The Unionized Campus: Understanding and working productively with academic labor

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The Unionized Campus

Understanding and working productively with academic labor

Illustrations by Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle ©2023 by The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc. All rights reserved. Electronic versions of this publication may not be forwarded or hosted online without express permission. For bulk orders, licensing, or special requests, contact The Chronicle at [email protected].

About the Author

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Introduction 6 DATA: The Rise of Academic Unions COURTESY OF MARGARET MOFFETT

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Section 1

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Section 2

Understanding Academic Unions 12 MAP: States With Right-to-Work Laws

Who Organizes and Why? 20 H  ow Academic Unions Form 23 Can They Unionize? A Short History 24 Do Unions Change Campus Culture?

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Section 3

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Section 4

The Risk of Strong-Arm Tactics 32 T he Worst-Case Scenario: Strikes

Working Effectively With Academic Unions 41 The Union Is Certified. Here Are Administrators’ Next Steps. 45 Negotiating Beyond Salaries

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, REPORTS Jennifer Ruark EDITOR Jennifer Ruark DESIGNER Scott Seymour

48 Fewer Graduate Admissions? 2 Views

PHOTO EDITORS Erica Lusk and Chuck Myers

49 Glossary

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Margaret Moffett is a North Carolina-based journalist who frequently writes about higher education. The daughter of community-college professors, Moffett was the editor of the 2022 book Broken: How Our Social Systems Are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them, by Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University. She worked for three years as an adjunct instructor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Moffett has received 20 awards for her writing, including the Green Eyeshade Award from the Society of Professional Journalists; a first-place national award from the Society for Features Journalism; and the Senator Sam Open Government Award from the N.C. Press Association.

A Final Word

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INTRODUCTION

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Take graduate students, who won back the right to form unions in 2016, more than a decade after the National Labor Relations Board barred them from organizing. Twenty-one new graduate-student unions formed between January 2020 and June 2023, representing 51,861 members, according to the National Center. The unionization surge has extended to resident assistants and other undergraduate-student workers. Before the pandemic, there was only one in the nation: the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s two-decade-old union of undergraduate peer mentors and resident assistants. By mid-2023, there were at least a dozen such unions, and many others in the initial stages of organizing. Among the most recent undergraduate groups to seek NLRB certification are dozens of resident advisors at Columbia University and hundreds of student workers at Harvard University. Contingent faculty, too, increasingly see unions as a path to higher pay and increased job security, with six bargaining units solely for adjuncts receiving NLRB certification in 2022. This growth is happening at a time when

he presence of academic labor unions on college campuses is far from a new phenomenon. Since 1918, when Howard University faculty members birthed the movement by forming the American Federation of Teachers Local 33, thousands of white-collar professionals at various stages of their careers have embraced this decidedly blue-collar approach to employment. In 2013, unions represented 375,000 faculty members in the U.S., including tenured, tenure-track, and nontenured instructors, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY), which tracks the growth of unions on college campuses. By mid-2023, membership had risen to nearly 422,200, a slowbut-steady growth rate that signals organized labor’s enduring appeal to academics. But particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic, union membership has expanded exponentially among newly eligible groups on campuses: graduate students, undergraduates, and adjunct instructors.

“University management should at this point recognize that unions are here to stay in academia, and that they’re going to increasingly be a vehicle through which faculty and staff express their needs and demands.” THE UNIONIZED CAMPUS 

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overall union membership is at a historic low in the U.S. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14.3 million workers belonged to unions in 2022, or roughly 10 percent of the work force, the smallest number since the bureau began collecting data. Compare that with 1954, when unions represented one in three U.S. workers. Experts say a confluence of recent events has sparked this explosive expansion of student and contingent-faculty unions in higher education — chief among them the NLRB ruling, in 2016, that reclassified graduate-student workers as employees eligible to unionize. Other major factors include the decline of tenured faculty. In 2021, nearly 7 in 10 higher-education faculty members were contingent employees paid by the course, working without insurance, sick leave, or in some cases even paid parking. State legislatures have only recently begun reinvesting in higher education after cuts that began during the Great Recession, and in more than half of states public funding remains below 2008 levels. Meanwhile, many private institutions must pinch pennies as they struggle to maintain enrollments. These fiscal pressures have meant that contingent faculty, while indispensable to the work of higher education, can’t count on steady or sufficient employment. The emergence of Covid-19 in early 2020 proved to be the final straw for many academics, including contingent faculty who weathered the tumult of asynchronous and hybrid instruction and battles over health precautions, only to lose their jobs to layoffs caused by declining revenue.

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Existing conditions “were further revealed and exacerbated by the challenges of Covid, and the centralization of power and the harsh treatment of workers were apparent in ways that furthered worker concerns” and organizing activity, says

TAKEAWAYS

Membership in academic unions has skyrocketed at a time when overall union membership is at a historic low. Several factors have contributed to the trend, which is unlikely to reverse. The increase in strikes and hardball tactics on both sides threatens to interfere with colleges’ missions. Coexistence will be easier if campus leaders and union representatives remember their common goals.

Tim Cain, a professor in the University of Georgia’s Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education whose work focuses on campus unionization and academic freedom. In the wake of these developments, unions have become an effective mechanism for raising the standard of living of

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The Rise of Academic Unions Faculty unions

Graduate-student unions

January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2019

January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2019

118 36,264

16 19,627 50

Newly certified or recognized bargaining units

Newly certified or recognized unions Total membership of new unions

Total number of graduate-student unions

January 1, 2020 to June 1, 2023

20 10,276

Newly certified or recognized bargaining units

January 1, 2020 to June 1, 2023

21 51,861 71

Total membership of new units

Newly certified or recognized bargaining units

Total membership in faculty unions 411,921

Total membership of new units:

422,197

Total membership of new units

Total number of graduate-student unions

375,176

Total membership in graduate-student unions

134,144 62,656 2013

2019

2023

As of Dec. 31, 2012

82,283

As of Dec. 31, 2019

As of June 1, 2023

Source: National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions

NLRB defines each bargaining unit. And it doesn’t get easier once an academic union is up and running on campus — not for union leaders and not for the administrators responsible for representing an institution’s interests during organizing and contract negotiations. Sometimes, it takes years for both sides to agree to the terms of one contract. And because large colleges and statewide systems often are

workers for whom unpaid hours were once considered a rite of passage — a sure step on the path to a full-time academic career. That’s not to say unionization is simple, though. The rules governing which academic workers can form unions are both intricate and ever-changing: A tenured professor’s right to join a union, for example, depends on where she lives, whether her institution is public or private, and how the

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home to dozens of separate bargaining units, negotiators can find themselves in constant contract talks. Despite these complications, the time has long since passed for administrators to debate whether academic unions are good or bad for higher education. All signs point to a future with increased campus organizing, including the 2022 merger of two of higher education’s largest unions, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers. Such developments show that academic unions are a phenomenon that campus leaders are better off acknowledging than ignoring. “University management should at this point recognize that unions are here to stay in academia, and that they’re going to increasingly be a vehicle through which faculty and staff express their needs and demands,” says Penny Lewis, an associate professor of labor studies at the CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, and a former official in the system’s faculty union, Professional Staff Congress/CUNY AFT Local 2334. Those college leaders are also better off figuring out how to coexist with academic labor unions, according to experts on both sides of the issue. They say it’s critical for administrators and union representatives to remember that they’re negotiating with colleagues who share a common goal: providing students with the best education possible. For that reason, cooperation is the clear path forward, says Chris Sinclair, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon and the secretary and treasurer of the American Association of University Professors. There will be friction, he says, and neither side will get everything it wants. “But if you see each other as being on a team — and if you see the union as being loyal opposition as opposed to disloyal opposition — then you’re going to have a more productive long-term relationship with your faculty,” he says. Unfortunately, campus leaders and

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union representatives alike say in recent years they’ve faced heightened resistance from the other side of the negotiating table, a fact evidenced by the number of strikes. At one point in 2023, there were six work stoppages taking place simultaneously. For context, there were just 163 strikes in all of higher education from 1966 to 1994, according to CUNY’s National Center. Strikes and other hardball tactics — the verbal jabs, the refusals to acknowledge union leaders, the no-shows for critical negotiating sessions — foretell a future where every win is hard-fought, every defeat stinging, and instruction takes a back seat to campus politics. “If it’s a bruised battle, there are going to be a lot of long-term animosities that continue over time,” says Daniel J. Julius, former senior vice president and provost at New Jersey City University, who has been involved in collective bargaining in higher education since the early 1970s. There’s much at stake for campuses as the academic-unionization movement continues. This report will serve as a guide not only for colleges facing their first unionization effort, but also for those campuses where faculty unions predate the internet. It will dissect the complex morass of labor laws, including recent changes that are partially responsible for the uptick in academic unionization. It will explain the consequences, both internal and external, that institutions face when they fail to seek common ground with academic unions or even use their time and money to discourage or actively oppose these efforts. And ultimately, it will provide advice from labor historians, union representatives, and campus leaders on how administrations can build relationships with unions that can withstand tense negotiations. “How a university proceeds in response to a unionization effort is a reflection of its values,” says William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center at CUNY, a labor historian, and a former labor attorney for the New York State Public Employment Relations Board.

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SECTION 1

REPORT TITLE 

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Understanding Academic Unions

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o understand the impact of academic labor unions on campuses today, it’s important to understand the American labor movement writ large. Historians consider the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 to be the movement’s defining moment. Part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the act guaranteed the rights of workers to organize as a collective-bargaining unit, and required private employers to recognize the unit and negotiate with it. Known as the Wagner Act, the law also created the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that protects workers’ rights and guards against unfair labor practices by private-sector employers. On the day he signed the Wagner Act into law, Roosevelt said, “By preventing practices which tend to destroy the independence of labor, it seeks, for every worker within its scope, that freedom of choice and action which is justly

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TAKEAWAYS The creation of rightto-work laws has had a significant impact on the contemporary academic labor movement. The fate of labororganizing efforts can shift quickly as the makeup of a key federal agency shifts. Protracted contract negotiations tax administrative staff as well as union staff. Once a contract is in place, administrators should make sure they understand what changes require union approval.

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BETTMANN, GETTY IMAGES

Picketers gather outside the Bethlehem Steel Company’s Lackawanna plant as a strike gets underway on January 13, 1946.

than the creation of right-to-work laws. Until 1947, unions could collect “fair-share fees” — dues from nonunion members who nonetheless benefited from the contracts that unions hammered out with management. The Taft-Hartley Act explicitly told states they could outlaw those fees, which nine states had already done. By 1963, 10 other states had followed suit. Today, 28 states and U.S. territories have right-to-work laws that require unions to represent all workers regardless of their membership status, but ban them from collecting fair-share fees from nonmembers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, this “creates a ‘free rider’ problem that weakens unions,” since workers lose an important incentive to join and pay dues. Financially robust unions are also much less likely to exist in those states, since all employees are entitled to union representation and are party to collective bargaining, without having to join or pay dues. “Right-to-work becomes an issue where it

his.” The result was skyrocketing union membership in the U.S., which rose from 8.5 percent of employed workers in 1935 to more than 27 percent a decade later. Unions capitalized on their growing influence by becoming bolder in their negotiating tactics. In 1946, 4.6 million union members in the U.S. went on strike, including those in manufacturing, transportation, and textiles. After World War II, though, Congress reined in the power of labor unions through the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, referred to by opponents as the “slave-labor act.” Among its provisions: Unions could no longer require membership as a condition of employment. Unions were also barred from “secondary boycotts,” the practice of discouraging one employer from conducting business with another over its unfair labor practices. But perhaps no provision has had more staying power, or a greater impact on the contemporary academic labor movement,

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can impair the unions having the resources necessary to do the kind of work that needs to be done to get a good contract,” says William A. Herbert of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. Employees at a handful of colleges have chosen to form “wall to wall” unions, which are open to every employee at an organization, increasing the power of collective bargaining. At a university, that would include full- and part-time staff in all departments — academic and nonacademic alike — adjuncts, graduate assistants, and in some instances undergraduates. United Campus Workers, for example, is a wall-towall union representing workers at universities in 12 states.

tenure-track faculty at private universities were managers and therefore not eligible to unionize. The university took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1980 sided 5 to 4 with Yeshiva. Today, tenured and tenure-track faculty at private universities remain bound by the National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva ruling. Another significant change occurred in 2014, when the NLRB ruled that contingent faculty were not managers and could unionize, effectively carving them out of the Yeshiva ruling. The decision was prompted by a failed challenge by Pacific Lutheran University, which argued that contingent faculty, who represented roughly three-fourths of its instructors, should be excluded from union membership because they take on management duties in their classrooms. The university also failed to convince the NLRB that, as a religious institution, it should be exempt from oversight.

THE IMPACT OF LABOR LAWS ON HIGHER EDUCATION Administrators in higher education can’t say they weren’t warned about the growing popularity and influence of academic labor unions. When the City University of New York founded the National Center at Hunter College, in 1973, one member of the New York City Board of Higher Education noted that “collective bargaining has emerged as one of the paramount issues confronting higher education.” At the center’s inaugural conference that year, Sidney Hook, an emeritus professor and the former chair of the philosophy department at New York University, predicted that “there is every likelihood that collective bargaining is the wave of the academic future,” especially among low-ranking faculty members. Back then, college instructors at every level had the right to unionize on all private and public campuses without rightto-work laws. That changed in 1980. Five years earlier, full-time faculty at Yeshiva University, a private Orthodox Jewish college in New York City, received permission from the NLRB to form the Yeshiva University Faculty Association. Yeshiva’s administrators challenged the NLRB’s decision, arguing that tenured and

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“It can’t just be on paper that the university says, ‘You’re managerial because faculty have collective autonomy over academic policy.’ It has to be real authority.” The ruling was a victory for contingent faculty across the country, who had argued for 34 years that their jobs carried no real management duties, says Risa L. Lieberwitz, professor of labor and employment law in the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and general counsel for the American Association of University Professors.

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Further complicating matters, the five-member NLRB itself is subject to political winds, since the U.S. president appoints members for five-year terms, with one seat coming open each year. Case in point: During the Clinton administration, in 2000, graduate-student teaching assistants and researchers at New York University won the right from the NLRB to bargain collectively, creating the first graduate-student union on a private campus. But four years later, with George W. Bush administration appointees on the NLRB, the board reversed course and overturned that decision, effectively barring graduate students on all private campuses from unionizing. The ruling stated that graduate-student workers at Brown University were students, not employees, and therefore ineligible to unionize. But by August 2016, the Obama-era NLRB had shifted its position yet again. In a reversal of the 2004 Brown decision, the board ruled that teaching assistants, postdoctoral researchers, and other graduate-student workers at Columbia University were employees. Within months, clusters of graduate students across the country were holding information sessions, meeting with national labor groups, researching the NLRB, and perhaps even searching online, “How do I form a union?” Donald Trump’s election as president three months later chilled some of the momentum, however. Graduate students feared a mass of NLRB petitions might prompt the administration to take action. “There was this withholding of certification attempts by graduate students waiting to see if there was going to be another change,” says Tom Riley Jr., executive director of labor and special counsel for the University of Illinois system. In 2019, the NLRB took the unusual step of announcing plans to reinstate the Brown decision pre-emptively — without a formal challenge from a college. The Trump administration ended before it could clear

“It can’t just be on paper that the university says, ‘You’re managerial because faculty have collective autonomy over academic policy,’” she says. “It has to be real authority, where the university administration respects and consistently follows faculty recommendations in these areas of academic policy in particular.” THE LONG, WINDING PATH TO GRADUATE-STUDENT UNIONS The road to graduate-student unions has been much bumpier, and on private campuses, much more circuitous. In the 1970s and ’80s, dozens of such unions formed at state colleges and systems — subject, of course, to their state’s right-to-work laws — including the University of California and the University of Massachusetts systems. “Big systems have had grad-student unions forever, so it’s not a new thing for them,” said Nick DiGiovanni, a lawyer with Morgan Brown & Joy who has negotiated union contracts on behalf of Elmira College, Harvard University, and the Tufts University School of Medicine. “The private sector is a different story.”

Right-to-Work States Right-to-work state

Forced-unionism state

Source: National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation

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“Much depends on what that contract says and what language has been negotiated. This is why first-contract negotiations are so important in terms of securing the core rights of management.” the red tape necessary for such a decision, and the Biden administration has signaled that it won’t pursue the matter.

n n

BYZANTINE UNION RULES These complicated laws and shifting NLRB precedents combine to create a quagmire that occasionally befuddles even experts. For starters, some of the most frequent obstacles faced by labor and management alike concern communities of interest, the NLRB’s criteria for deciding who belongs in a bargaining unit and who doesn’t. The regional NLRB boards that initially define these communities of interest are renowned for making strict distinctions about who can join. In fact, their decisions occasionally result in comically long lists of employee exclusions that are so granular they include job codes. Take, for instance, the NLRB’s January 2023 ruling on who may or may not bargain collectively with 3,000 graduate-student workers at Northwestern University:

n

n

n n

n

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n n n

That level of detail is common, particularly since the NLRB’s 2014 ruling on contingent faculty and its 2016 decision about graduate-student workers broadened the types of groups seeking to unionize. Because the NLRB often parcels workers into small bargaining units, large state systems can find themselves inundated with unions — such as the University of Illinois system, which is home to 58 unions across its three campuses. Another example concerns an academic union certified by the NLRB in May 2023 at Miami University, in Ohio. Originally,

Included Graduate students providing instructional and research services for the university Graduate assistants Teaching assistants Research assistants Fellows n

n n n n

Excluded A ll other employees Graduate students who don’t n n

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provide instructional or research services Undergraduate students Graduate students not seeking Northwestern degrees, including visiting students Graduate-student graders, tutors, and proctors who aren’t otherwise providing instructional or research services for the university A ssistant chairs in residential colleges Residential assistants Students enrolled in the Pritzker School of Law M.D.-seeking students in the Feinberg School of Medicine (including M.D./Ph.D. students who are in their M.D. phase of studies) Students enrolled in the Medill School of Journalism Office clericals Managers Guards and supervisors

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organizers of the Faculty Alliance of Miami envisioned its membership including the whole faculty, tenured or otherwise, along with visiting faculty and 31 librarians. But university leaders challenged the inclusion of the librarians, arguing that they didn’t share a “community of interest” with the faculty. The NLRB agreed and excluded the librarians from the bargaining unit. “We came together within a couple of days of that ruling and said, ‘OK, how do we want to move forward?’” says Rachel Makarowski, a librarian in the Walter Havighurst Special Collections, the University Archives, & Preservation, and one of the 31 librarians seeking inclusion in the faculty alliance, known as FAM. “The best option was to immediately refile our authorization cards as our own separate unit under the FAM umbrella, with the hopes that we could do so quickly enough to be at the negotiation table with the faculty union.” Within a month, the NLRB had certified the librarians’ bargaining unit. Today, it operates as a separate union but remains part of the Faculty Alliance of Miami, a convoluted arrangement that means the librarians got exactly what they wanted, just with more bureaucracy. What happened at Miami University is more the exception than the rule, though. Workers who are turning to union representation because they feel underpaid or disrespected suddenly have a new reason to feel aggrieved, says Chris Sinclair, an associate professor of math at the University of Oregon and the AAUP’s secretarytreasurer. “Ultimately, peeling them out of the bargaining unit is not going to help the morale situation on campus that caused the unionization effort,” he says. Even the presence of a statewide academic union doesn’t cut down on the number of bargaining units. Consider the United Faculty of Florida-Florida Education Association Local #7463, which represents faculty, graduate students, and professional employees at 12 universities, 16 state and community colleges, four K-12 “lab” schools, and St. Leo University, an

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independent college. Additionally, UFF represents Graduate Assistants United, which has chapters on four Florida universities. Some of these institutions have multiple unions of academic and professional employees — again, based on decisions about “communities of interest” made by the NLRB. Each chapter negotiates its own contracts, elects its own officers, and files its own grievances, though each relies on the UFF-FEA infrastructure to aid contract negotiations. Though most chapters are relatively mature — only six have formed in the past five years, says Candi Churchill, former executive director of the UFF — each contract-negotiation process can still take a year or more, taxing the infrastructures of unions and administrators alike. There’s another complication of labor law that affects unionized college campuses: determining what actions administrators can take without the union’s approval. When union and campus representatives begin contract negotiations, the NLRB’s strict rules kick in about actions that an institution can take without consulting with the union. For example, management can’t change working hours, raise or lower wages, or modify any terms of the collective-bargaining agreement. In case employers weren’t sure of those details, the NLRB issues this warning on its website: “Do not assume that a change you deem minor would be so viewed by the Board.” “Even after an initial contract is settled, depending on what is ultimately negotiated, the administration may be constrained in making some changes without negotiations or consultation with the union,” says DiGiovanni, the lawyer in private practice who represents higher education in negotiations with unions. For example, Rutgers University, its three faculty unions, and a New Jersey employment commission found themselves in a Venn diagram of Covid-19 and campus unionization. At issue: Can administrators eliminate a university’s mask mandate without negotiating with the unions?

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LEV RADIN, SIPA USA, AP

Graduate students at New York U., the first private university with a graduate-student union, hold a rally in March 2021 after voting to go on strike.

ments. Rutgers then lifted the mandate for all employees, and the unions were unable to persuade PERC’s appellate division to reverse the decision. Neither Rutgers nor its three faculty unions could have anticipated the need to parse language about mask mandates when negotiating contracts in the preCovid-19 era. But the story illustrates the complexity of labor laws and the imperative of unions and management to plan for as many contingencies as possible. “Much depends on what that contract says and what language has been negotiated,” says DiGiovanni. “This is why first-contract negotiations are so important in terms of securing the core rights of management.”

In October 2022, the three unions objected when the university dropped its campuswide masking requirements, arguing that faculty members should have the power to make individual decisions about masking in classes. The unions requested an immediate restraining order to keep the masking mandate in place, which a member of the state’s Public Employment Relations Commission granted. After hearing arguments from both sides, the commissioner dissolved the restraining order and issued a compromise: Identify employees with health vulnerabilities and maintain masking requirements in their workspaces. The unions appealed the ruling to the full PERC commission, which upheld Rutgers’s original decision to end masking require-

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SECTION SECTION21

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Who Organizes and Why?

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he expansion of academic unions presents quite a dilemma. On the one hand, there’s a growing sentiment among faculty members at colleges big and small, public and private, that their salaries and working conditions won’t improve unless administrators are forced to improve them. On the other hand, English professors and postdoctoral chemists historically haven’t turned to collective bargaining to get a raise. “College faculty and graduate students don’t conceptualize themselves as workers,” says Daniel J. Julius, a former administrator at New Jersey City University and an expert on collective bargaining. At least they haven’t historically. Faculty unions don’t form out of nowhere, according to Chris Sinclair, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon and the secretary and treasurer of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP. They’re almost always inspired by problems “people feel are hampering their ability to teach their students or do their

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TAKEAWAYS The recent rapid growth of academic unions shows that frustration among faculty and grad students is rising. Unions offer adjuncts the promise not just of concrete benefits but also of more respect from colleagues. Unions have benefited from faculty members’ sense that shared governance is disappearing. Administrative actions during the Covid-19 pandemic often undermined faculty members’ sense of a shared mission.

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research or just get the job done,” he says. And as the recent growth among these unions shows, those feelings of frustration are only worsening. For example, in April 2023, a new state law in Washington extended collective-bargaining rights to student employees on four of its regional campuses: Central Washington, Eastern Washington, Western Washington and The Evergreen State College. The following month, the National Labor Relations Board certified five new campus unions, including one representing medical interns and residents at the University of Pennsylvania. Also that month, workers on four other campuses petitioned the NLRB for union representation, including part-time faculty at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland and lecturers, both full- and part-time, at the University of Chicago.

shift that has been 50 years in the making.” That has created a hunger for unionization, especially among faculty not on the tenure track, says Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at the City University of New York. “Not only are there these highly educated people who are being paid at a very low wage without job security, they’re also carrying student debt that they have to pay off.” THE ADJUNCTIFICATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION In 1970, teaching college students was a full-time job, at least it was for 78 percent of instructors at four-year and two-year institutions. They received health insurance, contributions to retirement accounts, and paid leave, and their paychecks reflected time spent preparing for classes, meeting with students, or writing scholarly articles for publication. Importantly, contracts guaranteed their employment from semester to semester regardless of enrollment or teaching loads. Today, some faculty members still receive those benefits, but the percentage has dropped every year since then. According to a report from the AAUP, 68 percent of higher-education faculty were contingent faculty in 2021. That means more than two-thirds of college instructors teach without job security for very low pay. How low? Low enough that a common strategy among labor unions is to hold rallies where adjunct instructors and graduate assistants apply for food stamps in full public view. According to a 2022 survey from the American Federation of Teachers, about half of contingent faculty earn $3,500 or less per course — though the largest category of respondents (18.3 percent) reported receiving $2,000 or less. Four out of five said they struggle to pay for daily expenses. The AAUP’s report also revealed that most institutions categorize adjuncts and other contingent faculty as part time “even when they carry course loads equivalent to

“Not only are there these highly educated people who are being paid at a very low wage without job security, they’re also carrying student debt that they have to pay off.” Those developments reflect who’s been leading this academic-unionization movement, namely those outside the ranks of tenured and tenure-track faculty. A convergence of financial crises and cultural shifts on campuses led to this moment, creating what the academic-labor expert William A. Herbert calls “a systemic

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H. SCOTT HOFFMANN, GREENSBORO NEWS & RECORD

Faculty, students, and supporters march to protest for the creation of a faculty union for non-tenured professors at Elon University in November 2018.

full-time tenure-line faculty members at their institutions.” “It’s a national problem,” says Jim Roberts, an adjunct instructor in music at Elon University, in North Carolina, and president of the Elon Faculty Union, Service Employees International Union, South Region, Local 32, a unit of contingent faculty that received NLRB certification in 2019. Administrators “are balancing the budget of their university on the backs of the people teaching their students instead of paying people what they’re worth. And they fight tooth and nail with these little 2-percent raises when inflation is much more than that. It’s demoralizing.”

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“It’s just hard for me to see how you’d make the case that a part-time adjunct doesn’t deserve a union.”

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How Academic Unions Form The process for creating an academic union is complicated, time-consuming, and replete with bureaucratic red tape. All decisions rest in the hands of the National Labor Relations Board, which not only determines the scope of bargaining units, but whether they have a right to exist to begin with. “What’s interesting is the union doesn’t get the final say, and the employer doesn’t get the final say. In the end, the agency makes the determination,” says Tom Riley, executive director of labor and special counsel for the University of Illinois system. “And if you don’t like the agency’s decision, you go up to the courts and they will decide what is the proper unit.” Here’s an overview of the process, including the typical order of events, though some steps may take place simultaneously: There’s chatter among a group of campus employees about forming a union. Organizers affiliate with a union. Organizers petition the NLRB to form an official bargaining unit. The NLRB decides whether to certify the bargaining unit. CERTIFIES

DOESN’T CERTIFY

The bargaining unit prepares for a vote among its members.

Workers can try again later with a different bargaining unit.

The college decides whether it agrees with the NLRB’s definition of the bargaining unit.

ACCEPTS

CHALLENGES

Administrators wait for the outcome of the workers’ vote to unionize.

The institution can challenge the ruling with regional and national NLRB boards or through the civil courts. Case in point: Duke University challenged the NLRB’s 2016 ruling that doctoral candidates are employees with the right to unionize. In July 2023, the NLRB rejected Duke’s challenge.

Bargaining unit votes on whether to form a union.

NO

YES

The workers can vote again in the future, attempt to bargain with administrators outside of a union, or drop the idea altogether.

The union forms and contract negotiations begin. Strict rules kick in about what each side can and can’t do. For example, administrators can’t raise salaries or add benefits for employees within a bargaining unit during contract negotiations.

Once both sides agree to the terms of a contract, union members vote on whether to accept it.

NO The two sides resume negotiations.

YES The contract takes effect for a specified amount of time, usually three to five years.

The contract-negotiation process begins anew as the expiration date of the original contract nears.

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The 2014 NLRB ruling that gave contingent faculty the right to organize gave them something they’d never had before: a seat at the table. Not only do unions provide adjuncts a mechanism to negotiate for higher pay and more job security, they force the broader university community to take their concerns seriously. Union representation, from their perspective, translates to greater respect from their colleagues. “Non-tenure track faculty are frequently not even included in the college culture, as though they don’t even exist,” says Herbert, of the National Center. “I don’t mean to suggest this is only administrators who do this; the tenure track faculty can view adjuncts as being somehow less-than.” The opposite, however, is also true: An administration’s tacit support for an adjunct union can significantly change how its members feel about their jobs. When Holden Thorp was provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, he recognized that organized labor was a smart move for the campus’s contingent faculty. “It’s just hard for me to see how you’d make the case that a part-time adjunct doesn’t deserve a union,” he says. “I mean, these are people who are patching together their career from individual classes.” But he also calculated that their salary demands wouldn’t cost the university much more than it was willing to spend on contingent faculty anyway. As the nascent movement took shape in 2014 and 2015, Thorp — former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and now editor in chief of the Science magazine family of publications — advocated for a cooperation agreement spelling out what each side would and wouldn’t do during the organization effort, essentially codifying civility. The chancellor signed on. Adjuncts did indeed vote to unionize, forming Service Employees International Union Local 1, Missouri Division, AFL-CIO, CLC. Thorp said both sides were pleased with the first contract. “We didn’t think it was going to be any more expensive than if

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we didn’t do it,” says Thorp. “That was the simple analysis and the contract that we got, which they celebrated as big increases, we felt was fair for us.”

“I don’t know that you really can have shared governance without an organized power base. It could just be changed. It could just be ignored. It’s not really shared power.” After taking the job at Science, Thorp continued to teach chemistry and medicine at Washington University as an adjunct. He immediately joined the union. THE DIMINISHED ROLE OF SHARED GOVERNANCE Academic unions have also benefited from what many academics view as the slow demise of the concept of shared governance, one that is unique to higher education. The philosophy presumes that administrators, governing boards, and faculty members are responsible for governing an institution — operating it more like a democracy than a workplace. Faculty senates, for example, give instructors a formal process for communicating with the administration, addressing concerns about campus culture, or setting departmental academic standards. But college instructors, including tenure-line and contingent, say that in recent years the climate on most campuses has become more top-down, with faculty sen-

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ERIK MCGREGOR, LIGHTROCKET, GETTY IMAGES

James Davis, president of the Professional Staff Congress, representing City U. of New York faculty and staff, speaks to union members and supporters at a rally in January, 2022.

however, because the academy has never considered them to be partners in the process. Sam DiBella, a doctoral research assistant at the University of Maryland at College Park, says that gives administrators license to dismiss the concerns of graduate-student workers — especially in a state like Maryland, where they can’t form a union. (The state has allowed public-sector employees to bargain collectively since 2001, but exempts faculty members and students.). Graduate students at the University of Maryland, who originally organized under the name Fearless Student Employees, aren’t recognized by the university as a negotiating partner because they are not an official union. In that regard, the group exerts no

ates serving in more of an advisory capacity than as a full partner in governance. These days, says Candi Churchill, former executive director of United Faculty of Florida, faculty members receive no guarantees that administrators will act on their concerns or even agree to hear them. “That’s motivating people to unionize,” she says. “They want there to be stability and fair processes, and a collective-bargaining agreement provides some of that. I don’t know that you really can have shared governance without an organized power base. It could just be changed. It could just be ignored. It’s not really shared power.” You won’t hear graduate students bemoaning the demise of shared governance,

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Can They Unionize? A Short History 1918

1980

Howard University (right) forms the nation’s first faculty union, American Federation of Teachers Local 33.

U.S. Supreme Court (right) classifies tenured and tenure-track faculty at private colleges as “managers,” thus making them ineligible to join unions, also known as the Yeshiva ruling. Yeshiva University successfully argues that faculty members should be excluded FRANCOIS LOCHON, GAMMA-RAPHO, GETTY IMAGES from collective bargaining since their position as classroom leaders is a form of management. The ruling remains in place today.

1935

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, CORBIS, VCG, GETTY IMAGES

Congress passes the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, which guarantees workers the right to organize and requires that private employers recognize that collective-bargaining unit.

2000 The NLRB affirms the right of student researchers and teaching assistants to form a collective-bargaining unit at New York University, making it the first private university with a graduate-student union.

1947 Congress passes the Taft-Hartley Act (right), an amendment to the Wagner Act aimed at limiting the power of unions. Its passage will lead to “right-to-work” laws in 28 states that prohibit unions from collecting mandatory dues from nonunion members.

2004 The NLRB overturns the 2000 New York University decision, ruling that student researchers and teaching assistants at Brown University are not employees, and therefore ineligible to unionize. The decision bars graduate students at all private universities from unionizing.

BETTMANN, GETTY IMAGES

1969 The University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Teaching Assistants Association is recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, making it the first graduate-student union. The association launches a four-week strike (right) a year later as it negotiates its first contract with the university. PHOTO BY JON KIRN, COURTESY OF

2014 The NLRB rules that contingent faculty at Pacific Lutheran University aren’t managers and can unionize. The decision sets a new precedent by removing this class of workers from the Yeshiva ruling and ushers in the era of adjunct labor unions.

2016 The NLRB rules that graduate assistants at Columbia University (right) are employees, reversing the 2004 Brown decision. This opens the door for SERGI REBOREDO, VW PICS, UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP, GETTY IMAGES collective bargaining among graduate students at private institutions once again.

U. OF WISCONSIN-MADISON LIBRARIES

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Do Unions Change Campus Culture? Do unions change the culture of a college campus? It depends on whom you ask. College representatives say the presence of organized labor doesn’t affect institutional values or practices, and is invisible to most students. Labor organizers, however, argue that unions improve morale among members of the bargaining unit — and possibly campuswide — since better working conditions make it easier to recruit and retain employees. While the reality probably lies somewhere in between, the responses below show that higher-ed leaders need not fear sweeping cultural changes amid unionization efforts.

No

“ “

Yes

“

I’ve never seen where it just fundamentally changes the way in which a campus operates, because most already operate in a way that feels very much like a union setting. There are detailed faculty handbooks, which look a lot like collective-bargaining agreements that talk about processes and rights. And there are typically annual appointment processes and reviews and grievance committees and all of those sorts of things. Even when you get a union involved, it’s more a matter of an added layer, but it’s not like this enormous culture change.” — scott schneider, partner at the law firm husch blackwell who counsels higher-education clients on labor issues

“

At our college, it’s hard to tell we even have a union, to be honest with you. ... Union or no union, as president I see them as employees of the college. These are my employees.” — timothy beard, president, pasco-hernando state college in florida

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I literally know dozens of people who try very hard to be hired at CUNY and other unionized workplaces, because [it] has the potential and also often the reality of a very different internal culture that makes working there better.” — penny lewis, associate professor of labor studies, city university of new york’s school of labor and urban studies, and former vice president for senior colleges, professional staff congress-cuny

Being involved in the union erodes this sense of hopelessness that a lot of people have in their day-to-day work. When workers have a democratic voice on campus, they’re really better positioned to help make the administration have stronger policies and increase collaboration and have more cohesion. Workers already have a lot of great ideas about what needs to happen on campus. They just don’t have a say. Having a say in your workplace really does change people’s outlook. It changes how they look around and view their coworkers.” — melanie barron, senior campaign lead, communications workers of america, and former leader, united campus workers, university of tennessee at knoxville

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more influence over wages and benefits than any other campus organization.

likely took note that the union stood up for its members. Colleges’ Covid-related health-and-safety policies also drove more academics to unions. Throughout the pandemic, higher-education employees described feeling less like professionals who shared an institution’s educational mission and more like expendable workers. Organizers of UCW Arizona, the union for Arizona State University’s full-time faculty, contingent instructors, and student workers, specifically cited the university’s lax Covid-19 protocols as prompting its formation.

THE COVID-19 COMPLICATION The pandemic didn’t create the tensions that serve as a backdrop to rising union membership, but it certainly further revealed and exacerbated the conditions that many are working under, says Tim Cain, a professor in the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education whose work focuses on campus unionization and academic freedom. While some of those conditions aren’t new, Cain notes, they were “just worsened and made more apparent. That helped to push the movement that we see today.” For example, the pandemic brought into sharp relief the employment perils faced by contingent faculty and to a lesser extent, student workers. Adjuncts and other part-timers were the first laid off as enrollment dwindled and state legislators slashed budgets. By July 2020, The Chronicle calculated, 224 institutions had enacted layoffs, affecting nearly 52,000 workers — more than at any other time in the history of higher education. There likely were thousands more “silent layoffs,” such as adjuncts and graduate-student assistants whose courses were canceled. “It’s this idea that we were discarded. We’re all trash. That we’re not worth anything to the university. No matter how much blood, sweat, and tears we put in,” Sue Ramlo, a former tenured professor of technical physics, software applications, and programming for technology at the University of Akron, told The Chronicle after she was laid off in 2020. After the City University of New York laid off 2,800 workers in the first months of the pandemic, the faculty and staff union filed a lawsuit demanding an end to layoffs and the immediate reinstatement of those who had already been let go — with back pay included. A judge dismissed the suit. Still, adjuncts who worked on campuses without collective bargaining

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“It’s this idea that we were discarded. We’re all trash. That we’re not worth anything to the university. No matter how much blood, sweat, and tears we put in.” The effect of all of the above factors on unionization point to how important it is for college administrations to build strong relationships with their faculties. Scott Schneider, a partner at the law firm Husch Blackwell who counsels higher-education clients on labor issues, says he often tells administrators that they need to get out of their offices, talk to employees, and learn what issues are festering, then proactively address them. That’s the best way to stave off a union to begin with, he says. “When you have a president or senior leadership who is engaged, you’re probably not going to get a lot of rumblings,” Schneider says. “People won’t turn to or feel like they need to utilize a union.”

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The Risks of Strong-Arm Tactics

T

here always has been, and always will be, an inherent tension between management and labor. That’s true even at the most union-friendly institutions in the most union-friendly states — the ones, for example, that opted not to challenge their union’s right to exist with the National Labor Relations Board. The relationship may look civil on the surface, with public messaging leaning neutral to positive. Behind the scenes, however, these relationships are frequently contentious and occasionally unpleasant, as the irresistible force meets the immovable object during contract negotiations. According to union leaders and members, administrators often exacerbate existing tensions — sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally. And that makes constructive negotiations next to impossible. In their world, every word administrators speak, every action they take, signals their intent either to work with the union or quash it. Even hiring

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TAKEAWAYS Not recognizing the right of employees to form a union will worsen relations. Parties on both sides should be sensitive to how their words can be interpreted. Contentious relationships can have an effect on students. Infighting can also lead to negative press and a poor public image.

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The Duke Graduate Students Union holds its first rally, on Sept. 15, 2022, outside the Allen Building at Duke University, in Durham, N.C.

outside legal counsel is a symbolic act in the eyes of a union and its members: “Our president and trustees would rather give lawyers hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars than boost the salaries of underpaid adjuncts, graduate-student assistants, and postdoctoral researchers by 25 percent,” a union might tell its members. “The worst negotiating sessions that I’ve been involved in have been the ones where you have somebody screaming across the table and insulting people on the other side and sort of putting on a show,” says Chris Moran, a partner at the law firm Troutman Pepper who often works with administrators, sometimes behind the scenes, when the unionization movement reaches their campus. “It doesn’t accomplish anything. It tends to harden people in their positions and makes them less willing to move.” It’s also true that one person’s “tough negotiator” is another person’s “union buster.” During a March 2023 panel discussion at CUNY’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, the former leader of Temple University’s faculty union described “a series of twists and turns in logic that management tried to trip us up on” while they were negotiating for increased job security for adjuncts. “We would spend hours and hours away from the negotiating table, putting together the best proposal we could,” said Art Hochner, associate professor emeritus of management and former president of the Temple Association of University Professionals-American Federation of Teachers Local 4531. “And they would find flaws in everything we’d say. There wasn’t one thing we could get management to do on that issue.” In other words, every bargaining tactic is open to interpretation depending on the lens through which it’s viewed. But according to labor leaders, some ac-

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tions send such a clear message that there’s no room for misinterpretation. And the most incendiary of all is challenging the union’s very right to exist. As soon as graduate students, adjuncts, or tenured faculty take the first steps toward unionizing, “it’s really incumbent on the administration to remind themselves that this is their right,”

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DGSU

interview with faculty members. Alvarez, previously an associate editor of The Review, argued that “too often, university administrators treat the right to organize as, at best, an annoying formality and, at worst, a problematic entitlement that they can choose not to honor — and, if they have the resources and disposition, must

says Risa L. Lieberwitz, the AAUP’s general counsel. “They have the right to choose whether to unionize,” she says. “It’s not a choice for the administration. It’s really not their business.” Lieberwitz’s comments echo those made by the activist-journalist Maximillian Alvarez in a March 2023 Chronicle Review

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make it their mission to eliminate.” He cited Duke University and what he called its “deplorable decision” to challenge the 2016 NLRB ruling that opened graduate-student workers to unionization. Duke lost the challenge in July 2023, clearing the way for the Duke Graduate Students Union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Southern Region Local 27 to vote on unionization in August, which passed by nearly 10 to 1. But even as the vote approached, administrators continued Duke’s campaign to defeat it.

ty, Ogletree Deakins, replied to messages seeking comment. Such tactics may not stop workers from unionizing, but they do delay contract negotiations — sometimes by several years. Labor leaders say it’s a calculated effort by administrators to stop the bargaining unit’s forward momentum, and possibly delay unionization votes long enough for the movement to fizzle. “They’re not winning elections anymore. They’re not defeating union drives,” says Brandon Mancilla, the first president of Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers Local 5188, now a director of UAW Region 9A. “They’re delaying as long as possible the time when they’re going to be ordered to bargain.” A situation similar to the one at Duke played out on a campus just 40 miles west at Elon University, a private liberal-arts institution with just over 6,000 undergraduates. In 2019, adjuncts, part-time and limited-term faculty members, and some retired faculty members and accompanists in the music department voted to unionize. Among their concerns were low pay, lack of job security, unpaid hours spent mentoring students, and the absence of a formal policy for firing adjuncts. “It was simply, if you don’t like them, get rid of ’em,” says Jim Roberts, president of Elon Faculty Union, SEIU, South Region, Local 32. As with Duke, Elon’s leaders filed a challenge with the NLRB arguing that adjuncts weren’t a legitimate bargaining unit because they’re managers. The university lost, but the protracted process put nearly three years between the vote to unionize and the contract ratification — enough time that some of the original organizers had moved on to other jobs. In October 2022, the union and the university signed a contract that increased pay by 3 percent to 4 percent for 160 adjunct faculty members in the union. Other than sending an email to faculty and staff about the vote, Elon administrators concede they’ve done little to acknowledge the union’s presence.

DUKE U.

A Duke University web page, no longer public, lays out a case against unions.

“Did you know the law doesn’t require unions to tell you the truth, and sometimes they don’t?” asks a once-public university web page providing information about unions that, as of August, requires a password. “Did you know that some graduate-student union contracts attempt to limit the number of hours RAs are able to spend in the lab?” Suzanne Barbour, dean of Duke’s graduate school, declined to comment. Neither Provost Alec Gallimore nor lawyers from the outside firm representing the universi-

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TARANG SALUJA

Graduate student workers at Northeastern University hold a rally on campus in July 2023 in preparation for a union vote in September.

“There’s pretty much a blackout of anything that has to do with the union to the public,” says Roberts, who’s in his 17th year as a lecturer in the department of music, teaching percussion along with popular courses like “Woodstock, Hippies, and Other Enduring Legacies” and “Beyond the Beatles.” Union representatives argue that the use of such tactics by administrators ultimately hurts everyone. It creates a climate of confrontation and fear, which leads to low morale, higher turnover, and worst of all, a diminished educational experience for students, says Melanie Barron, a se-

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nior campaign lead with Communication Workers of America and a former leader in the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s graduate-student union. “On a day-to-day basis, when an employer is really hostile to the idea of the big, scary union, it just shows that there’s a culture of mistrust of your work force,” she says. “It shows that maybe the culture is not democratic at all.” Timothy Beard, president of PascoHernando State College, in Florida, says strong-arm tactics have the same effect on a university’s community that a dysfunctional family has on kids: “When parents

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The Worst-Case Scenario: Strikes

I

n higher education, “strikes are rare, and they should be,” says Tim Cain, a professor in the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education whose work focuses on campus unionization and academic freedom. “While they generate attention, they’re not the norm of labor activity.” For a college, though, that point is moot. A rare strike can bring about everything administrators fear about a union forming on their campus in the first place: Instructors don’t teach their classes, grade exams and papers, or, depending on when the strike happens, turn in final grades to the registrar.

while administrators typically issue bland, heavily lawyered statements that inspire no one. For those reasons, the last two years have been noteworthy simply for the sheer volume of strikes. There were 10 strikes in 2022 and 11 in the first half of 2023, with salary and benefits overwhelmingly the sticking points. Among the institutions experiencing high-profile walkouts: n

In an era when colleges compete for every student, and with a campus’s vibe playing an outsize role in students’ enrollment choices, strikes are a bad cultural fit.

n

Worse yet, at least in the minds of some administrators, strikes send a message to students, their families, and the broader community that the institution would rather bring learning to a screeching halt than pay workers a few thousand dollars more a year. While the reality is usually much more complicated, that’s not what the public hears. During strikes, unions control the messaging, marching around campus and chanting catchy slogans,

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n

32

 he University of Illinois at Chicago, T where a faculty strike in January 2023 canceled classes for six days. When it ended, the university signed a contract that raised annual pay for untenured instructors from $51,000 to $60,000 and for tenured instructors from $60,000 to $71,500.  he New School, a private liberal-arts T university in New York City, where about 90 percent of faculty members are contingent. At one point during the November 2022 walkout, tensions ran so high that the college threatened to withhold payments and benefits from striking workers. Union representatives countered by demanding the seizure of President Dan McBride’s townhouse, which is owned by the New School. Parents threatened lawsuits since their kids weren’t learning. The nearly fourweek strike, simultaneously the largest and longest ever by adjuncts, ended with the lowest-paid adjuncts seeing their salaries increase by about onethird, and stipends for out-of-classroom work doubling, to $800 per class.  utgers University, where 9,000 adR juncts and graduate-student assistants waged a weeklong strike over low pay and lack of job security. Worried over the impact of a prolonged strike on Rutgers’s 70,000 students, Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey called both sides to the

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MEL MELCON, LOS ANGELES TIMES, GETTY IMAGES

Graeme Blair (left), an associate professor of political science at UCLA, and Anna Markowitz (second from left), an assistant professor of education at the university, show their support for graduate-student workers on strike, calling for the university to offer the students a contract with a dramatic increase in pay and benefits to match the skyrocketing cost of living in California.

But by far the most significant strike — and the longest in the history of American higher education — happened across the 10-campus University of California system in November 2022, when 48,000 graduate students, postdoctoral workers, and academic researchers walked off the job. Representatives of the United Auto Workersaffiliated union and system administrators had reached an impasse on minimum salaries, which union officials argued fell below the cost of living on some California campuses. The strike coincided with the end of the fall semester, disrupting final exams and submission of final grades in some classes taught by striking graduate students. After 40 days of wall-to-wall news coverage, including front-page photos of picketers

state capital for “productive dialogue.” The new contract raised adjunct pay by 43 percent and wages for graduate-student workers by one-third, while guaranteeing each group five years of funding. n

 he University of Michigan system, T where graduate students on its three campuses went on strike in March 2023. In response, the university issued a 1,400-word statement noting 10 times that strikes violate both Michigan law and the union’s contract with the system. The strike ended in August with a three-year contract that raises graduate students’ salaries by 8 percent in the first year and 6 percent per year in the following two.

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Strikes by Academic Unions, 2013-2023 Student strike

Faculty/postdoc strike

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

Source: National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College of the City University of New York

exactly what prompted those stalemates to end, negative publicity often is enough to persuade administrators to yield to a union’s demands. In an era when colleges compete for every student, and with a campus’s vibe playing an outsize role in students’ enrollment choices, strikes are a bad cultural fit. It made news, for instance, when the U.S. education secretary, Miguel A. Cardona, backed out of speaking at the University of Washington’s commencement in June to show support for striking workers. And there’s another consequence of strikes, as evidenced by the one at the New School: It opens private institutions, in particular, to potential litigation for failing to honor contractual commitments to students, “who are basically buying [a college’s] education services,” says Scott Schneider, a partner at the law firm Husch Blackwell who counsels higher-education clients on labor issues.

waving “Unfair Labor Practice” signs with bright-blue letters, the system agreed to the union’s demands. Academic employees received 55- to 80-percent raises, with graduate-student researchers getting from 25 to 80 percent. The minimum annual salary for a first-year teaching assistant, for example, will rise from $25,000 to $36,000 by 2024. Each strike ended with workers receiving significant wage increases — perhaps not as much as the unions wanted, but definitely more than administrators wanted to pay. Those local victories strengthened the unionization movement nationwide, says Georgia’s Cain, since each win justified a refusal to compromise. “It’s one of the reasons that so many people are watching the University of California,” he says. “The successful strike there helps encourage workers on other campuses that their efforts in solidarity could be rewarded.” While it’s unclear in each instance

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“When parents are able to get along and talk with civility and collegiality, the children benefit. But when they’re fussing and fighting, the children are just traumatized. ... These dynamics don’t change because it’s higher education.” are able to get along and talk with civility and collegiality, the children benefit. But when they’re fussing and fighting, the children are just traumatized. It happens at institutions. These dynamics don’t change because it’s higher education.” News of the infighting invariably breaches a university’s walled garden, leading to public-relations disasters that rarely end well for administrators. In May 2023, for example, the Boston City Council took the extraordinary — and entirely symbolic — step of publicly rebuking one of the city’s largest employers, Northeastern University, for its “anti-union behavior.” The resolution came just days after graduate-student organizers filed an “unfair labor practices” complaint with the NLRB, alleging that Northeastern threatened to charge students from historically marginalized communities who wrote “2023” in chalk on university property. In a resolution that passed unanimously, the City Council accused administrators of waging a campaign “to obstruct and delay the majority of graduate workers’ right to hold an election.” Top leaders deployed campus police “to surveil, harass, and exclusively target BIPOC and trans workers with the threat of criminal charges for participating in protected concerted union

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activity as part of a pattern stretching back to 2019,” it stated. The resolution called on leaders “to allow all working master’s and doctoral graduate- students to vote in an election” and “stop disenfranchising graduate-student workers.” While politics undoubtedly played a role in the resolution’s harsh tone, it did offer a window into which side was winning the hearts and minds of Bostonians at the time — and it wasn’t Northeastern. In midAugust, the NLRB dismissed the complaint, saying that while campus officials did question the students involved, the “evidence did not show any unlawful interrogation or threat in response to protected activity.” Labor organizers say such tactics stem from a place of fear, as administrators anticipate having to cede control to workers, who campus leaders think don’t have the same understanding of how a college works. “They get scared. They feel like they’re losing their power, when all that’s happening is that their power is no longer unlimited,” says Cathy Wagner, an English professor at Miami University, in Ohio, and a leader of the newly certified Faculty Alliance of Miami. “But we all really want the same thing. Then the question is, How do we work together in a situation where their power is no longer unilateral?”

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Working Effectively With Academic Unions

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s the unionization movement continues to grow, deans, provosts, and presidents increasingly find themselves researching obscure labor laws and negotiating contracts with labor leaders for months or years on end — a career turn most didn’t see coming. Luckily, though, the 50-year history of collective bargaining by higher education offers both best practices and cautionary tales, says Daniel J. Julius, the labor expert and former senior vice president and provost of New Jersey City University. Administrators facing union deliberations for the first time would be wise to learn from the experiences of their peers. “Don’t rediscover the wheel,” he says. “There’s nothing new. Everyone in higher education thinks their situation

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TAKEAWAYS Negotiators should learn what tactics have and haven’t worked in the past. Acting transparently demonstrates good will. Relationship building needs to happen off site. It’s helpful not to personalize conflicts. Opportunities exist to work together toward common goals.

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GAVIN GUERRETTE, YALE NEWS

Yale graduate students rally for a union in 2018. The union successfully formed a collective bargaining unit under Local 33–Unite Here in 2023.

is unique. Let me tell you, I haven’t seen very much that’s unique in higher education.” That history can serve as a road map for administrators, who discover what negotiating tactics have worked in the past and, equally significant, which ones haven’t. “One of the most important things for a new president to do is, if there is a union in place, to work toward getting to know the leadership and the issues and the history of

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collective bargaining that’s taken place on that campus,” says Herbert, of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. “Some of it is about getting to know people on a personal level and developing relationships.” As the academic-unionization movement spreads to more campuses — private and public, big and small — administrators, lawyers, and labor organizers say there are

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additional ways to make the process less fraught:

administrators devoted to labor relations: an associate vice president, a director, six managers, four chief negotiators, and a consultant. Those employees negotiate and administer 15 contracts and 22 local agreements with 17 unions, which represent 134,000 workers across all professions. Others publicly acknowledge unions by creating websites that report votes, NLRB rulings, and contract negotiations. Cal State, the nation’s largest statewide system by enrollment, posts detailed information for the 14 collective-bargaining units on its 23 campuses, including contracts and memorandums of understanding. But even smaller institutions — including the 3,800-student Clark University, in Massachusetts — devote virtual space to collective bargaining on campus.

ACKNOWLEDGE THE UNION ONCE THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD CERTIFIES IT. This may seem perfunctory given an institution’s legal obligation to recognize the new bargaining unit and negotiate with it in good faith. But the tone of the acknowledgment can range from grudging to cooperative. Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, took the latter tack in an email in January 2023, shortly after the NLRB certified a 4,000-member bargaining unit of graduate student workers. Yale had fought the union’s formation since the 1990s, arguing that graduate-student employees were students, not workers, and so ineligible for union membership. While it fell far short of welcoming Unite HERE Local 33 into the Yale community, the email signaled an end to the administration’s challenges and an acknowledgment — however reluctant — that the two sides must forge a path forward: “With today’s result, the university will now turn to bargaining in good faith with Local 33 to reach a contract,” Salovey wrote. “As we work with the graduate-student union, we will continue to be guided by our commitment to Yale’s educational and research mission and to the success of all our students.” An institution can signal in other ways to its constituents that it’s taking the union’s presence seriously. Some institutions create jobs with “labor” baked into their titles. Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, for instance, employs an assistant vice chancellor for labor relations. The California State University system is more direct, calling its chief union negotiator an assistant vice chancellor for collective bargaining. The University of California system even provides an organizational chart that lists the names and titles of staff members and

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“People want to be a part of the solution, and people want to come together.” Campus leaders say such transparency shows that administrators have nothing to hide and are acting in good faith. “The fact that you’re willing to talk about it sends a strong message: ‘At least we have a leader who is not totally against us or unions.’ You’ve got to get out in front of it,” says Timothy Beard, president of Pasco-Hernando State College, in Florida. BUILD RELATIONSHIPS WITH PEOPLE ON THE OTHER SIDE. Negotiation tables aren’t safe spaces on college campuses. The process necessarily pits one side against the other, with each legally bound to act in the best interest of its constituents. Passions rise, and occasionally tempers flare.

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It’s much easier to move beyond those moments when labor and management have personal relationships, even if they’re tenuous. Given the push and pull of the bargaining process, friendships are unlikely to form organically, as they might during other work-related activities. This kind of relationship building necessarily needs to happen off site, according to administrators and campus-union leaders, perhaps over lunch or coffee. Candi Churchill, former executive director of the United Faculty of Florida, says that approach is much more successful than the opposite — “coming out extremely antagonistic

and just attacking and having a negative campaign.” “People want to be a part of the solution, and people want to come together,” she says. “So we try to make it a positive thing. We’re trying to build a voice here.” And in instances when organizers and administrators have waged particularly hard-fought battles during the unionization process, it may be best to find new people to iron out the first contract, says Chris Moran, a lawyer who often advises colleges on labor issues. “Sometimes the people who were actively involved in opposing the unionization

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Northwestern U. graduate students hold a union rally.

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The Union Is Certified. Here Are Administrators’ Next Steps.

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Decide whether it’s necessary to hire outside counsel. Chris Sinclair, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon and secretary-treasurer of the American Association of University Professors, warns that labor lawyers often aren’t well versed in the academy’s infrastructure, including shared governance and tenure. That doesn’t mean institutions should never hire outside lawyers, but colleges certainly shouldn’t put all decisions in their hands, he says. “If you’re relying on somebody who is used to bargaining with bargaining units that are not in academia,” he says, “you run the risk of them not really understanding the issue and getting things in contracts that ultimately the administration does not want. Getting that first contract right is extremely important, and I think that means having the right people at the table.” William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center, says outside law firms are frequently blamed for what a college is allowing to happen, often an intentional strategy used by institutions to deflect blame for unpopular decisions. “Actually the client is the university and the president and the Board of Trustees,” he says. “They can take a stand as to how they want any law firm to proceed.” Timothy Beard, president of Pasco-Hernando State College, in Florida, argues that using outside counsel is more about practicality than sending messages. “If you have inside counsel, you don’t want that person spending

ou’re an administrator on a campus with a newly certified union. Now what do you do? Within weeks or a few months of certification, the union will notify the administration of its intent to reach an initial collective-bargaining agreement. From that moment forward, the institution “has a duty to bargain in good faith with the union — a reciprocal obligation of the parties,” says Nick DiGiovanni, a lawyer with Morgan Brown who has negotiated union contracts on behalf of Elmira College, Harvard University, and Tufts University’s medical school. “The administration has to begin to plan for that reality.” Here are some issues DiGiovanni suggests administrators consider when dealing with their first on-campus union:

n

Outline broad administrative responsibilities. W ho will make final decisions on behalf of the institution? W ho will carry the load of dealing with the union from day to day? W ho will handle information requests or other communications from the union? n

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n

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Assign roles for the first contract negotiation, which typically lasts a year or more. W hich administrative unit will lead the negotiations? The human-resources department? A newly created labor-relations department? The provost? W ho will serve on the bargaining team? W ho are the decision makers? n

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costs of negotiating contracts, handling grievances and arbitration cases, dealing with labor-board proceedings, etc.,” DiGiovanni says. “This will involve time and money, and will be continual.”

the majority of their time in [contract] negotiations.” Holden Thorp, who after leaving as chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil served as provost at Washington University in St. Louis, says that outside firms often “manipulate” board members and other stakeholders who have little experience with unions. During an attempt by graduate students at Washington University to unionize, Thorp says lawyers at a well-known firm told him not to speak with student organizers, many of whom he knew by name, because it made him appear “too nice.” “I told them that I was the chief academic officer of the university, and that I would talk to them whenever I wanted,” he says. Thorp and other administrators continued meeting with the graduate students, who ultimately voted not to unionize. “I just think retail politics is a much better way to win these elections than union-busting garbage.”

Recognize everyone’s humanity. Labor relations is a people-driven process and needs to be treated as such, says DiGiovanni. While each side must deal with its own political realities, each side also must “honor the long-term nature of the relationship and the need to have harmonious labor relations,” he says. “The best relationships that I know of involve people of good faith on both sides who talk to each other frequently; meet with each other periodically, not just at the bargaining table; and try to anticipate problems before they become big ones,” he says. “They understand the role of history in the relationship; the challenges each side faces in dealing with certain issues that may come up; and the political pressures that sometimes intervene on both sides in dealing with something new.”

Calculate the union’s financial impact on the campus. “Obviously, there are continuing

effort,” he says, “may not be the best people to sit across the table from the union” during contract negotiations.

“You’ve got to have understanding to even start bargaining, let alone to reach a contract.”

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DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY. But even the chummiest labor and management relationships are tested during contract negotiations, which take place every three to five years. Occasionally the talks turn from tense to overtly hostile — sometimes as a negotiating tactic, but more often as a result of passion or frustration. It doesn’t help either side for those feelings to linger. “There have been times where I’ve gone

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into initial bargaining after there’d been a yearlong difference of opinion that had to be resolved through formal kinds of legal processes,” says Tom Riley, the University of Illinois system’s counsel on labor issues. “And there is a need for a little bit of healing on that point and understanding, because you’ve got to have understanding to even start bargaining, let alone to reach a contract.” Experts say campus workers turn to unions for reasons that may have nothing to do with their views of administrators. Risa L. Lieberwitz, general counsel for the American Association of University Professors, says academics may have good relations with leaders and still want to form a union. For those employees, the benefits of unionization extend far beyond wages and benefits to what Lieberwitz calls “democratic collective action.” Though it may be human nature to internalize such conflicts, administrators would be wise to consider the issues in broader terms. For a college president, that means viewing a nascent union of contingent faculty members as an outgrowth of the adjunctification of higher education, not as an indictment of the campus leader. “Honestly, you could be a terrific president, but you could also be gone in a year,” the UFF’s Churchill says. “It’s not about you.” The same principle applies to labor leaders. Academics are renowned for their vigorous debates, with Faculty Senate meetings often devolving into squabbles over petty issues. “What’s the difference between sitting and negotiating a contract versus any faculty meeting where people are getting irritated with each other?” asks Erik Loomis, a labor-history professor at the University of Rhode Island, where he’s treasurer of the faculty union. “Ideally, you don’t hold it against them for the next 20 years.”

possible educational experience for students. In an era of dwindling enrollments and tighter budgets, there are myriad opportunities for the two sides to work together to achieve common goals. This is especially true at state colleges. Depending on their size, unions can influence the decisions made in state capitals — from the votes legislators cast on budgets to the raises educators receive.

“When we have managed to be on the same page as our management, that has been very powerful because we go with the same demands or similar demands for resources as our bosses.” “When we have managed to be on the same page as our management, that has been very powerful because we go with the same demands or similar demands for resources as our bosses,” says Penny Lewis, the former vice president for senior colleges at the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY. “The union has certain political allies. The administration has other political allies. It can be an effective way of bringing more resources.” And for effecting change, as administrators and labor leaders at the University of Tennessee system learned in 2017. The two sides became unlikely allies in a two-year campaign to defeat a plan by Gov. Bill Haslam to outsource the jobs of

SEEK OUT AREAS OF SHARED INTEREST. Ostensibly, administrators and union members want the same thing: the best

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10,000 state facilities workers, including custodians, yard crews, electricians, physical-plant managers, and others. Haslam and his team drafted the proposal in private and planned to enforce it through executive order, bypassing both the Gener-

al Assembly and taxpayers. Enter United Campus Workers of Tennessee, a union affiliated with Communication Workers of America and representing 2,000 faculty and staff members at 20 state campuses that formed in 2000. Because

RACHEL OHM, USA TODAY NETWORK

Maintenance workers at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, part of the union representing 2,000 faculty and staff members, protest a plan in 2017 to outsource work on campus.

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ALEX MILAN TRACY, SIPA USA, AP

Protesters demonstrate at Portland State University in 2020, calling for the campus police department to be disarmed.

Negotiating Beyond Salaries

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he influence of today’s academic unions extends far beyond their historical turf: pay, benefits, and teaching loads. As the academy has become more diverse in recent years — with faculty unions following suit — union organizers and leaders have begun challenging administrators on issues affecting equity and putting an antiracist and social-justice lens on contract negotiations. Take the California Faculty Association, which represents 29,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors, and coaches across the 23-campus California State

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University system. Shortly after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the CFA presented a list of social-justice demands to system administrators. They included defunding and removing armed police from campuses, banning retaliation against workers who protest anti-Black racism, and efforts by administrators to overturn an anti-affirmative-action ballot measure. The union’s recent bargaining team was the most inclusive in its history, said the CFA’s president, Charles Toombs, at a March 2023 panel discussion at CUNY’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the

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Professions. Those new perspectives on race and equity often result in concrete improvements in working conditions, said Toombs, a professor and immediate past chair of San Diego State University’s Africana-studies program.

“The people — the players — have changed. And that’s what is making such a remarkable difference in the kind of contracts being negotiated, the kind of articles our members are interested in,” he said. For example, faculty members in the CSU system may now write rebuttals to student evaluations “when it is believed

that additional information is needed or in the case of student bias,” the contract states. Toombs said the provision addresses a concern among some minority faculty members that evaluations are less a reflection of instructors’ skills and more about their race, sexual identity, or gender. “You can’t just talk about it,” he told audience members. “As academics, we always want to be theoretical, but our work” at the union “is almost always practical and real. What can we actually get for our members that addresses their lived experiences?” Negotiators for colleges and universities, however, say sometimes the union’s demands for social and racial justice are too broad to fit into a contract — for example, they concern immigration, climate change, or other environmental issues. Tom Riley, the University of Illinois system’s counsel on labor issues, says that while those demands “may be very, very important — and important to both sides — [they’re] really outside the purview of a union contract. The administration might take the position, ‘We care about this, but this does not belong in a union contract. This is not going to drive our response.’”

Tennessee bars collective bargaining by public-sector employees, neither the University of Tennessee system nor the state government is obligated to recognize unions. Until 2009, in fact, university officials described all interactions with UCW Tennessee as “meetings with concerned individual employees not representing any organization,” not “union leaders.” Yet it was a university administrator who tipped off union leaders to Haslam’s clandestine plan in 2015, says Melanie Barron, a former leader of UCW’s chapter at the university’s Knoxville campus and now a senior campaign lead with CWA.

UCW immediately mobilized, arguing that privatization would jeopardize the jobs of one in five state employees. The union branded its protest “Tennessee Is Not for Sale,” holding rallies on campuses, lobbying lawmakers in Nashville, and unfurling enormous handmade banners down the hallways of legislative offices. At one point, UCW Tennessee members even occupied a legislative building to block access to a key meeting. After relentless pressure from UCW Tennessee, Haslam ultimately compromised, saying that each state institution could make its own decisions about outsourcing.

“Our work is almost always practical and real. What can we actually get for our members that addresses their lived experiences?”

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UCW Tennessee then met with leaders of each campus and persuaded them to formally opt out. Administrators didn’t exactly lock arms with union members at the sit-in or even acknowledge their shared interest in defeating Haslam’s plan, Barron says. But they offered tacit approval of the Tennessee Is Not for Sale campaign by giving the

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union free rein to protest — something university leaders couldn’t do publicly. “They could have reacted to all of that very differently, and they chose to allow us to fight this fight, because in some ways we were fighting it together,” she says. “We got to have a pretty loud activist voice in a way that they couldn’t, because they’re in a different position in those types of spaces.”

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Fewer Graduate Admissions? Two Views

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nine-month contracts, Princeton University and Penn, which don’t have graduate-student unions, matched that pay rate. “One interpretation would be, ‘Well, the bargaining at Columbia didn’t make a difference. Look, they’re similar salaries at a nonorganized institution,” says the University of Georgia’s Tim Cain. “But I think that the more realistic claim would be that the effects of unionization at Columbia helped change the salaries at other competitive institutions.” Now that more graduate-student workers are unionizing and successfully bargaining for higher pay, administrators are warning that there will be consequences — namely, fewer graduate students admitted into programs. This is especially true at state-run institutions that can’t count on state legislatures to offset the costs. In late 2022, 48,000 graduate-student workers, postdocs, and academic researchers across the University of California system went on strike over low pay in what was the largest academic strike in U.S. history. After nearly six weeks, negotiators for the two sides agreed on a contract that would pay graduate teaching assistants at least $34,000 for part-time work, up from about $23,000. And full-time postdocs would now earn at least $70,000, up from $55,000. The increases would make them among the highest-paid graduate-student workers in the country. The system estimates that it will cost $500 million to $750 million over the lives of the contracts — something Rosemarie Rae, chief financial officer at the University of California at Berkeley, called a “financial shock to the system.” Campuses across the system signaled that they might be forced to reduce enrollment in some graduate programs. Rich Leib, chair of the system’s Board of Regents, told the Los Angeles Times that he was happy with the agreement but that it would have consequences. “It’s not like the money’s coming from the sky,” he said. “We’re trying to figure it out, but it’s going to require changes.” Union leaders across the system’s 10 campuses

ew things have remained as constant in higher education as the academy’s tacit arrangement with graduate students, a class of workers motivated to compete for positions offering long hours, low pay, and no hope of advancement. In exchange for winning a coveted spot in a highly competitive program, those students have traditionally agreed to teach courses or oversee research projects for salaries that can fall below the poverty line. It’s considered a rite of passage among academics of a certain age, who have been known to romanticize their days as “poor, overworked graduate students.”

“The effects of unionization at Columbia helped change the salaries at other competitive institutions.” Administrators have argued that the system, however grueling, gives graduate students career-enhancing experiences they wouldn’t ordinarily receive. But colleges have also grown accustomed to leveraging those high-skill, low-wage workers to shore up budgets at a time when “professional” labor costs prohibit making full-time hires. The issue is so critical that some of the nation’s elite universities raised stipends proactively in the last year after graduate unions formed at Boston, Northwestern, and Yale Universities. The University of Pennsylvania, for example, increased its stipend from $30,000 to $38,000, the largest increase ever, and graduate-student workers at Duke and Stanford Universities received one-time payments of $1,000 each. When graduate students at Columbia University organized and bargained for salaries of $40,000 for doctoral students on

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reported hearing departmental leaders discuss the reductions in admissions, some by as much as 30 percent. “When I hear that, I hear that the priorities of its budget are elsewhere,” says Melanie Barron, a senior campaign lead with Communication Workers of America, an AFL-CIO umbrella union organization that works to organize campuses in states with right-to-work laws. Brandon Mancilla, the first president of the Harvard Graduate Student Union, United Auto Workers Local 5188, puts it more bluntly: “Not a single one of these private universities, especially the big ones that have these high-profile” fund-raising drives, “is going to go broke because of unionization. You have a fundamental problem if

your model can’t survive … if people are paid above $35,000.” If Barron and Mancilla sound skeptical, it’s because their colleagues conduct lineby-line analyses of college and university budgets long before they decide the scope of their contract demands. In states where legislators have made draconian cuts in higher-education budgets, Barron says it becomes obvious “there really isn’t anything much to work with,” so union representatives ratchet back their expectations about raises and benefits. “Typically, the union isn’t going to be making demands that don’t make sense and are completely unwinnable,” she says. “If those demands were really that unwinnable, they wouldn’t be out there.”

Glossary Bargaining unit A group of workers that negotiates terms of employment with an employer. The National Labor Relations Board determines who can become part of a bargaining unit, though unions define their own communities of interest in their petitions to the NLRB, and institutions have the right to challenge NLRB rulings. Collective bargaining The process through which employees negotiate with employers about wages, working conditions, hours, and other terms of employment. Employees elect union representatives to negotiate contracts with management on their behalf, with strict laws governing how the two sides reach those agreements. Collective-bargaining agreement A contract between an employer and the union representing employees, which lays out terms of employment such as salaries, benefits, hours spent working, and other issues.

Good-faith negotiations A term outlined in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 for how unions and managers approach contract negotiations. Though it’s loosely defined, it has come to mean approaching “bargaining with an open mind and desire to reach agreement.” Bad-faith bargaining could include skipping meetings or refusing to recognize a union or its leaders. National Labor Relations Board An independent agency of the federal government that was created by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and that protects workers’ rights and remedies unfair labor practices committed by private-sector employers. In addition to investigating allegations of wrongdoing and deciding complaints of unfair labor practices, the NLRB conducts the initial election that determines whether employees want to unionize. It operates 26 regional boards that decide disputes over bargaining units, certifications, and election outcomes.

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Right-to-work states A provision of 1947’s Taft-Hartley Act, currently in use in 28 states, blocks labor unions from collecting dues (known as “fair share” fees) from employees who choose not to join the unions but who benefit from collective bargaining. Nonunion members are nonetheless covered under the terms of collective-bargaining agreements in those states, most of which are in the South and Midwest. Shared governance The practice under which a college’s faculty has a say — alongside administrators and board members — in how the institution operates. The concept dates to 1920, when the American Association of University Professors published its first statement on the issue.

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A FINAL WORD

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will be seen as standing in tension with the academic mission,” he said. Consider a union’s calls for smaller class sizes. It’s not just a way for faculty members to cut down on the amount of work they’re doing, he said, citing the most cynical interpretation of their demands. Smaller classes are a way to provide a better education for students, Sandel said, something that everyone should want. In that regard, finding a way to coalesce around common goals shouldn’t be that much of a lift for administrators or union members. “Anybody who has the actual interest of the institution in mind should be more than happy to sit down with other parts of the institution and work out conditions that are fair and clear and acceptable to both sides,” says Erik Loomis, the history professor from the University of Rhode Island. For those leading an institution, that means acknowledging the union’s right to exist and its obligation to negotiate the best possible terms of employment for its members. Experts say such actions are a constructive way to demonstrate respect for the democratic process and acknowledge that the decision to unionize is the employees’ choice, not the institution’s. The more accepting the institution, the less likely it is that unionization will lead into an adversarial collective-bargaining relationship. In other words, it’s better to concede on a few issues than create palpable tension between faculty and administrators or lead to strikes that grind instruction to a halt, says Timothy Beard, the president of Pasco-Hernando State College. “Keep in mind,” he says, “our students are watching us.”

he significant growth in academic labor unions — and the likelihood that the movement will gain momentum in the coming years — is for college administrators the equivalent of a flashing neon sign. It’s saying that they’re better off forming a good working relationship with organized labor on their campuses than fighting its right to exist. And to those who object to unions on principle, the sign flashes this piece of advice: The best offense is a good defense. “In the past, university presidents could fall back on a generalized sentiment that unions are bad, or they’re not helpful. The pendulum is maybe generationally swinging in a different direction on that,” says Scott Schneider, the lawyer in private practice who counsels higher-education clients on employment issues. “It means if you want to avoid unionization, if that’s a strategic priority, make sure you have your finger on the pulse of the issues impacting your employees, and proactively address them.” But if and when faculty or students decide to unionize, the best strategy involves acceptance, patience, and above all, a willingness to put the needs of students first. Both sides should carefully frame their rhetoric to emphasize the collective good rather than the politics of self-interest, said Michael J. Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard Law School, in a March 2023 keynote address at the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at CUNY’s Hunter College. “The more we can frame the mission and purpose of collective bargaining in education in the name of improving education, the less it

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