Bill Lyne's blog

In the spirit of moving on, we’ll resist the temptation to point a finger back toward what Representative Brendan Williams calls the “Bill for Political Cowardice” about revenue and the “immoral all-cuts budget last session.”  What’s done is done.

So yesterday Governor Gregoire released her required “Book One” all-cuts supplemental budget and then immediately began denouncing it.  This time, with state services on the verge of completely disappearing, taxes are on the table.   

The governor’s budget proposes using $900 million from the “rainy day” fund (the real rainy day fund this time, not the universities as rainy day fund) and cutting about $1.7 billion from state services to cover the current $2.6 billion deficit.  In the press conference following the budget release, the governor said she would like to buy back some of those cuts with about $700 million in new taxes.  That still leaves about a billion dollars in cuts.  So if you’re a Washington citizen looking for human services or an education, you’re not out of the woods yet. 

The proposed new cuts to higher education come in two forms: a dramatic reduction to the State Need Grant and substantial cuts to university and college operating budgets.  The $146.4 million slice off the Need Grant would kick about 12,300 students out of the program and reduce the payment to those left by about 50%.  In her press conference, the governor specifically mentioned this program as one she wanted to buy back with new revenues. 

She did not, however, say anything about trying to reduce the cuts to the institutions where students might use those need grants.  So we’re looking at $89.5 million in cuts to our universities and community and technical colleges. 

At first glance, the cuts seem to be divided more or less equally between the two sectors: $45.9 million to the universities and $43.6 million to the community and technical colleges.  But it’s important to remember that this split is being imposed on a base that was wildly skewed in last year’s budget (O.K., maybe we’ll take just one quick look back at last year’s legislative session).  The cuts to four-year higher ed state appropriations were as deep as almost any state agency, while the cuts to community and technical colleges were about a quarter of the cuts to the universities:

It is also important to note that the maintenance-of-effort rules required for last year’s stimulus funding would have limited Governor Gregoire’s cut to higher education to $78 million, which, in a 50-50 split, would have been $39 million to the universities.  But adding $11.5 million in new Worker Retraining spending to the CTCs, the Governor’s budget proposal can then make the cut to higher ed that much higher.  So, while the proposal looks like pain shared between the CTCs and the universities, the alchemy of stimulus rules plus “new spending” plus cuts equals a shift of about $7 million in cuts from the CTCs to the universities.  Here’s hoping that there will actually be jobs for all those retrained workers when they leave those programs.

 As always here at the blog, the point of all this is not to disrespect or denigrate our dedicated and hard-working sisters and brothers at the community and technical colleges.  Like every other state worker at every other state agency, they are struggling to keep this recession from destroying the state. 

The point is that Governor Gregoire’s proposed budget, in keeping with a long tradition in Washington State, has once again chosen training over education.  Washington’s six public universities will be made more private and Washington’s citizens will continue to bump up against an even more impenetrable education system and economic ceiling.

On Thursday morning, fifteen legislators and a member of Governor Gregoire’s staff got up early and scraped the ice off their windshields to join us for bagels and coffee.  They were met by an unprecedented coalition.  No fewer than eleven, count ‘em, eleven presidents were part of the welcoming party:

Poor people have always fought rich people’s wars.  And the rich folks have always said thanks in one way or another.  Yesterday our airwaves were jammed with Veterans Day ceremonies, speeches, and heartfelt thirty-second thank yous to veterans from multimillionaire quarterbacks.  Applebee’s let veterans eat free for a day.

This gratitude used to take a more material form.  Military service bonuses began in 1776, and until about 1860, Continental army veterans received military service bonuses of both land (100 acres for a private, 1100 acres for a Major General) and cash.  As the number of wars increased and available land decreased, these payments were scaled back to the point where veterans of the Spanish-American War did not receive a bonus, and the millions of U.S. soldiers who participated in the carnage of the Great War received only $60 for their efforts.  In 1924, in response to political pressure led by the newly created American Legion, congress issued certificates of service to veterans that would mature in 20 years.

In 1932, at the crest of the Great Depression and finding themselves unable to wait to until 1945 to collect their benefits, 43,000 veterans and families of veterans, led by former army sergeant Walter W. Waters and calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, marched on Washington.  For about a month they camped on the Anacostia Flats, until President Hoover, utilizing a loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act, ordered the U.S. military to remove them.

On July 28, 1932 the United States Army, with fixed bayonets and Adamsite gas, and led by General Douglas MacArthur and Major George S. Patton, attacked its own veterans.  After the initial thrust drove the Bonus Army across the Anacostia River, President Hoover ordered the attack to halt.  But General MacArthur, beginning to hone his disdain for presidential authority, continued the assault and hundreds of veterans were injured and several were killed.

As is the case with most revolutionaries, the Bonus Army’s defeat turned into a victory for those who came after them.  In 1944, at the end of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, fearful of another Bonus Army march on Washington, signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more commonly known as the GI Bill.  This act provided veterans with unemployment relief and low-interest home loans, but its most important and far-reaching impact was on education.  Millions of veterans got a college education on the GI Bill. 

The GI Bill, along with the Women’s movement and the Civil Rights Movement, transformed public higher education.  But the GI Bill was only half the story.  State funding for flagship, land grant, and comprehensive universities grew dramatically after World War II.  At the same time that the federal government was investing in veterans, state governments were investing in public universities.  In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, public universities became the drivers of state economies and social mobility that they were created to be in the early part of the twentieth century.

But as genuine public responsibility for America’s wars declined, so did state support for public universities.  With the end of the draft in 1973, large portions of the U.S. middle and upper classes no longer have had to put their own blood on the line when our leaders take us to war.  Now more than ever, poor people fight rich people’s wars.    And since the 1980s, states have been steadily disinvesting in public universities and replacing state appropriations with increased tuition.  So as the military has become more and more the place where the dispossessed go for some economic stability, state universities have become more and more the playgrounds of the privileged. 

Recently, the education portion of GI benefits made a comeback. The Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, originally introduced by veteran and Virginia senator Jim Webb, provides 4 years of state college tuition to veterans who served after September 11, 2001.  But, as with the original GI Bill, that can only be half the story.  Right now, veterans trying to take advantage of the 9/11 GI Bill are waiting by their mailboxes for checks that have been delayed due to cuts to institutional financial aid offices, and looking for classes that aren’t there any more due to budget cuts.

If Washington continues to cut funding to our state universities, our veterans won’t have access to the institutions where they can spend the tuition money they earned on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Times are tough everywhere. 

People are losing their jobs and losing their homes.  And now comes the news that Disney will be refunding millions of dollars to everyone who bought all those educational Baby Einstein videos because it turns out they weren’t, well, educational.

And Disney is not the only mega-corporation that has fallen on hard times.  The advertising budget at Hewlett Packard seems to have been especially hard hit.  So it was good to see government doing its part to help out last Thursday as representatives of HP were given time to peddle their wares in a hearing of the Washington House of Representatives Higher Education Committee and on TVW.  For a good half hour committee members and audience were treated to a demonstration of the ways in which HP can make the world your classroom for the low, low price of $146 per license.

Leaving aside for a moment all the advertising on the public dime questions, the HP presentation gives us the opportunity to reflect on all the technology-and-education hubbub that’s in the air these days.  Baby Einstein was just the beginning—now our techno-corporate friends, undaunted, want to sit us down in front of a screen to get college degrees on line.

To be sure, the emergence of the virtual world and other technological advances have been as revolutionary for education as they have been for everything else. In fact, universities and their faculty embraced these advances long before they became so popular with various education reform movements.  Technology has greatly enhanced the classroom experience and it holds tremendous possibilities for bringing opportunities to places and populations that have often been excluded from higher education. 

But in these days of shrinking education budgets, many people have been tempted to see technology as a fiscal wonder drug that will allow us to produce degrees more cheaply, just as we might use technology to produce automobiles or fireplace implements more cheaply.  This fantasy depends on some dubious historical arguments and a very dim view of teachers.

Consider, for example, this slide from a recent report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation called “Disruptive Technology and Delivery Models in Higher Ed”...    

Were I a more technologically sophisticated blogger, you would see this slide in the suspense-building way that the Gates Foundation folks prepared it, with the telegraph-to-iphone strip leading off, followed by the miracle migration from the steam engine to the space station, and then topped off with the punch line of repetitive classroom photographs, where education has only recently managed to emerge from black and white and into a drab, 1960s-era Kodachrome color. 

You don’t have to be a Microsoft billionaire to get the point here: the hip, new techno-twenty-first century has made obsolete the traditional educational model of a bunch of white people sitting around talking.  Power Point doesn't auto-check for historical accuracy or find and replace ideas that are less than an inch deep, but it’s great for simple one-liners and the clear message here is that Professors Are the Problem.

This visual demonization of faculty is built on a widespread and false assumption that has become axiomatic in the techno-zealot education reform community: that professors, despite their constant contact with students, have no idea how those students learn.  This assumption underwrites this next slide from the Gates Foundation presentation...

Listen to any advocate for on-line learning, elearning, ilearning, or hybrid learning and within two minutes you will inevitably hear something about how the world has changed and, no matter how hard it may be for those tweedy professors, we now have to embrace student-centered and “learner-centric” models.  Only now, as Hewlett Packard and Microsoft and Apple have entered the education market, have we discovered that different people learn in different ways, and the days when a professor could just stand up and bray at his or her students are gone.

This crap is not a solution to our education problems, it is in fact a big contributor to the problem.  All of the exciting stuff in those communication and transportation slides would never have been invented if it weren’t for college faculty and their students.  The good people at the Gates foundation wouldn’t even know how to say “learner-centric” if it weren’t for college professors.

At least since Socrates, teachers have understood that you take your students where you find them and that your job is to shape instruction in a way that allows students to best engage and learn the material.  In the second half of the twentieth century, as the GI Bill, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s Movement made college available to people who had traditionally been excluded on the basis of class, race and gender, lots of research began to uncover the different learning patterns and styles of people from different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds.  This genuine inquiry has been co-opted by the elearning crowd and translated into a simple but stupid story that pits an imaginary new generation of students who learn differently because they have iPods against an imaginary professoriate that stubbornly refuses to leave their nineteenth-century classrooms.

This story is wrong, but it is easy to see why it has been pushed so hard. The real reason why the corporate techno-edcuators feel such a need to trash professors is revealed in the payoff slide near the end of the Gates Foundation presentation...

By stacking “pure online” college against real college, this chart insinuates that there is something about the online-ness of online education that makes it cheaper.  A moment or two of actual thinking reveals this as nonsense.  Technology in and of itself doesn’t make anything cheaper, in fact it adds hardware, software, and technical support costs.  What makes Rio Salado and Western Governors University cheaper than Maricopa and Cal State is the fact that the online “universities” have dramatically reduced their faculty labor costs by hiring moonlighting real professors to prepare course materials (syllabi and reading lists that most of us make available on our websites for free) that are then “facilitated” by underqualified, low-wage, no-benefit “instructors” who are available “anytime, anywhere,” kind of like those people at the other end of phone sex lines.  This may very well be stuff that people can learn something from, but it’s not a genuine university education.  And the way that we know that for sure lies in the fact that neither the children of the corporate execs selling this stuff nor the children of the policy makers and legislators buying it will be getting their college degrees from the University of the People or iTunes U. 

All of which brings us back to our favorite topic here at the UFWS blog: the dwindling access to genuinely public, genuinely high-quality university education in the state of Washington.  Technological advances have indeed done a lot to help bring more and better education to more people, but they will not replace real education or make it cheaper.  And if we direct more resources toward the sorts of things being advocated by the Gates Foundation, we will further separate Washington’s citizens from the highest levels of educational attainment.  The promise of genuine world-class education available to anyone who works hard enough for it will continue to disappear.  Real college and all the benefits and economic rewards that come with it will be private and the public will only have access to the online “degrees” that make them narrowly qualified to do low to mid-level jobs. 

The time we spent in the people’s house watching an HP sales pitch might have been better spent trying to find ways to reinvest in Washington’s universities.

House of Representatives, State of Washington (video embedded)

October 29, 2009 9:00am

Work Session: Tuition, Student Indebtedness, and System Expansion (discussion with HECB, SBCTC, WTECB, and other stakeholder groups regarding tuition policy, use of info technology, and system design work). For full video, please visit...TVW.

Ah, to have known then what we know now.  Ten years ago, if the presidents of Washington’s four-year universities had each taken a million dollars out of their budgets and gone to Vegas, they could have made some serious coin.  They could have gone to a casino with this bet: In the next ten years, the state budget in Washington will grow by about 8 billion dollars.  We’re willing to wager that none of that money will go to four-year public higher education.  In fact, we’re willing to bet that in a decade when the overall budget for higher education will grow by 17%, public baccalaureate funding will shrink by more than 7%.  Any bookie in town would have recognized these people as greenhorns and given them at least hundred-to-one odds.  And today we could have gone back to collect on a big payday.

It is, of course, good that investments in Washington’s Community and Technical Colleges and student financial aid have grown over the last decade.  But the failure to make a corresponding investment in our 4-year public universities has put a very low ceiling on educational attainment in Washington.  It is the reason why tuition has gone up and the reason why Washington ranks 48th in four-year college participation. 

It is also the reason why the citizens of Washington are at a distinct  disadvantage in the competition for Washington’s best jobs. 

This situation will not change until our elected leaders hear from their constituents that support for four-year higher education must improve.  Join us in this effort now:

In July Dr. Jill Biden, a part-time, non-tenure track community college instructor, gave a speech to the UNESCO Higher Education conference extolling community colleges as one of America’s “best-kept secrets” and the “way of the future” for higher education in developing countries.  A week later the World Bank, hewing closely to their mission to keep the division between the first and third worlds intact, issued a report discouraging developing countries from trying to build “world-class universities” to compete with those in the United States and Europe.  Hard on the heels of that, and sticking to the summer education script, President Obama announced the American Graduation Initiative, a 10-year, $12 billion plan to invest in community colleges. 

All this national and international excitement about community colleges resonates with the situation here in Washington, where community college participation rates are among the highest in the nation, and state leaders, like Jill Biden, hail community colleges as a big part of the solution to our economic woes.  In the recent state budget reductions, the cuts to community colleges were not nearly as deep as those to the state’s 4-year universities.  In the hubbub surrounding those budget cuts, the community and technical colleges were labeled the portals for the people and the universities were identified as snobby sites of elitist indulgence. 

These two sectors of higher education should not be pitted against each other, but in this state they have been.  Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the Higher Education Coordinating Board’s System Design Study Group. 

The System Design Study grew out of two imperatives from the last legislative session: the usual longing in desperate times to squeeze more educational blood from an ever smaller stone and the need to impose some harmony on the cacophony of pork-laden higher ed proposals that roll into every legislative session.  Under the relentlessly reasonable leadership of HEC Board Executive Director Ann Daley, the committee has worked valiantly to come up with guiding principles for higher ed growth and to imagine a future time when money for that growth might actually be available.  But from the beginning, there have been tensions between the representatives of the community and technical colleges and the representatives of the four-year universities.

Those tensions busted out into the open last Monday at the meeting of the System Design Study Group at Pierce College in Puyallup.  As the group worked on its final set of recommendations, the representatives of the four-year colleges suggested a single line about encouraging more high school graduates to go directly to a four-year college.  The representatives of the community colleges insisted that this single line be changed to include both two and four-year colleges.  When a four-year college representative responded with some exasperation that Washington ranks 48th in the nation in 4-year college participation and that one of the main goals of the System Design Study is to find ways to produce more bachelors degrees, the game was on.  One community college participant announced that she found the four-year attitude “offensive,” another claimed that the four-year colleges were trying to “steal” two-year students, and the executive director of the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges said that he could live with the line in the report only if the “proportionality” between the two and four year colleges remained intact. 

There’s nothing like bad economic times to bring out this kind of crabs-in-a-barrel behavior, but it’s worth looking past the turf battle for a moment and exploring some of the larger issues beneath the 2-year/4-year split.

When people want to defend community colleges they talk about the percentage of baccalaureate degrees that begin at community colleges and when people want to kick community colleges they talk about very low graduation rates.  Both of those statistics depend very much on factors that go well beyond education and both are beside the point.  The point is what has and is happening to educational attainment in the United States.  We have reached a place where for the first time the next generation is likely to be less educated than the last, and if we’re going to talk about redesigning a system, we should try to systematically reverse that.

State-supported public universities and the community colleges that followed them were created, as Eugene M. Tobin writes, “to meet the social and economic needs of the states that chartered them, to serve as a great equalizer and preserver of an open, upwardly mobile society, and to provide ‘an uncommon education for the common man.’”  Flagship state universities like those in Berkeley, Madison, and Ann Arbor were supposed to give to large numbers of regular people state-funded opportunities that had previously been reserved only for those wealthy enough to attend private places like Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Columbia.  The economic trajectory of the twentieth century, especially after World War II, brought tremendous investment first in state research institutions like the University of Washington, and then in the transformation of normal schools into regional comprehensive universities like Western Washington University, Eastern Washington University, and Central Washington University, and finally in systems of community colleges.  The idea was a tripartite state-supported system that would allow anyone with the talent and drive to attain the highest level of education and the social and economic mobility that comes with it. 

Over the last thirty years, with dramatic state disinvestment in higher education, this system has been heading away from college as the breaker of class boundaries and toward college as the guardian of class lines.  Washington’s higher ed system of community colleges, regional comprehensive universities, and research universities most resembles California’s.  California ranks first in the country in the percentage of its higher education budget spent on community colleges and Washington ranks second.   Both systems have made access to the highest levels of education harder and harder.  Washington now ranks 48th in the United States in the percentage of its population that goes to its public 4-year universities, and California ranks only above Mississippi in sending high school seniors directly to four-year colleges.

In their recently published book, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson demonstrate convincingly that, all other things being equal, a student with baccalaureate aspirations has a much better chance of attaining that goal if he or she enters a four-year institution directly than if he or she enters a community college.  They also show that one of the biggest barriers to baccalaureate degree attainment is  “undermatching,” which is the phenomenon of students failing to attend colleges and universities in which they will be appropriately challenged (so the 2,000 qualified applicants that lack the resources to attend the University of Washington this year are less likely to succeed if they enroll in community college than if they would have enrolled at UW).  If Washington’s higher education system were still about economic development and social mobility, we would be funding it in a way that allowed students from any socioeconomic background to enter the system at an appropriate level.  Instead, we have increasingly defined community college as the only public good in the higher education system and thus made community college a barrier rather than a conduit to class mobility. 

Community colleges are indeed, as Dr. Biden says, “a great place to go for new training.”  As New York Times columnist David Brooks points out in an essay lauding Obama’s initiative, community colleges give hope to the “kid who messed up in high school” or “a 35-year-old former meth addict trying to get some job training.”  They provide invaluable open admissions and second chances.  But neither Dr. Biden nor President Obama nor David Brooks mention one of the main reasons why community college is so attractive to government policy-makers.

It’s cheap.    

The primary reason community colleges can operate so economically is that they are running faculty sweatshops.  Almost 70 percent of community college faculty in the United States are contingent, part-time workers, most of whose second jobs don’t come with the perks that Jill Biden’s does.  This kind of staffing is much more conducive to training students in the vocations that will allow them to take their places on the lower-middle rungs of the economy than it is to giving students the lower division general education they will need to succeed at a four-year university.  This is, of course absolutely in keeping with the desires of the leaders of Washington businesses, who don’t want to pay any more taxes for higher education and can recruit nationwide for their best jobs.  What they do want is a pool of people no further away than the end of the bus line who have been trained to fill their technical and vocational jobs.  This training has become the primary mission of Washington’s community colleges.

And even when heroic community college faculty are able to overcome the lack of resources (which they do on a regular basis) and prepare their students for four-year college, those students have almost nowhere to go in the state of Washington.  Whether you enter directly from high school or transfer from a community college, if there are limited spaces and increasingly high tuition (due to increasing skimpy state support), the odds are stacked more and more against you. 

If the System Design Study has shown anything, it is that Washington’s institutions of higher education are doing an incredibly good job.  Washington spends less per student and less per degree or certificate than almost any state in the country while turning out very high quality degrees.  The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all the data is that Washington needs to invest more money in higher education, especially in the four-year sector.  But since there is no money to invest, members of the study group continue to entertain the fantasy that things like on-line learning, three-year degrees, and two-year colleges offering four-year degrees will allow us to produce thousands more baccalaureate degrees without spending any more money.

The bottom line is that Jill Biden’s kids didn’t go to community college.  Sasha and Malia will never see the inside of a community college.  The kids of the people who run the World Bank aren’t going to community college.  The people who gathered in Puyallup last Monday were overwhelmingly white and all of them had four-year degrees.  Their kids aren’t going to community college.      

Washington is, unfortunately, completely in step with the rest of the world in its educational policy and budget choices.  From Paris to Puyallup, we’re lowering the educational possibilities for future generations and reinforcing the division of our society along the lines of race and class.

In the P. T. Barnum department, you gotta love a guy who has made a career of selling himself as a man of the people through the state initiative process.  That is, until you remember that Tim Eyman is doing more than selling tickets to see the reptile man and the bearded lady, he’s peddling things that stand to genuinely hurt lots of people.

If Mr. Eyman’s latest initiative, I-1033, passes it will turn Washington into Mississippi (and I say this with all due respect to my friends and relations in Mississippi).

The state’s Office of Financial Management tells us that I-1033 would reduce funding available for education, health care, police, and fire services by $5.9 billion over the next five years. Cities and counties would lose $2.8 billion by 2015.  This is on top of the $9 billion that was cut from state services in the last legislative session.  More people would lose access to health care, roads wouldn't get repaired, police and fire departments would be stretched beyond the limit of safety, schools would be gutted, and only the rich would have access to college.

Mr. Eyman is plugging this latest initiative by demonizing elected officials, pitting the virtuous “people” against slimy “politicians” (who are presumably not people) and “their insatiable appetite for higher taxes.”  He tries to scare us with the loss of the American dream: “Washington shouldn't be a state where only rich people can afford a home.”  If I-1033 passes, Washington will be a state where only rich people can afford an education or a doctor or, if their house catches on fire, someone to put it out. 

I-1033 is so over the top that people from right and left, east and west have all come together to denounce it.  For a digest of reasons to vote no and people who think you should vote no, go to:

http://www.wslc.org/reports/2009/October/12.htm#Monday

So pick up the ballot that’s still lying there on your desk, connect the arrow for NO on I-1-33, sign it, put a stamp on it, and mail that sucker.

State Representative Reuven Carlyle is a smart guy with big ideas and big shoes to fill. He has recently published a three part series on higher education on the Official Reuven Carlyle Blog. The first and third posts skim the surfaces of a wide variety of higher ed topics. Some of the ideas are trenchant and some probably don't stand up to closer scrutiny.

But his second post, “Community organizing for change,” hit the nail squarely on the head. Representative Carlyle points out that he has filled the 36th District seat of the legendary and recently retired Representative Helen Sommers, who is perhaps the best legislative friend Washington’s universities have ever had. For 36 years Representative Sommers recognized the value of Washington’s universities and made sure that their budgets were protected. Her commitment to the universities was so consistent that Washington’s university leaders grew complacent in the glow of her patronage.

Representative Carlyle then makes the point that university administrators, faculty, alumni, and students have lost any sense of urgency about the “reality of the need to organize like Hell for your own future.” Washington’s budget situation is bad and getting worse and if our universities expect to survive, we need to do a much better job of organizing our constituencies to make the case for 4-year higher education to their elected representatives. Representative Carlyle and his colleagues rarely hear about Washington’s universities from anyone other than the “insiders” (university presidents, lobbyists, and labor leaders) and that needs to change.

By and large, Washington’s legislators understand the value of universities and, when they’re not calling us arrogant, tend to think pretty well of us. But at the end of the day, what elected representatives do is count votes and money. And if I had a nickel for every time a state legislator said to me something like, “Gee, I think you guys are great, but I never hear from any of my constituents about you, so you’re never gonna be at the top of my list,” I could fully fund several campaigns.

Olympia needs to hear from crowds from our universities and they need to hear often. The biggest impediment to this is that everyone who works at a state university is a state employee. Organizing is politics and the state’s pesky ethics laws make it illegal for us to engage in politics on state time or with state resources. If we want to motivate crowds and point them toward Olympia, we have to do it off campus, after hours, with home emails.

This is where the United Faculty of Washington State stands ready to help. With the support of our statewide affiliates, the Washington Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—Washington, we have an extensive organizing and advocacy structure that uses no state resources. In the last legislative session, our members sent over 1,500 emails to state legislators. We are now prepared to organize well beyond faculty. If you are a student, an alumnus, or just a Washington state citizen who cares about university education, join our mailing list now. We will keep you informed, and make it easy for you to contact your representatives.

Join our mailing list now to help save Washington’s universities...