Dear Faculty Colleagues:

As departments start considering whether to authorize a vote of no confidence, I want to share with you some of my thoughts as the Chair of APSCUF-KU’s Meet and Discuss team.

As I sat and listened to people speaking at last week’s open forum, I was able to empathize with the two speakers representing Kutztown Borough’s Council.  They noted that it has been their experience that when the Borough has sat down with President Cevallos and members of the Administration in attempt to resolve issues that were of mutual interest or which impacted the Borough (often, negatively) that they had a sense that it was the Administration’s strategy to ‘stone-wall’ (that was the term used by these speakers) and that these issues and concerns are never resolved.

After each session of Meet and Discuss, I have exactly the same feeling. 

I acknowledge that the process is ‘meet and discuss’, not ‘meet and resolve’ or ‘meet and agree’; HOWEVER, the purpose (spirit) of the process is to create a forum where APSCUF and the Administration can discuss issues in an attempt to resolve conflicts without resorting to the grievance process.  Clearly, the large number of grievances that APSCUF has filed in the past two years, and the relatively large number of these grievances that have already been sent into the arbitration process attests to the fact that the meet and discuss process at Kutztown is broken.

The question is how did this come about?  Let me suggest two partial answers to this question.

The first is indicated by the comments of the representatives of the Kutztown Borough Council at last week’s meeting.  It is clearly the ‘culture’ of this Administration to ‘stone-wall’ important stakeholders when they come forward with concerns or critiques of actions that the Administration has or wants to take.  As MIT Management Professor, and expert on organizational culture, Edgar Schein points out, it is one of the key aspects of a Chief Executive Officer’s leadership role to set and model the desired culture of the organization that the individual leads.

The second answer is more subtle, and concerns something that most faculty members are not aware of.  My tenure as APSCUF-KU Vice President and Chair of our Meet and Discuss team began right at the transition when Dr. Rinker departed the University and the Dr. Vargas arrived.  At my first Meet and Discuss, Dr. Rinker was present.  At that meeting, as had been the case with my predecessors, Dr. Rinker chaired the Administration’s Meet and Discuss team.  This meeting, however, was to be her last.  At that meeting it was announced that, rather than having the Provost chair the Administration’s Meet and Discuss team, the President had decided to delegate this responsibility to the Executive Director of Human Resources.   It was even suggested at that time that there might be times where it would not even be necessary for the Provost to be in attendance.  We voiced our objections to this change at that time, as well at meetings with the President.  The President was adamant about this change.  While the Executive Director of Human Resources is a very nice person, the role they play in labor-management relations is to be Tom Krapso’s enforcer on the Kutztown campus.  While we have insisted that the Provost be at the table during Meet and Discuss (and Dr. Vargas has been there), it is clear that the role of  the Executive Director of Human Resources at the table is to make sure that the local Administration not enter into any meaningful discussion (much less agreements) with the local APSCUF chapter without at least ‘checking with Harrisburg’.   [Typically, being told that they need to check with Harrisburg results in being told month after month that ‘we have not heard back yet.’]  When we do get a response (which is rare) it is clear that the Executive Director of Human Resources has been told to “just say ‘NO’.”  So what does this have to do with President Cevallos?  The c.b.a. states that “the University President or his/her designee shall meet…” (Art. 9, A.1.b)  It is the President’s decision to designate the Executive Director of Human Resources (and not the Provost) as his representative at the Meet and Discuss table.  Having the Executive Director of Human Resources play such a central role in the discussions has created a marked change in the tenor of the talks that go on, making them almost totally unproductive.  Those items that have been resolved have all concerned such minutia that they likely could have been dealt with outside the Meet and Discuss process.

It is clear from the comments of the representatives of the Kutztown Borough Council and from APSCUF-KU’s experience at the Meet and Discuss table, that while the Administration 'says' that it wants to work with important stakeholders, it is NOT the Administration’s modus operandi to do so in a productive way.

Ken Ehrensal

VP, APSCUF-KU

Chair, APSCUF-KU Meet and Discuss Team