So for those readers on a tight schedule, let’s not bury the lead: The recent brouhaha over the Western Washington University Collective Bargaining Agreement is not about students, not about the state budget, not about “shared sacrifice” or any of the other pious crap that Bruce Shepard’s attackers are mouthing.  It is about a managerial class organizing to discipline one of its own who has had the temerity to show some respect for the help. 

Last fall, when the Central Washington University Board of Trustees gave Central President Jim Gaudino a half million dollar bonus, the word on the street was that Governor Chris Gregoire was privately seething.  Publicly, she said nothing.

So perhaps pent up frustration got the better of her when, just before dashing off to Ireland, she sat down to write a poison pen letter to Western Washington University President Bruce Shepard blasting him for having the gall to sign a contract that included modest raises for the desperately underpaid faculty at Western. We’ll leave it to Gregoire’s biographers to debate whether this letter is in fact the most vitriolic official rebuke of her career, but here at the blog we certainly can’t remember her ever sending anything nastier. Not when Gaudino got his golden handcuffs, not when the Republicans hijacked the Senate budget process, not when the Superintendent of Public Instruction was busted for drunk driving, not even when Rob McKenna sued Obamacare. 

Even before Shepard had a chance to respond, the letter was sent to the press, generating Pearl Harbor headlines and another in the long-running series of editorials demonizing state employees in the Seattle Times. Papers around the state have followed suit.    

Any honest reading of the contract negotiated between the United Faculty of Western Washington and the Western Board of Trustees has to see the gubernatorial reaction as overblown at best. Never mind the dubious judgment of a sitting governor making thinly veiled threats about a contract that was legitimately, legally, respectfully, and collegially negotiated, Gregoire’s assertion that “the agreement between Western and its faculty will hurt current and future efforts to protect and increase funding for public higher education” is ludicrous.

For the record: the Western contract <link> strengthens both the administration’s and the faculty’s commitment to students and the academic mission of the university in sections on academic freedom, tenure and promotion, class size, intellectual property, and extended education (none of which has been reported in the papers). It also includes raises for faculty that, when averaged across the years covered by the contract and the years that Western faculty have given back raises and had no raises, come out to about 1.9% per year.  Everybody at Western—the trustees, President Bruce Shepard, the faculty, the students—has recognized the need for these very modest increases for a long time.  Western consistently stands at or near the top in rankings of regional comprehensive universities across the region and the nation. At the same time Western ranks near the bottom in peer averages of faculty salaries. Adjusted for cost of living, Western’s salaries and benefits rank 503rd out of 574 U.S. universities (Jalbert et al. 2010, <online>, <pdf>).  Western routinely tries to recruit and retain faculty who are being offered tens of thousands of dollars more by other universities.

Neither Chris Gregoire nor anyone else in the state can expect Western to continue to offer such a high quality education to students without some attempt to stay within shouting distance of competitive faculty salaries.           

If the governor were genuinely concerned about public perception and the future of higher ed funding, her yelling about the faculty at Western would not be so drowned out by her silence on things like football and basketball coaches’ salaries, Gaudino’s retention payday, Mark Emmert’s and Elson Floyd’s bloated compensation at UW and WSU, football stadium remodels, etc. 

The huge inconsistency of Governor Gregoire’s comments suggest that something more than a few extra bucks for professors is at stake here.  And the key to understanding what has provoked all the furor can be found in the public remarks of Office of Financial Management Director Marty Brown and University of Washington Vice President Randy Hodgins.

Mr. Brown, by all accounts the boss most angered by the Western contract, spent a lot of time talking to the press, calling the Western contract “a mistake” and threatening that “the legislature will look at how this occurred” (hope all those duly elected legislators get the memo that the appointed director of OFM is now setting the legislative agenda). But when the conversation turns to a subject close to Mr. Brown’s responsibilities, the governor’s office’s negotiations with the unions that represent state employees, we get some insight into what has him so worked up: “It makes it difficult, “ he said.  “Because we’re not going to be talking in those kinds of terms.”

Marty Brown has been in Olympia so long that it seems that he has come to believe that when a university Board of Trustees and a faculty union sit down at the bargaining table their primary job is to not do anything to make it harder for him to screw state employees.  Mr. Brown, of course, wouldn’t put it that way, and instead would probably fall back to the rhetoric of “shared sacrifice . . . during the Great Recession” that Governor Gregoire used in her letter to President Shepard. Outside of the Governor’s office, it’s hard to hear that kind of talk as anything other than a bad joke.  The only people the governor has asked to share the sacrifice during this recession have been general government state employees, K-12 teachers, and the higher education students who have paid for state disinvestment with dramatically higher tuition. No one has seriously asked wealthy business elites for even the smallest sacrifice, no one has seriously attempted to reform the nation’s most regressive tax system or seriously tried to close any of the loopholes that suck state revenues, no one has seriously challenged the pervasive and pernicious lie that state employees are somehow responsible for the state’s economic woes. 

Much as Governor Gregoire and Mr. Brown might try to spin their concern about Western’s contract as concern for state employees, it’s not a stretch to see it as actually the concern of bosses who have lost the confidence of their employees. 

The most disappointing thing that Marty Brown was quoted as saying was that the first people to call him to complain about the Western contract were the administrations of the University of Washington and Washington State University.  At first blush, this comes as quite a surprise. Until now, Washington’s six public universities have been united in their concern for the state of faculty salaries. The situations at Western and Evergreen are the worst, but all six universities have faculty salaries that are well below average and all six universities have recruitment and retention problems related to faculty salaries. 

So we found ourselves scratching our heads when we saw UW Vice President Randy Hodgins quoted in the press almost as much as Marty Brown and moaning just as loudly about the Western contract.  “They are getting a pay raise when no one else is,” Vice President Hodgins whined.  And then, parroting the Governor and OFM Director, he went on to say that “[o]ur concern is that shared sacrifice isn’t as shared as we thought.”  (At this point, a snarkier blog than this one might mention that Vice President Hodgins, who doesn’t teach one UW student, has a salary about three times that of the average full professor at Western.)

What Vice President Hodgins didn’t mention in his extensive press comments is that UW has a problem because UW doesn’t have a faculty union. The current state employee salary freeze that is in place until the end of this biennium exempts collectively bargained contracts, which means that UW cannot legally give their non-unionized faculty raises until 2013. 

Given that this is a faculty union blog, we obviously think that faculty unions are a good idea. But we completely respect our colleagues at UW and WSU who have collectively chosen not to unionize. But given the distance and disrespect that Vice President Hodgins has shown to the UW faculty, they might want to reconsider.  Had Vice President Hodgins consulted one of the many fine union prevention law firms in Seattle, they might have told him that it would be more reassuring to UW faculty to say something like this: We applaud our colleagues at Western for taking steps in their collective bargaining agreement to begin to address Washington’s faculty salary crisis and we look forward to doing the same thing at UW when the state salary freeze is lifted in 2013. 

Instead, he defaulted to the shared sacrifice hypocrisy and went on to use the Times to take a cheap shot at Western, claiming that UW used all of “its tuition increases to bolster financial-aid offerings and expand "gateway courses" into popular majors.” The pious implication here is that while Western and their greedy professors are lining their pockets with student tuition money, the virtuous UW is giving scholarships and expanding access. 

This shows a complete ignorance of what has actually happened at Western. For the last four years, the faculty and administration at Western have been working together relentlessly to deal with the continual budget cuts and preserve the high quality education Western students have come to expect. So, again for the record, as part of a university-wide rebasing project led by President Shepard with the full participation of the faculty, Western has:

  • Reallocated $2 million to reduce course bottlenecks in order to facilitate timely graduation.
  • Reallocated another $2 million to high demand (and often more expensive) academic areas.
  • Shifted an additional $2 million to support need-based financial assistance.
  • And now begun to address an abysmal faculty salary situation with the new Collective Bargaining Agreement that takes effect in September.

The reactions of Gregoire, Brown, and Hodgins (and their buddies on the editorial boards, with the shining exception of Joel Connelly <link> are the brittle reactions of well-paid bosses who feel betrayed by one of their own. They feel that Bruce Shepard has exacerbated their own problems with the help. 

This burst of boss anxiety has obscured the truly remarkable thing that has happened at Western. Bruce Shepard never worked with a faculty union before he came to Western, but instead of hiring union-busting lawyers or trying to insulate himself from the faculty, he has embraced the UFWW, both on campus and in Olympia, and helped to create the best faculty-administration relationship in the state.  Bruce Shepard didn’t create Washington’s financial crisis, but he has worked tirelessly with all campus constituents to make sure that Western emerges intact as an outstanding university. 

The result of this collaborative work has been a university that is incredibly united in the face of unprecedented gubernatorial and editorial nastiness. There is no daylight between Western’s Board of Trustees (read their statement here).

Administration, Faculty, and the students who have borne the brunt of the state’s disinvestment in public higher education. Both the student press and the student government leadership at Western have been fully supportive of the new faculty contract.  They recognize that if they are going to pay more, they shouldn’t be getting less.

When all the smoke clears, what Governor Gregoire’s letter to President Shepard reveals is the stark contrast between a boss and a leader.