July 16, 2016  

Learning from Flint, Rick Snyder Style

ACADEME BLOG

The editors at the Detroit Free Press have published an editorial titled “Like a Sick Joke.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

“In the wake of the Flint water crisis, amid profound concerns over an aging oil pipeline under the Great Lakes, with an ongoing, urgent need to decrease pollution and improve air quality and public health in southwest Detroit, Gov. Rick Snyder has appointed … wait for it . . .  a former oil-industry lobbyist, Heidi Grether, to head the state’s Department of Environmental Quality.

“It’s a stunning look into the way the governor views the state’s responsibility to protect Michigan’s environment, and Michiganders’ health.

“And in the aftermath of the Flint water crisis, it’s like Snyder is rubbing the noses of his constituents in his own mess. The move is astoundingly tone-deaf to Michiganders, who rely on the state’s environmental regulatory agency to keep us safe. It’s also a tacit announcement that Snyder no longer finds rebuilding…

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About martinkich

I am a Professor of English at Wright State University's Lake Campus, where I have been a faculty member for more than 30 years. I have served four terms as the president of the WSU chapter of AAUP, one term as the president of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, and three terms as an at-large member of the executive committee of AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congress. I was elected to the Ohio Conference Board ahead of the statewide effort in 2011 to repeal by referendum Ohio's Senate Bill 5, which would have eliminated collective-bargaining rights for all public employees in the state. As co-chair of the Ohio Conference's Communication Committee, I began to do much more overtly political writing during that campaign. It was a tremendous learning experience, though often quite overwhelming. At the beginning of 2018, our chapter at Wright State went of strike for three weeks. The second longest strike by a public university faculty in U.S. history, it was necessitated by an effort to gut our contract. Everyone who stood firm to preserve our contract paid a substantial financial as well as emotional price to do so, but the sense of solidarity--not just with our Wright State colleagues, but with our students, the faculty at other Ohio institutions, the members of other unions, and many community supporters who joined our picket lines and helped in countless other ways--was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I have sustained my activism over several decades, and at the risk of stating the obvious, I have very much enjoyed the work, I have been grateful for what we have sometimes managed to accomplish, and I continue to cherish the great friendships that I have made. Receiving AAUP's Sternberg and Tacey awards for those efforts has been a great honor, but also has seemed a little redundant. Beyond my blogging, I have been a fairly productive writer of articles and reviews for academic journals and more general periodicals. I have written one book and co-authored another, and I have co-edited a collection of essays. I am currently working on two book manuscripts.

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