On August 3 we reported on progress from our first day of bargaining over the copyright ownership policy. We continued bargaining on Thursday, August 31 and received the administrations counter proposal.
The Adminstration accepted our additions about academic professionals teaching a course, and came up with a solution in regarding publication restrictions that generally meet the interests of faculty.
The administration accepted most of PSU-AAUP's revised dispute resolution process, ut then sought to limit arbitrability to only procedural matters and not matters of "academic judgement," which is consistent with limitation in the current CBA. It is not clear to PSU-AAUP, however, how any matter regarding copyright ownership is academic judgement as it is defined in the CBA, so it is not clear to us that this limitation is appropriate.
We spent most of our time together discussing the limited revocable faculty to University permission to use course materials for teaching University courses. Administration generally wants to grant limited license to use any course materials created by a faculty member in the assignment of a course to another faculty member. The original language proposed was: "For the purposes of allowing the free flow and sharing of materials and pedagogy..." The PSU-AAUP Negotiating team, however, saw that as problematic as it would perpetuate the replacement of PSU-AAUP members with lower cost adjuncts. We dove deeply into the concepts of permission and revocability. As our time ran out we were discussing ways in which permission could be granted by faculty member in a reasonable amount of time during the summer when members were off contract.
The PSU-AAUP negotiating team will caucus over the counter proposal and submit a counter proposal via email as soon as it is ready.