Miami-Dade Community College (Florida)

Academe, May/Jun 2000

During the final bargaining sessions there was agreement to remain silent on shared governance and especially CASSC. If you read the contract, CASSC is not mentioned anywhere. Faculty did not vote to accept CASSC. The faculty opinion, as far as I have been able to discern, is that CASSC is an administratively controlled group and that academic issues at MDCC are totally under the control of the administration. There is no mechanism for input from a democratically elected group whom faculty have chosen to represent them on these issues. This was an issue we could not agree on in bargaining.

Last summer an article in the Miami Herald provided another sign of the level of disagreement and mistrust that have characterized relations between the faculty on the one hand and the Padron administration and the college's board of trustees on the other. The newspaper reported that at a meeting held the previous November 5, two days after the Florida gubernatorial election, the board of trustees, whose members were all appointed under a Democratic governor and would soon be replaced by the newly elected Republican governor, had voted to extend President Padron's contract for four more years, until October 2002. According to the Herald, the board's outgoing chair and vice chair cited the then-pending union negotiations and the resulting "unprecedented [institutional] instability" as the reasons for the early extension. "We knew Eduardo was doing a very good job for us," the vice chair reportedly said. "We knew it would be very difficult for any chief executive officer to protect the institution and its students from the onslaught we knew would come unless the governing body gave him security to act without fear of reprisal." At the same November 1998 meeting at which it extended Dr. Padron's contract as president, the outgoing board also voted to grant him a "continuing contract, at the academic rank of professor, with a 10 percent reduction in base salary effective twelve months after contract expiration." The new board, which was appointed in spring 1999, endorsed the contract extension.

Faculty leaders were angered by reports of the board's action. The faculty union sought to take legal action to have the president's contract extension rescinded, claiming that the meeting was illegal because it had not been properly publicized and was held at an unusual time and place not accessible to the public, but the court declined to hear the case. The union subsequently filed a second amended complaint, which remains pending as of this writing.

The advice and assistance of the American Association of University Professors on the foregoing matters was initially requested in early April 1998 by Professor James Jackson, who had been president of the Faculty Senate Consortium at the time it was suspended. After reviewing a file of documents provided by Professor Jackson, the Association's staff wrote on April 16 to President Padron and Martin Fine, who was then chair of the board, setting forth concerns about the suspension of the college's system of governance. The staff took issue with the stated basis for the administration's action and questioned the procedures the president had followed in initiating the creation of a new governance structure for the college.