Support the Central Michigan strikers

HERE IN Mount Pleasant, Mich., things have been getting a little tense...and a lot illegal.

On August 22, the Faculty Association at Central Michigan University (CMU), representing some tenured and tenure track faculty only, decided to strike due to the administration's unwillingness to bargain in good faith for a fair contract.

CMU faces a budget surplus, yet the administration is unwilling to slide on several key points, such as health care costs paid by the university and cost-of-living increases.

The Faculty Association is not asking for much. Essentially, they just want the same contract they had with some adjustment for inflation. I won't go into details on these points, mainly because I am sure you will be reading it all yourself very soon.

Why I am writing is because of the university president's actions to stop this strike. President George Ross, affectionately called "King George" by faculty and students alike, and his lawyers sought and received a court injunction, sending the striking faculty back to work. They did so by filing false information with the court and exaggerating the effects the strike would have on the student body.

Specifically, Ross claimed that all classes were canceled on August 22, and that a continued strike would make officials cancel the semester.

This was claimed just over 24 hours after an e-mail was sent to all students and staff saying "CMU students should report for classes Monday and staff should report for work. CMU's 439 fixed-term faculty and 591 graduate assistants will still hold classes as scheduled. " So classes were still in session for most of the students.

This lie is further illuminated by the temporary faculty and staff who made statements contradicting Ross's court documents.

What I believe is worse is the exaggerations and dehumanization King George likes to use. He claims that CMU having to cancel classes for a semester is a tragedy on the scale of Hurricane Katrina!

That exaggeration--in court documents, meaning he said this to a judge as part of a determination whether or not the faculty would be forced back to work--is a slap in the face to all the people who lived through the horrible things that happened when the levees broke. A university losing face because the administrators tried to strong-arm the faculty is, in every way, wholly unlike the disaster that happened in New Orleans and other places in the South.

ON TOP of all this is Ross's diminutive view of the students as children. He said in a press conference on the morning of August 23 that the "grown ups" were fighting, and that students should just get back to school and let them do their grown up things.

This disrespect is atrocious coming from the president of a university that educates students from all walks of life--from traditional fresh-out-of-high-school freshmen, to graduate students furthering their education, to non-traditional students who have lived most their lives outside of academia and have only decided late in life to attend university.

I know that I have left out some information, but I am no journalist.

I am just a local shopkeep who sees what is going on in this struggle between a group of hard-working educators and King George (annual salary: $350,000). Thankfully, there are local journalists doing the research and calling the powers that be to explain these lies.

Here is a link to a blog of one of those journalists who has obtained all 100 pages of the court documents filed on Tuesday.

Also check out the Friends of the CMU Faculty Facebook group for a current update of all the happenings.

Forcing workers back to work, lying to manipulate the judicial system, viewing certain segments of the community as inferior... this is NOT what I thought we stood for here in these United States.

Thank you for your time and I hope you will look into this more.
Benjamin M. Sidou, Mount Pleasant, Mich.