Like coastal residents waiting out a hurricane, many faculty members at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. In recent years, they have suffered reductions in their retirement benefits, faced threats of program cuts and furloughs, and watched their administration both move to reorganize academic programs with little faculty input and fire a prominent scholar without any stated justification.
That scholar, Ivor van Heerden, who has been deputy director of a university center that studies hurricanes, was poised last week to file a lawsuit alleging that the university refused to renew his contract for political reasons, because he had been blaming the levees designed and built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a major source of the university’s federal grant money, for much of the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Mr. van Heerden’s lawsuit may be among the least of the university administration’s worries. Faculty leaders there are citing his termination—as well as a other administrative actions they regard as infringing upon shared governance, academic freedom, and various workplace rights—in pushing their fellow faculty members to organize into some sort of union to push back.
A committee formed by the university’s Faculty Senate to examine unionization has released a report arguing that the organization of a collective-bargaining unit “may be the most effective way” to empower the faculty and protect its rights. Based on the committee’s recommendations, the Faculty Senate plans to hold a series of forums this winter to discuss how faculty members might organize for bargaining purposes and to try to build support among them for such a move.
Facing Resistance
Requests by The Chronicle for interviews with Louisiana State’s administrators were referred to the university’s assistant vice chancellor for communications, Kristine M. Calongne. She said the chancellor, Michael V. Martin, had chosen not to comment on—or authorize other administrators to discuss—Mr. van Heerden’s case or the efforts by faculty members to organize for collective-bargaining purposes.
A significant share of the university’s faculty members remain wary of unionization and question the need for it. Among them, Priscilla D. Allen, an associate professor of social work and a member of the Faculty Senate’s executive committee, says, “Personally, I feel there has been a somewhat open line of communication between the faculty and administration.” She argues that efforts to get the faculty and administration to communicate with each other more openly and to work together would be more productive than unionization, which she sees as likely to leave the two sides more divided.
But Kevin L. Cope, a professor of English who is president of the Faculty Senate, says that talk of the faculty becoming unionized “is simply in the air,” and that administrators have begun acknowledging the prospect at meetings.
None of the faculties on the other 10 campuses in the Louisiana State University system are unionized. Although past efforts to unionize the Baton Rouge faculty have failed, some faculty leaders believe they can pull it off this time, especially with the administration expected within weeks to announce a new, long-term plan to cut spending on instruction and other services in response to projected cuts in state financing. State budget analysts project that lawmakers will need to reduce appropriations to the Baton Rouge campus by 5 percent, or about $30-million, in the coming fiscal year.
John L. Protevi, a professor of French studies and president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, says faculty leaders are hoping to point to such recent and pending developments “to energize the faculty and to get them to take collective bargaining as a serious option.”
Dominique G. Homberger, a professor of biological sciences and member of the Faculty Senate committee that has recommended organizing to bargain collectively, says, “We think time is on our side.”
A Changed Culture?
Organizing a labor union in Louisiana can be challenging because its status as a “right to work” state means workers there cannot legally be compelled to join a union or pay dues. Mr. Cope argues, however, that the Baton Rouge campus has undergone changes in recent decades that will make it easier to get faculty members there to organize. Whereas it once drew most of its faculty members from the region, it now recruits them from all over the world, including many other states and nations where college faculties have much more power in dealing with their administrations.
In recent years, the Baton Rouge campus’s Faculty Senate has established various committees to look at faculty compensation. Their findings have led many faculty members to complain that they are not reaping enough of a return on the research-grant money they take in, or are not being paid enough compared with well-known scholars recruited from elsewhere.
Relations between the campus’s administration and its faculty members worsened last spring, when the administration asked the system to give it the power to furlough faculty members without a declaration of financial exigency and considered an academic reorganization plan devised without consulting the Faculty Senate. Although faculty objections forced the administration to back off from the furloughs and put the reorganization plan on hold, faculty leaders remain distrustful.
The report issued by the Faculty Senate committee charged with considering unionization said that in recent years “the voice, power, and morale of the faculty has been eroded by unilateral actions” taken by “an increasingly imperial upper administration.” It said the Faculty Senate “has increasingly been thwarted” by top administrators in its efforts to speak out about shared governance, and “cannot effectively address the faculty’s economic situation because it has no legal authority in this area.”
The university administration, the report complained, “has shown a willingness to ignore the contractual rights of faculty members under the assumption they are unlikely to pursue legal recourse as individuals.” The report cites the firing of Mr. van Heerden as “an example of what may lay in store for the faculty,” and argues that the administration’s refusal to meet the Faculty Senate’s demands for an explanation of the professor’s dismissal suggests that he was indeed terminated for political reasons.
In a grievance challenging the university’s decision last April not to renew his contract, Mr. van Heerden argued that his termination was part of “a multiyear campaign of retaliation” against him for criticizing the Corps of Engineers over the levees.
Mr. van Heerden’s lawsuit alleges that the university threatened to fire him if he served as an expert witness in a lawsuit filed against the Corps of Engineers by several New Orleans property owners. Although he was not an expert witness, he did advise lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case. A U.S. District Court judge accepted many of Mr. van Heerden’s criticisms of the Corps of Engineers in ruling in favor of the plaintiffs on November 18.
