AAUP Meeting Minutes/Negotiation Updates 19 March 2024

DelVal AAUP Meeting

19 March 2024

4:30 PM

 

Exec/Negotiating Team members present: Jessica McCall (President), Karen McPherson (Vice President), Matt Mutchler (Secretary), Michael Farbotnik (negotiating team member),

Overall attendance: 42 Members

Call to order at 4:33 PM

Business:

  1. Contact Yun Li (li@delval.edu) to get access to the AAUP website using your personal (non-DelVal) email.

 

  1. Please share personal (non DelVal) email with Ed Sambriski (esambris@gmail.com) so we can use this as a way to share updates. This is not required, but recommended.

 

 

  1. Contract Action Team (CAT)
    1. Reach out to Josh Glasner or Elizabeth Skendzic if you’d like to be involved. They play an important role in negotiations without having to be in the room.
    2. A way to have a smaller workload related to negotiation.
    3. Would like volunteers to help run our social media and other forms of communication.

 

  1. Are you willing to attend negotiation sessions?
    1. Topics that may be unique to a certain area (Grad School, Library, etc.) where having somebody with lived experience in the area to inform discussions.
    2. Reach out to a member of the negotiating team if you’re interested. This is not a commitment, just a list of people we could reach out to if/when needed.
    3. We may also invite people as observers to “stack the room” as a show of solidarity.

 

Negotiation Updates

  1. Our proposal (more detailed document sent to personal emails)
    1. 3-year contract
    2. Wages details being withheld in negotiations for now.
    3. Overload changes – number, pay rate, first refusal, increasing pay scale (model in development).
    4. Tenure Buyout
    5. Professional Development increases/changes
    6. Retirement match to 10%, making COVID losses whole
    7. Workload – decrease contact hours, spread over semesters, release for canvas transition, first priority in terms of scheduling times/rooms, 70% rate of classes taught by FT faculty (discussing in-load or including overload)
    8. Release time for negotiating team
    9. Health Care – maintain current benefits, coverage of increases made by PAISBOA, creating of health care committee to review potential changes.
    10. Sabbatical – payout of untaken sabbaticals or ability to stack multiple sabbaticals
    11. Expand tuition exchange to include a wider range of family members to benefit colleagues without recognized partners/children.
    12. Adjusting timeline for filing grievances – move from “calendar days” to “academic working days.” – aligning with 9-month academic calendar.
    13. Outside employment – remove requirement to report outside of instances of conflict of interest.
    14. Implementation of discipline policies that don’t leave chairs in the position of having to discipline other union members, gives a structure we can insist is followed.
    15. Update language around discrimination/bullying
    16. All members can request union rep in any private meetings with President, VP, Dean, other administrators. Current Weingarten law allows you to request but admin can deny in certain situations. We’re asking for it to be an option without the chance to refuse.
    17. Updated language on P&T around librarians, grad school, remote faculty so that all can be appropriately evaluated within the context of their job.
    18. Updated workday language for grad and other programs that fall out of the 8:00 – 4:20.
    19. Reduce faculty meetings to 2 per semester.
    20. Mandatory training limited to 3 hours (down from 6) and would include Day of Scholarship. Would not affect federal training that is required.
    21. Remove requirement to attend Founders ceremony and Commencement
    22. Update Academic Freedom & Intellectual Property language
    23. Addition of an additional compensation article to ensure equitable application of stipend and course release time for similar activities across the institution.

 

  1. Admin Proposal (more detailed document sent to personal emails)
    1. 3-year contract
    2. 2:1 labs is back. We rejected this outright.
    3. Two consecutive semesters below contact hours = laid off. We are arguing that this is not needed – if a person is out of contract they are out of contract and we do not need a loophole in our contract for this.
    4. Want MWF class schedule – we are waiting to see a sample schedule from them.
    5. Expectations around advisee load/accountability
    6. Online instruction – requirements re: DE 101 and DE 201 to be refreshed
      1. Unclear how DE 201 is helpful in increasing quality.
      2. We are open to more meaningful training
    7. Required elements in syllabi – early alert grades, midterm, and final grades on time.
    8. Early alert expanded to 2000 level and FY courses.
      1. We are working on trading syllabus issues for knowing finals schedule at the start of term to put in our syllabi
    9. P&T Committee – 4/4/4 across colleges, we proposed 4/4/1 (1 in grad), settling on 4/4/2. Temporarily waiving tenure requirement for grad side due to very few eligible faculty.
    10. Title IX grievance/arbitration
      1. Trying to minimize pressure on alleged victims of having to testify more than necessary
      2. Waiting for new Title IX regs to come from Washington – will affect this area
    11. Online class size – matches in person cap
      1. We countered to an absolute online cap of 20.
    12. Waiting on wages detail
    13. Increased cost sharing for healthcare and elimination of HRA – we stated that we’re not interested in this.
    14. Changes to PAISBOA coverage for pre-65 retirees – tied to purchasing COBRA
    15. Policy on not dating students – will be discussing exceptions for pre-existing relationships.
    16. Adjust background checks to align with updated PA laws
    17. Intellectual property proposal forthcoming.

 

Questions/Discussion

  1. Q: How is percentage of FT faculty calculated? Courses/Credit Hours/other?
    1. A: Will follow up – K Kovath did some math but was not in attendance to clarify what her metric was.
  2. Q: Are there timelines for adding in missing info, like wage info?
    1. A: No. We’ve met 3 times and we’re working on scheduling more. Wages will probably come up half to 2/3 through as the “easier” matters are dealt with re: policies, etc.
    2. Follow up: Is there a proposed deadline for ending negotiations
      1. No.
  3. Q: Re: Online course caps – are they proposing course caps will just change when the contract goes into effect?
    1. A: Probably, but we are emphasizing the need to use curriculum committee procedures for changing course caps.
    2. Follow up: Member wants to be sure there is some control over course caps because adjusting to different class sizes is a larger undertaking than those who don’t do it might expect. Needs to be consistency.
  4. Q: Input on DE 201 – based on a rubric developed by SUNY system to evaluate how a course meets certain expectations. A lot of work for the instructors (Cindy Renner & Tanya Letourneau) – they look through the course to see if it fits the rubric. Not really a training, but an evaluation of whether it meets a standard. They provide resources for areas a course is below standard, but any training is self-driven. “It might not be so bad.”
    1. A: Our concern is around academic freedom – how will our course information be used once it’s submitted to this course (ostensibly to admin).
    2. Follow up: Another member confirms that this is not a “training” but an evaluation of standards. If their goal is training, then it needs to be adjusted, or even just acknowledgement that they’re evaluating. Would like actual training to improve courses.
  5. Q: How do you feel it’s going?
    1. A: Tense, cautiously optimistic. Outside of 2:1, not request for increased workload. They seemed accepting that we weren’t willing to talk about it. We’re working to set up structures to protect our membership in general – admin side may be personalizing some things despite that not being our intent.
    2. That being said, we haven’t gotten to the details of difficult topics like wages and health care. Stay tuned.
  6. Q: Any talk about qualifications to be on P&T? A lot of people aren’t and will never be TT and will not sit on that committee.
    1. There has been talk but nothing specific to report. Our goal is to keep tenure requirement in place as leverage to build more tenure lines. Their openness to this is unclear.
  7. Q: Any feedback from them on our proposals? Any flat out “no”s?
    1. A: A lot of resistance to expanding language, unnecessary personalization of some of our asks. Not clear why they’re taking things this way.
    2. No interest in skipping graduation or course release for LMS
  8. Q: Need for resources to help with advising – some departments have a large number – don’t tell us to do it better without help.
    1. We are aware of this and making it part of the conversation
  9. Q: Can we see a copy of the drafts?
    1. A: Yes, we are just making sure it’s in a form that is appropriate and legal to share broadly. Stay tuned.
      1. Update: these were emailed to personal addresses on 22 March by Ed Sambriski (esambris@gmail.com) if you didn’t get a copy, reach out to Ed via gmail to be added to the list.
  10. Please reach out to us with other questions – come chat, email, semaphore, whatever you like.

Meeting adjourned at 5:19 PM.