This post is very EMU-centric– not to say that anyone at EMU will be interested either!– and about my thoughts on the EMU-AAUP’s negotiated “collective bargaining agreement” or CBA or “contract” for 2027 to 2029. I don’t know how much of the details are public because faculty got this information from a website that required a password. I’m voting for this contract because I think that this is the best deal we’re going to get under the circumstances, and because the most contentious issue the union agreed to, which is replacing the faculty senate with a TBA “university senate,” is not something I’m willing to go on strike over.
So, here’s my take, based on conversations, the documents the union shared with faculty, and the contentious Zoom session where the negotiating team tried to explain things:
I think it’s fair to say that the main thing driving the administration’s position is that the EMU is broke. EMU’s revenues are almost entirely based on tuition, so falling enrollment has continued to hit the institution hard. The union estimated that the decline in enrollment represented about a $2.8 million decline in revenue in the 2024-25 fiscal year, and the current estimated decline in enrollments will probably add up to another $5.89 million decline. The state appropriations fell in 2024-25 from $188.4 million to $100.7 million. Operating expenses have gone up (we all have experienced the costs of everything going up), the university is paying more in interest to cover it’s debts, and EMU ended the 2025 fiscal year with $6.1 million few dollars in cash holdings. So yeah, the finances ain’t good.
Most of the basic provisions of the contract– the things that define things like faculty work, tenure, and various policies about rules of work stuff– seem about the same. There’s a sliding scale for modest salary increases where everyone gets some money and a percentage based on income. So added altogether, my base pay will go up around 7.6% over the next three years, while someone at the lower end of the starting salary scale will go up 9.4%. That’s definitely a better deal than in a number of past contracts where the union negotiated an across the board percentage increase, which always meant that faculty making more money got a better deal. Not coincidentally, a lot of the past leadership in those days who helped negotiate those contracts were amongst the highest paid faculty at EMU. So I think the sliding scale to help people on the lower end of the pay spectrum has been a good thing, and the union has negotiated like this for the last couple of contracts.
Health care is going to cost more, but of course that’s true everywhere and beyond EMU’s control in so many different ways. But as far as I can tell, I can get the same insurance I get now for a bit more money. Hopefully, this insurance will continue to cover Zepbound, but time will tell.
There are some other things that were negotiated that streamline the grievance process and that reform the layoff and recall process so that the administration can’t get rid of faculty even if they eliminate the programs those faculty teach in. There’s a new appendix about AI that empowers faculty to make all of the decisions on using it or not. Among other things, the contract language specifically says that the administration can’t force faculty to use AI in ways they don’t want to, the administration can’t use AI (at least alone) to make hiring/firing decisions, they can’t replace faculty with AI, stuff like that. It also says faculty can’t use AI alone to assess/grade student work.
The number of sabbaticals and faculty research leaves were reduced, but modestly and in ways that probably don’t make much difference. For example, while the union did agree to reduce the number of faculty research fellowships from 55 to 35, the committee that decides FRFs (which is mostly faculty) typically only gives out around 35 of these awards anyway.
There’s also a faculty buyout, the ending of phased retirement, and a 10 year moratorium on future faculty buyouts. I’ve gone deep enough into the weeds as it is, but basically, I think the buyout is a pretty good deal for anyone who is old enough/can afford to retire, or anyone who is in their 30s or 40s contemplating leaving academia. I think it’s a shame they are getting rid of the phased retirement (at least for now), but the whole “no buyouts for 10 years” thing doesn’t mean anything. If the administration decides that another buyout is necessary to reduce costs, they’ll do it and they will do it within the next ten years.
So, on the whole, not any real gains and kind of modest loses, which, given the conditions on the ground right now at EMU, is probably about as good as it gets. If our current shiny and new president is able to turn things around and increase enrollments, I am sure the union will return to the bargaining table in 2029 and ask for more, but we’ll see.
Where things get most contentious is around shared governance and the replacement of faculty senate.
One of the things I heard first-hand from people on the negotiating team and that was also explained during this Zoom meeting the other night was that when negotiations got underway and both sides were listing their priorities, President Kelly and his interim provost, David Schecter, put reforming faculty input and the faculty senate as a high priority. I think it’s fair to say that the negotiating team was surprised by this– I would be too– and apparently, it was one of the last things that got settled as the deadline approached.
It sounds like the administration’s opening proposal was to get rid of faculty senate and replace it with faculty appointed by the administration, and to also eliminate college advisory committees, which I’ll get to in a moment. What the EMU-AAUP settled on was the continuation of CACs, but now there will be a “University Senate.” The details are TBA, but it will have 20 members, 12 of which will be faculty, and it will include representation from other “stakeholders” (I hate that word, but it’s the best I got). Staff are named in what I’m seeing from the union, but I think this might also include non-tenure-track faculty as well.
Now, my initial (knee-jerk) reaction was “what, wait: we can’t get rid of faculty senate, can we?” But then I thought about it a bit more, and, well, we can, and maybe we should.
Let me take a step back for the 30,000 foot view on how faculty governance and input works at EMU, at least in my experience. We have/had faculty senate and CACs and other bodies designed to be part of the governance process forever. I have been on both CAC and faculty senate. I was on faculty senate twenty years ago (I believe it was called “faculty council” back then), I was on CAC for the first time in (and briefly) in 2004, and I am currently on CAC for my department (so College of Arts and Sciences).
I realize that I have many colleagues who have devoted significant chunks of their careers to these bodies, and sure, I think both of these committees have had some accomplishments. But for me, these two bodies both exhibit two very common problems with input bodies like this in academia: “input theater” and “mission creep.”
The main purpose of CAC (IMO) is to review and approve curricular decisions: that is, when a department/program proposes a new course or a new major (or changes to existing courses and majors), CAC reviews it before it moves on to the last stages of approval in the Provost’s office. When I was on CAC the first time way way back when, that was literally all we did. Sometimes the twice a month meetings would be cancelled or would only last 20 minutes because once we were done reviewing these proposals, we were done.
When I was on faculty council way-back when, the meetings were fairly formal, frequent, quite a bit longer, and they often felt ceremonial. We did some real work back then– I recall a lot of time going over general education reforms, for example– but most of those meetings were presentations by administrators, and faculty were allowed to voice their approval or dissent, but the faculty senate’s actions rarely had any real consequences. That’s what I mean by “input theater:” it’s designed to give some folks the impression of having input and influence, but it’s not real.
Twenty-some-odd years after my first experience, the CAC has now leaned heavily into its advisory role. I think this has happened partly because of some deans wanting more advice/input from faculty, and also because of some of the faculty on CAC insisting on offering more advice and input on lots of things. So while most of CAC still revolves around curriculum, these meetings (never less than 90 minutes) now are addressing topics like the reorganization of the college, gen ed reform, graduate student appointments, release time, etc. Mind you, this is all advisory: the dean doesn’t have to (and frequently does not) follow the CAC’s advice. So here, CAC is a bit of input theater (though I think the curriculum part is still very real), but also a lot of mission creep.
It’s been more than a minute since I’ve been involved with faculty senate, but I must say I have a difficult time identifying a specific action that body has taken in the last 20 years that has had tangible results for me. As one of my colleagues pointed out, the faculty senate had a no-confidence vote against the former and now retired president, Jim Smith, a few years ago. While a majority of faculy senate voted no-confidence, it was not a decisive majority, and what was the result? The EMU Board of Regents extended Smith’s contract and gave him a raise.
The bottom line is that at EMU, shared governance and faculty input take place through the union. It’s the faculty union that negotiates the key rules for faculty work and grievances, and because of that, it has much more power than these other bodies. The administration ignores the input from the faculty senate and the CACs all the time; if they try to ignore the union, they risk being taken to court or pushing the faculty into a strike.
Anyway, to return from 30,000 feet and the matter at hand: my first reaction to a proposal to eliminate faculty senate was “absolutely not.” But as I started thinking about it, I came around to the idea that maybe a university-wide senate that includes staff, NTT, etc. might not be such a bad idea. For one thing, it’s perhaps best to think of this not as faculty senate being replaced; rather, this body is being expanded to include folks who are not faculty. And it is still going to be a body where faculty still retain a clear majority.
The other thing is a university-wide committee made up of more than faculty might have a stronger influence on input to the administration and to the Board of Regents. Let’s take the example of a no-confidence vote in the president (which definitely could happen if things don’t improve around here). A faculty exclusive group is a lot easier for the administration, the BoR, and the general public to dismiss because, you know, faculty tend to see themselves as “special”. But if a university-wide body had a decisive vote of no-confidence, I think that might be harder for the administration and the BoR to ignore.
I would prefer it if EMU kept the faculty senate in place, though with some basic and common-sense reforms. Term limits immediately come to mind. But I also do not think that changing the faculty senate into a university senate is a reason to reject the contract and to potentially go on strike. At that Zoom meeting, Matt Kirkpatrick (who is president of the union right now) explained that if we turn this contract down, negotiations start all over.
Do you think there’s any chance that this will result in a better deal? I don’t.
So again, I’m voting for this contract. It’s not everything we might have wanted, but as I posted in the Zoom chat of that meeting the other day, there’s no way I’m going to go on strike or risk an even worse renegotiated contract for keeping the faculty senate as it is.