A Message From Local 212 President
Michael Rosen:
 May
15, 2005
As another semester draws to a close, I want to thank all
of you for helping make this year a success. I recently
attended the MATC Foundation dinner where MATC scholarship
winners were announced. In their acceptance remarks, our
students repeatedly praised their instructors and the professional
staff. Surveys of MATC students uniformly identify their
instructors and front line staff as the college’s
most important asset. This should be a source of pride for
there can be no greater reward than the appreciation of
our students. Thanks for a job well done!
AAS Degree
This has also been a challenging year.
Many of you worked diligently to ensure that the AAS degree
reconfiguration would be based on the educational needs
of our students and the industries that hire them. We have
made some progress in correcting an ill-conceived plan.
The WTCS board established a state-wide A.A.S. degree committee.
That group subsequently agreed to increase the total number
of credits from the proposed 68 to 70 and to establish a
process for adding additional courses to the general education
core. Finally, the committee has proposed an Educational
and Curriculum Issues Committee composed of 6 faculty and
6 other stakeholders to guide this process and address other
educational issues.
Childcare Centers
We have also worked to keep MATC’s
childcare centers open. Some administrators had difficultly
understanding that these nationally-recognized centers were
student learning labs that directly serve our students.
We faculty know only too well how childcare issues often
interfere with our students’ abilities to perform
in the classroom. How many times have students approached
you and said they had to miss class or couldn’t finish
assignments because childcare arrangements had collapsed?
It is more than ironic that the administration was pursuing
a dormitory -- for which there is little demand -- while
trying to close down childcare centers that have waiting
lists!
The fight over saving the childcare centers
demonstrates the importance of our political efforts. Virtually
every member of the Milwaukee state legislative delegation
and Lieutenant-Governor Lawton joined the fight to keep
the childcare centers open. This is why we are engaged in
political activity!
Other Challenges
We have also faced a number of challenges
from state and administrative mandates. In nursing, for
example, the administration has unilaterally changed the
organization of the curriculum which threatens to undermine
student performance. This remains an unresolved matter that
we will continue to work on.
On the federal level, the Bush administration
continued its relentless assault on technical education,
cutting its funding by 17%, including the proposed elimination
of Carl Perkins. Now it is also proposing to dramatically
cut the social security benefits that have been promised
to our nation’s retirees. Many of you have responded
to our calls to actions around these issues and as a result
I am hopeful we will prevail on all three.
This was also a challenging year personally
because my father died suddenly in October. Then, in January,
Jack Rosenberg, a second father, close friend and a major
contributor to MATC passed.
They were my heroes, sons of immigrants,
World War II veterans who realized that the struggle for
a better world didn’t end when their military service
did. There is a lot of empty talk about the greatest generation,
praising it for surviving the Great Depression and heroism
in WWII. But those who praise it do so selectively, forgetting
that they also created the Social Security system, passed
the Wagner Act establishing our rights to unionize, the
Fair Standards Act that eliminated child labor and established
the minimum wage, and organized the unions including the
AFT. They helped create the middle class because they believed
in the Founding Fathers dream that “all men are created
equal.”
Jack and my father, like many other veterans,
returned to a country marred by segregation and engulfed
by anti-communist hysteria. They fought against both because
they believed a better world was possible -- that you could
not fight for democracy abroad unless you established it
at home. They defeated McCarthyism and Jim Crow just like
they defeated the Nazis.
I’d like to think that the work
we do at MATC -- providing our community’s most marginalized
with opportunity and hope through our degree and diploma
programs, the Adult High School and services like our childcare
centers -- honors Dad, Jack and the thousands like them
whose shoulders we stand on. I also want to thank all of
you who supported me when I lost my father.
Finally, enjoy the summer. Be healthy,
safe and productive. You’ve earned it!
Archived Messages...
May 22,
2007
January
16th, 2007
October
29, 2006
August 4,
2006
May 16,
2006
April 28,
2006
August 23,
2005
May 15,
2005
April 15,
2005
March 11,
2005
February
11, 2005
January
18, 2005
September
29, 2004
Michael
Rosen's Speech to the MATC Board - September 29, 2004
Welcome
back, August 2004
"Jobs
report paints bleak picture for the nation",
Michael Rosen's editorial in the August 21, 2004 Journal
Sentinel
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