Two years ago, the University System of New Hampshire [USNH] Board of Trustees and the Keene State Education Association [KSCEA]’s Collective Bargaining Agreement expired. It was active from Dec. 16, 2021, to June 30, 2025, and served as a documented set of agreements regarding wages, hours, benefits and other conditions of employment for non-adjunct faculty members.
The KSCEA exists alongside the Keene State Adjunct Association [KSCAA], which has its own contracts applicable to members’ experiences and requirements. Professor Michael Wakefield described them as “two separate unions, two separate bargaining units,” in a previous Equinox article.
In that same article, Professor John Lund said there was “essentially no difference at all” in regard to the work done in faculty’s classrooms. He also said that there is a difference in the amount of responsibility and courses taught, which explains the variation in financial compensation.
However, all faculty members have gone without a raise for the past two years. This was not dependent on their positions and has affected individuals regardless of whether they are tenured, non-tenured, tenure-track, adjunct or full-time. Prior to the two-year break, there was about a 2% annual increase in faculty pay.
Currently, the only raise that faculty are able to receive is in relation to a position change, such as going from assistant to associate professor. Similar to how adjunct faculty don’t have access to benefits or a guarantee of seniority and promotion, non-tenured faculty are not guaranteed long-term employment and receive less pay. Non-tenured faculty also don’t have “protections” in the same way tenured faculty do.
Dr. Eric McCurdy said the contract and union it represented were important. He said, “Bringing people together allows them to have bargaining power above and beyond what one individual could have. If one person says pay me more, a university can deny that request and dismiss them. If everybody says pay me more, they can’t leave, because there would be no faculty.”
McCurdy has been a Keene State tenure-track assistant professor in psychology for the last two years, after working in higher education for about 16 years. He said the bargaining agreement’s expiration could lead to faculty morale decreasing.
McCurdy compared the experience to students attending class while feeling sad, which often leads to disinterest, lack of engagement and an inability to retain information as well as they should be able to.
He said, “From a faculty perspective, it can be hard to go in and create the energy and excitement that draws students in. Some of these faculty members are on the union’s bargaining committee, so they have to put energy into their classes, their research and bargaining [with the university system].”
McCurdy brought up a research article he implemented into one of his classes within 5 days of its publication. He explained how the article wouldn’t exist without financial support, which was something Keene State faculty no longer had access to.
As a result of the bargaining agreement’s expiration, and in addition to the ongoing lack of a raise, all faculty are facing the loss of professional enhancement funds.
The funds were a set-aside pool of money that faculty members could use for amenities like conferences, professional association memberships, books related to their fields, equipment or certification maintenance. Those looking to utilize the funds had to submit a proposal regarding their research, education, program development or professional activities, which would then be evaluated by a joint faculty-administration committee.
Every faculty member was given an annual, non-transferable allotment on July 1, with a set expectation to use the funds by May 15. If not used by that date, the funds would be moved to Keene State College’s professional enhancement fund for succeeding years, where faculty could utilize them per request.
The agreement’s expiration has had a significant impact on all faculty. Non-tenured faculty are particularly at risk, as the loss of funds may affect their ability to make progress towards tenure. It’s possible that many non-tenured faculty will have to rely on their personal financial resources to continue research or have the ability to present that research.
“The loss of those funds means that, essentially, we can’t do part of our job. This is for all faculty, or anybody conducting research on this campus. Part of our job is creating new knowledge that nobody’s ever seen, and unfortunately, we need money to do that,” said McCurdy. “It prevents all of us from creating new knowledge, prevents biology and chemistry from learning new things about the human body, nature or science, and anything else we otherwise wouldn’t know existed.”
He added that those on the tenure track have about five to six years to conduct research and put together a portfolio, alongside teaching their courses. Previously, that research would be presented in a 3-to-4-inch binder with physical representations of all the faculty members’ work.
Now, tenure-track professors present a 20-to 25-page paper that gets evaluated by peers from other colleges in the same discipline. McCurdy clarified that while he is in no way competing with anyone on campus, those looking to get published in a journal are competing with others in their field trying to achieve the same thing. Getting work published is just one component of the tenure track process that cannot be fulfilled without financial support.
One faculty member shared that they had to drop professional association memberships due to the cost that was once covered by enhancement funds. That same faculty member said that they now cannot attend conferences to present their research without spending a minimum of $2,000 to $3,000.
McCurdy said, “A term that exists in the tenure-track community is publish or perish. If you don’t publish work, you won’t keep your job [in some cases]. You can’t move forward to tenure. If you aren’t creating that new knowledge, you can’t go up from assistant to associate professor, and you can’t get those raises.”
He continued, “I’m not part of the bargaining unit [for KSCEA], so all I hear is what gets told at meetings. This is a secondhand, thirdhand point of view. But it is very difficult to have to go in and say, we had a contract that gave us 2% in raises, and we’d like to get close to that. And the administration, which is not our folks on campus, the deans and provost, are fantastic; says they’ll give us a 1% raise one time and that’s it.”
Both parties involved in the bargaining agreement’s development [the Board of Trustees and KSCEA] were in support of the professional enhancement funds. In the agreement, it was stated that they viewed it as important support for faculty and their professional work. It was also stated that both parties intended to “encourage harmonious relationships between the Faculty and the Administration, to promote the welfare of the student body and to ensure continuation of the standards of excellence at Keene State College.”
Samantha Menard can be contacted at
smenard@kscequinox.com
