This should go over well with Ohio progressives.

Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Ed reports.

Professor Manager

Full-time faculty members at Ohio public institutions are objecting to proposed legislation with big implications for their right to organize unions. Tucked deep into a 3,090-page budget bill pending before the state’s House Finance Committee is language that would reclassify professors who participate in virtually anything other than teaching and research as supervisors or managers, and therefore exempt from collective bargaining. So serving on a committee, for example, turns a professor into a manager.

The language is nearly identical to another, ultimately failed piece of state-level legislation from four years ago, but faculty members consider the new bill a serious threat — and they’re warning legislators of the possible consequences of its success.

“What would happen if this passes, I think, is that faculty would choose simply not to do service and without that, universities would grind to a halt,” said John McNay, chair of the history department at the University of Cincinnati’s Blue Ash campus and president of the Ohio conference of the American Association of University Professors. “People ought to be aware that we volunteer to do those things.”

Earlier this week, state legislators introduced new language into the massive budget bill redefining what it means to be a supervisory or management-level faculty member at a public institution. The proposed legislation, Substitute House Bill 64, says that in addition to designated supervisors such as division and department heads, “any faculty member or group of faculty members that participate in decisions with respect to courses, curriculum, personnel or other matters of academic or institutional policy are supervisors or management-level employees.”