Top Story:
Please join us for an
Open Town Hall Meeting
for all Faculty with
Provost Clements: Wednesday, February
11, 3:30-4:30 PM
UU 0204 Loch Raven Room
President's Corner
Jennifer Ballengee, English
Welcome to the Spring 2009
Newsletter of the Towson AAUP. Some of you reading this may be
members, while others are not. Regardless of your membership status
with the Towson AAUP, I want to share with you some of the issues
that our chapter of the AAUP has been addressing this year. If
you’re not yet a member, I hope you’ll join after you read this (or
even before you do!). We meet once a semester, and the membership
fee is limited to $15. The burden is not high, but the benefits can
be great. Each additional voice can make a difference—as much as
anything can—in our faculty community and in the campus at-large.
Certainly a large number of voices grouped collectively behind an
issue has more influence than can individual voices raised
disparately.
What
are these issues about which I would have us “make a
difference”...?
Treasurer's Report
Isabel Castro-Vasquez, Foreign Languages
Towson AAUP’s membership is strong and growing--we already have over
100 members. If each of those members brought in just one colleague
our numbers would double and our voice of advocacy would be that
much stronger.
Our 3rd
Annual September Crab Feast / Bull Roast was a big success, as a
social event and as a membership drive...
Committee Reports
Junior Faculty Committee
– Harry Hochheiser, Dept. of Computer and Information Science
The Junior Faculty Committee was relatively quiet
during the fall semester. We have been working with the AAUP
leadership to follow-up on the specific concerns identified during
the 2007-2008 academic year: Research, Development Funds and Travel;
Work Load; University Growth; Salary; and Promotion and Tenure.
Many of these issues will likely need to be revisited through the
lens of the ongoing financial stresses that TU and USM are now
facing.
Family Leave Issues Committee- Karen Oslund, Department of History
In Fall 2008, Towson AAUP formed
a new committee: Family Leave
Issues Committee (FLIC)
Committee W - Ayse Dayi (Women's Studies) and Leticia Romo (Foreign
Languages)
Committee W
continues its work to bring better parental leave policies to Towson
University.
Editor’s Note – Kimberly Katz, Department of History
As the decisions come down from
the USM and TU’s Administration about the state of affairs and the
state of our institution, there has probably never been a greater
time for faculty to come together to confront the challenges ahead
of us. Furloughs, the workload, reduced spending on programs of
importance to our educational mission – all of these factors call
for faculty to turn to the AAUP for leadership, the faculty
organization of distinction, the organization that persists in its
efforts to ensure academic freedom and a healthy work environment as
efforts abound to try to prevent that. Still, one can see hope as a
new president is inaugurated and begins his work by undoing much of
the damage from the previous administration. Nevertheless, the
reasons to join the Towson chapter of the American Association of
University Professors couldn’t be more compelling. Join today!
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