Why I am opposed to faculty unionization at this point in time

Jim Kiper. Professor

Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering

Miami University

There seems to be increased concern about the faculty’s voice in university governance and a concomitant rise in calls for faculty unionization in response. What are the reasons for this at this point in time? From the Faculty Alliance of Miami website, these reasons seem to be:

• Concerns about shared governance

• Equity and job security for non-tenure-track faculty

• Workload

• Compensation

From conversations with other faculty, I believe that some of the underlying reasons for the interest in unionization currently have to do with some mistrust of some of our current administrators and concern about the way things were handled during the pandemic.

Let me summarize the key reasons that I am opposed to faculty unionization at this point in time and then explain each of these in a separate section. The key reasons are these:

• Faculty unionization is a very significant step. There are other steps that we could follow more incrementally to produce change in a more controlled manner

• A faculty union would change from an atmosphere of collegiality to an adversarial relationship.

• A union brings another layer of administration.

• A faculty union would have a singular focus rather than considering the university more holistically.

• A faculty union would result in extra, ongoing costs for the university and for individual faculty members.

• The university budget has many components. There are systemic budgetary constraints. Any change in one aspect results in changes in other parts of that budget. That is, the budget is a zero-sum situation.

• The pandemic was a once in a 100-year event. We should not overreact to it.

Point 1: Faculty unionization will have unintended and unknown impacts on the university. Such a step should only be taken cautiously and in a well-considered manner. There are other steps that we should consider to produce change first in a more incremental way. Some possible steps in increasing order of significance are these:

1. Bring up issues in University Senate

2. Bring up issues in Faculty Assembly

3. Hold administrators (chairs, deans, provost) responsible in their third and fifth-year evaluations

4. Try to modify unresponsive governance structures (for instance, the creation of a faculty senate.)

5. Faculty vote of no-confidence for deans or provost

6. Faculty vote of no-confidence for president

The order in which these occur can be debated. However, the essence of this approach is to try less dramatic steps before taking the significant and difficult to reverse step of unionization.

Point 2: A change from a collegial to an adversarial relationship. I have heard some faculty who support a union critique that this is an issue that administrators raise, but the union does not. The presence of lawyers requires an adversarial relationship. This is the foundation of our legal system. Lawyers on each side defend their clients’ interests, rightly so. By nature, it is an adversarial relationship.

There is also the possibility that a union will create divisions in the faculty. If all faculty are required to pay dues, some may resent this. If faculty have the option of paying dues or not, those who support the union may resent that others are getting what they perceive as benefits without contributing to the costs. The ultimate power of a union comes from job action. Will faculty be willing to participate in a work slowdown or a strike? What will happen if some faculty cross picket lines?

Point 3: A union is an organization that will effectively serve as another layer of administration. There will be elected union representatives. (Of course, how this will work and how representative it will be, we will have to await a union contract to find out.) Will the faculty representatives be good administrators? What kind of influence will union lawyers from outside the university have on decisions? We will get to review and assess the work of union reps periodically as we do our administrators? I believe that one of the reasons for the current push toward unionization is a lack of trust in our administrators. (I have commented more about that below.) How trustworthy will union reps be? We cannot know since we do not know now who they will be.

Point 4: The singular focus of a faculty union will be on faculty welfare. That is not to say that faculty involved in the union are not concerned about the university as a whole. However, how will the success of a faculty union be judged over time? What are the metrics for the success of a faculty union? These metrics will surely include faculty compensation and faculty workloads. Will these metrics include student welfare, staff welfare, fundraising, maintenance of facilities, etc.? Again, that is not to say that faculty members involved in the union do not care about these other issues, but that the success of a union will not be judged by those issues. The metrics for the union lawyers will include none of these. Conversely, how are university administrators judged by their many “constituents” including the Board of Trustees, faculty, staff, students, and the public? Their successes or failures clearly include a much larger set of concerns.

I believe that a fundamental belief underlying a push toward unionization and collective bargaining is a lack of trust in administrators – a belief that administrators have goals that are in conflict with what is best for faculty and the university in general. This has not been my experience over the past with our administrators. That does not mean that I agree with all of their decisions or that all of them have been as trustworthy. There are times when we disagree with administrators and we need processes to address such concerns, but a union is an overly complicated and expensive approach, particularly since we have not exhausted other existing processes. I have been a department chair and an associate dean, have served as a member of the University Senate for multiple terms, was elected chair of the Executive Committee of the University Senate, and have served on the Fiscal Priorities and Budget Planning Committee of University Senate. In these positions, I have worked closely with multiple Presidents, several Provosts, the Senior VP for Finance and Business Services, deans of several colleges, and many department chairs. My overall impression is that this is a group of hardworking, thoughtful, wise women and men whose goals are to sustain Miami University’s current strength and to improve it over time. I am taking the long view here. I know that many of our faculty have lost faith in some of our current administrators. I am cautioning against overreacting to this current situation.

Point 5: There are extra, ongoing costs for the university and for the faculty. The university will need to hire additional legal support. It is true that we have a general council office now. However, creating and monitoring a union contract will require expertise in the area of labor relations. If not additional full-time lawyers, there will at least be additional costs for periodic legal assistance.

It is likely that the union representatives in the faculty will be given some release time. As a result, there will be additional costs to hire faculty to cover those courses or other colleagues will be asked to teach additional courses.

The most obvious direct cost to faculty will be the union dues. This typically is about 1% of our salary. This is needed to pay for the ongoing operation of the union, to maintain an office, and to pay for legal support.

Point 6: The university budget is a zero-sum situation. One of the goals of the faculty union is to increase the compensation of faculty. Suppose that the union negotiated a large salary increase for faculty. Such an increase in compensation is not a one-time cost but would have to be built into the university budget. There is not a large budgetary surplus that can be tapped for this. How can the university respond to this? There are two possibilities: find additional income or reduce expenses. What are some of the possibilities?

• Tuition discount: One of the major costs to the university is the tuition discount. This is in effect the scholarships that the university uses to attract high-quality students. Currently, this tuition discount is over $100M. If we reduce this, the cost may be a decrease in the quality of our students. Such a reduction in characteristics like average ACT scores would most likely produce a reduction in our rankings, and a spiral downward.

• Healthcare costs: Another substantial university expense is the cost of our healthcare benefits. If you compare our coverage to that of many other companies, you realize that ours is quite strong. These costs typically go up at a rate that is substantially higher than that of inflation.

• Tuition: increasing tuition seems to be a way to increase revenue. However, the state legislature restricts the amount of increase each year. Furthermore, Miami already is viewed as having higher tuition than other state universities. Raising tuition may make Miami unaffordable for some populations of students that we want to increase.

• Intercollegiate athletics: Cutting or getting rid of intercollegiate athletics is often suggested as a way to save money that could be repurposed. At Miami, Intercollegiate Athletics (ICA) is administered as an auxiliary. Like other auxiliaries (food service, for example), ICA is required to fund itself. Evidence of that is that ICA is the only unit whose staff (including administrators and coaches) were partially furloughed in 2020. The primary source of revenue for ICA is the student fee. They also get some revenue from tickets and broadcast rights. If the university reduced ICA, we would have to stop that part of the student fee.

• Administrators’ salaries: Some believe that we have too many administrators and that their pay is too high. Although a few of our administrators make high salaries, these are generally comparable to or lower than those of other universities. (Compare Dr. Crawford’s salary to that of university presidents.). There has been some growth in administrators in some colleges. However, when you consider the number of administrators versus the number of faculty, cutting the number of administrators or their salaries would not make a significant change in faculty salaries.

• Building costs: Building expenses come from different sources than our general budget sources. These include state appropriations controlled by the governor and state legislature and contributions for donors. Donors have contributed substantially to finance buildings. Occasionally, donor money can be directed to an endowed professor position. But this does not seem to interest donors as much.

• Cutting programs: The number of programs that the university could be reduced. The cost savings would come from a reduction in staff and faculty.

• New revenue sources: This is one of the solutions to which Dr. Crawford has pointed us. The primary goal of the Boldly Creative process is revenue enhancement. This is a long-term process whose benefits we are just starting to see. Another effort is the current development campaign. Money raised in this campaign is focused on student scholarships and similar very appropriate goals.

• University size: We way to increase revenue may be to increase the number of students that we teach. The effects of increased size are complex. For instance, our recent increase in the size of the incoming class actually resulted in a lower net tuition revenue than in the previous years. This is caused by the cost of the new class (tuition discount) and the need for more faculty to teach the increased class size. Furthermore, increasing the number of students will increase our acceptance rate which will lower our national rankings.

The point here is that a major change in one area of the budget has implications across the university.

It is important to be careful in examining claims about the difference that union negotiation can make. On the Faculty Alliance of Miami web pages entitled The Difference A Union Makes, there is a reference to the “over 8.25% over 3 years” that the union at the University of Cincinnati negotiated in 2019. A quick calculation will show that this is a raise of about 2.75 % per year. The dues at UC are 1.0%. (See //aaupuc.org/membership/join-today/.) Thus, the net percentage increase from year to year is about 1.72%. (See the table below.). Over my 36 years at Miami University, the only times that we did not receive a salary increase of at least 2% was during the recent pandemic and the recession of 2008. (There was one year in the 90s when the raise was delayed for 6 months.)

Point 6: The pandemic was a once in a 100-year event. We should not overreact to it. Did the university administrators overreact to the budgetary implications of the pandemic? Were the university’s financial and budget issues sufficiently dire in the spring and summer of 2020 to necessitate that? I believe that, with the knowledge that the university had at the time, they were. Before the pandemic in the spring of 2020, the university was already facing financial constraints as I have described elsewhere. Then, students were sent home and were given refunds for their room and board. There were extra expenses to support remote learning. The size of the incoming class for the fall of 2020 became very uncertain as the students we had accepted and their parents worried about finances and health safety.

Faculty were consulted about how to respond to this through the University Senate Committee on Fiscal Priorities and Budget Management of which I was a member. What were some of the possible responses to this that the university could make that were considered? Remember that the primary cost drivers of the university budgets are salaries (faculty and staff), health care costs, and tuition discounting.

• Cutting faculty salaries

• Have no faculty raises

• Faculty furloughs

• Staff furloughs

• Reducing the number of VAPs

There may have been a few other possible responses, but none are attractive. As you know, the faculty did not receive a raise for the 2020-2021 academic year but did get a 1% one-time payment later. There were no faculty furloughs. The staff (including coaches) in Intercollegiate Athletics did have some furlough days.

There has been some criticism that the current university budget has improved so that there was no need to cut VAPs. It is true that the worst-case budget scenario did not materialize for several reasons. The Federal government provided some funds. (I believe that these actually came to the State of Ohio. We had to await the State’s decision about how to allocate those.). Secondly, the stock market returns for 2021 were amazing. There are still some real concerns about the long-term university budget, but the short-term reality is somewhat better. At the time that these decisions were made, these influences on the budget were unknown and unanticipated.

One of the concerns expressed on the FAM website is “Equity & Job Security for Non-Tenure Track Faculty”. In the spring and summer of 2020, the university reduced the number of visiting faculty dramatically. When any of our colleagues lose their positions, we are all sympathetic. One of the arguments for a union is that this would not have happened if we had been unionized. Of course, that depends on the language of the union contract. No one can guarantee that at this point. As you know, visiting assistant professors (VAPs) are hired on a series of one-year contracts for a maximum of five years. How will a union contract protect them? Will they be hired into five-year positions? That is unlikely. Visiting positions are valuable to a university because they fill a short-term need. Perhaps a union contract could make the criterion for non-renewal more rigorous in some way. What would that be? Of course, poor teaching as verified through student course evaluations should be one of those. Surely, university financial issues would be one of those.

The situation of visiting assistant professors should not be confused with those of our TCPL colleagues. These colleagues are hired on longer contracts and are full members of the faculty assembly. In my experience, they are some of our best instructors and provide very valuable service. The implication from FAM seems to be that our TCPL faculty have precariously job security. They could lose their position at the end of the 5-year contract “without cause”. I know of no cases of any TCPL faculty losing their position. It is very difficult to fire someone at the university.

In conclusion, I believe that unionization would be a step backward for faculty. The relationship between the administration and faculty will be constrained by the legal constraints of a union contract. Our university faculty have operated in a meritocracy. We get tenure not because of longevity but because of performance. (That is not to say that there are no cases of discrimination on the basis of other inappropriate factors that should be addressed.) Unions tend to have a leveling effect as poor performers are protected, and merit cannot as easily be addressed. Furthermore, the union will have a divisive effect on the faculty. We have a tradition at Miami University of generally having good leadership. When leadership is not of that high standard, we have mechanisms to deal with that.