Good morning! Welcome to Fall Quarter!
I’m Chuck Mueller, and I am proud to teach engineering and physics here at Edmonds College. I have been working at community colleges for 20 years now, and I chose this career because I believe in our mission: to make education accessible to our community. What I see every day at Edmonds College are people creating a welcoming environment for our students to learn. I see it in the faculty, the advisors, and the classified staff who work with our students every day. What we do is the essential work of the college.
Let me echo my colleague Lia Andrews to emphasize this point.
Staff labor is student success.
Faculty labor is student success.
Dignity is a living wage.
One of my goals as union president is to build powerful relationships amongst all of the workers dedicated to student success. I look forward to our future collaborations.
I also ran for union president so I could support the work of our faculty, and I know there are plenty of faculty out there who support us. If you are one of those faculty, and especially if you are a member of our Executive Council or our collective bargaining team, thank you for your time and effort. If you are a faculty member who wants to get involved in the union, please come to our Federation Lunch on Tuesday at 11:45 in Woodway. Find out what we have been up to, what we have planned for this year, and how you can get involved.
We have lots to talk about.
I can’t wait to see what our students get up to this year. And I look forward to collaborating with our faculty to create spaces that allow our students to learn with friction and intention. We know what we need to make that happen, and we can work together to get it.
We need the freedom to choose how and what we teach.
We need a meaningful voice in the governance of the college.
We need the respect of a living wage.
I invite all of our faculty to join in this work. Because when we work together, we – and our students – can achieve great things.
Thank you.