Clarification appended.
Ohio University’s Student Senate passed Senate Bill 2425-08 at its meeting Feb. 12 to show its support for faculty unionization after some discussion.
The bill’s primary sponsor was Academic Affairs Commissioner Maggie Giansante, who said she wanted Senate to vote on the bill because she believes it will improve the students’ experiences at OU.
“We're here to represent the students, and in our opinion, a faculty union will just make things better,” Giansante said. “We live in a pretty hard academic time, and our students deserve the best professors possible, and that is what a union will bring for them.”
Student Senate President Dan Gordillo was the secondary sponsor for the bill and agreed that having a faculty union would improve student experiences and elevate them to voice their opinions on a faculty union.
“Essentially, we would like the faculty to know that we support them, or more accurately worded, that we support the union,” Gordillo said.
OU faculty have been in the formal process of unionizing since March 2024, John O’Keefe, an associate professor of history at OU-Chillicothe and communications director of the United Academics at Ohio University, said.
While the official process for unionization started early last year, O’Keefe said OU faculty began to collectively organize years prior during university layoffs and the pandemic in 2020.
“Many faculty kind of looked around and saw a lot of concerns about job stability and other things … in terms of pay not keeping pace with inflation … and pressure to teach large classes,” O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe said some reasons there needs to be a union include improving working conditions and competitive salaries, which will contribute to more efficient faculty recruitment, therefore improving student learning conditions.
“We really hope (the bill) helps increase the amount of professors and faculty and classes that are offered, but really just shows that we stand by them because that is what they are also asking for,” Giansante said.
Although unionization has been in the works for years, O’Keefe said following state law and pushback from the OU administration has delayed the implementation of the union.
“We've given the university opportunities to be more collaborative in this process and to work with us in a more collaborative way,” O’Keefe said. “One of the options after that call for an election was to recognize our union at that point, and university leadership opted not to do that.”
O’Keefe also said UAOU recently found that OU has launched a counter-campaign against the unionization.
“We've seen a lot of misleading information coming out from the university,” O’Keefe said. “We also encourage any faculty who have any questions about mailers or emails they've received from the university to come talk to us. We're happy to set the record straight.”
Dan Pittman, senior director of communications, said the university respects the faculty’s decision regardless of the outcome of the vote but would prefer to continue a direct relationship with the faculty.
“Ultimately, we believe our university is and will always be at its best when our OHIO faculty and our academic and administrative leadership are able to work alongside one other to plan our collective future, and that the best pathway forward is to continue our direct relationship with faculty without introducing an external third party,” Pittman wrote in an email.
By an “external third party,” Pittman means the national organizations that UAOU is affiliated with, which are the American Association of University Professors, Ohio Conference AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers.
“National union representatives may neither share our passion for the students and the region we serve nor always prioritize local faculty concerns over larger national union goals,” Pittman wrote in an email.
O’Keefe responded to this concern, saying OU’s negotiation team is made up of OU faculty.
“This is a very democratic process,” O’Keefe said. “There'll be elections for officers, faculty are going to have a voice in the shaping of the union, and our negotiating team will be consisting of faculty.”
The official ballots for faculty to decide if they would like to unionize were supposed to be mailed by the State Employee Relations Board, or SERB, on Feb. 12, but were delayed and did not get mailed until Feb. 14.
The ballots will no longer be accepted after March 4. After voting has concluded, SERB will then be able to tally the votes on March 17.
The bargaining with the university will only be able to start if the vote reaches a majority of faculty in favor of a union, O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe said a union in higher education is important for students’ experiences in recruiting and retaining top professors, especially within a Research One institution such as OU.
While the Student Senate vote was overwhelmingly in favor of supporting faculty unionization, some students voted against the bill, such as Governmental Affairs Commissioner Donald Theisen, who spoke out during the meeting in which the vote occurred.
Theisen said he thinks it is a faulty issue and Senate's only concern should be OU students.
“My main point was that it was not our place to take a stance on the issue,” Theisen wrote in an email. “Our constituents are students, not professors and the issue is more complex than we may initially see it, having tradeoffs just as any other major decision.”
Gordillo said he was glad there was a healthy debate in the Senate and the bill ultimately passed.
“At the end of the day, I respect others,” Gordillo said. “I respect people's opinions. I respect when they have the guts to tell me that they disagree with me.”
Giansante, having proposed the bill, said she was also happy to see a majority of Senate members agree with her stance in publicly supporting the OU faculty.
“I think in the end, the Senate voted and what they believed was right, and in the end, that ended up being that we support this unionization,” Giansante said.
O’Keefe said UAOU was happy to receive support from the Student Senate.
“We advise students, we teach students,” O’Keefe said. “It's a core part of what we do, and so we're really happy to see that students understand that, and that's reflected in the statement from Student Senate.”
Clarification appended: A previous version of this article stated that the State Employee Relations Board mailed the official ballots on Feb. 12 as planned. It has been updated to reflect that SERB did not mail the ballots until Feb. 14, resulting in a delay.
