It’s late August, and with just days before the start of the Fall semester, Oakland University faculty are — once again — fighting for a fair contract; as famed baseball coach Yogi Berra might have said, “it’s déjà vu all over again.”

If you’re a student at OU, you might be wondering why all this is happening: why OU faculty are unionized, why we haven’t been able to reach an agreement with the administration about our contract, or why we would let the collective bargaining process disrupt the start of the school year. I’m here to answer some of those questions, but I also want you to understand: this is how it always goes. 

In my 12 years as a faculty member here at OU, every contract negotiation I have witnessed has been adversarial. Each time we come to the bargaining table, our administration attempts to chip away at our compensation and benefits and to override our expertise as scholars and teachers. Each time, we stand together and fight for our ability to do our jobs well and be compensated fairly for our labor. And every time this happens, I am proud to say that I belong to something bigger than myself.

This time around, the main issues on the table are compensation and workload; in other words, the administration wants to find ways for faculty to work more and be paid less. So here are some things you might not know about how faculty are paid: we don’t have a “step” system where salaries or benefits increase based on years of service. We also don’t have many opportunities for promotion: tenure-track faculty can be promoted at most twice (from Assistant Professor to Associate, and from Associate to Full) over the course of a 30+ year career. And for a variety of reasons, faculty change jobs far less readily than many private-sector workers; if we feel we’re underpaid, we can’t just go looking for a better offer. All this means that faculty salaries often lag far behind the current cost of living, and this problem gets worse, not better, the longer we have been at OU.

When faculty negotiate for better pay, we’re not being greedy. I have a Ph.D. — the highest degree you can earn in my field — and I make about 15% less than a K-12 public school teacher with a Master’s degree and equivalent years of service. The buying power of my current salary is more or less the same as what I hired in at — despite the fact that, since then, I’ve been promoted, amassed substantial teaching experience, added numerous publications, presentations, and grants to my professional record, and taken on new administrative responsibilities. And I’m one of the lucky ones; Special Lecturers, for instance, earn far less than tenure-track faculty, despite their hard work and expertise.

So here we are again, with administrators (who make at least double or triple what we do) telling us OU can’t afford to pay us fairly and scaremongering about raising tuition, even though publicly available information shows OU’s financial position to be strong and improving. Believe me, we wish we weren’t in this situation again, answering anxious questions from students and making contingency plans in case the start of classes on Sept. 4 is disrupted. We want to do our jobs — making knowledge, teaching students, and serving our community. And we know the power of our collective voice as we stand in solidarity with our faculty colleagues and with unionized workers across all sectors, both within and beyond OU. I’ve been here before, and I know what you will see over the coming days: we will fight like hell for one another, for you, and for the mission of this university. And we will still be here when the dust settles — when the news crews leave, and our administrators move on in search of greener pastures — doing the work of higher education we all deeply believe in.

About the author:

Joanne (Joanie) Lipson Freed is an Associate Professor in the department of English, Creative Writing, and Film