|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Faculty Strike at Eastern Michigan
Contract negotiations between the Eastern Michigan University AAUP and the university’s administration broke down in September, leading to a weeklong strike by about 630 tenured and tenure-track professors. The parties had resolved their differences over choice of health care plans by the time of the strike, leaving salary parity with comparable faculty groups and what business professor Denise Tanguay calls the "final four" points on the table: implementation of online courses; ownership of intellectual property; replacement of tenure lines with non-tenure-track, part-time faculty slots; and an increased workload in the all-female nursing department.
The issue of online courses was settled to the chapter’s satisfaction, says Tanguay, who was a member of the negotiating team. Faculty members who develop online courses for use at the university will receive a development fee; they must then teach the courses at least three times, unless the university waives this obligation. Professors retain ownership of such courses and may do with them what they wish. The EMU administration removed from the final contract language about intellectual property to which the chapter objected, permitting the status quo—faculty members’ ownership of their intellectual products—to continue.
Some headway was made regarding increased use of lecturers at EMU. Although specific limits on use of part-time lecturers—full-time lecturers have a separate union and were therefore not included in negotiations—did not make it into the final contract, the university agreed that, "in the absence of a change in circumstances, it will not permanently replace regular faculty members by a change in its historical uses of part-time lecturers."
"This is not exactly what we wanted," comments Cheryll Conklin, executive director of the AAUP chapter at EMU, "but it gives us a basis for a grievance and an Unfair Labor Practice complaint should the administration arbitrarily replace tenure-track faculty positions with non-tenure-track faculty."
The administration was particularly intransigent on the issue of workload in the nursing department, says Tanguay. In the past, one hour a week of contact time with students has been considered equivalent to teaching one credit hour, but a new department head’s decision stipulates that one-and-a-half hours of contact time equal one credit hour, a substantial increase in workload for nursing department faculty. EMU president Samuel Kirkpatrick has agreed to sit down with the chapter to discuss the problem, however.
Partly in response to the strike, the Chronicle of Higher Education sponsored a live online chat with AAUP general secretary Mary Burgan on the role of collective bargaining in limiting use of part-time faculty. The transcript of that chat is available at <www.chronicle.com/colloquylive>.
|