The administration has put out information regarding negotiations. Some of this information is simply incorrect. Here are the FACTS and MYTHS of what the administration has reported:

MYTH: EMU respects faculty

FACT: The President appointed a Provost - the top academic officer - without seeking input from faculty. The President said that he did not
understand what faculty governance meant here, but he was reprimanded by faculty at his previous institution for doing the same thing.

Right now, the administration has walked away from talks and is trying to impose their "best and final" offer on us. That's not respectful.
We believe they should continue to bargain until we have a deal. In the last contract negotiations, both teams bargained from 3pm to 7am
the next morning and reached a mutually acceptable deal in time for classes to start. What's the problem with doing that in this negotiation?

MYTH: The faculty turned down a 16% raise.

FACT: The faculty turned down a 2.4% annual raise.

Comments: The 16% is derived by simply adding 3% raises for 5 years, and then adding 1% for TIAA-CREF (which is actually phased in over 4 years). This is a very misleading and inappropriate manner in which to report annual raises. In fact, after considering the increase in health care costs that the administration is proposing, their offer is for only 2.4% over 3 years (the length of contract offered by the AAUP, a length of which the administration has not rejected).

Please see the comparison of administrative and faculty proposals.

MYTH: The average salary of EMU faculty is similar to the average salary of their peers.

FACT: EMU full professor salaries are 10th out 13 of Michigan public universities

FACT: EMU all rank salaries are 9th out of 13 of Michigan public universities

FACT: EMU full professor salaries are 11th out of 12 in the Mid-American Conference

FACT: EMU all rank salaries are 10th out of 12 in the Mid-American Conference

Comment: Our faculty salaries are close to the bottom when compared to various peer groups. And remember that EMU faculty reside in the 2nd most expensive area of Michigan, and the most expensive area of the Mid-American Conference. The details are in the file below. Note that the administration itself chose a peer group for comparison and benchmarking purposes several years ago. Our salary is below that average as well. Yet in documents in their website, they claim we are at or slightly above average for our peers. But they would not disclose who those peers are, and it seems liekly they were chosen simply because their salary was at or below ours.

http://emu-aaup.org/aaupsalaryproposal.pdf

MYTH: Total health care costs have “continued to rise dramatically each year”

FACT: The health care costs for faculty DECLINED from 2004 to 2005, on both a total and per-faculty-member basis.

Comment: The administration has admitted this fact at the bargaining table, but continues to combine faculty health care costs with all other employees. This is at best disingenuous.

http://emu-aaup.org/files/EMUAAUPhealthcareproposal.pdf

MYTH: “Bonuses paid to 7 administrators total $22,500. The balance of the $972k represent routine annual costs.”

FACT: In calendar year 2005, 17 academic department heads alone were paid BONUSES totaling $54,438.88. The average salary of our academic department heads was $100,000.

MYTH: There were only bonuses paid for automobile mileage reimbursement.

FACT: Several administrators received car allowances (the extra payments were coded as automobile-related) of over $17,000 each for the entire year.

Comment: It appears that the administrators drove a lot of miles