Students, faculty members, alumni and community members gathered on College Green Wednesday to rally in support of the United Academics of Ohio University’s ongoing negotiations with the Ohio University administration.
Before the rally, members of the UAOU passed out posters saying, “Fair Contract Now." Students were later encouraged to put the posters in dorm windows, apartment windows or on windows at their place of employment to make their support of the UAOU visible.
The rally began at noon, with OU’s percussion performing with drums, tambourines and bells in support of the union. It was also announced that the percussion club will be walking alongside the UAOU during the Homecoming Parade.
Speakers at the rally included faculty members, students and Athens residents. Among the student speakers were Tess Warren, a sophomore studying sociology, and Tylar Ayers, a senior studying political science. Both are members of the Ohio Student Association.
Ayers said in her speech that seeing the community come out for the rally in support of the UAOU “is power, and that is how we are going to make change.”
Warren said in her speech she expects better from the university.
“I expect this university to be listening to student issues and faculty issues because they are one and the same,” Warren said. “Faculty issues affect students, and if I am paying thousands a semester to go here, I sure as hell expect my professors to be fairly paid.”
Warren continued her speech, emphasizing OU faculty are vital to students’ education and experience on campus, giving attendees a call to action.
“It is not the university administration who make OU our home,” Warren said. “It is not the buildings. It is nothing like that. It is the faculty, the staff and the students that make my education and yours everything that it is and will be in the future. And I want you guys to remember for that to happen, we have to be supporting our faculty, we have to be supporting our students and we have to be fighting for our rights on campus."
Major themes among the speeches included a compensation proposal and better working environments for faculty. The compensation proposal UAOU submitted last October was a particularly important issue, as the administration just responded to it 10 months after its original submission, according to a previous report by The Post.
Matt Felton-Koesler, a professor of teacher education at OU, explained why the UAOU chose to rally.
“Today, partially, it's a rally to bring everyone together,” Felton-Koesler said. “ Partially, it's a response to the university's latest counteroffer, their first counteroffer on our financial package, which was, in my personal opinion, pretty bad.”
Joe McLaughlin, an associate professor of English and a member of UAOU, also on the negotiating team, said it was vital to have the union rally now as the semester recently began and students and faculty are back on campus.
“It's close to the beginning of the school year, and so faculty have been in different places,” McLaughlin said. “We thought it was important to bring people back together. Students are back around. We have a lot of student support, community support. We're just trying to have a strong show of support from different constituencies.”
McLaughlin also highlighted how universities often oppose faculty unionization.
“Administrations in general don't want faculty unionizing because it gives faculty more power in running the university,” McLaughlin said. “So you'll hear them use words like flexibility, which means the ability to do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want, no matter what the faculty think.”
McLaughlin also said university administrations tend to use words like “efficiency, which usually means things like downsizing and getting more faculty who are on temporary contracts versus permanent faculty in the tenure track.”
Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the secretary-treasurer of the Ohio American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, a division of one of the largest federations of labor unions in the U.S., was another featured speaker.
Cropper said in her speech that she is exhausted with OU treating faculty as a “dispensable line item.”
Despite Cropper not being a part of OU’s faculty, she expressed support for the UAOU’s mission and labor unions in general in her speech.
“When you see me standing here today, that means you see all of labor across the state of Ohio standing here with you and to send one clear message,” Cropper said. “And that is that you are not in this battle alone.”
Cropper then said treating faculty fairly affects student learning.
“Investing in faculty here is investing in the students,” Cropper said. “ It's investing in the future of this university. It's investing in higher education in general. Faculty are the engine that runs this university, and faculty, as you heard from the student who was up here earlier, are who’s there for the students when the students need help to move forward.”
Jessica Thomas, a longtime Athens resident and OU alumna, spoke as well. Thomas said adjunct and associate professors who live in Athens year-round are a small but valuable part of the Athens population.
“They're not looking to be in and out in a few years, like you're going to see in the upper levels,” Thomas said. “They want to live here, they want to have families here, they want to retire here and that really only builds a stronger community. It really strengthens us as a community, and all sorts of factors, from just knowledge base to historical knowledge to economic supports. It only makes the Athens community stronger.
As negotiations between OU and the UAOU are still ongoing, The Post will publish updates as decisions are made and negotiations continue.
