Open Letter: U-M Faculty Pledge to Withhold Grades– “You Have Refused to Bargain in Good Faith”

Dear President Ono and Provost McCauley:

We are writing as University of Michigan faculty members to express our solidarity with the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO). Like so many others in our community, we are horrified by the administration’s tactics during the current contract negotiations, which have included egregious stalling and obvious bad-faith bargaining, frivolous lawsuits, transient wage increases that the University announces and then suspiciously refuses to write into the contract, the garnishing of our students’ wages, mobilizing campus police officers against peaceful demonstrators in an off-campus location, and reports of continued attempts to threaten faculty, staff, and even department chairs.

You have refused to bargain in good faith. When your students went on strike—a fundamental right of all workers—you have tried to intimidate them with a wasteful and expensive lawsuit. You have forgotten that our primary mission at the University of Michigan is to educate our students, and asking graduate students to labor without a living wage has profoundly negative consequences for their ability to study and teach. Your spokespeople have attempted to portray the grad workers’ right to withdraw their labor as an unprovoked attack on the teaching and learning mission of this university, when in fact mechanisms for securing living wages and basic control over our work are constitutive of our ability to carry out that mission. You have docked the wages of striking workers. You have attempted to strongarm faculty, staff, and students into actions that diminish the integrity of our mission as educators.

The University’s official response to GEO’s demands echo repeated attempts by the administration to undermine faculty governance. We resolve to act collectively against such attempts to coerce and divide us and stand with GEO against those who seek to harm the collective interests of our academic community.

We the undersigned faculty stand with members of the History Department in hereby pledging to withhold grades until May 12th. If a fair contract is still not negotiated by then, we will collectively reconsider our position on that date.  

We also pledge not to punish or report any Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) for striking and/or withholding grades. In accordance with SACUA, we reject attempts to pressure faculty to grade work taught by GSIs and to issue arbitrary grades for ungraded or incomplete work.

The way to prevent further damage to our community is by offering GEO a fair contract and ending the strike with dignity and justice. We urge you to do so and ask that you do it quickly and in good faith.

Signed,

Ashley Lucas, Professor, Theatre & Drama, Residential College, American Culture, English, Art & Design

Yarden Katz, Assistant Professor, Department of American Culture and Digital Studies Institute

Victor Mendoza, Associate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, English, American Culture

Kentaro Toyama, W. K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information , School of Information

Ian Shin, Assistant Professor, History and American Culture

Natasha Abner, Assistant Professor, Linguistics

Stefan Szymanski, Professor, Kinesiology

David Myer Temin, Assistant Professor, Political Science

Megan Holmes, Professor, History of Art

Shanna Katz Kattari, Associate Professor, School of Social Work and Dept of Women’s & Gender Studies (by courtesy)

John Carson, Associate Professor, History

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Professor, RLL

Phil Christman, Lecturer II, English

Anton Shammas, Prof. Emeritus, Comparative Literature & MES

Rebecca Christensen, Lecturer III, Sociology

Ezra Keshet, Associate Professor, Linguistics

Manan Desai, Associate Professor, American Culture

Walter Cohen, Professor, English

Charles H.F. Davis III, Assistant Professor, Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE)

Artemis Leontis, Professor, Classical Studies and Comparative Literature

Kristen Harrison, Professor, Communication and Media

Duncan Steel, Professor, EECS/Physics

John Cheney-Lippold, Associate Professor, American Culture

Will Stroebel, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature and Classical Studies

Silke Weineck, Professor, Comparative Lit

Ivette Perfecto, James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor, School for Environment and Sustainability

Yopie Prins, Professor, English and Comparative Literature

Ryan McCarty, Lecturer I, English Department Writing Program

Terri Friedline, Associate Professor, School of Social Work

Lorraine Gutierrez, Professor, LSA Psychology/Social Work

Fatma Muge Gocek, Professor, Sociology

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Associate Professor, American Culture

Lucy Hartley, Professor, English

Tatiana Calixto, Lecturer II, Romance Languages and Literatures

Antoine Traisnel, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and English

Anna Watkins Fisher, Associate Professor, American Culture

Hadji Bakara, Assistant Professor, English Language and Literature

Tatjana Aleksić, Associate Professor, Slavic LL, Comparative L.

Savithry Namboodiripad, Assistant Professor, Linguistics

Nina O’Connor, Lecturer II, LSA RLL

George Hoffmann, Professor, Romance and Honors

Pamela Smock, Professor, Sociology

Ian Fielding, Associate Professor , Classical Studies

Andrew Herscher, Professor, Architecture

Gretchen Keppel-Aleks, Associate Professor, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering

M. Remi Yergeau, Associate Professor, Digital Studies & English

Jessi Grieser, Associate Professor, Linguistics

shakara tyler, Intermittent Lecturer, SEAS

Cherry Meyer, Assistant Professor, American Culture and Linguistics

Aileen Das, Associate Professor, Classical Studies

Javier Entrambasaguas, Lecturer II, RLL