Come mid-August the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty will… Come mid-August the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty will have to decide if it wants to take the state’s contract proposal back to school or back to the drawing board.

A meeting of the union’s legislative assembly July 26 revealed that there were still some points of contention within the language of the agreement that needed to be addressed before a contract couldbe ratified.

The legislative assembly is the group of delegates who review the proposal before it is officially distributed and put up for vote by the entire union.

The opinion of the assembly will serve as a recommendation to the rank and file membership as to whether to accept or reject the proposal.

Pat Heilman, president of APSCUF, told Peter Jackson of the Boston Globe that no definitive statement will be made by the legislative assembly to the membership until it is able to review the contract, something it should be able to do within the next two weeks.

These developments come at what might have been the end of a marathon of meetings and negotiation sessions between representatives from the union and the state system of higher education.

The current version of the proposal was hammered out in an 11th-hour meeting between the sides on July 2, a day after the official strike date for the faculty at Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned public universities.

Now, with most of the state’s schools slated to begin their fall terms on Aug. 27, the final decision on the proposal could also come down to the wire, with no way of ruling out a strike before a contract is ratified.

Heilman told the Globe that the sudden concerns arose from the union’s discovery of what they view as discrepancies in the language of the contract.

One such discrepancy would grant faculty raises the final year of the contract, but the raises would not come into effect until October of that year instead of September when the semester begins.

In the event that the union vote rejects the proposal, the first step would be further meetings of the negotiation teams from each side.

Although there is limited time before classes resume, no official deadline has been set for negotiations to end and a strike to begin.