A Quick Rebuttal

Mike Freeman’s latest attempt to fight truth with evasion promises to address misleading assertions only to proceed to mislead with phony assertions.

He begins by writing: “AFA president (sic) Charles Loiacono described what he believes would be an alternative approach in lieu of a strike…” Could I have said that? I went back and read what I had written. Of course, I didn’t write that. Freeman composed that out of whole cloth. Ironically, he then quotes what I did write. It bears no resemblance to describing an alternative to a strike. Adjunct faculties are not full-time employees on an annual salary. Their employment is based on individual assignment contracts signed on a semester basis. It is true that the adjunct faculty is considering declining assignments in protest over what they believe to be an attempt to turn the college into an adult education center. But that’s not a strike. A strike would occur if individual contracts were signed and the union called a strike.

Would a man like Freeman file an injunction calling one’s exercise of his contractual right not to work a strike? Probably. Would the court agree? Who knows? But certainly Freeman wasted a lot of ink describing possible penalties:

1)      Loss of Salary—Really? How does one lose salary when he is not working?

2)      Payroll Deduction—Really? How can one who is not working be fined 2 for 1 when it cannot be established who out of the 3,214 adjuncts would have worked, how many courses  would have been taught, how many days they would have worked, etc. etc. The key phrase here is “would have.”

3)      Disciplinary Actions—Really? See above.

4)      Paid Leaves—Really? How would one take a sick day if he is not working?

5)      Other Payroll Deductions—Hum, Hum. See above

6)      Use of Facilities—Well, I don’t imagine that one would need to use the toilet if he is not on campus.

Responding to Freeman as he tries to persuade the adjunct faculty to betray themselves is getting to be too easy. Need I point out that he called his missive a “Response to December, 2010 and January, 2011 issues of Vanguard,” yet never once mentioned any of the demands to which the January issue was devoted. Oops, he did mention one: the longevity increase. He thought he had found an “I gotcha” flaw. Freeman has not learned that members of the adjunct faculty are scholars that don’t need unnecessary verbiage in order to understand a point. The moment I described the “Excellence in Education Increase” as a longevity increase, the point was made. Further explanation for my readers would have been redundant. Freeman seeing a lack of further explanation as “apples and oranges math” just confirms that his level of communication does not come up to the level expected by college professors.

The bottom line is that in pretending to respond to the VANGUARD, wherein his negotiating demands were delineated and where their impact on the college and the AFA were described in detail, Freeman failed to address those demands in any way. That speaks volumes about Freeman and his obvious fear of facing the real issues.

Charles Loiacono