On October 11, full-time non-tenure faculty voiced their discouragement with the university’s teaching load policy, voting to unionize.
Tenure professors, who are already represented by the Wright State University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-WSU), will now be joined by approximately 173 non-tenure faculty members of the university.
This decision to unionize came about from a "one-size-fits-all” approach to teaching loads that was implemented by the administration. The Faculty Senate, on the other hand, had planned a process in which teaching loads would be determined on a college-by-college basis, which was not accepted by the administration.
As stated by Professor Martin Kich, Preisdent of AAUP-WSU, in AAUP-WSU‘s press release on the unionization of non-tenure faculty, “this is a group of faculty who do a substantial portion of the undergraduate teaching at Wright state University, and their teaching conditions represent our students’ learning conditions. We are very concerned that the increasing teaching load for this group of faculty will degrade the quality of education that we provide to our students.”
Now, AAUP-WSU is working to incorporate non-tenure teachers into its Constitution and Bylaws, and expects to begin conducting discussions with the administration about a Collective Bargaining Agreement soon.
Jim Vance, the Communication Officer of AAUP-WSU, stated, “In the longer run, the leadership of AAUP-WSU expects that the existing Bargaining Unit (tenured and tenure-track faculty) and the new Bargaining Unit (non-tenure-eligible faculty) will merge into a single unit; the leadership of AAUP-WSU believes that such a merger will be in the best interests of both units.”
The non-tenure faculty at WSU include Instructors, Lecturers, Senior Lecturers, Clinical Instructors, Clinical Assistant Professors, and Visiting Faculty, meaning that a “one-size-fits-all” teaching load policy does not account for differences in each job.
Students and faculty who are interested in more information about this unionization are encouraged to read the press release, or visit www.wright.edu/administration/senate or www.wright.edu/administration/aaup for more details about the university discussions and policies that affected this change.
