On the day before classes were set to begin for the current semester at Oakland University, near Detroit, months of negotiating had yet to yield a new contract for faculty members. So the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors did what it has typically done when negotiations go down to the wire: The members voted on whether to strike.
The result, overwhelmingly in favor, gave the union’s bargaining team needed leverage during negotiations. But the seven-day strike that followed was anything but typical for a faculty union, for which work stoppages of any length are uncommon.
The strike, which forced Oakland to cancel classes, ended in a tentative agreement. Even so, local union officials and higher-education labor experts say boycotting the classroom is a last resort. Students’ education, after all, hangs in the balance.
“Nobody wants to go on strike, because there are really no winners when you do that,” says William E. Scheuerman, president of the National Labor College. “But sometimes you’re squeezed and pushed into a corner.”
For the 600-member union at Oakland, it came down to what chapter leaders said were unfair labor practices. The university, they said, had withheld crucial information. Faculty members were galvanized in their unified stance on the issues—among them maintaining faculty governance, curbing a move to hire more non-tenure-track professors, and protecting professors’ intellectual property.
“They knew we could never accept the things they had on the table,” says Joel W. Russell, a chemistry professor who is president of the Oakland union.
Oakland administrators wouldn’t comment on the sticking points of the negotiations or the details of the new agreement.
In past years, when the union struck, some professors crossed the picket lines, says Lizabeth A. Barclay, the AAUP chapter’s grievance officer and a professor of management, who has been at Oakland since 1980. “I’m in the business school,” she says, “and I can remember times when we were bargaining and all of the people in the business school taught” during a strike. “They would just say, ‘These issues aren’t our issues’ and go to class.”
A signal that this month’s strike was different came when Oakland administrators canceled classes indefinitely on the first day of the fall semester. “I thought, wow, no one must be teaching,” Ms. Barclay says.
Reluctance to Strike
Richard W. Hurd, a professor of labor students at Cornell University, says faculty members aren’t usually willing to strike. “They have a belief that if you just have the opportunity to sit down with the employer, that you can talk to them, that you’re intelligent enough to do that and have it work out.” But when negotiations span more than “pay and benefits and class hours” to include alterations to sacrosanct ideals such as tenure and faculty governance, he says, “that creates a situation that’s more volatile.”
Still, those issues don’t always resonate with people outside academe. When it comes to faculty governance, for instance, “there aren’t that many workplaces in the U.S. where the employees exercise that much control over what are typically management decisions,” says Michael Mauer, director of organizing and services at the AAUP’s national headquarters. “Faculty are the experts in academic matters.”
But taking a stand to defend a workplace condition unfamiliar to most Americans means faculty unions can find themselves losing the battle of public opinion. “The public usually turns against you unless you can get your message out about why you’re doing it,” Mr. Scheuerman says.
Indeed, Oakland faculty members struggled to keep Michigan residents in particular from seeing the strike as simply a demand for more money, although salary increases were among the issues under discussion. The perception that professors were out for raises in an economic downturn—particularly in a state that leads the nation in unemployment—didn’t go over well.
As one commenter wrote in response to an article in The Chronicle about the strike: “My sister and brother-in-law live right near this school. He’s out of work with several mouths to feed and these (tenured, let’s not forget) prima donnas strike because they might not get a raise?”
The union tried to counteract such sentiments by circulating information describing Oakland as a public institution flush with cash, even if Michigan was not. The university disputed that characterization, arguing that it had neither a top credit rating nor excess reserves that it could use to give professors raises. The union recanted some of its statements.
Vying for Public Opinion
Oakland, like many institutions, has cited the recession as a reason to more tightly control costs. University officials say they have cut $31-million by outsourcing, eliminating positions, and continuing to defer much-needed maintenance on the campus, among other measures.
Mr. Russell, the AAUP chapter president, says the university thought “public opinion would be against” the union so strongly that it would make concessions. But Oakland, he says, didn’t count on at least two budget-related decisions “totally backfiring on them.” Last year the president’s base pay rose from $250,000 to $350,000, an increase the university said had been approved to put his pay in line with his peers at other public colleges. And this academic year, tuition increased by 9 percent.
It wasn’t until after a tentative three-year contract surfaced last week—following round-the-clock negotiations ordered by a judge—that the union could present evidence that salary concerns were not what had triggered the strike. The new contract calls for no raises this year, a 1-percent raise next year, and a possible 3-percent raise in the third year.
“It took almost the whole length of our strike for people to see that this wasn’t about money,” Mr. Russell says.
Sometimes, says the AAUP’s Mr. Mauer, it is hard for people outside academe to grasp the bigger picture. He pointed to the Oakland chapter’s refusal to accept the university’s plan to hire dozens of fixed-term faculty members in coming years. Professors, he says, had to “draw a line in the sand” on those hires.
“They already had contingent positions at Oakland, but if the faculty hadn’t said we’re not going to continue this—at least not to the degree proposed by the university—then the percentage would keep going up every year, and the quality of the education at Oakland would suffer,” Mr. Mauer says.
The Matter of Education
Perhaps the biggest hurdle faculty members must clear as they head for the picket line is the likelihood that they’ll hurt the very people who should matter most. At Oakland, 18,000 students were shut out of the classrooms.
“It’s one thing if you shut down an assembly line—you get a day behind in production and eventually they can catch up,” Mr. Mauer says. “But when it comes to students’ not getting their education, that’s a serious consideration for faculty.”
Ms. Barclay, the management professor, agrees. “I understand why people might say no to a job action. Faculty want to be in the classroom teaching,” she says.
For now, Oakland professors are focused on meetings scheduled for this week, when they will learn details of the proposed agreement. A vote is likely by the end of the month. Even in the aftermath of the strike, though, approval is not a given.
“Faculty examine things very carefully,” Ms. Barclay says of the contract. “People really want to debate it.”
