This evening I chose to address the board during the general public comments section because I am speaking to you not as a faculty member of the college, but as a tax-paying resident of district 502.

After spending my entire life in the north east, I moved to DuPage county 10 years ago after accepting a postdoctoral position at Argonne National Lab. When my postdoc position concluded, I found myself amused and slightly surprised that I chose to stay in DuPage county and make it my permanent home.

What is it that I love about this area? DuPage county is rich in nature and beauty. I can walk out my door and find my way through the trail system to one of many forest preserves. There are parks in every neighborhood.

DuPage county has an excellent education system for individuals of every age. My College of DuPage experience started not as a faculty member, but as a continuing education student taking an Italian language class on Tuesday nights.

On March 3rd of last year, I purchased my first home, just around the corner in Wheaton. This past summer, I paid my first ever property tax bill. While everybody around the country, and indeed the world, is being affected by high levels of inflation, I was still proud to do my civic duty and pay my tax bill. It is important to me to have Forest Preserves, parks, good roads and sidewalks, and educated neighbors.

I am disappointed that this board declined to increase the property tax levy. I know I don’t speak for all homeowners, but I would rather pay a few more dollars a year in taxes than require my students to shoulder the burden of a tuition increase. In addition, an increased tax levy doesn’t hold the school hostage to fluctuations in enrollment. The College of DuPage is a treasure that I am happy to continue to support financially. Some things are worth paying for, and this college is more than worth it. I hope you consider this next time you vote on an increase in the tax levy.

Thank you.

Good evening!

My name is Lisa Higgins. I’ve been a professor of English at COD for 18 years and the Director of the Honors Program for the past 6 years.

Thank you for your service to the college. I know that each of you gives a great deal of your time to the school.

I wanted to speak today to share some of the inspiring things that take place every day at COD and to express my hope that our upcoming contract negotiations will not distract from these successes.

Faculty members are on the frontlines when it comes to dealing with students. We see their successes — and their struggles. Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, our students have faced more challenges than ever before. We’ve seen a clear increase in students dealing with mental health challenges, financial problems, and family issues.

But we’ve also seen an inspiring amount of resilience among these wonderful young men and women. For the past 18 years, every fall, I teach an Honors Composition class that requires Service Learning. This semester, I’ve watched as my students volunteered with food pantries, the COD garden, after-school tutoring programs, the Forest Preserve, an animal shelter, a recycling center, and other organizations. They each spent at least 15-20 hours with these organizations, helping others and writing about the experience.

I also see many dedicated COD staff and faculty members putting in the time to help students connect to service projects and track their hours.

This is just one example of the successful cooperation that goes on every day at COD. As the administration and the COD Faculty Association enter into contract negotiations, I hope that the process is handled in a collegial and swift way that doesn’t distract attention from our mission at the college. Our number one priority has to be the students. Teaching matters.

Thank you!

Following President Goldberg, four CODFA members offered remarks to the Board of Trustees.

Professor Sam Mitrani

Our last contract was hard fought, and much better than it would have been without that fight. I know the majority of faculty wanted an extension, especially coming out of the stress of COVID.  But personally, if faculty were ready to stand up, I was against an extension because the current contract leaves in place the eroding of education we have seen at COD and across the country for 30 years, first of all through the massive replacement of full time by part time labor, and second of all through the vast increase in the number and power of administrators.

COD relies heavily on highly exploited adjunct labor. This has become so “normal” that few even question it anymore, but not so long ago, it was assumed that professors would get good health insurance and enough pay for a decent standard of living, with the occasional part-timer hired to teach a class as a form of training, or as a supplement to their retirement, or because they were an expert in a specific subject who had another full-time job. Today, most COD classes are taught by people who do not make a living wage. How can we tell our students that an education is the path to a decent future, when so many of the people teaching those students are highly educated and yet are denied the basic standard of living that used to be assumed for college professors? I hope our administration wants to add something to our contract that ensures everyone teaching at COD has affordable health insurance and a decent standard of living, first of all by hiring many more full timers.

The second massive change in education over the last era has been the enormous increase in administrators and in administrative power. It would have seemed strange not very long ago to put people who have almost never actually taught and who have chosen not to pursue teaching, in charge of people who actually teach and who presumably know what they are doing. I believe that it makes no sense to give administrators that power. If we need to have administrators who have chosen not to be educators, then our contract should bar them from intervening in the educational side of the institution, including deciding which classes should be taught, how they should be taught, who should teach them, and how they should be evaluated – and let the educators control the pedagogy, which after all is what we were hired to do. I admit faculty lost power in part because they didn’t want to do administrative work. But I think most of us today would be willing to take that burden back on if administrators would stay out of the things about which they know very little.

If administration wanted to open the contract to address these problems, then I am happy to hear it and I look forward to participating in friendly negotiations.

But if they rejected our offer of an extension because they want to add more “student success” metrics that they don’t know how to use, then I will instead be happy to participate in whatever fight is needed to defend education from so-called education “leadership.”

Professor Diane Gryglak

I’m Diane Gryglak from the Nursing and Health Science Division. I teach Medical Assistant and have been here for 15 years. That means I have been through two full negotiations. The things they had in common is that they were both distracting and exhausting.  

I like to wear red. It looks good with my gray hair, but it requires a separate laundry cycle. Too much sorting. It’s just one more thing to do.  I would like to see a contract extension.

I’m also concerned about everyone’s well-being. At in- service, which was just 2 months ago, we heard our keynote speaker, Dr. Imad Mays talk about the strain and isolation associated with COVID. This quote from her was included in the college announcement: “The fear, stress, and burnout that all teachers, students, higher education employees have faced in this pandemic are of a magnitude difficult to articulate.” Our whole in-service was about healing and recovery. I would like a little more time to heal and recover before we leap into something guaranteed to put the campus under stress.

Please re-consider a contract extension. 

Professor Robert Moorehead

Thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening. I’m Robert Moorehead, a faculty member in sociology. This is my eighth year at COD.

I wanted to give you some updates on the work that my colleagues and I have been doing. We’ve not only survived the greatest public health crisis in 100 years, we’ve innovated and, in a way, thrived. I hadn’t taught online before the pandemic, so, like many of my colleagues, I had a crash course in online instruction. We took classes on instructional design for online instruction, we learned best practices from our colleagues, and, to be honest, we got really good at teaching online. 

Now that we’re back in the classroom, we’re navigating a new set of challenges. We’re constantly reaching out to students who are falling behind. And there are a lot of them. Our students had two years of online classes, leading to all sorts of gaps in their skills, on top of the mental health issues they’re facing, the challenges they face paying bills, and the fact that they are working way too many hours while also taking classes. 

This is more than a full load. We’re exhausted. One of the most common topics of conversation among colleagues in the hallway is how tired we are. Between adapting our classes for this new environment, meeting with students, checking messages, filing BIT reports on students we’re concerned about, doing committee work, and much more, we’re tired. From looking at us, we might seem chill in our nice red t-shirts. You might not notice that below the water, our legs are kicking furiously. 

Given all that we have all been dealing with, the majority of faculty indicated their preference to extend our current contract. We expressed our desire to focus our energy on our students, and on each other, and not on re-negotiating our contract. So it’s disappointing that administration has rejected that request, and instead is insisting on opening everything up and re-negotiating the contract.

Please don’t mistake our fatigue for weakness or lack of commitment. We have a great negotiating team ready to work, but simply extending the contract seems like the best option for everyone, for faculty, for students, and for the college. Please reconsider this.

Thank you.

Professor Julia diLiberti

Last week the faculty were informed that our contract would not be extended. It was a surprise given that the faculty offer was made as a collaborative gesture. In fact, a new surge of COVID may be on the horizon and, as of about 9 hours ago, a new strain of Covid–the ‘”nightmare variant” it’s called—has now been found in the US.

We have barely begun to stabilize from the COVID-19, omicron, BA1. We, as a college, not just the faculty, but the staff as well, are still exhausted and feeling tenuous for having to live in present and contingency modes simultaneously.

Despite that, graduations have happened, student clubs are going, innovations in curriculum are occurring, pedagogies are being examined and implemented, committees are up and running, faculty are being developed, research is being conducted, peoples’ tech skills have increased exponentially, and our student count is up even if FTE’s are down.  All of this suggests some measure of collaboration within the college, some shared vision for a stronger COD. Sure, yes, we have different theories and ideas about what makes us stronger…and yet, much has been done to provide stable and new opportunities for students and the general community members we serve.

More importantly, with the cost of living going up and other financial implications potentially not to our advantage, the faculty offered a contract extension.

The offer was rejected so now the questions become:

“What does opening up the contract look like?” Is it sides drawn, public rallies, and marches? Is it more distraction to already frazzled college members?”
How does renegotiating a contract in newly stabilizing but still fragile times allow us to work on initiatives that are just getting traction—VR rooms, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion taskforces, Study Abroad and Field Studies Programs that are starting up again as more students and community members are willing to risk travel and travel together with groups outside their own health bubbles?

We realize that no contract is perfect and that clarifications are sometimes needed. Still, how does opening up the contract for prolonged negotiations allow us to focus on student success if we are all too preoccupied by another negotiation that puts us into another level of contingency in our work and personal lives as we worry about finances, family, and faculty concerns.

What problems exist for the administration with the old contract that are so big we must start this long, draining, disrupting, line-drawing, divisive process at this particular moment?

We will soon be losing two of the faculty who most exemplify COD’s excellence in helping students learn how to understand the world they live in, and consciously think through how they want to shape its future – which is, in my view, the real measure of student success. These two exemplify what full-time faculty represent to our students and the broader community.

Ben Whisenhunt is a renowned historian of Russia. He has written or edited eight books, published 15 articles in peer-reviewed journals and about 75 book reviews, founded a major scholarly journal on Russian-American relations, presented at dozens of conferences, was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Russia — I could keep going, but I can feel Ben getting embarrassed…

Ben has brought this expertise to his students and to the broader community. He has brought four groups of students to Russia itself. He has given dozens of presentations, helping us all understand more fully what has brought Russia and the rest of the world to where it is now – which is today more vital than ever.

Ben is not just a Russian specialist: he has designed three new and popular courses for the history program: History of Terrorism, Native American History, and 20th Century World History. He served as the first chair of the history department and helped us forge new 2+2 agreements with transfer schools. Most importantly, Ben imparts to students a passion to understand the social world they live in, to grapple with the complexity of history, to seek to put themselves in the shoes of people from different times and places – the only way to make sense of the complex, interwoven world we live in.

Ben’s replacement will have very large shoes to fill. But his work will live on in all of us.

Deborah Adelman – also retiring soon — teaches writing, literature, and film studies as a way of teaching students how to think deeply and broadly about their world. To this end, Deb has brought a global, interdisciplinary perspective to our students and the college community.

She has taught a Learning Communities class that links English and Environmental Biology for 25 years. She has helped build – and defend — the Community Farm, where students grow food for students, part of the Food Security Initiative. She has helped launch and build the Sustainability Film and Discussion Series, which ran throughout the pandemic and which made COD one of the venues for the One Earth Film festival, a major Chicago based festival. She has brought students on a service-learning field studies trip to Oaxaca, Mexico in which students lived with host families in a village. She is a key leader of Global Flicks. She has also presented at many national and international conferences – I could go on and on.

In short, like Ben, Deb has brought far more to the college than a list of her classes can summarize. She has helped our students learn to think about their world, the variety of people in it, and some of the key challenges we will face as a human species moving into the future. I can only hope that when we hire her replacement, we seek to find someone with a similar transnational, humane perspective.

These are just two examples among our 300 colleagues, unique but also emblematic of what full-time faculty bring to the school. I hope the board can see in their stories why we need to hire and retain full-time faculty.