letters
TO THE EDITOR
THOSE DIRTY BIRDS
How can the city of Eugene waste
its time debating a downtown exclusion
zone for people while turkeys are running
amok? Yes, at the corner of Broadway and
Willamette, less than three blocks from
City Hall, turkeys took over the sidewalks,
forcing pedestrians to go out of their way
to avoid them.
The problem was not just the presence
of turkeys. No, it’s much worse! It’s
what they were doing. Though I blush as
I write this, you must know. They were
defecating on the streets! And worse yet,
the males were displaying in public, an act
of overt sexual behavior! Even the turkey
hens retreated in dismay at the unwanted
provocations.
But you must know, that, nature
being nature, one day a hen will not shy
away. Is City Council really prepared for
turkeys fornicating in front of banks, title
companies and law offi ces?
Can you imagine what will happen
to Eugene’s image if word gets out that
turkeys have taken over downtown?
People like Stephen Colbert will mock our
slogan, “Eugene, a Great City for Arts and
Outdoors,” replacing it with “Eugene, a
Great Place for Nutria and Turkeys.” How
embarrassing!
I am also deeply concerned — worried
sick, in fact — that the streets of downtown
Eugene are no longer safe. Turkeys have a
reputation for being aggressive, especially
during mating season. What will it take to
secure the streets and protect the citizenry
— a severe peck on the thighs of a city
councilor?
a slew of local Democrats running in
Springfi eld and Eugene. We will stand
by the values of our party, and cannot
be fooled by the personal vendetta of a
disgruntled state representative.
Ben Torres
Eugene
INSPIRE VS. INTIMIDATE
Now, please tell me again, why is it that
City Council is trying to exclude people
from downtown?
John Hofer
Eugene
VAL’S VENDETTA?
Rep. Val Hoyle (D) won her fi rst
election with the endorsement of
current city councilor and previous state
representative Pat Farr (R). Farr is running
against stalwart Democrat Rob Handy
in the upcoming County Commission
election, and it seems that Hoyle’s known
the class war from above
BY GORDON LAFER
Time for
Faculty Union
The future of higher education depends on it
A
cross the UO campus, teachers and researchers are organizing to
create a faculty union.
Of course everyone wants better wages and benefi ts. UO
salaries are well below national averages, and health insurance
has gotten progressively worse. With a union, health and pension
benefi ts could never again be cut without neogitations with faculty
representatives.
But money is not the biggest issue. Anyone who’s smart enough
to earn a Ph.D. is also smart enough to have gone to business or
law school and be making more. Academics by defi nition are people
who explicitly chose the lower-paying path because they’re driven by
some deeper commitment to intellectual life.
But higher education is being reshaped in ways that threaten to
destroy the very values that drew us to academia. It is this, even more than
wages and benefi ts, that lends the union its urgency.
Universities are being remade in the image of corporations. Students are viewed as cus-
tomers, which means charging as much tuition as possible while spending as little as possible
on teaching. It also means abandoning the mission of educating smart working-class kids from
local communities, in favor of attracting higher paying students from out of state or abroad.
So too, academic departments are increasingly viewed as revenue centers —
encouraged to promote big lecture classes and to avoid hard-to-grade writing asignments
or other expensive forms of personal attention. The decision of which departments grow
or shrink is made not on any intellectual or pedagogic basis, but as a fi nancial decision.
What generates tuition dollars or outside grants grows; everything else — including
traditional liberal arts staples like philosophy and religion — get cut.
For faculty, corporatization means the wholesale replacement of tenure-track faculty
with part-time, adjunct and temporary instructors. Nationally, 70 percent of all teaching
hours are now performed by “contingent” teachers; an undergraduate signing up for
an English class has a less than one-in-four chance of being taught by a tenure-track
4
MARCH 1, 2012
EUGENE WEEKLY
dislike for Handy and Sorenson (perhaps
because they are strong, uncompromising,
and outspoken progressives who fi ght for
what we believe is right) may be a factor in
her scathing comments and attacks against
the “process.”
Pete and Rob don’t just fi ght for what
I believe is right; they honor and support
the values of the Democratic Party of Lane
County, which is why we endorsed the
two candidates almost unanimously. It’s
election time, and we strong progressives
will stand by the near-unanimous
endorsements of Sorenson, Handy and
After attending the most recent Eugene
Symphony Orchestra concert, I realized how
much I was still seething from music critic
Tom Madoff’s condescending comparison
between the former conductor, Giancarlo
Guerrero, and the current conductor, Danail
Rachev, which appeared in the R-G. Frank-
ly, I was worried that no one else would hire
Guerrero away. I was overjoyed to be prov-
en wrong and wish him success.
I have attended symphony concerts
since the symphony’s founding. I claim
only one collegiate music appreciation
course and admit to ears that may be unable
to discriminate the “color” with which
Madoff says the symphony occasionally
played under Guerrero but has not, so far,
under Rachev.
Manoff also criticizes Rachev for using
a score, whereas Guerrero did not. That’s
equivalent to my complaining that one
conductor negotiates the path between the
violins to the podium like an ox, while
the other does so with dignity. Arguably,
neither entrance style has that much to
do with the music. There is an important
distinction between memorizing a score
and understanding the music. Rachev
understands and leads the symphony with
inspiration, not intimidation.
professor. Non-tenure-track faculty — people with degrees and skills, but no job security
— are much cheaper than regular faculty, and can be treated as just-in-time production
inputs, hired or fi red at the last minute in response to fl uctuating enrollments. This is what
led NYU Dean Ann Marcus to famously celebrate adjuncts as faculty she could “abuse,
exploit and then turn loose.”
T
raditionally, a university is supposed to be a place that is specifi cally outside the rat
race, a place for curiosity and critical thinking. The idea of academia is to raise up
a crop of bold thinkers freed to pursue their own idea of the truth without fear of
losing their jobs for it. This is why campuses are homes for a broader range of ideas than
can be found anywhere else.
But by locking the majority of faculty to positions of institutionalized insecurity,
the corporate university does just the opposite: Instead of building thinkers up, it
tears them down, creating a scared and silent teaching staff.
In the sciences, the days when Ph.Ds. were encouraged to their own ideas
in their own lab have been replaced by a corporate structure where a single
professor oversees an army of postdoctoral “fellows” who constitute the
country’s most highly trained low-wage labor force, and whose hopes of ever
running his or her own lab shrink by the day.
These are national problems, not created by UO administrators. But
administrators — under pressure to squeeze all possible revenue out of each
function of the university — are not well positioned to resist them. A faculty union is
the only organization that can serve as an effective counterweight to these pressures,
in a fi ght to restore the more humane vision of education.
Personally, I’d like to see a contract that not only improves wages and benefi ts, but that
guarantees UO students access to smaller classes where they can formulate their own
arguments and learn how to write; increases the share of teaching done by tenure-track
faculty and creates a pathway from non-tenure to tenure-track positions; and encourages
mentoring of grad students by providing course release for supervising large numbers of
dissertations.
Whether we can win these things depends on how many faculty join the cause and how
strong a union we create.
But without a union, the future is clear, and it’s bleak.
It’s time for faculty to put down our books and and pick up the phone to the union
(uauoregon.org). For ourselves, for our students, and for anyone who hopes to follow us
into this life.
Gordon Lafer is a professor at the UO Labor Education and Research Center, a research associate with the Economic
Policy Institute and is the author of Free and Fair? How Labor Law Fails U.S. Democratic Election Standards (2005).
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