The Long Reach of Electoral Outcomes: How the 2010 Mid-Term Elections Affected Contract Negotiations on a Midwestern College Campus

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Increasingly, many Americans fail to see the connection between electoral outcomes and policies that affect their everyday lives. They see politics as a process that takes place far away in Washington, D.C., on issues that will have little impact on their own lives. Moreover, this disinterest is especially characteristic of the youngest generation of citizens – including today’s college-aged students. Hence this chapter attempts to explain how policies enacted in the wake of the 2010 U. S. mid-term elections dramatically affected communication processes in a setting that most students reading this text will readily recognize – a college campus. The chapter attempts to demonstrate how the broader political climate provided a backdrop that dramatically altered long-established communication patterns between college administrators and professors as they attempted to negotiate a new labor contract. Further, it asks students to assess whether the broader political climate made the resulting breakdown in negotiations and resulting labor strike inevitable, or whether it could have been averted despite recent changes in state laws and in the external political climate.