Meeting of the Truman State University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
October 18, 2016, 4:30-5:30 PM, in MG1098
Present: Marc Rice (president), Marc Becker (secretary), Kathryn Brammall (treasurer), Sergio Escobar, Mark Hatala (vice-president), Masahiro Hara, Taner Edis (at-large)
- Presidential search—we haven’t heard anything.
- Annual survey on salaries. Loss of salary for Freshman Week, insurance premiums going up, increase cost for MOSERS (contribution has gone up from 11 to 19 percent because of drop in interest payments)—all means that our raise will be eaten up which means a decline in our salaries in real terms. We should lay out scenarios of how these changes effect faculty at different levels, and how public school teachers get paid better than Truman faculty.
- Freshman Week: can’t require us to volunteer for sections. How do we respond? Part of an erosion of our salaries. May not be an issue that motivates the majority of faculty, except that it was a curricular change without faculty consultation. When the call for volunteers goes out, we need to let faculty know that they can’t be required to do something unless everyone is required to do it, and unless it is properly passed through governance we can’t be required to volunteer for Freshman Week.
- Collective bargaining: we would need 50 percent support, and we don’t want to call a vote until we know we will win. We need to talk to faculty individually, and can point to precedent of other Missouri campuses. So far, collective bargaining units have dealt primarily for governance rather than salary issues.
- Truman pays high discount rate to attract students, which means that university operates fiscally at a loss on the backs of faculty. We should put numbers together that shows how this is hurting us, that paying students to come here is not necessarily in our best interest.
- We really need to pay more attention to Board of Governors Meeting.