Tim has the support of James McKeever and the guild leadership because they know he will work tirelessly to protect the benefits and compensations we have fought for. Administration will use the projected deficit to attempt to cut programs and people you care about, but the answer is no, plain and simple. No takebacks is our stance with the district, and no takebacks is Tim's stance with administration.  

As chapter president Tim will represent faculty without favoritism. The guild is responsible for representing us all. Practices of leveraging guild support and favors for political capital will end the moment Tim take office. Tim has never made a decision based on who supported him, and he never will.

Tim is known for his integrity. It is his most valued characteristic. Every career and personal choice Tim makes is centered on the integrity of his ethical values. He will not buy gift cards for faculty to buy votes. He will not take an elite group of voters out for expensive dinners and drinks to garner support. Tim will never turn away a faculty member in need because they didn’t support him politically or out of fear they might run against him. That’s not who Tim is.

Tim will fight for you. Period. He will transform the guild at West into an institution you can be proud of, an institution that operates in accordance with the highest ethical standards, an institution that fights and wins for you.

When Tim joined the West community, our campus was a model of cooperation. West was known for faculty teamwork and effective relationships. Sadly, that once strong collegiality has deteriorated into faculty-on-faculty conflict as our most important shared governance meetings have devolved into territorial conflicts between the guild and other faculty leadership. These conflicts center not on the good of the campus or the faculty, but on the personalities and power of individuals. The only possible solutions are to either replace almost all faculty leaders or begin fresh with a chapter president dedicated to working with faculty. Tim represent that change. He has a proven track record of inclusion, of bringing faculty together and expanding faculty voices, of uplifting rather than tearing down colleagues, and of incorporating and amplifying all voices.

Tim will shine much-needed sunlight onto our chapter’s finances. You, our members, deserve to know how our money is being spent. As the steward of our funds, Tim will report to you. He will bring the full budget before the members for review and consultation because he will fairly and effectively manage our $10,000 allotted budget. Tim understand the difference between a campaign fund and the guild budget, so instead of treating our budget as a campaign fund, he will use our money to support our rights and benefits, to support our faculty needs, and to rebuild community and collegiality at our campus.

Under the leadership of James McKeever we have seen the greatest expansion of adjunct rights in the history of our guild. Adjuncts have full first-round seniority rights for assignments, healthcare, the right to full consideration for special assignments, and some small compensation for committee work. But we can do better.  Despite the progress, there is an unacceptable disparity between full-time and part-time compensation. Adjunct professors still drive from college to college trying to work out of whatever office-like space they can, but with enrollment down, most need to work at more colleges than ever. Adjunct professors would benefit from more online classes to make working at all these colleges more manageable, but full-time faculty take an outsized share of those classes. Many part-time professors never see an interview when a full-time position is posted. Opportunities for additional compensation and special assignments that would make a huge difference to our part-time faculty are too often distributed to tenured faculty. This has to change. Our campuses need to understand the difficulties adjunct professors are facing as they struggle to earn a living in an environment that has made working as an adjunct much more challenging than it was when many of the tenured folks did it. Working with James McKeever and Bill Elarton, who were the architects of the gains adjuncts have already made, Tim will use his strong relationships to fight tirelessly to raise awareness of these challenges and introduce changes that will help adjuncts in accessing the income they need while gaining the advantages that will help them manage the challenges of working across campuses and districts.

Tim will work with guild leadership to restore cooperation between West's guild and the district leadership. A united guild is an effective guild, especially when the executive board has a proven track record of negotiating strong contracts, leveraging the guild's power to help shape the Board of Trustees, and settling disputes campus guild leadership shied away from. A chapter president may occasionally disagree with the guild, but introducing motions in Eboard that garner only two votes and ignoring the Eboard norms is unnecessary  and counterproductive. Yes, the power of the guild resides in the members rather than the leaders, but working with, rather than against, effective leadership will strengthen our chapter.

The voices of the members must be heard, and as your chapter president Tim will restore your voice. Instead of requiring questions and comments to be filtered through direct chat with meeting moderators, Tim will ensure faculty are free to pose their own questions in their own words using their own voices. We are AFT, we are faculty, and we will not be silenced. Tim welcomes your comments. If you have concerns, he want to hear them. The censorship of members at guild meetings is unheard of and unconscionable. It must stop, and as your AFT chapter president, Tim will bring it to an end. Instead, he will encourage your participation and uplift your voice.

Tim will restore the practice of centering meetings around AFT business. Instead of running chapter meetings as a presenter-centered lecture series on the contract, Tim will make sure the members have a complete understanding of what is happening on our campus, in our district, and at the guild. Chapter meetings are meant to provide you with an opportunity to share insight and help you participate in the process. You are all college professors, after all; if you wanted to know the contract better you would read it and request the clarification you wanted. What is far more helpful is for you to know what the guild is doing to support you, so you can have a chance to guide the action. With the membership in the dark it would be far too easy for a chapter president to simply take credit for all the good work James McKeever, Bill Elarton, and all the other hardworking guild officers are doing. Tim will make sure you understand what is actually happening and provide opportunities for you to help guide the guild.

Under Tim's leadership you will have full access to the conference and tuition funds provided by our contract. The practice of unnecessarily limiting when you can apply and who can receive funds that are intended for all faculty will end immediately. The contract does not limit you to four funding periods. The contract does not include practices like limiting conference participation to four faculty members per division. These are self-inflicted wounds that favor full-time faculty, who are better positioned  to navigate campus-specific policies. They limit opportunities for true-adjuncts, and they encourage targeted funding of individuals. Tim will stop this unfair practice that allows a select few to game the system at your expense. The chapter president should not chair the committee that advises the chapter president on how to award these funds, and the practice of withholding application information from committee members has to stop. It is simply too much power concentrated on one person. Tim will stop the practice of denying and limiting applications for conference funds, and he will end the practice of awarding the committee chair the excess funds.