Faculty & Librarian Union History

Not every university has a union, and you may wonder why we have one.  Like most unions, we were founded during hard times.  In the 1970s the faculty and librarians on this campus suffered through several years of frozen salaries, deteriorating working conditions, and uncaring or incompetent administrators.  So on February 12, 1976, an overwhelming majority of the faculty and librarians voted to unionize.  Since then, in conjunction with the Faculty Staff Union (FSU) on the Boston campus, the MSP has served as the exclusive bargaining agent for over 1400 faculty and librarians.

Our primary responsibility is to protect and enhance faculty and librarian members' economic position and professional rights.  Yet in addition to carrying out our contractual obligations, we play an active role in campus life: we work with the Faculty Senate and administration on issues affecting the academic community; seat representatives on advisory and planning groups; actively lobby for University funding; represent the campus before the state's higher education and political authorities; and take the lead on a range of issues that affect the lives of faculty and librarians and the quality of education offered at the University.

The MSP is a member-driven organization in which faculty and librarians get together to decide what issues are most important to us, and then work together to promote those issues.  For example, in response to a strong message from the membership, we won what might be the best parental leave policy in the country.  The policy allows any tenure-track faculty member, librarian, or long-term full-time contract faculty member (father or mother) to take a semester off at full pay each time they have a new baby (biological or adopted).  We have also been working to extend gains in making this a family-supportive campus, fighting for substantial salary increases and research support, demanding funds for improved physical conditions on campus, and continuing our successful efforts to provide better working conditions for our non-tenure track (contract) faculty.

If you have a problem, the union wants to be one of the places you turn to address that problem.  Some problems are collective, which we can only solve by working together (say, getting more funding for the university).  Other problems are individual in nature.  Whatever the case, we want you to know that if you call us with a problem, we will treat everything confidentially, we will do our best to help solve your individual problem, and we will think about whether there are ways that collectively we can prevent future problems of this kind.