Faculty Alliance of Miami Win Union at Miami University

OXFORD, Ohio—More than 800 faculty members at Miami University officially have a union today after the State Employment Labor Relations Board certified that an overwhelming majority of faculty cast ballots in favor of forming a new chapter of the American Association of University Professors/American Federation of Teachers. The new union includes tenured and tenure-track faculty members and longer-term contract faculty including teaching professors, clinical faculty and lecturers. Voting took place via mail ballot election from April 18 through May 2. The result was 450 to 241.

The Faculty Alliance of Miami has spent more than a year organizing for the union election, motivated by shared governance issues, workloads, and the arbitrary and unfair dismissal of a large number of faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter filed with SERB to include these faculty members in the unit, but the board determined they would be a separate bargaining unit. The need for a stronger tenure system and more equitable compensation were additional factors that pushed Miami faculty to form a union.

English professor Cathy Wagner, a lead faculty organizer for FAM, said: “We are thrilled. This win means faculty’s voices will be heard. The teacher-scholar mission that made Miami a great school has been under threat from an administration that does not understand that teacher working conditions are student learning conditions. Now, we have the collective power and legal right to win changes for ourselves and our students.”

Paul Schaeffer, biology professor and organizer for FAM, said: “This victory is the outcome of years of hard work. As an organizer, I felt that the outcome was never in doubt after talking to so many of our colleagues and acting on their clear mandate. This victory will give us the pathway to use our collective voice to bring this mandate to fruition, and to ensure that the faculty are heard as we work to improve faculty working conditions and student learning conditions through collective bargaining. We look forward to beginning the bargaining process with the administration.”

Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, said: “This incredible win at Miami University is an inspiration to the growing academic labor movement. Fed up with an administration that treated the faculty like cogs in a machine, our colleagues at Miami University demanded and won the right to have a powerful collective voice on the job to fight for academic freedom, shared governance and a more just university for all. We are thrilled with today’s result, which will promote and strengthen the core academic mission at Miami University.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said: “Today, faculty at Miami University voted for a union because they want to teach and be respected for the work they do. They understand the basic maxim that together we can accomplish far more than we ever can alone. Faced with an administration that treated them as expendable widgets—rather than the knowledge creators, researchers and teachers they are—they joined together to demand a seat at the table and a real voice in their work lives. Now, faculty look ahead to bargaining a first contract with stronger tenure, pay and academic freedom that will improve Miami and the students that it serves. I could not be prouder, and we are honored to represent them.”

Faculty Alliance of Miami organizers say they want to use collective bargaining to promote more stable employment and strengthen the university’s educational mission.

###

The AFT represents 1.6 million pre-K through 12th-grade teachers; paraprofessionals and other school-related personnel; higher education faculty and professional staff; federal, state and local government employees; nurses and healthcare workers; and early childhood educators.

Unionized and nonunionized chapters of the AAUP champion academic freedom, advance shared governance, and promote economic security for all who teach and conduct research in higher education. Since 1915, the AAUP has shaped American higher education by defending standards that support quality education and ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good

5-17-23 Faculty Alliance of Miami Win Union at Miami University

SB 83

Dear Faculty,

As you may have read or heard, an anti-faculty, anti-higher education bill, Senate Bill 83 (SB 83), has been introduced in the Ohio Senate. The bill contains a lengthy and bizarre list of mandates and prohibitions, including:

  • Banning diversity, equity, and inclusion training for any faculty, staff, or students
  • Requiring each public institution of higher education to adopt a policy that affirms it will ensure intellectual diversity and guarantee that faculty and staff will encourage students to form their own conclusions about “controversial matters” and will not inculcate any social, religious, or political viewpoint. “Controversial” is defined as “any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate change, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”
  • Prohibiting all partnerships with Chinese universities and all study abroad programs in China
  • Requiring that all students take a 3-credit American history or government course that includes a specified list of documents as assigned readings
  • Requiring that all course syllabi include instructor’s name and biographical information, description of course requirements and major assignments/exams, required and recommended reading, and description of each lecture or discussion.
  • Requiring state institutions to make public the syllabus for each undergraduate course, accessible through the main page of the institution’s website by use of no more than three links
  • Requiring the Chancellor to develop a set of standard questions for state institutions to use in student evaluation of faculty. The evaluation must include this question: “Does the faculty member create a classroom atmosphere free of political, racial, gender, and religious bias?”
  • Requiring institutions to publish on their websites the “average annual numerical score” from the student evaluations for each faculty member beginning August 1, 2024, and the same date annually
  • Mandating an annual review process at all public institutions in Ohio that must use the categories “exceeds performance expectations,” “meets performance expectations,” or “does not meet performance expectations.” Student evaluations must account for at least 50% of the teaching evaluation component
  • Requiring institutions to conduct post-tenure review if a tenured faculty member receives a “does not meet performance expectations” evaluation for a minimum of two of the past three consecutive years
  • Requiring institutions to update their policies to express all faculty workload elements in terms of credit hours with a full-time 12-month workload minimum equal to 30 credit hours; faculty not on 12-month appointments will have workload prorated based on 30 credit hour formula
  • Eliminating the fundamental right of faculty and staff at higher education institutions to strike

The bill is an attack on higher education. While the provisions are ridiculous, SB83 is also something that we, as UC Faculty, must take seriously given what has occurred in Florida and other states.

AAUP-UC will be working with the Ohio Conference, other colleges, and allies throughout the state to defeat SB83. Faculty are encouraged to use this Action Page to contact your State Senator. Watch for additional communications and action requests from the Chapter and Ohio Conference.

Click here for more information on SB83 from the Ohio Conference of the AAUP 

Click HERE for an article in the Columbus Dispatch

Click HERE for a commentary from Cincinnati’s WVXU 

Issues such as this are why we have and need a strong AAUP-UC. Please CLICK HERE to join today.

In solidarity,
Connie Kendall Theado
President, AAUP-UC

Faculty unions say strike ban for Ohio college employees would create power imbalance

Sheridan Hendrix
The Columbus Dispatch

While legislators say a proposed higher education bill that could prohibit faculty from striking during contract negotiations is about fairness, union members say the result would be the exact opposite.

Senate Bill 83, also known as the Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, would overhaul campus life at Ohio’s 14 public universities and 23 community colleges. Included in a long list of possible changes is a plan to bar campus employees from striking when negotiating their contracts with administration.

The bill would add faculty to the list of public employees who aren’t allowed to strike in Ohio, which includes first responders and corrections officers.

Ohio Senate Bill 83:Overhaul of Ohio colleges targets diversity mandates, China and requires U.S. history class

Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee Chair Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, told The Dispatch last week that this facet of the bill is about being fair to students.

“Students pay for their instruction upfront at the beginning of a semester,” Cirino said. “That’s a contract between the student and the state, and nothing should stand in the way of those students getting the instruction they paid for.”

But faculty at those unions say the bill would only further the chasm between employees and administrators, creating inequity and a power imbalance on campus.

“The right to strike is paramount,” said Tom Shanahan, a legal studies professor at Columbus State Community College and immediate past president of the Columbus State Educators Association.

Shanahan, who led Columbus State’s faculty union for six years, said taking away a union’s right to strike removes one of the biggest tools it has during the bargaining process.

“Taking away strikes takes away any leverage faculty have and gives all the leverage to the administration,” Shanahan said.

“If there is no right to strike, it incentivizes administrators to dig in their heels,” he said. “What incentive do they have to negotiate in good faith?”

David Jackson, president of Bowling Green State University’s faculty union and a political science professor, said SB 83 is a “comprehensive radical restructuring of higher education in one bill.” But, he said, it’s also far reaching for the wrong reasons.

“It’s a classic solution in search of a problem,” Jackson said.

Strikes involving campus faculty have been on the rise nationwide, with work stoppages hitting a 20-year peak in 2022, according to Bloomberg Law. In Ohio, though, faculty strikes are more rare.

Faculty at Wright State University, near Dayton, went on strike for about three weeks in January 2019 over health care and pay disputes. And Youngstown State University workers went on strike in 2020 over pay disputes.

At Bowling Green, Jackson said the union’s past two contract negotiations went well, using interest-based bargaining. While striking is not an oft-used tool among Ohio faculty unions, it’s still a vital one to have when mediation fails, he said.

“The autonomy we’ve been given thus far has been working. We should be allowed to work without being micromanaged by the state,” Jackson said.

Steve Mockabee, an associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and communications and political engagement chair of UC’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said the university’s faculty union is “vehemently opposed” to SB 83’s prohibition of striking.

“The right to strike is critical to the balancing of economic power between workers and employers — especially those as large as many of Ohio’s public universities, which are often the largest employers in their base cities,” Mockabee said. “Without the leverage that the possibility of a strike provides, collective bargaining is reduced to collective begging.”

Mockabee said the proposal eliminates “a fundamental right of workers, and there is no reason to think they will stop with college employees.” He expects that SB 83 will be opposed by union organizers across Ohio.

Even public schools without faculty unions are talking about the proposed ban.

Pranav Jani, an associate professor of English at Ohio State University and president of it’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said SB 83’s strike ban hasn’t deterred faculty from an interest in organizing. Rather, it’s sparked more conversation.

“If anything, it’s gotten more people asking, ‘Why the issue of strike? What about faculty power are they so afraid of?'” Jani said. “They’re showing their cards.”

Sheridan Hendrix is a higher education reporter for The Columbus Dispatch. Sign up for her Mobile Newsroom newsletter here and Extra Credit, her education newsletter, here.

shendrix@dispatch.com

@sheridan120

Republicans set their sights on control of higher education in Ohio

91.7 WVXU | By Howard Wilkinson

Republicans in the Ohio General Assembly are an odd bunch.

 

Long ago, most of us were taught in high school civics classes that the Republicans were the party of limited government interference with people’s lives; the “hands off” party, as opposed to the “hands on” Democratic Party.

We have since been made aware that was a load of hooey.

Such Republicans do not exist in the Ohio Statehouse, at least.

With their veto-proof “supermajority” in both the House and Senate, they can pretty much do as they please. Who’s going to stop them? The governor? Yeah, right. That’s a joke, friends. Bazinga, as Dr. Sheldon Cooper would say.

Within the last few years, Republicans in the legislature have done power grabs with legislation to take over how elections in Ohio are conducted; take away reproductive rightscreate district maps that allow legislators to choose their own voters instead of the other way around; do the bidding of gun lobbyists; and strip the state board of education of any control over K-12 education and giving it to the governor.

And apparently, they’re not done yet.

Along comes State Sen. Jerry Cirino with his Senate Bill 83, a set of sweeping do’s and don’ts for Ohio’s universities and colleges, including some private ones, which he calls “a course correction” from what he sees as a slippery slope to a “woke-based” higher education system in Ohio.

ANALYSIS: Ohio GOP launches a power grab over public education. They’re likely to succeed

Opponents of Cirino’s bill call it an “over-reach” that would do “irreparable harm” to a fully functioning and well-respected system of higher education in Ohio.

“This is a solution in search of a problem,” said Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP Ohio). “I really don’t know why the senator is trying to pick this fight.”

Cirino is an amiable fellow who grew up in Cleveland’s Little Italy but has made a home for himself and his family in Lake County, a comfortable suburban community just east of Cleveland.

jerry c cirino

“I was the first in my family to go to college,” Cirino told me. “I have personally seen what it has done for my family. Higher education has always been my top priority.”

Senate Bill 83, he said, “is about quality education. I hear a lot of talk about indoctrination in some of our college courses. The idea that you have to think certain things and certain ways. Students may have to attest to certain beliefs in order to succeed.

“What I am interested in is intellectual diversity.”

So what does Cirino — along with the seven fellow Republicans who co-sponsored his bill — want to do?

A lot.

He made it clear to me that he could have split this into several separate bills but decided to “shoot the moon” with the whole package.

Here are some of the things Senate Bill 83 would ban:

  • requiring diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) training for students and faculty. Cirino says Ohio State University has 99 people running DEI programs. “I don’t know why we need this,” Cirino said. “What is this training for?”
  • strikes by employees, including the faculty.
  • “bias” in classrooms, with no hint of what the state would consider “bias.”
  • forbidding programs that partnered with the People’s Republic of China, “our enemy.”

Here’s what the bill would require:

  • That every student take an American history course, with a syllabus set out in the bill
  • Public syllabuses and teacher information online
  • Professors would face tenure evaluations based on if the educator showed bias or taught with bias — including student evaluations
  • That educators teach so students can reach their “own conclusions.”

The banning of DEI training is particularly hard to explain.

When pressed on whether or not DEI training is a requirement for graduation in any Ohio college or university, Cirino admitted that it is not.

ANALYSIS: Love it or loathe it, you need to get familiar with Ohio’s new voter ID law now

“There are apparently some medical schools around the country who have that requirement,” Cirino said.

But not in Ohio.

One of his objections to DEI training is that “it can pit one race against another.”

On a personal note, I have had DEI training at my place of employment. In my experience, it brought people together rather than push them apart.

From the point of view of AAUP Ohio, the most egregious part of Senate Bill 83 is the ban on strikes by unions at universities.

“Students pay up front for a semester in college,” Cirino said. “Why should students be used as pawns in union negotiations?”

The AAUP’s Kilpatrick believes that shows a complete lack of understanding of how labor negotiations work.

“The collective bargaining process works,” Kilpatrick said. “Strikes at universities are very rare.”

When it does happen, though, Kilpatrick said, there is no reason to blame the unions.

“When a strike happens, that is a failure of management to bargain in good faith,” Kilpatrick said. “That’s not the fault of the workers.”

Given the track record of the GOP supermajority in the legislature, Cirino believes he can get this bill through the Senate and the House and signed into law by Gov. Mike DeWine.

“I think there is broad support for this,” Cirino said. “I’ve had some people tell me they want to go further. I’ve never thought of myself as a moderate.”

COMMENTARY: Accuracy in Media pulls a stunt in Ohio to muddy the waters on Critical Race Theory

He said he hopes some Democrats in the legislature sign on to this bill. If I were him, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen. And the fact is, he doesn’t need them.

“This bill has a lot of things that are going to inflame the opposition,” Cirino said.

Inflaming the opposition has never stopped statehouse Republicans before. Hard to imagine it will now.

Save the date!

AAUP-UC will be hosting a SUDS and SOLIDARITY! There will be free drinks, a taco bar, live entertainment, and more! Attend and bring a UC faculty member with you! The event will be at the Fermentorium at Nine Giants (6111 Ridge Avenue, 45213 in Pleasant Ridge) from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on April 27th!

Click here to RSVP:  https://form.jotform.com/230745497990066