Editorial: Fact-finding brings distinctions for who should be in Faculty Association
Drawing distinctions between faculty members will lead to a divided campus and has the potential to unravel union representation.
In the Friday fact-finding session between the Faculty Association and Central Michigan University, the groups argued about the inclusion of coaches and College of Medicine professors to the union.
CMU asked coaches be removed from the union, and faculty members from the College of Medicine would never be included.
While it should be every member's prerogative to join the union, members of the College of Medicine should have the ability. After all, whether they have MDs or PhDs, they are faculty members.
The medical school has already been given a position of privilege in the budget — suggesting the new college's faculty are better or more important than members of the FA and UTF will further disconnect the project from the rest of the university.
Establishing a union for the medical school faculty upon the opening of the medical school would place it further away from the other colleges.
Allowing one college to negotiate outside the FA would set the precedent for other blocks of professors to defect as well, weakening the overall union.
Obviously CMED is quite different from other colleges on campus, but the faculty will still be teaching and the FA should represent all full professors on campus.
Coaches, on the other hand, are a little different than a normal faculty member.
Rarely do coaches stay in one place for their entire career, let alone for longer than a decade.
Coaches provide a valuable education to student athletes, but their job differs enough from professors and it's understandable that they aren't a part of the FA.
There is little reason why the FA needs to have coaches in the group as they serve very different roles from professors.
Keeping coaches integrated into a system that obviously is not suited to their unique situation would be wrong for both sides, but the university has to stop insisting on special treatment for CMED and its every element.
