I’m an English professor today because of Brooke Hopkins. I remember sitting in his Shakespeare class talking about King Lear and feeling the ground beneath my feet shift. I don’t know how many courses I took with Brooke—a lot—but he became one of the two or three most influential people in my life. Taking classes with him, talking with him in his office, eating lunch with him after I’d moved on to graduate school, made me think about myself and the world in which I lived in profound and empowering ways. When I teach, I often measure my success in comparison to him. 

I decided to become a professor because I wanted to help other students have similar experiences: engaging with texts by bringing to bear all the knowledge and experiences I had on reading texts that rewarded my efforts, and then to test the results of my thinking and reading by discussing it with my peers and writing about it for a professor who was both generous and rigorous. Reading and thinking and discussing and writing are not “merely” academic or educational activities. Directly and indirectly, those things prepare us to flourish in the world we share with others by enriching their prospects for careers, social and familial relationships, citizenship, learning, and working for a world where all can flourish. 

This is why Oakland University exists. This is the work of (higher) education. It is difficult for me to articulate how much I love Oakland University for giving me a place where I can play a role in the education of my students. I call them “my students,” not because I own or control them, but because they form a significant part of the core of my being. Teaching them invigorates me. It is who I am. 

My love for OU and for the work of education is also the source of my profound disillusionment, anger even, at my colleagues in the administration and those who have the privilege to serve on the Board of Trustees, for their betrayal of that mission. I believe it is a betrayal. If the mission of a university is to create an environment that facilitates the education of its students, then refusing to support the work of those who carry out that mission is a betrayal.

I’ll let others detail the specifics of the dispute. What I will say is that insisting that the university doesn’t have the money to compensate their faculty at anywhere near the level our colleagues at peer institutions universities receive while creating new administrative positions (which weren’t necessary), and building facilities that have nothing to do with the university’s mission staggers belief. Further, the administration insists on tying any significant increase in salaries to the faculty agreeing to a proposal that would allow the administration to set a one-size fits all policy for faculty workload—as if the administration were best positioned to say how many classes professors in Nursing, Physics, History, and Marketing should be teaching—or even exactly what qualifies as a class—as those things are very different across the disciplines.

The proposal to tie a meaningful increase in compensation to accepting the change in workload suggests that the university can afford to significantly increase faculty compensation, they just won’t agree to it unless the faculty give up something (shared governance; the long-agreed upon contractual principle that departments are best positioned to set work load) that is not strictly financial. 

Oakland University is not a business. We do not generate profit. There is no economic responsibility for the administration and the Board of Trustees to withhold fair compensation. Why do they do it? I can’t speak to their motives, but I can say what every contract negotiation feels like: the administration just doesn’t think what we do is worth it.