TL;DR
Our unified bargaining team met with management in Newark on June 3. Their response to our April 30th proposals regarding the School of Nursing and the School of Health Professions was to reject essentially everything we had proposed. We told them this was not how bargaining was done and told them to come back with actual counterproposals. See the Bargaining Update from April 30, 2026, for context.
Highlights of the Session
Management’s non-response:
The university rejected all of the union’s proposals in Articles 30B and 40b without offering any productive or substantive suggestions for addressing faculty concerns. Management said that because the deans had not heard anything from faculty about it, workload was not an issue.
Our union reps at the table pointed out that faculty may be intimidated by the deans–or fear retaliation–and so may not be bringing their concerns to them. However, faculty members are certainly upset about workload and are talking to their colleagues and union reps about it. They have made it clear at dozens of meetings and town halls that workload is a major issue. And faculty themselves played key roles in developing the proposals to address it.
For the School of Nursing (SoN), the university not only rejected the union’s proposal but even demanded concessions. The university struck the existing contractual limitations on class sizes for asynchronous online courses, which are particularly labor-intensive and time-consuming. SoN faculty at the table experienced this as a big slap in the face.
Rula Btoush (School of Nursing), questioned whether the university is taking bargaining seriously: “When they just decide, okay, our approach here is just to cross everything out. That’s not bargaining. […]We put so much time and effort into preparing these proposals. Meetings, discussions with faculty… This took hours and hours of work over months. We started on this back in October. Exactly October of last year. Having town halls, meetings, and discussions, drafting language, sending it to the faculty for feedback. All while teaching our students at full workloads. And then the administration’s approach is to say, ‘Okay, strike everything out.’”
Danielle Nanni (School of Health Professions): “The contract’s working for them, but it’s not working for us.”
Claire O’Connell (School of Health Professions) added to this, saying: “For the School of Health Professions, they absolutely did not even consider the proposal that we gave them and just gave back our current contract language with some changes that are regressive. And it is very insulting that all the work that we put together, all of the explanations that we gave them a couple of weeks ago, and it was completely ignored.”
What we proposed on April 30th and why it matters:
Faculty at the School of Nursing (SoN) and the School of Health Professions (SHP) have been dealing with rapidly rising workloads that are impairing their ability to provide a high-quality education to their students. One major way in which this manifests is in increasing class sizes in a range of different types of classes, including lab or clinical based courses where it is particularly important to have a small class size so the instructor can ensure each and every student acquires the core competencies needed to become a nurse, a physician assistant, a sonographer, or any of the other professions that faculty are educating students in.
There are workload articles in the current contract, but they could use strengthening. The existing language is not strong enough to protect faculty and students; it imposes significant barriers to faculty success by increasing workloads without balancing expectations.
Faculty at both of these schools spent months talking about these issues with their colleagues and developing thoughtful proposals that would appropriately credit the faculty for all the work that they do and ensure that if faculty do take on larger classes, they are relieved of other responsibilities so they can have the time to dedicate to every student.
The union’s proposals would also ensure that faculty have sufficient protected time for research, since Rutgers is an R1 university and faculty need time to conduct research and advance scholarship in the public interest. Research is also important for promotion, but faculty aren’t given the time to do it.
Read a more in-depth summary of the proposals here.
Next steps:
We told management we expected them to come back with “real” counters at our next session and to let us know by the end of the day on June 4 whether or not they would. We said that if they do not have any serious new proposals, then we would not meet with them on Friday, June 5. As of this writing, we have been told they have nothing new, and so the Friday session has been canceled.
Faculty members will continue to organize to ensure they can provide high-level service and scholarship and deliver a high-quality education to all their students.
Mark your calendar!
The session that was scheduled for Friday, June 5, from 8:00–10:30AM has been canceled.
Our next scheduled session is on Tuesday, June 9, from 10AM-2PM.
Other Upcoming Events
Click here for a full calendar
Our Bargaining Team
| Austin | Rooney | Camden | Philosophy & Religion |
| Beth | Adubato | Newark | School of Criminal Justice |
| Bryan | Sacks | Camden | Philosophy & Religion |
| David | Letwin | College Ave-NB | Rutgers Arts Online |
| Howie | Swerdloff | Cook-NB | Labor Studies & Employee Relations |
| Boris | Paskhover | Newark | Otolaryngology (NJMS) |
| Catherine | Monteleone | RWJMS-NB | Medicine |
| Claire | O’Connell | Busch-Nb | School Of Health Professions |
| Cynthia | Sutton | RSDM-Newark | RSDM Diagnostic |
| Jeff | Levine | College Ave-NB | Family Medicine (RWJ) |
| Josh | Bucher | College Ave-NB | Emergency Medicine (RWJ) |
| Kathleen | Beebe | Newark | Orthopaedics (NJMS) |
| Melissa | Rogers | Newark | Microbiology (NJMS) |
| Pankaj | Agarwalla | Newark | Neurosurgery (NJMS) |
| Rula | Btoush | Newark | School of Nursing |
| Stephan | Schwander | NB Piscataway | SPH |
| Tessa | Bergsbaken | Newark | Immunity & Inflammation (NJMS) |
| LaToya | Gibbons | Camden | Enrollment & Student Success |
| Miguel | Rodriguez | College Ave-NB | School of Arts and Sciences |
| Adrian | Liu | College Ave-NB | Philosophy |
| Alexander | Steiner | RCI | Radiation Oncology |
| Annika | Barber | Busch-NB | Microbiology |
| Becky | Givan | Cook-NB | Labor Studies & Employee Relations |
| Britt | Paris | College Ave-NB | Library & Information Science |
| Bryan | Oller | Newark | Physics |
| Carlos | Decena | Livingston-NB | Latino & Hispanic Caribbean St |
| Chidera | Ntiwunka-Ifeanyi | Busch-NB | Biomedical Engineering |
| Emily | Marker | Camden | History |
| Ian | Oiler | Newark | Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine/Earth and Environmental Sciences |
| Kathy | Lopez | Camden | Public Policy |
| Kyle | Riismandel | Newark | History |
| Lee | Carpenter | Camden | Law School |
| Lily | Todorinova | Douglass-NB | New Brunswick Library |
| Paul | O’Keefe | Livingston-NB | Geography |
| Season | Qiu | Newark | Molecular And Behavioral Neuroscience |
| Tara | Matise | Busch-NB | Genetics |
| Heather | Pierce | College Ave-NB | Political Science |
| Luis | Soto | Livingston-NB | Criminal Justice |