Central Michigan University and the Faculty Association are not fighting about money anymore; they are fighting for the ideological future of the institution.

While arguments between the two sides have mostly focused on contract negotiations the story took another turn during Tuesday’s Academic Senate meeting where A-Senate members, many of them faculty members, took a vote halting further action on the College of Medicine.

The decision came nearly four hours after media received copies of the fact-finding report which detailed the decision favoring CMU on salaries and benefits, but favoring the FA on retirement and promotion increments.

These moves were not incidental, but do show a change in how the FA is looking at the current bargaining push.

It’s clear CMU wants CMED to be just the forefront of a new campus, where the FA wants that money to go to support, strengthen and add faculty to existing programs.

While two months ago the two sides were arguing about who was or was not coming to the bargaining table, Tuesday they argued about the viability of CMED because, among other reasons, the A-Senate claims CMU is using funding from the general budget to create the college.

Reading through Barry Goldman’s fact-finding report makes it obvious that the particular amounts of money being fought over were not as important as the fight itself to the two parties. Part of the health benefits the parties could not come to an agreement over was the university’s monthly contribution to employees’ dental plans. The difference between the FA and university proposals for monthly contributions range from $2.36 to $15, never more. Either the argument has transcended beyond money, or these are the two pettiest groups of people ever.

For the most part, Goldman’s recommendations are fairly equitable to both parties. The only two sections that could be called into question — and certainly will be by the FA — are the recommendations on salaries and benefits.

In his recommendation on the salary issue, Goldman said CMU should not “eat its seed corn” by digging into the university’s reported $228 million in unrestricted net assets to pay for salary raises, suggesting the university is saving this money to compensate for the worsening Michigan economy. They are using this money less like a stockpile of seed corn and more like tonight’s filet mignon dinner, however, for building and expansion.

Second, he called the university’s health benefit plan “eminently fair” because it was the same plan agreed upon by the other bargaining units on campus. This assumes that the other bargaining units — none of which have the bargaining sway of the FA — wanted this benefit package or thought it was a good deal, rather than taking it as part of a compromise for other concessions in their contracts. This non-binding report is by no means a conclusion to the contract battle between the university and the FA, which is likely to only be fueled further by this report.

The FA will continue to argue for better salary and benefit packages, and they should. This editorial board is not saying at this time the packages offered by the university and recommended by Goldman are not fair, only that the reasons offered by Goldman lacked sufficient logic and compelling reasoning for the FA to settle.