Academic Senate Youngstown State University Youngstown, Ohio  44555

Note:  The next meeting of the Academic Senate is scheduled for April 5, 2006, at 4:00 p.m. Please submit agenda items and cover sheets for the October Senate meeting to Bob Hogue by noon on March 27, at the latest.  Provide both a hard copy and a disk or electronic copy of your report and cover sheet in Word or rich text format.  A downloadable cover sheet is available at the Academic Senate web site [hit "cancel" if asked for a password]:

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Minutes of the Previous Meeting:

Minutes of the February 1, 2006, meeting were approved as posted.  To view the minutes, go to <http://www.www.ysu.edu/acad-senate/minfeb06.htm>. 

Senate Executive Committee (SEC) / Report from the Chair / Ohio Faculty Council Report:  Tom Shipka, Chair of the Senate, reported:

As is my custom, I will consolidate my several reports. I apologize in advance for the unusual length of my report today.

1. North Central Reaccreditation Visit

Dr. Chet Cooper, Vice-Chair of the Senate, and I, met recently with three individuals who have major responsibilities for reaccreditation of YSU by the North Central Association. These are Dr. Bege Bowers, Dr. Jan Elias, and Dr. Sharon Stringer. North Central will visit campus from February 18 to February 20, 2008. YSU is required to complete a Self-Study and to submit it to North Central by fall, 2007. Dr. Bowers and her colleagues requested that Senate standing committees be involved in preparation of the Self-Study. Some Senate committees will review material generated by non-Senate committees and other Senate committees will generate material from scratch.

To do this, Dr. Bowers says that Senate standing committees need to be up and running at the start of fall semester 2006. To make this possible, we will move up the process for faculty to sign up for Senate committee service for 2006-2007 and we will ask all Senate standing committees to hold their organizational meeting for 2006-2007 before the end of the current semester. At that meeting they will elect their committee chair for 2006-2007. If we were to follow the traditional routine whereby Senate committees held their organizational meetings in the fall, some committees would not be ready to begin their work until October or November which is too late to complete the work to be done. Bob Hogue, Senate Secretary, will post an electronic sign-up form on the Senate web page very soon and I encourage all faculty to volunteer for service on two committees. As you know, most Senate standing committees require faculty representation from all the colleges, so an individual may not necessarily get his or her first choice of committee. Those faculty who have served one or two years on a committee need not reapply for that committee. They will be automatically extended until they complete three years of service on a committee unless they resign. Thank you for your cooperation on this important institutional project.

2. Ohio Faculty Council

The Ohio Faculty Council met at the Ohio Board of Regents Suite in Columbus on Friday, February 10. We had the best turnout in years. Dr. Sracic and I represented YSU. Our guest was Representative Jon Husted, Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. He made an opening statement in which he gave us an overview of the Ohio economy and the depressing State revenue picture, after which we had a candid but friendly dialogue with him. In his statement one of the points that he drove home is the decline in manufacturing jobs in Ohio, even in prosperous plants such as GM Lordstown, which he said he visited last year. Lordstown, he pointed out, can turn out more cars per shift today than it did ten, twenty, or thirty years ago with a fraction of the work force. He spoke about the need to emphasize STEM – science, technology, engineering, and math – in Ohio’s schools and colleges to build a viable future State economy.

I believe that the Speaker is the highest elected office holder ever to visit with the OFC. We found the Speaker to be knowledgeable, articulate, conscientious, street savvy, and gracious. (But please don’t put too much stock in my evaluation. I had the very same opinion of Tom Noe, former chair of the Ohio Board of Regents, when he was the guest of the OFC two years ago prior to the eruption of the Coingate scandal.) Congratulations are due from all of us around the State to Dr. John Cuppoletti, this year’s OFC chair, for orchestrating the Speaker’s visit and striking up a hopefully continuing and mutually beneficial relationship with the Republican legislative leadership.

When we reached the question-and-answer part of the program, I asked the Speaker if he saw any signs of a reversal in the longstanding trend in Ohio of declining State appropriations to the public universities as a percentage of operating costs. I pointed out to him that when I joined the YSU faculty thirty-seven years ago the State provided 77% of the YSU operating budget compared to around 30% this year. This, I said, helps in large part to explain the shift of the funding burden from government to students and their families in the form of ever-rising tuition costs.

His response was fascinating. He acknowledged that higher education is underfunded and said that there is a consensus to that effect in the Ohio General Assembly. Really. He said that the revenue picture in the near future is not a hopeful sign for higher education. He also acknowledged that the Legislature has been disappointed with the results of its enormous investment in K-12 over the past twenty years based on a variety of benchmarks, including proficiency test scores and dropout rates, especially in the cities, but that many legislators remain reluctant to undertake a dramatic shift in education funding because of the likely political repercussions. To illustrate this, he quoted from a poll which he took in his own House district recently. Among the questions were two about casino gambling. One said: “Would you support the legalization of casino gambling in Ohio if the proceeds go to elementary and secondary education?” Fifty-two percent, a thin majority, answered in the affirmative. Another question was this: “Would you support the legalization of casino gambling in Ohio if the proceeds go to higher education?” Only thirty-three percent answered in the affirmative. Put bluntly, though there is a growing realization in the Legislature that higher education deserves a greater share of State appropriations, the legislators lack the will to provide it even if they could because, given the mindset of the electorate, such an initiative could be political suicide.

At the April 14 meeting of the OFC, our guest will be chair of the Board of the State Teachers Retirement System. He is Dr. Robert B. Brown, Professor of Mathematics at The Ohio State University. He will give us an update on reform at STRS in the aftermath of the investment and administrative scandals of the recent past.

3. Compliance with the Labor-Management Review Panel Report

At our last Senate meeting, this body endorsed the Report of the Labor- Management Review Panel which was released on January 12. Since the Panel came into existence from my request to President Sweet for its creation, and since the Senate has officially endorsed the Panel’s Report, I want to share with you today my thoughts on where we stand on the issue of compliance with the recommendations of the Report by President Sweet and the leadership of the faculty union and the classified staff union.

Let me say up front that if anyone in the room today plans to submit a resolution of no-confidence in President Sweet at this meeting, I urge you not to do so. Based on information which has reached me in recent days, efforts by the Board of Trustees and the President to deal with several of the more controversial recommendations continue as we meet today. Attorney John Pogue, chair of the Internal Affairs Committee of the Board and a member of the Labor-Management Review Panel, you may recall, spoke on behalf of the Board last week after a very long executive session with President Sweet. He concluded his remarks with a mention that additional personnel actions may be in the offing. If there is no progress along this line in coming days and weeks, those who are anxious to submit a resolution of no-confidence certainly may do so at the Senate meeting in April or May.

That said, the package of recommendations which the Panel submitted in its Report aimed at stabilizing and normalizing labor-management relations on campus included three especially pivotal ones. One was the removal from university employment of two administrators with responsibility for labor relations whose attitudes and conduct, in the opinion of the Panel, were an insurmountable obstacle to normalizing labor relations at YSU. Another was the reinstatement of Christine Domhoff, President of ACE, whose discontinuation of employment was mysterious in the eyes of the Panel. The loss of her job certainly helped to poison the labor relations well. The Panel found many cases of YSU employees who were reassigned after grants supporting them ran out or after they had run into various problems in their old assignments. Among such employees are Carol O’Brian, Meredith Young, Silvia Hyre, Gordon Mapley, Diane Scacchetti, Sandra Denman, and others. There did not appear to be anything in Ms. Domhoff’s work record that supported a discharge for cause and there seemed to be other jobs on campus for which she was qualified. It was difficult for the Panel to conclude anything except that her discontinuation was linked to her role as a campus labor leader despite the fact that no one in the administration explicitly admitted it. The third was that Ms. Domhoff and Mr. Maldonado, President and Vice President of ACE, should take a breather from leadership roles for several years. The Panel understands that these are elected leaders and that it is unusual for a Panel such as ours to issue such a recommendation. Please remember that the Panel included Mr. Maldonado’s friend and the person who spearheaded the unionization of the faculty on this campus and led the faculty union for a long time – me; one of the most knowledgeable labor attorneys in the nation who is senior member of Mr. Maldonado’s union’s law firm, the same firm which serves the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, the Ohio Education Association, and most other unions in the region – Dennis Haines; and the President of the largest labor union in the region – Jim Graham from UAW 1112. We are no strangers to unions. We made this recommendation because we were convinced that the current leadership, especially Mr. Maldonado, is too angry, combative, and intense to play a constructive role in the short-term in normalizing labor relations.

And what has been the reaction of the President and the two unions to these pivotal recommendations? The President had been in denial about his Vice President of Administration for a long time. Long before the Panel was appointed and began its work, this Vice President was on thin ice with a sizeable contingent of the Board of Trustees. As far back as two years ago and as recently as an Administrative-Board retreat in December, members of the Board expressed their objections to this individual’s modus operandi. They were concerned about his ever-expanding power, by his practice of withholding relevant information from the Board until it was specifically requested by a trustee, by his repeated efforts to push the Board to a vote too quickly on complicated issues, some with big price tags, and by his becoming more and more the sole pipeline of information from the administration to the Board. The Board was prompted to support this individual’s proposal for an Early Retirement Incentive Plan in the ACE negotiations based on incomplete and inaccurate information which he provided.

So, no one in the know, especially the President, should have been surprised or shocked when the Panel found serious problems with this individual’s handling of campus labor relations in recent years. The Panel informed the President some three weeks before the issuance of our Report that two specific administrators were found to be a major cause of our problems. He asked that we not mention their names in our Report. When it came time to finalize the Report, and we had no assurances from the President as to his intentions about these two individuals, we felt obligated to name them and we did.

As to the Domhoff reinstatement, I urged this upon the President many months ago as an ideal opportunity for him to extend an olive branch to the campus unions. I told him that he needed to act before Ms. Domhoff’s case went to arbitration. I talked with people around the campus and found that several were ready, willing, and anxious to have her on their staff, including the Center for Working Class Studies. During the period in which the Panel conducted its work, Ms. Domhoff agreed to drop all of her grievances and unfair labor practice charges connected with the loss of her job if she were restored to employment with back pay. Further, if Ms. Domhoff were reemployed with back pay, ACE agreed to drop virtually all of its current grievances and Ms. Domhoff and Mr. Maldonado agreed to step down from their union offices. The President wouldn’t budge, however, and he declined the offer. In the past couple of weeks, with an arbitration hearing already a fait accompli, after the intervention of a former trustee, the President did finally show some interest in the possible reinstatement of Ms. Domhoff but as a new employee with no back pay, hardly a prospect that she would find attractive.

As to Ms. Domhoff and Mr. Maldonado, despite the failure of the President to authorize Ms. Domhoff’s reinstatement, it was my hope that the two of them would step down anyway. That, of course, has not happened.

On February 17 a meeting was scheduled for the Panel to meet with the leaders of the faculty union, the classified staff union, and the professional/administrative staff union. Ostensibly the leaders wanted a “clarification” of some of our recommendations. The Panel report was published on January 12. Neither of the two unions who had struck the university had indicated their intentions relative to the Panel’s recommendations for five long weeks. Just prior to the February 17 meeting, however, the newsletter of the faculty union carried articles by leaders saying that Ms. Domhoff and Mr. Maldonado should not be expected to step down. They had represented their members well and their members should remove them if they want a change in the next election. Further, the recommendation of the Panel that the two union negotiating teams step down was declared a very bad idea. The recommendation about the negotiating teams was part of the new faces theme of the Report and was viewed by the Panel as largely a symbolic gesture where the unions could show that they were willing to make a sacrifice, albeit modest, to normalize labor relations. Having read where the faculty union leadership stood on the Panel’s recommendations affecting the unions, I was skeptical that the meeting later that week was really about a “clarification” but the Panel went along with the meeting.

The meeting was a disappointment to me and, I suspect, to the other Panel members present. We were lectured for about ten minutes at about two hundred decibels about democracy by a defiant Mr. Maldonado. We were criticized for not having recommended the appointment of a faculty member to the Board of Trustees, an idea, by the way, that I do not remember any union leader presenting in testimony before the Panel. We were made to feel that by asking the two negotiating teams to step down as a gesture of good faith that we were asking for the PIN numbers for their credit cards and bank accounts. And after we were instructed as to why the unions couldn’t or wouldn’t follow our recommendations about Ms. Domhoff, Mr. Maldonado, and the negotiating teams, and a few other matters as well, we were nevertheless urged to continue our important work and we were even given a round of applause at the end. The unions seemed to me to be reshaping a lyric in a famous song: “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with YOU (and Hugh, and John).” They reminded me of St. Augustine’s mocking prayer prior to his conversion: “Lord, make me pure, but not just yet.”

So where does all this leave us? It appears that the plan outlined by the Panel will be implemented only partially. Some of the most important components have been vetoed by one or the other side. This is a disappointment to the Panel because we honestly believe that the Report presents a package which, if implemented fully by all sides, would result in a truly significant step forward in relationships at YSU. Thus far blame for the meltdown in labor relations on campus and the failure to comply with the Panel’s recommendations has been heaped mainly upon the shoulders of David Sweet. Certainly he deserves his share. But so do others.

I hope and expect that there will be modest improvements in campus labor relations in the months ahead. I am not ready to predict major improvements. The Panel has done its part. Our work is done. The rest is up to the President, the trustees, and the employees of this institution and their elected leaders.

Again, my apologies for the excessive length of this month’s report.

I will be happy to respond to questions or comments. Thank you.

Chet Cooper: Thanks to Dr. Shipka for his service on the Labor-Management Panel and to the University. I've lost a great deal of sleep over the past few weeks. David Sweet and I started at YSU at the same time. I've been angry with him at times, and sometimes with the unions as well. What we've seen transpire is a cancer of anger and hate that has metastasized. It is time to stop the alienation of our colleagues and most importantly our students. We need to be less self-centered and more communicative. Some ugly things have been said, and it's time to stop and take a step back. It's my suggestion to take a breather and start a dialog of open, honest, and respectable communications. It is time to stop the disease that has infiltrated this campus, because it's starting to affect our most precious element, our students.

Top of Page

Unfinished Business:   None.

New business:   

Cyndy Anderson: Maybe we can follow up on Chet Cooper's comments. Maybe we can decide here, or soon, on what some of those communications channels can be. Please e-mail me your ideas on this.

Amanda Mielke introduced a resolution concerning the creating of standardized curriculum sheets (see Attachment 3). Moved that it be sent to an appropriate Senate committee for action by the May Senate meeting. Seconded. Motion passed.

Bob McGovern: I’d like to speak to you about the labor-management relations climate; I’m pleased that this meeting has taken a more positive tone than we suspected. Lately, it has felt like we—the students—have been forgotten, so it was refreshing to hear Dr Cooper’s remarks just now mention students, and I would like to thank him for that. Amid all this talk of labor relations, it feels like some have lost touch with why they’re here, but that appears to be changing.

I know that many people within this room and without were hoping that President Sweet would have taken some different actions than he did. However, he did not terminate the employments of Messrs John Habat and Hugh Chatman. This decision should be accepted, even if not agreed with.

I’m sure a lot of the professors in this room assign group work. Some of them most likely choose the groups, instead of letting students choose their own. Why is that? I’ve been told that it’s because you can’t choose whom you work with in your career. I’ve also been in groups where our grade is not determined individually. We got a group grade—even if one member clearly excelled and another faltered.

That being said, I see this as a similar situation. We have to move on from here. We have to work together—whomever “we” entails. And even if you feel that another group at the University or member of the University Community is not willing to make that effort, please make the effort yourself.

A respected member of this Senate, Dr Keith Lepak, encouraged faculty members last semester to have a coffee with an administrator in Tod Hall. I renew that call, and further suggest that those of you in Tod Hall—and your colleagues—should try spending your lunch hour with some faculty and staff members. Possibly sit in on a lecture or visit their department. Do something to demonstrate that you care about them and what they do for the students.

I’m not disillusioned enough to think that we’ll find a solution overnight. In an environment like this, change is going to happen slowly. With little things like talking to each other, whether through a formalized Labor-Management Council, or through the previous suggestion of making an individual effort. I believe that YSU can have a great future if everybody is willing to work together, despite the personalities involved, so long as nobody forgets the reason why they’re here. Let’s remember what that is: the students.

Tom Shipka: I would like to point out that labor-management difficulties have occurred at other Ohio universities in the recent past, and those universities have been able to move on. I believe that we can also.