Petitions to put SB 5 on the ballot in November will be available at the following places this week:
*the parking lot of the Market on State St – Saturday April 30 from 10-1
*Howard Hall at Union and College on Monday May 2 from 10-5
*In Athens, outside polling places for the primaries on Tuesday, May 3
If you know if a place and date, please let us know so we can post it for others.
The petition to put SB5 on the ballot in November has been approved and the drive is now underway – volunteers are needed to get signatures. There will be a training session this Saturday, April 23 from 10-12 am in Morton Hall sponsored by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) or you can register at the We Are Ohio website http://weareohio.com/. We’ll keep you posted as we know more but there are a few things to be aware of,
*to distribute petitions you must go through a training session;
*to sign a petition you must be a registered voter though you can register to vote (or change your voter registration address) at the same time you sign a petition.
Now that Governor Kasich has signed SB 5 limiting collective bargaining and the action of unions, we will turn our attention to collecting signatures for the petition to put SB 5 on the ballot. The state AAUP is working with other organizations to coordinate this drive and we will pass the information on to you as soon as we can.
As the consequences of the Kasich budget unfold, it is important for us to be prepared to respond to the slow death of departments and decisions that are made based on expediency not academic mission. Below is a statement from the national chapter on the current status of the policy on department closures.
The American Association of University Professors announced Thursday that it is creating a special committee to review association policies on “financial exigency” and program closure. The AAUP has historically had a very high bar — a state of financial exigency in which institutions face a threat to their survival — to permit layoffs of tenured faculty members. In the current economic crisis, however, many colleges have not followed the AAUP’s policies. Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University and chair of the new AAUP panel, gave the following explanation in the AAUP announcement of the committee: “The AAUP’s Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure make provision for program closings and terminations of appointments when universities face ‘financial exigency.’ ‘Exigency,’ however, is defined as ‘an imminent financial crisis that threatens the survival of the institution as a whole and that cannot be alleviated by less drastic means.’ It is becoming increasingly clear that the financial crises faced by many American colleges and universities are not ‘imminent’ in this sense, and do not threaten ‘the survival of the institution as a whole.’ Rather, what we are seeing is a series of slow bleeds, crises brought on by austerity and attrition — especially at publicly funded institutions whose public funding has been dwindling for decades.” He added that the new panel would focus on “the question of how the AAUP can best respond to program closings and terminations under such conditions, conditions which may not threaten entire institutions with imminent bankruptcy but which do threaten to transform American higher education as a whole.”
OU+AAUP applauds the Ohio University Faculty Senate’s resolution condemning President Roderick McDavis and the Inter-University Council’s support of Ohio Senate Bill 5, proposed legislation that strips faculty at public universities of their right to unionize.
SB 5 is a direct attack on the fundamental values of shared governance and transparency in public universities.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) holds that college and university faculties are not mere employees or second-tier “managers” subservient to boards of trustees or administrators. Rather, they are professionals who possess authority and expertise in their areas of academic competence. They exercise this authority first and foremost on behalf of the broader public and their profession. Many faculties have organized behind collective representation to protect the unique identity of their profession.
The capacity of a university to fulfill its core mission depends on whether faculty are free to determine the shape and direction of teaching and research within their institutions. This freedom–known as “academic freedom”–extends well beyond individual First Amendment rights. Crucially, it entails the right and responsibility to shape the direction of the institution itself–what is known as “shared governance.” This right and responsibility is different from managerial priorities and political interests, which often focus on achieving short-term results unrelated to teaching and learning. College and university faculty have a responsibility to ensure the core academic mission not only for today’s students but for the generations to come.
But OU faculty are increasingly marginalized in decisions that directly affect the core mission of the university, and SB 5 threatens to deepen this isolation. The days when faculty could vote an incompetent or presumptuous dean or provost out of office ended in the 1970s. Now we lack even the means of meaningfully evaluating our top administrators, and we can’t hold accountable the many lesser administrators whose decisions affect everything from how much money is available for libraries–a basic resource for effective teaching and research–to how many faculty hours are devoted to clerical and administrative tasks rather than preparing for classes, meeting with students, and conducting research or engaging in creative activity.
Worse, the OU Faculty Handbook no longer guarantees an authoritative role for faculty in university decision-making. The handbook has no legal standing. The administration and board of trustees are free to ignore the Handbook’s requirements and frequently do so. This is no trivial matter. Academic freedom at O.U. and O.U.’s academic mission are at stake.
A collective bargaining agreement can make shared governance procedures and the Faculty Handbook legally binding on the administration and establish Faculty Senate and its committees as partners with administrators in university decision-making.
SB 5 will deprive public university faculty of the right to bargain collectively and in doing so will further weaken shared governance procedures. President McDavis says he wants greater “flexibility” to manage OU. This is corporate speak for the desire to concentrate power within the managerial structure and transform universities into firms whose workers serve at the whim of administrators. If we allow this to happen, faculty will have no authority whatsoever to shape the terms of their employment in any meaningful way. “Shared governance” will finally have become nothing more than an Orwellianism masking the basic fact of faculty irrelevance.
OU’s administrators tell us we face an unprecedented budget crisis that will fundamentally transform our university so that we will no longer recognize it as programs are excised or “restructured,” tenure positions eliminated, and senior faculty pushed into early retirement. The reality of our situation seems inexorable: we don’t have the money, so we have no choice but to cut–that is, unless you’re a coach of one of OU’s sports teams.
And, yet, as Amy Dean has noted in her analysis of how a powerful coalition of unions, community organizations, and political activists in Oregon built a solid consensus in favor of increasing taxes to reinforce public programs and institutions, there are other ways of viewing and responding to our predicament in Ohio. She observes:
[A]cross the nation, polls show that while people may favor reducing government spending in the abstract, when it comes to the actual programs that might be affected, they prioritize public services over deficit reduction. In a recently released survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Republicans said that the government should focus on reducing the deficit. Yet when asked about specific programs, a majority of respondents, including Republicans, rejected spending decreases for programs such as education, Social Security, agriculture and roads and bridges. Our challenge is turning the voices that we don’t hear regularly in the media into a vocal majority.
When we … set up the debate as one of saving money versus spending money, we lose. Drawing from the Oregon example, we must approach the discussion in a different way, creating a conversation about what is really worth paying for.
Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans want well-run and adequately funded social programs and public institutions. They want top-notch schools and universities that are affordable for everyone, not just the rich. And, as the example of Oregon shows us, they are willing to pay for them once they understand what is at stake. Dean reminds us that “Oregon had a history of antitax votes, with residents capping property taxes and repeatedly rejecting efforts to raise the state income tax or create a sales tax.” But in 2009,
the state legislature… enacted measures that would raise taxes on corporations and households earning more than $250,000 per year in order to preserve critical public services. In January 2010, after opponents forced a public referendum on the tax measures, proponents waged a resolute and ultimately successful campaign that allowed lawmakers to keep essential public services off of the chopping block.
What we have in Ohio is not a budget crisis but rather a failure to have an honest discussion about the importance of our public institutions, especially our schools and universities, and what it takes financially to support them. We are being sold a dangerous fiction–that we can cut our way to success. But what will be the measure of this success? An exploding wealth and knowledge gap exacerbated by skyrocketing tuition at the “charter universities” that could very well replace the public institutions we now have?
It does not have to be this way. There are other futures possible, and Oregon has pointed the way.
As discovered by the New Political and discussed in our last post, OU President Roderick McDavis supports Senate Bill 5, the proposed legislation that severely limits public employee collective bargaining rights and reclassifies university faculty as “management”–a provision that effectively prevents faculty from unionizing. President McDavis also “signed a letter to Ohio Gov. John Kasich last December, as a member of [the Inter-University Council's] council of university presidents, that requested more flexibility in dealing with regulations to public universities.”
President McDavis, in short, not only likes the idea of making it illegal for faculty to form a collective bargaining unit but also wants to deregulate OU, an idea that lines up neatly with a scheme Gov. Kasich has concocted to turn Ohio’s public universities into “charter universities”–basically, private institutions subsidized by taxpayer money. Language for such a provision could be inserted into the SB 5 before the bill goes to the House for a final vote.
Charter universities are potentially disastrous for students. In essence, a charter university means that the State of Ohio will give less money to our public institutions in exchange for less regulation on them. We know that regulation isn’t always a bad word; in fact, the regulations that exist on public colleges and universities are important ones, like the ability to place tuition caps and have government oversight and accountability of how taxpayer dollars are being spent. No tuition caps plus less state funding equals infinite tuition increases. In Virginia, which underwent similar restructuring in recent years, tuition has increased by double-digit percentages. This year, Virginia Commonwealth University increased its tuition by 24 percent. This is going to make it even more difficult for the average Ohio family to send their children to college. Either students will choose not to attend college, or they will graduate with an even greater amount of debt – both of which will equate to less spending potential in the economy.
Our public universities were meant to serve all Ohioans, not just those wealthy enough to afford a post-secondary education. Privatization, an idea President McDavis seems to embrace, undermines this fundamental trust to the detriment of bright, talented students whose only mistake was not to be born rich.
Now we know just where President Roderick McDavis stands on S.B. 5, thanks to Andrew Zucker’s reporting at The New Political:
Ohio University (OU) President Roderick McDavis, who sits on the presidents’ council as a part of the IUC [Inter-University Council], supported the original version of the bill that would have banned collective bargaining for all public employees, and does not oppose it in its current form, according to his Chief of Staff, Becky Watts. …
Watts said that President McDavis was “not opposed to SB-5” because it would give the university “greater flexibility” in addressing its budget crisis. …
Watts said that McDavis believes that SB-5 would maintain the status quo at OU.
“SB-5 would support a continuation of the shared governance model [between employee groups and student senate] that we have in place at Ohio University,” she said. “Shared governance is an important aspect of the culture of Ohio University.”
In actuality, S.B. 5 will undermine the status quo. While OU+AAUP is still seeking to clarify the precise ramifications of the bill (if passed in its present form) for faculty, it obviously undermines our ability to pursue collective bargaining. S.B. 5 also will have a detrimental effect on those OU staff members who currently enjoy union representation. They will no longer be able to collectively bargain for health insurance and other benefits.
Meanwhile, shared governance itself is threatened by high-ranking administrators’ insistence that the Faculty Senate is merely an advisory body. Shared governance is also weakened when our leadership insists that the Faculty Handbook imposes binding regulations on faculty conduct while conferring no limits on administrators’ discretion (e.g., when it comes to raising health care premiums beyond the caps currently set in the Handbook).
In no way is a university president obligated to oppose collective bargaining simply by virtue of his position. Consider the example of Wright State’s president, David R. Hopkins, who recently sent told his campus in an email:
“I was raised in a union family and, as president and provost, have found our union leadership to be of the highest quality. I appreciate all they have brought to us, and I believe we are a stronger institution because of their dedicated commitment to their membership.”
Ohio University could use that kind of cooperative spirit. Instead, President McDavis has chosen to take a position that will ultimately weaken the university. As OU+AAUP Vice-President Julie White told The New Political:
“I don’t think it’s the place of a college president to become at all involved in a lobbying effort of this kind, one that his employees all understand as an attack on their work conditions and their wages,” she said.
White was most troubled by mixed messages coming from the OU administration.
“We have been hearing from the president and the provost about the importance of us all pulling together across the university community to deal with this fiscal crisis,” she said. “To hear that they are actually offering up the salaries and jobs of workers and faculty — to so clearly manage this cut on our backs and not theirs — suggests to me that the message that we all need to pull together is less than genuine.”
Through his words and actions, President McDavis also reveals a narrow conception of collective bargaining. For those of us at OU+AAUP, the goal of collective bargaining would not be to enrich professors at the expense of all other stakeholders. It would be to provide backbone to the idea of shared governance, making it more than just an advisory function. It would give the Faculty Handbook the character of a mutually binding contract. It would protect our core academic mission by preventing administrators from seeing a decrease in the academic workforce as an easy way to achieve cuts. And in hard times such as these, collective bargaining could offer a basis for creative solutions that would spread the pain fairly while preserving solidarity and community.
The day before S.B. 5 passed, a massive omnibus amendment was added that restored limited collective bargaining rights (on pay but not on benefits) but also drastically restricted university faculty’s ability to be included in a bargaining unit. Those restrictions – known as “Yeshiva” language, after a 1980 Supreme Court case that essentially gutted faculty organizing rights at private colleges – define most faculty as managerial employees, unable to be represented by a union. (On the likely impact of this language, see this analysis in Inside Higher Ed.)
Wondering where this eleventh-hour idea came from? Now we know, thanks to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Leaders of faculty unions in Ohio are bristling at the revelation that an association of the state’s public universities was behind a controversial proposal that would strip most public-college faculty members of collective-bargaining rights by reclassifying them as management-level employees.
Bruce E. Johnson, president of the association, the Inter-University Council of Ohio, confirmed in an interview on Tuesday that he had suggested the measure to members of the state Senate. It was approved by the Senate last week, as part of a broader overhaul of Ohio’s collective-bargaining laws now pending in the state House of Representatives.
“We are anticipating significant budget cuts, and so we view this as a rational step in terms of moderating our expenses on campus,” Mr. Johnson said. “It is a leverage issue. It enables us to have more influence on scheduling issues and faculty-pay issues.”
In other words, lobbyists representing our university – or at least, representing our leadership – actively engaged in union-busting activities. The Chronicle article continues:
Mr. Johnson, who formerly served as a Republican lieutenant governor and state senator in Ohio, said the university presidents who led his association did not specifically direct him to propose the reclassification measure. But, he said, they had expressed a desire “to have more flexibility as it relates to the management of state institutions” and, accordingly, had authorized him to advocate for an earlier version of the bill, which contained a flat-out prohibition against collective bargaining by public employees. He said he interpreted such actions as amounting to authorization to propose the reclassification of most full-time members of public-college faculties.
“Our interest is to negotiate with labor and not to negotiate with management,” Mr. Johnson said. As things currently stand, he said, faculty members at most public colleges in the state have both unions and roles in managerial decisions, so that any time college officials are negotiating with faculty unions, “there is management, frankly, on the other side of the table from you.”
Do you feel like management? Me neither. And yet, if you even engage in activities related to curriculum planning, you might well be classified as a manager.
Johnson’s statement is disingenuous because if S.B. 5 passes in its current form, university administrators won’t be negotiating with faculty. The bill’s Yeshiva language seems intended to ensure that any surviving faculty unions will be weak or nonexistent. Besides, if administrators have any interest in negotiating with faculty (instead of ruling by fiat), why did the association support the original version of S.B. 5 that would have banned collective bargaining outright for state employees?
Also, “flexibility” and “leverage” sound like shorthand for bidding goodbye to shared governance.
The Inter-University Council of Ohio’s lobbying efforts raise a host of troubling questions:
We deserve answers to these questions. OU+AAUP urges our president, provost, and trustees to provide them.
Joe McLaughlin, president of our Faculty Senate, has started OUmatters, a new blog on the issues facing Ohio University. So far, it’s terrific: reflective, well-informed, and honest about our budgetary crunch. In other words, just what you’d expect.
Have you been wondering why Athletics is not being asked to take a hit in next year’s budget? The new system of responsibility-centered management (RCM) is at least partly to blame. Joe explains why this is so in his inaugural post, “General Fee Needs to Be Rebalanced,” and explores the implications of this in his latest, “On Shared Sacrifice and the ‘Student Experience.’”
Of course, the skeptics among us might question why – if RCM will inevitably have a disproportionate impact on the academic units – it’s being introduced precisely now as budgets are being slashed. RCM is not a financial imperative. It’s an approach to money management that Cutler Hall has already once considered and abandoned. In other words, it’s a political choice.
