Southwestern College administrators are trying to put a price on education. The price is five percent.
SWC is in a time of rebuilding and healing but recently administration and a group of union representatives known as the “Big Table” has tried to push faculty and staff up against a wall. Vote to cut your pay or there will be layoffs. Tactics like these are not how business should be done at SWC. Not anymore, at least.
Dr. Melinda Nish should be commended for promoting discussion and democracy, but the recent decision to have faculty and staff vote on whether or not they should cut their pay by five percent to save student services is a false sense of democracy. The “Big Table” is telling faculty and staff “cut your pay or we’ll cut student services.” This is not how voting should be done.
Dr. Nish recently won a pyrrhic victory by securing an increase in the salaries of vice presidents to retain and recruit more talented people. If Dr. Nish believes this to be true for vice presidents then the same should be true for faculty and staff, unless we want to lose more talented people like Andy MacNeill to other community colleges. Like Dr. Nish said, SWC needs to remain competitive in its salaries to attract the next great generation of faculty and staff. SWC has already lost a huge pool of institutional knowledge and academic acumen with last year’s Supplemental Early Retirement Package and we need to work on maintaining the precious knowledge we have.
SWC, like all colleges in California, is facing financial devastation, so decisions like these are not easy, but there are ways to maintain SWC’s current mission to preserve jobs and serve students.
Use the reserve fund now to keep salaries steady and preserve student services. The reserve should only be used in a time of emergency and there is no greater emergency than preserving employee’s financial stability and student services. Using the reserve will give SWC time to have a proper discussion where ideas are not being discussed at the same time as voting. There are many ideas bouncing around interoffice e-mails, furlough days being one of them.
One thing the college should do immediately is close and sell the remote Otay Mesa campus. SWC got left holding the bag when SDSU, Sweetwater and other partners bailed on an idealistic but impractical border education facility. SWC has poured millions down the drain at Otay Mesa and the spigot is still open. Otay Mesa has stolen many of SWC’s greatest programs including nursing, EMT, the police academy and Fire Science. Those programs need to be brought back to Chula Vista or distributed among the Higher Education Centers in San Ysidro and struggling National City, helping them achieve center status.
The “Big Table” has a lot more scenarios it needs to run before asking employees to cut their salary in an extremely weak economy. How much money could be saved if Otay Mesa was closed? How much revenue could be brought in if we leased or sold the land?
How much money would be saved if we closed the main campus Friday through Sunday and increased work days to 10 hours? How much money can be generated with an international student outreach?
Decisions cannot be made with a false sense of democracy. The five percent cut passed by a margin of six votes, but future decision-making cannot be conducted like this. Gunboat diplomacy in a community college is not appropriate. Creating animosity between classified personnel and instructors and being given an ultimatum is not okay. Encourage democracy, but do not push voters up against the wall with only two bad choices.
SWC employees are still healing from the biggest battles this college has ever faced. People were lost and those who were left beaten and bruised are still healing. Now is not the time to reduce their rations.