Ohio Conference AAUP

A great “May Day” option for our friends in Central Ohio. Here are some details to keep in mind if you plan to attend…

— We plan to line up at 12 p.m. on High Street at 15th as we gather to promote higher education as a public good.

— Please wear red or AAUP swag if you have it. We’ll have a small amount of t-shirts and signs but we encourage you to bring your own signs.

— OSU has adopted very restrictive policies in their effort to silence students and faculty. Things like amplified sound, including bullhorns, are prohibited on OSU property.

As such, we plan to meet on public property. However, police and administrators have been eager to shut down all spaces of free speech and attendees should keep this in mind.

We simply want to celebrate May Day and will try our best to de-escalate situations with police. But, OSU has been very aggressive in its efforts to silence students and faculty.

— At 1 p.m., we will have a faculty led campus tour, stopping
at important sites for labor and social justice struggles on campus. All are welcome.

Please, please, please keep in mind that we will have to abide by all OSU space and noise policies during the campus tour.

Retrenchment is destructive. Everyone loses but students are the most harmed....and, Ohio politicians are making it easier than ever to do this.

SB 1, passed in 2025, and HB 698, pending, greatly expand the authority of bureaucrats and non-experts to use retrenchment in ways that hurt students and reduce the quality of education.

Faculty are already a minority of total full-time positions. When boards of trustees retrench faculty, students get even less classroom education and academic support for their tuition dollars.

Retrenchment means less access to full-time faculty who are RECOGNIZED EXPERTS IN THEIR MAJOR, who MENTOR STUDENTS, GIVE THEM CAREER ADVICE, and who HELP CONNECT THEM WITH JOBS in their fields. It's not uncommon for students to leave a university when retrenchment causes their programs to be cut or their majors to be eliminated.

So, WHO TEACHES THE STUDENTS THAT STAY? Full time faculty are replaced with part-time and adjunct faculty who are often less available to help students.

It's not a situation that part-time or adjunct faculty want. They simply have no choice. Wages are very low and, as contingent workers, most adjunct faculty don't have access to benefits like health insurance. By necessity, adjunct faculty have other full-time jobs or they have to also teach at other universities--not campuses--but other completely different schools. As a result, adjunct faculty usually aren't on campus outside of class times or very limited office hours.

It's easy to see how students and educational quality suffer as a result of retrenchment at Ohio's public colleges and universities. So, does any good come from all the bad associated with faculty retrenchment? The answer to that is quite simply NO.

Because faculty compensation is just a fraction of the budget, real cost-cutting can only happen when high paid administrators and bureaucratic bloat are addressed.

Administrators already outnumber faculty 3:1. Retrenchment only widens that gap and allows students to fall through the cracks.

So what does retrenchment accomplish? Boards of trustees and administrations can use retrenchment to control and silence faculty and pour more money into non-academic entities.

Retrenchment is a road to the destruction of higher ed. And unfortunately, it's a path that Ohio has chosen to take.