It’s the end of our first year!

We got a ton done this year. Thank you all for your support. It’s made our work possible. Check out the list of achievements in the Miami Student article “A Year in Review: AAUP Celebrates Accomplishments, Sets Goals.”* Among other things, we’ve successfully pushed for more budget transparency, strongly influenced the position profile used to hire our new president, drawn local and national attention to the problematically secretive nature of Miami’s presidential search, and raised awareness about problems with our health benefits (such as the fact that there’s no cap on out-of-network expenses), and much more.

We have a lot more to do.

In addition to “continuing to pressure administration to emphasize the core mission of the university — education and research,” we aim “to hold regular conferences with the president and provost, collect information on upper administration salary trends, investigate service norms on campus and develop a plan for responding to increased teaching loads on individual faculty members.”

There are some important goals not covered in the article:

• We will continue working to support contingent faculty and lecturers. The AAUP member of Senate Executive Committee (Cathy Wagner) worked with the Faculty Welfare Committee chair and supported efforts to create a third promotion tier for LCPL faculty; also, we believe pressure from us has played a role in raises recently given to per-credit-hour and VAP faculty.
• We will keep working to support diversity and the needs of underrepresented faculty. Yvette Harris (chair of Senate Executive Committee) and Cathy Wagner, Executive Committee Member-at-Large, proposed an investigation of bias in student evaluations (well-documented elsewhere but not at Miami). That initiative didn’t make it through Senate Exec, sadly, but AAUP membership on Senate will continue to push for it. Also, through the Faculty Morale Survey, which AAUP proposed and which will happen next year, we are seeking attention to unfair service loads for minority faculty.

THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR SUPPORT! Please re-up your memberships and keep the faculty conversation going. We are making a difference but we need your continued support to keep it up. Join or rejoin now.

*We would like to correct something in the excellent Student article about our work this year. AAUP members in Senate did push for discussion of budgeting decisions and priorities, but it was Provost Callahan and Dr Creamer—not AAUP members—who gave presentations on the budget in response. Those presentations were a positive sign and we are grateful for the administration’s efforts. We have more questions on budgeting priorities and will continue to press for explanations and responses.