The unionized faculty has placed an ad in the student newspaper advising students to begin looking at other universities for their summer courses.
“The UNH Faculty Union will boycott the 2010 summer session if a contract settlement with the UNH Administration is not reached prior to the final scheduling of courses,” reads an AAUP advertisement run in today’s edition of The New Hampshire. “We strongly recommend that students investigate summer course offerings at other institutions well in advance.”
… “I need to take summer classes in order to have enough credits to graduate by next May,” said junior Arielle Romano. “This is a university. We’re paying astronomically high tuition prices. I understand professors have to make a living, but they are here to teach us; it’s an honorable profession. It seems selfish of them to strike a semester of classes for an extra 0.2 percent increase in salary.”…
Students are indeed very angry, and, as this editorial makes clear, their anger is directed against the faculty union.
There’s a good deal of language, in comment threads to various campus articles about the crisis, about lazy professors.
UD‘s only comment at this point? Universities with unionized faculties have a responsibility to inform incoming students about the union. UNH students would not be angry if, when they accepted UNH’s offer of admission, they knew that the school operates on the collective bargaining / strike model. This isn’t the sort of information students and their parents should be expected to pick up in some casual way. UNH needs to be very, very clear about the ways in which this arrangement makes campus life precarious.
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:47AM
This isn’t the sort of information students and their parents should be expected to pick up in some casual way.
Really? Whenever I’ve been involved in an institution with unionized faculty, the existence of the union is pretty routinely in the news, as a partner in negotiations, changes, etc.
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:05AM
There’s a ‘state of the relationship’ between union and management that’s variable and hard to verbalize officially. E.g., a certain educational institution in New Haven has a history of bad relationships between unions and University officials– but how many freshmen know this? And how are they going to find out?
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:22AM
“Universities with unionized faculties have a responsibility to inform incoming students about the union”….
Interesting idea, UD. As a part-time, unionized faculty member at GW, I’m wondering how–or if–the university has informed parents and students about the unionization of part-timers and adjuncts. I should probably know, but I don’t.
March 2nd, 2010 at 11:48AM
MattF–the distinction between Yale and UNH is that at Yale the union is of clerical / technical / maintenance employees, not faculty. The result is that a strike means bathrooms don’t get cleaned, and students get cash to eat at local restaurants (which they don’t complain about), but classes continue to meet. They might meet off-campus to avoid crossing picket lines.
The point is that a strike at Yale doesn’t block students’ progress towards graduation, which is what could happen here.
March 2nd, 2010 at 12:11PM
“UNH students would not be angry if, when they accepted UNH’s offer of admission, they knew that the school operates on the collective bargaining / strike model. ”
UD is strikingly naive if she actually believes that students will not be petulant in the face of knowledge freely offered to them.
UD has apparently never been subject to semesterly complaints from students who failed to read their syllabi and who think they deserve an A (or B or C) for just showing up.
I think UD should consider that the ad the faculty at UNH posted in the newspaper is far and above what they should be responsible to do.
March 3rd, 2010 at 8:29AM
Hmmm…
One of our institutions in the U of Minnesota system – the University of Minnesota Duluth – has a unionized faculty and I think things run a little more smoothly because of it. Of course the administration hates unions, because they make it more difficult to take advantage of faculty. The U of M came within a hair’s breadth of being unionized when the administration/Board of Regents tried to gut tenure about ten years back.
As I understand it Rutgers is unionized? And at our place, when the unionized workers – not faculty – went out on strike a couple of years ago there was some disruption because several faculty took their classes off campus. Threats were made by the administration, but nothing happened.
So what would be the point of universities advertising that they have unionized faculty?
How about?
Disclaimer: Our faculty is unionized and they may go out on strike at any time. Let the applicant beware!
Not likely.
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:03AM
While UD’s suggestion is indeed intriguing, I wonder if it would matter given that UNH is the major state university in New Hampshire, thereby making it the best–and in some cases, only–option for in-state students. And that fact unearths the really devious nature of this boycott: The union will be leaving students, may of whom, financially, might not have any other options other than UNH, with even fewer options.
I never mince words about my stance on unions: I don’t like them. I certainly won’t generalize, but all I can say is that in my 15+ years of being forced to be in various “labor” unions–in academia, secondary education, and the shipping industry (as a package handler for UPS for seven years, during the strike back in the late 90s, in which I lost my job)–these politics always seem like professional pissing matches perpetrated by people who really should be potty trained.
March 3rd, 2010 at 8:12PM
“The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over the nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.” Martin Luther King Jr.