need more reductions. We need to stay whole and healthy so that we can serve our students through this crisis and beyond.

In this critical moment, we call on our administration to stand with us, preserve our campus and our students’ futures.

Jenny Adams is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at UMass Amherst, her current research focusing on academic debt and university life in late medieval England.

Read the full article on the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

By Hilary Burns  – Associate Editor, Boston Business Journal | Aug 3, 2020, 2:57pm EDT

Higher education faculty and staff across Massachusetts have launched a campaign claiming that public campuses are unprepared for students to return this fall amid the pandemic.

More than 20,000 workers from the Bay State’s 29 public campuses have banded together and created a multimedia campaign to “warn parents, students, and elected officials about what they say is a lack of preparation on public higher education campuses,” the group said in a Monday press release.

The faculty and staff behind the campaign, called “Massachusetts Agrees: Defend public higher education now,” argue officials at public campuses have not done enough to advocate for funding while moving quickly to lay off and furlough employees.

Max Page, vice president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said in an interview that the group believes public higher education leaders should have asked faculty and staff to join in a campaign to advocate for more state and federal funding when the coronavirus pandemic first struck. He believes that cutting faculty, staff and programs could have a detrimental long-term effect on the schools and communities they serve.

“Behind closed doors, they are ignoring the voices that make public higher education what it is: The staff. The faculty. The parents. The students. The workers. The community,” reads the campaign’s message, which will air across the state on television and social media platforms.

“At a time when the White House is abandoning science, we need public higher education executives like UMass President Marty Meehan and Higher Education Commissioner Carlos Santiago to step up and do more. Right now, they’re coming up short and eliminating one student program after another,” the message adds.

UMass spokesman John Hoey said Meehan and the campus chancellors are “making a fact-based case every day for state and federal investment in UMass during this unprecedented financial challenge.” 

UMass officials have also “implemented a series of strategic efficiency and effectiveness measures that have saved $124 million over the last several years, and recently initiated a centralized procurement system that will save another $15 million to $20 million by the end of this fiscal year,” Hoey added in an emailed statement. “These actions have made financial aid increases possible, and allowed the university to freeze tuition for in-state students for the upcoming academic year.”

The UMass system has been “fully engaged with public health experts and each of our campuses’ surrounding communities in planning for a safe fall semester for students, faculty and staff,” according to Hoey.

The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education did not respond to a request for comment. Santiago did call for more public higher education funding at a Board of Higher Education meeting in January.

“Over time, Massachusetts’s support for higher education has slipped – cuts imposed more than a decade ago still resonate today,” Santiago said in January. “Our system is old-fashioned compared to many states with most of the money ‘block granted’ to individual institutions rather than following the student or providing incentives and rewards for performance.”

The new campaign, which is led by the Massachusetts Teachers Association and other representatives of workers within the state’s public higher education system, said that higher education leaders “should be leading the charge for additional funding to restore staff cuts and should be tapping into reserves.”

In addition, the coalition is calling for robust health and safety measures to be implemented across all campuses, including mandatory wearing of masks and free testing. Many buildings on public campuses have inadequate ventilation and crowded facilities, the group claims.

“Above all, this is an appeal to the employers within the public higher education system to work with us, not against us, as we attempt to preserve safety and the integrity of education for public higher education students this fall,” said Margaret Wong, an English professor at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester. “Our employers are shirking their responsibility to not just the students, faculty, and staff, but to the surrounding communities.”

Finally, the group is calling for a full reversal of all layoffs and program cuts made since the onset of the pandemic. The campaign said dozens of student programs have been cut in the past month including seven certification programs at Springfield Technical Community College and the Childcare/Early Education Center at Quinsigamond Community College.

“Through these cuts, the public higher education administrators in Massachusetts are creating not just a potential public health crisis, but also a crisis of equity,” said Merrie Najimy, President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. “Using the pandemic as an excuse to dismantle programs and to cut thousands of higher ed staff at the universities and colleges that disproportionately serve low-income students and students of color is a disturbing approach, one that needs to be reversed and rebuked. That’s why we are taking this campaign to the airwaves statewide.”

Several higher education institutions have announced budget cuts this summer. The coronavirus pandemic has strained colleges’ budgets by creating a bevy of financial investments in order to transform campuses into safe havens and move curriculums online. The pandemic has also created uncertainty around revenue as institutions do not know how many students will return for in-person classes this fall, or how many will enroll at all as the country continues to grapple with the coronavirus.

UMass Lowell, for example, said in late June that the university anticipated a fiscal year 2021 budget hole of more than $50 million — “a deficit significantly larger than anything we faced even during the 2008 economic downturn.” To balance the budget, UMass Lowell Chancellor Jacquie Moloney said that the institution would temporarily lay off about 100 people and said an additional 100 employees were leaving through retirement, buyouts and other departures.

In addition, UMass Amherst is asking departments to find $30 million in cuts within the next few weeks after the system said it would freeze in-state tuition for the upcoming academic year, MassLive reported. If the departments don’t make the cuts, layoffs are possible.

Read the full article on the Boston Business Journal.