The Pennsylvania System of Higher Education--and the Fairness Center--its Union-Busting Friend

In a desperate and cynical attempt to divide and conquer APSCUF, the State University Faculty Union, the "Fairness Center"--an organization that exists for one purpose only, UNION-BUSTING, sent this letter to a large number of faculty members:

Professors and coaches:

While APSCUF has a right to call a strike, many have reservations—and rightly so—about leaving their students to join the picket line. The good news is, you don’t have to. While you have the legal right to remain in the union, you also have the right to resign your union membership.

If you want to remain in the classroom or stay home instead of joining the picket line, you must first properly resign your union membership. If you don’t properly resign before refusing to strike, you can be subject to union discipline—which could affect your career and/or your finances.

I’m an attorney with the Fairness Center, a nonprofit, public interest law firm, and I work with public employees and union members. The Fairness Center can serve as a free resource to help you exercise your rights and to protect you should the union try to penalize you for following your conscience. Please email info@fairnesscenter.org or call (844) 293-1001. 

Sincerely,

David R. Osborne
President & General Counsel
The Fairness Center

Here is my response:

Dear Mr. Osborne,
Thank you for your missive. It is unfortunate to be sure that it contains patent falsehoods and misrepresentations. 

First, since the vast majority of the voting faculty across PASSHE voted to authorize our union leadership to call a strike, it is plainly false that “many have reservations” about joining a picket line. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. 

We do have serious reservations—but it’s not about whether or not a strike is the right and necessary action to take. It’s about the unfairness of a contract that, if enacted, will undermine the high quality of education we currently provide our students, further entrench the second class citizen status of temporary faculty, and continue the ideologically motivated effort to stamp out public sector unions. Make no mistake, my colleagues and I fully understand the objective of this cynical effort to manipulate PASSHE professors and coaches. But truth be told, your missive betrays the fact that you recognize the strength of our resolve to achieve a genuinely fair contract. You’d otherwise surely not have resorted to claims so demonstrably false.

Second, it is a patent falsehood to suggest that APSCUF or any APSCUF member would behave in any retaliatory fashion should a professor cross a picket line. To suggest this is little more than a very thinly veiled strategy to coerce or tacitly threaten APSCUF members into resigning, an effort to manipulate that is, well, shameful—but hardly surprising given the Fairness Center’s ideological goals. Few if any faculty across the fourteen schools will cross that line. But this isn’t because we're afraid of our fellows; it’s because we all know what a fair contract looks like. We all care deeply about our students and the missions of our universities to contribute to the educations of thinking citizens across the Commonwealth. We also recognize a divide and conquer strategy when we see one.

The Fairness Center is neither a public interest law firm nor is it interested in fairness. It is an organization devoted to public sector union-busting, plain and simple, a fact that makes the appeal to conscience all the more ironic. After all, it’s very clear wherein the appeal to conscience lay—and it’s not with those who’d seek to manipulate and coerce union members into resigning from the very organization that defends our best interests and those of the students we serve.  

So—thanks for the “no strike” offer—but I think I’ll stand with my colleagues and my students.

In solidarity with APSCUF,

Wendy Lynne Lee, Professor
Philosophy
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
wlee@bloomu.edu

To be very clear, the major issues preventing a resolution of the APSCUF contract dispute are not--as no doubt Mr. Osborne would have us think--about salary and benefits.

They're ideological--and would have an enormous and damaging effect on the quality and breadth of educational opportunities for PASSHE (Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education) students.

These are the main issues:

• Substantially increase the use of temporary faculty in lieu of permanent faculty
• Make use of students with few graduate credits to teach courses
• Stop funding faculty research and professional development
• Force on-campus students into distance education sections
• Give university presidents unilateral authority to transfer faculty members to other departments
• Cut the lowest-paid faculty members’ salaries by 20 percent. 

For more see the fine coverage at Raging Chicken Press:

http://ragingchickenpress.org/2016/09/22/negotiations-breakdown-passhe-sets-stage-for-first-ever-faculty-strike/.

It takes no degree in nuclear physics to see how damaging these proposals would be if they became enacted--especially across the entire 14 universities of the PASSHE system. 

As someone put it to me long ago, the PASSHE mission foresees Pennsylvania's private universities as the playgrounds of the children of the wealthy--and the PASSHE schools as the training centers and public relations firms for their future employees.

Here's the academically sanitized translation of what I, and I'm sure all of my excellent colleagues, think about that:

No.

Wendy Lynne Lee

PS: Where DID Mr. Osborne of the Fairness Center get the names of APSCUF faculty members?

Education Matters More Than Money: The APSCUF Anti-Extraction Resolution

After considerable protracted debate over a long Summer, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty—APSCUF—decisively passed by a vote of 68-31 a position statement with respect to SB 367—the PA Frack U Bill—and more generally the state university union’s position with respect to hydraulic fracturing—fracking—on state university properties.

It had been nearly a year since the “indigenous mineral resource development” bill had been debated and passed as Act 147 investing university presidents with the authority to decide whether a fracking—or coal, or oil—mining operation can proceed on Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) campuses—including campus quads, outside classroom windows, next to sports fields, or wherever else the industry determines is the most expeditious location for a drill head, a compressor station, a waste hauler parking lot, or pipeline (http://legiscan.com/PA/text/SB367/id/648399).

The text of the position statement reads as follows:

A motion was advanced to LA [Legislative Assembly] in April 2013 stating: Therefore, be it resolved, EUP Legislative Assembly delegates request the executive council to develop a position statement opposing fracking on Pennsylvania State System Properties. This motion will return to the floor at the pending LA in September.

The ad hoc committee, by majority, supports the position that PASSHE campuses are not appropriate locations for hydraulic fracturing (fracking), that given the environmental and health hazards of the fracking process, including all of its infrastructure and associated enterprises, its presence on PASSHE campuses is inconsistent and potentially deleterious to the PASSHE educational mission as well as to the health and welfare of PASSHE community members. A growing body of research is beginning to quantify and characterize the negative environmental, societal, economic, and ecological impacts on those close to such activities. Local impacts include but are not limited to gas migration, air pollution, and surface and near-surface water quality degradation as well as potential chronic impacts to air, water, landscapes, habitat, and ecosystems. Soeder (2012, Shale gas development in the United States) states, “Having one of these sites near a home, school or business can be distracting, inconvenient, annoying, and disruptive.” Moreover, APSCUF opposes SB 367–the Indigenous Mineral Resources Development Act–as inconsistent with the PASSHE education mission for the same reasons and because it effectively pits some PASSHE campuses against others for revenue which could accrue to the permitting of fracking operations on PASSHE lands. Such potential competition, or implementation of SB 367 in any form, could accelerate the presence of such operations–including pipeline construction, compressor infrastructure, waste management, heavy industrial truck traffic, and thereby increase exposure to pollution and hazards for members of PASSHE communities. Lastly, APSCUF takes a position against a PASSHE contribution to climate change, as induced by increased greenhouse gas emissions, as this is also inconsistent with a mission committed to the educations and welfare of future citizens of the Commonwealth.

Although the committee supports this position and acknowledges potential negative impacts to our campuses by on-campus drilling, a subset of committee members posed an alternative viewpoint that APSCUF should not offer a position on this issue but allow individual PASSHE universities to act independently in response to implementing the Act. Concern was expressed that issuing a position to oppose on-campus drilling would be viewed as a condemnation of the entire industry, a viewpoint not universally shared within the committee.

To fully appreciate the meaning of what may be the first union position taken on fracking in the Commonwealth, it’s useful to make brief review of the history, the motives, and the corruption that attended Act 147. In addition to Dory Hippauf’s fine piece “Welcome to PA Frack-U” (Welcome to PA FRACK-U), I laid out the argument against SB 367 in an October 2012 RCP piece, “The Industrialization of PASSHE” The Industrialization of PASSHE: Where the Public Good, its Students, and its Faculty are Auctioned Off to the Extraction Profiteers (Or: Extortion by Extraction) | Raging Chicken Press):

It’s sponsor Donald C. White (R-41) is a direct gas industry beneficiary to the tune of $94,150.
White explicitly compares the opportunities for gas leasing made available in SB 367 on PASSHE properties to leasing Pennsylvania game and state forest lands. He insists that the bill does not require the state to lease or sell property rights—making those decisions the province of university presidents—but this is nothing but thinly veiled subterfuge given that
Governor Corbett has bludgeoned PASSHE budgets for the last three years such that pressure for university presidents to play ball with the gas industry to make up the short-fall is a virtual guarantee of their complicity, and
The comparison with other state lands like those currently under siege by the gas companies (for example, Loyalsock State Forest) only strengthens the claim that whatever rightly counts as the people’s land—state forest, state campuses, state game lands—is absolutely for sale by a corrupt state administration which acts as a revolving door and an employment agency for the industry (Fracking and the Revolving Door in Pennsylvania | Public Accountability Initiative).

Leasing PASSHE properties to the gas industry is just one part of the strategy to convert state universities in Pennsylvania into privatized and corporatized training depots and public relations offices for industry. Whether Big Energy, Big Pharma, or Big Food, the industrialization of PASSHE is consistent with Corbett administration ideology which makes higher education the prerogative of the very wealthy all the while consigning the children of the middle and lower classes to fill the jobs requisite to an industry that fills the pockets of Corbett appointments and allies. As I made clear during the APSCUF Legislative Assembly, 9.20.13, SB 367 is manifestly inconsistent with the mission of any university: “The notion that a campus with active drill rigs competing for space with libraries, quads, and classrooms is conducive to learning, that a frack-operation is consistent with the atmosphere necessary to the free exchange of ideas, is absurd on its face.” This is true for at least three reasons:

1. The presence of a frack operation or any of its infrastructure is inconsistent with the health and welfare of the university community. The potential for carcinogen exposure, methane leak, explosion, noise, heavy industrial truck trafiic, etc. should make any parent taking the tour of a PASSHE campus think twice about sending their son or daughter to a PASSHE school.

2. The creation of university/industry “partnerships” can compromise the integrity of entire departments and programs. “Research bearing the imprimatur of Penn State, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Buffalo, for example, have all come under fire for “research” demonstrably biased to industry interests, for ignoring environmental and health concerns, and for failing to disclose their financing.” Closer to home, consider “A three group panel” discussing “environmental and operational safety of drilling for Marcellus shale natural gas” at PASSHE’s Slippery Rock University (SRU). The panelists included “health and safety manager at Advanced Waste Services Sean Decristoforo, vice president for safety and environment of Range Resources Ralph Tijerina, and James Daley, director of natural gas and energy programs of Greenhouse and Omara Inc. The mediator was Anthony Cialella, vice president for energy services for Advanced Waste Services”—all pro-fracking, all industry beneficiaries. Moreover, one of the attendees, Professor Patrick Burkhart, Geoscience SRU and committee chair for the APSCUF committee charged with drafting the APSCUF position statement on fracking insisted with respect to frack-related water pollution that “you cannot define dirty until you define clean,” and that “environmental issues are demand driven” (The Rocket : Local shale fracking under question) implying—as he reiterated at APSCUF Delegate Assembly—that economic circumstance ought to determine environmental policy—on PASSHE properties.

3. We teach our students a deeply immoral lesson about the value of human life and the integrity of the planet’s ecology when we allow operations whose contribution to water destruction, air pollution, forest fragmentation, and climate change to proceed on campus—as if our only value for their futures is as cogs in that machine.

SB 367, however, is just one piece in a suite of perverse legislations threatening to undermine not only the ecologies upon which we all depend, but the democracy we still pretend to value. SB 259/HB 1414 allows old gas and oil leases to be revived by drillers unless there is explicit language in the old lease forbidding it—and of course, there won’t be since fracking is a new technology (‎‎naro-us.org/Resources/NARO%20PA/PA%20Legislative/Here’s%20What%20NARO-PA%20has%20to%20say%20about%20SB%20259.pdf). The bill opens the door to forced pooling in a fashion called “sleazy” even by some in favor of drilling. SB 1047/HB 15756 effectively guts the states endangered species act making access to habitat otherwise off limits to drillers available to natural gas extraction (Endangered Species Act Proposed Changes: HB 1576 & SB 1047 | Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs). HB 1717 would “force DCNR to lease another 300,000 of state forest and park land for gas drilling, and direct the money to PennDOT to repair bridges” (http://birding.aba.org/message.php?mesid=505993&MLID=PA01&MLNM=Pennsylvania).

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. As I pointed out at APSCUF Delegate Assembly, once the export gas terminals at places like Cove Point Maryland come on line, the industrialization we have seen in Pennsylvania to date will look like a trip to Disney World—100,000 wells, twenty-two possible export depots from Maine to Oregon, their pipeline, their compressors, and their waste—will look more like Zombie Apocalypse than ‘It’s a Small World After All.”

All of this brings me finally to some observations about the potential Democrat party candidacy of former DEP head John Hanger who promises—with a straight face—that he will see to it that regulation will make fracking safe and natural gas cheap.

Indeed, he has duped some in the anti-fracking movement to his platform with promises that he’ll make right the wrongs they have suffered. But it is a small world after all. Besides the fact that there simply is no making right the permanent destruction of water, the generation of the conditions for cancer, and the erosion of the rural social fabric, Hanger epitomizes the perverse lie that it is possible to regulate a catastrophe in progress. Given that the regulations are themselves drafted by the very industry that benefits from no regulation at all, “regulate” can mean nothing other than “business-as-usual-concealed-with-a-bit-of green-wash.” And that is Hanger’s pitch for the development of energy alternatives—green wash. Not because he might not really mean that he’d like to see us move beyond fossil fuels, but because he has already conceded cheerily that we won’t and can’t—and he doesn’t really care. After all, if he did, he’d support the Democratic Party’s moratorium resolution—and he doesn’t. He calls it unrealistic—as if “realistic” were an acceptable concession to death-by-fracking.

So here we have another resolution with which a candidate for governor disagrees—the first Pennsylvania public union’s resolution to resist fracking operations on PASSHE properties. The value of such a resolution is not—to be really realistic—in its capacity to keep fracking off PASSHE campuses. It will not. It’s value lay in its bearing witness—when the trucks roll down our rural roads onto our campus quads, our students will know that we said NO to this egregious intrusion into their futures. Its value lay in its capacity as a tool for fomenting the only thing that will bring to an end a catastrophe that hasn’t really even begun—and won’t until pipeline and export depot are ready to begin the trans-ocean transports of frack gas to China and Japan and India. That thing is called a “revolution,” and it begins in the only place it can: every conscience of every thinking person who sees through the game of “regulation,” and recognizes that like all games of Russian Roulette, Regulation Roulette ends up with a bullet to the head—in this case that of our collective future.

So—it is a small world. But it is bigger than, say, Dimock, and it is bigger than any single college campus, and it is bigger than Pennsylvania. But it is not bigger than the shale deposits whose mining for gas represents the last gasp of a fatal addiction—and that is a world grown smaller by the day.

Letter to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett on PASSHE budget cuts

4.2.11

Governor Tom Corbett:

After having carefully read and digested your proposal for the Pennsylvania budget of 2011, after having considered the relevant facts concerning the Commonwealth’s fiscal health, the relationship of the state to its constitutional responsibilities, and particularly your proposal for cutting by 54 percent the state appropriation for the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education’s (PASSHE), we, the undersigned, can only conclude that your motives have little to do with the current recession—and everything to do with an ideologically motivated agenda that aims to privatize and corporatize institutions traditionally identified as public goods. It’s evident, moreover, that part of that agenda is to undermine Pennsylvania’s public unions by starving the institutions that employ union members. We are forced to conclude this for a number of reasons:

1. Failing to tax natural gas extraction: You claim the state is on the brink of fiscal disaster and must fill a $4 billion dollar budget shortfall, but yet you refuse to impose a severance tax (or any tax) on Marcellus Shale Drilling. You claim that the drilling companies will go elsewhere were such a tax imposed. False. Ninety-six percent of states that drill for natural gas impose a severance tax—including the largest gas drilling state, Texas. No evidence supports the claim that companies drilling in those states are threatening to leave. What discourages gas drilling, according to a respected University of Wyoming study, isn’t taxation but rather the market price of natural gas. Moreover, the Marcellus drilling fields are limited—drilling is only possible where it is possible—and this suggests that companies like Cabot and Penneco aren’t going anywhere. Indeed, their profit margins promise nothing but substantial future gains, and at a 5 percent tax (akin to West Virginia’s), a projected minimum of 200 million a year could be raised to fund essential social services and education in what some are now calling the Saudi Arabia of natural gas extraction. You claim that drilling will bring wealth and jobs to Pennsylvania, but this too is false on the evidence. In fact, profits from natural gas extraction exit the state at about the same speed at which the environment is destroyed. Even worse, as Pro Publica reports, “the state's oil and gas inspectors have been stripped of their power to issue violations to the drilling companies they regulate,” increasing profits for the drilling companies at the cost of Pennsylvania’s environment and its citizens who will no doubt shoulder the burden of restoration after the drillers have left—including the restoration of 74,000 acres of state forest land. You insist that “we need to send a powerful message to the Pennsylvania Business Community that Pennsylvania is open for business.” Indeed you have—at the cost of every citizen of the Commonwealth who works, goes to school, attends a state university, drinks Pennsylvania water, utilizes Pennsylvania social services, or has any sense for the fairness and equity embodied in the Pennsylvania Constitution.

2. Ideological motivation: Given the compelling argument for taxing natural gas extraction, we can only surmise that your opposition to it is either ideological or self-serving—or both. Fact: You received more than $800,000 in donations from drilling corporations for your gubernatorial campaign. Fact: in delegating some of the state’s most critical environmental decisions over to Alan C. Walker (appointed to head the Department of Community and Economic Development), CEO of Bradford Energy and Bradford Coal—a corporation who donated $184,000 to your campaign—you have effectively put a fox in charge of the henhouse: "Walker’s ties to the energy industry are deep. He is listed on state disclosure forms as an executive of the Pennsylvania Coal Association and he has served as chairman of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry...[L]ike many energy companies, his, too, have run into problems with the state. In 2002, three of Walker’s coal companies notified Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection that they had run out of money and were going to stop treating the 173 million gallons of polluted water they produced each year and released into tributaries of the Susquehanna River. The state eventually got a court injunction to force them to continue treating the wastewater as required by state and federal law" (www.propublica.org/article/corbett-pa-energy-exec-authority-environment). Why, Governor Corbett, should we believe that your investment in natural gas extraction has to do with anything other than an ideology that seeks to maximize private profit of a public good—all the while padding the pockets of your political and business allies? Why shouldn’t we think you endorse a new suggested slogan for Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania, Inc., only dirtier, dumber, and poorer than Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.

3. An end to publicly funded state universities: This brings us directly to your proposal to lacerate the funding of PASSHE. In addition to your refusal to tax gas extraction—and in the same week you drastically reduced funding for health services for the poorest of Pennsylvania citizens—you offered $833 million in tax breaks to corporations who do business in a state which already taxes fewer than 30 percent of corporate enterprises: “Governor Corbett announced that Pennsylvania’s corporate tax will allow corporations to follow federal accelerated bonus depreciation rules adopted as part of the tax cut compromise in December. The rules allow companies to write off or “expense” 100% of equipment purchases made in the last quarter of 2010 and all of Tax Year 2011…Bonus depreciation goes to investment in other states not just Pennsylvania. Companies do not have to purchase equipment in the state to take advantage of the provision. Thus the bonus may lead to no new investment in the state” (Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center). In other words, we have no reason to believe that such a give-away will benefit Pennsylvanians. Nonetheless, to afford this generous gift to your corporate allies, you propose to devastate education—leaving local school districts and their taxpayers to foot the tsunami-sized bill coming their way, undermining education at the K-12 level, and insuring that students are under-prepared for college. To add insult to injury, you also propose to cut state funding to the very colleges and universities that middle working class families have depended on for generations to educate their children, the PASSHE. 90 percent of PASSHE students are from Pennsylvania. Hence, the perversity of your reasoning on this matter can hardly be overdrawn: You insist that PASSHE universities have failed to “live within their means,” and that the evidence of this is found in rising tuitions—but you fail to acknowledge that state funding for PASSHE has already been cut to less than one third of total funding. It is, moreover, flatly false to claim that PASSHE has failed to “live with its means.” In fact, three PASSHE universities, West Chester, Millersville, and Bloomsburg made Kiplinger’s prestigious list of the 100 best state universities in the United States. Their criteria: “the best education at the best price” (apscuf.wordpress.com). Facts: “In FY 2010-2011, PASSHE will receive nearly $8.3 million less in state funds than it did in FY 2001-2002.Tuition increases have been below the rate of inflation in four of the last six years…Controlled for inflation, the System will operate with 13% fewer dollars from all sources per student in FY 2010-11 than it did in FY 1999-2000. Despite fiscal challenges, PASSHE continues to offer the lowest-cost baccalaureate degree programs in the state. However, the combination of flat state funding and low tuition increases has created historic shortfalls for the universities, which, if continued, could translate into viability issues” (www.passhe.edu). Add another 54% cut in funding, and here’s what “viability issues” means in plain English:

• A 25-33% rise in tuition that will exclude many deserving Pennsylvania citizens from being able to access higher education.

• The laying-off of faculty, particularly adjunct faculty, and the resultant loss of courses and opportunities for students.

• The inability to attract high quality faculty to the state, and the resultant loss of the quality instruction PASSHE can clearly demonstrate it provides. Indeed, at least four PASSHE graduates are appointees in Governor Corbett’s government.

• The expansion of class size, and the resultant loss of high quality instruction made possible by smaller classes and access to professors.

• Brain drain from the Commonwealth as students seek educational opportunities elsewhere in the pursuit not only of their dreams, but their economic wherewithal.

• Campus closures and the resultant loss of access to students to higher education in their communities.

There simply is no argument to be made for cutting funding for university education in Pennsylvania. Indeed, there is every argument for funding education at a much higher level, especially if you mean what you say, namely, that you want to see a citizenry fully equipped to participate in the global economy. The consequences for our citizens, especially our middle class working families will be crushing—and you cannot fail to know this. Hence, again, we are compelled to wonder what are your motives; they cannot be preparing Pennsylvanians to live and thrive in a globalized world; they cannot be to encourage what is fundamental to a thriving culture—the humanities, arts, and music; they cannot be what the Pennsylvania Constitution explicitly specifies is the responsibility of the state—the education of its citizens and the provision of their basic welfare.

4. The destruction of public sector unions: This brings us to our final argument, namely, that much like your apparent aims in effectively selling off Pennsylvania’s environment and resources to natural gas interests, your aim in undermining PASSHE funding is to see the end of the state university in Pennsylvania, to see, in other words, a fully privatized, for-profit, university system. But the only way to accomplish this—much like what are perhaps your models in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin—is to destroy the one real obstacle that stands in your way—the public sector unions. Unlike Governor Scott Walker who committed a political blunder in seeking to destroy collective bargaining rights for state workers in Wisconsin through legislation, you have in fact executed a far more insidious strategy of starving public sector unions like APSCUF (The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties) by starving their institutions of funding. One way, in other words, to force the state universities to either privatize or close is to cut the funding that supports their central missions—a mission instantiated by their faculties who, through the power of collective bargaining, are the bedrock of the excellent education offered by the PASSHE. As you surely must know what such devastating cuts this will mean is that the dream of higher education for thousands of Pennsylvanians will come to a grinding halt next year. We can only gather that you regard this as an acceptable casualty in the drive to corporatize higher education in the state.

To sum up, this agenda is unconscionable, and it is premised on the erroneous view that the budget deficit is the product of funding for public services and goods. It is not. Rather, it’s the result of licentious gratuities to corporate entities—some from whom you directly benefit. 41% of your own Republican Party members have recently assessed your performance as “poor.” The rallies on the steps of the state house should make clear to you where the vast majority of PASSHE students stand, particularly the Lock Haven students who ran one hundred miles to get your attention. A Franklin and Marshall College poll demonstrates that two thirds of Pennsylvanians oppose the budget cuts. In fact, these same Pennsylvanians who generally oppose tax hikes made clear they support taxing Marcellus Shale drilling in the interest of funding education (www.pennlive.com). Given all of the facts, Governor Corbett, what could justify what amounts to the re-invention of the Commonwealth as Pennsylvania, Inc. other than that this is precisely your goal? The problem, of course, is that he Constitution of Pennsylvania is a charter for a state—not a business plan for a corporation.

We hope you will reconsider this ill-fated ideological agenda for the sake of your state and its citizens.

Wendy Lynne Lee, Professor
Department of Philosophy
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
Bloomsburg, PA 17815
wlee@bloomu.edu