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Youngstown State Faculty Union Calls a Strike, Then Calls It Off

August 25, 2011, 9:50 pm

[This item has been updated since the original post.] Youngstown State University’s faculty union has rejected the administration’s final contract offer and said in a news release Thursday evening that professors would be on the picket lines Friday morning. Hours later, however, the union issued another statement saying the faculty had called off the strike, so classes could begin on time Monday.

The union, the Youngstown State University Chapter of the Ohio Education Association, and university administrators have been unable to reach agreement on a new contract. Among the sticking points are health-insurance contributions. The union says that faculty members have shown their willingness to sacrifice by agreeing to a fact-finder’s report, but that the university wants further concessions that would cost professors $5,000 a year, on average. The university says its proposal would result in an overall reduction in base take-home pay of less than $1,000 a year.

For students, when classes begin is more than an issue of when to show up. The university has held off distributing their financial aid until the starting date is certain. In a letter to students on Thursday, the university’s president, Cynthia E. Anderson, said that the university had to do so, under instructions from the U.S. Department of Education.

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  • sherbygirl

    I think one of the large, unexamined questions, is how we choose to share and “publish” that research. Are there better, more sustainable ways for academics, particularly in the humanities to share their research and, indeed, allow the findings to gain the recognition they deserve? The MLA has recently started a new Office of Scholarly Communications. (http://www.mla.org/new_from_mla/news_summary#t303) and I think that it is an interesting parallel debate that is going on in regards to our output as academics and researchers.

  • eberg

    It seems this and Mexal’s piece equate literary with academic research, attributing issues that afflict the former to the latter.  How about the editors identifying the applicable fields to which narrow comments apply and require that pieces be titled appropriately?

  • markbauerlein

    Check out the second link in the article, eberg, for an application of the points to scientific research.

  • mbelvadi

    Let me add one more point to your excellent list: the cost to our institutions (through library budgets) of (1) selecting what among all that is published should be bought and not bought, (2) actually paying for it, and (3) managing/warehousing/providing digital access support to it.  Whether it’s digital or print, there are ongoing, not just “capital”, costs to maintaining ownership/access to every item. I lol at the idea of citing a 19th century librarian – that person had no idea what it would be like to be under the firehose that librarians are under today in terms of collection decision making and budget management. One might as well cite a 19th century policeman about urban traffic management.

  • markbauerlein

    Sorry, eberg, it’s the third link, to this:

    http://chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Stop-the-Avalanche-of/65890/

  • jeangoodwin

    Isn’t your last point that we are reading too little, rather than that we’re writing too much?  Of course, if we read more, we might not have time to write as much;  but that wouldn’t be the aim.

  • midevilprof

    I think the point is that there’s too much to read, especially for those of us whose time is spent mostly teaching and grading.  Speaking from personal experience, I can say that I do not have as much time as I would like to read articles in journals I subscribe to and books I have purchased, because I’m busy tracking down articles and books for research.  And then, there’s just no way to get every book and article that could be of value to the research, because there are so many out there.  I’ve spent years tracking down items, getting citations, placing orders, reading and taking notes… now I’m at the point where I just have to finish my writing, and forget about some of the things that are out there and perhaps relevant, even the ones I know are out there but don’t have the time to acquire and read.

    Maybe I do research the wrong way or too slowly, reading too much of the article or book in hand.  But the fact that so much published scholarship exists makes it very difficult/impossible to keep up with everything just for a focused study, not even to mention the more general field.  I’d prefer it if scholars would slow down, produce fewer but better works, and allow each other to catch up.  We’d only need to convince those in charge of tenure, promotion, and other forms of evaluation that this is the way to go.

  • electronicmuse

    Yes, quantiy is the enemy of quality. And, while we’re dealing with aphorisms, there is this one:

    “Bad books drive good books out of the marketplace.”

  • gammapoint

    I think there is some truth to the argument that the amount of stuff that is published is overwhelming. But is that really due to a change in publishing policy or might it also have to do with increased research activity abroad? For example, physicists in China publish a lot, some of it good and some of it very, very bad. This additional literature was probably not present 30 years ago. With the number of researchers likely increasing worldwide (and the access to their work becoming easier), if it’s hard for you to keep up with all the literature you’d like, it may be a sign that you’re overextending yourself and should specialize more in a single area. 

    Also, there are many benefits to writing up research that have nothing to do with anyone reading it. Typically, when I am forced to sit down and write something up intelligently, it focuses what I did, highlights any holes in the logic, and helps me think of what the next important step to the research might be. This probably means that my next work will be of higher quality than it would be had I not had to sit down and reflect upon it. 

  • willynilly

    I suppose this essay finally answers a question I have been asking you for a very long time.  That question was, “Why don’t you ever share with your readers the results of the research you conduct with your students to determine their degree of learning, as well as to document the effectiveness of the teaching innovations you use in your teaching methodology”?  So now I have my answer.  You don’t do any research, likely because of all the impediments you mentioned above, which you conveniently allow to get in your way.

  • markbauerlein

    I can’t reply for the sciences, gammapoint, but in my field of literary studies (according to the Modern Language Association), the output demands made on assistant and associate professors for tenure and promotion keep going up.  I’ve often made a policy recommendation: limit the number of pages a candidate may submit for promotion.  That way, the judgment will be one of quality, not quantity.  People will publish less, but make sure that the corpus meets high standards.

  • fisherk

    As a non-academic I also agree with these points. I particularly agree with the diagnosis that academics need an environment in which they can afford to slow down the frequency of output in order to improve the quality of their intellectual products.  In my view it is damaging the reputation of academics and academia. 

    There is nothing more off-putting about academia than becoming aware of how much trivia and, frankly, tripe is written by academics, including some of those with flourishing academic careers.  For me, it has had the effect that attaining a PhD or being employed as an academic now no longer signifies automatically a distinction of intellectual rigour or scholarship, certainly not innovative thought. This is based on my knowledge only of English and Social Science disciplines.  It includes noticing that the kinds of academics who appear to be most readily rewarded these days are the factory production-line academics – those who are able to stomach writing 10 articles with the same half developed idea or piece of research or churn out endless book-lites.

  • manoflamancha

    In the begining, I was in the “quality counts most” camp. Then, I meet an old-timer at a conference, and discussed my predicament, namely, publish little because the quality as I perceived it was not up to snuff. He said: “Let the journal editors decide the quality issue. Just remember, Deans can’t read, but they can count!”

    Thenceforth, I published a lot, and only one in one hundred was rejected. And a curious singularity arose, a paper I did not want to publish, because it was too brief, was the most cited of all, with over 130 citations!

  • ITMaker

    Probably a wise move considering repeal of the state’s elimination of state employee collective bargaining is on the ballot in November.

  • plamya1952

    Yes, but more so because of the referendum for repeal of this item on the November ballot. The signature campaign to get it on the ballot was overwhelming, and so the collective bargaining issue is on hold.

  • 12080243

    As long as there are power hungry administrators and managers, there will be organized opposition whether they are “legal” or not.

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