Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Q: Organizers claim that unionization will allow BGSU to raise academic standards. Will it?

A:     Union organizers at BGSU claim that:

“Unionization would allow BGSU to raise academic standards in partnership with administration in a number of ways. For example, most unions have negotiated contracts that provide for periodic professional development activities, ensuring that tenure's guarantees of academic freedom come with the responsibility of keeping up academic standards. Unions have also negotiated formal policies for domestic partner benefits, family leave policy, and spousal hiring guidelines, thus ensuring that their institutions will attract and retain top faculty…”

Each of these claimed specific benefits should be carefully considered and tested. Comparison of existing BGSU policies with the collective bargaining agreements at other Ohio public universities is one way to do that.

Spousal Hiring
The organizers should be asked to identify the organized Ohio public university that has a collective bargaining agreement clause related to spousal hiring.

Domestic Partner Benefits
Whether to offer domestic partner benefits would be a subject of collective bargaining. Even with collective bargaining the Board of Trustees would have to agree to offer these benefits. Collective bargaining cannot compel the Board of Trustees to offer these benefits.

Family leave policy
Family leave policies are principally governed by the Family Medical Leave Act.

Periodic professional development activities
The phrase, “periodic professional development activities” could refer to several things, one of which is faculty improvement leaves (sabbaticals).

Such leaves may be collectively bargained. At Kent State, for example, the collective bargaining agreement only incorporates by reference the university policy concerning faculty professional improvement leaves. Even so, the KSU administration recently announced that it was canceling some sixty faculty improvement leaves as a cost-saving measure.
http://www.ohio.com/news/40029752.html

BGSU faculty testing the organizers’ claims should ask themselves what greater right to improvement leave did having a collective bargaining agreement give these sixty Kent State faculty than the BGSU Academic Charter affords the BGSU faculty? BGSU faculty should ask why the BGSU organizers seem to assume they would be able to collectively bargain for more advantageous sabbatical benefits than the Kent State faculty were able to? It is also relevant that BGSU faculty currently have access to a longstanding FIL program, as provided for by the Academic Charter, and that we have not cancelled FILs as a cost-saving measure.

The relationship between academic excellence and unionized faculty was recently addressed by the Provost at Ohio University. Her remarks are worth noting:

In academia reputation matters and, fairly or not, an institution is judged in part by the company it keeps. In Ohio, the unionized institutions are either Tier3 or Tier 4 institutions, according to U.S. News rankings. Whatever the AAUP has brought to those institutions, it has not been the ability to build their academic reputations….

What is the impact of faculty unions on faculty recruitment and retention?

I am sure that there are talented faculty who actively seek work at unionized campuses, but there are also many who will not join a university where the faculty work under a collective bargaining agreement. We all know that it is sometimes difficult to recruit faculty to Athens…By becoming a unionized campus, we would potentially shrink our pool even further…

There are talented faculty who aren’t looking to base their careers at an institution where the nature of merit pay is contractually determined…They aren’t interested in being at an institution that cannot recruit strong chairs and directors internally because anyone who assumes that role ceases to be considered a faculty member, is no longer part of the bargaining unit, and is required by law to be considered and treated as a “manager”.

Then again some people are gamblers. They are willing to put 204 years of academic excellence at risk by joining in a partnership with the AAUP that by its own accounts is having financial difficulties keeping its operations together. If we have problems, and I know we have problems, I’d prefer working to solve them ourselves…
http://www.ohio.edu/provost/upload/EVPP-Remarks-to-FS-10-13-08.pdf

These are the US News rankings the OU Provost referred to: