Mother Miami Gets the Back of the Hand
I've been told that Miami used to be quite a different place. Thus far I've told you about the sorts of things that we've come to expect in town. On campus it used to be that there was a community. The symbol of that community was Mother Miami, a personification of the shared concern demonstrated by all. Miami students were made to feel cared for by the staff and faculty. And Miami tried to do best by its workers. They were not paid a living wage, but at least they were paid respect by the management.
That all changed. Miami University staff are unionized, and during the start of the last decade there was a push for a living wage on campus. The administration rejected this, and in 2003, there was a short strike.
The strike was a great civics lesson, a study in leadership, the best course in political science, a seminar in sociology, a class in women's studies (seventy percent of the union members are women), and it has been history in the making.
What did we learn? We learned that the workers here do not earn a living wage, that many work two jobs, that 20% receive some form of public assistance, that many live in poverty. We also learned that they care deeply about students at Miami.
We learned that a public university that makes claim to high ideals will deal with its workers as if it were a private corporation that must grind employees to make a profit for selfish owners.
Things have not grown better in the time since. I've been involved in the effort to organize graduate employees on campus. The University has repeatedly mistreated us. Contracts made specifying one rate of pay are switched at last minute for others. Graduate employees have been told their contract is being cut in order to bring in new people. Pay has been slashed with no discussion. And the option to purchase actual health coverage has been withdrawn. There are at least 4 insulin dependent diabetics who work as graduate employees at the University. Since having their coverage switched to a Mickey Mouse plan, they've been forced to put their insulin on credit cards. Graduate employee pay generally floats around a little over half of the poverty level.
The situation is little better for the unionized staff. I speak with the union VP on a regular basis, so I know that they go through the same things. They've tried to work with the university administration, but the administration has shown an utter lack of respect towards them. Confronted with rising healthcare costs, the union approached the administration with a plan to reduce the cost of prescriptions through using existing university resources. The original plan called for using the power of the health center's pharmacy to purchase drugs at wholesale to drive down the cost to the university and employees. Typically wholesale pharmaceutical costs are around 10% of retail. Initially the union proposal was met with enthusiasm by HR, but the higher reaches of the administration shut it down before it could happen. (This isn't just at Miami, university unions in Ohio have called for the creation of a non-profit HMO-type organization covering employee healthcare costs through the use of school health centers, pharmacies, and university hospitals. But they've been shut down to protect the profits of the insurance middlemen that drive up healthcare costs, and pocket the difference between retail and wholesale.)
Miami University staff have constantly talked about how they want the university to act like a private school. Public education is a secondary thought for them. Part of this attempt at privatization has been outsourcing functions. First Student has a contract with the university and has attempted to drive down their costs through slashing wages and otherwise attacking workers. After a hard fight those workers unionized last year. The university bookstore is another target. Many employees have worked there for 10-20 years. They have protections because of the union contract. The university wants to outsource them, which would allow the new operator to break the union and bring in new workers at lower wages and benefits. Same thing with food and housing services. It's all been a push to make as many functions of the university private as possible.
So come this spring, there's this wave of right-wing legislation coming out of Columbus that's been picked up by the university administration like it's gold. Most of you know about the effort in Ohio called SB 5. This bill effectively strips public workers of the ability to bargain collectively. Recent polling has found that about 2/3rds of Ohio voters favor collective bargaining for public workers, and would vote down SB 5 by a 23% margin in a referendum. Most people know about this.
What less people know is that the Inter-University Council sent a letter to the Ohio Senate asking them to insert language into SB 5 that would strip most faculty of the right to organize unions. Follow the link, read the actual letter. This is an explicit effort to bust faculty unions. Miami University President Hodge sits on this body, and hasn't attempted to suggest that he in any way disagrees with this. The link to Miami University administration is even more clear when it comes to the charter universities idea.
When the charter idea came out, we had Miami university VP Creamer out there touting it saying that:
relief from regulatory burden would help colleges control costs.
“In trying to make sure things don’t get mishandled, we create a lot of red tape,” he said. “That’s a decision every institution would have to make, whether the tradeoffs are worth it.”
One of these "tradeoffs" would likely be an end to prevailing wage laws that require wages paid to workers match the going rate in the area. The idea behind a prevailing wage is that government money shouldn't be used to drive down wages. That possibility is what excites. Finally, as I said earlier less money likely means higher tuition rates. Something that removing "red tape" makes possible.
This whole chartering bit was a bridge too far, and finally there was momentum on campus to do something about it.
Education and Direct Action
A plan was hatched. If the campus only knew half the things that chartering would bring about, they wouldn't abide by it. It turned out we were right, but it was a long, rocky path there.
We got started with the idea that we would hold a teach in. The GEO folks had been active with the union on SB 5 things, and we knew the fight was coming to campus. So we planned a teach-in on the issue. We brought a lot of people in, and a few that had to be at conferences made video statements. My personal favorite is by Dr. Quantz, a professor in the Educational Leadership department. We posted it online, and you can watch it below.
I've already talked about the arguments against chartering, so you already have a good idea of what the teach in was about. We had a good showing. From that meeting emerged the Miami University chapter of Defend Ohio. Our little group that had grown from the GEO to include the union local and now quite a few awesome Miami undergrads now had a name. And a mission. Direct action was the next step.
One of the GEO people and I had already been batting around the idea of a protest at the ALEC meeting in Cincinnati. There was only so much we could do on campus, so that was our counterattack at the state level. So we managed to plan a "welcoming committee" for the assholes pushing this legislation in all the states, funneling corporate cash into legislative pull. Part of the reason that charter universities are even on the table is because universities have a revenue problem, not a spending problem. Years of tax cuts for the wealthy have left an emaciated state budget that is largely unable to allow the our democratic government to act as a counter to the anti-social behavior of big business. So we had our plan. Read Bob Sloan's write up for more on that.
On campus, we had smaller ambitions: Get President Hodge to publicly reject any notion that Miami would become a charter university. We got a confrontation, if not a confirmation. If the university wants to make changes that could lead to the class of 2015 suffering 24% tuition increases before they graduate, we thought that they, and their parents, deserved to know about it now.
One of the rites of spring in Oxford is the arrival of next year's freshman on campus with parents to tour the campus. They follow a fixed route. The have fixed times and places they will show up. They have the same shitty little stories.
The best is about the legend that stepping on the university seal outside the building containing the president's office will make you fail your next test. We know this. We know that it would be really effective if we put on our direct action there. So we did.
On Thursday, April 21st, and Friday, April 22nd, we held an action at the university seal, creating a quite scene, while handing out fliers to explain what the fuss was.
Pictures help explain what we did.
Chartering chokes the public out of public education. That's what the signs say, and that's what we ran with. The image of two people bike locked together on the seal is pretty jarring. People were curious, the parents on the tour couldn't quite seem to know what to think of it. That's when we hit them with literature. No yelling, not chasing, just handing pages out. And we had this going on at several locations across campus.
We managed to get through a two hour session before President Hodge himself came out to rock around the seal like a banty rooster. By this point I had left to attend another meeting on campus, so this is all second hand. First of all, we had sent a letter asking for President Hodge to meet with us about chartering. They hadn't responded. Second, when he came out he used the same exact demeaning language that he has used on several previous occasions. (Principally during the living wage campaign.) He implied that our letter was all over the place, and he didn't know what we wanted. He didn't actually say that he'd agree to a meeting in which two of our members weren't bikelocked together, but he did leave implying this after saying "you aren't the public."
Frankly, given what I've heard about the encounter, I couldn't help but think about what may family taught me: All work has dignity. Given the lack of this shown by President Hodge, I'm curious as to why he still has a job.
He's been at the head of an administration that has done the best to disrespect the people who work at the university while removing any opportunity to call them to account for their actions. This is why we had to go sit out in the cold and rain to make our point. Moreover, they have acted as though they are above the law. At the same time that President Hodge is slashing the jobs of people who barely make the minimum wage, he's fought tooth and nail. Condeleeza Rice recently spoke on campus, and the administration first tried to prevent the release of how much she was paid. When the number was finally released, we learned that Miami had paid her $150,000. This at the same time that employees who had worked at the university for years for well below a living wage were being shown the door.
And it isn't just that. Miami has racked up quite a bill with these visits, and some just make you scratch your head and ask, "Why?" For example, this week Miami played host to James O'Keefe, young journalist of ACORN "pimps and hos" fame, amongst other conservative ideologues. And it's almost certain that the university footed part of the bill.
O'Keefe apparently had an effect, encouraging the members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and College Republicans to emulate him, but to be a little bit more blatantly racist. O'Keefe drew upon racist stereotypes for his little expose. John Howting, president of the Miami chapter of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and officer in the College Republicans, went with full on black face to crash our final direct action. Oh, did I mention that this little shit interned for Human Events last summer. Clearly they taught him well.
Enter the Blackface
Our final event on campus was a rally on campus that the University tried to shut down claiming they had no record of our permit. (When we handed them a copy of the permit, they backed down.) Our rally was behind the Student Center at 3:30 on the Friday before Easter in the cold rain. Yet, was still got about 100 people to show up and stand in the rain to listen to speakers. I was only able to get part of the crowd from up the stairs.
After President Hodge's comment that we weren't the public, we thought that collecting signatures for a petition calling on Hodge to reject the privatization of the university through chartering would be a good idea. So we did. Collecting signatures in the rain is horrible. But we managed to get somewhere between 60-70. 2 and a half pages of signatures. I was busy running around collecting signatures, and taking photos that I didn't really understand the full extent to which over groups tried to crash our event.
First, the Larouchites managed to connive their way into the event. So we had to try to move them along quietly after they got the mike. But the biggest bs of all came from this Howting guy. I only briefly saw him, and was trying to figure out what the deal with them was having petition about also was about. Finally, I figured something was off, I didn't know what, but I was more concerned about getting signatures on our petition. I get the story second hand.
So this Howting guy shows up, but he's lathered himself in tanning lotion to make himself look darker, and is saying that his name is "Hugo Marnez." He's got this petition with him to "ban all privatization." He's saying that he's with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which I didn't catch on to at first, but someone else figured out. So he has this lackey running with him taping the whole thing.
This apparently was the ISI and College Republicans attempt at a counterargument as to why Miami should become a charter university: blackface. Basically this guy tries to darken his appearance assume a Latino name, and play on ethnic stereotypes. A fine cap on the year of racist bs at Miami, bought and paid for by the university when they brought in the speaker who clearly inspired this.
I thought that I had no more capacity to be honestly outraged, but this little shit did it. He's trying to mock the people who work at the university for an honest day's wage at the same time he's sucking up university funds to bring in the right-wing speakers who clearly inspired this incident. Something must be done.
What You Can Do
First, Miami most often reacts when confronted with their actions. The Dean of Students, Dr. Susan Mosley-Howard, will most likely act if their are emails sent. You can contact here at mosleygs@muohio.edu. Please do. I am certain that the knowledge that this incident is public knowledge will make them act.
Second, President Hodge needs to know that the public does not support his efforts to privatize Miami through the chartering process. He needs to know that their are consequences for trying to suck the public out of public education. He can be reached at hodgedc@muohio.edu.
Finally, the fight at Miami is only part of a larger struggle. The radical rightwing is trying to privatize the states so they can suck the public right out of the government. What we've seen them do in Michigan shows that they aren't averse to imposing martial law, and removing elected officials, when it suits them. These guys are a threat to our democratic form of government. They are gathering in Cincinnati next Friday. We've got the public square to tell them we are not ok with SB 5 and all the other crap legislation they've been taking undisclosed corporate cash to push. Come out. We will be out at in Fountain Square, 5th and Vine, from Noon to 2, Friday April 29th. If you go to our website you'll see that there is a whole series of teach-ins planned throughout downtown and Over The Rhine. They say cut backs, we're going to fight back. Come and join us.
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