Over a year after winning their union, there is still no contract in sight for faculty and academic staff as the University of Kansas’ management stalls negotiations.
The United Academics of KU (UAKU) won their union election on April 25th, 2024 in a landslide vote with 850 in favor and 132 against. This was the faculty’s second attempt at collective action. In the 1980s faculty organized separately with two different national unions, which split the ballot meaning that even though a plurality of the faculty were in favor of unionization, neither of the unions were able to surpass the 50% benchmark for certification and the union drive failed. This first drive saw its fair share of union busting on the side of the University and the Kansas Board of Regents. The School of Law was excluded from the bargaining unit (which refers to the positions covered by a potential contract) and the Regents offered a significant pay increase, which they promised to make permanent, but then cut after the unionization effort dissolved.
In the ensuing years, while tuition and enrollment continued to skyrocket, faculty compensation fell from 5% below the median average in 2009 to ranking dead last in 2019 amongst the Association of American Universities, which represent KU’s peer institutions. The number of tenure-line faculty also shrunk from just over 1000 to only 669 as KU began to rely more on lower paid lecturers. Other grievances with the administration also became more pronounced. Concealed carry laws allowing students to carry guns on campus resulted in unsafe working conditions, including an instance where a student threatened to shoot a faculty member if they weren’t given an A. Not only did the university fail to discipline the student, they threatened the professor with a job action if he moved his class online.
Although faculty had become resigned to remaining a non-unionized school after the first union drive failed, they organized for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to stay on at KU as an advisory chapter, advocating for issues concerning the denial of due process, governance, tenure adjudication and dismissal. Over this period, faculty, staff, and students also developed an active shared governance structure, split into four bodies: the university, faculty, staff, and student senates. They oversee things like university policy, setting the schedule of classes and approving programs in partnership with the provost and chancellor. However, operating as advisory committees, the demands made by these bodies have no binding authority and are frequently ignored by the university administration.
Around 2017, amidst statewide funding cuts, administrative expenses started to balloon. When the University Senate Planning and Resources Committee recommended that KU sell its jet for $5 million, and explore cheaper options for “work trips” to places like Napa, Palm Springs, and Fort Myers, the administration disabled public flight tracking so faculty and students could not monitor their expenditures. In turn, the advisory capacity of the Planning and Resources Committee was also limited. Projects like the Central District, which cost well over $380 million, were not presented to the committee until they were already under development, and $21 million spent by the administration on consulting was not uncovered until the committee was forced to file open records requests.
Even on non-monetary questions, the administration was still unwilling to cooperate with governance. Institutional discrimination was rampant at KU. When the university’s first openly gay professor, Albert Romkes, came up for tenure in 2011, the resounding faculty vote in favor of his promotion was vetoed by the department Chair Ronald Dougherty and Dean Stuart Bell on the basis of a funding rule which had never been applied to any other professor or incorporated into the Faculty Senate Rules and Regulations. Governance was similarly ignored in 2023 when professor Franklin Tao was wrongfully terminated after being falsely accused of spying for China. Letters from the faculty senate advocating for his reinstatement went unanswered by the administration.
With all this on their mind, the faculty and academic staff, in partnership with AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), publicly announced their renewed unionization effort in November of 2022. A union has the power to bargain for a binding contract that the university can’t simply ignore. It also gives the faculty and academic staff a federally recognized representative body that can provide legal assistance if the university takes unjustifiable action against any of its members. After a successful campaign, on June 24th of last year, UAKU started this collective bargaining process. Winning their election was just the first step, however, the fight for fair representation is far from over.
During the active contract negotiations, university leadership is redeploying many of the same strategies they historically used against shared governance to try and get their way. Most bosses engage in some form of stalling to try and break the union, but, like an abusive lover, KU is intentionally weaponizing feigned incompetence to avoid making concessions. During negotiations, each side will pass proposals across the table until they can come to a tentative agreement on each individual proposal. After every issue has been tentatively agreed to, they are compiled into a contract which every member of the union then votes to either approve or reject. Members of the union report that management continually shows up unprepared to discuss UAKU proposals, and when they do come to the table, they often can’t answer detailed questions about the contents of their counter-proposals. After UAKU presented their initial proposal on compensation, with an exact estimate for what it would cost over the duration of the contract, management took six months to return with a counter-proposal which stipulated that the funds for raises would have to come from department budget cuts, at which point they told the union, when pressed, that they would have to do more research to see what it would cost.
Although bargaining should be bidirectional, KU management has been approaching negotiations as a one-way street, refusing to seriously entertain UAKU proposals that divert from current policy if they go beyond what non-unionized employees at the university are guaranteed. When UAKU presented their proposal on paid leave, they detailed the exact changes from current policy that they wanted to make. Management countered 3 months later by walking through the proposal and pointing out all the spots that differed from current policy. In other words, just telling the union what they already knew. As members expressed,
It was pretty clear that they had just forgotten what we told them when we had made the proposal, and they were slapping this together at the last minute; they hadn't actually been using those three months to work on it.
Management is fine diverting from policy, however, to remove protections for union employees. When UAKU tried to formalize existing retirement benefits, management retorted that the union should not “punish us for good deeds”. Members note that management has a consistent disdain for developing a partnership with the union. Despite its binding authority, they treat the union like they treat shared governance: a body with advisory power that will rubber stamp new ideas, but can otherwise be ignored.
Management’s interest continues to be financialization, not the professor or student experience. In their workload proposal, management cynically invokes students to try and pressure professors to do more for less, stating:
In carrying out the unique responsibilities of their appointment, each bargaining unit member holds the responsibility to devote their best efforts to the university, and particularly to students, while the university holds the responsibility to support the success of bargaining unit members as they carry out their various roles.
However, when UAKU tried to codify existing policies that support students, like sabbaticals focused on curriculum development, management denied applying these to all members of the union on the grounds that KU is “primarily a research institution”.
These negotiation tactics are not a new strategy for management. Members of the Graduate Teaching Assistants Coalition (GTAC) report that during their negotiations the university will entertain their proposals in form, but refuse to budge from the status quo. This causes the state to step in when negotiations reach an impasse. Last year the Kansas Board of Regents illegally imposed a contract on GTAC that gave the graduate teaching assistants meager raises, insufficient to meet inflation.
Under Kansas law, it is illegal – and considered evidence of bad faith in negotiations – for public employees to go on strike. Although no union wants to strike, this restriction heavily constricts the bargaining power of the workers. It does not, however, foreclose all paths of pressure. When students and community members get involved in supporting the union, by showing up to their rallies, and wearing UAKU buttons, it signals to the administration that the union has power and will not concede to their demands. Professors are busy teaching classes during bargaining sessions, so it is difficult for them to show up in mass without negatively impacting students, making community support all the more important. Starting with small actions builds confidence and unity amongst everyone at the university, preparing people to attend bigger and bigger actions. Learning from the failed attempts at unionization in the 1980s, division and apathy are the two biggest hurdles to successful organization.
At noon on Wednesday August 27th, UAKU will be holding a rally on Wescoe Beach, just after their bargaining session. Students Support UAKU will be there with buttons and management will have to walk past everyone as the pressure ramps up for them to start making concessions. If you love your professors, show up. If you hate your professors, show up and bring a friend, because when their working conditions improve, their teaching and your experience at KU improve as well.
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