ATHENS, Ohio — Ohio University faculty are barreling full-steam ahead toward forming a union, organizers announced at a rally on College Green Tuesday.
“Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions,” goes the campaign’s slogan, echoed many times by faculty members across departments and in chants at the rally.
“This unionization effort is about improving the educational quality of this institution,” said assistant communications studies professor Matt deTar at the rally.
According to American Federation of Teachers organizer Jason Butler, close to 70% of eligible full-time faculty across all OU campuses signed cards to file for a union election with the State Employee Relations Board. However, OU could choose to recognize the union voluntarily.
OU Senior Director of Communications Dan Pittman said the university “leadership will carefully review and consider” requests submitted in a letter Tuesday by the would-be union, United Academics of Ohio University, and offer a response by UAOU’s stated deadline, Friday.
The union would be established through an association of the AFT and American Association of University Professors. It would represent all nonsupervisory tenure track, non-tenure track and instructional faculty across OU campuses, said Butler.
Tuesday’s announcement represented the culmination of many years of faculty organization around issues such as pay, staffing cuts and workloads, multiple faculty members told the Independent.
“One of the things we wanted to make very sure we took care of before we got to the stage of asking for card signage, is that we had support that was both wide and deep,” said Julie White, a UAOU organizer, political science professor and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies core faculty member. “We went through a multi-year process — first, talking to faculty, identifying their concerns, asking the very open ended questions … and that was just data collection.”
Although it took years of extensive organizing across campuses, DeTar, who has worked on the unionization effort since 2020, told the Independent the experience of speaking with faculty to garner support for the union has “actually been pretty easy.”
Faculty and students gather at Tuesday’s rally, which featured a performance by the OU Percussion Club. Photos by Abigael Miles
“Colleagues across the university don’t always recognize that the same thing is happening to them at every level,” deTar said.
While organizing predated the COVID-19 pandemic and OU’s 2020 layoffs, the layoffs served as a galvanizing force for the effort, history professor Katherine Jellison told the Independent.
“A lot of this enthusiasm comes from what happened in 2020 with the layoffs, and feeling the fact that we’re not consulted, and this has hampered our ability to be good educators, which has hampered the learning experience for our students,” said Jellison, who helped lead organizing in the humanities.
White said, “Our concern was that the teaching mission and then, by extension, the research mission of the university was going to be impacted by the way administration was prioritizing spending.”
OU justified mass layoffs in 2020 by citing budget woes related to ongoing and projected declines in enrollment.
While enrollment declined 23% from fall 2016 to fall 2022, the total number of part-time and full-time faculty declined 28.5%. The 2020 layoffs included 53 instructional faculty; many other faculty members entered voluntary separation agreements.
Enrollment has now begun to rebound, and OU previously told the Independent it is hiring accordingly. However, new tenure-track hires don’t nearly compensate for tenure-track positions lost, OU AAUP President John O’Keefe previously told the Independent.
Meanwhile, OU faculty earn less than faculty at nine other public research institutions in the state and less than at OU’s peer institutions, according to data compiled by UAOU and shared in its campaign materials.
According to the UAOU data, raises have increased OU salaries by an average of only 5% since 2019, compared to an average of 14% at Bowling Green University and Kent State University, two public research institutions in Ohio with unionized faculty.
“I did not get into this job for the money — I’m not that stupid,” associate engineering professor John Cotton said at Tuesday’s rally. “But, I’m also not stupid enough to stay with the current system of salaries that are just dictated to us rather than negotiating.”
Pittman, the OU communications director, said the university administration “greatly respects and values all employees and acknowledges the vital role they play in the success of our University. We have codified our commitment to our most valuable resource — our people — through our ongoing Dynamic Strategy process as we work to position OHIO as a destination employer in higher education.”
OU is developing its Dynamic Strategy to work toward a “shared set of university goals,” according to OU.
OU’s Faculty Senate currently offers an avenue for faculty to offer input on university decisions.
However, former longtime faculty senate chair Joe McLaughlin said at the rally, “When you join Faculty Senate, one of the things you quickly discover is that you are there to be consulted — merely consulted. What a union is going to give us is a relationship of negotiation.”
Issues cited by faculty members are not unique to the Athens campus, said O’Keefe, the OU AAUP president who works as an associate history professor on OU’s Chillicothe campus.
“We’re seeing a lot of the same issues across the board that faculty, you know, regardless of whether on the main campus or the regional campuses, the problems or issues that we’re dealing with, we think having collective bargaining can really help solve,” O’Keefe said.
It all comes back to students, O’Keefe said.
“We would really like to be able to devote more time, attention and care to teaching students and connecting with students, especially helping students who might be encountering struggles in a class,” O’Keefe said.
Many students attended Tuesday’s rally, including Hannah Louck, a fourth-year undergraduate majoring in history pre-law and sociology pre-law who spoke at the event.
“When I decided to attend Ohio University, I was excited about the diverse curriculum available to me,” Louck said. “However, throughout my past four years, I’ve watched as faculty numbers have declined. … Being a unionized university would only attract highly experienced researchers and teachers and overall strengthen our academic programs.”
Creative writing PhD student Austin Tucker attended the rally to show solidarity with faculty.
“For all students — and graduate students in particular, who also teach — it’s important to have good supportive faculty, who also are supported. You know, graduate students are sort of notoriously overworked and underpaid — but that’s also partially because faculty are overworked and underpaid,” Tucker said.
As Tuesday’s rally concluded, a group of UAOU faculty jointly delivered a letter to OU President Lori Gonzales’s office formally announcing the faculty’s intent to unionize.
When the group entered Cutler Hall on College Green, the crowd cheered and some faculty members hugged. White exclaimed, “Oh my god, I can’t believe it.”
The letter, a copy of which was shared with the Independent, states that UAOU will formally submit its petition for a union election this Friday.
“We hope the University will respect the wishes of the faculty by not objecting to the petition, working quickly to stipulate an agreement for a fair election, and agreeing to be neutral in the run-up to the election,” the letter states. It requests a response from OU by 5 p.m. this Thursday.
“We hope that the administration will immediately recognize our union and not drag out the process unnecessarily,” said O’Keefe. “We think the best way to do this is to step towards a more cooperative relationship, and that’s our hope.”
If that doesn’t happen, AFT organizer Butler said that the submission of a petition for an election will trigger a legal process to prepare for a union election. That process will involve organizers working with OU and the state board to determine faculty eligible to vote in the election, set a date for the election, and move toward the election, which will be conducted by mail-in ballot.
Should the university require a vote, associate professor of instruction in the Ohio Program of Intensive English Kyle Butler said, “We’re hoping to get that vote without delays.”
OU is one of the only public research institutions in Ohio with a non-union faculty. The Ohio State University faculty are likewise non-unionized; Miami University faculty formed a union just last year.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly listed the OU Percussion Club’s name.
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