An Insider's
Story
By Rodger
M. Govea
In December 1993
faculty members at Cleveland State University voted, by a five to three margin, to select the AAUP as their agent for collective bargaining. The vote was the culmination of years of discontent. Some sources of that discontent have disappeared, while others remain. But most important, unionization has given the faculty of Cleveland State a voice in governing the university. Established in 1964 as part of a statewide program to expand public higher education in Ohio, Cleveland State was founded on the site of Fenn College of Engineering, which became one of the university's seven colleges. Enrollment is around seventeen thousand, depending on how one wishes to count. Most students commute to CSU; fewer than a thousand reside on campus.
CSU Before the Union
Prior to 1993, Cleveland State did not have a strong tradition of faculty governance. It had plenty of competent, assertive faculty members, but the governance structure curtailed faculty participation in institutional decision making. Grievances were handled through a committee that heard cases and made advisory reports to the chief academic officer (CAO), who would accept them, reject them, or issue separate reports. The CAO's decision was always final.
The chief governing body was called the Faculty Council, something of a misnomer. The CAO set the council's agenda, while the body itself was dotted with upper- and mid-level administrators. The stalwart faculty members who worked tirelessly to advance the interests of the faculty always fought an uphill battle, and their success depended on the administration's willingness to listen.
In 1989, with accreditation at stake, the administration abolished the council and replaced it with the Faculty Senate. Over the next few years, the faculty's hopes for a genuine, representative structure were consistently frustrated. Although faculty members found themselves in control of the senate, the administration continued to view itself at a level above the faculty, rather than as colleagues and equals. What developed was a far more frustrating relationship, in which faculty would work diligently on proposals, only to have them amended or ignored by upper-level administrators.
Membership and activity in the local AAUP chapter, which dated back to the early days of Fenn College, fluctuated according to the level of tension on campus. When the faculty and the administration did not get along, the chapter grew and took positions; during quieter times, it was dormant. Although only a few professors were loyal dues-paying members, most faculty members greatly respected the AAUP. The faculty handbook was crafted using AAUP principles from Policy Documents and Reports, the compendium more familiarly known as the Redbook, and Association principles were often invoked in Faculty Senate discussions. It was thus generally understood on campus that the AAUP defined the values of the academic community.
The AAUP chapter was particularly active in 1976, when several prominent faculty leaders mounted an authorization campaign for the purpose of holding an election to choose a union representative. Well over 60 percent of the faculty signed cards selecting the AAUP as their collective bargaining agent, but that was in the days before public-sector collective bargaining was governed by state law in Ohio. The board of trustees politely declined to bargain, never suspecting that the matter would reappear sixteen years later.
Over time, as the administration failed to take steps to resolve certain problems, tension increased. First there was the issue of the overall salary pool. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the administration generously funded faculty salary lines, making Cleveland State faculty among the highest paid professors at Ohio's public universities. But toward the end of the 1980s, salaries became stagnant, and faculty purchasing power began to drop even faster than state support for education. Each year, faculty raises were made contingent on different sources, which occasionally failed to materialize. Faculty soon got the message, when zero percent increases resulted. Within a decade, salaries at Cleveland State slipped from among the best in Ohio to below the state median.
A second problem was that, over time, the discretionary portion of wage increases grew far too large, leading to salary inequities throughout the campus. Some faculty members moonlighted in department stores and cinemas, while some full professors earned less than $40,000 (the campuswide average was considerably higher). The administration refused to recognize these inequities, in the apparent belief that their salary decisions were based entirely on "merit" and that their past decisions had been flawless. Essentially, if you were being paid a low salary, it was proof that you were no good.
A third problem was that of salary compression. To remain "competitive," the university offered increasingly higher salaries to incoming faculty in the 1970s and 1980s, while salaries for continuing faculty flattened. As a result, the salaries of associate professors with ten years of service were lower than those of new faculty. While the administration acknowledged the effects of compression, it was unwilling to commit resources toward a solution.
A fourth problem was the faculty's fears about the future of the university. It had become clear by the 1980s that legislators in Columbus had no interest in protecting Cleveland State University. By that time, the state subsidy had fallen below 50 percent of the university's budget, and Cleveland State no longer fit under some definitions of a state institution. Reorganization plans were everywhere-what would happen to faculty positions if these plans were put into effect?
A fifth problem was the administration's treatment of individual faculty members. When a faculty member fell afoul of a chair, that faculty member had very little recourse. As a result, many professors were intimidated by the administrative hierarchy. This translated into suspicions (founded and unfounded) about favoritism and a general feeling that some faculty members were more equal than others.
Precipitating Events
Several events in the late 1980s and early 1990s clearly demonstrated the need for collective bargaining at Cleveland State University. The first was the irregular process by which Cleveland State's third president was chosen in 1988. After a long, thorough search with much faculty participation, the board of trustees aborted the process before any candidates could be interviewed and named the chief academic officer as president. This event, dubbed the "coup," served as a chilling reminder of the trustees' lack of concern with faculty input. A few years later, a newly appointed chair of the board of trustees issued a disturbing report proposing a set of dramatic changes at Cleveland State. One such change was the abolition of tenure and its replacement with "term tenure," a system under which faculty members would receive five-year renewable contracts. Another change would have led to the dissolution of about two-thirds of all departments by merging two or three departments (with varying levels of relatedness) and eliminating other ones entirely. Although these changes never came to pass, faculty members were appalled by the proposals and especially concerned that not one of them had been submitted to the faculty for discussion through any of the traditional deliberative committees or representative bodies.
The most dramatic demonstration of the dysfunctional relationship between the faculty and the administration came during the 1991-92 academic year. At the beginning of the year, the administration reported to the senate that no money was available for faculty salary increases during the fall quarter, but that there would be a midyear adjustment of 3 percent. The administration implored the faculty to be patient. In the meantime, the senate passed a resolution calling for the administration to make faculty salaries "first priority" in the university's budget, and the administration endorsed the resolution.
Nonetheless, in the middle of the winter quarter, the administration announced to the senate that the 3 percent increase had disappeared. While the acting president (who was appointed after the third president stepped down) claimed that he had ordered the sum of money sequestered, the vice president for finance asserted that no such money existed, and no record of any sequestration order ever surfaced. If there is one thing faculty members hear too much of, it's lame excuses. But this one did not come from a naive or uninspired undergraduate; it came from the top of the administration.
It was discovered that the administration had, despite its assertions, increased the salaries of fifty-two selected faculty members and administrators. Eventually, a list of the "supplements" came out, revealing adjustments of up to $18,000 for one individual. The faculty referred to this incident as the "hidden-money trick." The Faculty Senate responded to the incident by passing a resolution of "no confidence" in the administration. The administration countered by claiming that it was only trying to uphold the concept of "merit," which the senate was obviously trying to destroy. The administration refused to back down; with a few exceptions, faculty members received no raises for that year. When the local media got wind of the story, a bit of a tempest arose. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote an editorial criticizing the Faculty Senate; the bad publicity was unfortunate, but shortly thereafter, the acting president was removed and replaced after a full search. These trying events gave faculty members an object lesson in the limits of the "traditional" academic model. In the face of a hostile or indifferent administration, there is little recourse save an appeal to local political leaders-and that recourse is not to be desired. Most local leaders are either disinclined to intervene or know so little about academe that their intervention would probably not be benign.
The threat to the faculty became more tangible during the 1992-93 academic year, when the acting president, who was still in charge, ordered all faculty members to teach an additional course without compensation. He threatened to fire those who refused to comply. The lack of faculty involvement was no longer a theoretical problem; it had become a genuine crisis affecting every professor on campus. The Campaign We began our card-signing campaign in December 1992. A modest reception brought perhaps a hundred faculty, with about eighty signing authorization cards.
The task was, at first, overwhelming. Just a handful of faculty members committed themselves at the outset to accomplishing our goal. We could never muster more than six people at one time to help with tasks such as mass mailings. The obstacles were numerous. Our opposition consisted of several types of faculty members.
Truth to tell, few of us were that enthusiastic about collective bargaining. Most of us had devoted our lives to our disciplines and had never thought a time would come when we would need to organize. We came to accept collective bargaining only after some horrible experiences. Among our supporters, we faced several problems. Most faculty members do not relish the thought of going door to door soliciting signatures, and, when the time came to do so, few offered to take up the task. More often, professors volunteered to write clever flyers to persuade colleagues to sign.
Unfortunately,
that doesn't work.
Only face-to-face
contact works, and we reluctantly began the process of getting authorization
cards into the hands of faculty members and persuading them to sign. By
spring 1993, we had collected signatures from over half the eligible faculty.
The next phase involved the rather technical task of defining who qualified as bargaining-unit members. This is not an easy chore; it was especially difficult for us, because we had to carry it out at the same time that the administration was mounting legal challenges to our declaration of the unit. But we received valuable help from the AAUP's Washington office, and, in the end, we had our unit defined and an election set for December 1993. All things considered, it was a fairly clean and honest campaign.
The administration raised the usual objections-that collegiality would be impaired, that "outsiders" were going to control the campus, and that more layers of bureaucracy would result. Besides, the administration argued, the university had a new president. This new president had been appointed in spring 1993, only a month or two before the filing of cards (in what some believed to be a last-minute attempt to stave off unionization). She personally implored the faculty to give the new administration a chance. The faculty, however, had endured enough.
There came a curious moment during the campaign in fall 1993, when the administration announced salary increases for all university employees except the faculty. The administration claimed that it had no choice, that any faculty salary increases would violate state labor law. But the faculty believed that they were being strong-armed. The student publication, which had been sympathetic to the faculty position all along, ran stories with headlines like "Chairs Paid, Faculty Stiffed" (CSU Cauldron, 18 November 1993). The new administration lost a great deal of the goodwill it had cultivated between April and late fall. In the end, the faculty voted by 243 to 146-or 62 to 38 percent-for collective bargaining.
We have many people to thank for our good fortune, not least the administrators whose actions against the faculty guaranteed our success. But we are also indebted to the AAUP's national staff, especially its collective bargaining department, for assistance in all aspects of organizing and campaigning. They showed us how to proceed, helped us fight legal and political battles with the administration, and even helped mediate conflict among chapter members. Most important, they gave us the feeling that we were not alone.
Contract's Benefits
It was not until May 1995 that we got our first contract. Negotiating it entailed countless headaches, frustration, conflicts, and endless work. The local chapter began by recording faculty concerns, setting priorities, and producing proposals for which our superb negotiating team then fought. When it was all over, we had our first contract, which helped us address a number of faculty concerns.
Most prominent among these concerns was the establishment of minimum salaries at each faculty rank. This resulted in significant salary adjustments for about a fifth of all faculty members. For many professors, the adjustment moved them from economic marginality to a living wage. The most seriously underpaid received increases of over 20 percent. The moonlighters quit their night jobs and concentrated on the life of the academy.
We eased many
fears over the reorganization by developing a strong clause on tenure for
our contract. The clause establishes tenure as a status granted by the
university. Construing tenure in this way essentially prevents the administration
from dissolving a department and laying off all faculty members in it.
The administration attempted to amend the clause during the second round
of negotiations, but it remains in effect today.
Perhaps
most important, we now have assurances that the ugliest moments of the
university's past will not be repeated. Workloads must be negotiated;
the administration cannot legally increase them without negotiating with
the faculty. And if the administration agrees to a particular raise, we
will get that raise. It cannot withhold payment because the president's
cat has eaten the university's money, not to mention the less plausible
story we were told in 1991-92 as part of the "hidden-money trick." We have
not solved all of our problems.
Trying to recoup salary losses for four hundred faculty members is no mean feat. According to our calculations, for the CSU faculty to regain the position it held in the 1970s, we would have had to secure a one-year adjustment of over 20 percent across the board. No administration would ever admit to having such money available, much less consider devoting it to faculty salaries. We also have continuing problems with "market inequities" - departments whose salaries are far behind national norms-which will be costly to solve. Add to that the rising cost of health care, and it becomes clear that we must constantly struggle to balance several goals in an environment limited by the administration's cost concerns.
Ultimately, our progress on salary equity came at the expense of overall salary increases, and we have made only limited gains for the faculty as a whole. But we can now decide how the money is to be distributed. To some extent, the improved climate at Cleveland State is a product of the new administration installed in 1993. But administrations come and go, and we don't know what the next administration will be like. Now, no matter what sort of administration we get, we have the assurance of a minimum level of economic security and academic freedom. That peace of mind is, for some, the most important accomplishment of collective bargaining.
Value of Collective Bargaining
Many of the benefits we derived from our first contract addressed specific problems at Cleveland State and may not be appropriate or even desirable for other faculty units. Nonetheless, two benefits are universal.
The first is the presence of a legally binding document. Many professors believe that their university's faculty handbook offers sufficient protection for academic freedom and faculty governance. But as the AAUP has pointed out repeatedly, courts do not always recognize faculty handbooks as legally binding documents. In fact, they refuse to recognize them as contracts about as often as they sustain them (see the Legal Watch column in the September-October 1998 issue of Academe). After our first contract was ratified, we made some disquieting discoveries about the handbook. When several college and university bodies set about trying to bring institutional bylaws into compliance with the terms of the contract, close examination of the handbook revealed language far too imprecise to be valuable in a legal setting. And even when a section of the handbook was clear, it was frequently contradicted by another passage elsewhere in the document. Finally, we discovered sections that had never been reviewed by the faculty or approved by the board of trustees. We realized that, even if the courts had ruled that CSU's handbook was a legally binding document, the vague language and contradictions would have minimized the protections we had always assumed it contained. It is far better to have a legally binding contract that has been reviewed by all parties and their legal representatives than to place faith in a collection of ad hoc passages contained in the ordinary faculty handbook.
The second universal benefit of a contract is an improved grievance procedure. Most universities have a procedure providing for college- or university-wide committees to hear grievances. The committees issue advisory decisions for the administration to review. Professors usually control the committees, but the administration holds final authority over all grievances. All academic collective bargaining contracts make grievance procedures more equitable by establishing an appeals process for cases in which the administration will not sustain a professor's grievance. Sometimes, the contract calls for an outside arbitrator or a joint administration-faculty group to which appeals may be made. Ideally, a contract provides for appeals to an arbitrator whose decisions are binding.
We have a provision in the Cleveland State contract for binding arbitration. It allows us to present our grievances to a disinterested observer for a final ruling. While we haven't won all of our arbitration cases, we believe that we have consistently received fair hearings and impartial decisions. As a result of this process, cooperation between our local AAUP chapter and the administration has increased. Arbitration is expensive, and we both want to avoid it. This mutual desire has led to several amicable settlements in controversial cases. Overall, the ability of faculty members to have their grievances heard has been greatly enhanced. They understand that the Cleveland State AAUP can help them, and they do not hesitate to call us when they have a problem (they are somewhat more hesitant to pay dues and become full members). One of our most satisfying accomplishments is the ability to obtain justice for any faculty member who has been treated unfairly. As arbitrary treatment slowly abates across our campus, a more systematic, even-handed form of administration is emerging. In retrospect, it is amazing that we ever had faith in a system in which faculty complaints against the administration were ultimately adjudicated by administrators.
Collective Bargaining and AAUP Traditions
For many academics, including AAUP members, the connection between collective bargaining and the Association's traditional principles is not always clear. Indeed, some professors left the AAUP when the chapter decided to pursue collective bargaining because they felt that such a pursuit was incompatible with AAUP principles. We have found, however, that collective bargaining has strengthened both the faculty's awareness of core AAUP values and our ability to protect those values on campus. One of the fundamental assumptions underlying the Redbook is that faculty are the core of the academy. As such, they must be involved in appointment, promotion, tenure, dismissal, and governance decisions. Ideally, a collegial relationship between the faculty and the administration ensures that the faculty will be critical actors in important university decisions. When an administration does not honor this principle, an AAUP chapter objects, using whatever means are available-moral suasion, appeals to the media, even legal action. Collective bargaining is a clear extension of this traditional behavior. The only difference between a collective bargaining campaign and a concerted response by an AAUP chapter to a crisis is that collective bargaining relies on the legal system to secure and preserve avenues for faculty participation.
Otherwise, the transactions are identical - the success or failure of the campaign depends on the unity and assertiveness of the faculty. At Cleveland State, academic principles were under attack. Had the faculty not acted assertively, our rights would have been seriously compromised. In the early 1990s, our administration was on its way to joining the AAUP's censure list. Collective action prevented further erosion of academic values and created guarantees for the faculty. Despite the protestations of individualists in the AAUP, the success of the organization depends on the ability to organize collectively, whether that be in a formal collective bargaining environment or not.
Another core AAUP value recognizes the importance of collegiality in relations between the faculty and the administration. On the surface, a collective bargaining relationship would seem to undermine collegiality, since it is based on an "us-them" separation. But our experience indicates that collective bargaining has, if anything, a positive impact on collegiality. After all, collegiality is largely a product of the inclination of the faculty and the administration to get along. Our current administration is head and shoulders above its predecessors in respecting faculty opinion. More important, the relationship between the faculty and the administration is now governed by an agreement by both parties that delineates what each can and cannot do. In the same way that good fences make good neighbors, we have used the contract to guide the development of an improved relationship.
When the AAUP began to employ collective bargaining as a tool a generation ago, many feared that it would move the organization away from its principles. We at Cleveland State understand that, quite to the contrary, it is one of the best ways to guarantee academic rights for the professoriate. Collective bargaining at Cleveland State has brought stronger protection for academic freedom and tenure, a more equitable relationship between the faculty and the administration, relief to the most seriously underpaid professors, and a vastly improved grievance procedure. It is not difficult to recognize these accomplishments as the realization of core AAUP values.
Recently, our colleagues at Wright State University made the same decision we made five years ago. We hope that others in Ohio will follow suit. We also hope that state and federal law can be changed to make collective bargaining an option for professors throughout the country. That may seem like a pipe dream, but in 1990 collective bargaining at Cleveland State was little more than that.
Rodger Govea is professor of political science at Cleveland State University and a member at large of the executive committee of the AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congress.