Miami U Prohibits Faculty Teaching Outside for Labor Day

Three days before Miami University faculty planned to celebrate Labor Day by teaching class outside, university officials forbade the action, faculty union leaders told Inside Higher Ed.

“We wanted to have what we imagined as a really celebratory, nice event where we showed our labor by bringing our classes outside and teaching them outside,” said Theresa Kulbaga, an English and gender studies professor at Miami and president of the faculty union.

Organizers had been planning and advertising the event, scheduled for Sept. 2, for “more than a month,” Kulbaga said. On Sunday, they received a letter from Miami University’s lawyers stating that “as advertised, the event is not permissible.” According to the letter, the teach-out would violate the union’s collective bargaining agreement, which states that university officials retain “sole authority” over academic matters, including class schedules and methods and teaching facilities; it also prohibits “any interruption or interference with the operations of the University.”

“Nothing in the agreement gives [the faculty union] authority to designate an alternative instructional location or to direct faculty to disregard the instructional arrangements established by the University,” the university lawyers wrote.

Citing Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, the letter also noted that public university faculty members are prohibited from participating in “strike activity,” which the law defines “more broadly than the definition of a traditional strike,” the lawyers wrote. “It includes concerted slowdowns and an abstinence ‘in whole or in part’ from the full, faithful, and proper performance of employment duties for labor-relations purposes, including conduct undertaken partially or intermittently” during ongoing contract negotiations.

Faculty Alliance of Miami

The union is currently negotiating a new contract with Miami University management. A few articles are still outstanding, including one on compensation, said Elena Jackson Albarrán, a Latin American history professor at Miami and executive vice president of the union. The previous collective bargaining agreement expired in June.

In a subsequent Monday email to all faculty members, the provost wrote that “scheduled classes must meet at their assigned times and in their assigned instructional locations and modalities unless a change has been approved by the department chair through the University’s ordinary academic processes for a legitimate instructional reason.”

But Miami professors have been teaching class outside—weather and lesson plan permitting—for years, and they’ve never been asked to seek prior approval to do so, Jackson Albarrán said.

“We have sometimes gone outside when we need a little bit of extra space for an interactive discussion section. In some of my smaller classes, we’ve held class outdoors, both to do community engagement and also just to have a change of pace from the classroom and to utilize some of the small amphitheater and gathering spaces that have been constructed near some of the academic buildings,” Jackson Albarrán said.

In an email to members, union leaders called the university’s framing of the teach-out “untrue and a gross mischaracterization of the planned action” and reiterated that the event was not a strike, nor required by members to participate.

Early Wednesday morning, union leaders called off the event, asking members to teach class inside and then show up to an afternoon all-faculty meeting wearing their union red and prepared to “ask pointed questions.” In the tongue-in-cheek message, union leaders said they “wouldn’t want to violate any hastily-composed University mandate, especially one that contradicts decades of practice.”

“We certainly wouldn’t want to engage in the kind of hands-on, experiential learning that Miami is clearly against, such as writing outside with your students, taking your Bio students outside to look at actual plants, or engaging in field research about campus-area businesses with your students,” the leaders wrote. “We had envisioned peacefully teaching our classes outside tomorrow—but we admit we were wrong to envision Miami University as the kind of beautiful campus that would want its students to use the quad.”

University spokespeople did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment Wednesday.

Steven Conn, a history professor at Miami, said he responded to the provost’s email asking for clarifications about the purported policies, but he hasn’t heard back yet.

“The idea that faculty aren’t permitted to teach outside or indeed teach out at any place other than their classroom is just so preposterous on its face. I’m not sure what the university thought it was going to accomplish, except to continue to make itself look silly,” Conn said. “As I explained in my note to the provost, I’ve taught outside when the air-conditioning has failed in my classroom—did I violate a university policy? It reveals an office of academic affairs which is either simply disconnected from the faculty, or has been so co-opted by the Board of Trustees as to have been essentially neutered.”