POSTED BY MARTIN KICH
Wright State faculty and students need your support. Right now, the stakes at Wright State have never been higher— over the past several years, our students, the local workforce, and the region’s economy have been harmed by the administration’s poor stewardship. And now that this administration has exhausted the financial resources of the university on initiatives unrelated to its educational mission, it intends to recapture this lost money through cuts to faculty and programs. The one thing standing in their way is a faculty contract that protects the educational mission of the university.
You may have heard that the faculty union, AAUP-WSU, is moving toward a strike. The faculty at Wright State do not want to strike, but feel that they may have no other option. The situation is indeed that dire. What you might not know is that the base salaries and benefits of the WSU faculty—who generate almost all of the university’s revenue—account for just 17% of the university’s budget. But, since early 2016, we’ve suffered a net loss of 92 full-time teaching positions. We cannot allow our students to suffer from the inevitable decline in quality if faculty are forced to teach more and even larger classes, if critical courses are offered much less frequently, and if WSU is unable to recruit and retain the best educators and researchers.
There’s still time to avoid a strike. Sign your name and send President Schrader and the WSU Board of Trustees a clear message: the students, alumni, and the community are standing behind the faculty. We will not allow the administration’s poor stewardship of the University fall on the backs of faculty and students. End this contract impasse now, and return to the table to negotiate a fair contract with faculty.
Please sign our petition, expressing your support for our efforts to get a fair contract: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stand-with-wright-state-faculty.
Please share the petition with your colleagues, family, and friends, and please ask your chapter leadership to share it with all of your chapter members. What happens at our university may become a harbinger of what will happen at your college or university.
Thank you for any support that you can provide.
If you would like a fuller explanation of the issues involved in our extended contract impasse, you are welcome to look through the materials available on our chapter website: https://aaup-wsu.org/strike-related-materials/.
If you would like to know how our administration wasted $130 million in reserves over four years, you can get some sense of the misplaced priorities in these posts–open letters to our former president and our board of Trustees–to our old chapter blog, which are now archived on our new website:
I would normally support any strike action, in academia or elsewhere. However, not enough information was provided in this brief summary for me to sign a petition. For instance, what were the “initiatives unrelated to its educational mission” that bankrupted WSU?
These “shorthand” announcements used to work with the Old Left but leftists are more thoughtful about union activities nowadays and want full disclosure.
BTW, the picture on the link seems to show an all-white faculty — at least the union members.
For more information on the issues, see the links appended to the original post.
No, we are not an all-White or all-male faculty. I did not choose the photo, but I believe that it was chosen because most of the more panoramic shots of our members’ turning out for events and meetings are like crowd shorts at a stadium. In any case, between 86% and 87% of the 550-plus full-time teaching faculty who are in the bargaining unit are members of AAUP.