Bargaining Session Update
Today OU-AAUP’s Bargaining Team, led by Chief Negotiator Tom Discenna with Cara Shelly, Helen Levenson, Lori Ostergaard, Bob Fetter, Jacob Becker, Kasey Tomlin and Amy Pollard, met with a team representing OU’s Board of Trustees. This session was largely introductory with no proposals exchanged. Tom did share an Opening Statement with the administration team and we have included that in its entirety below. We were excited and grateful to be joined a handful of member observers in the room today. The next bargaining session is tentatively scheduled for 6/13/24.
Chief Negotiator Tom Discenna’s Opening Statement:
This summer marks a pivotal moment in the history of Oakland University and for higher education. We in this room have been presented with a unique and vital opportunity. Today, we commit ourselves to, in the words of the university’s FAQs on negotiations, the task of “providing faculty members with the resources and tools they need to perform the work of the university while compensating them fairly for their efforts in advancing the mission of the university in teaching, research, and service” we will, working together, have taken a significant step in reframing the popular discussion concerning higher education across this country.
This summer we can restore the public’s faith in higher education by working, transparently and in a spirit of collaboration, to arrest the downward slide in faculty salaries and benefits and reset them on a path of continued growth that matches their prodigious productivity. By doing so we will demonstrate to the public, including our current and future students, that at Oakland the crucial work of education, inclusive of scholarship in all of its multifaceted variations, is valued above all other priorities. The public’s confidence in higher education will be restored when the faculty who provide it can do their work secure in the knowledge that they and their families have affordable, quality benefits, including a secure, equitable retirement for our colleagues at every rank. In other words, we will signal to the community of southeastern Michigan that higher education is a public good worth preserving by appropriately compensating those of us who provide this public good to current and future generations.
The faculty of Oakland University believe in the promise of higher education. We are ourselves the inheritors of that promise and we hold it as an inviolable trust to pass it down to succeeding generations so that they might share in the joy of learning and reap the benefit of all that a university education has to offer. The promise of higher education is constructed on the bedrock principles of academic freedom and shared governance. And so today we in this room must resolve to preserve and defend those principles so that decisions about the work of the university continue to be made by those in the best position to make them and that professors are free to speak out without fear of retaliation.
We have the opportunity in these negotiations, at this pivotal moment, this inflection point in the history of higher education, to ensure that at this institution we reset the trajectory of faith in higher education. Short-sighted efforts to drive down the salaries and benefits of faculty, attacks on shared governance and academic freedom, and increasing workers’ precarity erode public confidence. Public higher education is a transformational enterprise: it shapes the lives of our students and our community economically, socially, and culturally. At the heart of this enterprise are faculty members engaged in asking fundamental questions about the world, testing answers, and sharing them with the students who reshape them to fit the needs of the future. This summer, if all of us at this bargaining table are clear in our conviction that higher education is a public good worth preserving and expanding and we demonstrate that conviction by ensuring that those who do the vital work of the university are fairly rewarded for all that they do to preserve and defend this institution then we will take a crucial step in once again making higher education a good worth supporting and investing in by our students and by the community.