http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/nyregion/faculty-lockout-at-liu-brooklyn-ends-with-contract-agreement.html 2016-09-15 04:45:26 Faculty Lockout at L.I.U.-Brooklyn Ends With Contract Agreement An expired contract will be extended until next May as talks continue on a new one. During the lockout, professors were restricted from gaining access to their offices and their email accounts. === A The announcement came on the heels of several student walkouts in protest of the replacement teachers who conducted classes, which began on Sept. 7. “If the university wanted to keep a semester viable for the students, they had to end the lockout because the students stood up and said, ‘This is a betrayal,’” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said on Wednesday night. The expired contract will run until May 31, 2017, as negotiations on a new one continue. Faculty members will return to classes on Thursday, the university said. The lockout began after the faculty and the administration failed to agree on a new contract, mainly because of salary disputes. On Labor Day weekend, faculty members were restricted from gaining access to their offices and their email accounts. Gale Haynes, the university counsel, said in a statement, “The union’s commitment not to strike during this academic year provides us enough runway to reach a reasonable and fair agreement while providing our students the ability to continue their studies uninterrupted.” Emily Drabinski, the treasurer of the faculty union and a librarian at L.I.U.-Brooklyn, said, “We made a really clear statement that you can’t run a university without faculty and without students.”