Good morning,

Our faculty union, United Faculty of ISU, representing 650 tenured and tenure track faculty, has been in negotiations with your administration team for over five months. On February 28th, we gave the administrative table team a comprehensive proposal. Having gone through multiple bargaining sessions during the spring semester, our table team members have been working on bargaining every week this summer as well, devoting uncountable hours of more unpaid time to building a stronger ISU. We have made some progress, but the administration team, led by a highly paid outside lawyer (almost half a million dollars over two years!) has refused to even discuss any of our economic proposals until everything they deem “non-economic” has been settled. This means our members start ANOTHER school year feeling undervalued, overworked, and underpaid. 

We will eventually get a contract. 2023 was a banner year for higher education contracts in Illinois, wasn’t it? Yes, we will get that contract. But how demoralized are we all going to be until we get there? August is a time that is traditionally full of hope and optimism for all of us who love teaching and learning. Instead, here’s another year without a contract, a year during which ISU will go up for accreditation. Faculty are already hard at work on fall courses and continuing summer research, despite only being paid for the duration of the academic year. At the same time, we are trying to plan our finances for the upcoming year as we pay rent and mortgages, our kids’ tuitions, and manage our families’ health care costs. We’re wondering if we can afford to attend important conferences in our fields. We haven’t had a cost-of-living increase in living memory, certainly not in the last 30 years. That’s how much we are appreciated by ISU [which is sitting on $600,000,000 reserve funds]. Without a contract or even any idea of what the administration team will be proposing on economic issues, what should be a time of hope becomes yet another very stressful stage of the academic year for us.  

Just two days ago, at the end of our most recent bargaining session, lead faculty spokesperson Dr. Ashley Farmer pointed out that we now have agreements or active discussion on the bulk of non-economic issues and asked if the administration team would have some economic counter proposals for our next session on August 7th. The immediate response? “No.” The administration spokesperson went on to say that presenting economic proposals would be “premature” and “wouldn’t be productive.” It would be nice to have the same confidence as this attorney about how much we are going to be paid for the next few years. Really, it would be too early, after over 150 days, to give faculty some idea of the administration’s starting point on issues of compensation that are so important to our faculty’s quality of life and to retaining the excellent faculty we currently have at ISU? When Dr. Farmer mentioned how important these issues are to faculty, the response was “We understand.” Clearly, though, given the refusal to engage on economic issues, the administration team does not understand the pressure and uncertainty that this negotiating strategy puts on the faculty whom ISU claims to value. Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. The farther we go into the school year without economic proposals and a fair contract, the more our students and their families will start to feel this uncertainty as well.   

We urge the Board of Trustees to let the administration team know that you are expecting a quick and fair contract for the faculty who have dedicated so much to Illinois State. Show us, the faculty, students, and community of ISU, that you truly value all the work that we do.