Tone Right, Facts Wrong

Yesterday, near close-of-business, an email came to "Everyone at Edison" from KY's account. The message, while conveyed in an uncharacteristically measured tone, was full of the double-speak we've come to expect from that office. Consider the following:

It is very important for everyone at Edison to understand that no faculty member or no administrator or classified employee has been non-renewed or fired. According to the union contract and board policy, any employee that may not be renewed next year must be notified 90-days before the end of the budget year, or April 1. The clear and unequivocal goal is to maintain full employment. We are doing the best we can under the circumstances, and we are currently planning a flat budget for next year as the basis for maintaining full employment. To be sure, this is a sensitive and difficult time for everyone. We need to work through this, and strident and divisive voices can only serve to distract us from that effort.

Um, no.

1. Everyone who received notice of non-renewal has been fired. It's that simple. KY's purported intention to rehire, or "maintain full employment" is irrelevant. From a contractual standpoint, a notice of kind-of-maybe non-renewal is absurd. The Administration has an apparatus for continuing a contract, or ending it. A bilateral contract where one party may, or may not perform obligations, at that party's discretion, is illegal and ludicrous. 500 years of Anglo-Saxon contract law probably trumps KY's creative attempt at sort-of firings.
   
2. No one has shown any person who has asked--and The Illuminator has--where the board's "policy" regarding non-renewal is recorded. As is typical, they seem to be making it up as they go along.
   
3. KY does not understand the union contract. Despite his misleading attempt to appeal to the union contract to support his firing of classified staff, the CBA is wholly irrelevant to the crisis. The CBA, or union contract, covers only tenured faculty. Tenure protects faculty who engaged in struggles like the current one, to save Edison from disaster because of KY's negligent stewardship and the Board's intransigence. Its protections allow responsible people to speak and act without suffering the fear through which KY maintains his stranglehold on the institution.
   
4. Tenured faculty may be non-renewed only under very specific circumstances: 1) for cause, which means failure to live up to contractual obligations, or for behaving very poorly, as in being guilty of a felony or moral turpitude--now, in most cause circumstances, faculty are required to receive a PIP, or performance improvement plan, and given a year to get things sorted; and 2) as part of a "reduction in force," which is a formal process by which tenured faculty may be non-renewed, but only after very specific steps are followed, none of which have been performed by KY or his praetorian guard. Mentioning the union in this missive is misleading at best, and a damn lie at worst.
5. KY's attempt at non-renewal of tenured faculty violates the CBA, and as explained in point #1, amounts to a firing, and a retaliatory firing at that. Not only have people been fired, or attempted to be fired, but more than seventy have been. His and Doug Murray's ignorance have placed administrators in untenable positions and made the administration a laughing stock.
   
6. As for divisive and strident, The Editorial Junta pleads guilty to strident. But divisive? No. No, certainly not. In fact, as KY will find, Edison's various constituencies are more united than ever; we're just united against him, and his plans to ruin our College.