Op-Ed in The Blade about BGSU Faculty Negotiations

[professorjackson]

http://www.toledoblade.com/Op-Ed-Column ... -BGSU.html

[Flipper]

I remain steadfast in the belief that your union is as necessary as tits on the Pope.....

[professorjackson]

BGSU faculty members disagreed with you...in a free and fair election. Now we just need to get the contract finished...

[rood]

I remain steadfast in the belief that your union is as necessary as tits on the Pope.....

Actually, tits on the pope might be all kinds of awesome.

[1987alum]

BGSU faculty members disagreed with you...in a free and fair election.

Proof, once again, that those with the authority to make decisions are often the least qualified to do so.

[transfer2BGSU]

Did the faculty overwhelmingly vote for a union or did those members of the faculty that actually voted overwhelmingly vote for a union?

[professorjackson]

What a bizarre comment about "those with the authority to make decisions are often the least qualified to do so." BGSU faculty knew exactly what they were voting for. Vigorous campaigns were waged by both sides of the collective bargaining issue, and the vote came out overwhelmingly in favor of collective bargaining.

87% of the faculty voted, and 57% voted in favor of unionization. Is 87% turnout not good enough? If you are articulating a standard that the majority of all potential voters must vote a particular way for the result to count, then almost no elections would count in this country.

And frankly this is all beside the point. The BGSU-FA won a free and fair election and are the legal collective bargaining agents for all full-time BGSU faculty. That happened TWO YEARS ago and we still don't have a contract. It's time for the foot-dragging to end. It's way past time we had a contract.

[Rightupinthere]

1) I'm not fan of unions, but if the BGSU faculty voted for it [and 49.5% absolute "for" is far from a mandate] then I have no quibble.

2) There is a datum which is missing. BGSUs primary source of educators comes from "Instructors" at a number of over 225 persons. To provide some insight, O$U has only 4 with nearly triple the total role of faculty. I'm not sure I understand why BGSU has this disparity. Likely, it's because the programs don't call for true Professors. I don't know, really. Art? Education? Music? Business? Do these schools need true Professors to properly educate? Arguments can be made, of course. The best educators I had for business weren't professors but retired professionals.

One thing is for sure, BG is near the bottom in total compensation for each class of faculty when compared to other state schools. Only the tiny Shawnee State is last. I strongly believe in paying proper talent and, where unioniziing isn't ideal in my view, it may serve a grander purpose. Even a 4% pop in overall compensation over and above the modest 2.4% [2010/11] wouldn't put BG over the middle of the pack.

[professorjackson]

If a US presidential election winner got 57% of the vote with 87% voting, would you say it's a mandate? Even Reagan and Johnson didn't come anywhere close to that.

BGSU has two classes of faculty: Tenured/Tenure Track (Professors, Associate Professors, and Assistant Professors) and Non Tenure Track (Instructors, Lecturers and Senior Lecturers).

NTT are real professors (usually have the terminal degree, do research, know how to teach, advise students, serve on university committees), they're just not paid like it. One of our goals is to improve their situation with greater compensation, job security and overall respect.

[footballguy51]

If a US presidential election winner got 57% of the vote with 87% voting, would you say it's a mandate? Even Reagan and Johnson didn't come anywhere close to that.

BGSU has two classes of faculty: Tenured/Tenure Track (Professors, Associate Professors, and Assistant Professors) and Non Tenure Track (Instructors, Lecturers and Senior Lecturers).

NTT are real professors (usually have the terminal degree, do research, know how to teach, advise students, serve on university committees), they're just not paid like it. One of our goals is to improve their situation with greater compensation, job security and overall respect.

The word I've heard is the administration wants to reduce the number of tenure track faculty and increase the number of NTT faculty. Your goal would actually serve to shoot the reclassification idea out of the water by making the two classes more similar.

[Flipper]

If you reduce the number of NTT faculty in favor of more tenured track faculty you will wind up with fewer total faculty...unless you raise tuition to cover the expense or make other cuts. How much of a decrease in faculty (and by definition, available classes to students) are you willig to take to achieve your goal? How much of a tuition increase should the University seek? What budget cuts do you want to see?

Since we're talking about "shared governance"....how are you going to pay for the changes you want?

[Falcon Commander]

"greater compensation, job security . . . "
OMG!

[professorjackson]

We are not proposing any changes in the numbers of NTTF or TTF. BGSU has plenty of money to fairly compensate the faculty members we currently have. Here is the analysis that proves it.

http://bgsu-fa.org/wp/wp-content/upload ... lysis1.pdf

[footballguy51]

We are not proposing any changes in the numbers of NTTF or TTF. BGSU has plenty of money to fairly compensate the faculty members we currently have. Here is the analysis that proves it.

http://bgsu-fa.org/wp/wp-content/upload ... lysis1.pdf

That looks like an interesting read. I'm not faculty at BGSU, but I do work at BG. I don't think I've seen this until now.

[transfer2BGSU]

87% of the faculty voted, and 57% voted in favor of unionization. Is 87% turnout not good enough? If you are articulating a standard that the majority of all potential voters must vote a particular way for the result to count, then almost no elections would count in this country.

I don't think I ever saw a figure about the percentage of total faculty that voted. As an individual with an HR background and having sat through several negotiations as an observer and working with a federal mediator, I know that it is usually a simple majority of those that vote. Similar to our election of government officials. Very surprised and glad to see that 87% of the faculty voted - that's approximately 800 faculty members (i was told we had 920 faculty). Very solid number.

Student government was having trouble getting 10% of the student body to vote. The USG Constitution used to require 10% of the student body to vote for an election to be valid. Not sure if that has been revised or not, but in the late 80's there were numerous elections below 10% participation.


For those that really want to know cold hard figures - click on the link

http://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/higher-ed