Professor Carries On, Despite Being Followed by Management Security Guards

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/07/11/professor-carries-on-despite-being-followed-by-management-security-guards/

by Mike Hall, Jul 11, 2008

It’s darn hard to conduct your duties as a local union president when you are watched and followed by the employer’s security guards every time you need to meet with your members at work.

That’s exactly what’s happening to Steve Sherman, president of the Moore Federation of Teachers, an AFT affiliate, which represents the faculty at the Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.

Sherman, a longtime professor of painting at the college, faces such extraordinary barriers because he was fired, and management will not let him on campus without a security escort.

Sherman was fired after the administration issued a so-called “final warning,” saying he had violated school conduct rules in opposing a merger of two departments. Based on that warning, the school fired him in January but refuses to say publicly why he was dismissed.

An arbitrator has ruled against the school administration’s issuance of the “final warning” but the college refuses to reinstate Sherman and the firing also is under arbitration.

His colleagues say Sherman was fired because of his vocal opposition to several school administration actions and fierce advocacy for the rights of adjunct and full-time faculty members. On the higher education website Free Exchange on Campus, produced by a coalition of education and free speech groups, including AFT, Barbara McKenna writes:

There have been a handful of incidents in the past few years in which a college administration has sought to punish faculty members for exercising their free speech rights with regards to academic governance. None, however, have been as brazen as the administration at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, who, this past January, fired a long-time professor who had the temerity to challenge the corporatization of his workplace.

FULL story at link.

[skooooo]

1. Sounds like there's no tenure at this school...

"Over the last 18 years, the faculty of Moore College has been transformed from one primarily consisting of full-time tenured to professors to one with 31 full-time instructors on contract and 70 adjunct professors to serve a student body of some 500 students."

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So much for American higher education. Without tenure if you say something admin. doesn't like they can just get rid of you. The last bastion of free thinking under attack.

[jody]

2. The growth of adjunct instructors coupled with distance learning using instructors out of the US

is changing higher education as we know it.