The Founding of AP:SOC, by Dave Hoffman

It was 1976 [74?]. The college was struggling to match its expenditures with the money allocated to it by the employers, the Oregon State System of Higher Education. To make ends meet the local administration announced that some eight, or more, faculty positions would have to be eliminated. The positions represented real people, not just the closure of positions created by retirements, or by people pulling out on their own accord. Further, faculty salaries, which had never been an attractive condition of our employment, were nearly frozen after several years of modest increases below increases in the cost of living.

To be fair, the local administration was viewed by many faculty members as having little control over what monies were being trickled down from OSSHE headquarters in Eugene. Prior to the terminations announcements of what became known as the “SOC Eight (the eight fired faculty members),” I had attended an information meeting in Portland put on by the Oregon Education Association, where I learned that a newly adopted legislative measure allowed collective bargaining by public employees, which included public school teachers and state college and university faculties. I guess I returned from the OEA meeting somewhat radicalized by what I had learned. This was a familiar emotion in my case, having grown up in a union family in industrial northern Ohio (A picture of FDR had hung in my parents’ bedroom.).

Some days after the revelation in Portland, our whole faculty met in the music recital hall to listen as our administration presented its Spartan budgetary plan. Close to the end of the meeting, I asked for recognition and suggested to the people present that before we shrugged our shoulders and accepted our fate, we should consider making our case to our true employers, the OSSHE. We could do so, using the process of collective bargaining. I quickly discovered that few, if any, faculty members knew about our new bargaining rights. [Looking back on that afternoon meeting, I must have been radicalized (self-destructive?) since I did not have tenure and my name could easily have been added to the notices of termination, thus making the “SOC Nine.” There is evidence here of a local administration predisposed to differing points of view, a fact I have always appreciated.]

At the close of the meeting, Cecile Baril, from the Sociology Department, came up to ask for more information about faculty collective bargaining rights. She was accompanied by others, including, as I recall, Ian Couchman, also from Sociology, as well as a couple of other campus “Rads.” Over the next several weeks more faculty members joined in discussing possible actions to establish, then carry on, collective bargaining procedures with administrators at the state level. The discussants at these small meetings included Cecile and Ian, Neil McDowell (Education), Dave Copping (History), Bill Cornelius (Political Science), John Finch (Economics), and Rob Carey and Ted Huggins (English). I hope I am not leaving someone out. Along the way we chose Bill Cornelius as our faculty bargaining unit president (we hesitated to call ourselves a union. We came up the the name “Association of Professors: Southern Oregon College (AP:SOC).
To say that the faculty immediately and overwhelmingly rushed to our colors would be an exaggeration. We held more than one faculty-at-large meeting where a spectrum of opinions was voiced, some complimentary, others less approving, ranging from polite argument to the less dignified “raspberry.” Nonetheless, after a State Department of Labor explained to then Chancellor Lewelyn, that negotiations would be between AP: SOC and the Chancellor’s office rather than with only the local administration, negotiations began. Dave Copping served as the lead negotiator of the bargaining team, which was made up of most of the people listed above. The crew representing the state system was led by Bill Lemmon.

Within a short period of time, Jerry Merchant (Communications) took Dave Copping’s place as chief AP:SOC negotiator. Jerry served for an extended period of time, until Al Hein an attorney and professional negotiator for the OEA rode into town. A major decision during those early months of organizing and negotiating had been to affiliate ourselves with the OEA. This association was to last, as I recall, for about three years, until AP:SOC voted to become independent. It has been so ever since. We met in the Stevenson Union on nearly a weekly basis for weeks, maybe months, before the initial contract was signed.

Did collective bargaining accomplish much in those early days? I believe that it did. For one thing, our negotiating group was left with the impression that in some ways we were negotiating for the faculties of all other state colleges; perhaps not the universities, as they had a separate relationship with the state higher education board. Bill Lemmon often argued that OSSHE could not grant the faculty at SOU more generous working conditions and pay than it could the faculties of other institutions in the system. We responded, after some consideration, that this would be fine with us. We did not mind representing more people than were located on our campus. Perhaps the primary outcome of our organizational efforts was the feeling that our faculty could have a mind and voice of its own which it could resent to the state system; that the instrument for this effort, at least on our campus, was collective bargaining. We were not all destined to drive “Beemers” anyway.