Decrying the lack of new faculty contracts since August 2021, Professor Kristi Barnwell (pictured) led a group of fellow teachers and their supporters on campus at UIS Thursday. Barnwell is UIF-UF president.
The ask? Better pay and recognition for their work. Professor Steve Schnebly is the union’s vice-president. “When you compare our salaries to those in Illinois, they just simply don’t compare. And our students, who pay University of Illinois tuition, their expectation is going to be that they have faculty who are fairly compensated for that level of education.”
Professor Richard Gilman-Opalski says the faculty feel “disrespected and underappreciated.”
But with a new chancellor taking the reins in July, “I’m hopeful,” he said. “I don’t know her. I hope that she will come in and recognize that we do have a faculty union. I hope that she will work with the union and be much more responsive to our requests, and that she will work in a more productive way with our faculty union than the chancellor we have now. And we have an experience, on this campus, of chancellors who are really quite hostile to the faculty union.”
According to Gilman-Opalski, the current 2% offer is no better than the faculty would have gotten in pre-union days.
Janet Gooch will lead the school as chancellor when she assumes her new role in July.
Here is a statement from interim chancellor Karen Whitney:
“An informational picket is not a strike, and we support the faculty’s right to participate in this activity to express themselves.
“Our next negotiation session with the federal mediator is tomorrow, Friday, April 1, and we recently added additional negotiating sessions weekly through late April.
“The University’s goal in these negotiations has been to balance an intent to fairly compensate our valued and respected teaching colleagues for their important contributions, while also ensuring progress to reduce the University’s $3.7 million FY21 structural deficit and achieve financial stability. These dual priorities have become particularly challenging in the face of declining enrollment and related fiscal challenges. We are continuing to implement an aggressive five-year deficit reduction plan that includes strategies to grow enrollment and control expenses.
“The University and the union have reached agreement on a range of non-economic issues, and we are now addressing some of the more challenging issues, which relate to compensation and faculty workload.
“I continue to believe that we can reach a fair and fiscally responsible multiyear collective bargaining agreement that is in the best interest of our entire campus community without disruption to teaching and learning.”