Bret Carroll: Even students know Bee wrong about CSU strike

Re “CSU deserves raise, but strike is a bad move” (Our View, March 30): As a proud member of the CSU Stanislaus faculty, I found disappointingly vacuous the Bee’s opinion against a faculty strike.

Its argument that a strike would hurt students misses the obvious point: the purpose of a strike is to demonstrate the value of the withheld labor to those who take that labor for granted. And an ever-expanding, funds-gobbling, tone-deaf CSU administration have indicated such an attitude. We faculty are thoroughly dedicated to student success, but the administration has taken cynical advantage of that dedication by expecting us to continue working for salaries the Bee itself recognizes as unreasonably low. The argument that negative impact on students makes striking a bad idea troublingly implies that our right to strike should never actually be exercised – a repressive position beneficial to exploitative employers generally and CSU administration fat cats specifically.

CSU administration threats that funding faculty raises will require cutting classes and other student services are little more than fear-mongering since it’s clear, and acknowledged in the Bee editorial, that other costs, such as those incurred by administrative bloat, could (and should) be cut.

Trained in critical thinking, the many students supporting a faculty strike understand this. Why can’t the Bee?

This story was originally published March 30, 2016 at 5:03 PM with the headline "Bret Carroll: Even students know Bee wrong about CSU strike."