Bargaining MMXX-VII: What’s a professor?

12-3PM, 125 Chiles. I’ll try to live-blog it. Other bargaining posts here, Budget Buckets here. If you don’t like my blog read the official Union tweets or Facebook.

Synopsis: The Administration’s team is “doing everything humanly possible to respond to the union’s proposals”, but still doesn’t have much in the way of substantive responses. Except that they don’t want to call anyone a “Teaching Professor”.

ARTICLE 20 – Tenure Review and Promotion – Union counter to Admin proposal. Would make mid-term (3rd year) reviews of assistant profs advisory, instead of the current situation where they can be used to get rid of them early by giving them terminal contracts.

Long discussion of the diversity statements. There’s some revisionist history about why the current CBA says “should also include discussion of contributions to institutional equity and inclusion.” The original argument for this was to give women and minority faculty a place to point out their extra service and mentoring work. Now the union wants to make it mandatory for everyone. The admin team is pushing back, pointing out that these statements are often just window-dressing.

Post-tenure reviews: Union team wants department’s to develop the policies, deans and provost to make sure they are followed. Does not want a situation where faculty have to come up for tenure again every 6 years, with the administration in charge of setting the standards.

ARTICLE 40 – No Strike, No Lockout. Union counter. Faculty who agree to do work performed by a striking employee will get at least $75 an hour.

ARTICLE 33 – Sabbatical. Union counter. Takes out the admin language denying sabbaticals to people who have signed up for the TRP.

ARTICLE 15 – Academic Classification and Rank. Admin counter.

The Administration is refusing to give the title Teaching Professor to long term Carreer/NTTF with demonstrated teaching excellence, though they are open to the concept of recognizing/rewarding them somehow. This got pretty heated, mostly because Matella was unable to offer anything substantive to counter the union’s proposal.