What to do when grades come due? CUCFA Virtual Town Hall, Fri 7/7 @ noon

Many UCLA faculty are teaching courses with TAs who are on strike, and therefore striking TAs may not be grading final assignments and exams. What does this mean for us as faculty? What does it mean for our undergraduates, their courses, and their final grades?

The UCLA Faculty Association invites all UCLA faculty to participate in a Virtual Town Hall Meeting this Friday, June 7 from 12-1PM hosted by CUCFA (Council of UC Faculty Associations). This meeting is intended to be an opportunity for faculty to think through and share the policies that have been devised by other faculty at various UC campuses.

To make the best use of the time during the session, UCLA-FA will be collecting your questions, and forwarding them to CUCFA. Please fill out this form in advance with any questions or concerns you may have:

https://forms.gle/VuY2LsyWnzjgB8rA6

You will receive a Zoom link to the Town Hall after submitting the form.

Faculty Association members make resources like this possible.
Join UCLA-FA to make sure we can continue to offer these opportunities.

UCLA-FA files Unfair Labor Practices charge against UC

LOS ANGELES, CA (June 5, 2024) – On June 3rd, the UCLA Faculty Association (UCLAFA) filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against the University of California (UC) to vindicate faculty rights to protest, organize, and exercise academic freedom. The ULP charges the UC for UCLA’s failure to uphold, and their choice to interfere with, faculty’s legally protected rights during and after the recent UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment. This is the fourth organization to file a ULP against the UC in the wake of its actions at UCLA in late April and early May, following charges by UAW, UC-AFT and AFSCME.

The UCLAFA is a voluntary, dues-supported employee organization that represents UCLA faculty on employment and academic freedom issues. It is independent of the University and complementary to the Academic Senate, which engages in shared governance on academic matters. In the ULP charge filed on June 3, UCLAFA details two primary ways in which UCLA interfered with its members’ rights under the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEERA).

First, UCLA engaged in interference and discrimination by: 1) allowing anti-Palestinian counter-protesters to assault both UCLAFA members and other faculty, alongside our students, and 2) calling on law enforcement to forcibly remove and arrest them between April 30 and May 1. In doing so, UCLA interfered with faculty’s protected right to advocate and organize regarding matters that impact their workplace– including the safety of students, graduate workers, faculty colleagues, and staff who are exercising their right to protest.

Like our students, faculty were brutalized and arrested, in violation of the UC’s own policies of de-escalation and minimal police response to protests. UCLA’s conduct discourages Faculty members from engaging in strikes, pickets, and other activity protected by HEERA, for fear of further violent repression at the University’s behest. This has been further underscored by UC’s newly announced policy of pursuing its own internal discipline against anyone the UC itself chose to have arrested or cited.

Second, UCLA unlawfully interfered with faculty members’ exercise of their protected rights, including the right to academic freedom, by adopting overbroad rules in the aftermath of the attacks and police sweep. On May 16, for example, the university issued an overbroad gag rule prohibiting faculty from discussing the UAW strike or any union-related matter with any employee or student, essentially banning any possibility of engaging these important events as a “teaching moment,” or allowing faculty to provide emotional or intellectual support to struggling students. It also overreached by closing campus activities and staffing the university with dozens of security guards between May 6 and May 10. In doing so, UCLA interfered with employee rights and chilled academic freedom, faculty association, and the right to protest university policies.

The University should be ordered to cease and desist from its unlawful conduct, including interfering with employee rights, discriminating against employees, and arresting faculty for engaging in protected activity. The University should also be ordered to rescind its unlawful rules and policies, and refrain from disciplining or taking any other adverse action against UCLAFA members; any discipline underway should be rescinded and removed from faculty personnel files. The Faculty Association also urges the withdrawal of ongoing and future disciplinary actions against all members of the UCLA Community, including students and staff.

Faculty association executive committee member Anna Markowitz notes, “This ULP is faculty speaking out. What the UC did violated our students’ rights, and it violated ours in tandem. There is no world in which faculty can speak freely if our students cannot do the same. We see that, and we stand in solidarity with UAW, AFT, and AFSCME in demanding redress for the wrong decisions that UC made.”

Meet us on Wednesday, Jun 5 at 3pm at Murphy Hall for a discussion of our ULP charge, held in conjunction with a UAW 4811 rally.

Help defend faculty rights by joining the UCLA Faculty Association.

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The full text of the ULP charge can be found below. For press inquiries, contact our Communications Committee at comms@uclafa.org.

2024.0603-filed-UCLA-FA-ULP Download

Sign On to the Faculty Association Statement Regarding Possible Strike by UAW 2865, UAW 5810 and SRY-UAW

Please consider signing on to the Faculty Association Statement Regarding Possible Strike by UAW 2865, UAW 5810 and SRY-UAW:

Graduate students, postdocs, and other academic student employees are essential to the teaching and research mission of the University of California, especially as undergraduate enrollments rise. Given the escalating costs of living in California, 48,000 people in the UC system represented by three unions–UAW 2865, UAW 5810, and SRU-UAW–are coordinating their fight for living wages, affordable UC housing, greater support for working parents, sustainable transit benefits, equity for international scholars, and other improvements that would strengthen teaching and research across the University of California. A full list of their demands is available at fairucnow.org.

Negotiations for new contracts with the University of California have not been going well. The UAW has filed more than twenty Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) charges against the University of California, such as failing to respond to requests for basic information and unilaterally making changes to working conditions. The California Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) has issued complaints against the university in at least three of those ULPs.

Now, all three unions that represent teaching assistants, tutors, readers, student researchers, postdocs, and academic researchers are voting on whether to strike in response to these ULPs. A strike authorization vote is taking place between October 26 and November 2; if approved, the UAW may call an open-ended strike to begin as soon as November 14.

The Council of UC Faculty Associations calls on the University of California to cease its unlawful behavior, resume good faith negotiations, and settle fair contracts with the unions. We support fair wages and working conditions for academic workers and hope a strike can be avoided. If not, we encourage all Senate faculty to support our fellow academic workers. We remind you of the power of Senate faculty solidarity last year in the UC-AFT lecturers union’s successful campaign for a substantive new contract that inspired academic workers around the country.

Sign on here to show your support for the union efforts and to urge President Drake to settle fair contracts immediately to avoid a devastating strike.

Should UCOP fail to engage in negotiations, The Council of UC Faculty Associations will offer guidelines on faculty rights in the event of a union-sanctioned strike along the lines of those we provided in the face of a potential UC-AFT strike in fall 2021. While the negotiations are ongoing, and before voting concludes, the UAW says faculty can support the student workers in the following ways:

Contact University leadership (Chancellor, UCOP, etc.) and demand that they bargain in good faith (template letter available here)
Donate to the hardship fund: https://givebutter.com/uc-uaw
Discuss with undergraduate students the critical role that academic workers play in the everyday functions of the university

Other suggestions for supportive actions can be found here.

Learn More About Your AFT Benefits

The AAUP’s recent affiliation with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) means that together, they now represent more US higher education workers than any other union. The affiliation also means that in addition to being an AAUP member, UCLA-FA members that choose to add AAUP membership are now AFT members as well, with access to a number of new resources and benefits, including counseling, traveling, educational, and insurance programs.

The AAUP will be hosting a webinar on October 18 at 4 pm ET/1 pm PT where staff from the AFT membership team will walk members through the benefit program. Register here.

AFT member cards are being sent out this fall to home addresses. If you do not have a home address on file, you’ll be asked to supply it in the coming weeks. If you have a question about your AFT membership, please email aftplus@aft.org.

To read more about the affiliation, visit our website. We hope you can attend the webinar!

2022 Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors

The AAUP’s annual Bulletin collects in one place the reports, policy statements, and official AAUP business materials of an academic year—in this case, 2021–22. Most of these documents have already been published on the AAUP website or in Academe, and the parenthetical dates after their titles refer to date of original publication. This year’s Bulletin features a special report on governance, academic freedom, and institutional racism in the UNC system; two academic freedom and tenure investigative reports; a statement on legislative threats to academic freedom; and findings from the 2021–22 Faculty Compensation Survey and the 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices.

Find out where you stand as a professor in academia. Read the Bulletin!

Preventing Teaching Faculty from becoming Second Class Citizens

An article in today’s Academe Blog by Kris Boudreau and Mark Richman discusses research from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Becky Supiano about how creating a “teaching track” of faculty can elevate instruction and instruction focussed faculty, but also risks “cementing their second-class citizenship.” The article examines a new tenure track for teaching faculty program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “The tenure track institutionalizes the university’s respect for [teaching faculty] well beyond providing a set of formal academic titles and adds the critical component of guaranteed academic freedom that is difficult to secure with anything less than tenure… By extending, supporting, and protecting exemplary teaching throughout the institution, it finally places teaching faculty and traditional tenured and tenure-track faculty on equally solid footing.”

Education Gag Orders Attack Academic Freedom

Academe Blog has posted an article by Jennifer Ruth that describes how red state anti-Critical Race Theory laws are both an impingement of freedom of speech — and so will be challenged on First Amendment grounds — but also are direct attacks on academic freedom. “Despite all its old Cold War fear mongering and all its talk of freedom, the Republican Party now harbors a sizable contingent of politicians who are increasingly willing to use authoritarian tactics to get what they want. The legislative bills banning so-called divisive concepts are the biggest assault on academic freedom this country has ever faced.”

Covid-19 Accelerated the Erosion of Academic Governance

The Chronicle of Higher Education has coverage of a recent AAUP report about the surge in unilateral decision-making by governing boards and administrations during the Covid-19 era. The full AAUP report is available online and states: “The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the most serious challenges to academic governance in the last fifty years.” And that faculty were forced to choose between participating “in ad hoc governance processes they knew to be flawed in the hope of shaping their outcomes or refusing on principle to participate at all, thereby allowing administrators and board members to move forward without them.”

Report from the National AAUP Convention

Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA, of which UCLA-FA is the UCLA chapter) President Constance Penley attended the historic National AAUP convention on June 16-18 in Arlington, VA, as the CUCFA delegate, which meant that she had an opportunity to vote on the proposed alliance between the AAUP and the AFT (AFL-CIO) and to fill six open AAUP Council seats. Read her report from the Convention at the CUCFA website.

New 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices

Tenure practices vary among institutions, however systematic studies of these practices are rare. The 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices is the first survey of its kind since 2004. It “offers a snapshot of prevailing tenure practices and policies at four-year institutions with tenure systems. Among the findings, the survey found that tenure is highly prevalent throughout US higher education, with 87 percent of four-year institutions that have a Carnegie Classification of bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral institution reporting having a tenure system.” Available online.