They've already quietly gathered commitments of support from 44% of all tenure-track faculty, NiCole Buchanan, a member of the organizing committee, said Wednesday.

They will need to get support from a simple majority of the tenure-track faculty to be recognized as a collective bargaining group by the university, according to the MSU ordinance governing unionization.

She hopes that number will increase rapidly now that the effort is being publicized on social media and through campus events.

Buchanan said the primary goal of the union, deemed the Union of Tenure Stream Faculty, is giving faculty a louder voice in administrative discussions. MSU's non-tenure track faculty and many of MSU's non-academic staffers are already unionized, but research focused, tenure-track professors are not.

Currently, faculty can lobby the administration and board through academic governance with advisory groups like the faculty senate. But, Buchanan said the non-binding resolutions those bodies create aren’t a real "seat at the table" for faculty.

"They are just advisory," Buchanan said. "That means faculty can spend months crafting ideas and policies and suggestions that just kind of get file-drawered by the administration and never acted upon."

Specifically, she thinks a union could ensure faculty are involved in ongoing debates about how MSU can improve campus safety, promotion and tenure systems and sexual misconduct and Title IX issues.

"We're the ones that work hand-in-hand with the students, that write papers and get grants; we need to be providing influence as they're making policies going forward," Buchanan, an MSU professor of psychology who's studied sexual violence and racial discrimination, said.

The campaign has been quietly developing for years, Buchanan said.

Interested faculty began talking to the National and Michigan Education Associations in 2019, she said, but things "really got rolling" after salary and retirement adjustments for non-unionized faculty and staff that administrators said were spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I think that was a mobilizing force for a lot of people, really seeing that we’re not going to be valued or respected unless we have something that forces them to talk to us and negotiate with us," Buchanan said. "That's when things moved into higher gear."

In March 2022, Buchanan and other organizers began "going door-to-door" talking to faculty and collecting union cards.

Chemistry professor Piotr Piecuch said he learned about the union push from his former department chair this summer. He's since become deeply involved with the effort, sitting on the organizing committee and talking to other faculty about joining the cause.

He said about 90% of his department has already signed union cards.

The issues motivating faculty to support the union vary between the various disciplines and departments, Piecuch said.

His colleagues were especially interested in a perceived "erosion of academic freedom" through strict administration policies that Piecuch said sometimes contradict the faculty handbook.

Specifically, he said professors dislike policies that prevent faculty who are under investigation by the university from publishing until the investigation is complete.

"You hope during that kind of process, you would be presumed innocent, but the university has a way of imposing sanctions," Piecuch said.

He said he thinks a union will give faculty a larger voice in administrative discussions.

"Faculty are the heart and soul of a university," Piecuch said. "We are the ones who make new discoveries, who create and disseminate knowledge … so we feel we should have a voice, and we feel that we don't have it now."

Buchanan said organizers are in an "unusual and amazing position" to make this union happen because of a 2021 Board of Trustees resolution that prevents university leadership from blocking or contesting unionization efforts."

The resolution was passed in a rare split vote by MSU's board — one of only six non–unanimous votes in the 200 they took that session. It passed 5-3 along political lines, with Republican trustees Dan Kelly, Melanie Foster and Pat O’Keefe voicing broad concerns with the resolution.

Kelly, the only one of the three dissenters to still sit on the board, said he didn't think the board should be regulating union negotiations between MSU and its employees, according to the minutes of the meeting where it was passed.

Foster called a provision preventing administrators from saying anything "positive or negative" about potential unions a "muzzle" on university leaders, according to the minutes.

She said it "strips management of the right to tell the truth and to distribute factual information in a timely manner."

Foster said she believed Democrats on the board supporting the resolution were "lobbied" by major Michigan unions. O'Keefe raised similar concerns, saying the Democrats support of the resolution could be a conflict of interest.

The Democrats on the board received a large portion of their campaign funding from major Michigan unions, according to campaign finance filings. Every Democrat received a donation from the United Auto Workers in their most recent campaign, most also solicited large contributions from the Michigan Education Association and AFT Michigan, which represents MSU's non-tenure professors.

Because of the resolution's prohibition of administrators saying anything "positive or negative" about potential unionization, interim-provost Thomas Jeitschkko said he couldn't say much about the effort.

"I am happy to have the faculty engage in comprehensive discussion and debate on this matter," Jeitschko, who supervises MSU's faculty, said in a statement. "While I am a faculty member as a professor of economics, as interim Provost, I myself will not be part of that debate in light of the (the) resolution."

MSU administrators are allowed to "distribute purely factual information" that corrects lies or mischaracterizations by unionizers, according to the resolution. Administrators have to give union leadership two days' notice and a chance to correct misinformation before saying anything.

Buchanan said she's not aware of that happening to the union thus far.

The union is aware of issues with accessing their website using devices on MSU's servers. Buchanan said she has heard from "many individuals" who were unable to load the site while connected to university WiFi.

The State News was unable to access the site on various devices connected to MSU WiFi Wednesday morning.

Devices connected to private residential networks, networks of East Lansing businesses and those using cellular data could successfully load the website.

"There's definitely something happening," Buchanan said. "I can't say if this is intentional or not, perhaps there's an issue with it being a newer website, but the trend is one that's been brought to our attention by many, many individuals on campus."

MSU deputy spokesperson Dan Olsen said Wednesday afternoon the site was being blocked by a third-party vendor the university uses for cybersecurity because it is a new domain.

He said it's "not unusual for newly created sites" to be blocked by the university and that MSU has asked the vendor to allow the site.