Editor’s note: This commentary is by Felicia Kornbluh, a professor of history at the University of Vermont and the director of its Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies program.
Recent reporting about the negotiations between the faculty and administration of the University of Vermont has missed important parts of the story. Most important, journalists have not yet captured what has truly been at stake in these negotiations – and what continues to be at stake, as the United Academics faculty union and its bargaining partners from the university’s top administration have reached “impasse” in our months-long dialogue.
What is on the table here is far more than salaries and other monetary benefits. The most significant points of disagreement between United Academics and senior UVM administrators are philosophical and moral: How do we understand what a university is, and is for? Who does it serve? How will it preserve, and even strengthen, its educational mission? How can it better serve the state of Vermont, and the world beyond Vermont as well? And how can the University of Vermont serve as a model to the state and the nation of a workplace that really works – a humane and welcoming environment for students, staff members, faculty, and community members?
United Academics and the elite stratum of the university administration offer profoundly different answers to these questions. Unionized faculty members view their students as citizens whose attendance at college offers access to critical thinking skills that allow them to participate fully in the wider world. Elite administrators have repeatedly expressed their sense that students are a source of financial resources for the institution. The administrative rhetoric at UVM has become one of “entrepreneurship,” in which the focus of the university should be revenue maximization, not civic responsibility. Union members have argued for smaller classes and for maintaining opportunities for professors to address their students’ educational needs personally. But upper-level administrators have threatened to place ever-increasing burdens of work upon the people whose job it is to educate the next generation.
Union members have argued for smaller classes and for maintaining opportunities for professors to address their students’ educational needs personally.
United Academics members are all too aware that our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.
Moreover, as to salaries, the administration has repeatedly misrepresented the facts by offering averages of tenured and tenure-track faculty salaries that do not capture the wide range of compensation earned by the members. The range of faculty salaries at UVM is very wide. United Academics is dedicated to all of its members, many of whom are lecturers without the protection of tenure, who earn substantially lower salaries than anything the administration mentions. For some lecturers and other faculty making less than $50,000 per year, the administration’s most recent financial proposal would actually result in a diminution of total compensation in this academic year, once the effects of the small wage increase and substantial health care premium increase are combined. One principle of United Academics’ bargaining has been – and remains — that the union will not accept a package of salary and health care changes that results in any member experiencing a decrease in compensation.
A recent independent audit of the university’s financial situation concluded “that the University remains in very good financial condition and is likely to remain in very good financial condition for the foreseeable future.” Likewise, it is clear from a variety of recent reports, members of the administration spend lavishly on their own priorities, whether these be new buildings or increased compensation for certain high-level administrators themselves.
United Academics stands with the nonunionized university staff who received an inadequate compensation package. With a small salary increase but a substantial increase in health care contributions, some of these colleagues actually received a net pay cut from the combined effects.
United Academics continues to work toward a fair contract and toward the wider principle of sustaining a university that serves the campus community and the state of Vermont. The union invites the entire community, faculty, staff, students and administration alike, to join its members as we work to preserve high-quality, affordable, personalized, public higher education.
