The two largest protests in San Francisco and Oakland didn’t involve crowds gathering in front of buildings or marching side-by-side through city streets while chanting and waving colorful signs. Demonstrators instead climbed into cars and trucks, or mounted bikes and other vehicles and formed caravans to parade their way through cities and sometimes surround government buildings or businesses.

The new approach allowed the region’s active social justice movements to continue the May Day tradition of celebrating workers’ rights while complying with physical distance guidelines put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Organizers encouraged people to stay in or on their vehicles, wear masks or face coverings and use hand sanitizer that protest planners provided.

Protesters in Oakland called for protective equipment for essential workers, free health care, equitable education, the withholding of rent and mortgage payments and the release of prisoners at risk of being infected by coronavirus.

The AAUP continues to update the AAUP's coronavirus resources page with new information from the national AAUP, local AAUP chapters, and other organizations. Please write to smink@aaup.org to share news about how your chapter has adapted its organizing work to respond to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you for the work you are doing.

Webinars
Keep up-to-date on AAUP's latest webinars, including the webinar on financial exigency and program elimination, held last week. Slides and links to all past webinars can be found here.

The CA-AAUP is delighted to announce that the Loyola Marymount University AAUP chapter has been granted an AAUP advocacy charter.  The LMU AAUP Advocacy Chapter was founded in March 2020 to advocate for higher education, defend academic freedom, strengthen shared governance, and promote the interests of faculty of all ranks and contracts at Loyola Marymount University and throughout California, in partnership with our colleagues within the CA-AAUP. We look forward to organizing together!

You can find us at: lmuaaup.org.

Hans-Joerg Tiede was quoted in The Daily Beast on Turning Point USA’s new plan for exposées of liberal bias.

An academic freedom case at Emory University has been resolved with support from the AAUP. Paul Zwier’s lawyer says the AAUP’s intervention was “instrumental” in helping the faculty hearing committee reject the administration’s argument for Zwier’s dismissal.

Committee A chair Henry Reichman received the Intellectual Freedom Round Table's 2020 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award—which recognizes the best published work in the area of intellectual freedom—for his book The Future of Academic Freedom.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 10 of the AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features recent scholarship on academic freedom and its relation to contemporary crises of austerity, shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. This year's contributors draw connections between the multiple frequencies of bullying present on our campuses and the principles and practice of academic freedom and shared governance.

The volume’s eleven essays address a wide range of topics, including the use of discourses of civility and student evaluations of teaching to bully faculty, threats from on and off campus to the academic freedom of faculty of color, and the troubling legacies of historical infringements on academic freedom and shared governance. Follow the links to each article in the table of contents below or access the complete volume at https://www.aaup.org/JAF10.

We are also excited to share a new call for papers, “Academic Freedom on the Managed Campus," for the eleventh volume of the journal, scheduled for publication in September 2020.

—Rachel Ida Buff, Faculty Editor
The Journal of Academic Freedom is supported by funding from the AAUP Foundation.

Table of Contents

Editor's Introduction
By Rachel Ida Buff

Compulsory Civility and the Necessity of (Un)Civil Disobedience
By Judy Rohrer

A Vision for Scholar-Activists of Color
By John Streamas

The Danger of Campus Bans on Bullying
By John K. Wilson

The Weaponization of Student Evaluations of Teaching: Bullying and the Undermining of Academic Freedom
By Jason Rodriguez

Endangered and Vulnerable: The Black Professoriate, Bullying, and the Limits of Academic Freedom
By Lori Latrice Martin, Biko Mandela Gray, and Stephen C. Finley

The Tale of Professor X
By Sherryl Kleinman

Postwar Recovery and Student Academic Freedom in Côte d’Ivoire
By Alfred Babo

"Book Burning" in Japan
By Frank Baldwin

No Sanctuary: Japanese American Internment and the Long Arc of Academic Freedom and Shared Governance
By William Kidder, Judy Sakaki, and Daniel Simmons

Dear Administrators: To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money
By Isaac Kamola

Speech, Academic Freedom, and Privilege
By John F. Covaleskie

Dear Fellow AAUP Members,

Greetings! My name is Christopher DeWeese. I am a poet, an Associate Professor of English at Wright State University, and a proud AAUP member here.

You may have heard about how last month, over 300 members of our union went on strike for 20 days after the WSU administration imposed a horrible contract on us, a contract that would have undermined the educational mission of our university. Our strike was the second longest strike in US higher ed history, and we were out on the lines through the coldest part of the winter here in Ohio. It was a hard-fought battle, and we won a much better contract than the one that had been imposed (maintaining current workload, retrenchment language, and continuing appointments for Non Tenure-Track faculty) but this came at a cost: each member who was on strike is now out 7.2% of their annual salary, as the Wright State admin refused to grant us back pay for days missed on strike.

I'm writing to you today in the hopes that you might spread the word among your colleagues and your union chapter that we have launched a gofundme in order to help our members recoup some of their missing salary. As our AAUP chapter represents NTT faculty in addition to TT, many of our members who are the most precarious are in extremely difficult financial situations. Any help that you or your colleagues can provide would be much appreciated- every little bit helps!
Here is a link to the fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/aaupwsu-strike-fund

If you would like to read more about our strike, here is a good interview in Jacobin with our strike leader, Professor of History Noeleen McIlvenna: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/wright-state-university-strike-noeleen-mcilvenna and here's another interview with a member of our EC, Sirisha Naidu: http://socialistworker.org/2019/01/30/striking-for-the-soul-of-the-university. Finally, here's a piece from the Chronicle: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Now-Comes-the-Hard-Part-/245668

Thank you for considering passing this message along.
All best,
Chris DeWeese

Thank you for all of your support during our recent strike at Wright State. I am writing to ask for some further support. Please bear with me on this somewhat lengthy message.
 
The faculty strike at Wright State ended on February 11, after 20 days. It ended up being the second longest faculty strike at a public university in U.S. history.
 
The administration and Board’s obvious intention was to break our union because we have been the most prominent voice in criticizing the reckless and wasteful spending that led to an almost entirely self-created financial crisis and the most insistent voice in asserting that academics need to become, again, the primary institutional priority.
 
Largely the same Board approved five years of deficit spending that erased more than $130 million in reserves. That spending was almost entirely on non-academic initiatives and enterprises—schemes often driven by cronyism—none of which produced any of the additional revenue streams that were promised. In fact, some of the affiliated entities created to facilitate those schemes are each still costing the university several million dollars every year.
 
In the contract that the administration and Board imposed on January 4, they eliminated our right to bargain over benefits and thus our ability to bargain meaningfully over compensation. They eliminated our MOU on workload, our right of first refusal on summer teaching opportunities, and objective standards for merit increases. They effectively eliminated the possibility of continuing contracts and job security for most of our non-tenure-eligible full-time faculty, and they allowed for unlimited furlough days while asserting that teaching and service would not be disrupted by the furloughs. Worse than all of that was a retrenchment proposal that would have made tenure meaningless, a proposal that they had presented to the fact-finder but left out of the imposed contract. We were certain, however, that if we failed to strike over the imposed contract, that proposal would be on the table when negotiations on the next contract began in spring 2020.
 
In the successor agreement that we reached to end the strike, we rolled back all of these things. We did not get the sort of healthcare plan that we wanted, with more emphasis on premiums than on deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, and we made significant, if contract-limited concessions on summer teaching compensation. We will receive raises in the last two years of the five-year deal, but we will have paid for them several times over by the time we receive them. We said all along that the strike was not about money, and we are, indeed, taking a significant financial hit in the new contract. That said, the accepting the imposed contract would have meant accepting even larger and very open-ended losses in pay.
 
I am writing because our members are taking a further financial hit that we did not anticipate.
 
About two-thirds of our members remained on strike until the strike was ended, and it was very clear that the university was not covering a third to half of the scheduled class sections. On just about every day, there was some announcement about cancelled, suspended, or rescheduled classes, with the creation of a spring B-term supposedly being necessitated by the extended strike. So, when the strike entered the third week, we assumed that the university would need to make up the lost class time and that we would be compensated for a significant part of the pay lost due to the strike.
 
But within a week of the end of the strike, all class sections had simply been put back on the original spring schedule. We do not think that the administration can have it both ways: either a large percentage of our students are not receiving 20% of what they paid for (with all of the obvious implications related to accreditation, professional certifications, and financial aid), or we are being asked to make up the lost time and work without compensation.
 
I am currently collecting documentation of how the lost time and work are being made up, and we plan to file a grievance than will almost certainly go to arbitration.
 
In the meantime, our members are being docked for about 7.5% of their base pay, all of which is being deducted from their last four spring checks.
 
It is extremely important that faculty not be dissuaded from striking out of concern over the financial consequences and that no precedent be set that this is an effective strategy for breaking a strike or a union.
 
So, while we are pursuing the case that will end up in arbitration, we are shifting our Solidarity Fund to a Strike Fund so that we can offset at least some of the lost pay. As the monies are distributed, everyone will receive the same amount, and so our lowest paid members will receive a higher percentage of their lost pay.
 
We have established a GoFundMe account for individual donations, and we are asking that you distribute the link to your members and allied groups. Here is the message on our Facebook page, with the link, which might be used in a communication to your members:
 
On January 22nd, the majority of Bargaining Unit Faculty represented by AAUP-WSU made the choice to go on strike. Not for higher wages but for the protection of the academic mission of the university and our right to negotiate over our terms and conditions of employment. We stood strong for 20 days as the administration drug their feet to the bargaining table. Our  #solidarity prevailed.
 
The end result? A much stronger contract than the one the administration imposed on January 4th with restored protections and the preservation of our legal rights. We call this a win, but it comes at a price.
 
Collectively it cost our striking members over 7% of our annual salary and many will experience financial hardships due to the loss in pay for being on strike.
 
MANY, MANY people {friends, family, and colleagues, both affiliated with Wright State and from afar} have asked how they can help. Therefore, we have created a GoFundMe page to help striking members financially in the wake of #fighting4Wright.
 
Thank you for your support and encouragement. It has never ceased to amaze us!
 
https://www.gofundme.com/aaupwsu-strike-fund?teamInvite=XrKsR8c1pnknynyIbjLAiLah6mA3qH8B3sGy5OcKrTmq9YUkKavAa6u7n9KmF6Tr&fbclid=IwAR1xQVGNUcNcDu4C2Oe-8j7vXB8jW-XK1uUhvPppMkKn5xh-JQBwBaZ3rNc
 
We are hoping that even modest contributions from individual members, as well as from chapters and conferences, will add up. And, when we get a more precise sense of what the strike has cost our chapter, we plan to supplement the contributions that we receive with funding from our own accounts.
 
If your chapter has already sent us a check during the strike, thank you again on behalf of our leadership and our membership.
 
If you have not and wish to send a check instead of contributing to the GoFundMe account, please make the check out to AAUP-WSU and send it to: Tom Rooney, Treasurer, AAUP-WSU; 113 Medical Sciences Building; Wright State University; Dayton, Ohio 45435.
 
Following this blog post are three documents: a chart comparing the imposed contract to the successor agreement, as well as a letter from CBC Chair Paul Davis and John McNay’s article for Plunderbund, both of which highlight the significance of our strike. Please feel free to post them or to distribute them in any way that you think will be effective.
 
Thanks so much for all of your solidarity and your support,
 
Marty Kich
President, AAUP-WSU

1133 19th Street, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20036
PHONE: 202.737.5900 • FAX: 202.737.5526 • www.aaupcbc.org

February 14, 2019

Marty Kich
Wright State University
AAUP-WSU
113 Medical Sciences
Dayton, OH 45435-0001

Dear Wright State AAUP Chapter,

As the Chairperson of the National AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress I want to thank all of you for the effort you put into your recent strike. All of you must know that this action was not only about the issues at Wright State. You represented every member of the AAUP, and likely symbolized every college educator across this nation. Your fight was everyone’s fight.

I know that the last several weeks and probably the last several months have been extraordinarily difficult, but you stood proud. The passion and fortitude you have shown us is beyond inspiring. When I look back at my time in this office one of the moments that I will remember most will be watching, and even a few times walking with you. The enthusiasm you maintained during your strike, especially in the weather elements you endured was beyond belief.

If you need to know if you were successful read the lyrics of “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. During the time you were not in the classroom many will argue that you were not doing your job and were hurting your students. By carrying out your strike for the principles you – and all AAUP CBC members—fight for, you taught them an important life lesson. You stood strong for the quality of instruction and higher education as a common good. As the strong student support throughout the strike made clear, your principles are ultimately their principles too.

Sincerely,

Paul Davis
CBC Chairperson

plunderbund.com/2019/02/21/wright-state-faculty-successfully-defend-ohio-higher-ed

John McNay

Now that the dust is clearing from the faculty strike at Wright State University in Dayton, let’s to take a look at what happened. A tentative agreement was reached on Feb. 10, 2019.
 
Faculty at WSU went on strike on Jan. 22 and finally settled three weeks later. It was the longest academic strike in Ohio history and apparently the
second longest in the country. The faculty union at Wright State is a chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
As the Wright State faculty continually, and correctly repeated, this strike was not about money. It was about quality of education that would be endangered by allowing a corporate-style administration to have unilateral control over such things as teaching loads and class sizes.

The Wright State administration seemed to think that they had the upper hand going into this struggle. “The actions of one-sixth of our employees will not alter our mission as an institution of higher learning,” WSU President Cheryl Schrader told the Dayton Daily News. She could not have been more wrong. Even though the administration advertised nationally for strike breakers, the fact is that they could not operate the university without the faculty. Schrader’s comment shows the problem with too many of our administrations. Engaged in so many other activities, they lose track of the reason that we have our universities – education. It isn’t building office palaces or playing games or rubbing elbows with the corporate big wigs. It is education.

What precipitated such a struggle? Primarily, it was gross mismanagement on behalf of the Wright State board of trustees and its administration. This crisis has statewide importance because of the actions of the Wright State administration and its board of trustees. Like others in charge of our public institutions of higher education in the state, the WSU leaders have spent more taxpayer money and student tuition on administrative bloat, grandiose construction projects (and in WSU’s context off-campus real estate purchases, including $26 million in Greene County alone), athletic department deficits, and, generally, non-academic initiatives. At WSU, these non-academic initiatives
were supposed to produce additional revenue but instead have cost tens of millions.

The Wright State faculty drew a line in the sand and won.
Hopefully, it sends a message to our other corporate-style administrations. The actual timing of the strike was triggered by the board of trustees’ decision to unilaterally impose its contract offer. The vote that came suddenly on Jan. 7 was a surprise but the union was determined. “We can’t trust these folks to be good managers. They have shown themselves incompetent,” Noeleen McIlvenna, a History professor and union contract administrator, said. “I do hope that the community understands that this is a final straw.”

Certainly, what happened at Wright State seems to have been a perfect storm of incompetence. Some of the mismanagement has even been illegal. The ongoing FBI investigation into whether WSU violated work visa laws has so far cost the school more than $2 million. Other boondoggles have included spending more than $4 million (including updates to the Nutter Center) attempting to host the first presidential debate in 2016: Wright State spent more on the debate – that it didn’t host – than Hofstra University spent to host it.

Hard as it is to believe, the former president of Wright State, David Hopkins, under whom most of these blunders were made, had a contract that was certainly irresponsible. For the last years that Hopkins was employed, he was listed among the top 10 highest paid university presidents in the country and for four of those years his taxable compensation was over $1 million. Even today, the president who has overseen the failed negotiations that led to this strike, Cheryl Schrader, is pulling in more than $680,000 in taxable compensation (more than my entire eight-person department at UC Blue Ash).

And, as reported in the Dayton Daily News, there is more:

• An Ohio Inspector General’s investigation concluded in December a report that questioning $1.8 million of the $2.3 million WSU paid to a consultant, a so-called “rainmaker” for grants.
• Wright State University spent $850,000 on a branding effort that included a new logo that was scrapped in mid-2016 amid criticisms that it looked too similar to Rumpke Waste & Recycling.
• Wright State in November paid $1.98 million to settle a complaint brought by the U.S. Department of Education over how the school was handling student aid.

Notice that none of these actions involved actually spending funds directly on the university’s primary mission – instruction and research.

So, it is clear to see how the university created its own financial crisis and that the faculty had nothing to do with this. Shockingly, faculty salaries and benefits make up only 17 percent of Wright State’s budget. Nevertheless, two years ago, when negotiations first began, faculty accepted they were going to have to take a financial hit to help correct the administration’s mistakes. But as negotiations unfolded, it became clear that the administration was not intending to let the budget crisis go to waste. Instead, they aimed to gut the faculty’s contract in what now seems a determined attempt to break the union.

Over the two years of negotiations, the administration agreed to meet only about 10 times. They were reluctant to put anything in writing, and stood by extreme demands. Faculty members had been targeted to make up for these mistakes since 92 full-time faculty positions already had been eliminated. As we often tell our students across the state: “You should ask where your money is going, because it is not going for your education.”

Salary had not been a sticking point because the union agreed early on to no pay increases in this contract given the financial hole the administration had dug. Instead, two other issues have been at the heart of the WSU dispute: workloads and health insurance. Faculty workloads typically are determined by departments based on the academic need for the students. But the WSU administration has proposed to eliminate workload agreements and impose a top-down approach that would have the accountants making decisions in engineering, biology, English, medicine and other disciplines. Wright State faculty insisted on defending quality higher education and research by having expert faculty in the disciplines involved in making these decisions.

Of great importance, the administration wanted to eliminate health insurance as a negotiation topic. The objective in any such proposal is to be able to bar the union from negotiating for compensation. If one cannot negotiate for healthcare, any pay raise one receives can be taken back with a premium increase. This is a union-busting tactic, one that was part of the infamous Senate Bill 5 attack on public employees in 2011, which Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected and repealed, including the people of Dayton and the surrounding counties.

For those who joined the picket line with the Wright State faculty, one was immediately struck by the sense that they must have done this before. It was impressive that so many people stood up and took hands- on leadership roles to make the strike work. It appeared to be a smoothly-running well-oiled machine as picketers braved snow, rain, and bitterly-cold temperatures. And yet, this was a first for everyone involved.

Some things they did very well that helped with the victory:

• Higher education faculty from all over the state showed their solidarity in various ways. Faculty from AAUP chapters at University of Cincinnati, Kent State, Bowling Green, Akron, Cincinnati State, Miami, Ohio State, and others walked the picket line and showed their support in other ways – donating food or coffee and social media posts. Kent and Akron even did a virtual picket from their universities. AAUP national and state staff and representatives were on hand as well helping to support in any way they could. Some days there were hundreds of picketers.
• They formed over the months and years before strong ties with the broader labor movement, some of the connections going back to SB 5 days. Even with the extremely bitter weather picketers faced, one found on the picket line day after day, Ironworkers, school teachers (both OFT and OEA), electrical workers, other public employee unions, as well as other member unions of the AFL-CIO.
• They made good use of their political contacts. Many politicians offered support. Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley came to strike headquarters to speak to the faculty. Both she and Sen. Sherrod Brown sent letters to the board and administration expressing the same sentiment. Brown wrote, for example: “I urge you to reconsider your approach to these negotiations, specifically the hard line you have taken with the Wright State faculty.” Even area Republican legislators sent a letter encouraging a return to negotiations, something the faculty were eager to do and the administration refused. The Democratic caucuses in both the state House and Senate sent letters to the administration that were supportive of the faculty and calling for the administration to return to negotiations.
• The faculty had amazing support from the students. They had sit- ins outside administration offices. They picketed with faculty. They had very active social media platforms on Twitter and Facebook defending the faculty.
• With the help of the Ohio Conference, WSU faculty held a press conference that drew media, politicians, and a surprise and welcome visit by the new Chancellor of Higher Education, Randy Gardner, who spoke to the over 100 faculty, students, and allies. Gardner was on the phone a great deal in the final week or so of the strike with both sides encouraging a return to serious negotiations.

In the end, after finally agreeing to the use of a federal mediator, the administration gave up on a series of bad proposals, including unilateral control of workload and merit pay and unlimited furloughs. About insurance, the new contract will include a clause guaranteeing the faculty’s right to negotiate over healthcare although the union did agree to go into the same insurance plan as the other employees at Wright State. Because they negotiated for two years, they have essentially agreed to two contracts, one will complete the year left on this term, and then another three-year contract which provides for small raises in 2022 and 2023, the last two years of the second contract – at that point faculty will have gone five years without an overall pay increase.

There are going to be a lot of wounds to heal going forward. We agree with the sentiments of Chancellor Gardner:

‘The first people I thought about last night when I heard the news of the agreement were the students I met with Friday at the Statehouse,” Gardner said. “I’m hopeful that their plans and goals for the future – and those of thousands of others as well – are restored.”

You can be sure that the Wright State faculty will be working to restore those futures. As WSU-AAUP Chapter President Marty Kich said “I am sure all our members are glad to be going back to the classroom where we hope things will return to normal for our students as soon as possible.”
—–
 
John McNay is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, and author of “Collective Bargaining and the Battle of Ohio: The Defeat of Senate Bill 5 and the Struggle to Defend the Middle Class”