Eugene weekly., October 11, 2012, Page 13, Image 13

far higher than national averages, reasonable working hours,
comfortable offices, relatively secure positions and an
opportunity to pursue their passion for research. Having
scored a gig like that, who would want to hazard a clash
with management?
D
uring the 1970s, however, a rash of teachers’
unions at community colleges set a precedent
and profs began thinking — could things be
better? Anti-union legislation in many states
hindered — and continues to hinder — unionizing
at private colleges, but most public universities have
always enjoyed the legal right to collectively bargain. And
conditions had changed on campuses nationwide.
Administrations had begun hiring adjuncts at temp-worker
wages to teach classes normally helmed by tenured
professors, and had been focusing more on “branding” the
university to sell it to prospective students. By the time the
UO drive got going, there had been for many years a
reaction among university faculty nationwide against what
on adjuncts — people paid $4,000 a class for a 10-week
term, busting their ass, with no guarantee they’ll be there
the next term — the environment the students are learning
in is degraded.”
Still, in Eugene, the effort didn’t exactly get off to a
sprinter’s start. Faculty involved in those early years say
that AFT’s Ziemer seemed out of touch with the nuances
of higher education, had a hard time understanding the
different categories of faculty, and overall didn’t inspire
confidence in the ranks of faculty activists. As Ziemer and
faculty were trying with little success to iron out the kinks
and personality clashes, the Provost’s office had begun
sending out memos to faculty “educating” them on the
unionization process. In one memo dated Nov. 17, 2009,
Provost Jim Bean cautioned faculty to “Please read
carefully anything you are asked to sign … as you may be
giving up your right to vote and committing yourself to
inclusion in the union.” They banned union activists from
using campus email to communicate to their fellow
professors about the union, according to Vitulli. They also
‘We hire good people and we lose them really
fast. Other universities know Oregon has lots
of good talent for the plucking.’
— D AVID L UEBKY , HISTORY PROFESSOR
was seen as the corporatization of higher-education, a
bottom-line approach that eroded the university’s mission
of cultivating novel ideas through research, promoting
freedom of investigation and thought and offering the
highest quality education possible.
“Administrations had begun to treat the university and
the delivery of classes as something coming off a
production line that can be met at the lowest cost possible,”
sociology professor Michael Dreiling says. “By depending
built an “informational” website for faculty to visit,
countering United Academics’ website. Meanwhile, pro-
union profs were fanning out across campus to introduce
the idea of a union to other profs. Political science
professor Gerald Burke was one of those charged with
rapping on office doors, behind which he found a mixture
of support and caution.
“It was all over the map,” he recalls. “One person said
to me, ‘I trust the administration to make good decisions,
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I
n a state with a median household income of $49,000,
you might risk an aneurysm trying to coax a tear for a
professor pulling in more than $80,000 a year (UO
profs’ average), but it’s important to place it in
perspective: Of the 60 member institutions in the
Association of American Universities, a grouping of elite
research universities, the UO ranks dead last in salary. There
are many who feel that this makes it tough for the university
to retain the best and the brightest, thereby undermining its
stated mission to provide the highest-quality education
possible to students in Oregon.
“We hire good people and we lose them really fast,”
says history professor David Luebky. “Other universities
know Oregon has lots of good talent for the plucking.”
By the summer of 2010, nearly three years since the
effort began in earnest, United Academics still had not
initiated the card-check phase that would lead to its
certification, the amassing of a critical number of
supporters that would make the union a reality. The AFT
removed Ziemer and brought in Yonna Carroll, and the
new blood seemed to invigorate the effort. Perhaps
fittingly, the Oregon State Board of Education decision to
terminate the contract of popular president Richard
Lariviere, in part for giving faculty and administrators
raises against the wishes of the state’s governor, in
November 2011, may have swelled activist sentiment and
nudged the union into existence. At the very least, it was a
symbolic moment.
“It reaffirmed to many of us that the idea of faculty
governance is mythical, that we really didn’t have a say in
the direction of the university,” Dreiling says. “He was
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and I know union-management relationships tend to be
adversarial, and I don’t think it would be good for the
university as a whole.’ To which my response was, ‘Tell
me about those good decisions. If they’re good decisions,
why are we one-third tenure-track, two-thirds contingent
faculty, and why are we in salary scale on the bottom of all
our comparator institutions?’”
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eugeneweekly.com • October 11, 2012
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