A union is organizing for the Ohio University faculty, so the Athens News sat down with Julie White to learn more about the United Academics of Ohio University.
A key organizer for the union, White said 70% of the faculty has endorsed the formation of a union to address demands for better pay and an equitable teaching workload.
“If we’re talking about faculty, there are instructional faculty and then there are tenure track faculty. Our instructional faculty carry heavier teaching loads and are really under compensated. Our tenure track faculty, pretty much at every rank, although it’s less the case with our assistant professors, we are below the average in the state of Ohio,” White said. “In several cases, the comparison seems to indicate over the last five years that we are the lowest paid at those ranks as well.”
OU and Ohio State University are the only public institutions of higher learning in the state that are not unionized.
“Our salaries are the lowest of the publics in the state,” White said. “And that’s in part because 12 other universities in Ohio are already unionized. And they had multi-year guarantees of percentage raises during a time when we did not get any raises at all.”
Doesn’t OU provide annual cost-of-living increases?
“We don’t actually have a cost-of0living guarantee because most of the time that would be a part of a union contract,” White said. “But for example, we went for three years with no raises — three of the last 10 years. A typical year over the last 10 years I believe has been somewhere around one point a half percent. Of course, given inflation, that’s a real concern also. … But we are looking again at another year of about 1.5% as the anticipated raise pool.
Healthcare costs have increased too.
“Given the conditions around healthcare costs, that has also been a concern,” White said. “This year, the administration did agree not to increase our healthcare costs. They agreed that that would be something the university itself would cover.”
May 9th Deadline
OU is required to respond before or by Thursday as to whether the faculty can unionize.
“May 9, we will know how the university is going to respond, whether they’re going sit down with us and work with us to determine a date for an election or whether they’re going to further stall on the construction of the bargaining unit, which is what happened at Miami where they went through a long period of negotiating with the administration and the state employee relations board about who would be in the unit and who would not be in the unit,” White said.
So far the bargaining unit represents at least 860 union members.
“We filed cards at the beginning of March and we filed cards with a just under 70% of the faculty in the anticipated bargaining unit having signed on in support. That’s really, really impressive. We have very strong support and we were hoping that given that level of support and also given that the overwhelming majority of institutions in the state are already unionized, that we would be on the fast track.”
Cutler Hall’s Goodwill
White is cautiously optimistic Cutler Hall will approve unionization.
“We could anticipate the goodwill of the administration,” she said. “I’m still somewhat hopeful or less, although less hopeful than I was at the beginning of March, that we can work with the administration to address some of the kind of clear concerns, legitimate concerns about working conditions here. So they have had two extensions granted by the State Employment Relations Board.”
When White was asked if she is worried that Cutler Hall might be less inclined to support a union, she said, “I’m still hopeful that there’s going to be a relationship of goodwill between administration and United Academics of Ohio University. The delays do give me some pause along those lines, but we know from talking to our colleagues at other universities around the state, that places like Bowling Green have a really good working relationship between their union and their administration.”
White continued, “I mean, in some ways a union contract simplifies the jobs of many of the administrators by constructing a shared set of expectations — shared not just between administration and, and faculty generally, but shared across units about what fair compensation will look like about what a fair workload looks like.”
So what was the genesis of talks to form a union for the faculty?
“I think the genesis of it was about five and a half years ago, when the university laid off 54 instructional faculty — fired 54 instructional faculty,” White said. “Many of them had teaching loads that were six or seven courses. That’s a huge curricular loss. They’re slowly trying to add in some more positions. Again, we lost some of our very best teachers. Those were faculty who were incredibly committed to the teaching mission and they were unceremoniously dismissed from their work.”
What happens if May 9 comes and goes and Cutler Hall opposes the formation of a union?
“The short answer to that is we have signed union cards and the state will require that at some point we have an election,” White said. “So that is going happen. The concern would be that there’s a longer period of stalling. So for example, going back and forth about who’s going be in and out of the bargaining unit — that can take months. They could stall for another six months. I hope they won’t do that. I think in the end. there’s going to be an election and ... for all involved, I don’t want all goodwill to evaporate. So I’m hoping that we’re not going to see a lot of stalling on the administration’s part.”
Why isn’t the faculty unionized?
OU’s maintenance and classified staff are unionized through the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the largest trade union of public employees in the United States.
Question becomes if there is already a union present at OU, why isn’t the faculty unionized?
“The one thing I think how unfortunately there has been at various points in the institution’s recent history, a sense that faculty are disposable, “ White said. “There are a lot of Ph.D.s out there looking for jobs. I think this is the sort of mindset that administration had five to 10 years ago. I think there is a sense that they want to shift a greater percentage of the workforce to non-tenured tenure track faculty. And one way to do that is to make this the kind of place people who are tenured in tenure track don’t want to stay. I think that was I think true 10 years ago.”
OU President Lori Stewart Gonzalez has been at the helm of a new administration for less than a year. Moreover there have been a lot of staff changes in recent months at Cutler Hall including naming Donald J. Leo as the university’s next executive vice president and provost, effective July 1. White said her comments about past administrations do not reflect the present orientation at Cutler Hall.
“I think this current administration is new enough that we don’t know what their orientation will be,” White said. “Our president hasn’t even been here for a year yet. So I want to acknowledge that as we reflect on this recent past, we’re also reflecting on a past she was not part of.”
While said there’s no denying that staffing levels have changed at many public universities as administrators seek to cut costs.
“I think it’s important to connect OU last 10 years with broader trends in higher education,” she said. “And you know most institutions, public universities anyway, are sort of downsizing the percentage of the faculty that’s tenure track, it’s been particularly to save money.”
White said that by eliminating faculty protections and making staffing decisions “flexible” has a negative impact on not only learning, but the university culture. She explained that hiring flexibility means the ability to fire people.
“I am not sure given what education looks like at the college level, students are admitted for four-year programs where they anticipate access to a curriculum that we presume is part of the reason they’re coming to the institution,” she said. “You know, you can’t just fire faculty in areas where students anticipate being able to access courses that’s bad for the institution. It’s bad for students and it’s bad for the faculty.”
A union’s strengths
A union would protect the workers — the faculty.
“I think that what you get out of a union is a contract and that contract stipulates not only wages but also grievance procedures. And in that sense it gives faculty a much greater sense of protection than we currently have,” White said.
White praised the Faculty Senate as being really good, but conceded that it serves more as an advisory body to the administration.
“In the end, much of the work that they do is merely advisory,” she said. “And some of the important work that faculty senate does would be more meaningful if it was backed by a contract, a legally enforceable contract. I think faculty senates at unionized campuses have the extra legitimacy of having a working environment where their faculty has contract protections.”
White said a union isn’t a substitute for a Faculty Senate.
“I think we have a lot of faculty who are deeply invested in doing the hard work of being on a Faculty Senate of serving in those capacities, but many of the decisions they make can simply be ignored,” she said.
For example, instructional faculty in the last 10 years developed a system of promotion and long-term contracts for instructional faculty, but that system was ignored when finances were tight, White said.
“Five years ago when the university felt the financial situation was dire enough, they simply failed to deliver faculty those contracts,” she said.
A union would protect a faculty member’s right to free speech and academic freedom.
“I think it’s really important to protect both free speech on campuses, which is better protected with a union, but it’s also really important to protect academic freedom,” White said. “I think those are things that are important for faculty and for students as we’re learning, watching what’s going on around the country with protests. And again, I want a university to be the kind of place where people can express a range of diverse opinions comfortably or even uncomfortably disagree with each other and still count on having a job. And that really increasingly requires a union presence on campuses.”
Dollars and sense
If a union contract mandated wage increases every year, wouldn’t that increase the price of tuition? White said the Legislature caps tuition rate increases.
“You can only increase your tuition so much each year,” White said.
White noted that administrators at Cutler Hall, like their counterparts nationwide, have high salaries, particularly in comparison to the faculty.
“The other thing to keep in mind is that while faculty are not terribly well compensated, executive administration, which is different from the administrative class that has a regular interaction with students. I’m talking about executive administration which is very well compensated,” she said. “I think we need to recognize that there are places where we’re spending money where we could spend less.”
In April, the Board of Trustees approved a new 591-bed residence hall on South Green. The residence hall, which will be the largest on campus, will cost $110.5 million — funds that come from external financing and Housing departmental reserves.
“I’m concerned now that we’ve over invested in new building, and we need to make maybe more responsible financial decisions about that,” White said.
Resources should be allocated to OU’s mission — education.
“But in the end, what students are paying for is an education,” White said. “That means that at the center of any university should be faculty and students. And that is going to require not just giving voice to the centrality of that mission, but also putting the resources behind it.”
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