Ithaca College

The front-page article in last week’s Ithacan detailing the expansion of Ithaca College’s administrative footprint should be a cause of concern for all faculty at Ithaca College.

The front-page article in last week’s Ithacan detailing the expansion of Ithaca College’s administrative footprint (“Administration Expands During Collado’s Tenure, https://theithacan.org/news/administration-expands-during-collados-tenure/) should be a cause of concern for all faculty at Ithaca College. While representative of a national trend, Ithaca College can not escape the well documented negative impact of such expansion, as the needs of the administrative superstructure bleed time and resources away from the College’s core constituency: the students and their teachers.

This administrative expansion is particularly concerning to the Contingent Faculty Union, which represents almost half the faculty at Ithaca College. Shortly after beginning her tenure, President Collado met with faculty union leaders to request, in effect, that the union “behave” while she assembled her leadership team. No subsequent contact with the President’s Office has taken place. On a number of issues concerning contract interpretation that directly impact the ability of faculty to plan their courses and carry out their lives, the administration has doggedly pursued the most restrictive interpretation of the protections negotiated into the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) possible. While the rest of the Ithaca College campus community embraced the spirit of the CBA’s recognition of the need for job security and professional development among all faculty, the administrative team’s response has been to ignore the clear intent of what was negotiated in favor of narrow legalistic interpretation.

The College can only be strong if there is respect for all IC community members and this means owing up to the intent and spirit of agreements. Legal pedantry is not a community building activity. Turning the lives of faculty over to lawyers and strangers to quibble over legal technicalities and seek out loopholes is not an expression of profession respect or a spirit of inclusion. The current state of American Higher education is proof that when faculty cede ownership of institutional values to an administrative class that the results are corrosive to students and professors – both contingent and tenure-track.

Contingent Faculty Union Leadership Committee

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