The MSCA bargaining team met with the COP/BHE team on Monday March 12^th.

The MSCA team decided to make a serious effort to settle the contract that day. MSCA put together a package that would resolve the most significant outstanding matters and hold off smaller issues to successor talks which will begin in less than two years.

Significant progress was made until the university presidents threw two monkey wrenches into the progress.

Bait and switch on student learning outcomes

The MSCA had agreed to include in the CBA management’s one sentence statement on student learning outcomes and the importance of student learning outcomes in the education of our students.

After the MSCA had agreed to management’s one sentence statement, the university presidents withdrew the sentence and proposed replacing it with a paragraph that detailed the faculty’s responsibilities regarding the assessment of student learning outcomes. This was a bad faith effort to change the parties’ statement of principles to an increase in faculty workload.

15% rule

At the beginning of the day the MSCA had made an offer that would retain the 15% cap on part-time sections at the end of the new contract, but that allowed Bridgewater State University and Westfield State University to stay at their current levels (over 15% but below 20%) to allow those two universities two years to slightly reduce their use of PT faculty to the 15% cap. In response the two presidents insisted that they be allowed to increase part-time sections to 20%.

Result, agreement held hostage

The university presidents’ last ditch, bad faith effort on assessment and two presidents’ decision to now hold contract settlement hostage were unacceptable to the team, and we hope, to you as well.

You should know that in the case of Westfield, the president is holding open 20 unfilled tenure-track faculty lines while violating the 15% cap on part-time sections. And, the Westfield president is working on replacing three temporary dean positions with five permanent deans at a cost of more than $1,000,000 in salary and benefits.

SEND A MESSAGE!

Call or email your university president and tell him not to defer contract settlement for the bad faith and greed of others.

Call or email Bridgewater President Clark (fclark@bridgew.edu 508 531 2484) and Westfield President Torrecilha (president@westfield.ma.edu 413 572 5201) and tell them not to hold up a contract for all our universities for their own campuses greed.