After seven years of fighting for the right to vote in the University Senate, the classified staff members on campus celebrated their victory Wednesday afternoon by attending their first Senate meeting as full voting participants.
The classified staff, which represents more than 1,300 University employees, works in various positions around campus from nurses to residence hall cooks to support staff.
“I was classified staff for 15 years and I was really happy when this passed,” retired classified staff member Ed Singer said. “I thought it would happen, but I knew it’d just take time.”
Until recently, many classified staff members have struggled with voting discrimination, self-worth and uncovering the truth while being kept out of the Senate decision-making process.
“We either have a true University Senate, in which all stakeholders have a say in the issues, or we don’t,” University biology professor Nathan Tublitz said. “The classified staff were being treated as second-rate citizens.”
A group of classified staff members discovered the right to vote proved to be more attainable than they expected after searching for loopholes in the Senate charter.
When Tublitz served as Senate president from 2001 to 2002, he worked to give classified staff a voice. For the next several years, they worked to push the motion through.
“It was ruled by Frohnmayer that because all of us are represented by SEIU (Service Employee International Union) contracts, we couldn’t be voting members,” classified staff member Carla McNelly said.
University President Dave Frohnmayer and the Office of the President worried about potential conflicts of interest during voting issues, and consequently told interested classified staff members who pursued the topic that this goal of incorporation was illegal, McNelly said.
Tublitz confirmed that general counsel to the University, Melinda Grier, told classified staff members and certain faculty that it would be against the law to allow classified staff voting rights.
However, when Singer and McNelly, along with past participants, further looked into the matter, they discovered Grier’s comments weren’t entirely true. For years, they pushed Grier to give the Senate a formal written document that stated why the change would be illegal. In an e-mail interview, Grier said she referred the matter to the Oregon Department of Justice. The written response from the assistant attorney general, Leigh Salmon, advised against including classified staff in the Senate.
After receiving the letter from Salmon, many classified staff members learned that it was not, in fact, illegal to have a vote on the Senate just because many of them are union members, as they were originally told.
“The University administration was very much against the idea of having classified staff as voting members,” Tublitz said. “Melinda Grier came up with a number of incorrect conclusions and decisions which ended up being overturned by the Department of Justice.”
Tublitz said the Senate decided the benefits outweighed the risks of such a decision.
“We tried to give them a vote – a vote they deserve,” Tublitz said.
Singer, who took it upon himself to research the Senate bylaws, discovered a sentence in the “Enacting Legislation” section of the Senate’s charter that was mysteriously absent in the original charter.
The sentence reads: “May only be altered by the University Assembly in accordance with sections 2.4 and 6.6.”
“See that sentence?” Singer said. “It doesn’t belong there. It’s not in the original document. But because it was in there, people thought they couldn’t change the rules. No one knows how that sentence got there, when it got there and by whom.”
Once that particular sentence was removed from the charter, and the Department of Justice failed to state the illegality of incorporating classified staff, the Senate voted in favor of the incorporation.
McNelly lamented that she feels the University is beginning to closely resemble the corporate world. “The bottom line is that it’s about the students,” McNelly said. “We know that mission. We keep the sidewalks clean when it snows so people can walk to class. We get up early to do that and to prepare for events like graduation. We do that knowing the importance of students. And the nurses at the health center, they care about students, or they’d be out there in the corporate world making bigger bucks. It’s just a loyalty to our constituency.”
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