activism

MONTE BUTE ELECTED AS IFO ACTION COORDINATOR

by Russ Stanton, IFO Director of Government Relations

The Inter Faculty Organization (IFO)  Board of Directors has elected Monte Bute to the position of Action Coordinator. The IFO represents faculty at Minnesota’s seven state universities. The Action Coordinator will chair the Action Committee and:

• Help publicize the valuable work and efforts of the IFO and its members to various external constituent groups.
• Engage in efforts to build solidarity and community within the IFO and its membership and with various external groups.
• Coordinate information flow between faculty and the Negotiating Team regarding issues and progress of negotiations.
• Coordinate actions that will move the negotiation process on and encourage settlement.
• Keep the Negotiating Team informed of action plans and be receptive to input from the Negotiating Team; and
• Work with the GRC to encourage efforts at writing letters to legislators and the local press.

Monte Bute is an associate professor of sociology at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota. His opinion essays appear on the editorial pages of daily newspapers in the Twin Cities. Bute also frequently testifies on higher education issues before the Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives.

Bute began teaching at Metropolitan State as a community faculty member in 1984. He finally finished a long-delayed B.A. at the university in 1991. After a 20-year career as a community organizer, he realized that his next mission in life was teaching. To fulfill that calling, Bute began graduate school rather late in life. Professor Bute has been a prolific writer over the years, publishing 65 articles in scholarly publications and the popular press.

Sociologists of Minnesota (SOM) gave Bute the Distinguished Sociologist award in 2004. Bute has received Metropolitan State University’s Outstanding Teacher award and the Excellence in Teaching award. He has also been given awards by Minneapolis Community and Technical College, the Jobs Now Coalition, and the Job Training Partnership Association.

Professor Bute is a past president of both Sociologists of Minnesota and the National Council of State Sociological Associations (NCSSA). Bute has been the editor of Sociograph, associate editor of the Sociological Imagination, and has served on the editorial board of Contexts, a journal of the American Sociological Association. He has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.

[I want to let my readers know that I have not been posting much for the past six months because I am fighting an extremely rare, late stage form of lymphoma. Accompanying this disease is a particularly nasty neuropathy, which is slowly crippling my legs and feet.]

If sociology is to have any relevance for everyday life and ordinary folks in the 21st century, then it needs to produce instantaneous definitions of the situation that will help inform our social interactions. This “e-mail as essay” is an application of the Thomas theorem: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This essay interprets events that have occurred in the previous 72 hours, and prescribes civic action for the next 72 hours.

Gary and Faculty Association colleagues

Thank you, Gary, for the sincere effort to restore collegiality and solidarity within the union ranks. The powers-that-be, whether intentionally or not, have managed to divide us. Let us not forget what has caused this regrettable exchange between colleagues over a scarcity of space –the administration’s refusal to meaningfully share power with other stakeholders within the university.

As long as the President and the President’s Council  believe that they have a God-given right to rule arbitrarily and without adequate prior consultation, we are destined to either fight among ourselves—or to began fighting back against those who, due solely to their own egregious behaviors, are rapidly becoming our enemy.

I have added below an embellished version of a statement that I rather bluntly made on behalf of the Faculty Association at the last Planning and Budget Committee (P&BC) meeting. I ask that union members study this analysis. Without an adequate understanding of our current situation, we cannot begin to forge the strategies and tactics required to compel respect and shared power from the administration. What happens in the next 72 hours concerning space reallocation within the university will be decisive for both the future of the union and of Metropolitan State. Be vigilant and be active.
Best,
Monte

The unions, and particularly the Faculty Association (FA), feel that the administration has ignored pleas for a more grassroots collaborative model. Faculty members are demanding that the president and her administration be more willing to share power. When I sat on the P&BC in the early 2000s, the group felt more like a community, the power wasn’t necessarily equal, but it was shared. The unions are ready to draw a line in the sand. If the administration refuses to collaborate, they had better be prepared for a more adversarial and conflict-ridden future.

The FA Executive Committee is apprehensive that a redesign of our university plan poses the danger of becoming nothing more than new window dressing. I would argue that the real problems of this university are not the plan or the budget reductions we face, but rather the rigid hierarchy and status system that are at work in this institution.Some have the authority to give orders, while others have the obligation to obey orders.

“Orders” is the operative word. I liken Metropolitan State to George Duby’s study of medieval France, The Three Orders. The three orders in the 12th Century were the medieval knights who fought and ruled (administers who govern), the priests who prayed (faculty who teach), and the peasants who supported the other two orders (the other Metro State unions who do our heavy lifting). That system of status inequality finally collapsed with the coming of the French Revolution. Enough said.

Even the best-laid plans of the administration too often break down in implementation, and that will continue as long as the President and her Council continue to see their role, in the words of George Bush, as the “Decider.” As examples of arbitrary and capricious “deciding” I cite the following: the scheduling redesign, website redesign, Gateway redesign, budgeting redesign, and commencement redesign. [Now we can put space reallocation at the top of the list.]

While the university does make use of the governance process of meet-and-confer in decision-making, it is often too little too late—and it has become essentially meaningless. Why has this happened? To put it baldly, some members of the President’s Council are making decisions without forewarning and feedback.

Realize that aside from the Provost, all members of the President’s Council have been at the university less than three years. Most practice a corporate or bureaucratic style of leadership and management. This culture, which we have seen steadily encroaching upon our community since the days of Susan Cole, has taken even deeper roots during the past two years. This is an alien appendage on an institution with a more collegial and collaborative heritage.

I see no malignant intent on the part of any member of the President’s Council. I do see some folks naively bringing along their previously acquired taken-for-granted beliefs and acting as if those assumptions prevail at Metro State as well. I also see some folks who believe that their positions confer upon them a certain authority to take unilateral action. This may be what they experienced in previous bureaucratic organizations and they just assume all institutions follow this seemingly ubiquitous model. The honeymoon is over.

Several recent fiascoes within the university are a result of vice-presidents not listening to other stakeholders and/or not understanding the implications of what they were doing. I am ‘up to here’ with these preemptive strikes—each of the three orders at Metro State deserves to be a full participant in university decision making. In the future, we can pull together and develop into an exemplary urban university, or we can enter into an era of class warfare among the three orders.

The administration expects us to obey their “order(s),” but they do not take the time to seek out, or to understand, the positions of the faculty and staff. The Faculty Association urges the administration to seek our counsel, and to take into account that we may have something to offer—we did not just fall off the turnip truck. We are tired of having things explained to us only after the fact at meet-and-confer. The train wreck, by then, has already occurred.

Yesterday’s administrative forums demonstrate a significant tool for communication and some generic feedback. I have no doubt these efforts are sincere and that the administration finds them useful, as do faculty and staff. However, the administration has grown excessively fond of (and dependent upon) these dog-and-pony-shows as the principal form of communicating and seeking feedback.

Unfortunately, forums are essentially one-way forms of communication. The random individual responses at these events are just that, individual responses. We need a new structural mechanism that will provide real give-and-take between the formally recognized bargaining entities prior to meet-and-confer. This applies particularly to new initiatives coming from the members of the President’s Council that have not yet scrutinized by other relevant stakeholders.

To end on a positive note, what we now need organizationally is to restore some facsimile of the old Joint Initiative Groups. Those bodies were temporary ad hoc groupings, bringing relevant stakeholders to the table to design and beta test ideas before implementation. When their work was finished, they dissolved. Their vetted proposals then went through the traditional governance process.

What these ad hoc groups of stakeholders do particularly well is to hold managers feet to the fire. Administrators must bring their proposals to the table and field-test those plans against the experiences of people who work where the rubber hits the road. There is an old-fashioned name for this process—grassroots democracy.

The highway is alive tonight
Nobody’s foolin’ nobody as to where it goes
I’m sittin’ down here in the campfire light
With the ghost of Tom Joad

“The Ghost of Tom Joad”                                                                                          Bruce Springsteen & Rage Against the Machine

Public Spaces–Disappearing or Transforming?
Sunday February 28, 3:30pm to 5:30pm

The Book House in Dinkytown
429 14th Avenue SE
Minneapolis, MN  55414
(612) 331-1430
(Located near the East Bank of the University of Minnesota)

Featuring:
Michelle Filkins, Associate Professor, Library and Information Services, Metropolitan State University
David Unowsky, Founder of The Hungry Mind Bookstore
Jay Walljasper,  Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces and editor of OnTheCommons.org

Moderated by:
Monte Bute, Associate Professor, Sociology, Metropolitan State University

Last fall, the University of St. Thomas provoked global condemnation when the Catholic institution banned South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu from speaking on its St. Paul campus. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate soon found another host. Tutu will deliver the Metropolitan State University President’s Lecture on Friday, April 11, at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Tickets for the 7 p.m. event are still available to the public (call 877-772-5425). Reduced price tickets are available to students, faculty, staff, and alumni (651-793-1816).

The news media so sensationalized the story of “where” Tutu would or would not speak that they missed the more important journalistic question—“why” was he coming to Minnesota? The Archbishop and his daughter Naomi Tutu will also be involved in the nonprofit youthrive’s PeaceJam conference for youth on April 12 and 13 at Metropolitan State.

Last November at the PeaceJam Slam in St. Paul, I gave the keynote address, “New Tricks from an Old Dog.” Click here to read “New Tricks from an Old Dog.”

I am a sociologist. I inhaled my sociological moxie the old-fashioned way—as a deviant, a dissident, and an organizer. I will probably never receive the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) seal of approval. In truth, I am a backstage sociologist. I would like to share with you, in the words of the Grateful Dead, “what a long, strange trip it’s been.” Come. Let me take you backstage. I want you to see the “dirty work” that went into the making of this sociologist.

This invitation comes from an essay of mine, “The Making of a Backstage Sociologist” (which you can read here). That article is adapted from a speech I gave in 2004 upon receiving the Distinguished Sociologist award from the Sociologists of Minnesota.

The essay introduces you to both the “Full Monte” and the presuppositions informing my posts. In this blog, I will be speaking to you from my civic soul, visiting with you from time to time about topics that have allowed me to make some sense of my life and times—biography, society, history, and civic action.

Growing up, I lacked what Tillie Olsen called “the soil of easy growth.” I spent most of my high school years as a convict in the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Red Wing. Today I am a professor at a state university. How did this improbable chain of events occur? Education awoke me from my slumber. I gradually came to realize that for my first 18 years, I had been little more than a sleepwalker—the lights had been on but nobody was home.

I eventually developed an interior compass. However, it would be a few more years before I would discover the kinds of history making in which I might take part. Once that fog lifted, I quickly became a fool for the radicalism of the Sixties.

Years later, when I first read Peter Berger’s little Invitation to Sociology, the following passage was more than words upon a page or a scientific proposition. No, this existential truth had pierced my very soul:

Sociology is justified by the belief that is it is better to be conscious than unconscious and that consciousness is a condition of freedom. To attain a greater measure of awareness, and with it of freedom, entails a certain amount of suffering and even risk.

Now for all too many of us, when shit happens, we may get angry or become despondent but because we feel too weak to fight the power, we resign ourselves to inevitability. To be blunt, all too many of us do not yet have our own shit together.

“What matters,” wrote Max Weber “is the trained ability to scrutinize the realities of life ruthlessly, to understand them and to measure up to them inwardly.” By intentionally choosing how to think and behave, we can opt to improve our lives and, in turn, improve the world around us.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”