Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, May 30. Today’s Briefing was written by Rick Seltzer, with contributions from Julia Piper. Write to me: rick.seltzer@chronicle.com.
A faculty union makes a clever election play
Local politics are often overlooked, but they directly shape policies and lives — including at colleges.
At one Oregon college this year, no one registered to run for two open board seats that are democratically elected. So the faculty union at Blue Mountain Community College scrambled a quick write-in campaign for the election, which was held this month.
Now, a laid-off instructor and a faculty member who is about to lose her job have the inside track to winning board seats. Scott Wallace, who was an accounting instructor at the college, was laid off last year. Dulcie Hays will lose her position as an instructor when the college shuts down a corrections-education program.
It’s been a difficult few years for Blue Mountain. Officials say falling enrollment is driving a need for budget cuts and layoffs.
But the faculty union isn’t brash about flexing its muscles in the election. The goal is to provide balance and perspective for the board, Sascha McKeon, president of the Blue Mountain Community College Faculty Association, told the Daily Briefing.
- “It’s very easy for these civil servants to get tunnel vision and think, ‘I’m responsible for passing a balanced budget and this is the hand I’m dealt.’”
- But board members don’t see students day-to-day, making it hard for them to fully appreciate the value of programs that may be on the chopping block.
- The members the union backed won’t form a majority on the board, which has seven seats.
Candidates wouldn’t typically run unless they were tapped by someone already on the board, according to McKeon.
Yet it doesn’t take many votes to win.
- “I talked to my neighbors. I put it on Facebook,” Hays told the Daily Briefing.
- Hays led her race with 14 votes as of last week, with officials still tallying ballots.
- Wallace led his race with 92 votes.
The bigger issue: Educators are surprisingly rare on college governing boards.
Just over 9 percent of public board members work in higher education, according to a 2021 report from the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Only about 2 percent of members were retired from jobs in higher ed. (Those statistics cover mostly four-year institutions and don’t differentiate between appointed board seats and elected seats, which are less common.)
Local boards tend to be stocked with business owners and lawyers for a reason. Where elections are involved, campaigns take time and, often, money. Positions are usually time-consuming and unpaid.
Some governing boards have seats reserved for faculty representatives. But college employees are often barred from serving on the governing boards of the institutions that employ them, which can prevent conflicts of interest and outline distinct roles for faculty members and boards under shared governance. That’s the case at Blue Mountain. Yet its faculty union found a clever way to give itself a shot at educators having a more meaningful say in the college’s future.
Would other local governing bodies — from the zoning board to the state legislature — benefit from more educators?
Quotable: “To see that no one filed for these positions and it was basically an uncontested vote — we took it as an opportunity,” McKeon said.
