CREW TPM letter to CFA BODDownload

9/5/24

Dear Members of the Board of Directors of the California Faculty Association:

We, the CFA Caucus of Rank & File Education Workers (CREW), write to share our alarm about the new Time, Place and Manner (TPM) diktat recently imposed systemwide by the CSU (with a nearly identical policy at the UCs). Though clearly a response to the student encampment movement last semester to protest the genocide in Gaza, it goes far beyond forbidding camping. It is a broad attack on academic freedom, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, worker rights to concerted activity and of freedom of speech on our campuses.

The new policy could suppress our right of association and movement at our campuses, and could infringe on our right to concerted activities, potentially stifling the ability of union members to organize, agitate, protest, picket, and strike. Further, the policy contradicts our values as an anti-racist social justice union. For example, there is no religious exemption on the mask ban which could violate the religious freedom of our campus members who wear face coverings as a religious practice. Determination of intent would be in the hands of administrators and campus police, with no assurances of sufficiently rigorous training on islamophobia or broader anti-racist safeguards. The mask exemption for health reasons is also rife with possible abuse through arbitrary enforcement and ableist stigmatizing. If people are feeling unwell, they would not be able to use a mask to protect our immune compromised community members. We can look at the long history of the selective enforcement of our seemingly “neutral” criminal justice policies to predict how these TPM policies will punitively target people of color and our intersectionally marginalized communities. We have reason to doubt rowdy sporting events and fans will be equally subject to these TPM policies; instead, administrators may selectively target free speech and political organizing in line with the neoliberal interests of the university.

We would like to open a dialogue with you because we believe you share our concerns. The new TPM constitutes a drastic alteration of our working conditions. We are concerned that the union (and shared governance) has been largely bypassed in the formation of this policy. We would like to coordinate between the union leadership and the rank and file on various campuses in order to maximally resist this unjust and unconstitutional new policy. We think that a multipronged approach would be best to include the following.

  1. The required meet and confer stage offers the opportunity for vigorous pushback by CFA representatives against the new TPM as a whole. We invite you to dialogue with us on strategy and request transparent communication about it. Each campus will have unique addenda to respond to and it behooves us collectively to collaborate in the formulation of approaches to push back on campus specifics as well as the whole.
  2. We also would like to coordinate such that campuses wishing to participate deliberately violate the policies in order to test CSU response. At SFSU this has already occurred. Students holding a vigil after the encampment were told that the local administration was not going to enforce the full extent of the changes in policy. It is important to continue to test them and to hold administrators to such standards and agreements. We suspect that these policies will be used mainly to ensure that nothing like the encampments can happen again but if we can establish a longstanding policy of nonenforcement, it will be more difficult for them to justify draconian action should that moment arise.
  3. We also hope to work with you to widely publicize both the policy itself and our resistance to it. We believe that public attention will undermine the power and danger of this policy. Holding a public forum on the new TPM policy, ideally in ways that actually violate the TPM itself, would help to create a sense of collective resistance while generating media coverage to publicly shame the CSU for its attack on our academic freedom and constitutional rights.
  4. We are also interested in legal pursuits to shut down the policy. This is obviously something that the union leadership must take the lead on but we would like to support that effort in any way that we can. Please let us know how we can support any legal action the CFA plans to take against the TPM suppression on our campuses.
  5. For the medium term, we suggest adding an article on Academic Freedom to our CBA in the upcoming contract negotiations. Detailed contractual rights could not only nullify TPM measures that constitute administrative overreach regarding faculty freedoms but serve as a precedent for the assertion and defense of rights for all members of the campus community and our broader society. We believe bargaining to defend Academic Freedom can unite faculty across the CSU and provide an empowering win for our union.
  6. Work with student groups and SQE to support their efforts.

Finally, we noticed an inaccuracy in CFA Headlines emailed on August 29th, under the heading “Academic Freedom Under Attack by CSU Management.” The email states, “Current time, place, and manner policies are in effect for faculty.” This needs immediate correction. Here is the current condition for faculty:

The current exception to the interim policy is for union represented employees. The existing Time, Place and Manner policy will continue to apply to union represented employees until the unions have completed bargaining. The systemwide Time, Place and Manner policy will apply to all employees following the conclusion of bargaining.

CSUN has emailed its campus with this language, “This directive is in effect immediately for all students and employees, and all other members of the community, including represented employees.”. We have also had reports from other campuses about this. This misinformation needs to be corrected immediately and widely for all campuses please.

We look forward to this very important conversation with you and thank you for your attention to this serious matter. Please update us on our concerns.

In solidarity,

CREW Steering Committee:

Sang Hea Kil (SJSU)
Brad Erickson (SFSU)
Luke Wukmer (CSULB)
Scott T Kelley (SDSU)
James Martel (SFSU)
Anthony Ratcliff (CSULA)
John Caravello (CSUCI)
Robert Ovetz (SJSU)
Robin Marie Averbeck (CSUC)
Whitney Russell (CSUS)


CREW Members:
Brian Dolber (CSUSM)
Gulhan Bourget (CSUF)
Lindsay Briggs (Chico)
Steve McFarland (Dominguez Hills)
John Christopher Bachman (Los Angeles)