After over a year of negotiations, your bargaining team signed a tentative agreement (“TA”) with PSU’s administration just after midnight on Tuesday, May 5th. The wins you see in the list of highlights below were made possible by the solidarity and collective strength of adjunct faculty and our campus allies. Now, it is up to you and your fellow adjuncts to exercise your democratic power to decide if you want to ratify the contract language of this TA and turn it into your new collective bargaining agreement.
You're strongly encouraged to read the new tentative contract language in full so that you can make an informed decision and vote YES or NO to ratify the new contract.
Only dues-paying PSUFA members will be able to vote in the ratification, so if you are not yet a dues-paying member please join now so that you will be eligible to vote.
To learn more about the TA and the ratification process, join your bargaining team and executive council members for a TA Town Hall meeting on Monday, May 11th, 6:00–7:00 PM, on Zoom.
What improvements did we secure in this tentative agreement?
Fair Compensation & Equal Pay for Equal Work
An increase of $85 to your per-credit minimum (from $1,360 to $1,445) for Fall 2026 (and more than $2 per hour increases for research adjuncts), achieving, for the first time, pay parity with the instructional labor of full-time non-tenure-track faculty (senior instructor 1 level).
Yearly cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) increases, starting with the 3.1% COLA included in the 2026–2027 per-credit minimum, followed by future variable COLA increases tied to inflation.
Back pay of an additional $52 for every credit you taught during this academic year ($1.30 per hour for adjunct researchers), a 3.8% pay increase for 2025–2026 that will be disbursed as a one-time payment by June 30.
Length-of-service pay increases for those adjuncts who have served at PSU for 6 years (+$10 per credit), 9 years (+$15 per credit), and 12 years (+$20 per credit) beginning Fall 2026.
A cost-of-living trigger for an economic reopener, ensuring that your union will be able to renegotiate your wages and benefits if inflation rises over 6% before the expiration of your contract in June 2029.
Job Security
Structures to support increasing your course loads, including standardized assignment rights credits depending on contract type (12 units for adjuncts on annual appointments; 16 units for adjuncts on two-year appointments, or grandparented assignment rights for two-year adjuncts with higher than 16 units).
A commitment to support an adjunct’s capacity and expertise to teach additional courses, including classes new to the curriculum, encouraging departments to diversify your course loads.
Timely processing of grievance procedures, giving you the tools you need to enforce accountability on admin and protect you from encroachments on your rights.
An agreement for admin to share the costs of arbitration, making it less costly for your union to defend your rights by seeking out impartial adjudication of your grievances.
A restriction barring departments from using the course assignment process as a form of discipline, ensuring that chairs cannot take away your classes without just cause.
Explicit contract language describing your basic work duties, allowing your union to demand bargaining when the administration makes changes to your working conditions.
A commitment to work with PSUFA to address teaching opportunities in other PSU departments for adjuncts affected by program elimination.
Real Benefits and Equity
Nondiscrimination safeguards for more protected classes of adjunct faculty identities.
Acknowledgement of part-time faculty access to state protected leave and health benefits programs in the contract.
Provisions explaining the use of sick leave to supplement long-term leave (such as parental or bereavement leave).
The Support We Need
Paid regular orientations for new adjuncts, and pay for other required training.
Clarification of adjunct access to the staff-fee privilege for education, the discount structure that allows you, your partners, and your dependents to take courses at PSU (and other Oregon public universities) at 30% of the undergraduate tuition rate.
Continued adjunct inclusion funding, supporting initiatives to incorporate adjuncts into the culture and operations of departments.
Increased support for adjunct course development labor ($600) for designing new classes.
Increased Adjunct Excellence Award amounts ($1,500).
Academic Freedom and Other Rights
Enforceable academic freedom language, allowing you to defend yourself from disciplinary action that would violate your rights by invoking academic freedom protections in grievances and arbitrations.
Recognition that you determine methods of instruction, course materials, learning outcomes, and assessments for your courses.
Recognition of intellectual property protections for your course materials, an essential countermeasure in a time of escalating digital and AI exploitation.
Recognition of your rights to participate in workplace labor actions like picketing.
Transparency and Collaboration
Contract language requiring departments to provide you with key course materials to teach your classes.
Clarified information sharing protocols, including explicit timelines for admin to respond to your union’s requests for information.
Remote access to your personnel files, ensuring you can easily consult your workplace records.
In the face of the administration’s unprecedented effort to bust your union and undermine your basic supports, what does this tentative agreement do to preserve the key provisions of your current contract?
Saves the Adjunct Financial Assistance Fund, defending your adjunct hardship resources against admin’s illegal and destructive efforts to withhold the funds.
Stops admin from weaponizing contract expiration, resisting attempts to codify limitations on the benefits funds in order to preserve the funds’ status as continuous resources that PSU is legally obligated to provide for you until a new agreement is ratified.
Blocks the elimination of assignment rights and two-year contracts, undoing admin’s attempts to end your basic job security protections.
Prevents admin from subverting your right to file grievances on key provisions of the contract such as retaliation, discrimination, and violations of academic freedom resulting in discipline and termination.
Pushes back on management’s effort to narrow its responsibility for properly withholding union dues after an administration error caused a $49,000 loss for your union.
Holds admin accountable for its information-sharing responsibilities with your union, countering the attempt to shirk these commitments in the wake of an unfair labor practice ruling against the administration.
Prevents admin from limiting applications to the professional development fund to every other year, ensuring that you have persistent access to support for enriching your skills and knowledge.
What compromises were made in order to protect past gains and achieve new wins?
Loss of the technology fund and elimination of budgetary rollover on the benefits funds in order to preserve the Adjunct Financial Assistance Fund and to support wage increases. The end of the technology fund was agreed to only with the inclusion of stronger contractual assurances on departmental responsibility for providing you with the technology needed to succeed in your work.
Limitation of only two applications to the Adjunct Financial Assistance Fund per year for each adjunct.
Extension of the introductory period for new adjuncts to two years without assignment rights in order to preserve assignment rights protections and two-year contracts for established adjunct faculty and to obtain new provisions for maximizing and diversifying adjunct course loads.
Conversion of the Education Fund to the staff-fee privilege structure (30% of undergraduate per-credit tuition) that other faculty and staff use to take courses at PSU. Adjuncts will see an increase to their per-credit tuition rate when using the Education Fund (from the current rate of $31, to a transitional rate of $45 in 2026–2027, up to the staff-fee rate of $72 for 2027–2028 onward), but the university will waive course fees that were previously covered by the fund, allowing this resource to support educational opportunities for more adjuncts.
No grandparented assignment rights credit counts for adjuncts on annual (nine-month) appointments. While adjuncts on two-year appointments will have their assignment rights converted to either 16 units or their current assignment rights credit targets (whichever is higher), adjuncts with annual contracts will be standardized at 12 units, an increase for most adjuncts at that appointment level that simplifies the tracking labor and clarifies the assignment rights system for all adjuncts. Once eligible, adjuncts with annual appointments may still elect to undergo an evaluation in order to advance to a two-year contract with 16 credits of assignment rights.
Inability to incorporate “bargaining for the common good” provisions into the contract, which would have increased student support services and affirmed PSU’s values as a weapons-free, fossil-fuel-free sanctuary campus.
Inability to expand intellectual property rights to cover user analytics in Canvas and to prevent the university from entering contracts with vendors that could use our materials or metadata in Canvas to train artificial intelligence.
Inability to obtain a commitment from admin to meet with the union to discuss the impact of educational technology, including AI, on adjunct faculty work.
Inability to obtain a commitment from admin to refrain from using metadata/user analytics from Canvas to assess the performance of or to discipline adjunct faculty.
Inability to obtain a commitment from admin that the university will not shift any part of our work to artificial intelligence.