After the first week of classes the vast major­ity of stu­dents have learned that there was (and still is) the pos­si­bil­ity of the Ferris State teach­ers going on strike.

From within my classes or just walk­ing around cam­pus, I can­not even begin to count the times that I heard stu­dents say­ing some­thing in ref­er­ence to hop­ing the teach­ers would go on strike. Now, while their moti­va­tion behind these state­ments is not hard to imag­ine, these short-sighted com­ments are not very intelligent.

Granted, I get excited for the occa­sional day of class which is can­celed unex­pect­edly. Who doesn’t love a good snow day? With that said though, com­par­ing a snow day to the pos­si­bil­ity of the teach­ers going on strike is like com­par­ing a leak­ing shower head to a hurricane.

The pos­si­bil­ity of a strike is a very seri­ous issue which would ulti­mately have a neg­a­tive impact on the stu­dents. The sit­u­a­tion really makes one won­der how a col­lege would han­dle it.

Would they just cut their losses and refund the stu­dents? While I doubt that would hap­pen it would be a dis­as­ter if it did. I am in my fifth year of col­lege; it is time for me to grad­u­ate. The last thing I want is to have this semes­ter be a com­plete loss. Not to men­tion the loans I already took out and the money I am pay­ing to live in Big Rapids. Basically I would be sink­ing fur­ther in debt for nothing.

Then there would be the option of hir­ing con­tem­po­rary teach­ers to fill in for those who are strik­ing. Now, while this option would clearly be bet­ter, it would still be upset­ting. If I am pay­ing thou­sands of dol­lars for classes I expect to be taught by the teach­ers I signed up for. I really do not want to spend thou­sands of dol­lars to be taught by some­one who is just there to fill a posi­tion and who may not be as qual­i­fied as the orig­i­nal teacher. While some classes may be filled by an ade­quate pro­fes­sor, I have a hard time believ­ing there are that many peo­ple with Ph. D.’s wait­ing around to teach at Ferris in a tem­po­rary role.

I have talked to sev­eral teach­ers around cam­pus and they all said the same thing as to why they decided not to go on strike: The rea­son being us stu­dents. I am truly thank­ful they decided to con­tinue teach­ing even though they are still with­out a contract.

Students need to stop think­ing about how ‘sweet’ it would be to have no classes and think about the impli­ca­tions of what that would truly mean.

Hopefully, the teach­ers will be able to get a new con­tract soon and the whole issue will come to a close. For now though, I would just like to thank the teach­ers and let them know how much I appre­ci­ate the fact that they decided to keep teach­ing in order for me to receive the edu­ca­tion I paid for. n