Mysterious letter in ROTC building shakes students, enforces need for safety measures.

Is he an unstoppable rhetoric machine?

Barack Obama is the scariest person in politics today. I say this not because of his platform or of his past performance. He is not alarming because of his progressive message or his marketing presence. The reason is much simpler than any of these facets.

Everyone I know who listens to the man speak, without preconceptions or partisan bias, end up liking him.

In a culture driven by the rhetoric of lifestyle, where a product’s most important feature is its ability to improve or enrich a person’s existence, the most important feature of a politician is whether we like him or her. I offer an experience from yesterday afternoon as anecdote to this phenomenon.

Early in November the Michigan Tech community started a new service to assist in the responsible monitoring of university conduct. Together with EthicsPoint, an industry standard in confidential reporting services, the Internal Audit office introduced the Michigan Tech EthicsPoint Hotline. The hotline provides faculty, staff and students a means to report inappropriate or unethical activity when they fear repercussions for their whistle-blowing.

EthicsPoint has set a standard for reporting services in college and university systems. Founded in 1999, EthicsPoint was started by a group of fraud specialists who pioneered reporting services on the internet. “We’ve been interested in this for a number of years,” stated Amy Hughes with the Internal Audit office.

The Internal Audit office started looking for a reporting service solution after receiving the blessing of the Board of Controls. The search was prompted by a desire to make the daily activities of Michigan Tech more transparent and improve the level of conduct amongst Tech employees. The search was strongly supported by the university’s external auditors, who work closely with private companies and have experienced the positive results of such services.

After three and a half years of negotiation, unfair labor practice lawsuit battles and internal struggle, the MTU chapter of the American Association of University Professors voted Thursday to decertify its right to represent the MTU faculty in collective bargaining. The vote was prompted by an Oct. 31, 2007 petition for decertification filed with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission by members of the union.

The university administration and AAUP chapter spent approx. 13 months out of three and a half years in active negotiations. The remainder of the time was spent between the courtrooms of the MERC and antechambers of the Michigan judicial system battling for what the MTU-AAUP claimed was a breach of fair practice. The first summer of contract negotiations in 2005, the administration followed a previously-established practice of giving selective salary bonuses and raises. The issue challenged was the fact that, as of January 2005, the MTU-AAUP was the collective bargaining representative of MTU faculty. The union, therefore, should have been the communication channel through which the administration dealt its raises and bonuses. A legal suit ensued, paralleled by the first decertification petition raised by a set of members represented by the union.

Over the following 17 months the two parties quarreled in Michigan courts over the ULP. A decision was made, finally, in April 2007 which allowed negotiations to reopen. As part of this decision, the 2005 decertification petition was nullified and the membership of the MTU-AAUP was banned from refilling a petition for five months, to allow for progress to be made in contract negotiations.