So faculty are bargaining again…

The faculty union has been back at the bargaining table for the past three months, trying to negotiate a fair contract with our administration. Our contract determines our salary, benefits, and our right to shared governance (which means that faculty have a say in how OU is run). I’m writing to catch people up with our situation.

But first: a confession. I hate writing these letters. It’s humiliating.

It’s humiliating for several reasons. The first is that I’m a professional educator. I’ve been teaching English literature and creative writing at OU for 25 years. I love teaching. I love my students. I work hard to try to help them in the classroom and beyond. I co-run Career Night twice a year, bringing back English grads to speak to current students about how they got their jobs. I also co-run our internship program, which gives our students work experience. Before coming here, I taught classes for nine years at Washington University in St. Louis, where I did my PhD. 

So yes, I’m a professional educator, but I don’t feel like one when I have to explain why my union is having trouble getting our administration to give us a fair contract. I feel like I’m not valued. The primary mission of a university is to educate students. I feel like that mission is not being prioritized when our administrators begrudge us cost-of-living raises. 

Everyone’s been feeling the bite of inflation lately, but here at OU, before the pandemic, faculty salaries had already been lower than the salaries of faculty at our peer institutions. And during the pandemic, we agreed to put bargaining on hold in order to help the university get through that difficult time. But when we came to the bargaining table in 2021, we had one of our most discouraging bargaining sessions on record. Our salaries didn’t go up much (we are still underpaid compared to our peers). And the administration’s bargaining team used strong-arm tactics that left a lot of us feeling upset and depressed. 

Now comes my second moment of humiliation. To let you know the reality of how low faculty salaries are here at OU, I have to break a taboo that most Americans never break. I have to tell you how much money I make.

$80,775 a year. I don’t know if that seems like a lot. As I mentioned, I have a PhD. I’m 60 years old; I’ve been teaching classes for 34 years now. But I’m currently unable to put money aside for retirement. I’ve had to cut down on the travel I need to do to research the novels I write. I’ve also had to cut down on the charities I support and the money I give to family members in need.

And here’s the third humiliation. This past Wednesday, our administration said that our two teams can’t discuss faculty raises until we faculty agree to make changes to the shared governance rules that have been in place in our contract ever since the university was founded. They want us to give up our right to have a say in how course workloads are structured at OU. In other words, they want us to organize our English department in the same way we organize our mechanical engineering department, even though each department works quite differently.

I was hired to be a teacher. I know best how my students learn. I don’t know how students from other disciplines best learn, just as those professors don’t understand how my students best learn. And administrators aren’t in the classroom at all. Yet they want exclusive control of how faculty workloads are determined, which ultimately determines how students are taught. 

Faculty need to have a say in how classes are organized and taught. And we need to be paid fairly while we do that teaching. Administration is trying to hold hostage raises that are long overdue. They want us to give up our say in shaping how teaching happens, even though teachers are the ones who best understand how to do this work.

I love working at OU, but the faculty need fair pay. We need to continue to have input in our students’ educational experiences. And we need to be respected, not humiliated for doing our jobs as dedicated educators.