518: 'We're not going to be held hostage by 7 contract-rejecting faculty'

Plain Talk

Dickinson State University, one of the North Dakota University System's four-year institutions, has been thrown into chaos by a labor dispute with a group of nursing faculty.

First the faculty, after rejecting a new contract aimed at tamping down what DSU President Stephen Easton too much spending on a program that produces too few students, chose to resign en masse. Then Easton himself tendered his resignation alongside a lengthy statement in which he defended his approach to the dispute.

"The simple reality is that, though we love DSU Nursing and want to help it survive, we cannot spend over half a million dollars in compensation expenses for 16 Registered Nurses," he wrote in that statement posted on DSU's website. "That does not work financially."

"We're not going to be held hostage by 7 contract-rejecting faculty," Mark Hagerott, chancellor of the university system, said on this episode of Plain Talk.

Hagerott told guest co-host Corey Mock and me that "the focus is on the students" who are set to resume classes for the fall semester in approximately five weeks, and said that Eason, who continues to serve as president until the State Board of Higher Education chooses a new leader, is still negotiating with the former nursing faculty to find a new contract.

The chancellor noted that East was trying to apply the same standards for credit hours and instruction that apply to the rest of the faculty at DSU. "Seven people didn't sign their contract," he said. "Everybody else is moving forward."

Will the DSU nursing program survive? And what will happen to the students currently enrolled in this program if the impasse continues? Hagerott said his expectation is that the program continues, and that if need be current students could be served by faculty at some of North Dakota's other public institutions. He also said he's had preliminary conversations with at least one state lawmaker about finding funds to help those students with scholarships to smooth over any hardships from that transition.

Also on this episode, U.S. House candidate Julie Fedorchak joined to reflect on the Republican national convention she just attended in Milwaukee. "You could hear a pin drop when he was recapping the assassination attempt," she said of former President Donald Trump's speech accepting the convention's nomination.

"You could see the weight on him," she continued, noting the less bombastic tone Trump struck during the address. She said it was "electric" in the convention hall, and that Trump's "drill baby drill" comments about expanding domestic energy production got the "loudest" reaction from the audience and was "music to my ears."

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