Excerpt from Academe Blog
By Rudy Fichtenbaum
It has been an incredible week at Wright State University. The weather has been terrible (temperatures in the single digits followed by snow and freezing rain). But everyday this week, hundreds of faculty have been on the picket line from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the four main entrances to the campus. Our faculty have given up their paychecks, lost their health insurance, and left their classrooms, labs, schools, and hospitals to take a stand and send a message to the administration and board that we will not let them destroy public higher education at Wright State.
Members of the Wright State AAUP chapter executive committee have been working around the clock, writing press statements, doing interviews, posting on social media, organizing picket shifts, and dealing with the campus police. All who can are also doing regular shifts on the the picket lines. We have other members in charge of checking people in for picket duty, supplying picketers with hand and foot warmers, providing food for hundreds of strikers, shoveling snow, shuttling picketers from our headquarters to the picket line, putting up and taking down tents every day.
Our students have been unbelievable. They have brought food and drinks to us on the picket lines. One day last week while I was on the picket line a computer science student crossed the street in front of campus carrying a shopping bag full of hot bowls of chili and thanked us for what we were doing. Students have held two marches, walking from campus out to our picket lines, and briefly occupied the president’s office on Thursday demanding a meeting with the president.
We have been joined by our brothers and sisters in the labor movement from Dayton area and beyond. Of course, AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress chair Paul Davis was there with us, as were others from Cincinnati State. John McNay president of the Ohio AAUP conference was on the line with us. Other chapters from across the state have joined us as well — Bowling Green State University, the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, and faculty from the University of Dayton. This fall the Wright State AAUP chapter affiliated with the Dayton-Miami Valley Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO) and their support for us has been fantastic. The president Tom Richie and executive director Diane Walsh have been on the line with us as have members from IBEW local 82, UFCW local 75 , IUE local 775, Iron Worker’s local 290, Ohio Federation of Teachers, and the Ohio Education Association. The state AFL-CIO blasted out our petition and a petition organized by students across the state. The AAUP-CBC has approved a grant in support of the strike and we have received donations and letters of support from other unions across the country.
We have had the support from members of the Dayton City Commission and Senator Sherrod Brown.
