Inherited challenges
President Miller succeeded former Hamline president, Dr. Linda Hanson. Hanson’s 10 years as president saw the dawn of monumental changes for the university, and Miller saw many of those changes take effect in her early years as president, including the unionization of Hamline’s adjunct professors and the merger of Hamline’s law school with William Mitchell to form Mitchell-Hamline School of Law.
According to Miller, she was told in the interview process that the university faced a $127,000 budget deficit before she arrived on campus to learn that the actual deficit was closer to $4 million.
“How you get from $127,000 to close to $4 million is concerning to me,” Miller said. “So my job, actually, over the years was really doing deep dives into the budget to try and understand how we were putting our budgets together: whether we were dealing with real numbers, rather than ‘what we’d like’ numbers.”
With an eye on balancing the budget, Miller faced many challenging decisions in her first year.
Although Hamline’s adjunct faculty had already unionized under SEIU Local 284 a year before Miller’s inauguration, the first union contract was negotiated throughout the fall semester of 2015. When a contract was agreed upon after months of negotiations culminated in a final, 16-hour deliberation, many adjuncts felt a lack of support from the university.
Dr. David R. Weiss, then an adjunct professor at Hamline and a Union Steward involved in the negotiations wrote extensively about his own frustrations throughout the process.
“Our [bargaining] team, from the first session of training to the final exasperation at the edge of tentative agreement, had hoped to meet in the administration team willing and imaginative partners in thinking outside the frame toward a future for higher education where the affordability of teaching excellence does not hinge on the exploitation of adjunct faculty,” Weiss wrote in a post on his personal website on Jan. 22, 2016. “We did not meet that team. Ever. Nonetheless, our first contract, hard-won, is a first step toward justice. And the first step is often the most difficult.”
According to Miller, dissatisfaction is unavoidable, and that negotiating parties, “Don’t always get what they want, but that’s the reason why you negotiate. You try to come to some sort of understanding that all parties can live with,” Miller said.
In both early and current negotiations, Miller says her priority is the overall wellbeing of the university.
“When you’re dealing with contracts you’re always gonna have people that are not gonna be happy with what they get … you always want to do something that’s going to be the right thing to do, and the right thing may not seem right for everyone,” Miller said. “But you always try to do the right thing and respect the people with whom you’re negotiating, as well as respect the institution that you’re representing.”
Still, Miller bristled at the implication that Hamline’s relationship with adjunct faculty is unfair.
“We’ve been using adjuncts for many, many years,” Miller said. “Most institutions do. You’ve never heard of us abusing an adjunct on campus. At least I haven’t heard of it.”