CURMUDGUCATION: PA: About the Professor Strike

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: About the Professor Strike:

PA: About the Professor Strike

As just about everyone has heard today, the professors at fourteen of Pennsylvania's state colleges and universities are on strike (due to a quirk in our system, Pitt, Penn State and Temple are in a different state university system). This is the first such strike in ever.

It is hard to know exactly what's going on in the first days of a strike. I was president of my own local union over a decade ago when we went on strike, and I still remember well how information management is a huge issue all by itself, struggling both with the issue of hundreds of people shooting off their mouths regardless of knowledge, and both sides trying hard to control the narrative. 

Bottom line-- be a cautious information consumer these days.

But as some with friends, family and former students all over this dispute, I can note a couple of things.

The state's point man is Chancellor Frank Brogan. Brogan started out as an elementary classroom teacher in Florida and got out pretty quickly to enter administration. He eventually became Florida's youngest-ever Education Commissioner. He was going to run for that job again when he was tagged to be Jeb! Bush's Lt. Governor. He was Jeb's point man on education and was elected to second Lt. Gov. term, but left in 2003 to become president of Florida Atlantic University. Upon being appointed to second term at that job, he left that job to become chancellor of Florida's university system in 2009. In 2013, Pennsylvania hired him away, while PA was being run by a governor who wanted to roll the university system back. And he carried all that baggage into contract negotiations that have been dragging on since 2015. 

The contract struggle has been a fine example of all the bad things happening in higher education. The state has proposed to hire more adjuncts, force them to teach more classes for the same money (or, more likely, take a pay cut for the same work), push more cyber classes, and just generally CURMUDGUCATION: PA: About the Professor Strike: