Letter to the faculty from WMU-AAUP President Lisa C. Minnick |

September 19, 2017 |

Dear colleagues:

The faculty has voted in favor of ratifying the tentative agreement.

The WMU Board of Trustees will meet tomorrow (Wednesday, September 20) to hold their ratification vote. If they approve the new contract, it will go into effect immediately.

Upon ratification by the Board of Trustees, a two-percent salary increase will be retroactive to the beginning of the 2017-18 academic year for all WMU-AAUP bargaining-unit faculty on academic-year appointments and retroactive to July 1, 2017, for fiscal-year faculty. Additionally, all WMU-AAUP faculty will receive an additional salary adjustment (the research supplement) effective January 1, 2018, of an amount equivalent to one percent of the median salary at your rank.

The Board of Trustees will meet tomorrow at 11 a.m. in 157 Bernhard. As with all the board’s formal sessions, this meeting is open to the public. All faculty should consider attending. Important decisions that affect all of us will be made.

Better yet, please consider addressing the board at tomorrow’s meeting. The only way the trustees can know what faculty are thinking, feeling, and experiencing is if they hear it from us. Their interactions with faculty and staff are limited. They spend most of their time on campus with senior administrators. This obviously limits their perspective.

We can help them with that. And we should.

Your stories are powerful and deserve to be heard. The trustees will listen to what you have to say. Some of them will be moved by what they hear. All of them will learn from it.

Many of us enjoy the protection of tenure, and we all enjoy the protections that come with being union members. But these privileges come with the responsibility to use them in service to the greater good. As professors, of course, one of our foundational responsibilities is to serve others.

If faculty don’t do the work of engaging and educating the board — on our own behalf, on behalf of staff who are not protected the way we are, and ultimately on behalf of our students — things are unlikely to change in ways we would like them to.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in the ratification vote and to all who supported our team throughout the negotiation process. We appreciate you.

In solidarity,
Lisa

• Follow this link to access the procedures for addressing the Board of Trustees.
• Follow this link to sign up online to address the BoT.