PHOTO BY DATHAN POWELL
From left to right: UIS senior Teddy Armstrong, Dr. Natalya Zinkevich, graduate student Elizabeth Boateng and Dr. Jennifer Martin were among the speakers at an April 28 event held on the quad. Faculty, students and alumni were encouraged to share testimonials about someone from UIS who advocated for them, or how they wish the UIS administration would advocate for the campus.
The UIS United Faculty union (UIS-UF) officially filed a demand on April 14 to bargain with University of Illinois Springfield administration for a new contract. There are 152 faculty members represented by the union, which is part of University Professionals of Illinois (UPI) Local 4100. A press release from UIS-UF calls the latest demand “a critical step in ensuring that the voices of the faculty are heard and respected in a fair and equitable collective bargaining agreement.” The union has negotiated contracts with the administration twice before and went on strike for five days in May 2017.
The faculty is seeking job security and other protections, based on concerns they have seen playing out recently at other institutions, according to Dathan Powell, associate professor in art, music and theater at UIS and chapter president of the union. “Obviously, there’s a federal administration right now that seems to have it in for higher ed,” said Powell. “Our faculty know that through collective bargaining we’re able to protect certain things – not least of which is our academic freedom.”
He said the formation over the past year of a new UIS union representing non-tenure track faculty helped encourage UIS-UF to advance its current demand. Powell also pointed out that the administration’s negotiating team has undergone significant changes in the years since their most recent bargaining sessions, meaning they will be negotiating with a new batch of administrators.
“Our administrators, instead of seeking ways to make a systemic change, seem to just be reacting in the moment,” Powell said. “We have seen a lot of turnover – interim deans and interim provosts and interim chancellors – meaning we don’t have any kind of continuity that can help people to plan for what’s to come. That’s why there are unions.”
Powell explained that UIS-UF’s primary concern is to ensure that UIS faculty continue to be able to engage in “world-class research and teaching,” something the faculty feels is made more difficult by recent university-wide initiatives such as program reviews, where large amounts of faculty time are expected to be spent evaluating ongoing courses and programs, above and beyond teaching, grading and helping students.
“We’re held to the standards of excellence in teaching,” he said, adding that these requirements create distracting levels of anxiety for instructors in addition to being time-consuming. “People start to feel like their program is on the chopping block or that programs on campus are being pitted against each other for a limited set of resources. We continue to hear from administrators that we need to increase enrollment, but it’s unclear to us how they expect us to do that absent the resources to make it happen.”
At UIS, compared to larger institutions such as University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, there is a greater amount of service expected from faculty. This includes participation on committees and other demanding activities that help keep the institution afloat.
“We all know coming in that there is that expectation of service,” Powell said. The problem, from the union’s point of view, is that these service requirements are only spelled out in university policy documents, but not necessarily codified in faculty members’ contracts. “That makes it easier for those policies to be violated when there’s no mechanism for actually enforcing them,” Powell said. “As much as we can, we want to try to enshrine the policies that we know will strengthen our faculty’s ability to do the jobs that they were hired for and not be doing these kind of side quests at a time when (the university) could just decide to do away with the program in question.”
UIS-UF also sees inequities in relation to which faculty members end up shouldering the burden of service requirements. “There is a smaller subset of tenure-track faculty who administration know will say yes to those things, while others who may have already achieved tenure might not be doing as much service,” said Powell. “And someone who’s got a National Science Foundation research grant is probably not going to be able to do as much in terms of these kinds of expectations.”
“I think it’s a really scary moment for the future of universities,” said Amanda Hughett, an assistant professor in the legal studies department at UIS as well as chapter vice president of UIS-UF.
“At UIS we have a lot of first-generation students who require a lot of one-on-one attention, a lot of answered emails, a lot of additional encouragement – faculty at UIS do that work. And so we want a contract that reflects the hard work we put into making UIS a good place for our students to learn and grow.”
Hughett said that one of the union’s main goals is to ensure as much stability for faculty as possible. “We want a sense of what the next semester – not to say anything of the next year – is going to look like for us,” she said. “I think that having a union makes UIS a better place for both faculty and students. It gives us an opportunity to get out ahead of some of the uncertainty that we are in the midst right now. We hope that the administrators come to the table ready to get this contract done and use it as an opportunity to think about how to make UIS a better place.”
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the UIS administration said: “UIS has been in contact with the president of the UIS United Faculty union regarding plans to schedule a bargaining session. The university remains committed to negotiating a fair and fiscally responsible collective bargaining agreement that supports the needs of the entire campus community and our students.”
“Faculty more than anything else want to be treated with dignity and respect,” said Hughett. “We don’t become college professors to get rich.”
Editor’s note: While serving as an instructor at University of Illinois Springfield, Scott Faingold was a founding member of the UIS non-tenure track union, which is also part of UPI Local 4100 but is a separate entity from UIS-UF.