April 29, 2013

Today in the last meeting of the year of the Academic Senate, it was announced that the Senate Executive Committee might meet over the summer to examine wages, benefits and working conditions.

We in the CFA have spent the past two years talking with our colleagues about  salaries, benefits, working conditions. Clearly our efforts have attracted the attention of the central administration, which has finally taken serious notice of these concerns. However, our discussions have also revealed that the vast majority of faculty voices are not usually part of the top-down policy-formulating and decision making process.  This newly announced and vaguely constituted committee may or may not come up with recommendations; it is a very small step.

The CFA wants to emphasize that only a legally binding collective bargaining agreement can effectively and fairly resolve salary disparities, improve retirement benefits and family leave policies, guarantee a fair and transparent grievance process, and address many of the other issues that affect the faculty.  We also point out that anything granted by administrative fiat can also be taken away.  Collective bargaining is the best path to protect and enhance working conditions here at UIUC.

For further information please check out this website or email us at campusfacultyassoc@gmail.com.

We at Campus Faculty Association are still studying Chancellor Wise and Provost Adesida’s announcements at the Town Hall meeting on Monday.  We are pleased to see recognition of some of the pressing concerns we have been hearing in our face-to-face conversations all around campus, but we have reservations about some of the planned actions, and whether they will meet campus needs.

Our first take is that the plan to hire new faculty is a step in the right direction, but insufficient. The plan sounds dramatic (“hire 500 new faculty”), but the full announcement is much less satisfactory, and will achieve no more than replacing the faculty numbers lost in the past few years. Over the last five years, tenure track faculty numbers have fallen by about 10%, while student numbers have risen by about the same percentage.   The Visioning Future Excellence plan aims to replace these lost faculty over roughly the next seven years, while also adding back those lost to normal attrition. This is how they reach the headline number of 500 hires, by including replacement faculty hires.  By 2020, faculty numbers should be back where they were in 2007 – yet with thousands more students to teach than in that year.

While this is an important start, it is not enough to strengthen and preserve research and teaching excellence at our university. The surge in retirements and departures over the last few years was caused in large part by the threat of further damage to our retirement benefits, and by frozen and lagging salaries.  We still face those threats, and our own central administration has announced that it supports a permanent 2% pay cut in the form of an increased employee contribution to SURS.  The administration has also endorsed a reduction of the cost of living adjustment for future retirees.  Until these major problems are solved, UIUC will face continued erosion of the tenure-stream faculty.    A union with collective bargaining rights would help faculty to address pension issues at the campus and state levels, and would work with the University to preserve excellence over the long term.