Academics take to the air

Who says union leaders can appear only in print, at a podium or on the street going door to door? William Scheuerman, vice president of AFT and president of United University Professions in New York, also inhabits the airwaves.

Every month, listeners in seven states can tune in to WAMC-Northeast Public Radio to hear Scheuerman’s commentary about higher education. His first one, reaching 12 stations in the region, blasted the Bush administration for underfunding No Child Left Behind and for patterning the law after the Houston school district whose extravagantly high success rates were falsified. His next segment decried the growing difficulty of paying for college, enumerating cuts to Perkins funds and the Workforce Investment Act, changes to Pell Grants, and grabs for federal dollars by for-profit institutions. Another show trounced the privatization of public higher ed.

Alan Chartock, president and CEO of WAMC-Northeast Public Radio, invited Scheuerman to become a regular contributor to WAMC because “no one could be a bigger expert on higher education.” A communications professor emeritus at SUNY-Albany (and a UUP member, too), Chartock puts higher ed professionals on the air because “the public radio audience is the brightest, and often the most educated, of any group.” Among them, says Chartock, college is “almost universal” and, according to one survey, 80 percent have attended graduate school. WAMC makes a point of interviewing professors, examining pedagogy and remembering its audience. “In my opinion, all public radio stations ought to be doing [the same] because their demographics are similar to ours,” says Chartock. Although WAMC is not college-affiliated, its signal reaches numerous colleges and universities in western Massachusetts, New York, Vermont and beyond.

In an age when media giant Sinclair Broadcasting required its stations to air anti-Kerry film footage during the presidential campaign and billionaire conservative Rupert Murdock is in charge of Fox News Channel, “the people who have the gold make the rules,” says Chartock, and the voice of public radio is precious. “We think we’re an honest broker of the truth,” he says, explaining that he takes care to balance liberals with “a huge number of thoughtful conservatives.” During a recent fund drive, the station warned listeners, “You have no honest broker in the media except for us.” People responded enthusiastically, and the station raised $680,000 in four days, a record-breaking figure.

Could higher education find an even stronger voice on public radio? Chartock thinks so. “Public radio has a national interest group,” he says. “The more information they give about higher education, the more transparent it is, and the more support it will get.” And educators are eager to participate. “We can reach out to any professor in our listening area and I think they’d give their right arm and three fingers of their left to be on the radio,” says Chartock.

Perhaps putting more profs in the studio would allay Chartock’s fear for public programming. He worries over the “right-wing garbage” saturating commercial radio through people like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, and says his most dire prediction is that “sooner or later, they’ll come after public broadcasting.” A few more academics on the air might be just the ticket to help save public radio from such a fate.

McCann: Serving Midwest unions

When the position of deputy director in the AFT Great Lakes region needed to be filled, the union didn’t have to look far to find a qualified candidate. AFT national representative Cathleen McCann was appointed to the post this past July.

Being part of the effort to bring “unrepresented people into the labor movement and increasing the activism of already represented workers is most rewarding,” McCann says about her job. Organized labor is at a crucial crossroads, and the ability of the AFT to improve education and public services and to tackle tough issues like healthcare reform depends on the active involvement of AFT members and unionists, she says.

As a deputy regional director, McCann will play a key role in working with locals and state federations to determine how the national union can best assist them. This includes coordinating AFT resources for organizing and other union-building activities.

McCann brings a diversity of AFT experience to the job. Since 1992, she has worked in a variety of capacities at both the state and national levels. But possibly the best training McCann received was from watching her father, Tone McCann, former president of the AFT’s Shenendehowa (N.Y.) Teachers Association, as she was growing up in Clifton Park, N.Y.  “I was a small soldier in the wars for basic rights and respect that took place in upstate New York in the 1970s,” McCann recalls.

The Great Lakes region includes Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin.