Jack Longmate, a part-time English instructor who drew national attention this year by clashing with the National Education Association and its Olympic College affiliate over their representation of adjunct faculty, is once again at odds with union leaders.
The latest dispute centers on the union affiliate’s derailment of an effort by Mr. Longmate to bring Washington State lawmakers to campus last month for an annual forum on the concerns of faculty members and students. Lawmakers withdrew from the proposed forum, which Olympic College’s faculty union had helped sponsor in the past, after Chris Stokke, the affiliate’s president, told them that Mr. Longmate had acted alone in inviting them to it and that the event no longer had the union’s blessing.
The skirmish is reminiscent of Mr. Longmate’s battle with the union earlier this year, in which he was accused of speaking out of turn in testifying before lawmakers against a union-backed appropriations measure that, he argued, did part-time adjuncts no good because it explicitly financed pay increases only for full-time faculty members. The union responded last June by voting to oust Mr. Longmate as its secretary, a development that has been cited by some leading advocates for adjunct faculty members as reason to question whether the leading national education unions can be trusted to represent faculty members other than those who are either tenured or on the tenure track.
When the NEA’s Olympic College affiliate, the Association of Higher Education, met last month, its leaders considered voting to censure Mr. Longmate based on an allegation that he had misrepresented himself as acting in the union’s name in sending out the forum invitations, minutes from the meeting show. They chose not to hold the vote, however, after a representative of the the NEA’s Washington State affiliate warned that any censure vote must cite a stated union rule that Mr. Longmate broke, and Ted Baldwin, the union affliliate’s vice president, cautioned that a censure vote could create the impression that Mr. Longmate’s First Amendment free-speech rights were somehow being infringed.
Mr. Longmate has since mounted an effort to have the union revise the minutes of its meeting to delete, as libelous, any reference to his having claimed to act at the union’s behest in contacting state lawmakers about the planned forum. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Stokke, the affiliate’s president, admitted he “may have made an assumption that was inaccurate” in accusing Mr. Longmate of claiming the forum was a union-sponsored event.
“I like Jack. I don’t want a rift in our association at all,” said Mr. Stokke, who is a professor of nursing. But, he argued, Mr. Longmate “did not talk to the leadership about it at all” before sending out the forum invitations, and “these issues would even occur if people would talk to each other in advance.”
Mr. Longmate characterized the discussion of censuring him as evidence of “groupthink that pervades the union.”
“I am not considered a union member,” he said. “I am considered an enemy, and everything I do is looked at with suspicion.”
