Tonight’s Faculty Senate vote on faculty unionization, prompted by concerns over the administration’s priorities, parallels a movement in the mid-1970s that came just 21 votes shy of unionizing Ohio University’s professors.

In the mid-1970s, OU faced a “crisis.” The school was losing students by the thousands and could not meet its financial obligations. Non-tenured faculty had already been fired, and departments were asked to identify tenured faculty to let go.
Faculty Senate held a vote on unioniza

tion, with 74 percent of faculty on the Athens and regional campuses participating and 75 percent voting in favor.

That was the climate at OU when Charles Ping became president heading into the 1975-76 school year. OU’s current Faculty Senate votes tonight on whether to recommend that faculty unionize.

Many of the reasons cited for unionization echo those cited in 1974. Faculty in both cases complained of a lack of shared governance and feared future salary and benefits cuts.

“Ping came into a crisis,” English professor Samuel Crowl said. “(But) the situation was different from now in that the turmoil (then) had cost blood.”

At the time, Crowl was a recently tenured professor and a member of Faculty Senate. He had received a letter saying his contract would have to be terminated.

“There was a sense that the university was spiraling out of control,” Crowl added.

In April 1975, after the initial vote in December 1974 and the formation of faculty unions at Kent State University and the University of Cincinnati in October and November respectively, OU’s Faculty Senate asked the Board of Trustees to sanction an election for May. The board declined. (Until 1984, Ohio public employees could only unionize after an employer-sanctioned election.)

Ping urged the board to allow a vote, but asked the senate to postpone it until further research could be done.

Although he did not often offer his opinion on unions publicly before the final faculty vote in Winter Quarter 1976, in his first address to the university in September 1975, Ping, who was provost at Central Michigan University under a faculty union, made his views clear.

“Faculty unionization is in tension with the life of the university as a distinct social institution marked by traditions of collegiality, self-governance, participation and voluntariness,” he said. “Whether or not it is possible to have faculty bargaining and to be a university is at present an unanswered question.”

Crowl said one difference between the 1970s movement and today’s is that “Ping himself was not the issue.”

Donald Borchert, a philosophy professor who was vice president of the OU-Ohio Education Association at the time, said in fact, Ping’s newness might have killed the unionization effort. (The association was not only pushing for the union, but was lobbying to become the faculty’s bargaining agent should a union vote pass.)

“The idea ‘Give Charlie a Chance’ really caught on and it meant the defeat of the collective bargaining march,” Borchert said.

The official unionization vote during Winter Quarter 1976 had 95 or 96 percent turnout on the Athens and regional campuses and failed by 21 votes, Borchert said.

“I’m sure Charlie was happy not to have to deal with the union, and I think he tried to establish a collegiality with his faculty,” Borchert said.

In that effort, Ping established the University Planning Advisory Committee made up of faculty, administrators and students. It set priorities for spending at the university. The committee made the front page of the Wall Street Journal in 1981 as a model of running an organization.

Crowl and Borchert both said hindsight has convinced them faculty made the right decision voting down the union in 1976.

“At the time, I thought they didn’t, but in general, the faculty was treated quite well after the election,” Borchert said, adding a qualification about the situation now: “I think that is a choice that every faculty member has to make for himself or herself. I wouldn’t dare to say, ‘Hey, you guys ought to unionize right now,’ (or) ‘You ought to wait a certain amount of time.’ ”

Crowl said he would vote no now, “just because I’m older and wiser,” but said he credits Ping’s leadership with correcting a lot of the problems from the 1970s.

“The difference was Charlie Ping knew a lot about unions. … He’d gone to work and studied,” Crowl said. “He knew how to address the issue. I’m not even sure that the current guy has it on his list.”

In an interview last week, Ping said he was pleased with the outcome of the vote and, eventually, with his administration.
“In hindsight, I recognize that we really were starting to develop a sense of community,” he said.