Excerpt from the People's World
On a frigid day in January 2019, Wright State University (WSU) faculty walked out of their classrooms and laboratories, showing an arrogant and manipulative administration that it could not continue to ignore the power of the union. After a tumultuous three-week strike, one of the longest college strikes in U.S. history, WSU administrators finally agreed to a fair contract with faculty.
The lessons of the WSU Strike of 2019 were the subject of a presentation last weekend by two Wright State faculty members, Gretchen McNamara from the College of Liberal Arts, and John Martin, from the College of Business, to the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors—Ohio Conference. Wright State faculty are organized by the AAUP-OC.
McNamara and Martin began with the context of the strike. At the beginning of 2017, WSU was suffering the effects of extreme mismanagement. The administration was under multiple state and federal investigations, including a scandal over mishandling H-1B visas. Overspending of approximately $130 million for consultants and revenue-seeking schemes put the university at risk of being put under state fiscal watch.
When contract negotiations began, faculty knew they would “take a financial hit to help correct the administration’s mistakes,” according to AAUP-OC president John McNay. “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.”
In 2018, the university proposed a contract with increases in workload, reductions in tenured staff, no raises, no job security for the non-tenure track eligible faculty, and removal of tenure track faculty’s chance to teach summer classes. Adding wage theft into the bargain, WSU administration proposed unlimited furlough days, when faculty would have to work but not get paid. From the time that she was hired in 2017, WSU’s president, Cheryl Schrader, simply refused to meet with union representatives.
