I’m not sure what % of faculty are voting members of the faculty union, but it would be hard to describe this as anything other than a resounding rejection of President Scholz’s efforts to get faculty to accept his real wage cuts:
I’m not sure what % of faculty are voting members of the faculty union, but it would be hard to describe this as anything other than a resounding rejection of President Scholz’s efforts to get faculty to accept his real wage cuts:
Is there a document that specifies timelines for what can happen during a strike.? If the Admin does not budge, what happens next? and when?
If you’re at another AAU the state rules won’t apply to you. Oregon’s rules are here: https://www.oregon.gov/erb/Pages/PECBA.aspx
The union can strike and the university can implement a contract.
Does anyone know how many members of the union there are? Is it only 20% of all faculty? 80%? Ballpark numbers welcome.
Any impacts the wider Eugene/Springfield community should know about? Is Donald Trump going to send his goons to town if faculty at UO strike? Strikes are sometimes needed, and faculty deserve every penny they can get, but right now I’d say a faculty strike is a great way for UO and Eugene to get unwanted attention from Trump. The student protests last spring sometimes seriously disturbed neighbors, which ultimately hurt their cause within the off-campus Eugene community. Faculty shouldn’t make the same tactical mistakes as the students (Eugene community as collateral damage) as they strategize towards their desired outcomes.
The Union says that they stand for transparency however they do not publish how many votes were actually submitted and counted. What is that number? How many union members are there actually? People have been talking about the relatively small amount of faculty that are actually in the union (a little over 50% of eligible faculty or so). Is this true? I know you stand for facts and transparency and would share this. Thank you.
How many faculty are actually in the union would be broadly interesting to know, how many career vs tt, which units, etc. but there is zero benefit to the union to make that information available. The union’s leverage in a strike is the degree of chaos it can cause, and much of that chaos is dependent on the University not knowing which faculty will or won’t cross the picket line to teach.
I have various issues with the Union but this ain’t one of them. And considering the University’s complete unwillingness to share its economic data in any real way, I’d say union member numbers are quite small ball in comparison.
Reading the latest Schmelz email and it occurs to me that their “significant economic headwinds” argument would possibly get some sympathy had the university been investing in faculty all this time. In fact, it reminds me of a recent rallying cry that the faculty did respond to, that ended up with them sharing in the considerable downside risk of Covid reductions. That goes unrewarded, plain and simple. (But for a few who get plucked from the faculty ranks and paid off with fat administrator salaries?)
Juggling any “headwinds” is their job! Scholz. Moffitt. Run this place like faculty matter and we’ll step up. We’ve done it before. (I was going to say “before you were here,” but that’s not true of Moffitt. She’s been here the whole time of decline and still manages to rake in a 15% raise to $501,010, despite how shit the administration wants to sell the financial stress. Don’t buy it.)
The Union does not represent the majority of faculty at UO, or at least not a large majority. For example, those faculty with enough external funding (based on grant proposal writing) to hire one or more research assistants (who are eligible) are not “allowed” to join. This rules out many of the more academically successful faculty, who then have no say in questions like strikes. Not a good system (but was forced on the union organizers by state law).
What a stunningly (and stupidly) arrogant comment. Not all disciplines require vast amounts of “external funding” in order to proceed with their inquiries; nor do all disciplines have equal access to funding sources.
In fact, many academic disciplines (sociology, political science, history, literature, philosophy, women’s studies, ethnic studies, theology, and the list goes on) regularly question the dominant value systems of our culture — and are therefore (unsurprisingly) not as widely or as well funded as disciplines that might superficially appear more in alignment with those value systems (such as business, or forms of inquiry with potential military applications).
One would think that with even certain areas of STEM research now under attack from the current federal government for obviously political reasons, it would be obvious to anyone with half a brain that external funding does not correlate with “academic success” (whatever you think that means, beyond access to money). Funding is hardly the only measure of intellectual importance.
But apparently that’s not obvious to you? Clearly, your own academic “success” is not predicated on intelligence.
I confess I also choked on that part of Michael’s comment, but on a closer read I do not think he is equating academic success or intellectual importance with external funding, and certainly not across disciplines. In any case this is not the best time to engage in ad hominem attacks on our colleagues’ intelligence, especially when there are so many more deserving targets.