The idea of unionizing LSU’s faculty has been discussed several times over the years.
Mike Russo, an associate librarian and instruction coordinator, says the idea was discussed in 2002, when the LSU Board of Supervisors granted then-Chancellor Mark Emmert a 70% pay raise, to $490,000. According to media reports at the time, it was the highest salary of any state university chancellor in the nation.
Dominique Homberger, an LSU professor who studies comparative anatomy, says the deal signaled the scissoring of salaries at the university, with high pay for administrators contrasting with stagnant faculty wages. But teachers were ambivalent about joining a union, and the idea fizzled.
“They didn’t see themselves as labor,” Homberger says, “[but] we have been treated like labor.”
For over a year now, a Faculty Senate committee has been researching bargaining and representation issues, including the possibility of unionization. The committee has had conversations with the Louisiana Association of Educators, a teachers’ union heretofore limited to K-12.
Russo and Homberger, meanwhile, are helping organize LSUnited, which is seeking support for the union. The fledgling movement’s chances of success could hinge on how nervous faculty members are about pending state budget cuts, or how frustrated they are over a perceived lack of input into the university’s future.
LSU officials have been working on various proposals to restructure the university in the face of state budget cuts of at least 20%. Those conversations largely have taken place in secret, on the theory that public discussions would cause faculty to bail if they learned their department might be a low priority. It appears the cuts will be far less severe than originally feared, Homberger says, but the faculty now knows where it stands.
“People don’t know if they’ll have a job,” Russo says. “They’re just being jerked around. They don’t know what the future holds.”
Russo and Homberger believe a union could speak for the faculty with an authority the largely powerless Faculty Senate lacks. When Gov. Bobby Jindal says university faculty should teach more sections or take fewer sabbaticals, the union could issue a press release with its side of the story.
Faculty Senate President Kevin Cope says there was a time when issues like pay, benefits and workload could be handled internally. But those issues have become politicized in the current environment, and university faculty can be an easy target.
“We need to find some way to protect the faculty,” he says. “When people are suffering because they are poorly organized, they start looking around for some way to organize.”
Some of the early support for unionization comes from faculty members in the liberal arts or social sciences, who tend to make less money but might have a stronger commitment to academic life than an engineering or business professor with more options in the private sector.
“You’ll get a lot of support in English and the humanities and the arts,” says Robert Newman, chairman of the LSU Department of Economics, who has expertise in labor economics. “That’s typically where most of the movement to unionize comes from.” One would also expect more support from nontenure track instructors with little job security, he says.
Louisiana’s political climate isn’t very friendly to unions, to say nothing of the Jindal appointees to system boards. And in a right-to-work state, no one can be required to join a union. The nature of LSU makes the organizing task even harder.
“It’s really difficult—and in my opinion, doesn’t work—to organize at a research-intensive university like LSU,” Newman says.
Faculties at regional or technical schools have teaching as their primary mission, so it’s easier to set up a union pay scale based on factors like experience and the number of classes taught. At a university like LSU, the faculty is expected to publish and perform research, and the value of that work is hard to quantify.
“A union movement at LSU is not going to help us get where we want to get in the long run to take care of faculty and students,” LSU Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Jack Hamilton says. He declined to elaborate, saying he hasn’t been working on the issue, and deferred to Chancellor Mike Martin.
Martin was unavailable for an interview. A spokesman e-mailed a statement in which Martin says he’s “open to any discussion.”
“LSU embraces shared governance,” Martin says. “The current system we have is working well, especially during these difficult times, but I always welcome dialogue among all parties.”
The Louisiana Federation of Teachers has members at the University of New Orleans, which currently is part of the LSU System, and several schools in the University of Louisiana and Louisiana Community and Technical College systems.
But the union doesn’t have collective bargaining contracts at any of those schools, says Prentiss “Penny” Ferguson, a retired teacher from Delgado Community College in New Orleans and a longtime union organizer. For example, he says, UNO only has 35 or 40 members, adding that a union needs at least about half of the faculty to have a significant impact.
Ferguson says LFT has tried to organize on the LSU campus several times dating to the 1970s, but “couldn’t get anybody interested.” He says LFT also met with the current Faculty Senate committee.
“We said at the time it’s going to be a difficult thing; it’s not going to be overnight that you’re going to get changes at LSU,” he says. “They’re starting from scratch.”
LSUNITED THEY STAND
Mike Russo, an associate librarian and instruction coordinator, is co-chair of LSUnited, which is trying to organize a union. If it’s successful in establishing dues deductions in the LSU System, it would be affiliated with the Louisiana Association of Educators and the National Education Association. Its goals include:
• Better job security
• An equitable and transparent means of negotiating salary systems
• Improved benefits
• A work environment that follows “prescribed protocols” that are based on “shared decision-making between the faculty and administration.”
• Allowing “all faculty members to feel empowered to engage in collective advocacy.
