Last updated on 2020-03-03
Republicans in Pierre claim that collective bargaining limits the “flexibility” of our public universities. In a detailed fifteen-page letter to the Legislature an the Governor, former Regent Harvey Jewett and former USD President Jim Abbott say that the Legislature has limited our universities’ flexibility with along-standing shift away from state support that has culminated in $143 million in harmful budget cuts over the last decade:
…In the late 60s when we went to the University of South Dakota, the State paid approximately 65% of the cost of a student’s education. Then began a long process of reducing State Support to the point where the State now pays only 34.3% and the students pay 65.7%.
…It is not an accident that three of our senior academic officers have been hired away as University presidents in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in the last few years. When large cuts are made or inflation at any rate is ignored for decades, the ability to add new types of courses or majors as needed is limited or eliminated. Flexibility is limited. The ability to take risks is limited. And, the ability to match salary offers received by faculty from other schools and to reward faculty “stars” on campus is limited. Faculty salaries are transparent to the world, so professors simply do not apply. South Dakota saw that exact thing happen at Dakota State University in the late 1990s as it tried to specialize in Information Technology. DSU did not attract qualified applicants for several positions. Our market value and merit pay system simply will not work when the total salary package available to the Unviersity is significantly less than the national average. The number of “failed searches,” where no one applies or, more often, no one acceptable applies, increases….
There really is no free lunch. South Dakota has great Universities but they are on the edge after a decade of neglect [Harvey Jewett and Jim Abbott; letter to Governor Kristi Noem, legislators, Regents, and the people of South Dakota; 2020.02.24; posted by KELO-TV, 2020.02.27].
Legislators find it much easier to wage their culture-war against their perceived enemies in academia than to consider their own role in the real threat to the ongoing success of our Regental institutions. We can only hope that Republican Jewett and Democrat Abbott can shake our legislators out of their long habit of neglect and focus on their fiscal responsibility to maintain a top-notch university system.
And by the time our top students graduate they have I-29 or I-90 locked
on their GPS devices so they don’t waste any more time than necessary
leaving the state.
So how much per student did the state contribute in the 60s as opposed to the present? How much was the total cost per student, then as opposed to now?
Somehow I doubt the dollar amount of the state contribution is less now than it was then. Just guessing.
It’s not a “cut” if it’s the same amount of money. I suspect it’s more now than it was then.
An educated, involved electorate is the enemy of the SDGOP. It does not serve their mean spirited purpose to support higher quality education.
In the GOP playbook, school beyond grade 12 is unnecessary and that high school education ought to be based on their twisted and distorted and WRONG opinion of the bible.
Please, Anne, consider what you write before you post stupid stuff. Why is the state budget now much more in dollar amounts than it was in the 1960s? Do a little research, think, then get back to us with a rational post.
Anne, I would suggest that Jewett and Abbott know more about higher ed finance than anyof us. Do you think they are wrong, and that the state is bearing a larger proportion of the cost of higher education than it did in the 1960s? And do you have any evidence to support your preferred prejudgment?
It costs a certain amount to go to college. The college education is more important for more people now than it was 50 years ago. Yet the state invests less and make students bear more of a cost now for that more important product than it did back in the 1960s.
grudznick would suggest that Messrs. Jewett and Abbott are drunk again and suffering from a dementia not yet categorized, but which the higher ed gurus should focus their collective research towards identifying.
Thank you South Dakota for sending my three kids out of state where they all have great high paying jobs one to go, keep exporting our youth.
Is there a website where Abbott & Jewett’s 25-page “summary” and 50+ page letter are available for download? I’d like to read the original documents.
BTW, for those with a lot of time on their hands and an interest in higher ed, the Argus published a three-part, 8,000+ word series from then-Regent Bob Sutton and USD prof Matt Moen. The Argus also published my 1,700+ word response to their article(s). Subscribers can see both by going to: https://www.argusleader.com/story/opinion/2016/08/05/future-south-dakotas-public-higher-education-isnt-past/88304036/
But they haven’t been neglected…..private industry has taken over student housing at USD.
Don’t think the cost of a degree will decline though or that that parchment will be more valuable.
When, at any level, has South Dakota ever properly supported education? The current trend is more disturbing than ever before. You cannot build economic success on the backs of the people who need, seek, and pay the most for it.
The typical SDGOP response is we have no money to make any changes. As long as people keep electing SDGOP to office, nothing will change. The no money response works for the SDGOP, so why would the SDGOP want to change anything?
SD has real shortages of people such as doctors, nurses, scientists and so forth. Part of the solution could be paying back student debt if those grads work and live in SD. If you get SD grads to live and work in SD right out of college, they could establish a family, and some of those grads would stay in SD forever.
Michael, I haven’t seen the full documents. I’d like to.
The lack of support Terry sees continued today, as the House sent SB 147, the ban on collective bargaining for Regental employees, to the Governor on a solid 47–19 vote. Get ready for the shortage of professionals Scott sees to get wider.
Maybe higher ed fat cat CEOs and Provost types need to spend less, so that the state’s percentage goes up? But no, no, they are hogs at the trough and spend more and more and more like wild-eyed drunken professors and gouge the students for ever more tuition. There is no way my tax dollars should go to pay these fat cat administrators more and more when they can raise tuition to whatever they want. Put grudznick in charge and I’ll hone the college budgets down to the lean bone they should be.
Get ready for this. . . Talented professors leaving and taking with them their research grants benefitting South Dakota that are partially funded by federal dollars. Can SD recover from this?
So very few of these college fellows were part of this union, it begs a few questions before we start crying of the loss of federal dollars.
1 – do not most of you libbies and conservatives want federal dollars out so our government is less on the dole?
2 – won’t it be the weak professors who rely on their union to get them raises instead of working harder to be good professors and earn more raises?
3 – do the SILT (Seven Indisputable Levels of Teacher) apply to college professors? grudznick expects they do, and thus we should target keeping only the top 4 layers
South Dakota doesn’t want to recover from this, Terry. South Dakota wants to wallow in the delusions of Trumpism, which assure them that we don’t need no eggheads or book-learning, that any idiot can run a business or a government, that they prosper and rule by the divine right they earn with their piety (I’m still trying to figure out how they square that last item with their current godhead… but hey, the inconsistency is a consistent part of Trumpism).
What rot, Grudz. Why ban collective bargaining when the union is already so small and weak that it’s not harming anyone? Why deny a minority their right to pay dues to freely associate in an organization that the state can already mostly ignore and which doesn’t really add any direct cost to Regental operations?
To Jewett and Abbott’s point, instead of taking away faculty rights, why not invest real money in lowering the cost of education for college students to encourage them to stay and learn and maybe even work here?
Cory, “Round wheels are better, but square wheels are Ok.” Progress is difficult to grasp especially when it involves a change from the status quo.
Cory, I heard something on SDPB radio tonight that suggested a 285,000 dollar savings by getting rid of collective bargaining. What is that money used for? Sorry I did not hear the entire story. How does negotiating cost the regents so much money?
We must save the people from themselves, Mr. H, as they are clearly unable to make rational decisions. Unions are dying, and bad. They are bad. We need to help these people keep a few sheckels in their pockets to feed their families and not pay for fat cat labor bosses.
SB 147 legalizes discrimination of persons who can do advanced math for dissertations. You are welcome to have an opinion, just be sure to check it at the border.
Mark, could interested faculty work up a challenge to their First Amendment freedom of association here? Or do rational actors in the academic marketplace pass on lawyering up and just go work in a state that respects faculty rights?
Craig, there’s plenty of dispute over those alleged costs. Langer and the Republicans cite those numbers, but SDEA lobbyist Jeremiah Murphy and others testified in committee that those costs don’t go away by ditching the union; someone still has to process grievances and handle related tasks that COHE does now. My impression is that the state won’t save a penny; they might even end up spending more as the BOR has to handle more grievances that COHE right now filters.
“Senator Jeff Partridge dropped in to say professors are costing us money by negotiating. He said only 8% of Regental employees belong to the Council of Higher Education, the campus bargaining agent, which he suggested means 92% of Regental employees reject the merit of collective bargaining.”
It’s called freeloading, of course. 92% of the faculty enjoy the hard-won privileges including tenure, due process, and additional contractual rights which have been carved out on the backs of others over time since collective bargaining was instituted in the State of SD by far thinking faculty in the 1970s.
Not surprisingly, in a right-to-work state, many have always resented the fact that some ’employees’–although the most educated in the state who are beholden to the global standards of their profession which greatly exceed the boundaries of their employment contracts and the geographical boundaries of the State of South Dakota–hold such ‘special’ rights such as tenure and due process, rights antithetical to fire-at-will. But fire-at-will is no way to build a solid university system, however much many administrators also resent that the sum total of their PhD employees weigh short-term agendas of administrators much more deliberately than do the administrators themselves. What administrations want in terms of ‘flexibility’ is to implement careerist agendas in order to build their resumes, upon which they leave the university, more often than not in cultural shambles upon their departure. Of course university administrators want pliant employees rather than diligent and dedicated professionals who value the longer term stability and integrity of the university and who weigh ideas both practically and from a rigorous philosophical standpoint, rather than from a mono-dimensional and what has become an increasingly corporatist management viewpoint that steamrollers over tried and true academic values.
Yes, many universities have no collective bargaining. They also pay their faculty better and have ample protection in place by which the whims of administrations are balanced by the better judgment of the collective faculty, not to mention thick infrastructure to buffer against the flavor of the month.
“In 1973, the AAUP [American Association of University Professors] adopted the Statement on Collective Bargaining, recognizing that collective bargaining is consistent with the AAUP’s defense of such important standards as academic freedom, shared governance, and due process. The AAUP’s approach to collective bargaining is unique in its focus on faculty and other academic professionals; its commitment to protecting academic freedom and shared governance; and its emphasis on grassroots organizing and local autonomy.” https://www.aaup.org/programs/collective-bargaining Although the SD collective bargaining system is not under AAUP (but under NEA, resented by many at other levels) the COHE/BOR Agreement builds upon many of the fundamentals expressed in AAUP core documents. To eliminate those would leave SD more bereft of educational standards at the university level than it currently is: the SD BOR has increasingly compromised the negotiated COHE/BOR contract over past decades, subsuming more and more of the contractually negotiated agreement into its own policy manual.
For Rep Jon Hansen Rep Dell Rapids to say “If professors fail to provide an education for their students they should be let go and not subject to the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement” [as reported in the RC Journal https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/education/house-passes-bill-to-prohibit-collective-bargaining-at-state-universities/article_60e81e8b-09d2-5163-8347-179f595dbcd8.html%5D is simply for him to demonstrate his ignorance of what goes on under the current negotiated system. The negotiated COHE/BOR Agreement has ample mechanisms to remove those who are not ‘performing’ as required by the terms and conditions of the current Agreement.
For additional perspective read this 2013 article “Collective Begging at Its Best: Labor-Management
Relations in South Dakota” by Gary Aguiar written for the Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy for a deeper and broader understanding, one which greatly exceeds the understanding expressed by some legislators in this state. https://thekeep.eiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1309&context=jcba
The union was growing by about 30% over the last three years. Also, every faculty senate voted to oppose SD 147, so it is not like we were not representing the body of the faculty. We also had proposed several cost saving measures to the BoR, which were largely ignored.
Nothing Grudznick says has any basis in reality.
I joined the South Dakota faculty the first year that it operated under a collective bargaining agreement. It had an organizational election, negotiated a contract, and it went into effect in the fall semester of 1979. At the time, about 80 percent of the faculty at NSU had joined the union. But that number began to dwindle from the outset. I was on the negotiating team for the next two set of negotiations, and we saw memberships decrease as the faculty understood that they were covered by the contract whether they were dues-paying members or not. The sadly ironic aspect was that the reasons that the faculty organized to begin with were largely eliminated by the provisions in the collective bargaining agreement. When I retired, the dues-paying members were down to about 12 percent of the faculty.
The SDEA was part of the problem with maintaining membership. Their staff members kept insisting that college faculty were no different than the public school faculty in employment matters. But college faculty face an entirely different set of circumstances about promotion, tenure, continuing education, and professional issues. That attitude cost us members. As did attrition. Faculty turn-over was brisk. At one point, some members from USD forced an election to end our affiliation with the SDEA and affiliate with the AFT. There was no strong presence of the AFT in South Dakota at the time, and the proposal was voted down.
As state president of COHE, I had maintained my membership with the AAUP and received the most cogent advice and support from them. NSU and SDSU had been under sanction by them. When the institutions were under the collection bargaining agreement, the sanctions were lifted from them and were placed on the board of regents, which eventually negotiated settlements.
Now the state legislature has voted to ban collective by the college faculty. And from the reasons given by legislators, can see a descent of higher education into a political morass that will make South Dakota a place to avoid for prospective students and professors. The faculty will have to respond, but that involve saving themselves and not the system.
Grudz, of course you are off on a mission of goat napping, because you being a learn’ed and well-read man know that union membership INCREASES salaries of members. You also know that when workers have no voice or representation, the profits of their labors go disproportionally to the owner-class. Income inequality has been the death of civilizations – unions fight against that entropy. I do appreciate that your anti-unionism banter shows the true core motives of your GOP colleagues. Never let the specifics of a situation, or the facts, cloud a good slogan.
But on-topic you know that we want quality professors an professionals in our colleges (our students are certainly paying for that); and that when the state talks “cost savings” they mean reduced quality – something bad for SD, bad for SD Universities, and bad for SD students. Not even a university can cut its way to success.
CraigSk, The $280,000 number thrown around by the proponents would be the time spent bargaining, in billable lawyer hours (Nate Lukkes). Given that Nate’s entire annual salary is $170,700, that number is overblown. It is not like there will now be no personnel issues or policy matters that involve administrative time, we simply lose the format to discuss them once as a system every three years, and kick the can down to the individual campus’.
Additionally, COHE proposed cost saving measures, like reworking the student survey from the $121,000 annually instrument currently being used to a free survey, easily doable with today’s technology. We also proposed a Google Form Waste Not Want Not site to anonymously report BoR waste.
The SDGOP always lets ideology and knee jerk get in the way of good legislation. Mark, o, and David have been very clear about why this is bad legislation.
If the SDGOP was actually concerned about governing for the good of SD, rather than obeying ALEC, they’d have consulted with smart people like those 3 and proposed a bill to make the state’s higher education system better.
It feels like I keep hijacking discussions across this forum with the same theme. This is another example of the REAL issue not being cost, or university quality, or education stewardship, but instead anti-unionism pushed down from above. Debbo’s last comment is SO VERY on point.
The Koch organizations et al realized long ago the key to success was not changing a political party, but instead creating a corporate structure of dogma: ALEC, Federalist Society, the NRA . . . Then from those dogmatic institutions, get GOP folks elected and get them the playbook (just make them think it is the “GOP” playbook). The GOP is so absolutely successful because its elected officials are handed the ready-to-go directives the moment they are elected into office. Democrats waste opportunities trying to figure out what to do when elected – like a dog that actually catches the care it has chased so long.
In the primary debates, the Democrats still talk policy because each individual candidate has a specific policy agenda or focus. The GOP wastes no time on that division, the cult of personality just gets an election won then implements the pre-determined policy of the patrons of the GOP. Worse yet, there is even criticism of candidates who talk policy. How often have we been told by the media that talking policy makes a candidate unelectable? Instead just elect a likable candidate and let the policy be filled in later! Don’t elect the smartest kid in the room – she’s an independent thinker; instead elect who you would like to have a beer with (someone else will take care of the policy).
This is not democracy.
O, your last paragraph illustrates why most Democrats are just that. We are interested in ideas, policies, possibilities, thinking about things, the larger world, etc. Very few Democrats would accept top down orders.
Republicans who are similarly intellectually curious and thoughtful are the ones who have left the GOP or stayed but became self-described “Never trumpers.”
o, actually, rather than “this is not a democracy,” the circumstances you describe seem to fit the pattern feared and predicted by those who warned that a democracy can lead to stupid and harmful decisions by the governed; in this case voters have repeatedly made an unfortunate choice of key political leaders who often give their personal interests greater weight than the public interest.
Here is an interesting James Madison quote from Jeffery Rosen’s October 2018 take on the situation:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/
It is difficult to find an alternative explanation for the choice of Trump and Trump’s sycophants. Indeed, the electoral college can’t even offer an excuse for electing folks like Moscow Mitch and most other current Senate Trumpists in light of the 17th Amendment to our Constitution. In our current democracy it appears that Robert Crumb’s paraphrasing of LeSage’s observation regarding human frailty holds true: “when passion comes in the door, reason flies out the window.”
“when passion comes in the door, reason flies out the window.”
I believe this helps prove LeSage’s observation, nicely…..
https://www.exploreokoboji.com/news/news-stories/arnolds-park-man-faces-multiple-charges-after-being-pulled-over-in-obrien-county-for-alleged-erratic-driving/
:)
Looks like some of the $ should go to SDSMT to get it off the list of ugliest campuses. They didn’t have much good to say about RC either:
“Rapid City itself is dangerous and poorly patrolled.”
is.gd/yRbcI4