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2006年03月11日
It’s a revolt!
■between apu & me
∟●It’s a revolt!
It’s a revolt!The saga surrounding APU’s attempt to change the labour conditions of language lecturers is taking mythical forms. Last year, I wrote about Ritsumeikan’s thuggish attempts to curb lecturers who were unionizing to demand better labour conditions.
In the past months, that story has become bleak compared to the protest mounted by APU’s own language teachers. The APU-Post has a reasonable article on it, to which I made a comment.
But although I think this is a vital issue, I thought that it was largely being dealt with in closed meetings and that most students were not aware of it at all.
That, it seems, was a wrong assumption.
The ‘APU Union’ has launched its own website. And more interesting, there is a online petition going on that is demanding APU President Monte Cassim to stop the squeeze-em-out policy he is trying to implement.
One comment made an anonymous lecturer on the site sums it up pretty well:
The only way to have high quality education is to have high quality teachers - no good teachers will come to APU if they are not given good contracts.
The online petition has already gathered over 400 signatures over the past 3 months, inluding many from APU students with outcries like
Please do not take our beloved teachers away
We also find respected faculty like Prof. Dipendra, Prof. Faulkner, a Ritsu economics professor and an anonymous APU English lecturer who rightly remarks:
Ritsumeikan and APU are now in trouble with the government and strikes because of your calloused attitudes and behavior toward the people who work hard for you and your organizations. Why don’t you learn from those things and start being honest with us and treating us like human beings? You boast about things such as "humanism" and "democracy," but that’s just "tatemae." You don’t act accordingly at all.
Especially with the last two lines you get the ‘I told you so’ feeling… for years students have been crying wolf about the gap between ideals and practice at APU, especially when it comes to democracy.
Apart from the question marks this whole issue raises again about the competency of APU’s management, the whole issue has become tragic. Since even IF the change in employment conditions of the language lectures would have been a good idea in terms of costs (quality of teaching) and benefits (flexibility, money), the damage now done to APU’s image, trust (Institutional Respect) and reputation is more than can ever be gained back.
投稿者 管理者 : 2006年03月11日 00:00
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