New tensions are rising between the union representing City Colleges of Chicago faculty members and the district’s administrators over recent terminations the union calls unfounded.

Cook County College Teachers Union President Perry Buckley today said  he would be filing to take the district to arbitration over two recent faculty terminations following anonymous student complaints about those faculty members.

"I see many more of these coming down the road and part of this deals with the fact that we are not able to dialogue and sit down and fix these problems to an acceptable resolution without going to arbitration,” Buckley told the Board of Trustees at the beginning of their monthly meeting.

But he declined to name the faculty members who had been terminated or provide specifics about their cases. In general, he said, the union is finding itself fighting a losing battle when students file anonymous harassment and intimidation claims against teachers.

“We’re forced to defend people and we have no idea what’s going on,” Buckley says.

While he doesn’t take issue with the complaint process itself, he said in the past -- and with suburban community college districts currently -- he has been able to resolve things by talking directly with district officials and college presidents.

However, that’s not happening at the City Colleges, Buckley says.

“I think the legal department and the human resources department of the City Colleges of Chicago are running the City Colleges of Chicago,” Buckley said during the board meeting. “There are presidents at this table that have told me, ‘Legal told me to do this.’”

James Reilly, the district’s general counsel, declined to respond to Buckley’s remarks, saying only, “I wouldn’t address that publicly.”

Relations between the city colleges and the teachers’ union became frosty after the 2004 teachers strike, and there was “bad blood” at the time, Buckley says. But for at least the last year, the union and the district have been able to work well together, both sides say.

“It was going well but now we’ve gone back about 10 steps,” Buckley says.

Following Buckley’s statement, the board spent 45 minutes in a closed-door meeting. Board Chairman James Tyree declined to say afterward what was discussed, but said no action was taken.

“Anytime there are personnel issues, administrators and boards and unions look at things differently,” Tyree said after the meeting. “It needs to be address and, you know, the chancellor and all the appropriate folks at the City Colleges will address it.”

But while he said there was no rift between the union and the district, he suggested that the union wasn’t handling its concerns in the right way by raising them at a public meeting.

“I think it’s a big mistake to try and go around the chancellor and not deal with the chain of command and the enforcement and the administrative functions that exist today,” Tyree said during the meeting.