Defending the Citadel: A Personal Narrative

by Wayne Lanter

Overview

This book is about a school-a community college in Illinois, Belleville Area College (BAC) now Southwestern Illinois College (SWIC)-my experiences, as well as the experiences of other professors there from 1967 until 1995. Its purpose is two-fold. First, I have set out an historical narrative of some of the more problematic practices pursued by the school's board of trustees, its administration, and faculty members the administration solicited in support of these practices. Second, I have related the response of a majority of the BAC faculty to these practices, a response among other things, in 1967 that activated for the first time an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter as a collective bargaining unit, led to a three-week faculty strike in 1980, created the initial joint American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers (AFT) local union amalgamation in the country, transferred faculty governance from a traditional Faculty Senate to a collectively bargained contract-at BAC-SWIC, the Memorandum of Understanding-and eventually led to the unionization of the entire school. Additionally, from 1967 to 1995, the BAC faculty entered into the Memorandum of Understanding, the AAUP "1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure," a contractual control of intellectual property rights (the first ever included in a faculty contract by any college or university in the United States) and helped see through the Illinois General Assembly the 1980 Community College Teacher Tenure law and the Illinois Educational Employees Collective Bargaining Act in 1984. The conflicts these issues generated are endemic and, for well over a hundred years now, have been ongoing in post-secondary educational institutions across the nation. What I report here is a small account of that past, a part of the saga of what the Belleville Area College faculty did in an attempt to cut into the corporate agenda and to maintain quality higher-educational instruction at one community college in Illinois.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780983841203
Publisher:	Twiss Hill Press
Publication date:	02/09/2012
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

WAYNE LANTER
Wayne Lanter, English Professor Emeritus, Southwestern Illinois College, was a Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa's Graduate Program in Creative Writing and at the Aspen Writer's Workshop. He is a former Contributing Editor of St. Louis Magazine. He founded and for ten years edited River King Poetry Supplement.

His books of poetry include The Waiting Room, Threshing Time, At Float on the Ohta-gawa, Canonical Hours, A Season of Long Taters, and In This House of Men. He has edited New Century North American Poets, an anthology of contemporary American and Canadian poets, and has published a novel, The Final Days. His work has been anthologized in the United States and in Canada.

Editorial Reviews

Community college teachers fight for their rights--and the soul of higher education--in Lanter's feisty memoir. Lanter (In This House of Men, 2010, etc.) taught English and philosophy at Southwestern Illinois College, a two-year public institution with a history of labor activism. Here he chronicles 25 years of union battles against an administration and board of trustees hell-bent on bringing the crass, exploitative norms of the corporate workplace into academia. The struggle involves familiar issues of pay, workload--officials were forever trying to impose "productivity" benchmarks on instructors--part-time staffing and the fight for recognition of the faculty's American Association of University Professors bargaining unit. But in the background, Lanter contends, lie deeper conflicts over the meaning of a college education; namely, whether it should be a rigorous tutelage in academic disciplines conducted by professionals or--in extreme terms--a cheap, profit-generating commodity geared toward vocational training and employment credentialing, purveyed by glorified "drug-store clerks." The narrative provides a comprehensive, if somewhat disorganized and repetitive, case study in academic and labor politics, immersing readers in pay tiers, overtime provisions and tenure guidelines. The author regales readers with the minutes of particularly rancorous meetings and the returns from county board of trustee elections and property-tax referenda. The level of detail is often eye-glazing, but there are dramatic episodes--including a sharp-edged 1980 faculty strike that ended in mass arrests--and an invigorating edge of scorn for the administration, its professorial cronies and its "insidious and parasitical" union-busting lawyers. Intertwined is a caustic, loose-jointed critique of higher education that takes swipes at watered-down grading, vapid learn-at-home telecourses, excessive concern for student self-esteem, junky "education" degrees and religious zealots who want to censor their profs; the whole "American capitalist ideology" under which "democracy has come to mean the right to make a corporate profit" also takes a hit. Lanter's memoir may be, at times, curmudgeonly, but the author makes a cogent case for defending academic standards--and academics' dignity--against an onslaught of business values. An opinionated, perceptive insider's take on an unsung but vital part of America's education system.

Kirkus Reviews