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Your Wednesday editorial urging the faculty at ISU to “face the realities” provides appropriate perspective on our employment situation. It is true that most (but not all) of the teaching faculty retain decent jobs and good health care and retirement benefits. By standards in higher education, positions at ISU are not great, but our work conditions are much more favorable than those that many Americans face.
But this misses the central point of faculty reaction to policy changes announced by the ISU provost last week. We do indeed see the reality of a difficult economy and consequent reduced support for higher education in Indiana, and we are indeed willing to bear a share of the burden of adjustment. Our reaction is to how ISU executives are addressing the problem.
An alternative recommended by faculty was a widely shared reduction in salaries, which could have preserved the jobs of all those recently dismissed. This was summarily rejected. In recent years when ISU has faced financial challenges and offered zero or modest increases in faculty compensation, annual salary increases for its executives have been in the tens of thousands of dollars. Such increases are as much as the annual incomes for many citizens and do not contribute to curriculum.
The dismissal of adjunct and temporary instructors and consequent adjustment in teaching loads among remaining faculty is not necessary and, in the long run, is more damaging to ISU than alternatives. Both students and the taxpaying public have an interest in this, and we welcome open examination of the issues on their behalf, as your reporter pursued last week.
The meeting she attended was not a public complaint session, but a discussion of how faculty collectively can best address both the current economic environment and choices made by the ISU executives. Our objective is not individual gain, but a healthier university as a community project. In this I believe that the interests of ISU faculty and Indiana citizens, particularly working class citizens, are actually closely aligned.
— Richard Lotspeich, Officer
AAUP — ISU Chapter
Terre Haute
I am offended by President Obama’s brash attack on the unborn as he tries to ram through a very unpopular health care bill that provides government funding of abortion. Poll after poll show Americans are against this, yet Congress is unrelenting, almost fanatical, on trying to pass health care reform.
Abortion is not health care, as the abortion industry and President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would like Americans to believe, and it should not be mandated under any health insurance plan, especially one that Americans will be forced to subsidize. The proposed health care bill amounts to a bailout for the abortion industry, which is swimming in profits already and will result in the largest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade.
Tell representatives to vote no on any health care bill that does not include precise language to clearly exclude abortion from any health care legislation.
— Sarah Knoblock
Terre Haute
