Faculty outraged over e-mail ban
Union takes First Amendment concerns to court 

Faculty and Staff at LaGuardia Community College are seeing red over an edict that came down from the college president last fall: They can no longer receive or send notifications of meetings or discuss "union business" on LaGuardia e-mail. On Oct. 28, LCC president Gail Mellow sent an e-mail to Professional Staff Congress chapter chair Lorraine Cohen warning that sending out "notices relating to union meetings" was a violation of CUNY's policy on computer use.

Cohen and other officers of the union have been using e-mail for years. The system at LaGuardia made it especially easy to do so by providing an option that would automatically send messages to everyone in the PSC chapter, says Cohen. After Mellow's letter, that option,, and one for another campus union, was deactivated.

When a senior faculty member posted the president's letter on a collegewide listserv, pandemonium erupted.

"The most important thing is that the faculty and staff have responded powerfully and clearly to what they consider to be an assault on their rights and the union," says Cohen. "Members feel conditions of labor are essential to their performance as academics."

The union immediately sought a restraining order in federal court, arguing that the employees' First Amendment rights were being violated, says Steve London, PSC first vice president. It also filed an improper practice charge with the New York Public Employment Relations Board and filed a grievance based on a clear record of past practice.

LaGuardia's action came before the National Labor Relations Board's Dec. 16 ruling that a private employer has the right to prohibit workers from sending union-related e-mails at work. That ruling raises concerns for the public sector, says AFT general counsel David Strom, "to the extent that state public employee relations boards look to the NLRB for guidance on e-mail usage issues."

On Jan. 23, Cohen and other PSC leaders carried a petition to Mellow, signed by 174 faculty and staff seeking the immediate lifting of the ban.

"People feel that the union was using e-mail mainly to inform them of meetings and events and to answer questions that may have come up," says Cohen. They think the ban is "a petty, mean, vindictive and authoritarian decision and one that does not respect faculty and staff."

Governor calls for more full-time faculty 

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced in January that he will hire 2,000 new full-time faculty for the state's two public university systems, the State University of New York and the City University of New York. He also plans other initiatives to bring the state's higher education institutions to world-class status and to address more than a decade of underfunding.

Spitzer plans to pay for the improvements by setting up a $4 billion endowment, funded using proceeds from the New York State Lottery Fund, part of which he's considering privatizing.

In announcing the plan in January, Spitzer was moving quickly on recommendations that emerged a month earlier from the 30-member Commission on Higher Education. But soon after the plan was announced, other details surfaced, including the possibility that both private and public colleges would be able to apply to the endowment for grants that would be awarded competitively.

In testimony before the New York State Legislature on Jan. 30, New York State United Teachers executive vice president and AFT vice president Alan Lubin objected that "the establishment of any endowment and the proceeds that are generated from it should be used solely for public higher education."

Leaders of the SUNY and CUNY faculty-staff unions also testified, applauding the governor's acknowledgment of the need for more faculty and for restitution for years of shortchanging the universities. The number of new faculty hires, however, won't come close to closing the gap on the losses that have occurred, they noted.

"In 1975, the last time CUNY enrollment was at its current level," Professional Staff Congress president Barbara Bowen testified before the state Legislature, "the university employed 11,500 full-time faculty. Today, the number of full-time faculty is about 6,600. CUNY is 5,000 faculty short."

And United University Professions president Phillip H. Smith noted that, to reverse a 15-year decline in faculty, SUNY can't wait for the years it might take to set up a dedicated funding stream. "During those 15 years, SUNY eliminated 900 full-time faculty positions, while student enrollment has grown by 45,000. ... Any new revenue source must be targeted to improving access and quality for our public higher education systems now."