AFA Welcomes Your Feedback!

Submit comments, letters, and/or articles via email to afa@santarosa.edu or via fax to (707) 524-1762.

AFA members who submit original articles of 500 words or more that are published in an issue of the AFA Dialogue will be awarded a stipend of up to $200.

AFA DIALOGUE

The AFA Dialogue has been created to air concerns of all faculty. It encourages conversation and publishes personal opinions about workplace issues and political concerns. We invite any faculty member to submit letters, articles, or opinion pieces. AFA reserves editorial prerogatives. We also publish the AFA Update, which is the factual voice of AFA.

As the AFA Council Composition Team’s report will be presented at this week’s Executive Council meeting, the articles in this issue of Dialogue explore the complex nature of representation. The opinions contained in the articles below are solely those of the writers, and AFA neither condones nor condemns these opinions.

EXECUTIVE COUNCIL REPRESENTATION

Ianthe Brautigan-Swensen
"The Value of Numbers"
Ours is a vital institution, and its contribution to our community and nation, in an era of shrinking support for public education across the board, has perhaps never been more important. Read more »

Sheryl Cavales Doolan
"The Art of Making Comparisons"
[T]he instructional work we do in the classroom is the same for adjunct and full-time instructors alike, but contract faculty have other work obligations, including required service to both one’s department and to the College. How do we determine “equitable treatment” between two unlike groups? Read more »

Jean Hegland
"Meaningful Shared Governance"
[I]f the representation on the Executive Committee were to become 50/50, it would reflect neither the current make-up of the college nor the make-up toward which it should be striving. Read more »

Sharien Hinton
"What's Fair?"
How can representation be fair when it does not reflect the varying responsibilities of its constituents? How is this equal? Read more »

Terry Mulcaire
"Fairness and the Fate of the College"
The proposed changes to AFA's constitution and bylaws ... will do absolutely nothing to ease the pressure to cut costs. Instead, they will seek to distribute that pressure more equally among all faculty, and this will point us to a future in which the basic unfairness of the current part-time position will, in the name of fairness and equity, have become the general condition of all faculty. Read more »

Eric Stadnik
"What Is a Representative Executive Council?"
As decisions on cuts evolved, instead of moving toward one another, battle lines were drawn, with many impassioned arguments on both sides of every issue. This created divisiveness instead of solidarity. Read more »

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