Although the push is at least four years in the making, unionization at OU has long been a topic of debate. A clear pattern appears in the OU archives where articles from The Post document a fight for unionization dating back to Oct. 7, 1961. In the article, custodian Paul Robinson expressed discontent with the University’s attitude toward unionizing. He said that although university officials listened to his complaints, they did not do much beyond that.

In an editorial from 1976 titled, “An act of desperation,” The Post’s editorial board writes that although the university may not currently be ready for unionization, “in a few years’ time, the university may be ready to adopt faculty unionization from a position of strength.”

Now, 48 years and many articles about raises, working conditions and unions later, the position of strength is seemingly nowhere to be found.

March 5 marked the first demonstration by the United Academics of Ohio University, or UAOU, with a “Day of Action.” The event, attended by over 150 faculty members, ended with UAOU submitting a letter to the Office of the President requesting that Ohio University President Lori Stweat Gonzalez respect its wishes to organize.

The letter stated that most full-time employees had endorsed UAOU as their collective bargaining representative and asked that the university remain neutral until an election could be held. UAOU also requested that the university respond to the request by March 8. Soon after, the university changed its anticipated response date to March 26, according to a previous Post report.

“The advocacy chapter has been here for a number of years, but that experience of layoffs, I think, was really galvanizing for people,... There was really a sense of urgency, that we really had to do something, that the university had all this power, and we had no way to push back effectively.”-John O’Keefe

The university declined UAOU’s request to remain neutral throughout the process. OU administration requested one 14-day extension, changing the deadline to April 9, and then a 30-day extension, setting the date back to May 9.

Around 50 faculty members gathered again to show their solidarity again at Scripps Amphitheater April 10.

John O’Keefe, an associate professor of history and president of OU’s American Association of University Professors chapter, or OU-AAUP, said the COVID-19 layoffs were a catalyst to the current push for a union.

“The advocacy chapter has been here for a number of years, but that experience of layoffs, I think, was really galvanizing for people,” O’Keefe said. “There was really a sense of urgency, that we really had to do something, that the university had all this power, and we had no way to push back effectively.”

This sense of urgency was felt throughout OU faculty, but certain departments felt the layoffs more than others. Kyle Butler, associate professor of instruction in the Ohio Program of Intensive English, or OPIE, and vice president of OU-AAUP, said that OPIE, in particular, was hit hard.

“In OPIE, we had 10 faculty in 2020 and seven of them were laid off,” he said. “It was a huge blow.”

Regardless of the sense of betrayal widely felt among staff, this blow was a great factor in spurring Butler’s involvement with AAUP. He said he began attending support group meetings through the AAUP for instructional faculty.

“What I found there was that a lot of my feelings of frustration with the way things were going and the way decisions were being made at the university were not unique to me or my program, and I really found a sense of comradery there,” Butler said.

Along with frustration with OU’s handling of the 2020 layoffs, OU faculty is grappling with the administration’s handling of the Supreme Court decision in the Harvard v. Students for Fair Admissions case.

The decision, which ruled that race-based affirmative action programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, magnified the pressure created by the COVID-19 layoffs.

Based on Ohio Attorney General David Yost’s interpretation of the decision, the university instructed faculty not to award diversity scholarships in the 2024-25 school year. Professors have been informed that if they do award said scholarships, they will be held personally liable for any lawsuits relevant to the ruling. Essentially, the school has told professors they are on their own.

However, Executive Director of the Ohio Conference of the AAUP, Sara Kilpatrick, said that if OU unionized, these issues could be addressed in their collective bargaining agreements.

“I know that there are concerns that there might be things that faculty may participate in that they may be held personally liable for, and it's such a gray area,” Kilpatrick said. “Because this is all just coming to fruition really over the last several months, we haven’t seen how this might play out yet.”

Currently, Butler said there is not much that the advocacy chapter can do beyond making statements about issues including the SCOTUS decision and contacting the provost and President Gonzalez.

“What we currently have is our advocacy chapter,” he said. “We are affiliated with AAUP, but it's really an organization that is independent of the university. We have a charter with AAUP national and they recognize us as an official advocacy chapter, but we don’t have any sort of official recognition from Ohio University or the state of Ohio for the advocacy chapter.”

In the wake of the SCOTUS decision, O’Keefe said he sees yet another threat to professors who share this vision of building a more egalitarian society in which a more diverse group of people have the opportunities that college provides.

“We’ve had faculty who’s been really fiercely advocating for (the university to push back against the decision), and we want to push back against the administration’s willingness to give into this directive because that’s not the only interpretation of the law,” he said.

By unionizing, professors would not only stand up to the administration for better benefits and more job security in lieu of what happened in 2020, but also participate in an act of unity.

O’Keefe said he wanted to make sure that the university knows just how much support exists for a union among faculty, as a supermajority of faculty on campus are in favor of unionization. “We’re proud to advocate,” he said. “We’re willing to do so very publicly, and we have strength in numbers.”

Even if the university does accept the unionization, it will likely be on its own terms. When Miami University faculty unionized, the university accepted but left librarian out of the union deal entirely. While the Miami librarians eventually won the ability to unionize, it made the process much more difficult.

Butler said this bump in the road to unionization delayed total unionization for eight months.

Although the AAUP only unionizes faculty or professors, Kilpatrick said oftentimes other groups of workers, such as librarians, communication workers and service employees, form their own staff unions.

“For faculty in a collective bargaining agreement, (they are) talking about things like shared governance, academic freedom, tenure, whereas the terms and conditions you’re talking about with staff are a lot different,” she said.

However, the decision does not end with the workers, as Butler said the university may work to further break up the bargaining unit. If that happens, Kilpatrick said further state powers will weigh in.

“Sometimes this comes down to how the state board rules on these kinds of things because we do have librarians and other faculty unions around the state, so there is precedent for that,” Kilpatrick said. “A lot of this comes down to (whether) the university administration will object to the proposed composition of the bargaining unit, the State Employment Relations Board will rule on that, and then you just have to go from there.”

She added that if the university objects to the composition of the bargaining unit, the process may be dragged out even longer.

“Instead, institutions will try to fight the composition of the bargaining unit and delay, delay, delay,... What this ultimately means is that they are spending public dollars and student dollars to fight the union. And they could be spending that money on much more worthwhile objectives.”-Sara Kilpatrick

OU stated that the university is aware of the push to unionize but declined to make any further comment on the situation.

“The University is in receipt of formal notice of UAOU's filing with the Ohio State Employment Relations Board; however, since this is a complicated process with multiple steps, it would be premature to comment further at this time,” Samantha Pelham, a university spokesperson wrote in an email.

Kilpatrick said the OU administration could end this now and give the OK to the bargaining unit, allowing an election to be held to determine whether the faculty could have a union. She added the longer this goes on, the more public funding and student tuition are funneled into suppressing the union.

“Instead, institutions will try to fight the composition of the bargaining unit and delay, delay, delay,” she said. “What this ultimately means is that they are spending public dollars and student dollars to fight the union. And they could be spending that money on much more worthwhile objectives.”

In fact, the university has hired lawyer Daniel J. Guttman of the Columbus-based BarkerHostetler law firm. Communications professor Matthew deTar said that although the university has yet to make an official statement, the law firm only works with the employer side of labor work and has a history of fighting unionization efforts at the state level in Ohio.

“The current strategy is to delay any decision on the election,” deTar said. “They have gotten extensions from the State Employee Relations Board twice now to push their own deadline past when grades are due so faculty are not on campus so the faculty are not around to respond and the more that they are able to delay, the longer this could happen.”

Regardless, Butler said he remains impressed by the faculty’s unity, specifically between tenured-track and instructional-track faculty. He said that although there can be tension between the two, it did not exist in this space.

“I didn’t feel like there was a division within the campaign between the tenure track and the instructional faculty,” Butler said. “Everything felt very collegial, very egalitarian.”

Although rumblings about unionizing have long echoed throughout Hocking Hills, Kilpatrick is optimistic that this time, a union will be born because of how faculty members have gone about unionizing “the right way” this time around.

“They had one-on-one conversations with faculty members,” she said. “They made sure that they had sufficient support before going public and announcing their intentions to unionize, so they have very strong support, and we feel really good that they will win their election.”

Both Butler and O’Keefe relayed the importance of one-on-one conversations in this process and emphasized the importance of a genuine grassroots effort between faculty members.

Journalism Professor Bill Reader, who joined OU’s faculty in 2002, also said in an email statement that past unionization efforts focused on keeping faculty workloads reasonable and protecting the little shared governance left at OU.

“We are very passionate about our mission, and one of the things that we say very often is that faculty working conditions are student learning conditions,... So we really want to be able to have class sizes where we can get to know our students a little bit better and look out for them and ensure they get the education that they deserve.”-John O’Keefe

He said over the years, there have been several presidents, provosts and deans who would impose top-down decrees that undermine faculty rights.

“The mid-pandemic layoffs, the failed ‘One OHIO’ initiative, and recent top-down edicts to remove academic advising from faculty duties are just three such examples,” Reader said in an email. “Another was the sneaky and obsequious move by Cutler Hall to defund diversity scholarships this past semester based on a flimsy and mean-spirited overreach by the state attorney general.”

No matter how the university responds, OU will have to accept the consequences of its actions, whether it be learning how to work with a union or the backlash that would follow if unionization was blocked.

“We are very passionate about our mission, and one of the things that we say very often is that faculty working conditions are student learning conditions,” O’Keefe said. “So we really want to be able to have class sizes where we can get to know our students a little bit better and look out for them and ensure they get the education that they deserve.”

Collective bargaining is something that public employees are entitled to under Ohio Revised Code 4117. Kilpatrick said the idea behind a union is that there is strength in numbers in terms of the employees coming together and advocating for themselves.

Still, she said the state of Ohio’s hostile attitude toward higher education runs deep and that OU’s unionization now does not mean it will be safe later. She said those concerned with professors’ right to unionize should remain vigilant, specifically with Ohio Senate Bill 83 and how university administration will react to it.

“(Ohio Senate Bill 83) is a bill that tries to gut collective bargaining rights for college and university faculty,” she said. “So these are things that are happening that could potentially have an impact on our unions and how collective bargaining agreements get negotiated and what can be negotiated.”

Kilpatrick said there are mixed reactions from administrations in favor of some parts of the bill, including the anti-collective bargaining aspects of the bill, but not in favor of other parts.

The implications of Senate Bill 83 and how it has been received by university administrations throughout the state suggest something much bigger stewing in the state’s hostility toward the right of higher education workers to unionize. Although the fight for collective bargaining at OU has been brewing for decades, it may only be one battle in a much larger war.