Southern Illinois-Carbondale Moves to Subject Tenured Professors to Layoffs

Southern Illinois-Carbondale Moves to Subject Tenured Professors to Layoffs: "

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale will be able to lay off tenured faculty members without declaring fiscal exigency under the terms of a one-year contract it imposed on its faculty union this month. The new contract for the current fiscal year allows the faculty union, the SIUC Faculty Association, to bargain with the university over proposed layoffs and calls for nontenured faculty members to be laid off first, but the document stands out from faculty contracts elsewhere in allowing the cash-strapped university to circumvent the usual requirement that a formal declaration of fiscal crisis precede any decision to lay off the tenured. It also calls for faculty members to take four unpaid furlough days in the current academic year. The faculty association plans to file a complaint accusing the university of unfair labor practices for unilaterally imposing the contract after the union’s negotiators rejected the agreement. University officials have said they had no choice but to move ahead and adopt a contract that had represented their “last, best, and final offer.”

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