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GOVERNANCE


Dear colleagues,

I’m Tyler Bickford, a professor in the English department on the Oakland campus, and the chair of our Union’s bargaining committee.

Faculty involvement in university governance is a key part of having a voice in decisions about our jobs, which is a core reason we formed our Union. It is common for faculty contracts to include provisions addressing governance, and there is a lot of research that demonstrates that having a union improves faculty participation in many areas of decision making. For example, the AAUP recently found that collective bargaining increases faculty authority in areas such as chair selection, teaching loads, course delivery, and intellectual property, in addition to salary policies (PDF, p91).

By law, our Union is the exclusive representative for the basic elements of our jobs—wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment—which empowers us to negotiate strong protections and improvements into a legally binding contract. While we are negotiating our first contract, the administration has made a number of changes to governance procedures across the university. We have heard reports from faculty that they are being told by administrators that, because of the Union, they cannot talk to faculty about particular subjects anymore, or that faculty cannot serve on certain committees because they are in the bargaining unit. We have tried repeatedly to engage the administration over these issues during the interim period before we have a full contract, to avoid disruption and encourage faculty involvement in decision-making. Unfortunately the administration has not responded to our proposals or presented any meaningful proposals of their own for an interim policy on governance, and instead they have taken this more disruptive approach. We think there are ways to move forward that would be more productive, but we are waiting on the administration to agree to discuss those.

Faculty governance happens at all levels, from majors and minors, to programs and departments, to schools and campuses, up to the entire university. For example, I have served in roles ranging from departmental curriculum committees, to overseeing my department’s graduate program, to leading the Children’s Literature Program, to chairing the University Senate Budget Policies Committee, all of which are components of faculty governance. Serving on our bargaining committee represents another way of contributing to the governance of our workplace.

Our contract proposal on faculty governance would strengthen and protect faculty participation in governance at all levels of the university. Our bargaining unit includes a wide range of faculty, with diverse job descriptions involving teaching, research, clinical work, and librarianship in disciplines with different standards and expectations. Therefore, our proposals build on existing governance structures in departments, schools, and campuses–—while ensuring that those committees and procedures are inclusive, transparent, and democratic—to empower faculty to use their local governance structures to develop appropriate and enforceable standards and processes for topics like workloads, promotion procedures, and performance evaluations.

At the university level, similarly, we have proposed that the contract should protect and strengthen the University Senate and other university-level committees’ important role in governance and oversight. Our proposal would strengthen the Senate’s role in developing and implementing policies covering students, staff, and unrepresented faculty, and in addressing the wide range of topics that don’t fall under the union contract.

In solidarity,

Tyler Bickford, Professor of English, Oakland
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