Are unions really associated with inferior universities rather than the flagship institutions that OU considers its peers? The self-styled Committee for an Independent Faculty (OUCIF) suggests this in its most recent effort to scare their colleagues at OU from forming a collective bargaining unit.
I wonder, though, how OU faculty would view OUCIF's assertions about collective bargaining if they knew faculty at the following campuses enjoyed the benefits and protections of collective bargaining.
These include the University of Connecticut (OU peer institution), University of Delaware (OU peer institution), University of New Hampshire (OU peer institution), Rutgers University, University of Rhode Island, University of Vermont, New York Institute of Technology, Bard College, City University of New York (23 CUNY campuses), State University of New York (64 SUNY campuses), New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rider University, University of California (5 campuses: Berkeley-San Francisco, Davis, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Cruz), San Francisco Art Institute, California State University (23 campuses).
Hardly a crowd of slacker institutions! And guess what? They all have active collective bargaining units that empower their faculties to win real and enforceable terms of employment and to exercise effective influence in matters of shared governance. For a list of AAUP-represented campuses, see http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/about/cbc/colbargainchap.htm.
What about OU? When OU is compared to its self-identified peer universities, the three institutions on the list represented by the AAUP surpass OU on numerous indicators of quality. OU boasts 82% freshman retention, but Connecticut boasts 91%, Delaware 90%, and New Hampshire 86%. OU has a graduation rate of 71%, but Connecticut graduates 74%, Delaware 76%, and New Hampshire 74%. While 15% of OU's freshmen are from the top 10% of their high school classes, at Connecticut 38%, at Delaware 39%, and at New Hampshire 20% are. OU accepts 85% of applicants, Connecticut 51%, Delaware 47%, and New Hampshire 67%. U.S. News & World Report ranks OU 54th among national public universities, but ranks Connecticut 24th, Delaware 31st, and New Hampshire 52nd. The student/faculty ratio at OU is 19-to-1 but only 17-to-1 at Connecticut and New Hampshire and 12-to-1 at Delaware (http://www.ohiou.edu/instres/univ/peerstudy/PeerComparisons.pdf).
As for the rest of OU’s self-declared peer universities, all but Washington State are located in states that prohibit faculty from collective bargaining: Tennessee, Indiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Missouri, and North Carolina. Luckily, Ohio has legislation enabling collective bargaining by faculty. Why would anyone NOT want to take advantage of laws offering faculty the legal means to enforce employment agreements?
An underlying fallacy in the OUCIF’s argument is that nationally MOST faculty--at any kind of institution, no matter its national ranking--are NOT organized into collective bargaining units, period, just as most U.S. workers in every other field are not. Harvard, for example, dominates rankings but does not have collective bargaining; but then neither does the University of Phoenix, which fails to show up in the rankings at all.
It’s impossible to know which institutions’ faculty WOULD choose to form collective bargaining units if they weren’t legally prohibited from doing so. However, the academic workforce in education generally and higher education in particular is opting for collective bargaining at a rate that eclipses the general workforce’s rate of unionization (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf).
Collective bargaining does not tarnish or devalue an institution. Nor does it cause the quality of teaching and research to decline. Although the OUCIF acknowledges that correlation is not causation, they set up their correlation against collective bargaining anyway, claiming perceptions matter. Perceptions of what? That collective bargaining devalues a university. Go tell that to OU’s peer institutions--especially those fortunately located in states that allow collective bargaining!
