Susan Titus: The Grey-Haired Warrior

by Marjorie Lynn

Holding the door open to the Paris Café in Detroit, Susan Titus, a wide-smiling, grey-haired woman in jeans and a hot pink sweater, greeted me warmly as she realized we had known each other in the past. In fact, Susan shared that I had been the first person years ago, in the early 90s, to make her aware of “freeway flyers” and “road scholars” when I belonged to the lecturers’ organizing committee at Eastern Michigan University. Now, this self-proclaimed “Grey-Haired Warrior” has helped organize a new union at Wayne State University, the Union of Part-Time Faculty (UPTF), and serves on the bargaining team for their first contract. Almost all other faculty and staff on Wayne State’s campus are unionized, but the nearly 900 part-timers who teach half-time appointments or less had never been organized.

“I love organizing people and at this point in my life (early-60s), I have time to give to the efforts,” says Titus.
Susan was married, but had no children. She has an adopted a greyhound and has a couple of cats. Born in California and raised in a military family, Titus credits her mother with instilling in her a concern for injustice and inequity beginning as far back as elementary school. Titus’s family relocated frequently, and Susan graduated from the American High School in France. She came to Detroit for graduate school in 1968 and never left.

Organizing efforts at Wayne State, a large, public research university in downtown Detroit, began in earnest in 2005, (soon after neighboring University of Michigan settled its first contract with lecturers in 2004 and whose contract UPTF is using as a model.) Titus didn’t feel particularly mistreated; she thought she was reasonably well paid, and she loved her teaching, but when the two staff AFT organizers came to her after a class to “do the script,” she asked, “Are you talking about unions?” And said “Yes!” right away.

read entire article