{"id":389169,"date":"2026-09-03T09:44:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T09:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/389169\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T09:44:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T09:44:38","slug":"miami-u-prohibits-faculty-teaching-outside-for-labor-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/389169\/","title":{"rendered":"Miami U Prohibits Faculty Teaching Outside for Labor Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Miami professors have been teaching class outside\u2014weather and lesson plan permitting\u2014for years, faculty said.<\/p>\n

636Buster\/Creative Commons<\/a><\/p>\n

Three days before Miami University faculty planned to celebrate Labor Day by teaching class outside, university officials forbade the action, faculty union leaders told Inside Higher Ed. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to have what we imagined as a really celebratory, nice event where we showed our labor by bringing our classes outside and teaching them outside,\u201d said Theresa Kulbaga, an English and gender studies professor at Miami and president of the faculty union.<\/p>\n

Organizers had been planning and advertising the event, scheduled for Sept. 2, for \u201cmore than a month,\u201d Kulbaga said. On Sunday, they received a letter from Miami University\u2019s lawyers stating that \u201cas advertised, the event is not permissible.\u201d According to the letter, the teach-out would violate the union\u2019s collective bargaining agreement, which states that university officials retain \u201csole authority\u201d over academic matters, including class schedules and methods and teaching facilities; it also prohibits \u201cany interruption or interference with the operations of the University.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing in the agreement gives [the faculty union] authority to designate an alternative instructional location or to direct faculty to disregard the instructional arrangements established by the University,\u201d the university lawyers wrote. <\/p>\n

Citing Ohio\u2019s Senate Bill 1<\/a>, the letter also noted that public university faculty members are prohibited from participating in \u201cstrike activity,\u201d which the law defines \u201cmore broadly than the definition of a traditional strike,\u201d the lawyers wrote. \u201cIt includes concerted slowdowns and an abstinence \u2018in whole or in part\u2019 from the full, faithful, and proper performance of employment duties for labor-relations purposes, including conduct undertaken partially or intermittently\u201d during ongoing contract negotiations.<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Tongue-in-cheek digital posters designed by the Faculty Alliance of Miami tell faculty not to go outside.<\/p>\n

Faculty Alliance of Miami<\/p>\n

The union is currently negotiating a new contract with Miami University management. A few articles are still outstanding, including one on compensation, said Elena Jackson Albarr\u00e1n, a Latin American history professor at Miami and executive vice president of the union. The previous collective bargaining agreement expired in June.<\/p>\n

In a subsequent Monday email to all faculty members, the provost wrote that \u201cscheduled classes must meet at their assigned times and in their assigned instructional locations and modalities unless a change has been approved by the department chair through the University\u2019s ordinary academic processes for a legitimate instructional reason.\u201d <\/p>\n

But Miami professors have been teaching class outside\u2014weather and lesson plan permitting\u2014for years, and they\u2019ve never been asked to seek prior approval to do so, Jackson Albarr\u00e1n said. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have sometimes gone outside when we need a little bit of extra space for an interactive discussion section. In some of my smaller classes, we\u2019ve held class outdoors, both to do community engagement and also just to have a change of pace from the classroom and to utilize some of the small amphitheater and gathering spaces that have been constructed near some of the academic buildings,\u201d Jackson Albarr\u00e1n said. <\/p>\n

In an email to members, union leaders called the university\u2019s framing of the teach-out \u201cuntrue and a gross mischaracterization of the planned action\u201d and reiterated that the event was not a strike, nor required by members to participate. <\/p>\n

Early Wednesday morning, union leaders called off the event, asking members to teach class inside and then show up to an afternoon all-faculty meeting wearing their union red and prepared to \u201cask pointed questions.\u201d In the tongue-in-cheek message, union leaders said they \u201cwouldn\u2019t want to violate any hastily-composed University mandate, especially one that contradicts decades of practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe certainly wouldn\u2019t want to engage in the kind of hands-on, experiential learning that Miami is clearly against, such as writing outside with your students, taking your Bio students outside to look at actual plants, or engaging in field research about campus-area businesses with your students,\u201d the leaders wrote. \u201cWe had envisioned peacefully teaching our classes outside tomorrow\u2014but we admit we were wrong to envision Miami University as the kind of beautiful campus that would want its students to use the quad.\u201d<\/p>\n

University spokespeople did not respond to Inside Higher Ed\u2019s request for comment Wednesday. <\/p>\n

Steven Conn, a history professor at Miami, said he responded to the provost\u2019s email asking for clarifications about the purported policies, but he hasn\u2019t heard back yet. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea that faculty aren\u2019t permitted to teach outside or indeed teach out at any place other than their classroom is just so preposterous on its face. I\u2019m not sure what the university thought it was going to accomplish, except to continue to make itself look silly,\u201d Conn said. \u201cAs I explained in my note to the provost, I\u2019ve taught outside when the air-conditioning has failed in my classroom\u2014did I violate a university policy? It reveals an office of academic affairs which is either simply disconnected from the faculty, or has been so co-opted by the Board of Trustees as to have been essentially neutered.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Miami professors have been teaching class outside\u2014weather and lesson plan permitting\u2014for years, faculty said. 636Buster\/Creative Commons Three days…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[18025,113,684,18024,960,123,125,124,115],"class_list":["post-389169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-career","tag-education","tag-events","tag-higher","tag-jobs","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}