Unionization in the Academy: Visions and Realities

Unionization in the Academy

Issues in Academic Ethics Series Eltor: Steven M. Cahn

Campus Rules and Moral Community: In Place of In Loco Parentis by David A. Hoekema, Calvin College University-Business Partnersh@s:A n Assessment by Norman E. Bowie, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities A Professor%Duties: Ethical Issues in College Tedching by Peter J. Markie, University of Missouri-Columbia Neutrality and the Academic Ethic by Robert L. Simon, Hamilton College Ethics of Scientijc Research by Kristin Shrader-Frechette, University of South Florida Academic Freedom and Tenure: Ethical Issues by Richard T. De George, University of Kansas Diversity and Community in the Academy: Affirmative Action in Faculty Appointments by Celia Wolf-Devine, Stonehill College The Moral Dimensions ofAcademic Administration by Rudolph H. Weingartner, University of Pittsburgh Free Speech on Campus by Martin €? Goldmg, Duke University Sexual Harassment as an Ethical Issue in Academic L$e by Leslie Pickering Francis, University of Utah Moral Leadership: Ethics and the College Presidency by Paul J. Olscamp Unionization in the Academy: Visions and Realities by Judith Wagner DeCew

Unionization in the Academy Visions and Realities

Judith Wagner DeCew

ROWMAN & L I T T L E F I E L D P U B L I S H E R S , I N C . Lanharn Boulder * New York Oxford

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,Inc. A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright 0 2003 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,Inc.

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DeCew,Judith Wagner. Unionization in the academy /Judith Wagner DeCew. p. cm. - (Issues in academic ethics) Includes bibliographicalreferences @. ) and index. ISBN 0-8476-9670-7 (cloth :alk. paper) - ISBN 0-8476-9671-5 @bk.: alk. paper) 1. College teachers' unions-United States. 2. Universities and unions-organizing-United States. I. Title. colleges-Employees-Labor 11. Series. LB2335.865.U6 D43 2002 331.88'1 13781'209734~21 2002015220 Printed in the United States of America

ern

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For Lanny who is always there with his insights, ideas, and critiques as well as his support and love.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Part I: Commentary Introduction

3

1 Faculty Unions: Background and History

11

2 Arguments for and against Faculty Unions, and the Problem of Legitimacy

31

3 The Yeshiva Decision and Unions at Private Institutions

45

4 Major Effects of Faculty Unionization

57

5 Unionization among Part-Time Faculty

75

6

Graduate Student Unions

89

7 Unionization for Undergraduate M s : One Case Study

111

Conclusion

119

vii

viii

Contents

Part 11: Selected Readings Section I: Faculty Unions and Academic Politics Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education: Concluding Observations Everett Carl1 Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset

127

Academic Politics: Faculty Unions and the Academic Perception William R. Brown

139

Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad James E Carlin

167

Are Unions Good for Professors? Stanley Aronowitz

173

Section 11: Faculty Unions and the Legal Landscape Collective Bargaining and the Professoriate: What the Law Says Deborah C. Malamud

187

The Yeshiva Faculty Union: Tales Told Out of School Manjed Weidhorn

199

Section 111: Unionization and Part-Time Faculty To Many Adjunct Professors, Academic Freedom Is a Myth: As the Ranks of Part-Timers Swell, They Lament How Easily Colleges Can Dump Them Alison Schneider The AAUP Organizes Part-Time Faculty: An Experiment in Community Responsibility Suggests that Part- and Full-Time Faculty Can Enrich One Another’s Professional Lives Richard Moser

209

217

Selected Bibliography

223

Index

227

About the Author

239

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

here are many people who have assisted me in various ways in the development of this work. Steven Cahn deserves special thanks for inviting me to write this book, for his patience waiting for it, for his trust and encouragement as well as his thoughtful advice and comments. I also continue to marvel at the support I receive from my dissertation advisor, Fred Feldman. I am very appreciative of generous sabbatical support from Clark University, which allowed me time to write fkee from teaching, committee meetings, and other duties. I also thank the Clark Higgins School of Humanities for assistance and Clark's Research Board for faculty development funds that supported the completion of this book. Edward McDermott and Mary Hartman at Clark's Goddard Library, and Carmella D'Ambra and Jesse Bailey were invaluable in helping me get resource material and check references, and I thank them very much for their always timely assistance. I am also grateful to those who read and commented on the manuscript for me, most especially Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow of the Graduate School of Management at Clark University. Many thanks also to Ellen Brink, Eve DeVaro, Peter Markie, Mary Mitchell,Jason Proetorius, Marsha Wagner, and John Wehmueller. Naturally, I express gratitude to those holding the copyright on the excerpts, essays, and opinion pieces in Part I1 of this book for their reprint ix

x

Acknowledgments

permissions. These works add excellent additional perspectives on the difficult issues raised and discussed here. Finally, this book would not exist without the support of my family. Special thanks to my children, David, Melissa,and Jeeey, for their tolerance of my working hours, and even help with computer problems. They are wonderful and talented, malung all the effort worthwhile.

PARTI COMMENTARY

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I NTRO DUCTI o N

A decade ago, unionization of college and university professors was not even a ripple on the pond of academic life. Their behavior seemingly still conjirmed Thorstein Veblen’s observation made at the end of World War I, that professors would not join unions because of “a feeling among them that their salaries are not of the nature of wages, and that there would be a species of moral obliquity implied in overtly dealing with the matter.” But today, to continue a not very elegant analogy, unionization has become a large splash. -Everett

Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset

C

olleges and universities expanded and grew economically during the 1950s and 1960s as higher education became available to a larger group of students. Then these institutions were consumed by the campus confkontation and activism of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam era. The early 1970s brought a period of austerity on campuses,with drops in the number of students, faculty positions, and hnding. Many factors contributed to the htorically unprecedented emergence of faculty unions in the mid-to-late 1960s. One of these was social, based on critiques of the status quo accompanied by skepticism about solving social problems, 3

4

Introduction

brought on by student protests. The difficult national economic climate was another major factor contributing to the unionization of faculty, which grew dramatically in the 1970s, slowing somewhat in the 1980s, and reemerging during the subsequent years, even as more traditional labor unions in America lost resources and much of their influence.' In addition, during the last two decades there has been a tendency for government at all levels to attempt to impose control over higher education. Public officials such as governors and state legislators urge that they are seeking economic efficiency while enhancing the delivery of education. Critics argue to the contrary that these officials ultimately seek political control over institutions of higher education, reducing the power of faculty and their role in institutional governance.* Efforts by public officials to restructure and reorganize universities, to impose new tenure policies, and to push the importance of teaching over research support the view of critics that politicians seek more institutional power. This political change has affected not only public institutions, where faculty members seek to retain their power and status, but also private institutions where faculty and students benefit h m federal grants. Thus social, economic, and political forces all contributed to feelings of uncertainty and the growth of academic unions. Unions in the professoriate continue to have a major influence on about one-third of American campuses, mostly public institutions, but the past decade has also shown a growth in attempts to begin unions among private universities. Unionization for faculty is more complex than for traditional unions in industry, not only because of political and economic forces but also because of issues and values peculiar to the profession, including tenure and academic fi-eedom. Most recently, there has been growth in the move toward unions among part-time and adjunct faculty, among graduate teaching assistants (TAs),and even among undergraduate resident advisers (RAs). The causes and effects of these unions in academia range from social and economic to moral, political, and legal. Moreover, all academic unions have an impact on the campus culture, on the values and priorities deemed most important at a college or university, on the distribution of power on campus, and on the shaping of American higher education. The breadth of issues that faculty unions often see as within their scope and thus subject to collective bargaining is remarkable. Some issues are generally nonacademic and more clearly economic, including salary, merit pay, and compensation for additional activities, as well as other benefits such as life and disability insurance, moving expenses, tuition waivers for dependents, sabbatical leave, leaves of absence, maternity and sick leave. Other issues fall under the category of working conditions, including reappointment, tenure and promotion policies, grievance procedures, course load, number of students, the col-

Introduction

5

lege calendar, office space, secretarial stafT and research staff, committee work, and so on. But collective bargaining often covers more obviously academic issues as well, including admissions, educational policy, curriculum, program development, nominations and selections for deanships, department chairs and other administrators, searches for presidents, naming of endowed chairs and hstinguished professorships, to name a few.3 Faculty unions have been controversial from the outset, and debates surrounding unionization have included heated political rhetoric. Numerous commentators have pointed out that despite the large percentage of faculty workmg under unions, most of the literature in higher education has ignored or overlooked unions or has been very critical of unionization in the academy. According to one writer, “In some ways the literature on the academic profession qua profession is all too brief in its review of faculty unionization, a process that necessarily places the professor in the position of bureaucratic empl~yee.”~ Another researcher says, “Although empirical data do not support such a view, this work [studes in the higher education literature] generally regards unionization as a threat to professionalism and to faculty ~alaries.”~ Of the limited literature on academic unions, much of it gives a negative portrayal of them as imposing their own rules, officials and bureaucracies, and allowing membership majorities to ignore the preferences of minorities. Notable exceptions include articles from Academe, the Bulletin of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors).AAUP leaders and other supporters of collective bargaining stress that academic unions have the potential to protect and safeguard moral values includmg academic freedom, fair treatment, and faculty governance, as well as due process and other rights. Unions provide community and comradeship and enhance debate about institutional priorities. The goal of this book is to provide a balanced account of academic unions: their many and varied strengths and weaknesses, multiple arguments in favor and against them, and both the positive and negative effects they produce. Chapter 1 begins with a focus on faculty unionization-an examination of the background and history of unionization in academia, including data on faculty unions both in the 1970s and through the 1990s. It includes an explanation of the independent and sometimes conflicting concerns cited by faculty as reasons to support academic unions on campus, a brief overview of the organizations involved in collective bargaining in academia, and identification of the central goals prominent in academic contracts. There is discussion of the primary values emphasized by unions, such as academic freedom, indvidual autonomy,job security, due process, diversity on campus, along with job conditions including teaching loads, salaries, and benefits. This chapter ends with an emphasis on the various reasons unionization in academia arises.

6

Introduction

It will become clear that the discussion of the various factors and influences in the movement toward collective bargaining on campus naturally evolves into a substantial description and assessment in chapter 2 of the wide variety of arguments given in favor and against academic unions, fiom multiple perspectives and various college and university groups. These arguments highhght the ways in which faculty unions are Werent fiom other more traditional unions in such fields as manufacturing, construction, transportation, and communications. Moreover, the arguments on each side appear to be very balanced. Recent work on unions and legitimacy is particularly useM in explaining this balance.6 It also helps explain the complexity of faculty unions and the controversies that continue to surround them concerning their quality and effectiveness. The vast majority of faculty unions are at public institutions of higher education, which are largely subject to state legislation. There remain, however, quite a number of unions at private colleges and universities, though fewer than union advocates had predicted thirty years ago. These unions are governed by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)and by rulings fiom the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of the Supreme Court’s 1980 National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University de~ision,~ which held that faculty members at Yeshva University were “managerial” employees and thus excluded under federal law h m collective bargaining. This chapter examines as well the initial impact of the Yeshiva decision, discouraging unionization at private schools, and recent attempts to form faculty unions at private colleges in spite of the Yeshiva holding. Given background information on unionization at both public and private institutions, chapter 4 provides an extended discussion of the overall effects of the faculty unionization movement, both positive and negative, over the last approximately thirty-five years. As Stanley Aronowitz has written, “The untold story of the 1970s and 1980s-untold partly because it doesn’t agree with what the press and the public s t i l l believe unions are about-is that the fastest-growing section of the labor movement came to consist of professionals and other white-collar employees. And until the rise of unions among health-care professionals in the 1980s and 1990s, the main leader in this trend was the professoriate.”8 As is now well known, unionization in academia has in the past decade or so expanded to include part-time faculty and adjuncts, who now make up more than half of the teaching professionals in American higher edu~ation.~ Chapter 5 focuses on recent developments in the attempts by part-time faculty to unionize. This discussion not only highhghts reasons that unions for parttime faculty may be even more valuable than those for full-time faculty but

Introduction

7

also emphasizes why such unions are so dfficult to establish for a transient and largely unconnected group of workers. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the existence and legal battles surroundmg graduate student unions for TAs, as well as the most recent developments allowing undergraduate R A s to form a union at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Some of the arguments both in favor and opposed to these academic unions are similar to those surrounding faculty unions, but there are also issues peculiar to these student groups in which membershp shifts regularly. While debates concerning unions for campus groups other than faculty and students are certainly important, they are beyond the scope of this study. lo Similarly, this book does not devote special attention to concerns about hours and working conditions for m e d d students. Each of these topics deserves treatment on its own. Throughout t h s book there are sets of major related and recurring questions, over which there is considerable disagreement. One is whether unions pose a threat in academia because unionization is in conflict with academic values or whether academic unions are consistent with and really enhance those values. Another is whether unions arise in part in response to adversarial relationships between faculty and administration and whether unions generate and perpetuate or actually alleviate such adversity. One recent commentator, Gordon Arnold, gives usell guidelines when he sums up the relatively short history of faculty unions as consisting of three phases of development. “First, there was an early period of intense activity, as the legal environment cleared and as unionism rapidly gained some measure of legitimacy in the higher education community. Second, there was a slowdown in the movement, whch occurred as a result of the Supreme Court’s Yeshiva decision in 1980, but which also was accompanied by societal and economic changes. By the latter half of the 1990s, a tentative new phase began as increased wihngness to explore unionization seemed to emerge, with the possibhty that the movement would take on new life.”” It will become clear that the effectiveness of academic unions varies and that unionization is likely to increase, probably not in leaps and bounds, but at least at a reasonably steady rate. There are many reasons for this likely increase, including economic constraints fiom a weakened economy and legislative cutbacks, as well as declines in enrollment and the increased difficulty of getting additional research funds. Further reasons are attacks on academe and the professoriate, perhaps most prominently attacks on tenure, the change in faculty mix as part-time faculty become a much larger percentage of the workforce in higher education, and changes in faculty workload and the delivery of higher education arising from increased uses of instructional technology.

8

Introduction

There are two major caveats to keep in mind throughout the discussions in this book. First, remember that generalizations about the merits of unionization in academe are difficult to make because of the wide diversity of institutions in higher education, spanning public and private and ranging fi-om s m a l l two-year institutions, community colleges, and four-year colleges to large research universities and multicampus university complexes. Detailed analyses of particular union movements indicate that each campus story is unique, depending on the actors involved and the political dynamics, both of which vary internally and externally, and that it is important not to oversimpw causes and effects. l2 Second, there is substantial information on unionized institutions regarding salaries, work conditions, faculty governance, and procedural rights regarding retrenchment, outside employment, intellectual property, and so on, which has been gleaned fi-om the analysis of existing faculty union ~ontracts.’~ However there is no comparable set of data for the even larger number of institutions of higher learning without unions. Thus comparisons between conditions for faculty at unionized and nonunion colleges and universities are extremely dif6cult to make. This problem is compounded by the fact that there are surely interactions between union and nonunion institutions. Clearly, for example, some schools have raised faculty salaries to prevent or deter union organization, and thus doing so has made meaningful comparisons difficult and perhaps impossible between faculty salaries at union versus nonunion institutions. Nevertheless, principles of collective bargaining that had evolved in more traditional “blue-collar” fields have now successfully transferred into multiple academic institutions of higher education. This is quite remarkable, given the different structures and roles in industry and higher education. Many worry about the conflict between labor rights and academic fieedom. They see the outcomes of unionization as a leveling process in academia, leading to a decline in academic excellence and the traditional values of higher education. Others argue that colleges and universities have improved in many ways through collective bargaining. They believe unions protect faculty values and help provide an important sense of community on campus. The following chapters indcate that many or even most of the benefits have been gained by unions for faculty at lower-level or less elite institutions and at public universities subject to political oversight. Among regular faculty, many of the benefits of unionization have helped junior faculty in a weak labor market. Whether one views t h s as good news or bad news, it is clear that as economic constraints continue to change the makeup and roles of faculty, union battles and assistance for the least-powerful faculty cannot be ignored as important moral and public policy concerns.

Introduction

9

Note, however, that faculty unions are currently functioning very well at a significant number of institutions of higher learning despite the fact that unionization by faculty is not only highly political but also usually a lengthy and exhausting pro~ess.’~ This suggests faculty are u d k e l y to undertake a unionization effort unless they feel pushed hard and believe unionization is absolutely essential to gain improvement and rectifj unfairness. Wilham R. Brown has argued that academicians are primarily concerned with their own chosen and independent teaching and research, and thus only under extreme provocation will they band together to protest outside forces.I5 In his view, “the manner in which academicians organize themselves and the institutional relationships through which they create a college’s internal politics are inherent to higher education as we know it today? Gary Rhoades has added that “many, if not most, faculty are unaware of the scope and significance of the restructuring that is ongoing in higher education. Indeed, many faculty seem to think of themselves as independent professionals,”” and this is true at both public and private institutions. If these observations are correct, then there are important reasons to study and reflect on the topics in this book: concerns cited by faculty as reasons to join unions, factors leading to unionization in academia, primary aims and effects of academic unions, and arguments given for and against the existence of unions in academic environments. All these reveal insights about different perceptions and perspectives regarding employment in academia. Consequently, all can help faculty, administrators, students, legislators, and others enter into the debate in political ethics as they assess the merits of unionization on their own campuses and elsewhere. The goal is for all to understand more fully the issues that will influence campus culture, academic excellence, institutional values and priorities, and the future development of higher education.

NOTES Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education (Berkeley,Calif.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1973),x, quoting Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (New York: B. W Huebsch, 1918),162. 1. Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 1. These authors say that beyond any doubt labor unions in America are in a “continuing crisis” and union membership “has fallen by nearly five million (about one-fourth) since 1980,” p. 1.

10

Introduction

2. See, for example, William R. Brown, Academic Politics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 3. 3. Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 84-85. 4. Philo A. Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate: Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 5, including a citation to Joseph W Garbarino and Bill Aussieker, Faculty Bargaining: Change and Conjict (New York McGraw-Hill, 1975). 5. Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and RestructuringAcademic Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 26. 6. Chaison and Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy, 1. 7. National Labor Relations Board u Yeshiva University, 444 U.S. 672 (1980). 8. Stanley Aronowitz, “Are Unions Good for Professors?” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 12-1 7. 9. Matthew M. Bodah, “Sigmficant Labor and Employment Law Issues in Higher Education during the Past Decade and What to Look for Now: The Perspective of an Academician,”]ournal $Law and Education 29, no. 3 (July 2000): 327. 10. As an example, see Chaison and Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy, chap. 3, for a detailed and interesting case study of the organization of clerical workers at Harvard. 11. Gordon B. Arnold, The Politics ofFaculty Unionization:The Experience o m r e e New England Universities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000), 37. 12. See Arnold, The Politics ofFaculty Unionization for descriptions and a comparison of faculty unionization at the University of Rhode Island, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of Connecticut. This detailed study gives particular insights into what the conflicts and politics of the unionization movement say “about the distribution of power on a campus,” p. 7. 13. For an analysis of many of these contracts, see Rhoades, Managed Professionals. Gary Rhoades’ main theses are that faculty are highly managed and stratified professionals, who will continue to encounter less involvement in decision making and increased divisions within their academic hierarchy. 14. Arnold, The Politics $Faculty Unionization, x. 15. Brown, Academic Politics, 12. 16. Brown, Academic Politics, 7-8. 17. Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 4.

ONE FACULTYUNIONS: BACKGROUND A N D HISTORY

E

verett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset’s 1973 study for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, Profssors, Unions, and Amevican Higher Education, gives perhaps the best, most comprehensive, and most detailed treatment of the early rise of faculty unions. It has been widely quoted and cited in later discussions of the topic. Their study focuses solely on the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, when unions in academia became a new social phenomenon at that point in history. Malung clear that unionization has been successful at some institutions and has failed at others, they examine different faculty views on unions, as well as responses from administrators, students, and legislators. Their general conclusion is that “from the broadest perspective, the rapid growth of collective bargaining in higher education during the past half-decade should be seen as the extension-to the level of university governance and faculty life-of the powerful trends toward equalization and away from elitism that have characterized many sectors of American society since the mid-sixties.’’’ Although there are numerous other factors arguably affecting the rise of faculty unions, Ladd and Lipset are particularly astute in their ability to identi@ and analyze the conflicts between “the egalitarian orientation of unions and the importance of preserving values inherent in college and university 11

12

Chapter One

lifecommitment to scholarshp, the transmission of cultural values, and the importance of individual achievement for both faculty and st~dents.’’~ This conflict is not unique to unions in academia. In a study of unions in general, it has been argued that “many Americans, including some who would benefit economically from union membership, view unions with ambivalence or even hostility. . . . This skepticism may reflect disapproval with the alienating style of the AFL-CIO in modern times. But American individualism also plays a role. Americans tend to distrust organizations that seem to put solidarity, security, and fraternity above personal liberty, innovation, and c~mpetition.”~ Perhaps it can be said, however, that the conflict between individualism and egahtarianism, and the resulting skepticism and distrust, is especially pronounced in the academic arena. Although this varies among institutions, there is a traditional view of faculty as professionals with independence who place a high value on autonomy as well as originality in learning, teaching, and research. As Ladd and Lipset as well as others explain, college and university professors had a long-standmg aversion to unions prior to the mid-1960s. There were many strong reasons for faculty to be disinclined to form or join unions. Most faculty members viewed themselves as professionals with a social status incompatible with trade unions that they associated with manufacturing and manual labor. As highly educated members of society, faculty members appeared to be at the very opposite end of the spectrum of workers &om those who traditionally unioni~ed.~ Their view of their own professional status led them to value independence and self-control, as well as control over peer evaluations and their working conditions. They valued choice and self-regulation over their course loads and the subjects they taught, the focus of their research, voluntary participation on committees, and so on. These individualistic values contlicted with the egalitarianism and collectivism associated with trade unionism. Faculty also felt uncomfortable acting through unions rather than as individual scholars. It is thus hardly surprising that administrators and boards of trustees were unprepared for the unionization movement in academia and had negative feelings toward faculty unions, fearing loss of their power. Many faculty members share this disdain toward unions in the academy today. Even those who have formed or joined unions often say they never really wanted a union but felt they had to unionize to get their administrators to listen to them. Such views are common among scholars in disciplines within the social sciences and humanities, where pay is low and outside employment is scarce. Given these attitudes, it is interesting to wonder what factors would be powerful enough to overcome these antiunion

Faculty Unions: Background and History

13

feelings and to lead many in the professoriate to embrace collective bargaining. Bureaucratization and egalitarianism play strong roles.

FACULTY UNION DATA As of spring 1973 there were faculty unions at 304 institutions, at both twoand four-year schools,including the two massive multicampus and multifaculty institutions, State University of New York (SUNY) and City University of New York (CUNY), for a total covering over a tenth of the professional employees at colleges and universities. Ninety percent of the unions in 1973 were at public institutions, though twenty-five private colleges and universities had also ~nionized.~ By 1990 there were approximately 476 faculty union bargaining agents at public and private institutions,6 and by 1994 there were 242,221 faculty on 1,057 campuses represented by collective bargaining agents. These unions constituted 44 percent of fU-time faculty, and 29 percent of all campuses nationwide, and 95 percent of these unionized faculty were at public institutions.’ In the statistics from 1973 as well as from 1994, it is clear that the predominant number of union contracts were at two-year and community colleges rather than elite universities with advanced scholarship and research. Those faculty members had less status, independence, self-regulation, salary and benefits, and less bargaining power than their colleagues elsewhere in the profession. Perhaps it is not surprising that those in a glutted labor market may need unions to protect their rights, while highly skilled researchers who command prestige, high salaries,and other rewards at the top feel they are more free and will fare better professionally without a union. The most scholarly and productive faculty worry that union efforts reduce emphasis on research, merit, and academic achievement. They oppose the parity that unions want, and worry unions will downgrade the standing of top universities, without bringing the lesser ones up. They believe nonunionized universities and colleges-public or private-are more attractive for creative scholars and thus will continually improve. Ladd and Lipset suggest that academic unionization therefore shows that faculty are becoming “less professional” because unions are much more successhl at less prestigious schools and have the greatest impact in the “least professional components” of academia.8 Nevertheless, we would do well to treat such statements with some caution. Although it is true that in 1994 approximately 70 percent of a l l collective bargaining agreements nationwide at

14

Chapter One

institutions of higher education were at two-year colleges, and 78 percent of those were in the public sector, nevertheless more faculty members at fouryear institutions than two-year colleges (138,254 versus 103,967) were covered by collective bargaining agreements. Many large state systems of colleges and universities tend to be unionized, incluhng those in California, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. Thus while there are more union contracts at two-year colleges, these are smaller campuses with fewer numbers of faculty9 Note also that unionization in academia often depends on endowments to institutions as well as legislative responsiveness,both of which can vary at both more and less elite colleges and universities.

FACULTY VIEWS O N UNIONIZATION Concerns that are cited by professors as reasons to develop or join a faculty union on campus clearly differ depending on the variety of school or institution with which the faculty member is affiliated. Because faculty unions exist predominantly at public institutions, multicampus schools and two-year colleges but generally not at large top-tier research universities (with notable exceptions),Ivy League schools, and elite liberal arts colleges, it is no surprise that faculty members’ attitudes toward unionization are affected by the type of institution where they are employed and the institution’s system of governance. At the earliest stages of unionization, it was clear that faculty with high status and salaries gave little support to unions. “In the upper reaches of academe, faculty generally have acquired almost all of the power to choose new employees (colleagues), to judge whether they should be retained (given tenure), and to a lesser but stdl substantial degree, to determine individual salary increases. Naturally enough, they do not view the university admmistration and trustees as their employer, in a fashion comparable to the way those working in industry or government look upon their top admmistrative hierarchies.”” Many view this as elitism and snobbery as professors disdain identieing with the “working class.” Faculty members at large state universities, however, worry that legislatures will retain power over their job conhtions, possibly even tenure and academic freedom, and faculty at lower-tier schools in terms of scholarly prestige and financial benefits worry about their salaries and economic benefits as well as job security. They view collective bargaining as a strategy for enhancing their terms of work, even if they do not view themselves as working class.

Faculty Unions:Background and History

15

As Ladd and Lipset put it in 1973, “Since the enormous expansion of higher education over the past decade has occurred disproportionately at the lower levels, in institutions where faculty independence, hence professional standing, is tenuous at best, we have identified one component of the receptivity to unionism in the academic community.”” They concluded that those most likely to be in favor of faculty unions tended to be younger scholars without tenure, scholars with low salaries, and those given minimal recognition and with little role in decisions about salaries and faculty governance. “Age and tenure exert consistent independent effects upon attitudes toward faculty unionization.”” It is intriguing that Ladd and Lipset also found that in the early 1970s professors’ attitudes toward unions were strongly affected by their political leanings. Those faculty members with liberal and leftist political views were more supportive of unionization and its egalitarian and collectivist goals than their politically conservative colleagues. Those with politically liberal views, who had supported liberal political candidates and compensatory programs for blacks, tended to favor unions. Those favorable to campus activism and greater support for students, as well as those who desired more faculty power in the governance system, were most often the ones who endorsed faculty unions. This ideological component is a hfferent and independent source of faculty support of unionization. It turns out that these two independent sources of faculty support for unionization and collective bargaining, faculty members’ professional status and political views, can come into conflict. “Highly achieving academics, then, are the most liberal; and there is a very strong relationship between liberalism and support for faculty unionism. But at the same time . . . scholars of high attainment are less supportive of unionism than their colleagues of lower professional standing. The liberalism of elite school faculty push them one way with regard to unionism, but factors relating to their professional status at once shove them in the opposite d~rection.”’~ Given the data on where unionization has thrived and where it has failed, it seems clear that when these two factors conflict, professional status in the end overrides political ideology in determining faculty support for academic unions and collective bargaining. Interestingly, the Ladd and Lipset study is noteworthy not only for its conclusions but also because it had its own effects on the unionization movement in academia. In his detailed account of the road to unionization at three large state universities, Gordon Arnold concludes that Ladd and Lipset’s “observations helped emphasize the prevailing view that American higher education was a meritocracy and that the unionist impulses were the result, at least in part, of professors who could not compete with their elite peers. With the

16

Chapter One

Imprimatur of the Carnegie Commission, such conclusions certainly played a part in reinforcing a climate in which university and college leaders viewed faculty unionization as a setback for their institution^."'^ A study reported in 1985 gives even more detail on how faculty members feel about unionization. This study corroborates many of the Ladd and Lipset findings, but adds new data as well. The management professors conducting this study found both wage and nonwage aspects of the job to have an impact on faculty views on unionization. “Lower paid faculty were more likely to indicate that they would vote in favor of unionization. . . .Faculty members who were dissatisfiedwith the fairness of adrmnistration policy were also more likely to indicate an intention to vote to uni~nize.”’~ Furthermore, tenured faculty not worried about job security tended to favor unions to secure other conditions of employment, and those dissatisfied with their job security, who felt they would have a hard time finding replacement positions, were likely to support unionization. These conclusions mirrored the researchers’ expectations and were hardly surprising.Yet a final findmg was significant and unexpected: namely that “female faculty members indicated a greater intention to vote to unionize than did their male counterparts.”16The authors did not speculate about the reasons, but it is plausible to infer that women faculty worried more than males about how they were treated in academia and sought out unions to aid them in such areas as salary and benefits,job security, and work conditions. Even at private colleges trying to unionize in 2000, however,the concerns cited by faculty inclined to join unions are similar: salaries,job security and tenure, advancement,respect, academic fieedom allowing independence in the classroom and fkeedom with respect to research activities, faculty governance roles, and working conditions including teaching load and other university expectations about their time spent on campus and time for creative work.” Unions also work to enhance contract agreements for computer resources and library facilities. All these demonstrate the overwhelming faculty desire for independence and autonomy and not necessarily a desire for egahtarianism and collectivism. Faculty members who favor unions clearly believe unions can help them make gains in these areas. Once again this highlights the conflict between traditional union egalitarianism and the individualist professional values of autonomous faculty.Yet it does not appear to support Ladd and Lipset’s view that unionization demonstrates faculty are becoming “less professional.’’ It is well worth noting that several researchers have documented a shift over time in faculty attitudes on the reasons to support unions in academia.

Faculty Unions:Background and History

17

Thus, for example, a study done in 1983 found that “as the dfferential in salaries between unionized and nonunionized campuses narrows, the union agenda extends from economic issues to other faculty welfare issues. In the middle 1970s, as some faculty members began to face a shrinlung job market, the focus of faculty bargaining began the shift toward personnel matters, with faculty members expressing growing concern about job security, advancement and tenure policies.”18 Similarly, a 1988 study concluded, “Initially, faculty gravitated toward unionism because of monetary factors,but over time the major concern of unionism has changed to personnel and academic matters.”19 This study found that union members sought more of a faculty role in academic policy making for such issues as the evaluation of teachers, the tenure process, and termination. Finally, another study from 1989 discovered an emphasis on noneconomic issues includmg “academic freedom, followed by procedures for reappointment, promotion and tenure; hiring procedures and standards; and effective teacher evaluations.”20A follow-up study reported in 1991 suggested that the reason for these shifts was that the narrowing of the gap between salaries at unionized and nonunionized institutions led faculty to have mixed feelings about the influence and effectiveness of unions on compensation issues. This study found faculty feeling that unions had an important role to play in representing them to state legislatures. The data also indicated that “tenured, older faculty men have less favorable sentiments pertaining to unionism influence on faculty compensation in comparison to non-tenured, younger faculty women.”’* This echoes the findmg in the 1985 study that found females tended to support unions more than males did. This shift in faculty views on reasons to support unionization, away from economic concerns, is certainly explained in part by the decrease in the salary gap between unionized and nonunionized schools. However, the shift can also be partially accounted for by another type of change on campuses that influenced the move toward unionization, a change aptly described in a study by Philo A. Hutcheson.22 State universities began to grapple throughout the last decades in the twentieth century with legislatures getting more involved in the workings of their institutions, and even private institutions like Columbia University and the University of Chicago began to develop managerial staffs.23 Professors continued to view themselves as professional teachers, researchers, and scholars, yet they were subject to demands of another sort, the pressure to respond to bureaucratic concerns. They began to question their relationships with their colleges and universities. The ideal view of professors as

18

Chapter One

professionals was reinforced by institutional requirements of more scholarship for attaining Ph.D.’s and for gaining tenure and an increased emphasis on graduate training and research ~pecialization.~~ Professors were proud of their professional expertise. In reality, however, faculty members were also working at institutions with increasing layers of professional administrators, administrative specialists, and increasingly bureaucratic forms of organization and employment procedures. They were expected to be efficient and accountable, reporting on and justi!+ing their work. This generated fragmented and competitive decision malung, leaving faculty with less control at statewide public institutions and with less of a participatory role in governance even at private institutions, and thus a loss of much of their autonomy. Hutcheson argues that this phenomenon increased tension between faculty members’ professionalism and bureaucratic employment, leading to challenges to the professionalism of faculty. Therefore it seems an additional concern among faculty members, which inclined them to be more sympathetic to unionization and the ways unions could help them, was this heightened tension between professionahsm and bureaucratic demands and their increasing loss of autonomy.

NATIONAL UNION AFFILIATES Collective bargaining on campuses has been achieved through either the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), or the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). None of these associations is a national union, but all have local affiliates that serve as the certified collective bargaining agent for a faculty union. Many collective bargaining agents are viewed as antagonistic. In addition, many view some or all the national affiliates as opportunistic, defining issues and boundaries as most beneficial to them, not the academy. Academics have had a long professional association with the AAUP, since at least 1915, and it is the only national association focused solely on college and university professors and their professional interests. Faculty have long respected the AAUP’s national lobbying efforts and concern with protecting faculty rights such as academic freedom, tenure, due process, and faculty salaries. More recently the AAUP has focused more on faculty roles in university governance, includmg the budget process.Yet until the late 1960s and early 1970s when it had approximately ninety thousand members, the AAUP resisted the

Faculty Unions: Background and History

19

image of being a trade union that would engage in collective bargaining and possible strikes. To the contrary, AAUP leaders and members rejected unionism and denied their organization was a union, apparently concerned to avoid the negative connotations associated with unionism. Although the AAUP was viewed externally by many as a union, its leaders viewed themselves as “custodians of the interests of lugher education,” promoting the “standards, ideals and welfare of the profe~sion.”~~ As interest in unionization grew during the late 1960s, the AAUP looked more carehlly at the role of collective bargaining for the profession and in 1968 first published its Policy on Representation of Economic Interests.26 That statement specifies the following goals and objectives as attainable through contract negotiations: “(a) the protection and promotion of the economic and other interests of the faculty, (b) the establishment of the structures that provide for faculty participation in governance, (c) guarantees of academic freedom and tenure, and (d) orderly and clearly defined procedures for prompt consideration of problems and grievances of faculty mernber~.”~’ This statement stdl defines the AAUP mission in collective bargaining,which the AAUP entered into reluctantly but eventually endorsed, along with the AAUP goals of upholding the rights of faculty through the principles set forth in the AAUP Redbook. The goals of the AAUP are intended to reinforce the best features of higher education and to ensure for faculty members an effective voice in decisions that affect their working conditions and professional well-being. The AAUP became concerned with increasingly bureaucratic conditions at many institutions of higher education. With its history of collegial rather than adversarial relations with administrators and trustees, the AAUP felt it could be a leader in aiding faculty in their effort to maintain autonomy in the face of bureaucratic pressures. “The longstandmg programs of the Association are means to achieve a number of basic ends at colleges and universities: the enhancement of academic freedom and tenure; of due process; of sound academic government. Collective bargaining, properly used, is essentially another means to achieve these goals.”28 At the national level, the AAUP is an “educational charitable organization,” although some local chapters (about 61 of approximately 370 nationwide) are the exclusive bargaining agent for the faculty they represent.29 The AAUP is viewed as the least militant of faculty unions, and it has support and respect from faculty still unsure of the labor movement. It currently represents more faculty at four-year and research universities than the other two major unions. It has a Committee on the Status of Women in the Academic Profession and offers advice, training, and resource guides on legal

20

Chapter One

trends, faculty handbooks as enforceable contracts, good practices in tenure evaluations, and faculty roles in shared governance. The AAUP consistently claims there need be no conflict between collective bargaining and shared governance on campus. One particular goal that distinguishes the AAUP from other national affiliates is its commitment to ensure that negotiators maintain the perspective of an academic rather than bringing in negotiators from outside of higher education. The NEA also began as a professional organization in 1870, was dmolved in the 1920s, and was recreated in 1943 with a goal of improving the quality of education and the influence of teachers. Eventually focusing on salaries and working condtions in classrooms, the NEA placed emphasis on teachers in primary and secondary education, only functioning as a faculty union in the late 1960s. When the NEA joined to aid college and university faculty unionization, it focused on an “equitable voice” for faculty at a time when it viewed faculty senates as powerless. It is viewed as less of a threat to faculty autonomy and sees collective bargaining as the only way to prevent budget cutback^.^' The NEA was viewed early on as being the most effective bargaining agent in higher education, and it emphasizes its role as an association. The NEA may well remain a popular faculty union; however, the AFT, an affdiate of the AFL-CIO, is the only national a m a t e that is a union in the traditional sense, and it embraces its formal relationship to organized labor. The AFT has emerged as one of the strongest and most popular academic unions, with its collectivist appeals to those without power, and it is also viewed as the most militant faculty union. Data from 1998 indicate that the NEA had 2.3 d i o n members at the time, but only 86,000 in higher education, and represented 3 graduate student unions. The AFT had 975,000 members with 91,000 in higher education in 1998, and represented 8 graduate unions, compared to the AAUP’s 43,000 members, but with only 21,000 in bargaining units, representing 2 graduate student unions.31 The AFT focuses on higher salaries and benefits, greater voice for faculty in institutional governance, and emphasis on academic freedom and the role of professors as employees. On its view, “Unionization is therefore a representation of an employee group’s interests in such matters as economic benefits, influence and control of organizational affairs, and in the case of the professoriate, academic freedom.”32 These large national organizations provide economic resources as well as personnel with knowledge and skill to aid local union movements. At the same time, however, they compete with each other to represent local unions in academia. Thus they sometimes hinder unionization efforts among faculty.

Faculty Unions: Background and History

21

UNION GOALS Faculty unions cite a variety of goals and faculty collective bargaining agreements reflect these.33Not surprisingly, these goals also reflect faculty concerns that incline them toward unionization. Most prominent among the aims of faculty unions are protections for salary and benefits,job security and tenure, due process and grievance procedures, and issues of academic fkeedom includmg indwidual autonomy and independence for faculty, better working conditions, and protection of faculty roles in university governance. Only a small number of union contracts address issues concerning part-time faculty. Unions assert they aim to protect faculty time and work conditions, such as teaching load, class size, faculty development programs, and allocation of scarce research funds, as well as to protect professors against faculty reductions in retrenchment programs.34However, unions also claim one of their goals is to place constraints on managers, deans, and other administrators on campus as well as legislators. It is thus no surprise that administrators and other officials with oversight usually view unionization with suspicion, believing contracts restrict their discretion and flexibility and lead faculty to be more antagonistic toward the administration. Unions are apparently recognizing the need to contract for more compensation or released time for faculty who learn and introduce new instructional technologies in their teaching. Both AFT and NEA officials cite concerns about preserving human contact, protecting intellectual property, and guaranteeing adequate support services for faculty who use instructional techn ~ l o g i e s Nevertheless, .~~ there are as yet apparently few union contracts addressing this issue or faculty concerns about outside employment and intellectual property rights in an age of increased technological de~elopment.~~

REASONS FOR THE RISE OF ACADEMIC UNIONS There is doubtless no single reason explaining why unions arise in academia, yet we can now identi+ quite a number of factors contributing to the increase in unionization among faculty during the 1970s and thereafter. The following are not given in any definitive order, as all have contributed to the unionization movement in academia. The most commonly cited reasons are economic, as faculty initially sought better wages, benefits, and job security through protection of tenure.37 The financial plight and budget deficits at universities in

22

Chapter One

the early 1970s have been well documented, and it changed the labor market for academics. There were more individuals with Ph.D.5 available for faculty positions, fewer job openings, and thus more supply than demand in the profession. Faculty personnel felt the effects of economic restraints and limitations in terms of smaller (or a lack o f ) salary increases, reductions in staff, and more limited resources. Staff reductions in turn led to larger classes and heavier teaching loads. The economic squeeze made unions seem more appealing; collective bargaining could be seen as an effective way to combat salary and working condition losses brought on by economic hardship. It is not surprising that more junior faculty supported union efforts to enhance salary and tenure. A similar economic environment is currently affecting college campuses throughout the nation3* and helps explain renewed interest in academic unionization. A related reason is sometimes referred to as pressure from below. As elementary and secondary school teachers gained pay raises, power, and benefits through collective bargaining, college teachers worried about being left behind. The NEA helped focus t h s perspective. Faculty members began to see the benefits unions could bring within educational environments,Moreover, as more faculty unions formed at colleges and universities, unions in academia came to be viewed as more acceptable and legitimate. A third important factor in the rise of faculty unions is a legal one. It was only in the 1960s that state legislation was passed allowing for collective bargaining by public employees,particularly in hgher education. This permissive legislation allowing collective bargaining in academia provided a spark ready to light a fire. The enabling legislation, conducive to state employees engaging in collective bargaining, emerged rapidly. Some believe this was most often the major cause of faculties moving toward collective bargaining.39One difficulty, however, was that this enabling legislation sometimes dictated the membership of the bargaining group. Another important change was the growth of universities during the expansive 1960s,leading to an increase in the size of institutions.In particular, the increased formation of multicampus systems,most notably the City University of New York (CUNY) and the State University of New York (SUNY), changed the administrative bureaucracy on many campuses. Multicampus systems eroded the closeness and collegiality of faculty and left many feeling that important decisions were being made off campus and without sufficient faculty input. Many public institutions developed into huge units where the central administration reported to state authorities or directly to state legislatures. In such an environment,faculty no longer felt they had the independence and

Faculty Unions: Background and History

23

self-control they cherished or an adequate role in institutional governance, and unions provided the promise of a way to have an effective voice. Closely related to this factor is the argument that multicampus institutions with separate sets of faculty and other mostly public universities have grown so fast and have become so huge that they have come to be run like large businesses and corporations. Thus, the argument continues, this bureaucratization perpetuates an employee-employer relationship between faculty and administrators and legislatures, and fuels the need for faculty to form unions to represent their interests and protect their rights. According to law professor Deborah C. Malamud, “As the Yeshiva dssent perceived in 1980,market pressures are causing universities to become ‘big busines~es.”’~~ Other labor relations researchers echo this view: “Universities are becoming, to varying degrees, commercial institutions-governed more by business practices and by individuals on boards of trustees and in key academic posts who come out of the business community. At meetings of trustees or of top administrators at many of our institutions, the language of ‘strategic planning,’ ‘cost centers,’ and ‘customers’ H e r s little fkom the language spoken in corporate offices and boardrooms every day.”41To the extent this is true, issues in business ethcs arise at universities as well. Fifth, the campus activism of the 1960s related to the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War had multiple effects. In part, these movements supported militant ephtarianism, and the popularity of the movements made e&tarianism promoted by unions appear more acceptable. Faculty members with liberal political views were more supportive of unionization than their conservative colleagues. More important, perhaps, was that campus activism led to students being organized on one side and adrmnistrators bureaucratically organized on the other. Faculty members were thus lett with the options of sidmg with one of these groups or the other, or acting independently in some way. Ultimately concerned with preserving their own power, organizing through unions seemed an appealing way to preserve faculty rights and liberties and to combat pressure h-om students, a h t r a t o r s , and state legislatures to alter their working conditions. Sixth, many have thought that conflicts between faculty and administrators, at least on some campuses, heled unionization. Arnold’s detailed studies of unionization at three prominent state universities largely support this view. It is striking that his review documents conflct between faculty factions as well. The unionization votes in these cases varied, as the tally at the University of Rhode Island was one vote short of unanimous, while those at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and at the University of Connecticut were far more split, and reasonably close. As Arnold points out, when a vote is close, resentment lingers.42

24

Chapter One

There is additional support for the view that unions arise due to adversity on campus. Faculty members have complained they were wasting their time sitting on committees when adrmnistrators usually decided to do what they wanted to anyway In contrast, administrators argued that faculty almost always got what they wanted in the end. The AAUP seems to have believed that adversity led to unionization. They viewed collective bargaining as a rational and equitable method for accomplishing important goals when relations were distant and impersonal and agreement was apparently unreachable through traditional academic means, accordmg to Hutcheson. “When facultyadministration relationships reached an adversarial nature and the ideals of the profession could not be obtained, the AAUP was willing to seek representation of faculties in such situation^."^^ Seventh, at least in the last decade, economic factors, adrmnistrative efficiency, and pressure on the “bottom line” have continued to play a role in the rise of unionization,but these have been exacerbated with harsh attacks on academia and the professoriate. These attacks have ranged from criticisms of tenure, to questions about faculty teaching loads and time in the classroom, to criticisms concerning faculty compensation and the value of academic research.44The ongoing criticism of faculty has appeared in the popular press and also comes &om education administrators: “Faculty are too independent. They are self-interested careerists.They devote too little time to lower division undergraduate teaching. They are committed more to themselves than to their clients or institution. They are inflexible and resistant to change. (Or . . . too radcal.) They enjoy the lifetime job security of tenure and thus are not ac~ountable.”~~ Those faculty at schools being targeted, or those at public institutions overseen by legislatures sympathetic with these attacks and where the political climate is not favorable to higher education, came to reahze that public officials were gaining control over institutional decisions and were beginning to perceive them, fairly or not, as replaceable. The more replaceable people are in their working situations, the more dnpensable they are, and that is when they value and need unions to protect them. It is no surprise, then, that such faculty have felt threatened enough by their loss of power to believe that united responses through unions and collective bargaining could be justified to help them regain control over their job security and work conditions, rights, and educational decision making. Finally, as Matthew Bodah has pointed out, “The tenure debate is intertwined with the issue of faculty mix.”46In part, the change in composition among faculty included an increased number of women and people of color. In addition, institutions of higher education have some combination of full-

Faculty Unions: Background and History

25

time, tenure-track faculty;full-time nontenure-track faculty; and part-time, ontenure-track faculty. The varying balance of these three groups is influenced by both the financial and strategic concerns of institutions, as well as by accreditation standards. In adltion, part-time faculty with no tenure-track prospects fill in the gaps. “The trend in faculty mix is away from tenure track positions. In 1970, approximately 22 percent of faculty appointments were part-time or adjunct. Both the National Education Association and the American Association of University Professors now estimate that part-time faculty represent just over 50 percent of position^."^^ This astonishing rise in the number of part-time faculty has led full-time faculty to look toward collective bargaining as a way to retain their rights and role in faculty governance. It has also, of course, led to an increasing number of unions including part-time faculty in their bargaining units and to an increasing effort to unionize nontenure-track faculty, and part-time and adjunct faculty, and this latter movement wdl be the topic of chapter 5.

CONCERNS ABOUT UNION CONTRACTS

It is worth noting that several commentators have found difficulties with many actual faculty union contracts. William R. Brown has pointed out that those who draft faculty contracts are concerned to include multiple provisions to enhance protection of the rights and interests of individual faculty in sections on academic freedom, autonomy, teaching assignments, and so on, while at the same time attempting to serve the interests of the university. Seeking a balance inevitably leads to contradictions and uncertainty, conflicts between faculty and the administration as well as between faculty and the university. For example, personnel decisions are often said to be based explicitly on considerations of merit, but then contracts often say as well that such decisions can include considerations of “institutional need.”48 As another example, contracts often protect administrative control over budgets and financial matters, leaving faculty’s main control over issues concerning academic programs. Certainly, however, budgetary decisions can adversely affect decisions about academic programs. It is not at all clear that economic and academic concerns can be separated as easily as some contracts assume.49 Others have urged that many faculty contracts are out of date or filled with gaps. Most contracts are based on the traditional model of a largely full-time tenure-track faculty pursuing research and lecturing to students in

26

Chapter One

a single location. The huge change in faculty mix to a faculty often made up of a majority of part-time teachers raises important new questions about personnel practices such as alternatives or supplements to tenure, and these are usually not addressed.The introduction of new multimedia technologies leaving students spatially separated from faculty, though electronically connected, raises new concerns about workload and compensation. There are currently few contractual provisions regarding the use of instructional technology, the likelihood that it will lead to additional staffnot part of the professoriate, and the ways it can be used by administrators to bypass full-time faculty members’ influence and control over the content, form, and delivery of curriculum. In addition, few contracts have provisions about outside employment, and most contracts have not yet addressed policies and principles of intellectual property that are raised by new technol~gies.~~ Perhaps most troubhg are findings that despite union emphasis on equity provisions in contracts and attempts by unions to restrict administrativeand managerial flexibility in determining salaries, there is little mention of the value of diversity on campus. Moreover,equity provisions in contracts have increased,rather than alleviated,gender-based inequity. “Gender issues do not figure prominently in the salary provisions of contracts. That relative absence is remarkable given the continued and expanded gender gap in faculty ~alaries.”~’ Therefore, union supporters have problems to resolve with their contracts. If they tackle some of these contractual difKculties, however, then they also have opportunities to make a difference and to shape the future of their educational institutions.

NOTES 1. Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education (Berkeley,Calif.:Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1973), 103. 2. Clark Kerr, foreword to Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, by Ladd Jr. and Lipset, vii. 3. Peter Levine, “The Libertarian Critique of Labor Unions,’’Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 21, no. 4 (fall 2001): 17. 4. Gordon B. Arnold, The Politics of Faculty Unionization: The Experience ofThree New England Universities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000), 4. 5. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 2. 6 . Debra E. Blum, “Merits of Academic Unionism Still Hotly Debated 10 Years After High Court Limited Faculty Bargaining,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, January 31, 1990.

Faculty Unions:Background and History

27

7. Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998),9-10, citing a database from contracts put on CD-ROM by the National Education Association called “Higher Education Contract Analysis System” (HJXAS). 8. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 3. 9. These data are from Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 12-13. See also Frank Annuziato, “Unionization among College Faculty,” National Centerfor the Study o f Collective Bargaining in Higher Education G the Professions Newsletter 23 Uuly/August 1995): 4 and Randall Hurd and Alberta Foerster, “Unionization among College Faculty: 1996,” National Centerfor the Study o f Collective Bargaining in Higher Education G the Professions Newsletter 24 (March/April 1996): 8. 10. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 16. 11. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 16-17. 12. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 17. 13. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 29. 14. Arnold, The Politics of Faculty Unionization, 44. 15. James B. Dworkin and Do-Hwa Lee, “Faculty Intentions to Unionize: Theory and Evidence,” Research in Higher Education 23, no. 4 (1985): 382. 16. Dworkin and Lee, “Faculty Intentions to Unionize,” 384. 17. See, for example, Courtney Leatherman, “A Private College’s Professors Try for a Unionizing Breakthrough,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15,2000, A12. 18. Dean Elmuti and Yunus Kathawala, “Full-Time University Faculty Members’ Perceptions of Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions,”journal of Research and Development in Education 24, no. 2 (1991):9, citing B. Dennis, Proceedings of the Thirty-sixth Annual Meeting (Madison, Wis.: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1983). 19. Elmuti and Kathawala, “Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions,” 10, summarizing G. B. Williams and A. P. Zirkel, “Academic Penetration in Faculty Collective Bargaining Contracts in Higher Education,” Research in Higher Education 28, no. 1 (1988): 76-92. 20. Elmuti and Kathawala, “Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions,” 10, citing S. Dayal, “Collective Bargaining among Academic Professionals: An Analysis of Issues and Outcomes,”journal of Collective Negotiations 18, no. 3 (1989): 207-16. 21. Elmuti and Kathawala, “Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions,” 12. 22. Philo A. Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate: Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000). This book gives a mostly historical and detailed investigation of the role of the AAUP as a focal point for understanding the shifts in institutions and students between the 1940s and 1970s,with some reflections on the 1980s and 1990s as well. 23. Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate, 77. Hutcheson focuses on the AAUP, urging that it gives an important focal point for understanding the tension described in the

28

Chapter O n e

proceeding between professionalism and bureaucratic demands in the professoriate and how faculty members dealt with this tension. 24. Arnold, The Politics of Faculty Unionization, 23-25. 25. Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate, 2,9. 26. Estelle S. Gellman, “Collective Bargaining and the AAUP,”Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998):38. 27. Estelle S. Gellman, “Collective Bargaining and the AAUP,” 38. 28. AAUP “Statement on Collective Bargaining,” AAUP Bulletin 58 (December 1972):423-24, quoted in Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate, 151. 29. Jack F! Nightingale, “Collective Bargaining and the AAUP,” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998):39. See also American Association of University Professors, Statement on Collective Bargaining (Washington,D.C.: American Association of University Professors, 1984). 30. Arnold, The Politics ofFaculty Unionization, 66. 31. “Profiles of 3 Faculty Unions,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, May 22,1998, A12. 32. Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate, 15. 33. Allen Ponack, Mark Thompson, and WiEed Zerbe, “Collective Bargaining Goals of University Faculty,” Research in Higher Education 33, no. 4 (April 1992):423. 34. For more details on union contracts, see William R. Brown, chap. 6 in Academic Politics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982). 35. Peter Monaghan, “Technology and the Unions: Faculty Labor Leaders Air Hope and Concerns as Colleges Enter the Electronic Era,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, February 10,1995. 36. Rhoades, chaps. 5 and 6 in Managed Professionals. 37. Richard C. Kearney, Labor Relations in the Public Sector, 2nd ed. (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1992), 132. 38. “Colleges Brace for the Economic Downturn,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, April 20,2001. 39. For example, Matthew Finkin, “Report on the National Leadership Conference for Conference Officers,” AAUP Bulletin 55 (December 1969): 494, as discussed in Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate, 121. 40. Deborah C. Malamud, “Collective Bargaining and the Professoriate: What the Law Says,” Academe 84, no. 6. (November-December 1998):21. 41. Kate Bronfenbrenner and Tom Juravich, “Universities Should Cease Hostilities with Unions,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, January 19,2001. 42. Gordon B. Arnold, The Politics ofFaculty Unionization, 137. 43. Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate, 118, 146. 44. James E Carlin, “Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, November 5,1999, A76; Matthew M. Bodah, “Signtticant Labor and Employment Law Issues in Higher Education during the Past Decade and What to Look for Now: The Perspective of an Academician,”Journal o f L w and Education 29, no. 3 (2000):317, citing Marvin Lazerson, “Who Owns Higher Education?

Faculty Unions: Background and History

29

The Changing Force of Governance,” Change 29, no. 10 (1997); Dinesh D’Souza, aliberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York Macdan/Free Press, 1991); Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1990); Charles Sykes, Profscam: Professors and the Demise ofHigher Education (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988). 45. Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 4,citing Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities ofthe Professoriate (Princeton, N.J.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990); William E Massy and Robert Zemsky, “Faculty Discretionary Time: Departments and the ‘Academic Ratchet,”’ The Journal of Higher Education 65, no. 1 (1994);Alan Bloom, The Closing oftheAmerican Mind (New York Simon & Schuster, 1987); as well as D’Souza and Kimball &om the previous note. 46. Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues,” 327. 47. Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues,” 327, citing American Association of State Colleges and Universities, “Facing Change: Building the Faculty of the Future” (1999), 23. 48. Brown, Academic Politics, 136. 49. Rhoades, Managed Professionals, shares this concern, saying “the contracts make clear that in the current context it makes little sense to distinguish between financial and curricular decisions, as is so often found in the higher education literature,” p. 269. 50. Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues,’’ 26246,325. 51. Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 250-60.

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Two ARGUMENTSF O R

A N D A G A I N S T FACULTY U N I O N S , AND THE P R O B L E M OF LEGITIMACY

T

here are many diverse arguments that have been given both in favor and against unionization among college and university faculty, and these often reflect faculty views on unions and reasons for the rise of unions described in the last chapter. Nevertheless, it is worth taking time to outline these considerations in a way that allows one to assess their strengths and weaknesses. In this chapter, these arguments are grouped together under four broad headings: (1) arguments concerning collegiality on campus and the extent it is enhanced by unions versus arguments claiming that unionization merely incites and increases adversity; (2) arguments citing the practical effectiveness of unionization versus those that find unions ineffective, harmful, and a liability on campus; (3) arguments about the nature of university and union organizations and whether unions are needed because of a new corporate structure at institutions of higher education versus arguments that unions only cause colleges and universities to become more businesslike; and (4)arguments for and against faculty unions based on fundamental academic values. Many find these arguments evenly balanced. Recent work on unions and legitimacy helps explain this balance and also helps explain the complexity of assessing arguments for and against faculty unions. 33

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COLLEGIALITY VERSUS ADVERSITY One set of arguments addresses the extent of collegiality on campuses. Those favoring unions urge that faculty should have the freedom to decide for themselves whether unions will be beneficial and appropriate for them given their particular campus atmosphere. These advocates claim that unionization can enhance collegiality on c a m p ~Unions ~ . ~ reflect respect for the values of freedom of choice and association. Rather than creating adversity, unions help ameliorate adversity by improving communication between faculty and administrators or a governing board.2 In part this is because advocates of unions believe unionization helps faculty have a better working relationship with administrators and helps them have a united and collective voice on issues of salary, personnel practices, and grievance procedures3 In addition, as faculty and even administrators at state-supported schools feel alienation and frustration as legislators weigh in on how the educational institution should be run and endorse a more anti-intellectual perspective, faculty can be united with each other, and connected to administrators, through unionization. Indeed, many point to the moral and psychological benefits of community provided by unions and share Richard Rorty’s view that unions provide excellent examples of comradeship and l~yalty.~ These union supporters contend, furthermore, that unions can and should support traditional forms of shared governance such as academic senates. On this view, unions do not conflict with traditional faculty governance, but support and enhance it. Unions are also able to alleviate adversity on campus because they provide written policies and procedures, already agreed on by faculty and administration, that can provide clear guidelines for mutual decision making. For example, according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “Essentially, a collective bargaining agreement puts the legal force of a contract behind the principles of shared governance and due process. It obliges the university to negotiate . . . and it gives the faculty a vehicle for enforcing the policies articulated in faculty handbooks. An AAUP collective bargaining chapter does not replace the faculty senate; it works in tandem with it. . . . [A] collective bargaining agreement enables the AAUP to enforce the policies and procedures that govern faculty participation.”’ These advocates of collective bargaining believe unions can facilitate communication and be cooperative in working with administrators and managers, and they are unwavering in their support of this vision. Linked with these considerations are further arguments about faculty governance. Union supporters argue that few campuses give faculty real authority and that in ac-

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33

tuality most faculty have very little voice at all in university governance. Therefore, the ideal vision is one of collective bargaining as a system of selfgovernance between management and the faculty union, promoting debate and compromise.6 Naturally, those who take the opposing view argue that once unions are formed, they create even more adversity, tension, and division between faculty and administrators and also among faculty members who disagree with whether to unionize and who ofien retain bitterness even after a successhl union vote. O n this view, the reality is that the mere presence of unions on campus creates adversity and antagonism because the union model from industry is inflexible and bureaucratic rather than collegial. Thus, “some faculty members report feeling that universities should not be unionized because such organization does not create the right academic environment. The term ‘union’ has a hstory connotation [sic] of conflict between labor and management, and some faculty members believe that there is no room for such conflict in higher ed~cation.”~ Perhaps the most well-known case is the battle at Boston University, “a large research university with a president Uohn Silber] who had openly attacked faculty unions-in academe in general, and at his institution in particular.”’ Moreover, these critics of unions believe that traditional academic collegiality is replaced with divisiveness and a labor-management relationship. On t h s view, there is a loss of a sense of community on campus. Administrators claim that unions tie their hands and restrict them from being able to make decisions in the best interests of faculty. Some argue that the adversary model set up by unions alienates administrators and changes their role. Furthermore, they contend, faculty members do have a strong say in university governance through faculty senates and committees, and many even believe the faculty run the show. These opponents of unions believe faculty governance works, and works well, and thus provides a good alternative to formation of a union. They believe faculty can negotiate for their interests without a union. O n this view, unions actually diminish and weaken faculty governance;just the existence of a faculty union on campus makes it far less appealing to offer to spend time on committees, faculty on this side counter, if in the end the unions will engage in the negotiations with administrators. These defenders of faculty governance believe it is better to keep faculty voices within the university rather than polarizing faculty and losing them to a union so they are no longer a part of the university management team. Given this positive assessment of faculty governance, faculty and administrators on this side argue that unions merely add another layer of administration

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and bureaucracy, slowing things down, since bargaining over every term and condition takes so much time. There is, in addition, an argument that unions create adversity between faculty members themselves. Many votes for unionization have been close, and bad feelings between those who support the union and those who oppose it often linger and even fester. Moreover, as the union majority proceeds with collective bargaining it may well ignore the preferences of minorities, generating even more tension among the faculty. This particular debate may reflect the fact that unions in academia vary so much. Collective bargaining at institutions of higher education appear to take shape under two dfferent models. “Where collective bargaining was adopted, it tended to take one of two broad forms. The more ‘industrial’form, in which management and workers are cast as adversaries, tended to appear where the balance of power had skewed decidedly toward the administration and where the faculty was therefore weaker. Unions favoring an approach of cooperation and collegiality with administration were seen at institutions where existing arrangements and structures (such as faculty senates) had worked more effectively in addressing academic and professional issue^."^

UNION EFFECTIVENESS Another set of arguments for and against faculty unions concerns their effectiveness as a political force in achieving faculty goals or their liabihty as they exist on campuses. Defenders of collective bargaining argue that contracts can be as flexible or detailed as the parties to the agreement decide. They point out that unions have most importantly given faculty at some schools “a voice in governing the university” for the first time.1° They also urge that unions do improve salaries for faculty, establishing salary pools, minimum salaries at each rank and for years of service, and so on,” as well as benefits such as health insurance and professional leave. They believe unions are good for the economy. Unions improve working conditions such as the inclusion of guidelines that workloads must be negotiated, along with procedural guidelines and grievance procedures to protect faculty autonomy and fair treatment of faculty. Union supporters stress that unions are particularly crucial for job security by including strong clauses on tenure in contracts with legal force, in an age where advancing technology may threaten faculty appointments and in an age when many in the public and higher education administration are questioning the value of tenure or come from outside the academy and fail to un-

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35

derstand and appreciate the importance of tenure and the faculty role in university governance.12They point out that these important advantages are often gained for the lowest paid and most vulnerable faculty in academia. In addition, they argue that unions have enhanced equity in salary and parity in work conditions, correcting inequity and minimizing “private deals” struck by certain faculty with their administrators that generate wide discrepancies in salary. These union advocates point out that public institutions are again cutting budgets, freezing hiring, and offering minimal salary increases, and small private colleges have their own economic ~ 0 r r i e s . lOn ~ thls view, faculty no longer have much control over budgets anyway. Financial woes are also leading to reductions in the number of full-time faculty on camp use^.'^ In times of fiscal austerity,they argue, unions are the most effective way to maintain faculty compensation and benefits. Moreover, union advocates see their organizations as enhancing faculty autonomy. Contracts have helped guarantee faculty a role in faculty hiring. As another example, at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, faculty now choose their own department chairs, whereas prior to the existence of a union on campus, administrators selected the department chairs and just announced the decision to other department members.15 Those opposed to unions sometimes claim that unions have a negative effect or no influence at all on compensation issues.I6 Others believe that even if unions are sometimes effective in making gains for faculty, they are more often “recalcitrant, self-interested and out of touch with the times.”” They also view unions as coercive by nature and see them as violating rights and freedoms. They worry that unions protect unproductive faculty and believe that the process of collective bargaining is overly time consuming and costly. Furthermore, they contend, unions harm the effectiveness of administrators and faculty to enhance life on campus. In part they slow down processes and decision making that is easier to complete in a collegial and consensus-oriented atmosphere. Collective bargaining negotiations can last months or years and can be extremely expensive. At their worst, faculty unions shift decision making so that nonacademics are involved in such crucial academic issues as personnel evaluations and decisions. These opponents of unions also claim that the collective bargaining agreements leave less flexibility for policy changes that affect faculty and less leeway for merit pay raises and recognition of outstanding work through salary. Merit raises are crucial, on this view, because without them there is a decline in the quality of an institution’s faculty, and incentives to encourage intellectual creativity and achievement are stifled. In the strongest terms, these critics believe the best faculty will leave unionized institutions due to salary “leveling” and redistribution, and thus unions ultimately bring mediocrity. In

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addition, detractors believe the existence of unions on campuses pose liabilities. Faculty strikes do happen at times, although strikes are not as common among faculty unions as they are among other unions because administrators and management usually insist on “no-strike’’ clauses in academic union contracts. If, however, a campus is embroiled in a union and administration controversy, or a strike, these critics believe the campus image and university reputation is tarnished, affecting undergraduate admissions and the ability to woo and hire the best new faculty.’* Another concern is that if faculty find themselves focusing on union activity and combating outside influences on their educational institutions, this shifts faculty time and energy and can lead to a decline in intellectual productivity and “fkee-floating” intellectual endeavors.l9 Furthermore, these critics believe, far from actually enhancing faculty autonomy, unions often do, particularly at state-supported institutions, lead to the end of autonomy when faculty bypass administrators and negotiate through unions directly with legislators. At such institutions state legislatures get more power, possibly over tenure and even curriculum matters.20 UNIVERSITY AND UNION ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE A third set of arguments concerning the benefits and disadvantages of faculty unions pertain to the nature and structure of universities and unions as organizations. Those supporting unionization for faculty members argue that many universities are big businesses and corporations, and thus unions are needed to represent faculty employees finding themselves in a corporate atmosphere. In such an atmosphere, faculty feel they are not valued and are viewed and treated as replaceable. Thus they value unions as necessary to protect them and their job security.Unions can also serve as watchdogs to monitor administrators and managers to ensure that their behavior and decision making are ethical.Defenders see unions as positive organizations promoting the interests and values of the faculty as well as the institutions of higher education they serve. Advocates of faculty unions believe that bargaining is a way to maintain the traditional values of the academy and the only effective way to do so at some institutions. Some approve of the fact that unions are becoming more militant as collective bargaining becomes more prominent. On this view, individual faculty members do have less power than administrators, and thus a union is a reasonable option, and it has an appropriate role to help serve as a counterweight to the power of administrators.“For people who &strust managers, a union is not

Avguments for and against Faculty Unions

37

an unwelcome bureaucracy but an independent institution to which they can appeal in defense of their rights.”21Such rights include due process and fair treatment, and this type of argument suggests that unions are compatible with personal liberty.22 In contrast, others emphasize the solitary nature of work as a professor at a college or ~niversity.~~ This ideal of campus life and the academy appears to conflict with the collectivism of unionization. Critics of faculty unions also counter that colleges and universities are not businesses or corporations and are in reality very dfferent in structure and goals, so that the industry model dictating a need for unions does not apply to them. They worry, in addition, that the rise of unions tends to make universities function more like corporations, with standardization and inflexibility, and believe that should be avoided, not embraced. These opponents of faculty unions point out in addition that unions do not represent all faculty members on a unionized campus. Only a majority vote is needed to elect to begin a union, and there is usually a split vote, indicating a split between hfferent groups of faculty. Those faculty members who do not wish to be members of the union cannot opt out. Furthermore, the union majority need not heed minority interests. There is also the worry that with unionization “outsiders” unfamiliar with academia end up controlling the campus. Moreover, there are data that early unions in the 1970s era of student activism actually created tensions between students and faculty. While less well documented, it is easy to believe that such student-faculty tensions continue in contemporary times, especially when there are clashes over issues most affecting students, or especially when there are faculty strikes. There is a further concern that the three main national organizations, the AAUP, National Education Association (NEA), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT), supporting local collective bargaining afiates, “have all been ‘opportunistic,’ pressing for whatever definition [on boundaries for bargaining elections, for example] would benefit them most in a given ~ituation.”~~ Thus critics worry that unions are not subject to review or oversight and do not always represent genuine faculty and institutional values, because the national affiliates have agendas that reach beyond an individual campus.

ACADEMIC VALUES O N CAMPUS A fourth set of arguments, intertwined with the previous ones, focuses on the academic values and nature of a university. Through his examination of three

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case studies, Gordon Arnold has shown that debate over unions is often fiamed in terms of moral and ideological concerns about class identity, public accountability, student welfare, faculty status, and institutional prestige and f d ure. His cases demonstrate that unions do often change campus culture.25 The AAUP has for many years endorsed a number of core values. “One of the fundamental assumptions underlying the Redbook is that faculty are the core of the university. As such, they must be involved in appointment, promotion, tenure, dismissal, and governance decisions.”26When an ideal collegial atmosphere exists on campus and the administration ensures faculty autonomy and faculty roles in university governance, harmony is likely and a union is usually not needed. When an administration breaches this principle, the reality is that the AAW and other unions d intervene through moral persuasion, appeals to the media, and legal action. In such an atmosphere, a union can be an enormous benefit for faculty to regain these rights. Another value endorsed by the AAUP and most faculty and administrators is collegiality on campus, which facilitates the former value of faculty as the university and faculty governance as a shared role on campus. When collegiahty exists and is at its best, procedural fairness is the norm, and collective bargaining is largely unnecessary and perhaps even h a r d , adding a layer of administration and the introduction of nonacademics into institutional decision making. However, there are times when collegial relations have been shattered for one reason or another and when the breakdown in communications between faculty and administration is in fact egregious and horrible. If, then, far from being collegial, trust and communication are almost impossible, a union can be the best or even the only way to repair the damage. A third crucial value for institutions of higher education endorsed by the AAUP and all in the academy is academic fieedom and the autonomy it preserves.Academic fieedom has been described as “who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.”27However, the term “academic fieedom” may mean and may cover a variety of activities, including how one focuses one’s research and teaching as well as the job security of tenure to protect this fieedom. The academic value of protecting faculty freedom to determine the content of their teaching and research and their academic programs within a college or university is one of the values most cherished by members of academe. Academic fieedom is what allows scholarly creativity and intellectual productivity to thrive. Indeed, many view this fieedom and self-reliance as values that are foundational, and they believe these values lead to distrust of unions. When administrators, trustees, and others overseeing colleges and universities have the vision to understand and respect the hndamental value of aca-

Argumentsfor and against Faculty Unions

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demic freedom, faculty members feel respected, valued, and vahdated. They understand that their managers are acting in their own best interests and in the overall interest of their institutions. They are then unlikely to seek unionization. But when this value is not respected, faculty members have strong incentives to regain it, and many believe unions are in reality the most effective way of doing so. When the campus atmosphere and political climate show little respect for academic freedom and tenure, faculty unions may truly be wise. Finally, a crucial value to institutions of higher learning is what in the tradition of John Stuart Mill can be described as the search for the truth. Some point to a major strength of unions as promoting deliberative activities and having the ability to force other institutions, such as the mass media and legislatures, to debate issues that may otherwise be ignored.”28In addition, promotion of devotion to teaching and research, to the quest for knowledge, to understanding and truth, to following one’s imagination, and to intellectual striving and vigorous open debate are all at the heart of the meaning and quest of a college or university. They signify the essence and importance of institutions of higher learning. The vision is that these are alive and vigorous on campus, and in such cases unionization seems incompatible with promoting these values. When the reality is that these are neither encouraged nor protected, institutions of higher learning may find union organizers on their doorsteps.

THE PROBLEM O F LEGITIMACY How is it possible to assess these conflicting and reasonably balanced sets of arguments? One concept that may be useful is the notion of legitimacy,which authors of a recent book have argued is crucial for understandingunions and their strengths and weakne~ses.~’ In their study, Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow suggest that employer opposition is a main cause of recent union decline in industry, yet they argue as well that the notion of legitimacy, common in work on organizational theory, can help explain the decline in union size and influence in the last twenty years. On their view, legitimacy is vital for unions in multiple ways, for political and ideological support,membership, and hnds. They believe that legitimacy is a problem particularly for organizations with &verse constituencies and multiple authorities. They argue as well that cooperation and participation can only happen if “management believes in the legitimacy of unions and accepts them as valued advisors in running the ~orkplace.”~’ While these authors do not address faculty and other academic unions in particular, their insights on more traditional unions are helpful in this context.

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Chaison and Bigelow point out that the term “legitimacy” is ambiguous and say that “despite assumptions that legitimacy is important to unions, there is no common understandmg of what the legitimacy of unions means or why it matter^."^' Thus they differentiate multiple meanings of the term. For the purposes of t h s book on academic unions, the most important types of legitimacy are what they refer to as “pragmatic” legitimacy and “moral” legitimacy. Pragmatic legitimacy is, they argue, the most elementary form of legitimacy. A union gains pragmatic legitimacy for its members and for others when it clarifies what items of value it can provide to its members and is able to demonstrate to members and to those in other constituencies that it is actually providing the benefits it has promised. But, Chaison and Bigelow argue, following the traditional model of fighting the establishment or management, and merely meeting the expectations of members, is not sufficient for a union to survive and thrive. Unions need to move beyond pragmatic concerns and must convince members and others that they have moral legitimacy as well, namely that they are “doing the right thing” in the sense of accomplishing something of social value or something appropriate and right given existing norms and values, that is, something that is socially valued. Examples of such values might focus on justice, fairness, and dignity. Or the valued social goals might be “equality, community,empowerment, and parti~ipation.”~~ Usually, gaining moral legitimacy means demonstrating that the union is not merely meeting immediate needs of members but also bringing about larger social improvement that is valued by union members as well as those outside of the union. According to Chaison and Bigelow, unions and their leaders cannot assume that just because they see the moral value and legitimacy of their work that others do as well. They need to convince their members and management and other groups in society that they are accomplishing both the pragmatic goals and the moral values they espouse. Through a series of five case studies, the authors illustrate unions that have been successful and those that have not, arguing that the most successful and high-quality unions achieve not merely pragmatic legitimacy but moral legitimacy as well. Indeed, moral legitimacy is often essential for the existence and continuation of unions.33 Furthermore, moral legitimacy can enhance the pragmatic legitimacy of unions, but because moral legitimacy is rare, a major challenge is how a union can strengthen and revitalize itself by gaining moral legitimacy. In the case of academic unions, it would seem, then, that if we could show that they have both pragmatic and moral legitimacy, then we would have a strong argument in their favor. And yet it seems that establishing the moral legitimacy of academic unions, and faculty unions in particular, is extremely

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41

problematic. If this is correct, it becomes clear why it is difficult to assess whether the arguments in favor or against academic unions are most persuasive. It also becomes clear why the assessment w d vary from union to union and from campus to campus, depending on the unique aspects of each, and the claims each can make to pragmatic and moral legitimacy. One problem for faculty unions is that they do have diverse constituencies and multiple authorities, and many universities are thus a paradigm of the type of organization for which legitimacy is a problem. The constituencies include union members, faculty at unionized schools who are not union members, ahnistrators, trustees, students and their families, and, for state institutions, public officials and the general public as well. The multiple layers of authorities include faculty senates and faculty governance committees, department chairs, and different levels of ahnistration on campus, as well as presidents and others overseeing multiple campus institutions, members of boards of trustees, and legislators and governors for public institutions. This broad array of constituencies and authorities makes it difficult for faculty unions to gain pragmatic and moral legitimacy. The dlscussion in chapter 1 makes it reasonably clear what goals faculty members want their unions to achieve in order to establish pragmatic legitimacy. Moreover, the spread of faculty unions from the mid-1960s and 1970s on, helps to explain further how they were perceived to have enhanced legitimacy. But to gain moral legitimacy, academic unions need to demonstrate to their members and diverse constituencies that they have done the right thing in some sense by achieving shared social and moral values. This poses a second major problem for faculty unions, as it assumes that existing norms and values can be identified. But what are the existing norms and values in academia? Certainly there is agreement among academics on the value of academic freedom and tenure as well as due process rights. It is at least arguable, however, that often other norms and values held by various faculty members differ, and that even when there is some consensus on faculty views, these may differ from the norms and values held by admmistrators and others. Divergent constituencies in academia may place different values on teaching and research. They may prioritize autonomy and fiscal efficiency hfferently. They may have vastly different views on merit, equity, and seniority. Thus, for example, if a faculty union achieves more power for faculty in decision making at the expense of the professors’ individual autonomy, is it doing the right thing? If a faculty union gains more in salaries at the cost of increased adversity and acrimony between faculty and administration, is it doing the right thing? If a faculty union gains more salary equity at the cost of merit recognition for research, creativity, and academic excellence, is it doing the

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right thing? If a faculty union gains use of seniority for promotions and layofi and retrenchment, is it doing the right thing? For these complicated questions there may be no simple answers, no single set of existing values, and no shared vision. If this is correct, then it appears that in such cases faculty unions cannot be shown to have moral legitimacy. Consequently,when faculty members are beleaguered, disrespected,powerless, and treated as expendable by an adrmnistration,trustees, or legislators, the faculty members are likely to be more united in their own shared values and visions for their institutions. In the face of gross unfair treatment, they are more likely to unite around issues of job security and community, of fairness and justice through equitable pay, of the need for autonomy to preserve dignity, along with empowerment through enhanced participation in faculty gove r n a n ~ eDependmg .~~ on the type of institution,there may be more agreement between faculty and administrators on the priority of teaching as opposed to research. In such cases faculty unions are likely to be more successful at gaining not only pragmatic legitimacy but moral legitimacy as well. At colleges and universities where there is wide agreement on existing norms and values for both faculty members and the institution, there may be no need for unions. There may be little concern about unions or their legitimacy if faculty members already feel well compensated,highly valued, treated respectfully, included in institutional governance, and secure in their positions through tenure and the academic fieedom it brings. If this is correct, then the parallel and balanced arguments in favor and against faculty unions can be attributed to the fact that there are a wide range of institutions with varying levels of managerial power, varying levels of agreement on values, with different constituencies with different priorities, and so on. All these factors help explain the complexity and controversy surrounding academic unions: why some have been successfbl,while others have failed and why some institutions have become unionized, while others have not. Moreover, these considerations indicate that Chaison and Bigelow are correct that legitimacy is truly a lens through which to evaluate unions and to enhance debate among union supporters and critics about the value and mission of academic unions.

NOTES 1. Rodger M. Govea, “The Unionization of Cleveland State: An Insider’s Story,” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998):38.

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2. Estelle S. Gellman, “Collective Bargaining and the AAUP,” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 39. Many of the following arguments are also discussed in Debra E. Blum, “Merits of Academic Unionism Still Hotly Debated 10 Years After High Court Limited Faculty Bargaining,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, January 31, 1990. 3. Dean Elmuti and Yunus Kathawala, “Full-Time University Faculty Members’ Perceptions of Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions,”]ournal of Research and Development in Education 24, no. 2 (1991): 13. 4. Peter Levine, “The Libertarian Critique of Labor Unions,” Philosophy and Public Afairs Quarterly 21, no. 4 (fall 2001): 21, and quoting Richard Rorty on unions in general, not academic unions, on p. 22. 5. Gellman, “Collective Bargaining and the AAUP:’ 39. 6. Cf. Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 8, on unions in industry. 7. Elmuti and Kathawala, “Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions,” 12. 8. Debra E. Blum, “Merits of Academic Unionism Still Hotly Debated 10 Years After High Court Limited Faculty Bargaining,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31,1990. 9. Gordon B. Arnold, The Politics of Faculty Unionization: The Experience of Three N e w England Universities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000), 43-44, citing Burton R. Clark, The Academic Lfe: Small Worlds, Dgerent Worlds (Princeton, NIJ.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1987). 10. Rodger M. Govea, “The Unionization of Cleveland State: An Insider’s Story” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 34-38. 11. Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education (Berkeley, Calif.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1973), 9. 12. Elmuti and Kathawala, “Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions,” 14. Gellman, “Collective Bargaining and the AAUP,” 39. 13. See, for example, Courtney Leatherman, “Colleges Brace for the Economic Downturn,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, April 20,2001, A10. 14. Piper Fogg, “Colleges Have Cut Proportion of Full-Time Faculty Members, Study Finds,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, November 2,2001, A17. 15. I am indebted to Professor Jumth Stanton for this point. 16. Elmuti and Kathawala, “Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions,” 13. 17. Peter Monaghan, “Technology and the Unions,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, February 10,1995. 18. Scott Smallwood, “A Faculty Strike in Hawaii Shuts Down Public Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 27, 2001, A16. 19. William R. Brown, Academic Politicr (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 8.

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20. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Pr4essors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 9. 21. Levine, “The Libertarian Critique of Labor Unions,” 19. 22. Levine, “The Libertarian Critique of Labor Unions,” 23. 23. Brown, Academic Politics, 10. 24. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 66. 25. Arnold, The Politics OfFaculty Unionization, 7, and throughout the text. 26. Govea, “The Unionization of Cleveland State,” 38. 27. Catherine Stimpson, “A Dean’s Skepticism about a Graduate-Student Union,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, May 5,2000. 28. Levine, “The Libertarian Critique of Labor Unions,” 23. According to Levine, “political theorist Jean L. Cohen has argued that the ‘concept of the public sphere is the normative core of the idea of civil society and the heart of any conception of democracy.’ The public sphere is the arena in which citizens gather information, for preferences about public policy, encounter alternative perspectives and arguments, and sometimes improve their views. Unions form part of this sphere.” 29. Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). 30. Chaison and Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy, 4. 31. Chaison and Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy, 2. 32. Chaison and Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy, 47. 33. Chaison and Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy, 95. The U P S strike is one of their examples of a successful union effort where the union was able to achieve concrete outcomes to gain pragmatic legitimacy and also able to promote social welfare, convincing others that part-time workers should be protected and that full-timers needed job security. See pp. 39-43. 34. A striking illustration of this is described in the unionization at three public New England universities. In his study predating the Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow work on unions and legitimacy, Gordon Arnold concludes, “On a more conceptual level, faculty unionism was a response to the lessening of a shared vision of academic life between faculty, on the one hand, and governing and administrative authorities, on the other . . .governing boards and faculties have fundamental differences when it comes to values.” Arnold, The Politics $Faculty Unionization, 137 (emphasis mine), citing academics seeking professionalism and governing boards taking a business perspective. Although there were clear differences between the faculty and the administration, these apparently prompted faculty to be united in their shared values and institutional vision.

THREE THE Y E S H I V A DECISION AND UNIONS AT PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS

T

he emergence of collective bargaining at public universities was initiated, as previously noted, afier enabling legislation was passed at the state level in the 1960s. Public institutions of higher education are governed by state laws on collective bargaining rather than the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, known as the Wagner Act. Hence, they are exempt h m the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rulings. In contrast, private colleges and universities are governed by federal legislation and are under the jurisdiction of the NLRA and the NLRB, a federal agency with the authority to make decisions concerning orgamzed labor in the private sector. The Supreme Court ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University’ had a major impact on unionization at private colleges and universities afier 1980. Some say that it sparked a new trend in collective bargaining in academia,’ and it has certainly posed an enormous challenge to unionization at private colleges and universities, as it limited the ability of faculty in the private sector to unionize and only a few private schools have voluntarily recognized faculty unions since 1980.3 The NLRB first assertedjurisdiction over institutions of higher education between 1970-1972 at such institutions as Cornell University, Fordham University, and Adelphi Uni~ersity.~ But the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in the 45

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well-known Yeshiva decision was a benchmark case for private colleges and universities and has had some ripple effects at public institutions as weL5 The holding in the Yeshiva decision, written by Justice Lewis Powell, was that fulltime faculty members at Yeshiva University exercised sufficient power over governance and academic matters at that institution to make them “managerial” employees and therefore ineligible for protection under the NLRA,6 thus excluding them fiom all rights under the federal law of collective bargaining. The NLRA guarantees bargaining rights to private-sector employees, but not to managers. The case was decided narrowly on how the Court viewed the facts and situation at Yeshiva University, and the Court did not specifically state that the decision was to cover all private institutions in higher education. To the contrary, the majority even included a footnote stating there may be similar institutions with faculties “entirely or predominantly n~nmanagerial.”~ Nevertheless, most cases since the ruling have followed Yeshiva and have found faculty at private institutions to have managerial authority, making them ineligible for collective bargaining. The decision did not prevent professors from unionizing, but it “meant that the Yeshiva’s administration was no longer obligated to recognize the union or negotiate a collective bargaining contract with it.”8 As Ann H. Franke has pointed out, the Supreme Court decision in Yeshiva criticized the NLRB harshly for failing to make adequate factual findings at the appellate court level. She observes, “Perhaps the whole thing would have turned out differently had the Board adopted findings of fact, both to satisft its obligations in that regard and to inform the Supreme Court about the true nature of faculty governance a~thority.”~ However that may be, the Supreme Court identified several areas where faculty at Yeshiva University were found to exercise, through their work on committees, substantial authority. These areas included “curriculum, gradmg practices, admission and matriculation standards, academic calendars, faculty hiring and tenure, and tuition and enrollment levels, among others.”1° Most faculty members did not see themselves as managers or as holdmg governing power over many of these areas, however. Nor did they feel in control in other areas such as major budgetary decisions and an administratively imposed salary fieeze.” Nevertheless, the Court concluded, in a passage quoted fiequently, that “when one considers the function of a university, it is hfficult to imagine decisions more managerial than these. To the extent the industrial analogy applies, the faculty determines within each school the product to be produced, the terms on which it will be offered, and the customers who w d be served.”12 The dissent in Yeshiva, written by Justice William Brennan, countered that managerial roles of faculty were minor because faculty were largely judged by

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their employer on the basis of their teaching and not their managerial work. Furthermore, the dissent argued that “Yeshiva’s faculty, however, is not accountable to the administration in its governance function. . . .When the faculty . . .participates in university decision-making on subjects of academic policy, it does not serve as the ‘representative of management.”’13 Recent research supports this view, indicating that administrators have continued to control institutions of higher education, and colleges and universities have continued to be run by managers seehng administrative efficiency.14 There is also evidence that most faculty at private colleges and universities feel their role in “governance” does not make them managers. Nevertheless, the Yeshiva holdmg has maintained a grip on the future of collective bargaining at private institutions. The Yeshiva decision allowed administrators to argue for the decertification of faculty unions. Franke points out that by 1983 faculty certifications were revoked at colleges and universities in Connecticut, Missouri, Ohio, among others, and the 1984 Boston University case became famous, in part because of the years spent gathering voluminous hours of testimony and documents, resulting in a transcript of twenty-one thousand pages and 157 days of hearings over two years.15 Although the conclusion in the Boston University case said in part that major questions of policy were made without serious faculty participation and that budgets were developed without particular faculty involvement, “the decision nonetheless found the faculty at Boston University to be managerial. While this result may not appear to follow from the facts adduced, even more surprising is the conclusion that the entire Boston University faculty exercises supervisory authority, by virtue of the faculty role in hiring other faculty and recommending faculty promotions.”16 Franke finds the decision “remarkably laclung in legal analysis” and concludes that by 1984 “the results of the post-Yeshiva cases are generally mixed, with some union victories and some administration victories. Both sides lose, however, in terms of the length and expense of the proceedings. Both lose in terms of antagonisms and frustrations created.”17 More recent commentators argue that very few private college union cases have succeeded since the 1980 Yeshiva decision.” “It remained possible for a private institution to voluntarily agree to collective bargaining with its faculty, but this was also rare.”” As of 1995 the NLFU3 had decertified thirty bargaining units and only seventy private colleges and universities had collective bargaining units.20Because the arguments and holding in the Yeshiva case have remained dominant in so many cases in the private sector, the decrease in faculty unions at private institutions since 1980 is largely attributed to the Yeshiva holding. Certainly, the decline is also due in part to institutional closings, more focus by unions on organizing clerical workers and

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other support staff, and other factors. However, predictions that faculty at public institutions would be declared managerial based on state legislation have not been borne out. The Yeshiva decision did not prevent hrther organization at public institutions, and while new unions there were few after 1980, those cases in the public sector continued to be victories for faculty unions, rejecting the Yeshiva arguments. Over a decade after Yeshiva, however, seventeen states still prohibited collective bargaining among public agency workers.21But as Franke observes in her conclusion, based on documentation &om multiple decisions, “The cases will continue to be expensive and time-consuming, and to exacerbate underlying controversies.”22 One consequence in thls era after 1980 is that private schools have made decisions about allocating finding based on decisions by administrators and trustees. In contrast, fhnding decisions at public universities are made at the state level. It seems that faculty unions reduce the number of financial decisions made university or campus wide. But when unions negotiate directly with state ofticials, the unions can become agents of the employer side. What have been the more recent implications and effects of the Yeshiva ruling on collective bargaining? Many faculty members are angry and fiustrated by the case and its consequences, observing that the decision has prevented the organization of new faculty unions at private colleges and universities and has had a chilling effect on organizing at public institutions. Even at Yeshiva University, there has continued to be a difference of opinion. Some faculty argue they had and still have little voice in governance, especially since the administration there indicated it would establish a faculty senate and nothing has been done to fidfill that promise. Faculty on this side wonder why, if they had so much of a role in governance at the university, they would have wanted and voted for a union. O n the other side, Yeshiva faculty have said they believe the Supreme Court ‘saved the university’ fiom a faculty that would have demanded too much,” and administrators at Yeshiva have claimed the faculty “run the show.”23 As recently as 2001 the controversy has continued. Some faculty members at Yeshiva University say academics elsewhere have blamed them for the effects of the case at other private colleges. They express surprise that their administration fought their small organization and disbelief that the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, nor can they believe the outcome. Others counter that Yeshiva was correctly decided because faculty are managers with a tremendous amount of authority.24 An important outcome for faculty at private institutions since the Yeshiva decision is that faculty workload is no longer an NLRB-mandated collective “

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bargaining issue as it had been before the 1980 decision. Many see this as a negative result, leaving faculty unprotected &om increasingly heavy teaching loads. Another consequence of the decision is that more private colleges and universities have restructured their faculty self-governance committees on the Yeshiva model. The more control that faculty have over university governance and economic decision making, the less likely a collective bargaining unit can be certified by the NLRB.25That is unfortunate according to union supporters, but given the reality of the Yeshiva ruling, it may be the best way to empower more faculty members at private institutions. On the wider national level, collective bargaining at private colleges and universities declined over the last two decades. More and more private institutions lost their cases based on reasoning fiom the Yeshiva decision as administrators argued their faculty were influential and helped control institutional governance. There were only a handful of exceptions. In addition, unionizing efforts at private colleges became more complex and expensive, and faculties and unions began to feel that the fight was not worth the effort. Unionization at private schools seemed paralyzed. Nevertheless, some saw signs of an apparent shift in the late 1990s as faculty groups attempted to combat or somehow get around the Yeshiva decision at private institutions. Consider the following recent examples: In November 1997 the full NLRB in Washington upheld a decision by a regional &rector of the NLRB concerning the University of Great Falls in Montana, granting bargaining rights to the faculty at a private college. To pro-union faculty there, the results are still not what they want. The university has appealed and has vowed to go to court if the case loses a second time. In addtion, “The Montana Federation of Teachers took on the Great Falls case against the advice of the American Federation of Teachers . . . and so has no financial support &om the national union.”26Without finding the case drags on. It seems that as the legal battle continues, union support is dwindhng at Great Falls. In November 1998, however, “the board of trustees at Goddard College in Vermont agreed to recognize the union its professors had overwhehngly voted to e~tablish.”~’The situation was noteworthy not only because the trustees did not follow the pattern at other private schools after Yeshiva but also because the trustees were under no obligation to recognize the union. Then in late 1999 Daniel Silverman, regional director of the NLRB office in New York, wrote an eighty-one-page decision involving Manhattan College, ruling that faculty members at that private Roman Catholic college have the right to bargain collectively. Silverman ruled “essentially, that the institution wasn’t Catholic enough to be excluded fiom the board’s juridction over labor issues . . . [and] further ruled that professors at the college were

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employees, not managers, and therefore were entitled to union representation.”28Mr. Silverman wrote, “While it is clear that the faculty has an obvious and pervasive influence on curricular and academic life at the College, their lack of representation on committees empowered to create academic policy militates against finding them managerial employee^."^^ The president of Manhattan College, Brother Thomas J. Scanlon, called the decision “absurd” and the reasoning “offensive” and vowed to appeal the ruling, even though faculty at the college had begun unionization efforts as far back as 1972. The faculty at Manhattan held a union election in which 93 percent of the 175 faculty members voted, but ballots were sealed pending the appeal.30 Then on June 9, 2000, the NLRB upheld Silverman’s decision in the Manhattan case, affirming faculty as advisors, not managerial workers. This is a highly noteworthy development because the NLRB panel rejected the college’s appeal with a one-sentence order finding “no substantial issues warranting review.” But the issue is currently moot at Manhattan College, where the unsealed votes ironically showed faculty voted against the union by a vote of seventy-six to f~rty-seven.~~ Union leaders are renewing their attempt to organize the faculty at Manhattan, but as yet there is no collective bargaining there. At Seton Hall University, pro-union professors have taken a different approach for the same goal, recognizing that the New Jersey Constitution includes a clause that guarantees employees bargaining rights. The union organizers at Seton Hall (1) filed suit in state court seeking bargaining rights under the Constitution, losing in the first round and losing again on appeal in 2000, and (2) filed a petition with the regional director of the New Jersey N L M for a hearing. They were heartened that this petition was not rejected and that they were asked to submit further justification for a formal hearing3’ Two other recent cases of faculty attempting to unionize at private colleges have been at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, and at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. Professors at Sage have argued along the lines used at Manhattan College and the University of Great Falls in Montana, that their faculty role is very lfferent from that of the faculty at Yeshiva University, and they are not managers at their campuses. Sage’s president, Jeanne H. Neff, has responded that faculty are the vast majority of members on the curriculum committee, that faculty play an enormous role in performance evaluations and decisions on new technology, to name a few.33 The core debate is the same as that in the Yeshiva case: whether faculty have enough control over decision making at the college to be deemed “man-

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agers” ineligible to enter into collective bargaining. Once again the case highlights that pro-union faculty and their administrators are pitted against one another. What has also been emphasized again in the Sage Colleges case is the enormous time and effort and money that such a case requires. With the administration and professors each trying to convince the regional NLRB office (a different regional office than that which decided the Manhattan College case) of their views on the extent of authority faculty have in governance, the paperwork has been immense and the testimony lengthy. For those at a small private school, the costs on each side must be nearly prohibitive. Sage faculty members complain about their low salaries, and the latest survey by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) shows that “faculty members at Sage earn an average of $41,600, well below the $57,196 figure for their peers at similar colleges in the N ~ r t h e a s t . ”Never~~ theless, faculty members at Sage cite respect and a role in faculty governance as the most important issues for them. Their complaints range from lack of control over their budgets to a massive restructuring plan that was initiated in 1996. “The plan created one institution, the Sage Colleges, out of what had been four colleges on two campuses, with two faculties. The creation includes Russell Sage College for Women and Sage Graduate School, both in Troy, and Sage Junior College and Sage Evening College, in Albany. . . . In place of separate academic departments on the two campuses, academics are now organized by 10 interdisciplinary divisions, which include faculty members from both sides of the Hudson. Faculty governance was also restructured: In place of two such bodies, the institution now has one-the Council of Fac~lty.”~’ Many faculty members understandably feel fiustrated by the new plan, feeling that it has led to less collegiality and more alienation on the split campus as well as an odd and complex organizational structure without tradtional departments with chairs, and thus with most of the power held by the president. They claim not to be included in faculty searches and not to be given authority to hire adjuncts without authority from the administration. The president and administration and trustees believe, to the contrary, that the restructuring plan has streamlined academic programs, eliminated duplication, and wiped out the $2 &on deficit, even allowing a 4 percent increase in faculty salaries in 2000. The administration claims, in addition, that faculty approved the new governance structure and that it enhances collegiality,while the union is likely to create adversaries. Adrmnistrators sit on faculty meetings in a nonvoting capacity, but say faculty make the decisions. However, union supporters believe administrative presence at meetings has a chilling effect on

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the discussions and makes clear that administrators place parameters on many decisions and have the sole authority to make many other decisions. Most worrisome is a claim by some that division heads and program directors were brought to a meeting and ordered not to participate in the union, whereas administrators say the meeting was merely inf~rmational.~~ It is difficult to know which side to believe, but two-thirds of the faculty signed cards authorizing the Sage Faculty Association to be their collective bargaining agent, and hence the conflict and divisiveness between faculty and administration is abundantly clear. In contrast to the regional NLRB decisions at the University of Great Falls in Montana and Manhattan College in New York, a regional official fkom the NLRB overseeing the Sage case ruled that the faculty members there, affiliated with the National Education Association (NEA), are managers and thus ineligible to engage in collective bargaining. Those faculty who support unionization at Sage insist they are teachers, not managers, and point out that two-thirds of the faculty would not have signed union cards if they believed they were managers. The group is appeahng and continuing their organization

effort^.^'

In another blow to those favoring unionization at private schools, an acting regional &rector of the NLRB, Jonathan Kreisberg, ruled in July 2001 that faculty members at Sacred Heart University are managerial employees and thus are unable to form a union and engage in collective bargaining. Kreisberg based his decision on the Yeshiva decision, rather than NLRB rulings permitting bargaining at the University of Great Falls in Montana and Manhattan College, and found that faculty as a whole at Sacred Heart University “effectively determine and implement the curricular and academic policies of the university, as well as such nonacademic matters as faculty hiring, leaves, promotion, and tenure.”38 The Sacred Heart faculty members say they wiU not appeal. Decisions in 2002 further undermined efforts to establish faculty unions at private colleges. A regional &rector of the NLRB in Chicago, Elizabeth Kinney, rejected claims by professors at the University of St. Francis who had sought to form a union. Kinney followed the Yeshiva holding, ruling that faculty at St. Francis were managers ineligible to engage in collective bargaining.39 A second development occurred in a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., that ruled against the NLRB, which had held that the faculty at the University of Great Falls in Montana could organize a union and bargain collectively. Interestingly, the court ruling did not even consider the question of whether faculty members at Great Falls are employees or managers. Rather, the court found that the University of Great Falls, a Roman Catholic institution, was a religious institution and thus the labor board lacked jurisdction over it

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under the NLRA. Note that this conflicts hrectly with the regional NLRB ruling by Silverman in the Manhattan College case, because he rejected the claim that Manhattan, also a Catholic college, was religious enough that the labor board lacked jurisdiction over it. The central theme in each of these cases, with the exception of this 2002 court ruling about the University of Great Falls in Montana, is faculty governance and the pivotal Yeshiva question about the role of faculty-as managers or employees. Faculty favoring unionization are convinced they have little power at their schools, aslung why they would want a union if they really had a solid role in setting academic policy, not merely an advisory role. There is evidence to support these faculty claims, since playing a major role in decisions on curriculum, as well as on hiring and promotion and tenure, does not mean that faculty are managers in the sense of having control over the budget and final decisions about programs, retrenchment, restructuring, and so on. Meanwhile, the faculty members involved in these cases are among the lowest paid at private colleges and universities and are understandably concerned about their fiscal situation and job security. They believe unionization can protect them. O n the other hand, at these private and mostly quite small colleges and universities, administrators genuinely feel that unions would not only create more adversity but could lead them into financial disaster. If such private colleges have small budgets but are forced by collective bargaining to raise salaries by a large amount and avoid retrenchment, the result could very well be insolvency and bankruptcy. The irony is that faculty surely do not want their colleges and universities to close, and one has to wonder if the costs of attempts to unionize at such schools far outweigh benefits that could be gained by more collegial cooperation between faculty and administration to seek the most productive future for students, faculty, and administrators at these private schools. Now it is clear as well that the Washington, D.C. court has reopened, in the University of Great Falls in Montana case, the issue of whether Catholic colleges and universities are sufficiently religious institutions that they are not within the jurisdiction of the NLRA. Interestingly,Yeshiva is the only university under Orthodox Jewish auspices and has many rabbis as faculty members,40 yet the argument that it was a religious institution outside the jurishction of the NLRA was not relied on in the Supreme Court’s Yeshiva decision. The revival of this argument may stifle unionization at private colleges even further, because many of the colleges testing the Yeshiva ruling and trying to unionize are Catholic institutions. Faculty members at other private colleges, including Fairfield and Villanova Universities, claim to be watching these cases closely-especially the

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one at Manhattan College. That case is taken to be the most important one, despite the antiunion vote by the faculty, because it is the first case where the regional NLFU3 supported faculty unionization at a private college, and the ruling was upheld at the national level. In that sense, it is a move away fi-om Yeshiva, which supporters of faculty unions welcome. Nevertheless, everyone is aware that until the Supreme Court overrules the Yeshiva decision (and at this point that is not going to occur through a court test from the Manhattan College collective bargaining case), National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University is still the law of the land.

NOTES 1. 444 U.S. 672 (1980). 2. Ann H. Franke, “Two Trends in Academic Collective Bargaining:A Faculty Representative’s Perspective,”Journal $Law and Education 13, no. 4 (October 1984):651-68. 3. Matthew M. Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues in Higher Education during the Past Decade and What to Look for Now: The Perspective of an Academician,”Journal $Law and Education 29, no. 3 (2000):318. 4. For a summary of these cases and the citations, see Franke, “Two Trends in Academic Collective Bargaining,” 652. 5. See also George Bodner, “The Implications of the Yeshiva University Decision for Collective Bargaining Rights of Faculty at Private and Public Institutions of Higher Education,”Journal of College and University Law 7 (1980-1981): 79, and Joel M. Douglas, “The Impact of NLRB us.Yeshiva University on Faculty Unionism at Public Colleges and Universities,” Journal of Collective Negotiations in the Public Sector 19, no. 1 (1990): 1-28. 6. 29 U.S.C. SS 151-69 (1976). 7. 444 U.S. 672 (1980),as described in Courtney Leatherman,“Union Movement at Private Colleges Awakens After a 20-Year Slumber,” The Chronicle offfigher Education, January 21,2000, A16. 8. Debra E. Blum, “Merits of Unionism Still Hotly Debated 10 Years After High Court Limited Faculty Bargaining,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, January 31,1990. 9. Franke, “Two Tretlds in Academic Collective Bargaining,” 654. 10. Franke, “Two Trends in Academic Collective Bargaining,” 654. 11. Madied Weidhorn, “The Yeshiva Faculty Union: Tales Told out of School,” Academe 84, no. 6 (Novembex-December 1998): 25. 12. 444 U.S. 672 at 686. 13. 444 U.S. 672 at 699. 14. Philo A. Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate: Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 5, including a

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citation to Joseph W. Garbarino and Bill Aussieker, Faculty Bargaining: Change and Conflict (New York McGraw-Hill, 1975), 179-80. 15. Franke, “Two Trends in Academic Collective Bargaining,” 656. 16. Franke, “Two Trends in Academic Collective Bargaining,” 656. 17. Franke, “Two Trends in Academic Collective Bargaining,” 656. 18. Deborah C. Malamud, “Collective Bargaining and the Professoriate: What the Law Says,” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 18-23; Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues,” 318. 19. Gordon B. Arnold, The Politics ofFaculty Unionization:The Experience ofThree N e w England Universities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, ZOOO), 48. 20. Frank Annuziato, “Unionization among College Faculty,” National Centerfor the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education G. the Professions Newsletter 23 (JulyIAugust 1995): 8. 21. Arnold, The Politics ofFaculty Unionization, 48. 22. Franke, “Two Trends in Academic Collective Bargaining,” 658. 23. Blum, “Merits of Unionism Still Hotly Debated.” 24. Courtney Leatherman, “Union Movement at Private Colleges Awakens After a 20-Year Slumber,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 21,2000, A16. 25. Barbara Lee and James Begin, “Criteria for Evaluating the Managerial Status of College Faculty: Application of Yeshiva University by the NLRB,”]ournal of College and University Law 10, no. 4 (1984): 516. 26. Leatherman, “Union Movement at Private Colleges Awakens After a 20-Year Slumber,” A16. 27. Bodah, “Sigdcant Labor and Employment Law Issues,” 318, and Alison Schneider, “Goddard College Allows Faculty to Unionize,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, December 4, 1998, A14. 28. Courtney Leatherman, “NLRB Official Says Professors at Manhattan College, a Private Institution, Can Unionize,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 1999, A20. 29. Quoted in Leatherman, “NLRB Official Says Professors at Manhattan College, a Private Institution, Can Unionize,” A20. 30. Leatherman, “Union Movement at Private Colleges Awakens After a 20-Year Slumber,” A16. 31. Courtney Leatherman, ‘“LFU3 Lets Stand a Decision Allowing Professors at a Private College to Unionize,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, July 7, 2000, A14. 32. Leatherman, “Union Movement at Private Colleges Awakens After a 20-Year Slumber,” A16. 33. Courtney Leatherman, “A Private College’s Professors Try for a Unionizing Breakthrough,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15,2000, A12. 34. Leatherman, “A Private College’s Professors Try for a Unionizing Breakthrough,” A12. 35. Leatherman, “A Private College’s Professors Try for a Unionizing Breakthrough,’’ A12.

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36. Leatherman, “A Private College’s Professors Try for a Unionizing Breakthrough,” A12. 37. Scott Smallwood, “NLRB Rules against Faculty Union at Sage Colleges,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, August 17,2001, A9. 38. Scott Smallwood, “Sacred Heart U. Professors Lose Bid to Unionize,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, July 6,2001, A12. 39. Scott Smallwood, “Twin Setbacks Hit Faculty-Union Drives at Private Colleges,’’ The Chronicle $Higher Education, March 1,2002, A12. 40. Weidhorn, “The Yeshiva Faculty Union,” 24 (see note 11).

FOUR MAJOR

EFFECTSO F FACULTYU N I O N I Z A T I O N

D

ifficult as it is to assess the effects of faculty unionization, it is worth looking at the results of several studies done on this issue. A study in 1992 concluded in general that the initial effect after unionization by faculty is positive, but that this effect declines over time.' Other studes focus on more particular and widely discussed effects including (1) salary and compensation; (2) job security and tenure; (3) faculty governance, academic freedom, and autonomy; (4) adversity between faculty and administration; and (5) tensions between faculty and students.

SALARY AND COMPENSATION With respect to salary, the earliest studes tended to find that prior to unionization there were wide discrepancies in faculty salaries, with certain star faculty gaining huge salary benefits. Unionization tended to bring more salary parity, with fewer differentials except those arising from seniority. Although some unions oppose merit increases completely, others have contracts explicitly allowing for merit pay. Nevertheless, collective bargaining generally makes 57

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it more d8icult for merit awards to be as extensive as they were prior to

unionization.2 A later study found that while unions did tend to help with salary increases at unionized institutions, as of 1981 it was possible to see that the faculty salary gains had spiked in the mid-1970s and were less by the end of that decade. Moreover, data showed that prior to 1975 professors at hgher ranks benefited more fiom collective bargaining. Overall, however, adding data after 1975, union salary gains were most substantial for instructors and assistant professors, namely those at the bottom of the economic and job security ladder. The researchers emphasized this latter finding, that unions gained the most in compensation and equity for this least powerful group, as the most solid finhng. In adddon, t h s study found, using data &om an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) survey and adjusted for cost-of-living dif€erences, that after the mid-1970s nonunionized faculties acheved larger salary gains than unionized faculties (exactly the opposite of data findings prior to the mid-1970s). Moreover, they found that in the private sector, faculty at institutions with unions were paid more than faculty at institutions without unions, and that just the reverse was true for public sector colleges and universities. Unions at colleges offering only the baccalaureate or its equivalent made more compensation gains than those at more diverse and complex institutions. These data were based on a sample of thirty pairs of colleges and universities, of which thirteen were public and seventeen were private institutions. Finally, the researchers found that in the early part of the eight years of the study the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) achieved the highest salaries, while the National Education Association (NEA) achieved the lowest. They were carefkl to note, however, that in the most recent years of the study the AAUP was the most effective bargaining agent.3 The authors found that unionism was not a potent salary predictor, but unions did have some effect on salary. In trying to answer their basic question as to whether unions were actually successful in acheving salary gains that would not have been achieved in the absence of collective bargaining, they concluded “overall that the relative compensation gains fiom bargaining in higher education tend to increase for several years and then probably to decline thereafier. The impact of collective bargaining on fringe benefits in higher education is modest though demon~trable.”~ This 1981 study spent considerable time assessing the impact of unionization on merit pay as well. The researchers confirmed that merit pay is greater at nonunion schools than unionized institutions, and use of a merit principle was more common at nonunion colleges and universities. This was

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not surprising given the standard union goal of salary equity. Traditionahsts in higher education may nevertheless find this alarming, while pro-union faculty will be pleased with the demise of what they view as inequities. A third and more recent study by Gary Rhoades is less detailed in its findings on the effects of faculty unions on salary, noting the inadequacies of recent studes on the to pi^.^ Rhoades argues, based on an examination of collective bargaining contracts, that unions do promote the collective interests of faculty and defend across-the-board percentage increases in salary as a most basic contract clause. This is not strange, on his view, because of the generally low salaries in academia and the market-driven forces of the profession. He points out that whatever gains unions have brought for faculty at their own institutions, they have had positive effects on wages at nonunionized institutions as well, because nonunion colleges and universities often raise salaries to undermine organizing efforts. Thus, he finds conclusions about the comparison between salaries at union and nonunion schools dfficult to make. He does argue, however, that unions stress equity provisions in their contracts and hope to constrain managerial flexibility in salaries. Nevertheless, accordmg to Rhoades, the salary gap between different fields and between faculty at the top and the bottom of the profession, and between males and females, has increased over the past years. He attributes this to his conclusion that “it would appear from my analysis of salary structures that at least in this personnel area, managers enjoy a great deal and an increasing measure of flexibility in unionized institutions, though perhaps less than they enjoy in non-unionized colleges and universities.”6He is troubled in particular that unions have not generally attempted to include gender equity provisions in collective bargaining agreements. Rhoades argues further that unions are not antithetical to merit, pointing out that merit clauses are built into most contract agreements at four-year institutions, though less often in agreements at two-year institutions of higher education. It seems that with respect to salary, the effects of unionization are controversial and unclear. Unions apparently have had some positive effects for faculty salaries at schools with unions and, as a by-product, at institutions without unions as well, perhaps especially for those at the lowest level of instructor or assistant professor. But if Rhoades’ analysis is correct, salary inequities have increased, rather than decreased, despite the unionization movement. This less than conclusive summary correlates well with another finding about faculty perceptions on the impact of unionization. According to this study, “University faculty members have mixed feelings about the union’s influence on the overall compensation dimensions.” In particular, “results indicate that only a third of respondents felt that the union has a positive effect

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on pay, benefits, and retirement plans. The other two thirds of the respondents felt that the union has a negative effect or no influence on pay, benefits, and retirement plans.”’ Note that the move to unionization and collective bargaining itself are lengthy processes that are very expensive. The financial requirements of collective bargaining may take away from the funds for salary increases. It is rather surprising that faculty union contracts have not had a more discernable and positive impact on economic factors surrounding faculty life.

JOB SECURITY, TENURE, AND DUE PROCESS In their Carnegie Commission study, Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset found in the early 1970s that faculty unions had already had major effects on issues surrounding reappointment, tenure, and job security.* In particular, the unions’ stated goal of eliminating the power of “management” is shown clearly in this area. They found many union contracts articulating conditions for tenure as well as rights for appeals through arbitration and the courts. They cited several stuhes as well as the City University of New York (CUNY) union’s extensive guarantees of due process and rights to outside arbitration to demonstrate these had become matters of widespread controversy. They concluded that personnel policies differed between unionized and nonunionized institutions, because many faculty members did not get tenure at nonunion colleges and universities and could not register a union complaint, whereas most did get tenure at unionized schools, as long as they were less prestigious with less emphasis on research. In the CUNY contract at the time, for example, no consideration of academicjudgment was allowed, and the scope of arbitration was limited to procedural matters.’ That union wanted personnel judgments to be reviewed by a committee of three, consisting of an appointee by the union, an appointee by the administration, and a third member chosen by the first two.The university administration vigorously opposed such a review committee, concerned that it would involve nonacademic “judges” in the reappointment and tenure decisions. The unions in effect wanted to substitute specialists trained in union grievance procedures for evaluation by the candidate’s academic “peers.” Ladd and Lipset found in their study that this issue separated unions from adrmnistrators as well as from senior and tenured faculty in academe who felt the union process would undermine the scholarly quality of new colleagues.

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Unions wanted to limit external academic evaluations for reappointment and tenure decisions. This created deep disagreement &om administrators and faculty at institutions hoping to excel in scholarship, who felt such evaluations were crucial to avoid a decline in the quality of the faculty. A similar disagreement arises when one asks the question concerning where the burden of proof lies in a personnel case. Is it the faculty member’s responsibility to demonstrate his or her qualifications? O r is it the institution’s responsibility to show there has been a failure to meet some set of quahfications? O n the latter view, the presumption is that reappointment and tenure should be expected unless there is a major failing on the part of the candidate, and this presumption is precisely what unions support and what administrators and others believe leads to a decline in the quality of the professoriate. While unions have had the most success with their arguments at schools that are primarily teaching institutions,a simdar controversy arose at a researchoriented school at the University of California. There the chancellor at the Santa Barbara campus turned down a candidate for tenure, reversing the favorable recommendation of the department, “on the basis of negative evaluations of the man’s published work fi-om authorities in speech outside the university.” lo The AFT successfully litigated the case, allowing a new review of the assistant professor the following year, arguing that this power can be abused by adrmnistrators. “This insistence by the union that administrators should not have the power to review faculty peer evaluations by seeking outside judgments of a candidate’s scholarly quahfications runs directly contrary to an assumption shared at many leading schools: that it may be necessary, in upgrading ‘weak’ departments, for administrators to seek confidential extramural advice to prevent faculties from becoming staffed with people like themselves.”” There are, certainly, plenty of complexities surrounding this debate. Are administrators the best judge of which departments are “weak”? How should evaluations of faculty in new or interdisciplinary fields be made, where quality of scholarship seems to matter but qualified referees may be difficult to locate? Should departments be deemed best able to evaluate their colleagues? Is administrative review ever appropriate, and if so, when? How should cases be handled when there is a tendency for faculty to hire others not likely to challenge them? Some believe unionization supports a trend toward equalization and away &om elitism, widening the gap between distinguished public and private universities and the less elite institutions. But others believe that while unions reduce meritocracy, as they spread they also lessen the domination of small groups or cliques of scholars and support those individuals with less

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bargaining power, lealng to intellectual and cultural diversity. Ultimately, however, the evidence indicates that unions do enhance tenure and job security for faculty members. Most faculty unions consistently support the view that “humane treatment” of canldates outweighs the value of encouraging professional scholarship, whereas those opposed to unions argue that collective bargaining continues to erode professional standards of excellence. Unions want to deny senior faculty and adrmnistrators the right to make qualitative judgments of those up for review, claiming such judgments are always subjective and involve favoritism and discrimination. As in industry, faculty unions seek to reduce the power of the employer to discharge faculty. They usually support the view that tenure should be awarded as long as the candidate’s work and performance is satisfactory or competent. They seek public decisions, urging public clarification of the reasons for a tenure denial, for example, claiming this will reduce corruption. Those on the other side take the view that if there is doubt, or sometimes lack of departmental agreement on a candidate, for example, then the faculty member should be let go. They believe the value of faculty excellence is not sustainable with unionization. Insisting on procedures for reappointment and tenure appeals and clarification of the reasons for a denial is generally perfectly reasonable. Nevertheless, it is important to note the following: There is clearly a difference between the typical situation in academia, where outside evaluations come from those in one’s field, acquaintances, or referees unknown to the candidate, and the situation in industry, where evaluators are usually employers or supervisors, and those who w d continue to work with those whom they evaluate. Another important point is that during times when the economic situation has been most difficult for colleges and universities, in the 1970s and late 1990s,for example, denial of tenure has more serious consequences because of the scarcity of new job openings. This has led unions to continue to promote job security as part of their agendas, to push harder for more formal rules, and to emphasize procedural safeguards. But as Ladd and Lipset point out, this union emphasis has had some unintended effects. First, faculty have tended to approve colleagues even when doubtful about a weak canldate, in order to avoid public controversy,to avoid being the “bad guy,” and to avoid the time and expense of a battle to defend a negative judgment threatened by union litigation. Second, some colleges and universities have initiated policies on the percentage of canldates that can be awarded tenure, and although unions oppose this, their own activities have been one of the reasons for their enactment.

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“These pressures to yield on a tenure issue in indwidual cases also encourage administrators and boards to look for more formal rules limiting arbitrarily the number who can gain tenure. Increasingly under the pressure of finances, as the publicly expressed reason, but also of unions and court decisions, as a private one, colleges have been initiating policies requiring the dismissal of a fixed proportion of those who might be considered for retention. Unions, of course, strongly resist such proposals, but ironically,their very policies and activities are one of the forces bringing them about.”12 Third, and perhaps most ironic, is that faculty bargaining groups may not want to change traditional promotion patterns and procedures, but the union processes for grievances end up pushing administrators to require more guidelines and detailed follow-up at department levels. Department chairs and others are thus more constrained by formal rules, and therefore faculty end up losing much of their independence in case evaluation^.'^ William R. Brown also stresses the ways in which faculty union contracts often leave department chairs in an awkward situation. By the early 1980s he found that most contracts dealt in some way with departmental authority and included ways to preserve a department’s criteria and policies and procedures for tenure, promotion, appointments, and so on. W e the ideal and vision is thus a group management approach that is the essence of collegiality, the reality is that in collective bargaining agreements “much of the authority exercised by departments is not expressed as specified actions that the group will take. . . . As a result it sometimes appears that the academician does not even operate under the direction of the collegial group.. . .Departmental administration can become almost n~nexistent.’’’~ Brown also emphasizes the extent to which faculty union contracts stress job security, not only in terms of reappointment and tenure policies and procedures but also in terms of stringent guidelines to prevent dismissal or retrenchment due to financial exigency. In many cases, the information an administration must supply to a faculty union before terminating tenured or untenured faculty is so extensive it is doubtful terminations could ever occur. The goal of preserving job security is justified by the importance of preserving intellectual stimulation and thus the academic mission of the institution. Ann H. Franke has argued that the economy poses one of the two most serious challenges to faculty unions because declining revenue seriously influences colleges and universities. The most important response has been for unions to negotiate more detailed and more favorable provisions about retrenchment programs and faculty cutbacks. Most common are union stipulations that administrators notie faculty members and their bargaining agent of anticipated declarations of financial exigency, which is defined by the AAUP

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as “an imminent financial crisis which threatens the survival of the institution as a whole and whch cannot be alleviated by less drastic means.”15 She cites a variety of recommendations from the AAUP that are widely

incorporated in union contracts to minimize faculty terminations, to encourage suitable reassignment of faculty who lose their positions, and to encourage early retirement programs to alleviate the need for layoffs and retrenchment. The effect is to minimize the pain of retrenchment due to economic difficulties, but the reality is that jobs for younger scholars will remain scarce and that tenured and nontenured faculty may still lose their jobs during a financial crisis. Rhoades’ 1998 study also focuses not so much on policies and procedures for personnel reviews for reappointment and tenure to maintain job security as on the extent to which retrenchment can occur, even for tenured faculty. He argues that the myth that tenured faculty cannot be fired is false and that tenured faculty can be and have been fired legally. Usually such action is justified by program expansion and contraction in various fields or based on financial difficulties. Based on contracts he examined in the 1990s, Rhoades believes it is clear that managers and adrmnistrators retain the final authority to retrench or lay off faculty, and he argues that even with union contracts they are left with extraordmary authority. Nevertheless, he agrees that unions do make it procedurally and politically more dfficult to fire and lay off even tenured faculty. But he concludes that unions are basically left playing only a reactive role. When union clauses preserve seniority and full-time status as conditions to be accounted for in determining layo&, the ultimate effect, he believes, is heightened tensions among Merent categories of faculty.16 In spite of these controversies, unions do generally enhance job security and tenure, especially at institutions where faculty feel most vulnerable. Moreover, their emphasis on due process and grievance procedures help protect those faculty members who feel wronged. Adrmnistrators must be carell about procedures because they know the unions are watching.

FACULTY GOVERNANCE, ACADEMIC FREEDOM, AND AUTONOMY The effects of faculty unions on faculty governance and academic freedom are varied and complex, but generally positive. Rhoades suggests that perhaps what union contracts do best is negotiate freedom, autonomy, and insulation

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from managerial control, although he acknowledges that this may not be enough.” Unions can and do negotiate contracts that protect faculty members’ due process rights in grievance procedures and that protect their rights to discuss and write about unpopular ideas at their institutions, thus enhancing academic freedom and autonomy, particularly at institutions with AAUP support and where these are under attack. These positive results are substantial and real. Despite gains that unions can achieve through negotiations, however, there can be problems. Individuals can lose independence and freedom of action when working under a union, and faculty as a group may lose their voice and power when the union is in charge as their bargaining agent. In particular, the role and authority of faculty senates are sometimes affected by the existence of unions on campus. Although unions claim to be seeking more of a role in governance for faculty, at many institutions the result is a diminished role for university or faculty senates. O n issues such as conditions of appointment and educational policy, traditionally decided by faculty senates or committees reporting to the senate, unions often take over the decisions or negotiations. What had existed as faculty governance is replaced by the voice of the union. Two major negative effects are noteworthy. First, even if faculty senates at nonunion institutions are run by a few politically active faculty members, they are supposed to represent the entire faculty, and the expectation of all is that they be responsive to any of the members of the faculty. Unions do not represent all the faculty members at a given institution, however, but only those who have joined the union. Even AAUP chapters that represent faculty through collective bargaining only allow votes &om dues-paying members. This raises the question of the rights and voice of faculty members who choose not to join the union on campus and has led to charges, particularly against the AFT and NEA, that they are on some campuses undemocratic or controlled by a clique of officers ignoring their members and the faculty as a whole. A second problematic effect of the shift from faculty senates to unions is the change in the type of individuals representing the professoriate. In traditional nonunion institutions, those serving as department chairs or on committees are likely to be more conservative and more friendly to the administration than the faculty members as a whole. Unionization often shifts power and prestige to a different group, more liberal politically, more inclined to favor across-the-board benefits for faculty, ready to lobby state capitals, ready to undertake legal representation before administrative boards for grievance hearings and arbitration, and more inclined to be adversarial to the administration.’*

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Unions claim their activity does not conflict with faculty governance, and some (especially those backed by the AAUP) argue that they provide a real voice for faculty members to determine institutional policy. O n this view, unions enhance faculty governance, and there is no competition between unions and faculty senates. Unions claim in addition that they stdl want faculty to oversee curriculum and scholastic standards, for example. Detractors complain, however, that merely the existence of a union on campus can diminish the interest of faculty members to volunteer to serve on faculty committees and participate in faculty senates. To the extent that unions weaken faculty governance, some unions view this positively. They claim that although the faculty alone are no longer in charge, the union monitors and ensures that the administration is fair and equitable in its treatment of faculty, and this benefit outweighs any loss in faculty voice. Overall, there are controversies over governance and some negative effects of faculty unions in that area. Most believe, however, that the bottom line is union success in protecting academic fi-eedom and autonomy for their faculty members.

ADVERSITY BETWEEN FACULTY AND ADMINISTRATION Collective bargaining easily invites the adversary model of university governance rather than cooperative self-governance. This is partially due to the formal and detailed stipulation of rights, obligations, and details articulated about such issues as teaching load, contact hours, research time, and so on. Administrators may push for post-tenure reviews, for example, when faculty members may view them as a threat.lg There certainly are variations, however, as some unions want faculty to have an administrative role, and some do not. In ad&tion, the adversity seldom involves strikes because administrators and other university officials normally insist on no-strike clauses in union contracts. Unions claim to, and sometimes do, enhance community and collegiality. Nevertheless, there is also substantial evidence of adversity, as described in the proceedmg. One adverse effect of unionization is a somewhat subtle one, namely the tendency for the atmosphere on campus to change after a union is formed. One study found that there was defensive behavior and impaired communication between faculty and administration once a union contract was signed. It is not surprising that this study also found that unionization led to more cen-

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tralized decision making, whereas the decision making had been more informal before the collective bargaining agreement.” Other commentators agree that unions do indeed increase more direct adversity between faculty and administrators, whether unions admit it or not. According to Brown, “Collective bargaining agreements truly reveal the suspicion with which administration is held and the uncertainty of faculty over administrators’ intent.”’* In addition, “contracts . . . also reflect a certain distrust of the academician on the part of administrators. Mutual distrust is evident in a number of ways, but none is more pronounced than the attention devoted to personnel fiIes.”’’ In a more recent study, Gordon B. Arnold argues that whde “faculty unions may have improved the situations of many faculties that adopted them,” they also brought heated conflict and acrimony, and thus unionization “may also exact a toll on the sometimes delicate balance of relationships among actors on a campus.”23He continues, saymg faculty unions “aim at the heart of the academic enterprise, questioning assumptions about the role of a faculty and about the distribution of power within institutions of higher education . . . [yet] during a union drive and in the aftermath, informal working and personal relationships, which may have been cordial and longstanding, can be seriously, and sometimes irreparably, ~trained.”’~ To the extent faculty and admimstrators become adversaries,this is certainly a negative effect of unionization. A further point is that the adversarial model does change the role of institutional administrators. The ideal vision is that faculty and administrators are colleagues and that administrators are representatives for faculty working to cope with off-campus power groups including alumni, trustees, the media, and legislature. Within the university they are also colleagues operating somewhat informally. Ladd and Lipset describe this vision: “A good dean rarely inquires as to what given individuals are doing with respect to teaching load, sick leave, and the like.”25But when faculty are unionized, administrators and department chairs must see that things are run in accordance with the legally bindmg contract. In reality, as managers they seek more administrative efficiency. Unionization requires more administrative accountability and thus more bureaucratization.26 They are legally responsible for their actions and become the representatives of management,protecting management’s rights under the contract. In many cases contracts are damaging to faculty because they emphasize and enhance administrative authority more than was normal prior to the introduction of collective bargainir~g.~’ The result is that union representatives work to protect faculty rights, yet often end up in battles with administrators over interpretations of the words in

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the contract. Usually contracts push administrators to a more bureaucratic point of view than they might have otherwise taken, and eventually administrators tend to assume more and more responsibility.Thus “the tendencies toward rigidity and bureaucratization, inherent in any case in the sheer size and complexity of many academic institutions, are magnified.”28 In addition, a unionization movement, especially at a public institution, invites public attention and scrutiny by the politicians, news media, and public. This invariably leads to more misunderstandings and more conflct. Academics have not done a particularly good job of explaining and defendmg their work situation to the public, and thus they are viewed suspiciously as remote workers in their “ivory towers.”29 Critics believe there are many examples illustrating the adversity generated by unionization. Consider two cases from C U W . In the early 1970s, the adrmnistration at C U M insisted that the contract gave them the power to select all their members, including department chairs. The union there took the position that management positions should be filled by election of the workers, namely, the faculty. This disagreement was one of many, and it led researchers to conclude “yet four years of negotiations at CUNY have clearly exacerbated the relation~hips.”~~ The situation was seen to become more adversarial and less collegial, one of winners and losers. A more recent case at CUNY makes the same point. In a spring 2000 election, a new activist slate of officers called the New Caucus won most of the CUNY union leadership posts ousting the union president of twenty-four years, who was also vice president of the AFT. Their complaints were that the former leadership had allowed administrators to damage the university in multiple ways, in particular by cutting the budget, eliminating programs for remedial education, and hiring more part-time faculty. At least one union member is quoted as saying, “The New Caucus has been among the administration’s chief opponents. This election sends a strong message to them to watch out, we’re going to come on strong.”31The results of the election and this accompanying rhetoric make it obvious that faculty-administration relationships at CUNY are becoming more strained and dwisive rather than more collegial. Examples such as these directly conflict with the goals of the AAUP for collective bargaining, however. In addition, leaders of the AAUP claim that “formal negotiations can improve communication between the faculty and admini~tration.”~~ In addition, other researchers find a trend in collective bargaining toward mahng it more collaborative and less ad~ersarial.~~ If that collaborative model carries over after a union contract is signed, collegiality is enhanced and adversity reduced. As faculty unionization has spread, campus collegiality has varied. The AAUP stresses collegiality and common goals; the

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AFT is more militant. It is likely that the extent of adversity on a given canpus is affected by which national organization is backing the union, as well as the personalities of those inlviduals leading particular unions.

TENSIONS BETWEEN FACULTY AND STUDENTS It would be ideal if unionization by faculty did not affect students, but inevitably it does, in varied ways. There has been remarkably little written on this topic since the Carnegie study by Ladd and Lipset, and the amount and type of student-faculty tensions varies from campus to campus. Most obviously, if a faculty union goes on strike, students are very lrectly affected and likely to be outraged with classes shut down. Few students look at the situation from the faculty’s point of view in such a crisis. It is more usual for students to see themselves losing out or at a lsadvantage, and the obvious target of their anger is their faculty. Matthew Finlun reports of a case from the Chicago city system when the union told students that “grades and course c r e l t which would be given without the certification of your teacher would be inval~d.”~~ In such a case it is easy to sympathize with the anger of students. A major cause of less dramatic conflicts between students and faculty unions is that collective bargaining makes much more visible and public the faculty concerns over salaries, benefits, tenure, teaching loads, and hours at institutions of higher learning. This heightened visibility may encourage students to get more involved in finding out more information on these topics and to have more outspoken views on them as they discover the effects of faculty negotiations on student benefits. A third issue of contention is the role of students in college and university governance. Students often see faculty unions as a threat to their power and role in decision making at colleges and universities. To the extent that unions try to keep students out of the decision-making process, they push students to be more likely to align with administrators to retain as much of their power and control as possible. For example, students will work even more energetically to retain their role in governance by having positions on university committees and input on a range of academic matters. This was perhaps what happened at CUNY in the early 1970s, when students there wanted to have representatives as observers at collective bargaining sessions and wanted to give testimony for fact-finding on issues being debated. The Board of Higher Education supported the students on this, and the union at CUNY opposed it.35 Clearly, students there felt rebuffed, frustrated, and angry.

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Fourth, the extent to which students oppose union platforms when they perceive unions pushing for faculty benefits that they believe will translate into higher tuition bills is also of concern. In this way, union negotiations also encourage students to see advantages going to faculty as detracting &om their own benefits. Most dramatically t h s can lead to students opposing salary raises for faculty in order to prevent tuition increases that place the burden on them. Therefore, if students see unions actively fighting for faculty raises, they may be inclined to oppose the faculty and their unions. As another example, students may oppose tenure for simdar reasons, worrying that a hghly tenured and more senior faculty uses up more college resources for the salary pool, again increasing the threat of tuition increases. A fifth area of tension is related to faculty effectiveness and evaluation. Students notoriously have strong views about their teachers and want to be part of the evaluation process. To the extent unions oppose student input and the use of teaching evaluations by students, they only increase student unhappiness and irritation at not being taken seriously.Whether students align with administrators when feeling this dissatisfaction, they are increasingly likely to be in conflict with faculty unions. At CUNY, for example, students opposed across-the-board increases favored by the faculty union, and defended merit raises as an incentive to improve faculty teaching and ~cholarship.~~ It has also been suggested that faculty sometimes support unions for the very same reason students oppose them. Namely, faculty are more inclined to support unions when they want to keep students out of the decision-making process, want to keep them from having a voice on faculty salaries and tenure, and want to exclude them &om faculty and teachmg evaluations. Given the view that autonomy and independence is the paramount concern of faculty, to select their colleagues, determine curriculum, control their work schedules, and so it is not surprising that many faculty will support unions for these reasons, believing they d reduce student threats to their ability to control their academic lives. To the extent t h s is so and to the extent unions publicize these policies as part of their platform, students fear faculty unions and see them as uninterested in student concerns and unwdhng to find a balance between student concerns and faculty demands. Ths is ironic given that faculty members who are supportive of student voices and input tend to support unions. Throughout the early 1970s, Ladd and Lipset found evidence of these types of student-faculty tensions at CUNY, State University of New York (SUNY), Chicago, community colleges in Pennsylvania, Central Michigan University, Washington State University, Rutgers University, and the University of Cahfornia. They note the one exception was in Massachusetts, where both the AFT and NEA supported governance that included student repre-

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sentatives. Their conclusions for the reasons for this exception were, ironically, (1) that salaries were so low in that state that students were able to sympathize with faculty and (2) that Massachusetts state law forbade bargaining on economic matters, so student input was no threat to their salaries.38 The more common portrait, however, is one where faculty unions push for higher faculty salaries, lower teaching loads, more research facilities, more faculty control over governance and other academic matters, and, in business language,present themselves as sellers of services for students. At the same time, students are seen as buyers or clients who want more of the budget to go to teaching, student activities, housing, and so forth. Thus, as faculty unions become more prominent and increasingly staffed with professional negotiators, while student groups and leaders continue to change from year to year, Ladd and Lipset conclude, “In the long run, it is likely that those who view faculty unionism as a way of enhancing faculty authority and reducing student power are right.”39

CONCLUSION

It turns out that there is multiple evidence of the adversity that faculty unions bring on campus, both between faculty and administrators and between faculty and students. In addtion, there is controversy surrounding faculty union effects on faculty governance. And it is not clear that faculty unions enhance salary and economic benefits as much as they had hoped. Yet there is considerable evidence that even when there are difficulties, the most prominent and successful effects of faculty unions in academia are their defense of job security and tenure, due process and grievance procedures, and academic freedom and autonomy. This is noteworthy because it helps explain why faculty unions have formed and flourished at institutions where faculty members feel they are treated as, and perhaps are, replaceable and expendable.At colleges and universities where adrmnistrators and politicians leave faculty feeling disrespected and vulnerable, unions meet an important need and are valuable in protecting the rights of these faculty members. Because it is unclear that faculty unions have a sustained and positive effect on salaries and benefits, it is difficult for them to demonstrate their pragmatic legitimacy in that area. Many unions do have major positive effects on job security and tenure, academic freedom and autonomy, and sometimes faculty governance. They can use these to establish their pragmatic legitimacy. Nevertheless, these gains alone do not help them gain

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moral legitimacy. Furthermore, when unions increase faculty-administration adversity and tensions between students and faculty, these detract from both their pragmatic and moral legitimacy. Given that the effects of faculty unions are intertwined in complex ways, it is now possible to see why generalizations about these academic unions are nearly impossible to make. It does become clearer, however, what benefits and values individual faculty unions can strive for in order to become more effective and to gain more legitimacy.

NOTES 1. Fehmida Slemi and Phyllis Brown, “Collective Bargaining Agreements in 1992,” Monthly Labor Review 5 (May 1993): 22. 2. Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education (Berkeley, Calif.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1973), 69-72. 3. Barbara Guthrie-Morse, Larry L. Leslie, and The-Wei Hu, “Assessing the Impact of Faculty Unions: The Financial Implications of Collective Bargaining,”Journal o j Higher Education 52, no. 3 (1981):237-55. 4. Guthrie-Morse, Leslie, and The-Wei Hu, “Assessing the Impact of Faculty Unions,” 248. 5. Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998), 29-81,259-60. 6. Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 81. 7. Dean Elmuti and Yunus Kathawala, “Full-Time University Faculty Members’ Perceptions of Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions,”Journal of Research and Development in Education 24, no. 2 (1991). 8. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 72-81. 9. Matthew W. Finkin, “Grievance Procedures,” in Faculty Unions and Collective Bargaining, ed. Edwin D. Duryea and Robert S. Fisk (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973), 79-80. 10. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 74. In contrast to the AFT, in 1973 the national AAUP opposed outside arbitration and did not endorse open files, but some local chapters did otherwise, see p. 78. 11. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 75. 12. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 80. 13. Cf. Jack Cherniak, “Grievance Procedures under Collective Bargaining,” Institute of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., October 26,1972, cited in Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 81.

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14. William R. Brown, Academic Politics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 153. 15. Ann H. Franke, “Two Trends in Academic Collective Bargaining: A Faculty Representative’s Perspective,” Journal of Law and Education 13, no. 4 (October 1984): 662. See also pp. 661 and 663 ff. 16. Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 83-129,260-62. 17. Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 268. 18. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 83. 19. When post-tenure reviews are run and overseen by administrators and legislators, they certainly are threatening. They appear to violate the principle of tenure and open the door to invasions of academic freedom. But they need not be so. When conducted by faculty committees and done well, with the best purposes and goodwill, post-tenure reviews can assist faculty members to gain a clearer vision of their strengths and weaknesses, and the best path for them to pursue for faculty, department, and university success in the future. 20. Jim Vander Putten, Michael K. McLendon, and Marvin W. Peterson, “Comparing Union and Nonunion Staff Perceptions in the Higher Education Work Environment,” Research in Higher Education 38, no. 1 (January 1997): 145. 21. Brown, Academic Politics, 159. 22. Brown, Academic Politics, 166. 23. Gordon B. Arnold, The Politics ofFaculty Unionization:TheExperience o f r r e e New England Universities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000), ix-x. 24. Arnold, The Politics ofFaculty Unionization, 1-2, 9. 25. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 88. 26. Philo A. Hutcheson, A Professional Professoriate: Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 183. Hutcheson discusses how this has been a recurring theme, and now is currently increasing, not decreasing. 27. Brown, Academic Politics, 161. 28. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 88. 29. Arnold, The Politics of Faculty Unionization, 19. 30. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education, 87. 31. Courtney Leatherman, “Activist Academics Oust Leadership of CUNY’s Faculty Union,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, May 12,2000, A19. 32. Estelle S. Gellman, “Collective Bargaining and the AAUP,” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 39. 33. Don Crist,Jeanne Higham, and Fred Wall, “From Adversaries to Allies: How to Build Trust at the Bargaining Table,” The Executive Educator 18, no. 2 (February 1996): 32,34; Todd A. DeMitchell and Walter Streshly,“Must Collective Bargaining Be Reformed in an Era of Reform?” Internationaljournal ofEducationa1 Reform 5, no. 1 (May 1996): 78-85. 34. Matthew Finkin, “Collective Bargaining and University Government,” University ofWisconsin Law Review 150, no. 1 (1971).

74 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Brown, Academic Politics, chap. 6. Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American Ladd Jr. and Lipset, Professors, Unions, and American

Higher Education, 90. Higher Education, 91. Higher Education, 93. Higher Education, 95.

FIVE UNIo N I ZATI o N AM o N G PART-TIMEFACULTY

A

n immense change in higher education over the last few decades has been the huge increase in the number of part-time faculty members teaching at colleges and universities. “In 1970, approximately 22 percent of faculty appointments were part-time or adjunct. Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) now estimate that part-time faculty represent just over 50 percent of positions,”’ according to a study published in 2000. Others place the estimated number of part-time faculty higher or slightly lower. For example, a U.S. Department of Education report titled “Background Characteristics,Work Activities, and Compensation of Faculty and Instructional Staff in Postsecondary Institutions: Fall 1998” said that 43 percent of the professoriate worked part-time in fall of 1998.2According to this study, the proportion of part-time faculty increased sharply in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but then leveled off between 1992 and 1998, but others argue the number of part-time faculty increased from 1991 to 1998.3 The data and percentages may vary depending on whether graduate students teaching part-time are counted as part-time faculty. Moreover, there is no single, clear definition of “part-time faculty.” The term often differentiates those with varying gradations of status based on course load, and part-timers 75

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are defined differently in those institutional union contracts that refer to them at all. Many schools use the terms “part-time” and “adjunct” synonymously to refer to those with less than a full-time teachng schedule.Others use the term “adjunct” more broadly to include those who assist a program or department without actually teaching a course. Whatever the makeup and exact percentage of part-time faculty at institutions of higher education is, it has at least doubled in the past thirty years, and that is a hugely significant increase. The shift in the faculty mix has been influenced by numerous factors, includmg economic issues, strategic planning issues, enrollments, and accreditation requirements. The shift raises important questions about campus culture, academic standards, and the future of higher education. Many view part-time faculty as a threat to the numbers and proportions of full-time faculty. It is also notable that as the percentage of part-time faculty has increased, there has been a greater effort to unionize part-time faculty. The change in the faculty mix is complex for several reasons. Not only has the percentage of part-time faculty in higher education increased to over 40 percent, and some studies say over 50 percent, but also the percentage of part-timers at two-year and community colleges is much higher-perhaps 65 percent. Even at well-known and prestigious schools such as Boston College and Northeastern University,part-time professors outnumber full-time faculty by significant amount^.^ In addition, the U.S. Department of Education has verified in a 1999 study that colleges and universities are reducing the percentage of full-time faculty positions on their faculties. “The study found that fkom 1993 to 1998, 40 percent of all institutions took action to reduce the size of their full-time faculties. Almost a quarter of those institutions did so by replacing full-time faculty members with part-time faculty member^."^ At the same time, the percentage of full-time faculty working on contract (such as those at Hampshire College in Massachusetts who work on five-year renewable contracts) and not in tenure or tenure-track positions has also increased. One recent study found that “whilejust 8 percent of full-time faculty members worked off tenure track in 1987,rising to 11 percent in 1992,that by 1998 fully 18 percent of full-time professors were workmg off the tenure track.”6 These changes demonstrate reahgnrnent in academia and raise numerous questions. One question is whether, with senior faculty members retiring in growing numbers and both state and national economies in a slowdown,these open positions will be filled by even more part-timers in the future, further changing the faculty mix, or will be left unfilled and eventually disappear, adding to the glut of unemployed academics. A second question is whether the increased number of part-time faculty and full-time professors working off the

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tenure track will lead to a continuing and increasing erosion of tenure (whether that is an institutional goal or not) and the academic fi-eedomit is intended to secure. Third, as the faculty mix grows to include more part-time faculty, there are questions about the effects on campus life, academic standards, and academic excellence with more professors carrying heavy teaching loads and spending less time on campus. Finally, there are questions about the future of the unionization movement among these faculty and what it can accomplish. The most obvious reason for the increased number of part-time faculty being hired is that they are less expensive and make it easier for an institution to shift program resources because part-timers are easier to hire and to let go. But as Gary Rhoades points out, “The increased use of part-time faculty is ironic given current criticism of full-timers. If many full-time faculty are not in their offices on Fridays, part-timers do not even have offices. If full-time faculty do not spend enough time with their students outside of class and office hours, part-timers may not have defined duties outside of classroom teaching and office hours. If full-time faculty do not care enough about the quality of their teaching, part-timers may not have their teachng evaluated by peers.”’ This comparison of full- and part-time faculty only scratches the surface of the differences in worlung condtions between the two groups. One very clear difference between being hired as a part-time faculty member rather than a full-time professor is job security.Part-time positions are rarely converted to full-time positions, and a part-time faculty member is almost never eligible for a tenure-track position. Part-time faculty members are usually hired course by course and semester by semester, often with no continuity. These professors worry that they can be let go or fired without notice. Obviously,part-timers are not part of the tenured group, and without that job security, they are not only unsure of their future employment semester to semester but also clearly feel threats to their academic fi-eedom.Because they are easy to let go, they cite a chilhng effect on what they teach and include in their curriculum as well as what they say in classes.* Second, part-time faculty members are often teaching heavy course loads compared to full-time faculty members. The teaching load covers a broad range. Some part-timers teach only one class or a couple of courses a year because they have other full-time jobs, yet they enjoy teaching or truly want only part-time work. More commonly, there are those who teach four courses a semester for a total of eight a year and thus are carrying a course load equal to or heavier than full-time faculty. At the other end of the range are those part-time faculty members who teach at multiple institutions in order to increase their income and teach as

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many as six, seven, or eight classes a term, and as heavy a load as 7-7 or even 8-8, for a total of fourteen to sixteen courses per year!9 In addition, part-time faculty often have larger classes and higher enrollments (common in introductory courses) than their full-time colleagues, and thus they have a heavier grading burden and more demands on their time for extra help and office hours. In some cases, part-timers teach the same courses repeatedly, leaving them more susceptible to boredom and burnout. Finally, some part-time faculty teach year round, depriving them of the summer off for research and rejuvenation that most full-time faculty enjoy. Third, salaries for part-time faculty are usually woefully bad, often including no benefits such as health insurance. Their compensation is especially poor in comparison to salaries of full-time faculty members. There is of course a large discrepancy in the pay of part-timers, and it is very likely larger than most in academia are aware. The Modern Language Association (MLA) conducted a survey in 2000, for example, and released their results that December. The response rate was only about 42 percent of the English and foreign language departments in the 5,245 surveyed in the United States and Canada, much lower than the normal response rate of about 90 percent for the MLA’s other surveys. According to the study, noticeably absent are data from prominent English departments at such elite institutions as Harvard,Yale,and Brown Universities and the University of Chicago. Nevertheless, the responses are very revealing, and the lack of response may say volumes about schools that do not wish to divulge what they pay their part-time faculty. Perhaps the most strilung results of the survey were that some “part-timers earn as much as $7,200 per course and get some health insurance benefits. At the other end of the spectrum are institutions such as City University of New York‘s Kingsborough Community College, where part-time faculty members in the English department earn an average of just $450 per course,”1oand where a course requires four months of teachng. The lowest salary in a doctorate-granting English department is the $1,575 per course paid by the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. The study makes clear in general that “more-elite colleges and universities pay better. For instance, Stanford University reported that its 12 part-time instructors in the English department get health benefits, life insurance, and an average of $7,200 per course. At nearby San Jose State University, part-timers in the English department earn $3,500 per course, on average.”” Other interesting examples show that part-time English instructors make about $2,400 per course at St. Joseph’s and Vdlanova Universities in Philadelphia, while the pay is approximately $5,000 per course at the University of Pennsylvania and $6,560 per course at Swarthmore College for English instructors in the same

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geographical area. As another example, the twenty-seven part-timers in Enghsh at Washington’s Georgetown University earn about $4,400 per course, while those at George Washington University earn half of that.12 The average pay for part-time faculty members leaves them teaching what is equivalent to a full load for full-time faculty members at some institutions for only $15,000 to $20,000 per year, or less than half the pay for a beginning a - t i m e assistant professor. This pay cannot be considered a decent living wage. These data have to make all in academia wonder why we view education in general, and higher education especially, as so valuable, but do not do well at rewarding so many of those who do the teaching. With respect to benefits, the U.S. Department of Education study giving data for fall 1999 found that while nearly all institutions of higher education provided benefits for full-time faculty, of the institutions surveyed only 53 percent contributed benefits for part-time faculty mernbers.I3Part-timers often get little or no health insurance coverage, and almost never gain child-care and retirement benefits. This study also showed that part-time faulty were assigned to teach 27 percent of undergraduate courses, and part-timers may actually teach more than this, as courses are sometimes assigned to a full-time faculty member but actually taught by a teaching assistant or other part-timer. A fourth major difference between part-time faculty and full-time faculty concerns the proportion of women in the groups. Although the mix of white and nonwhite faculty members &d not change much between 1987 and 1992, the role of women changed considerably. There was an increase in the proportion of women among full-time faculty members &om 27 percent in 1987 to 36 percent in 1998 according to the US. Department of Education study. In some ways the details show this increase may be deceiving,because “among those full-time professors and instructors worlung at private research universities, the proportion who were female declined between 1992 and 1998-from 31 percent to 26 percent. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty members at two-year colleges who were women climbed from 38 percent in 1987 to nearly 50 percent in 1998.”14The study also shows the percentage of women serving as part-time faculty in fall 1998 consistently ranged from 40 percent to 56 percent at all types of institutions, including research universities, both public and private, liberal arts colleges, and two-year public institutions. One impact of this is that women in higher education are more likely to have heavy teaching loads with lower salaries and benefits and less job security than men in the profession. Moreover, female faculty members who have been worlung part-time for many years are often denied full-time positions when their family or other responsibilities allow them to consider full-time employment.”

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Fifth, most part-time faculty have little or no input in faculty governance and the direction of their colleges and universities, and some even have no offices or telephones of their own. They are hired and let go as they are needed (or not), without much notice, due process, or adequate grievance procedures and with no voice to change the situation. Clearly, part-time faculty members are the least advantaged faculty with respect to job security and academic freedom, teaching loads, salary and benefits, faculty governance, and impartial grievance procedures. The documentation for this is clear and convincing; hence, it is easy to be sympathetic with their concerns. Their stories consistently say they feel exploited and humiliated, and they seek more recognition and acknowledgment for their hard work, as well as better treatment at the workplace. The supply of unemployed academics, even many of those with Ph.D.’s in hand, is increasing, and in this market “the rate for teaching a course in many regions has not risen substantially in twenty years.”16 There is a growing tendency for part-time academics to teach at more than one institution. In general, most full-time faculty members have not tried to counter the trend toward increasing reliance on part-time appointments, despite growing evidence that salaries of full-time faculty at institutions with a large number of part-time faculty members are remaining relatively stagnant. While some hlltime faculty members speak out for and support part-timers, there is a sense that most full-time appointees are concerned about their own salaries and working conditions, whether unionized or not. As a consequence, they are paying little attention to the impact of more part-time m a t e s at their schools and to the quality of education being provided at their institutions, especially for students taking multiple courses from overworked part-timers. Numerous studies have shown that the difficulties that part-time faculty confi-ont can often be attributed to the fact that full-time faculty in academia are primarily concerned with protecting their own professional positions and privileges, not employment equity. Although thousands of part-time faculty members are unionized and the regular faculty unions on their campuses represent many of these, most parttimers are not unionized. Nevertheless, there are signs that more and more part-time faculty are attempting to organize among themselves to improve their pay and benefits and worlung conditions. One approach that has had some success is the move toward organizing across institutions in a particular geographical area. This holds promise for part-timers, because many teach at more than one institution, and geographical proximity makes attendance and rallies reasonably easy. For example, the AAUP was a foundmg member of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), now a national or&-

*’

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zation of part-time faculty, graduate students, and full-time faculty off the tenure track. Groups afiated with COCAL have held numerous meetings, including those in 1996 in association with the MLA meetings in Washington and in 2001 in California, where the primary goal was to bring attention to the plight of this group in academia.*’ Participants have said there is now a sense that a movement is building. A prominent example of the effort to establish organizing for part-time faculty is ongoing in the Boston area, with the assistance of the AAUP.l9 Their goal is to form a regional organization to institute standards that apply at multiple colleges and universities. The efforts focus on wages for part-time faculty members and also on building coalitions to act in the public good by improving the quality of higher education through enhanced working conditions for this sector of the academic labor market. Part-time faculty at Emerson College in Boston, where nearly half of the professors are considered part-time, recently voted overwhelmingly to establish a labor union as part of this AAUP effort.’* Since 1996, the MLA has continued to include panels on the hture of academic labor. Those who support using unionization to help solve the difficulties raised by the plight of part-time academics point to the sheer number of panels devoted to the topic at the 1997 meetings, for example, and argue that “when we consider that no more than 50 percent of the Ph.D.s in Enghh have found employment in the profession in any year since 1976, it becomes clear that it is misleadmg to describe the situation as a job crisis. Rather . . . the job crisis is chronic and systemic.”21 Part-time faculty point out that there is plenty of work, but less and less of it pays a living wage. They legitimately wonder why society continues to value higher education and the need for people to teach undergraduates,but does not fairly compensate those who do the work. Moreover, they are also aware that a large question is lurking: can unions solve the problems in a profession where so many graduate students who actually get their advanced degrees never find an opportunity to become full-time members of the academic community? The enormous problems facing part-time professors associated with lack of job security, heavy teaching loads, poor salaries and benefits, no role in faculty governance or adequate due process grievance procedures, make it clear that part-timers are an exploited group in academia and make it seem that unionization would be an ideal way to improve condtions in valuable ways for this segment of the labor force. In terms of the labor problems they face, parttime faculty look in many ways like the academic group that could find unionization most valuable and could most enjoy what it has brought in terms of benefits in other professions. In addition, focus on collective bargaining on multiple campuses in certain geographical districts seems promising.

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Effective unions could make huge gains for part-time professors, providing pragmatic legitimacy. The unfair treatment, exploitation, and resulting alienation of these workers makes it seem that unions for this group could certainly gain moral legitimacy as well, making the case to them and a broad range of constituencies that providing better salaries and benefits and fair treatment, as well as a sense of community, is clearly the right thing to do for these workers in a society that places such a high value on advanced education. Nevertheless, some part-time faculty resist unionization because they worry that union membership will make them vulnerable to retribution &om administrators and will further jeopardize their chances of gaining full-time faculty positions. Furthermore, there are a number of problems and questions unique to the possibility of unionization for part-time faculty. One difficulty, of course, is that part-time faculty members are ofien a transient group. There is good reason to wonder about the suitability of collective bargaining for employees whose work may be temporary.22 A second question is whether moral pressure can be put on administrators and faculty department chairs to minimize the hiring of part-time faculty whenever possible and to return to the more traditional academic model to increase the faculty focus on tenure-track positions. In other words, can positive changes be made through other means and without unions? Economic forces may work against this, but the sweeping change in the faculty mix may have sufficient impact on the quality of higher education that administrators and others in charge of decision making may be swayed by pressure to change. Third, should unionization be deemed the best way to gain improvements for part-time faculty, there is an additional question about the most appropriate and effective bargaining unit structure for part-time employees. The recent activities through COCAL focus on unionizing part-time employees across multiple colleges and universities. Historically, the unionization attempts of part-time faculty have had a hfferent focus-unions at particular institutions. In 1971 the NLRB had, for the private sector, “determined that the hfferences between Ml- and part-timers were minimal and found in favor of a single unit.”23But by 1973 the NLRB had reversed that stand, holding that “parttime faculty did not share a community of interest with full-time faculty in four [sic] areas-compensation, participation in university governance, and eligibhty for tenure-and, therefore, belonged in a separate unit.”24 In a similar debate in the public sector, the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission decided in 1976 that part-timers would be excluded fiom fulltime collective bargaining units if they did not teach at least one course in three consecutive semesters, while in California in 1977 the employment rela-

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tions board ruled that part-timers should be included in full-time bargaining units when they have taught classes for three of the precedmg six semesters. In 1982, the NLRB decided part-time faculty could determine their own collective bargaining units at the University of San Francisco, despite arguments by the university that these temporary employees should not be covered by the NLRA at all.25 There are other examples: in 1995 and 1998 public sector parttime faculty have been allowed to form their own bargaining units in Ilhnois and later in Alaska, where a superior court judge affirmed the state labor relations board’s decision.26 Part-time faculty have established unions at such schools as Columbia College and Roosevelt University, both in Chicago. More recently the New Hamps h e Supreme Court unanimously ruled, contrary to the University System in New Hampshire, that adjunct professors at Keene State are not temporary employees and thus have the right to form a uni0n.2~New York University’s (NYU’s) 4,000 adjunct professors had the options in 2002 to unionize with the United Auto Workers (UAW), which now represents NYU graduate students and touts its relationship with the NYU adrmnistration,or the American Federation of Teachers (AFT),which “represents more than 10,000 part-timers in the New York area, including members of the faculty union at the City University of New York,”28or to have no union representation at all.29The UAW won 52 percent of nearly 1,600 votes, now representing adjuncts at NYU for the first time.30 All three of the national unions, the AAm,the AFT, and the NEA support organizing and collective bargaining for part-time faculty. The AAUP decries the subordmate treatment of part-time faculty and recommends that institutions limit their reliance on nontenure-track and part-time faculty. It also supports better treatment for this group, including regular evaluations, eligibility for promotions, fringe benefits, advance notice for lack of reappointment, a role in institutional governance, to name a few.31 The AFT also refers to the abuse and exploitation of part-time faculty and even suggests that “the heavy dependence upon part-time faculty . . . is becoming more and more obviously a form of adrmnistrative resistance to faculty unionism. . . . Part-time faculty must be protected by the same regulations and granted the same rewards and cllgnity as those enjoyed by their full-time colleague~.”~~ In addtion to advocating for enhanced worlung conditions for part-timers, better pay, benefits, due process in hiring, evaluation, and layoffs, the AFT report on part-time faculty focuses on organizing part-time faculty and including them in the same bargaining unit with full-time faculty.33 Finally, the NEA recognizes the excessive use of part-time faculty as well. It recommends equitable salary and benefits for them, prorated according to workload, and says, “The Association deplores the practice of

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employing part-time education employees for the primary purpose of reducing instructional budgets or for the purpose of reducing the number of full-time education position^."^^ Clearly all three national faculty union organizations defend as one of their goals the reduced reliance on part-time faculty and enhanced working conditions and benefits for part-timers in higher education. Nevertheless,in his study of 183 college and university union contracts, Rhoades has found that although approximately two-thirds of those contracts cover or include provisions for some part-time faculty, their faculty rights and duties are not at all guaranteed.35 Despite claims by unions that they want to protect part-time faculty’s procedural rights, Rhoades found they had done little to enhance working condltions for part-time faculty. He found a striking absence of provisions about process and personnel actions surrounding hiring and firing for part-timers in nearly 80 percent of the 183 contracts. The result is that admmistrators are left broad dlscretion to use part-time faculty extensively. Rhoades found this surprising, but if hll-time faculty members really are most interested in preserving their own positions and privileges, it is hardly unexpected that union leaders may be unable to persuade them to include more protections for part-time colleagues. In addition to finding that contract references to part-time faculty dld not include much reference to their professional rights, Rhoades also commonly found provisions that consistently elaborated on the priority of full-time faculty over part-timers for layoffs. A few contracts spoke about ratios of full- and part-time faculty in cases of retrenchment, but these were the exception. He noted the absence of basic employment perquisites for part-time faculty, such as due process, insurance, sick leaves, and retraining, and found almost nothing on their worhng conhtions and no mention of leaves and benefits for parttimers. Eight of the contracts explicitly denied such rights and benefits. Rhoades discovered that rather than exerting any control over the hiring and firing and working conhtions for part-time faculty, union contracts only addressed the numbers and use of part-timers, often to their disbenefit in comparison with full-time faculty. He found only one collective workforce provision protecting the rights of part-timers: “The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s contract provides for the increased job security of various grades of part-time faculty, ensuring longer contracts for larger numbers of part-time faculty.”36 Moreover, the few contracts noting duties for part-time faculty required evaluations and office hours. Past teaching experience was mentioned, often negatively, in only one-third of the contracts that even referred to part-time fac-

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ulty. Alongside this, Rhoades found that contracts included phrases and clauses giving adrmnistrators and managers extensive flexibility and discretion in dealing with part-time faculty. Rhoades concluded fiom his analysis of 183 faculty union contracts that these documents do not often protect, but actually hrther marginahze, parttime faculty. In part this occurs through the increased gap between hll- and part-time faculty in terms of rights and privileges and through prioritization of a-timers, and in part it is due to the extensive flexibhty granted to administrators in their deahngs with part-time faculty. In addtion, given the high number of part-time faculty who are women, the contracts expose and further aggravate the gender gap in salaries, worlung conhtions, and benefits. Rhoades concludes that while the professional strategy of unionized faculty appears to be to contain the use of part-time faculty, the strategy backfires because the contracts ultimately encourage more use of part-time faculty members rather than less. Consequently,the national unions may claim to be advocating for part-time faculty, but the contracts do not show that they have made much progress. Rhoades’ study is a sobering reminder that joining a regular union may not enhance academic life for part-time faculty members. An obvious conclusion, then, is that part-time and adjunct faculty wdl do best to form unions on their own or in regional groups joining part-timers from campuses in close proximity to one another. Still, it is unclear whether unionization can truly succeed for part-time faculty who are temporary. For those part-time employees who have long-term appointments, it may be that unionizing is the best way to enhance their professional status and working conditions. It is obvious that this group in higher education is the most replaceable and dispensable, and they are consistently treated that way. As in industry, it is degrading and damaging to one’s self-esteem to be treated as expendable. Thus, part-time faculty members are the ones in academia who most need unions to protect them. Unions and collective bargaining for this exploited labor force have the potential to gain both pragmatic and moral legitimacy. For those who support the value of strong undergraduate education, there is likely to be widespread agreement on the social value and need for these faculty to have better wages and benefits, more job security and better working conditions, additional respect for their hard work, and an increased role in the direction of education at their institutions. Moreover, it can be argued that enhanced working conditions for part-time faculty will serve the public good and the quality of higher education in general. In the private sector, where few institutions have the ability to unionize, part-time faculty have few options and may only be able to use collective

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bargaining where they can form a separate bargaining unit as has happened at NYU or where they work through a multicampus group as is ongoing in Boston. In the public sector the part-time faculty have more options. They may join multicampus organizations, or as recent cases in Illinois and Alaska demonstrate, they may also form their own unions for part-time employees, or they may be represented by full-time faculty unions on their campuses. Some might argue that it is still an open question whether one option is wisest, and the decision probably depends on the factors at play and the administrative structure on any given campus. Nevertheless, the studes reviewed here suggest unions for part-timers on their own or in regional groups will be more successful than including part-timers in the bargaining unit with their fU-time colleagues. In sum, the increasing use of part-time faculty w d clearly continue to provide challenges at all institutions of higher education. The challenges include questions about the state of campus life with more faculty members unable to spend much time on campus, questions about whether academic standards are lowered with harried part-timers teachmg heavy loads and large classes, and questions about student-faculty relations and the educational options available to undergraduates with fewer full-time faculty members. NOTES 1. Matthew M. Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues in Higher Education during the Past Decade and What to Look for Now: The Perspective of an Academician,”Journal o f L a w and Education 29, no. 3 @ly 2000): 327. 2. Robin Wilson, “Proportion of Part-Time Faculty Members Leveled Off &om 1992 to 1998,Data Show,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, May 4,2001,A14. The report is online at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001152.pdf [accessed October 19, 2002l.Yet Richard Moser puts the number at approximately 60 percent, in “The AAUP Organizes Part-Time Faculty,” Academe 86, no. 6 (November-December 2000): 36. 3. Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1998),135-36. 4. According to recent data h m an AAUP source, during 2001 Northeastern University had 1,547 part-time professors with only 735 full-time professors, and Boston College had 779 part-timers with only 577 full-timers. The data from this study appears in David Abel, “Part-Time Professors OK Union,” The Boston Globe, April 18, 2001, Al, A5, at A5. 5. Piper Fogg, “Colleges Have Cut Proportion of Full-Time Faculty Members, Study Finds,” The Chronicle OfHigher Education, November 2, 2001, A17. Part of the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty conducted by the National Center for

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Education Statistics in a survey of 960 institutions, it can be found at http://nces. ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001201[accessed October 19,20021. 6. Wilson, “Proportion of Part-Time Faculty Members Leveled Off from 1992 to 1998,” A14. The study showed, in addition, that the number of full-time faculty working as full, associate, or assistant professors at four-year institutions, rather than instructors or lecturers, dropped to 84 percent in 1998, down from 87 percent in 1992 and 89 percent in 1987. 7. Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 132. 8. See the personal stories, for example, in Alison Schneider, “To Many Adjunct Professors, Academic Freedom Is a Myth: As the Ranks of Part-Timers Swell, They Lament How Easily Colleges Can Dump Them,” T h e Chronicle ofHigher Education, December 10,1999, A18. 9. Courtney Leatherman, “Part-Time Faculty Members Try to Organize Nationally,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, January 26,2001, A12. 10. Scott Smallwood, “MLA Survey Reveals Wide Discrepancy in Part-Time Faculty Members’ Earnings,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, January 5,2001, A15. The results of the survey are online at the MLA website www.mla.org [accessed October 19,20021. 11. Smallwood, “MLA Survey Reveals Wide Discrepancy in Part-Time Faculty Members’ Earnings,” A15. 12. Smallwood, “MLA Survey Reveals Wide Discrepancy in Part-Time Faculty Members’ Earnings,” A15. 13. Fogg, “Colleges Have Cut Proportion of Full-Time Faculty Members,” A17. 14. Wilson, “Proportion of Part-Time Faculty Members Leveled Off from 1992 to 1998,” A14. 15. Karen Thompson, “Piecework to Parity: Part-Timers in Action,” Thought and Action 8 (January 1992): 53-60. 16. Stanley Aronowitz, “Are Unions Good for Professors?”Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 16. 17. See, for example, George E. Biles and Howard Tuckman, Part-Time Faculty Personnel Management Policies (London: Collier/Macmillan, 1986);David W. Leslie, Samuel E. Kellams, and G. M. Gunne, Part-Time Faculty in American Higher Education (New York Praeger, 1982); Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 133,168. 18. Courtney Leatherman, “Part-Time Faculty Members Try to Organize Nationally,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, January 26,2001, A12. 19. Moser, “The AAUP Organizes Part-Time Faculty,” 34-37. 20. David Abel, “Part-Time Professors OK Union,” The Boston Globe, April 18, 2001, Al, A5. 21. Patrick Kavanaugh and Richard E. Miller, “After Yale: The MLA Considers the Future of Academic Labor,” Academe 84,no. 6 (1998): 50-51, at 50. 22. Bodah, “Si@cant Labor and Employment Law Issues,” 327. 23. Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues,” 327, referring to Long Island University (Brooklyn Center), 198 NLRB 909 (1971).

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24. Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues,’’ 327, citing New York University, 205 NLRB 4 (1973).Much of the information in the rest of this paragraph is drawn from Bodah’s essay. 25. 265 NLRB 1221 (1982), cited in Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues,’’ 328. 26. Julianne Basinger, “State Judge Clears Way of Alaska Adjuncts to Bargain,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, January 23, 1998, A14. 27. Piper Fogg, “Court Mows Union at Keene State,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, May 3,2002, A12. 28. Scott Smallwood,“Adjuncts at NYU May Form Union,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, May 3,2002, A12. 29. Scott Smallwood,“2 Unions Fight to Represent 4,000 Adjuncts at NYU,” The Chronicle ofHigker Education, June 7,2002, A14. 30. Scott Smallwood,“UAW Will Represent Part-Time Faculty Members at New York U.,” The Chronicle ofHigker Education, July 19,2002, A10. 31. Committee G, “Report: On the Status of Non-tenure Track Faculty,” Academe 81, no. 3 (1992):39-48. See also www.aaup.org [accessed October 19,20021. 32. Perry Robinson, “Part-Time Faculty Issues” (Washington,D.C.: American Federation of Teachers, 1994), quoted in Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 139. 33. See also Scott Smallwood, “Faculty Union Issues Standards for Treatment of Adjuncts,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, August 2, 2002, A12. 34. N E A , Resolutions, hgislative Program, and New Business 1994-1995 (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1994), 80, quoted in Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 139. 35. Rhoades, Managed Professionals, 131-71. The following paragraphs summarize his findings. 36. Rhoades, Managed Pr$essionals, 154-55.

SIX

GRADUATESTUDENTU N I O N S

T

he most active unionization movement in academia in the late 1990s and early 2000s has been among graduate students. The issues surrounding this movement are intertwined with those of part-time faculty, because many graduate teaching assistants (TAs) teach part-time. But they are enrolled as students as well; hence, their situation is unique in many ways and deserves separate treatment. Graduate student collective bargaining has existed for many years at large public institutions, and these provide important historical examples. For example, graduate students unionized at the University of Wisconsin in 1969-1970 and at the University of Michigan in 1975.' But the movement has accelerated in the last decade, and membership in graduate student unions tripled in the 1990s to include almost forty thousand teaching and research assistants. The following unionization cases show the impact of organizing pressure and strikes. They also highlight the varied rulings about whether graduate TAs are primarily students or employees entitled to bargain collectively. One instructive case arose in 1990 when graduate student assistants at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst voted to unionize with backing from the United Auto Workers (UAW), and used direct pressure to bring the university to accept collective bargaining despite a 1979 r d n g that students were not employees under the Massachusetts labor relations act. There were other 89

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large graduate student organizing victories during that decade at such institutions as the University of Iowa and the University of Kansas. In Cahfornia the movement began in 1983 with graduate students organizing at Berkeley. In 1987 the Cahfornia public relations board ruled that graduate students were covered by the state’s higher education bargaining act, as were the Berkeley students m a t e d with the UAW. The state board reversed itselfin 1989, ruling that students were not employees under the state act, and the state appeals court upheld that decision.2Yet the Berkeley students also applied direct pressure, staging a strike in 1992, and the university did agree at that time to bargain with an association of some of the tutors and instructors, though not all graduate students. This and other events led to a systemwide strike in 1998. “Ten days later, the California public employment relations board determined that a unit of graduate TAs, special readers, tutors, and other employees was appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining3 On March 22, 1999, graduate TAs at UCLA voted for union representation, and the university, reversing its earlier position, agreed to bargain.”4 The graduate students at UCLA are also represented by the UAW. Other University of California campuses held union elections throughout the year. The widely reported and discussed situation at Yale is also instructive,particularly as the longest organizing effort at a private university. The graduate students at Yale began organizing in the early 1990s through the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO).Yale TAs withheld grades at the end of the fall 1995 semester to protest the university’s unwillingness to bargain with their group. Many of these students reported receiving what they viewed as threatening comments fi-om faculty and administrators, and they eventually turned in their grades. With the support of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) general counsel, the union filed charges of unfair labor practices against Yale. The main complaints were that Yale had unlawfully threatened retaliation against union members for lawful activities. Nevertheless, an administrative law judge dismissed the charges on the grounds that the grade strike was unprotected and thus comments of Yale officials did not violate the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB upheld this administrative law judge’s r h g on the grade strike in November 1999. However, the board agreed with the general counsel that even if the grade strike was unprotected, some comments fi-om faculty and administrators at Yale may have constituted unfair labor practice, and further hearings on that portion of the case continued. Meanwhile Yale University is still fighting the graduate student unionization.

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Moreover, in 2001 Yale raised graduate student stipends by 20 percent. These stipends are guaranteed for five years and are given in addition to four years of tuition and health insurance. Administrators at Yale claim that they are attempting to remain competitive with other institutions of higher learning in attracting the best graduate students and continuing to improve the experiences of their students. Leaders of the GESO believe, to the contrary, that the increased stipends are motivated by a desire to mollify those who support the graduate student union movement. If they are correct, they believe their organizational efforts are working5 A review of even more recent cases wdl help identify the main issues at stake in unionization for TAs. One of these cases is the graduate student success in 2000 in reaching an agreement with administrators at the University of Washington to begin collective bargaining between the union and the university by threatening to strike. The agreement makes clear that the university will recognize the union, which is affiliated with the UAW, and as they confer on an eventual contract, “the university and the union wdl together lobby the Legislature to authorize collective bargaining by the university’s 1,650 graduate teaching assistants . . .the authorization would determine who is in the bargaining unit, define what issues are subject to negotiation, and provide mechanisms to resolve dsputes short of a strike.”6 Interestingly, this description of the union and the university coming to an agreement and then jointly lobbying the legislature appears to be an example of the groups beginning to work together rather than as adversaries and leads to the farmliar question whether the unionization movement among graduate students promotes cooperation more generally or increases adversity on campus. Most notably, the NLRB ruled in November 2000, in a case involving New York University (NYU), that TAs at private colleges and universities have the right to unionize, malung it possible for those graduate students to follow TA unions that have been recognized by public universities.’ Private institutions, where the Yeshiva decision still largely eliminates unionization for faculty, have been fighting unionization by TAs, arguing they are primarily students, not employees. T l s NLRB opinion is a broad one, stipulating that graduate students are employees and thus eligible to seek collective bargaining rights. The unanimous ruling affects graduate students at NYU who are also organizing as an affiliate with the UAW. NYU officials originally predicted powerfid and &re consequences for higher education, arguing that decision making at colleges and universities is not a process at all analogous to collective bargaining. Supportive administrators at Yale urged NYU to fight the decision in federal court.

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The NLRB decision concerning NYU supported the graduate students in two main sets of arguments.* First, in relying on an earlier decision involving medical residents and interns at Boston Medical Center, the NLRB rejected all the university arguments that graduate student TAs are students. The board ruled there was ample evidence that graduate students are compensated for their teaching and not merely receiving financial aid; hence, they plainly fall within the meaning of “employee” and thus have hndamental statutory rights to organize. Moreover, the board rejected the university argument that student work is largely educational, acknowledging that even if TAs do gain educational benefit from their teaching and research, their work is not generally a requirement for gaining an advanced degree, nor is it part of the graduate student curriculum in most departments. Thus graduate student TAs are still employees entitled to bargain. Second, NYU had claimed that allowing graduate students to unionize and negotiate through collective bargaining would damage academic freedom. Yet the NLRB said the university’s worries about infi-ingement on academic freedom merely grew out of speculation that a graduate student union would bring academic and curricular matters to the bargaining table. The board cited, moreover, nearly thirty years of experience with bargaining with faculty unions, urging that history gave it confidence that the negotiating parties could confi-ont issues of academic freedom along with any other issues up for negotiation. Officials at NYU were &stressed at the decision, concerned that the ruling failed to take seriously that it opened the door for collective bargaining to be used, rather than student and faculty consultation, to decide what courses are taught, how they are taught, and who teaches what courses. One UAW official helping the graduate students organize called such arguments by the university “absurd.”’ The immediate rhetoric, at least, was divisive rather than harmonious. Instead of going to federal court and rehsing to negotiate with the union, however, the NYU administration agreed to begin collective bargaining with the new graduate student union. NYU officials say they were willing to bargain only after the union agreed that it would not negotiate over “academic issues.” This meant that questions about degree requirements, admission criteria, teaching methods, or course content were to be excluded from the bargaining. However issues about higher stipends, better health benefits, assistance with the high cost of housing in New York City, clear job descriptions, a grievance procedure, and a voice in university governance were all allowed as part of the collective bargaining. Interestingly, “many public universities with TA unions are subject to laws that limit bargaining on academic matters. In contrast the federal law governing the

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NYU negotiations has no such limits."" Nevertheless, the graduate student union at NYU agreed to the restriction. Others believe that despite their public comments, the administration at NYU was pressured into agreeing to collective bargaining due to support for the union and increasing anti-NYU feelings. The undergraduates there had signed pro-union petitions, and of the 300 faculty members who responded to an e-mail survey by the Faculty Council, 270 urged the university to bargain." The faculty apparently were uncomfortable with the administration brealung the law by refbsing to bargain, but the vote also reflects their pro-union feelings. As of January 2002, NYU and the union representing its TAs reached a contract agreement, the first ever at a private university.The graduate assistants are guaranteed in a four-year contract (1)a minimum stipend of $15,000, with a 3.5 percent annual raise for those students already receiving the minimum, where the average across campus had previously been about $12,500, and (2) 100 percent of their health insurance costs, while students previously received partial or no health insurance, but usually less than half of the cost.I2 Parties on both sides appear relieved that the students formed a union, that they gained the administration's agreement to negotiate, and that both sides agreed on a contract without a strike. The NLRB decision in the NYU case, leadmg up to the contract between the university and the graduate student union, clearly set a precedent and may make it difficult for that regional board to reverse itself and for other boards not to follow the ruling. But a change in board membership with new appointees by President Bush could certainly affect hture decisions. The NYU ruling has had ramifications for other institutions and has led the way for increased graduate student union activities at both private and public universities. TAs at Temple University and Michigan State University have voted to unionize. The Temple graduate students won a victory over the university when the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board agreed that TAs are employees and that granting collective bargaining rights to graduate students does not undermine the educational mission of the university. Echoing the NLRB arguments in the NYU case, the Pennsylvania board found no evidence that collective bargaining by graduate students infiinged on academic fieedom.13 Temple University officials initially filed legal challenges against the decision. In response, Temple graduate assistants, 95 percent of whom voted to unionize (the actual vote was 290-16),14 mounted a public relations campaign with the help of Philadelphia ministers, rabbis, and city officials. Ultimately, Temple University, with approval ti-om its board of trustees, agreed later in 2001 to negotiate a contract with the TAs' union, which is

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affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The university’s president, David Adaman, denied that the decision was merely a face-saving move and suggested the Temple agreement will provide a model for other institutions. The AFT felt the agreement was particularly good news for graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania State University, both governed by the same labor relations board as T e m ~ 1 e . l ~ What is unique about the Temple contract is that it is even more specific than the agreement reached at N Y U in stipulating the guidelines that define the scope of the negotiations. The NYU case made it clear that threats to academic freedom, particularly whether curricular and academic decisions would be part of the collective bargaining, was the most divisive issue between the university and the union, and the contract was reached after the union agreed not to negotiate over academic matters. Both sides at Temple seem to have learned well from that case, and the administration believes it has taken a new step forward in speci@ing the boundaries of negotiations. The Temple graduate student union agreed that curricular decisions, degree requirements, and the number of graduate teaching assistantships will not be part of the collective bargaining process, whereas wages, benefits, hours, and workload will be negotiated. It appears that this concession may have swayed the trustees at Temple to approve the recognition of the union. In any case, the agreement “tries to draw a line between TAs’ roles as students and employees.”16 During this same time frame, inspired by events at NYU, graduate students at Brown, Columbia, and Tufts Universities filed petitions to be recognized. Subsequently, the regional directors of the NLRB in each of their areas have ruled that the Brown, Columbia, and Tufts TAs have the right to form unions, relying on the two major arguments from the NLFU3 case involving graduate assistants at NYU. The regional ruling in favor of graduate students at Brown clearly echoes earlier rulings, rejecting the university arguments that TAs are primarily students. Brown University argued that the N Y U case was distinguishable from Brown’s because N Y U students were not required to teach as part of their academic programs. Brown argued that their own TAs were primarily students because their work is required by their degree programs as part of the educational process, their work is basically academic in nature, and their pay is financial aid, not compensation for work. The regional NLRB argued to the contrary that graduate students are employees, sometimes performing the same work performed by faculty memb e r ~Brown . ~ ~ administrators seem intent on preventing unionization on their campus, and as of 2002 had appealed their decision to the full board in Washington, D.C. Graduate students at Brown have been organizing with the UAW,

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and, like students at Temple, they seem focused on pay, benefits, and workload, noting in particular that Brown bars them from other outside employment. They acknowledge that most graduate students are enrolled in departments that require teaching, but say most assistants teach more than required because they need the additional source of fundmg. Although most graduate student unions have had resoundmg success, there have been some setbacks for pro-union graduate students. Unions have repeatedly lost in elections at the University of Minnesota, for example. In 2001 an Illinois labor board “dealt a serious setback to unionization efforts among graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by issuing guidelines that would exclude all teaching and research assistants from the proposed union” leaving only those graduate students who work outside their discipline eligible for mernbership.l8 Later, graduate TAs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign held a strike to protest their administration’s refusal to recognize their union. With the university supporting a total of 5,200 graduate students, over 10,000 undergraduates had at least one of their classes canceled.” Ultimately, however, early in 2002, university administrators agreed to meet with the AFT-affiliated union leaders there, and the groups are negotiating who will be part of the bargaining unit. Note that while the numbers are few, some graduate students oppose unionization. These antiunion students worry that collective bargaining is too confrontational, they object to union dues, they fear union elections have excluded too many students, and they believe “unionization proponents haven’t worked with the existing student organizations.”20These antiunion graduate students appear to be those most gratified to be in school at top universities, often private institutions where the teaching load is lower than at public universities. They are usually in science or other nonhumanities fields where stipends are higher and there are better job prospects. Some are from foreign countries and view unions as protecting American students, presumably because of the UAW’s history of strongly opposing visas for skilled foreign workers. Some of these antiunion graduate students note that threats of unionization appear to have prodded several universities to increase stipends and benefits, and they are happy to keep that leverage without paying dues.Yet this latter argument is unpersuasive, since the leverage will only last as long as their graduate student peers continue to exert pressure in favor of unionization. Overall, however, the movement toward graduate student unions is continuing and gaining momentum. For example, the regional NLRB &rector has recently ruled that some graduate students at State University of New York at Albany can unionize, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor settled on a three-year contract with the graduate student union there, also affiliated with

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the AFT, in order to avert a strike after the previous contract expired.’l Graduate student union campaigns are also underway at the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Maryland at College Park. Another highly publicized case is ongoing at Columbia University, where the regional NLRB that had approved the NYU union also ruled in February 2002 that Columbia TAs, includmg some undergraduates, can unionize. The arguments in the NLRB decision follow those in the NYU and Brown cases, but the situation at Columbia is more complex because of the involvement of undergraduates and because of disagreements about who should be part of the bargaining unit. The union, aflated with the UAW, had proposed that the bargaining unit include TAs and other instructors on the Morningside Heights campus only. The Columbia administration continues to insist graduate assistants are students, not employees, and thus not eligible to bargain, but has nevertheless argued that any unit should include a l l graduate students at every campus. The regional NLRB ruling supported neither, expanding the union proposal to include teaching and research assistants at the Health Sciences Campus as well as undergraduate TAs, but excluding TAs at the school of International and Public Affairs, the law school, and some at the & school, on the grounds that they hold temporary, finite appointments and are thus not eligible to unionize.” This meant that the March 2002 vote was also complicated by the fact that only some TAs were able to cast votes on unionization. Tufts University graduate students won the right to unionize in April 2002 when the NLRB ruled that graduate TAs are legally employees with a right to collective bargaining, against the university’s stand that they are students receiving financial aid rather than compensation for their work at Tufts. If students vote for the union, a i a t e d with the UAW, it will be the first graduate student union at a private university in Massachusetts. As in the r d n g granting graduate students at Brown the right to unionize, the director of the Boston office of the NLRB noted that students often perform work that is the same as that done by faculty.23The Tufts TAs say their main concerns are larger stipends, better health care and tuition packages, and job security. In reply, the administration continues to insist that their graduate TAs are students who are teaching as part of their educational process. The votes at both Columbia and Tufts remain sealed while the legal battles continue. It is worth noting that the membership of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has endorsed a graduate student bill of rights “which sets standards for recognizing students’ rights to academic freedom, intellectual property, and a role in institutional governance. The statement . . .

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[also says] . . . that graduate students who teach should have the right to bargain c~llectively.~~ AAUP leaders believe their association must support graduate students and part-timers to truly represent the profession. They hope to convince others that collective bargaining need not conflict with academic principles. This brief survey of cases from 2000 to 2002 gives data to help understand the issues of greatest concern to graduate students and whether there is a pattern emerging in the movement by graduate TAs to unionize. With respect to the issues graduate students want addressed there is simdarity throughout the cases. The most prominent concerns are fighting for increased stipends, wages, and benefits such as health insurance and sometimes child care, to provide these students an amount that they can live on in the cities where they are studying and teaching. Graduate students also seem to be seelung more uniformity in stipends in place of the more traditional variabhty across departments. There is also a less urgent but reasonably consistent concern with negotiations about workload and job security. The contract at NYU and the agreement at Temple make it clear that students and their unions are generally w d ing to accept a separation between salary and academic matters, to the extent that is possible, agreeing that only economic matters, and not academic issues, are subject to collective bargaining. With respect to patterns in this unionization movement, the results are more mixed. Events at the University of Washington and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign show that a strike or threat of a strike can force administrators to recognize TA unions and reach agreements with them, as had happened earlier at UMass-Amherst and at Berkeley and other Cahfornia schools, where direct pressure or strikes led to union contracts. Given that unions for graduate students at public universities have been around for some time, the tendency of university officials to negotiate and the pattern of increasing unionization among graduate TAs at those schools is likely to continue. The recognition of graduate student unions and subsequent contracts at NYU and Temple are recent and historic, especially for graduate students at private institutions. Many believe these cases have galvanized TAs elsewhere and changed the nature of graduate student education. What is yet unclear, however, is whether recognition of unions, negotiations, and contracts will follow at other private and even more elite universities. The issue is obviously contentious. Administrators at Yale, Brown, Columbia, and Tufts continue to fight this unionization movement. Clearly, the arguments for and against graduate student unions include as foundational the two main sets of arguments

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addressed in the various NLRB cases: namely, whether TAs are students or employees and whether their unionization will compromise academic fkeedom. But the full range of arguments is also more detailed and more subtle; it goes beyond the debate outlined in the cases discussed in the preceding. What, then, are the most successful aspects of graduate student unions and the most common arguments in favor of them, and how do these compare to administrative arguments against unionization for TAs? Note first that one’s perspective on graduate student unions will certainly be influenced by one’s view of academic institutions. Many administrators and faculty members think of graduate student TAs as apprentices serving under their masters or mentors. This “guild” model of employment is at odds with academic unionization, as unions interfere with this model of personal training on the job. For those who see academic institutions becoming more corporate, however, the idea of graduate students who teach many of the institution’s courses forming a union does not appear so alien. Clearly, faculty views on unionization among TAs &ffer as well, as NYU faculty generally supported the graduate student union there, while the negative and sometimes threatening comments made to pro-union students by faculty at Yale made clear that many professors there oppose that graduate student union. There are a number of arguments in support of unionization for graduate students, and some are extremely compelling. One consideration that appears to support the graduate students currently seeking to unionize is a historical one. A number of TA unions have existed for many years at highly regarded institutions such as the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which was the first union established in 1969. There appear to be no major disasters that have arisen because of these unions, and these eminent universities continue to renegotiate contracts with the students successfully, focusing on stipends and benefits. Moreover, the longevity of graduate student unions at these schools indicate that unions and administrators have been able adequately to limit collective bargaining negotiations to economic issues concerning stipends, health insurance, child care, and so on. Thus, these cases appear to demonstrate that economic and academic issues on campus can indeed be separated. Interestingly, critics of unions for graduate students have been accused of snobbery and elitism for seeming to take the attitude that such unions may be fine at two-year and community colleges, but not at Ivy League schools. Yet the endurance of such unions at fine research universities such as Michigan, and later at Berkeley, UCLA, and elsewhere, does not support such a distinction.

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Another consideration is legal. When state laws and the NLRB rulings support students in granting them the right to organize and bargain collectively, then students do have the legal right to choose to unionize. Faculty and adrmnistrators often disagree with those rulings, but recent decisions make it clear that students have the law on their side now more than ever. This may be one reason that graduate students have gained external support. Both United States senators &om New York, Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, urged the Columbia University administration to remain neutral in the debate prior to the TA union vote there. To the contrary, the administration wrote e-mails and letters to students urging them to vote against unionization. There are also a number of economic arguments that support the prounion students. One is the economic downturn and its implications for hgher education. There is more uncertainty in the job market, especially for students who wish to pursue academic careers, and particularly for those in the humanities. Thus many graduate students stay in school longer and see themselves in a situation with a poor employment hture. In this environment it is difficult for graduate students to see their work as an apprenticeship. It is also difficult for them to feel comfortable going into debt while working on their degrees, for fear that they will not be guaranteed work in the profession that w d pay well enough to allow them to repay their loans. In addition, the economy has made it increasingly more expensive for students to live, especially in cities such as New York and Boston. These factors combine to explain the urgency with which graduate students look at their stipends for their duties as research and teaching assistants. Labor activism is also rising among graduate students because of their teaching loads. As dscussed in the case at Brown, some students take on more teaching responsibilities than required by their degree programs because they feel they need the income and have no other employment options. Often graduate students carry a teaching load of courses equivalent to that of hlltime faculty members. In addition, researchers such as Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor-education research at Cornell University, argue that graduate education has changed, and current graduate students are conh-onted with a situation where their hours are longer, their work is harder, and the rewards are fewer.25This is particularly true at large universities, which graduate students often feel are run more like corporations than academic institutions. TAs today work in more higher level courses than was customary in the past; some teach large lecture courses and supervise other TAs, and some carry teaching and grading loads that are so heavy they sometimes do not complete

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their own course work on time and take grades of Incomplete. A heavy teaching load and bleak job market combine to paint a gloomy picture for graduate students. The increased teaching load also supports the view that students are employees, not just students getting financial aid, and thus they should be allowed to bargain collectively. Furthermore, graduate students view themselves as experiencing common difficulties, making collective action appear to be a reasonable means of action. It could be said that if students carry such heavy teaching loads that it interferes with their stuhes, then this merely demonstrates poor planning and poor judgment on the part of the students themselves. But this does not take the economic worries of graduate TAs seriously. Moreover, faculty all know that the undergraduate papers and exams have to be graded, whereas a graduate paper or dissertation chapter due later is easy to postpone. In addition, there is the concern that faculty members have not been supportive enough of students and that students have less of a relationship with their professors today than in the past. O n this view, faculty should be speaking up to protect students and mentoring them more as students and teachers. To the contrary, when they are silent, faculty are condoning the heavy, and some would say exploitative, teaching loads given to graduate students, perhaps because the faculty members are happy with lower teaching loads and more time for their research.26 This argument can be pushed further, saying that unions for graduate students not only allow them to negotiate their workloads and protect their rights but can help make professors and institutions more accountable for better support and advising for graduate students. A practical argument in favor of graduate student unions is that they do accomplish real benefits for students. Student stipends and benefits have risen through unionization, and thus these unions have pragmatic legitimacy. NYU students are now guaranteed by contract far higher stipends than they previously earned, they have full health insurance, and Michigan students now get excellent child-care benefits. Students would say it is difficult to argue with success. Presumably administrators recognize this, as stipends at Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia Universities, as well as the University of Pennsylvania, have been raised. While the official reason given is to attract the best students, it is likely that the motivation is also in part that officials at these schools hope to forestall unionization among their students. In that case, it is a wise administrative move, given their opposition to unions. Columbia, for example, publicly opposes unionization by graduate students. Administrators there have not only increased graduate student stipends but also have enhanced housing services, enhanced career

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counseling, and provided a graduate student lounge. The message to their graduate students is that they are valued and do not need union representation. Note, however, that this treatment of graduate students is rare and may be impossible at a financially strapped public university. Indeed it demonstrates that graduate student unions elsewhere, and the threat of unionization, can bring about tangible benefits for students at institutions without unions. In addition to the real financial benefits graduate student unions can bring, others argue that unions give students psychological benefits because they feel more empowered. Morale on campus is enhanced. To take the argument one step further, one can say that students who feel they can affect their working environment have a greater incentive to contribute, and thus perform better, as students and teachers. When students feel both they and their work are valued, they want to do well, and this can lead them to improve their teaching of undergraduates. Finally, pro-union students believe that in addtion to arguments that unions allow them to protect their rights, there are consequentialist moral arguments in favor of graduate student unions. They believe unions provide multiple benefits, and in particular, they help put the value back into teaching. They argue that the art of teaching, with both its physical and mental demands, is genuinely labor, and that unionizing demonstrates their commitment to education, to their fields, and to their work. They believe unions can improve teaching conditions and thus improve undergraduate education, and can improve a department’s ability to attract the best graduate students to its program. Graduate students argue that “when unions help teaching assistants win better wages and worlung condtions, the mission of the university is ultimately served: Students don’t have to work extra jobs that take time away from their teaching and scholarly work, and students from a wider range of economic backgrounds can afford to pursue graduate education. Unions also fight for better training, smaller classes, and other improvements in undergraduate education. Indeed, we have found that faculty members who attended unionized graduate schools themselves generally support unions for teaching assistant^."^^ These students believe that through unionizing they can raise educational standards. In sum, according to this argument, unionization of graduate student TAs has the consequence of enhancing the educational mission of the institution as a whole. To summarize, there are arguments in favor of graduate student unions that are historical, legal, and economic. Other arguments are more pragmatic, based on the overly heavy teaching loads carried by students, the lack of faculty support, both the real financial and worlung condition benefits, as well as the psychological benefits unions bring. The most basic arguments are moral,

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that unionization helps protect graduate students’ rights and helps realize significant benefits to the institution as a whole. One essay on the topic says, “The cheapening of academic labor dnninishes everyone who values learning.”’* Many of the arguments put forward by admimstrators, faculty, and others opposed to the unionization of graduate student TAs can be viewed as replies to, or as the fip side of, arguments favoring unionization for students, although some antiunion arguments are independent. With respect to the hstorical arguments, administrators, faculty, and others who oppose graduate student unions believe that unions are ofien recognized by admimstrators trymg to save face. Union critics insist, moreover, that it is impossible to separate economic and academic matters, focusing on collective bargaining only for the former. They urge that unions often do want to negotiate academic matters such as graduate student admissions and the role of graduate students in hiring faculty, matters that they believe are the purview of a collegial administration and faculty and student effort and should not be subject to unionized collective bargaining. In support of this, they point to hstorical examples of these ddiculties, such as the situation at UMass-Amherst, where the graduate student union once pushed for assignment of TAs based on seniority, rather than qualifications, and where negotiations have sometimes included issues of class size. Assigning employees through a seniority system c e r t d y reflects what typical unions advocate in business and industry, but university administrators see it as disruptive and inappropriate for an academic setting. Insisting student TAs have seniority rights is antithetical to the traditional academic system that usually allows faculty in charge of the course, on their own or with a h n i s trative input, to decide which TAs have more expertise in the subject matter and are thus more suitable for running discussion sections, grading papers, and advising students in the course.29 Related to this is the claim that historical examples also highlight the many practical difficulties of unionization among graduate students. Students are a transient population, as members graduate, transfer, or otherwise move on. Largely for this reason, the same difficulty of organizing that arises for parttime faculty, unions among graduate students at such schools as Purdue University and the University of Connecticut have sputtered or ended. In addition, because graduate student teaching and research assignments vary semester by semester, those voting for unionization are only those currently worlung as teaching or research assistants. Hence, those eligible to vote may be only a partial percentage of the total graduate student population as a whole and may not represent the views of the majority of students. A simple majority vote is needed for unionization, and a vote for unionization binds all current and future students into the union and the dues they must pay. Indi-

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viduals who prefer not to be part of the union cannot opt out, and it is d~fficult to end a union once it has national affiliate support. With reference to the legal claims of graduate students’ right to choose to unionize, antiunion officials cannot deny the state laws and NLRB rulings, but most believe the NLRB decisions are incorrect. On their view, graduate students are truly students, not employees, who are receiving educational training and financial aid. To argue otherwise, saying they are employees first and then students, places the categories in the wrong order for explaining graduate education as a whole. Moreover, unionization merely soliddes the sense that graduate students are employees and further alienates them. Administrators and faculty opposed to unionization for graduate students extend this argument further. They urge that both teaching and research help students develop critical thinlung SUS essential for their future jobs and generally help students with their studies, so these are not properly called work. These duties are directly tied to students’ educational and career goals and do serve as part of an apprenticeship. Those against graduate student unions rarely dispute the economic difficulties of being a graduate student or the heavy teaching loads students bear, but they believe that there are better ways to deal with such problems and complaints. These issues, they argue, can be handled by improving student benefits, as Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, and Penn have done, or through committees or collegial campus discussions and negotiations, rather than resorting to unionization and collective bargaining, particularly through the UAW. Indeed, some adrmnistrators are skeptical that the UAW, in its need for new members, is wooing students vigorously and then exploiting them so the student voice is lost. Labor research supports this view in part because traditional unions in industry are in peril, as union membership is down, and graduate students provide a new source of membership and dues.30University officials suspect that national affiliates of graduate student unions are corrupt. They wonder, outright, whether students really want union activists and UAW leaders to speak for them and whether students really believe the UAW is representing their interests and needs and goals appropriately. Antiunion administrators thus view unionized students as submitting to an outside authority that will interfere with the structure of the university. They believe union officials working for graduate students at UMass-Amherst and at the University of Cahfornia at Santa Barbara have not trusted students to conduct their negotiations, shifting the responsibility for making important decisions to professional union agents unfamiliar with the universities. They doubt that addmg an additional layer to the interactions between students and

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faculty and administration is truly helpful for students, and worry a union will deprive graduate students of the opportunity to make their own important educational decisions. Administrators also believe that with respect to economic issues, collective bargaining through graduate student unions can lock them in to bear costs the institutional budget cannot handle. O n this view, it is often too expensive to raise student stipends and provide health insurance and child care, as these will only lead to greater undergraduate tuition hikes. This trade-off, administrators believe, must be made through a balanced look at all segments of the university, not just through the eyes of a union supporting graduate students. These considerations lead to another prominent argument given by those opposing TA unions concerning the academic culture on campus and the benefits both to the graduate students and the institution as a whole. Contrary to claims by graduate students that their unions improve conditions at universities where they exist, detractors argue that the addition of graduate student unions does not help them attract the best graduate students, as many potential applicants will balk at attending an institution where they will automatically be bound to a union. Critics cite unions as being damaging to the institution’s academic image as well as having other negative consequences. Unionization modeled on industry, they argue, is highly inflexible, bureaucratic, formalized, and potentially divisive. It is the antithesis of the collegial model needed at a university. They urge, furthermore, that unions can produce further practical problems such as forcing tuition raises for undergraduates that can affect admissions negatively, and that the implementation of seniority systems for teaching assignments is unfair to undergraduates who should reasonably expect their teachers to be assigned on the basis of their expertise rather than years of service. Related to these concerns are more basic arguments about universities and campus culture, and arguments that unionization will harm academic integrity on campus. Ths latter is an explosive but vague phrase. What harms do these antiunion admmistrators have in mind? Officials at Yale have argued that unionization among their graduate students will destroy collegial relations. Presumably they are suggesting that the presence of unions will antagonize faculty and harm the professorstudent relationship where the faculty member is the student’s mentor and supervisor. In this sense there is a conflict between the student’s teaching duties and his or her role as a researcher with a faculty member. Others have suggested that unionization, in its effort to increase standardization in stipends and benefits for graduate students across departments for ex-

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ample, is inappropriate for an academic institution, where students and professors in different disciplines have different circumstances and diverse needs. Group organizing through a union seems incompatible with a profession that recognizes indvidual merit. Calling the scheduled vote at Columbia on whether the UAW will represent graduate teaching and research assistants a “crucial choice,” George Rupp, outgoing president of Columbia wrote, “A union would reduce the flexibility that faculty advisors and students currently have to structure teaching and research assignments to meet indwidual educational needs” as well as other aspects of graduate training.31 Lee C. Bollinger, incoming president of Columbia urged students to vote against unionization, writing in an open letter, “What I would emphasize here is the lack of fit between what a union is and does and the character of an educational community we should aspire to achieve. O n e can, as I do, recognize and respect the benefits unions bring to the traditional world of business and industry and, at the same time, not believe the relationship between faculty and graduate students would be enhanced by the intermediary presence of unions.”32 The bottom line, according to university officials opposed to unionization by graduate students, is that it diminishes the importance of collegiality and of protecting the academic nature of what members of the academy do. There are clearly powerful arguments on both sides of this debate over unions for graduate TAs. In his letter, Bollinger indicated that the presence or absence of a graduate student union “will profoundly determine everything from the quality of our teaching in the classroom and elsewhere to the depth of our scholarship and research.”33The difficulty, of course, is that supporters believe unions for graduate teaching and research assistants can and will enhance that quality, while those opposed to such unions are confident they cause declines in academic excellence. One issue that is particularly intractable is whether economic issues of employment, stipends, benefits, and worlung condtions can really be separated from academic issues that antiunion officials believe lie at the heart of the mission of an institution of higher learning and are inappropriate for collective bargaining by a union. Some working conditions such as teaching load and class size seem to fall into both categories. Concerns that standardization will not take into consideration the differences between disciplines and that seniority could be the standard for TA placements do appear to make the line blurry. Complicating the issue is the behind-the-scenes “squabble” between the UAW and the AFT, the two national affiliates for graduate student unions concerning what is and is not an

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academic issue unacceptable for union n e g ~ t i a t i o nNevertheless, .~~ unions at the University of Michigan and NYU seem to have found a way to make and accept this distinction with reasonable clarity, and the NLRB ruling in the NYU case concluded that collective bargaining negotiations could be limited to matters affecting wages, hours, and conditions of appointment without compromising academic freedom. Administrators at Temple University, despite their early reluctance, believe they have progressed even further in articulating the details of this distinction about what is and is not appropriate for discussion at the bargaining table. It seems that for graduate students at schools where the cost of living is high, where their stipends and benefits have been miserable, where administrators have been unresponsive to their financial and scholarly needs, and where legislatures have been politically unsympathetic to universities, graduate student unions have brought major benefits to both students and their academic institutions that very likely could not have been realized otherwise. In such cases, graduate students have suffered from budget cutbacks and have felt mistreated and unappreciated for their work, and unions have been valuable and necessary to protect them. In addtion, time and effort have allowed unions and administrators to sort out the thorny issue of distinguishing what are the economic and employment issues that can be negotiated without compromising the academic integrity of the institution. These unions thus have pragmatic legitimacy because they have gained for graduate students the benefits students sought and that the unions promised. They have also been successful, often over the long term, because they have moral legitimacy for graduate students and others who believe they have done the right thing to alleviate exploitation of graduate student teaching and research assistants. O n the other hand, at institutions such as Columbia, where there is a responsive administration willing to assist students by keeping their stipends and benefits competitive, keeping their teaching loads reasonable, and providing other perks as well because they have the money, the opposite may be true. The addition of a union, while it may be empowering to some, may also add an administrative layer and a new voice, where graduate students could better defend their concerns and needs on their own. At these institutions unions appear unnecessary for pragmatic legitimacy, and it is more diacult for unions to make a case for their moral legitimacy. In these cases, however, acknowledgment of the interaction between institutions of higher education is important. It is clear that graduate student unions elsewhere, and thus threats of unionization, are a major reason these students need not unionize.

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The most troubling instances involve those universities where many conditions indicate unionization can be both pragmatically helpful and morally successful for graduate students, but faculty opposition may make students’ academic work with their advisors unbearable if they unionize. In such cases there is a complex set of student and faculty perspectives. If graduate students working on union efforts hear from their faculty that they are wasting their time and are not committed enough to their dscipline, and thus believe there is a likelihood of retribution, it is not clear that unionizing is worth the risk. Whether one is organizing a union, or joining as part of one, it may not be wise to fight one’s own faculty and advisers. In addition, a serious problem for graduate students throughout the academy is the uncertain job market even when they finish their degree programs. Whether a university is unionized or not, it seems clear that the economy dictates that departments should track the placement rates of their Ph.D. graduates, and universities should be alert to making sure the size of their graduate programs reflect employment possibilities and prospects. Furthermore, academic institutions can do far more to help graduate students find opportunities for nonacademic employment. The fact is that an institution of higher education is ideally an institution of human beings working together to enhance teaching and learning and research. The endeavor requires consistent and cooperative effort by all, and in reality that is not found at many universities and graduate programs. Graduate students need strong advising and mentoring, respect for their work as students, and fair remuneration for their work as teachers, and they should not be exploited as cheap labor to cover classes tenured faculty do not want to teach. Increased health benefits and child care are enormous benefits for them, which can increase their quality of life immeasurably. Faculty members and other university officials need to take seriously the stress and difficulties of life as a graduate student; most of them have lived through it. Graduate students are in a position to appreciate the current threats to higher education, yet with very little power, they are the least capable of addressing them. Faculty members need to provide the support, advising, and mentoring that graduate students need, and some do a fine job at this. Department chairs and administrators need to encourage this support from faculty not yet providing it, to ensure the best education possible for both their graduate students and the undergraduates they teach. Human beings have different personalities, and public and private institutions have different political climates and varying levels of external support for their academic missions. Graduate students at different universities also have varying levels of support from other factions inside and outside

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their institutions. All these conditions affect whether unionization for graduate students at a particular university will be wise and helpful or will create further adversity and anger as well as being detrimental to the academic mission. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question about the appropriateness of graduate student unions. H o p e m y , a clearer understandmg of cases at schools where there has been success as well as failure and articulation of the arguments on each side of the unionization debate can help both pro-union and antiunion advocates better understand the position of those on the other side. Then all can better assess the potential and promise, or lack thereof, for graduate student unions o n their own campuses.

NOTES 1. Matthew M. Bodah, “Sigdcant Labor and Employment Law Issues in Higher Education during the Past Decade and What to Look for Now: The Perspective of an Academician,”]ournal o f h w and Education 29, no. 3 (2000): 320. The examples in the next two paragraphs are drawn from, and documented by, Bodah’s essay. 2. Association of Graduate Student Employees, District 65, United Automobile Workers v. Public Employment Relations Board, Calif. 1 App. Dist., No. A046075 (1992). 3. Regents of the University of California and Student Association of Graduate Employees, UAW, Cal. PERB No 1301-H (1998),as cited in Bodah, “Sigdcant Labor and Employment Law Issues,” 320. 4. Bodah, “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues,” 320. 5. Jennifer Jacobson, “Yale Increases Stipends for Ph.D. Students by 20%:’ The Chronicle ofHigher Education, February 2,2001, A12. 6. Robin Wilson, “T.A.’s at U. of Washington Call Off Planned Strike,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, December 15,2000, A14. 7. Courtney Leatherman, “NLRB Rules T.A.’s at Private Universities Have the Right to Unionize,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, November 10,2000, A14. 8. See Leatherman,“NLFU3 Rules T.A.’s at Private Universities Have the Right to Unionize,” for a fuller summary of the arguments. 9. Leatherman, “NLRB Rules T.A.’s at Private Universities Have the Right to Unionize,” A14. 10. Scott Smallwood, “A Big Breakthrough for T.A. Unions,” The Chronicle offfigher Education, March 16,2001, A10. 11. Smallwood, “A Big Breakthrough for T.A. Unions,” A10. 12. Scott Smallwood, “NYU Agrees to Contract with TAs, Setting Minimum Stipend and Health Benefits,” The Chronicle offfigher Education, January 30,2002 and

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Scott Smallwood, “NYU and Its TA Union Reach Pact on a Contract,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, February 2002, A18. 13. Martin Van Der Werf, “Temple Teaching Assistants Win Ruling in Union Drive,” The Chronicle oJHigher Education, September 7,2001, A18. 14. Scott Smallwood, “Teaching Assistants at Temple U. Vote to Unionize,” The Chronicle oJ Higher Education, A18. The Temple graduate students and organizers said their primary focus was health insurance and stipends, at the time ranging from $11,000 to $14,000, forcing two-thirds of the students to take on second jobs. 15. Scott Smallwood, “Temple U. Agrees to Negotiate with Teaching Assistants’ Union,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, October 12,2001, A16. 16. Smallwood, “Temple U. Agrees to Negotiate with Teaching Assistants’ Union,” A16. 17. John L. Pulley, “Brown U. TA’s Have Right to Form Union, NLRB Regional Director Rules,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 30,2001. 18. Scott Smallwood,“State Labor Board Deals Blow to T.A.’s at University of Illinois,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, April 13, 2001, A18. Note that Illinois is one of a few states with a law explicitly denying employee status to those whose work is related to their enrollment as students. 19. Thomas Bartlett, “Teaching Assistants Strike at Urbana-Champaign,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 14,2001, A12. 20. Scott Smallwood, “Union? N o Thanks. Some Graduate Students at Elite Universities Fight the Push for Collective Bargaining,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 17,2002,A12. Note that most of the other arguments in this paragraph are drawn from this article. 21. Scott Smallwood,“U. of Michigan Strikes a Deal with Teaching Assistants,” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, March 29,2002, A12. “As in previous contracts, the graduate instructors will get a percentage raise as received, on average, by faculty members in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. . . . The [child care] subsidy will rise to $1,700 from $1,000 per semester for a first child and to $850 from $500 each for second and third children. . . . The union also won three spots on a university committee that will be charged with making child-care improvements on the campus. The administration has promised to spend $450,000 over the next three years to pay for the panel’s recommendations,” p. A12. 22. Scott Smallwood, “Labor Official Rules That TAs at Columbia U. Can Form Union,” The Chronicle @Higher Education, February 14,2002. 23. Andrew C. Helman, “Tufts Grad Students Win Right to Unionize,” Boston Sunday Globe, April 7, 2002, B7; Piper Fogg, “TA’s at Tufts U. Have Right to Unionize, Regional Labor Board Rules,” The Chronicle offfigher Education, April 8,2002. 24. Courtney Leatherman, “AAUP Reaches Out and Takes Sides,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23,2000, A16. 25. Quoted in Scott Smallwood, “Success and New Hurdles for T.A. Unions,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, July 6,2001, A10. See also Kate Bronfenbrenner and Tom

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Juravich, “Universities Should Cease Hostilities With Unions,” The Chronicle Of Higher Education, January 19,2001,B24. 26. For a short and eloquent letter taking this view and arguing that “professors could have played a significant role in preventing the transformation of their graduate students into a group of alienated proletarians who have now quite understandably turned to unionization,” by the president of Barnard College, see Judith Shapiro,“Faculty Support of Unions for Graduate Students,” in Letters to the Ehtor, The Chronicle ofHigker Education, September 14,2001, B20. 27. Tamara Joseph and Jon Curtiss, “Why Professors Should Support GraduateStudent Unions,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, February 21,1997. 28. William Vaughan, “Apprentice or Employee? Graduate Students and Their Unions,” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 44. 29. For more on this issue, see John J. Furedy, “Why Graduate Students Shouldn’t Join Unions,” Letters to the Editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 1998,Bll. 30. Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow, Unions and Legitimacy (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 1. 31. George Rupp, letter to the Columbia University community, February 15, 2002. 32. Lee C. Bollinger, letter to the Columbia University community, March 7,2002. For a thoughtful and clear articulation of a full range of sindar views, see Catherine Simpson, “A Dean’s Skepticism About a Graduate-Student Union,” The Chronicle OJ Higher Education, May 5,2000, B7. 33. Lee C. Bollinger, letter cited, March 7,2002. 34. “The American Federation of Teachers is worried that the United Auto Workers made a strategic error by agreeing to remove academic issues from the table at N.Y.U.” Scott Smallwood,“Success and New Hurdles for T.A. Unions,” The Chronicle ofHigker Education, July 6,2001, A10.

SEVEN U N I O N I Z A T IFOON R UNDERGRADUATE RAs: O N ECASESTUDY

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n March 5,2002, the resident assistants, also called resident advisers or RAs, at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst voted 138-88 in favor ofjoining a local chapter of the United Autoworkers (UAW). The students needed only a simple majority of the vote to win, and they certainly acheved that, although the vote was not as close to unanimous as many had expected. This historic vote was the nation’s first to establish a union of undergraduate students in academia. The vote, watched closely by universities, colleges, and unions all over the country, was part of a union movement that began two years earlier when a senior who had spent three years as a UMass RA, Gregory Essopos, published a thirty-page statement citing a 50 percent turnover rate among dorm monitors at the university. Soon after publication of his paper, two R A s were fired or let go by UMass-Amherst, raising anger among many R A s and other students on the campus who felt the firings were unfair. In April 2001 the Amherst campus R A s filed a union-election petition with the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission,’ and in January 2002 the commission ruled in their favor that they have the right to unionize, setting the stage for the historic vote. R A s said they will “elect leaders, form a bargaining committee, and precisely define their goals”2and then will begin negotiating as a union with the university administrators.

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There are approximately 2,500 graduate teaching assistants (TAs) at the Amherst campus who formed a union twelve years prior to the undergraduate R A vote and call themselves university employees rather than students, like other graduate assistants who have unionized. The undergraduates supporting unionization are spurred on by what they say are their miserable worlung conditions and their claims that “the university has misled them on everything from their compensation to their right^."^ Moreover, the arguments given for and against the undergraduate R A union mirror many of those given in the recent debates and cases about graduate student unionization around the country. Union activists and R A s who support the undergraduate union offer a variety of arguments for their efforts, focusing on salary,job security, and additional benefits including a clear ~ o n t r a c tThey . ~ claim they are merely trying to gain fairness, namely the same protections that other members of the university community enjoy. They first cite the work expectations of RAs, urging that it is very much a job, and thus RAs are truly employees. The position is often a demanding, demeaning, and even dangerous one, they argue. It requires R A s to cope with drunken students, clean up after late night parties, put up with threatening notes and messages, and such things as shaving cream sprayed on their doors. The Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission apparently agreed when it ruled in their favor. The UMass adrmnistration counters that undergraduates are clearly students and not employees, and this position was stated explicitly in 2001 by David K. Scott, who was chancellor at the time. In a February 2002 letter to RAs, acting chancellor at the Amherst campus, Marcellete G. Williams, echoed Scott’s view, writing: “It is my very strong belief that unionization of undergraduate students is inconsistent with education at UMass-Amherst. Collective bargaining with an outside entity will, in my view, inevitably colhde with core educational and administrative decisions. . . . Unionization is particularly incompatible with your position as a student leader and role model in the residence halls.” Wilhams continued, “The university does not look at your activities as a ‘job.’ . . . We look upon you as holding a position of leadership that arises from and is directly tied to your accomplishment as a ~tudent.”~ The university claims that it screens, trains, and supports RAs throughout their tenure in the position. Union activists and supporters view the acting chancellor’s letter as the worst sort of union busting and accuse the administration of perpetuating threats, intimidation, and lies. A second major point of contention is whether the R A s are given adequate pay for their duties. According to the university, RAs receive the equiva-

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lent of $5,100 for the academic year, which includes a subsihzed double dorm room that they can occupy as a single, a waiver of residence hall fees, and the cost of a high-speed Internet connection, as well as a small weekly stipend. “University officials say R A s are paid $137 for 20 hours of work a week, but union organizers say that’s misleading. RAs say they’re really earning only $50, or $2.50 an hour, after residence officials subtract the cost of their rooms, which are supposed to be h.ee.”6 The administration also met with U s to suggest that a vote for the union might jeopardize some of their benefits. The salary and financial issues are crucial because they are widely viewed as the main reason the majority of RAs supported the union vote, but they are also the focus of a debate between RAs supporting the union and those who voted against it. Students are well aware of the drastic budget cuts currently affecting all the UMass campuses, and many feel the union protection, especially with the backing of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers (UAW Local 2322) with deep pockets, can assure them adequate remuneration in the future. Others are less convinced, and some R A s voted against unionization and joining the UAW, worrying that it put their jobs and wages at risk and that it was inadvisable to put their money in the power of another group, perhaps one exploiting students to increase union membership. Union organizers reply that the housing department has hked housing fees recently, that all RAs would vote on any contract, and that the union dues, at 2 percent of wages, would not go into effect until the first contract is signed.’ R A s supporting the union insist that money is not the sole driving force behind their campaign to unionize. They claim not to be motivated by greed but rather by the desire for respect and the recognition that they are working for less than minimum wage. Some admit that they are excited about making history by being the first undergraduate group in academia to unionize. Perhaps more important, they say that they are subject to arbitrary punishments, citing the earlier firing of two RAs, which many found to be questionable or arbitrary. Some fear they are at risk of being fired and “thrown out of their rooms without due process”8 thus mahng job security prominent among their major goals. University officials reply that such an accusation is unfair, and that R A s are not subject to an arbitrary discipline process because, as with any students who are fired or disciplined, they have a right to appeal. After the March 5,2002, vote, students summarized their goals as gaining the following: a clearer contract, higher wages and better benefits, more job security, and a fairer system ofjustice for RAs accused of breaching campus rules. Many undergraduates also worry that as R A s they have fewer rights than their residents. Thus, they support the union as a way to protect their rights.

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The administration at UMass-Amherst continued to oppose the undergraduate union during the spring, suggesting multiple options. One option was to go to court to argue that the R A program is educational and incompatible with a union. University officials also warned students prior to the vote that if students negotiated wage increases, the university might increase fees for all students, making a negotiated pay increase meaningless.Without saying so, university officials must realize that this would help their public relations efforts by gaining support against the union from those students whose fees rise. In addtion, administrators warned that they might eliminate or radically change the R A program. One possibility given was offering students in the university’s hotel management program positions as R A s for academic credit. These statements and options from university officials were viewed by student R A s supporting the union as further threats; the union, according to these students, will be able to protect them against precisely these sorts of administrative moves. The UMass administration refused to negotiate with the R A s following the vote, claiming that they view the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission’s decision, the certification of the student bargaining unit, as a misapplication of the relevant state statute. In response, a lawyer for the students filed “13 unfair-labor-practice charges with the labor board against the university.”’ Most participants on both sides then expected a costly legal battle, draining the university’s operating budget even further than it has been hurt by state budget cuts. Those who view the union vote as a victory are certain that more undergraduates across the country will organize, and lawyers for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT),which represents about fourteen thousand graduate students, acknowledge that they have already begun conversations with R A s at other schools. It seems clear, then, that independently of this case, efforts to unionize undergraduate RAs are likely to continue and to expand. Supporters are confident this will bring them better salaries and benefits, due process rights, and other protections. On the other hand, the rhetoric in the debate over the vote for an undergraduate union at UMass-Amherst makes it clear that there is strong adversity and divisiveness on campus over the issue. The debate prior to the vote emphasized the extent of distrust between the administration and the student RAs in support of the union. Each side accused the other of presenting the issues unfairly, and students accused the administration of trying to threaten and intimidate them. The rhetoric escalated to the point that students said they were merely treated as commodities and were being fed lies by the administration. In addition, after the vote, it was clear there were still wide &visions between the RAs supporting the union and those who voted against it. Each

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side views the other with dstrust and feels the other side has misjudged the situation and made a foolish and mistaken decision. It is difficult to dismiss the depth of the divisions and also difficult to see how the union can help dlminish those divisions if the rift with the administration leads to less job security and no increase in pay for the RAs. This is of course only a single case of an undergraduate union in academia, but adversity between the student resident advisers and the administration seems to have run deep during the two years prior to the union vote. Both the previous chancellor, Scott, and the interim chancellor, Wikams, made clear that they totally opposed the student union, and students made clear they had demands. None of the meetings between R A s and administration prior to the vote appears to have been set up as collegial mediations to resolve differences. In this particular case, adversity appears to have fueled the pro-union vote and continued after it as well. At the close of the 2001-2002 academic year, thirty-four students and union activists were arrested by campus police after a sit-in protesting the administration's refusal to bargain with them. Those arrested included some who had entered the office of the vice-chancellor for student affairs, and went limp when police tried to arrest them, and others among the approximately seventy-five picketers outside the administration building, who lay in the road to block police attempting to remove other protesters." Undergraduate RAs bemoaned the fact that the university is spending money to fight the union in the midst of severe academic cutbacks. The message &om the adrmnistration was that officials place an extremely high value on avoiding undergraduate unionization, despite the costs elsewhere on campus. It is unclear whether campus departments and groups facing cutbacks will support the RAs or will reject their efforts as undermining other academic priorities. It will also be interesting to see if the type of students who apply to be RAs, or are selected to be RAs, changes in the future. The undergraduate unionization movement reflects issues affecting graduate student unions; however, there are differences as well. O n one hand, it seems that the UMass administration's claim that R A s are primarily students is more obviously correct for undergraduates than for graduate TAs involved in unionizing. RAs are full-time undergraduate students, and their RA compensation could be called part of their financial aid. It is difficult to think of these full-time students as laborers. The arguments for unionization of undergraduate RAs seem far less compelling than for other academic unions. O n the other hand, it must be acknowledged that the RA duties are not associated with teaching and grading and, thus, cannot be said to be part of their training, as has been claimed for graduate students. In addition, the university adrmnistration lost the first round of this legal battle through the decision of

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the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission, ruling that RAs are employees entitled to bargain. Thus, the students have the legal advantage. Beyond the legal debate about the status of R A s as students or employees, the most compelling arguments in favor of unions for undergraduate R A s depend on the extent to which students are correct that they are exploited financially, treated unfairly and disrespectfully, and denied due process and other rights. If the university administration is correct, to the contrary, that the RA compensation and work conditions are fair, that student R A s are respected and are not let go without due process, then it is difficult to find persuasive arguments in favor of unionization for undergraduates. Moreover, if the administration is correct, then the undergraduate union does not have pragmatic legitimacy, as there are no practical results to attain, nor are there persuasive grounds for the union to claim moral legitimacy. Furthermore, there is good reason to wonder if the national affiliate, the UAW, is the one exploiting students by trying to unionize them in an attempt to gain more members and additional dues. Unfortunately, the actual responses by administrators at UMass, suggesting they might eliminate or replace RA positions and claiming R A s have already jeopardized their benefits, appeared to support the R A complaints about unfair treatment. These official responses make it clear that the administration viewed their R A s as replaceable and dispensable. In almost any context, people do not want to find they are expendable and thus virtually worthless on the job, and that is one of the major reasons employees embrace and value unions to protect them. In some respects the UMass administration appears to have, perhaps unwittingly, made the case for undergraduate unionization better than the union leaders themselves. Moreover, from the outside it appears the confrontation and dwisiveness escalated deeply. Others at institutions of higher education would do well to learn from the events in this case. In a surprise reversal, following additional huge cuts in the state budget during summer 2002, UMass officials agreed to negotiate a labor contract with the undergraduate RAs." This decision was not based on a change in educational goals, but was due to budget constraints, legal costs to fight the union, and what the administration perceived would be pressure from the graduate student union and the faculty union on campus. The faculty union is already angered that their recent collective bargaining agreement is not being honored by the university due to the state's financial crisis. In sum, the ideal was that campus collegiality and negotiations between students and administrators could satis+ the student concerns. The reality is that these concerns turned into demands, and the attempt to unionize created

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distrust on both sides, further alienating students and the administration. The union vote also created antagonism between student groups on opposite sides of the union debate. The UMass case now sets a precedent, as undergraduates join the labor force. Thus the undergraduate unionization movement may be here to stay, along with the adversity and divisiveness it brings, and that is certain to affect the culture of campus life in academics in the future.

NOTES 1. “Resident Assistants Seek Union at U. of Massachusetts at Amherst,” T h e Chronicle of Higher Education, May 4,2001, A39. 2. David Abel and Andrew C. Helman, “UMass Dorm Monitors OK Union,” The Boston Globe, March 6,2002, Al, A8, at A8. 3. David, Abel, “At UMass, a New Union Battle,” T h e Boston Globe, April 13, 2001, A l , A25, at A25. 4. Abel, “At UMass, a New Union Battle,” A l , A25. 5. David Abel, “UMass Dorm Leaders Urged to Reject Union,” T h e Boston Globe, March 2,2002, Al, A9. 6. Andrew C. Helman and David Abel, “UMass R A s Face Historic Union Vote,” T h e Boston Globe, January 23,2002, B8. 7. Abel, “UMass Dorm Leaders Urged to Reject Union,” A9. 8. Abel, “UMass R A s Face Historic Union Vote,” B8. 9. Andrew C. Helman, “Undergraduate Union Seeks Chance to Negotiate,” T h e Boston Globe, March 28,2002, B4. 10. Andrew Helman, “UMass Sit-in Ends with 34 Arrests,” T h e Boston Globe, April 30,2002, B2. 11. Patrick Heal5 “UMass to Negotiate Pact with RAs,” T h e Boston Globe, August 1,2002, B1, B4.

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here are a number of controversial and intertwined issues surrounding academic unions. There are not easy answers to these questions, nor are the answers uniform across different campuses. One question, for example, is whether unions arise in part due to adversity between faculty and administrators or between students and administrators and whether unions generate and perpetuate or possibly alleviate such adversity. Second, one can ask whether unions arise because universities are run more and more like big businesses and corporations or whether the existence of unions force universities to become more corporate and businesslike in their administrations. As a third example, one can ask whether budgetary and academic issues can genuinely be separated, so that unions for faculty, part-time faculty, and students can be negotiated to assist with economic issues without compromising academic values and educators’ control over academic issues. How one answers these questions for a particular institution of higher education, based on individual and group experiences in a union or based on reports from colleagues and peers, will affect one’s views on academic unions. Supporters of unionization in academia believe budgetary and financial matters can be separated from academic decisions; believe that universities are already more and more being run like big businesses and corporations 119

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with employer/employee relations, which justifies the need for academic unions; and believe that unions can ideally alleviate and reduce adversity by having preagreed and written policies and procedures to protect individual rights, to enhance communication and community, and to provide guidance when disagreements and disputes arise. Opponents of academic unionization argue just the opposite. Evidence assessed in this book supports the view that unions in academia do arise in part out of adversity and demonstrates that adversity and even acrimony and divisiveness often linger after unionization as well. In response to the question about the relationship between unions and business or corporate structure, the cases discussed here indicate that the answer varies from institution to institution, based on the administrative structure, the board of trustees, and political influences both on and off campus. Finally, despite skepticism over complicated issues such as teaching loads and class size, there is evidence that economic and academic issues can be separated in collective bargaining. Multiple faculty contracts and graduate student unions at institutions indicate that this distinction can be made in a way that is satisfactory to both negotiating parties. This book also makes clear that academic unions do indeed help the least well-off and the most vulnerable in academia to a certain extent in terms of salaries and benefits. A major reason these economic enhancements are not uniformly increased by unionization is that collective bargaining has given leverage to members of academia at nonunion schools. It has caused nonunionized institutions to increase their benefits to match or exceed those negotiated by unions. In addition, the collective power of a union helps protect job security, academic freedom, autonomy, due process, and fair treatment for all faculty and students in academia workmg under unions. Nevertheless, we are left wondering about the impact of unions on faculty governance and how to minimize the adversity often caused by unionization. We are also left wondering if the move toward equity destroys the abihty to reward merit and exceptional individual achievement in academia, which many educators believe is an essential academic value as one of the great incentives for learning and gaining knowledge. These pose major challenges for academic unions. Even when a vote for unionization succeeds in academia, there are additional questions to answer. First, who should be included in the bargaining unit? Should it be faculty only? If so, should it be full-time faculty alone or both full-time and part-time faculty? Should it include librarians and other academic support staff? For graduate student unions, which teaching and research assistants should be eligible to bargain? The decision about who will

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be represented by a union is a difficult one and will affect the main aims of the negotiators. Second, at large state universities and other institutions with multiple campuses, should different campuses have separate collective bargaining units or not? There are examples of both types of arrangements, and while a larger union representing all campuses may have more power, it may also gain less allegiance from faculty who feel removed fiom the main negotiating team. As one example, City University of New York (CUNY) originally settled on a single bargaining unit for the multiple campuses, but had more difficulty deciding on which personnel to include in its bargaining unit. It is unclear that any combination of these models is more effective than the other. There is an ideal vision that an institute of higher education is a collegial academic community committed to academic freedom and autonomy, excellence in the pursuit of knowledge, with respect and fair treatment for all on campus through shared governance. On campuses where the culture is close to this ideal, academic unions are not needed. In reality, however, these values are not all respected on numerous campuses. When faculty and others working in academic roles feel unappreciated and are viewed and treated as replaceable and expendable, then they see the value of unions to protect their job security and rights. Many full-time faculty members work at institutions of higher education where they perceive this is the case, and they vote in favor of unionization. Part-time faculty are most obviously treated as dispensable, and thus can also benefit from unions for these reasons, but they are a transient group and sometimes intimidated by their lack of power. Some graduate student TAs appear moved by similar concerns about their treatment, as do the undergraduate U s in the case study presented, although this could differ on another campus. Nevertheless, as in any work environment, people want to be valued and they want their contributions at work to matter. When faculty and students feel disrespected and feel they are treated as expendable, they fear for their job security and rights, not to mention their self-esteem, and they seek academic unions as a valuable and effective way to force administrators and other oficials to respond. With no unions at all and no threat of unionization, administrators and politicians would retain nearly unlimited power and control at some colleges and universities. This also helps explain the snobbery and elitism associated with antiunion feelings. Supporting a union may mean acknowledging one’s lack of poyrer and one’s replaceability, which many faculty members disdain. Ultimately,the effectiveness and force of arguments both for and against academic unions vary fiom campus to campus and &om institution to institution,

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depending on the campus culture, the extent of collegiality and community,the treatment of faculty and students, the particular personnel in leadership positions involved in decision making, as well as the extent of their power. Pursuit of knowledge and the joy of learning can be enhanced or dampened by the governance system of an institution of higher learning. These same issues affect whether an academic union gains a pragmatic legitimacy and/or moral legitimacy, both of which can determine the success and effectiveness and the overall quality of an academic union. Unions with pragmatic legitimacy are able to earn for members what they want and have been promised. In addition, however, the best academic unions need moral legitimacy. They need to convince members and other constituencies on campus and externally that they are not merely achieving narrow and self-interested gains but are also defending shared moral values that are important and that enhance both their academic institution, higher education, and society as a whole. There are two additional conclusions: First, supporters of academic unions should be cautious to take note of the deleterious effects of unionization discovered by Ladd and Lipset, and the numerous issues arising for higher education noted by Rhoades that are not yet addressed by most union contracts. Second, faculty and students at elite institutions without unions need to realize that the unionization movement at faculty and student levels has an influence on all in academia, even those at nonunionized schools. This study has demonstrated that unionization by faculty and graduate students has had major effects at schools with and without unions, often to their benefit. Unionization is ongoing, and it affects the future of campus culture, especially student and faculty relationships, institutional values and priorities, and the future of higher education. None in the academy can afford to fail to pay attention.

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SECTION I FACULTYU N I O N S

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ACADEMICPOLITICS

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PROFESSORS, U N I O N S , A N D A M E R I C AHNI G H E R E DU C A T I O N : C o N c LUD I N G 0B s E RVAT I o N s

Everett Carll L.uddJK and Seymour Martin Lkset

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ur discussion of the prospects for and consequences of faculty unionism has emphasized the extent to which the academy dffers from most other institutions in which unions and related employee groups operate. As noted fiequently, the focus in intellectual life on research and creativity, with concomitant great rewards for high achievers, is challenged by unionism’s concern for fair and equitable treatment for all those in a given occupation. Clearly, the discussion about the “leveling” effects of unionism on academe is warranted. Yet, it should also be noted that other professions have been unionized while retaining a highly competitive “star” system. The most obvious example is the entertainment industry, which, though highly unionized, includes the most highly paid and prestigious “stars,” motion picture writers, directors, and others. Unions such as Actors Equity and the Screen Writers’ Guild have improved the situation for the less distinguished members of their profession, while not interfering with the ability of those at the top to secure enormous rewards. Similarly, journalism is a highly unionized field, which includes Ths article is reproduced 6om Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, “Concludmg Observations,” in Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education (Berkeley, Calif.: Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1973). Copyright 0 2002 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Reprinted with permission.

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yeomen reporters whose pay is largely determined by union contracts, and well-known major figures who are paid very high salaries and are able to determine when and how they shall work. Our readmg of the situation suggests that the pressures towards “equal treatment” in academe wlll have many of the “leveling” consequences on institutions that some critics of unionism foresee, but that it wlll not eliminate the “star” system. The City University of New York, for example, has thus far been able to retain its particular form of the “star” system, provision for fifty “Distinguished Professors,” who receive a highly honorific title, a light teaching load, a variety of special support services, and five thousand dollars above the maximum salary that other professors in the system may attain. Conversely,of course, unionism at CUNY has equalized salary scales and other conditions for faculty at the community and four-year colleges, and has made it more &fficult to refise tenure. There is no denymg that unionization is changing many of the basic characteristics of academe. In large measure, many of the modifications are inherent in the enormous post-1945 expansion of American higher education and the challenges to tradtional practices in higher education posed by the growth of egahtarian forces in the larger society. Unionism is both a response to increased bureaucratization and egahtarianism and a firther stimulus to these developments. Any effort to generalize about trends, however, must always take into consideration the extreme variety in the types of institutions that now comprise the college and university world. Particularly relevant, as we noted earlier, is the fact that faculty power and professional independence vary with the quality of school. The higher its academic standmg, the more an institution resembles a professional guild; further down the hierarchy, colleges take on the characteristics of regular bureaucratic structures, with the “higher-ups” in charge. Moreover, even in faculty-dominated schools, a broad range of decisions related to the amount of money available for salaries and how the “pie” is to be divided among the estates of the university (other employees, building, students, etc.) are usually made by the adrmnistration and trustees. In public institutions, the legislature has considerable economic power, including that to set salary scales. Ironically, collective bargaining appears to be reducing the extent to which decisions are made at the campus or even universitywide level. Since the ultimate power to decide on a wage and working conditions package is in the hands of the state government in public institutions, the university administrators and trustees are increasingly bypassed by the unions in favor of direct negotiations with the state officials. Conversely, as noted, the traditional role of university adrmnistrators as lobbyists for more funds and higher salaries for the faculty is curtailed, for with collective bargaining they become agents of the

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employers’ side of the negotiations. This change in role necessarily widens the gap between administration and faculty.’ There is also an existing political issue among professors within facultydominated schools, since power inherently is unequally mstributed. For young, nontenured academics, there is a generational conflict of interest with senior members who are often, de facto, their employers until they are voted regular membershp (tenure). The efforts to “regularize” the granting of tenure, to permit those denied a permanency the right to file a grievance, to see the “record,” are in many schools directed against the tenured faculty at least as much as against the administration.2 And as tenure vacancies become fewer, junior faculty grow more anxious to protect their access to them. The argument that faculty unions might meet some real interests ofjunior stafi-, but not of senior professors, was made recently in explicit terms by the president of the AAUP chapter at a private institution, Boston University. [Unions cannot] offer tenured professors greater job security, since the instances of tenured faculty being fired are almost non-existent. . . . The only faculty group a union could really help are the junior, nontenured members, who tend to be exploited both on salary and working conditions, as well as having little job security. Unions might well lead to a higher percentage of these junior members being continued permanently in employment, but at a substantial price-the watering down of academic standards3 To extend to the research-oriented part of academe the trade union policies successfidly applied in elementary and high schools clearly would require some drastic modification of practice. The more scholarly productive faculty, though much more liberal than other academics on societal questions and, hence, ideologically more receptive to the norms of unionism in general,tend to be opposed to intramural changes that will reduce the emphasis on research, meritocracy, and the abhty of the academically successful to determine who will gain permanent status (tenure) in their institutions. Many of them see the competitive aspects of the system-the hgh regard given to presumed intellectual achevement as reflected in national and international peer judgmentsas desirable ways of motivating the successful to continue to innovate and the able young to work hard to prove themselves. Further, as Riesman notes, “a college faculty needs to combine the individualism one associates with artists and free-floating intellectuals,with the cooperative-competitive collegiality, not of a submarine crew, but of a research group, a private medical c h c , or the partners in an elite law firm.4 Even these concerns may dwindle, however, in the face of the financial crunch that reaches all across academe. Faced with declining monetary support,

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faculty may decide that unions are necessary. As Michigan State University economist Walter Adams, national president of AAUP, noted following the defeat of unionism in an MSU election in October 1972, economic hard times could quickly reverse the aversion of major university faculty: “Two bad years in the legislature and some lsliked adrmnistrative action-no matter how trivial-will eventually put over unionization.” It is not coincidental that the University of Hawaii voted to have a bargaining agent after statements by state officials that the university budget would be cut. In Rhode Island, the three state institutions for higher education all chose collective bargaining agents in 1971-72, a year in whch the legislature drastically cut appropriations for hgher education, the first time this has occurred since the days of the Depression.As noted earlier, a movement for unionization is sweeping through the various public colleges and universities in the state of Washington in 1973. To a considerable extent, this is a reaction to the legislature’s turning down the governor’s proposal for a sigmficant salary increase for faculty, and passing a token raise of $40 a month for nine months. What immediate success faculty unionism has at academically stronger colleges and universities will be determined sigruficantly by the short-run economic positions in whch these institutions h d themselves. In almost every state, the lesser parts of the public system argue vigorously for parity with the most prestigious public university in salaries, teaching loads, and research funds. With unionization, they should have greater power to affect variations in levels of supportand hence, in levels of quahty-among state-funded schools. And this will probably serve more to downgrade the relative stanlng of the high achievers among public universities than to bring the lesser ones up to the level of their more affluent competitors. At Rutgers, for example, the AAUP, on one hand, resists proposals to integrate facilities such as the computer center with those of the state college system, arguing strenuously that it is “one more step in the erosion of the independence of the University, disregarding, in an important area, the legitimate lfference between Rutgers and state college^."^ Yet, as the bargaining agent for a multicampus system, it finds that the faculty at the lesser units within the university press for parity with the more prestigious New Brunswick campus through the m e l u m of AAUP collective bargaining. Thus, a member of the AAUP bargaining team notes that the AAUP is resisting “an unequal allocation of new faculty positions in an apparent effort to increase college workloads [at the Camden campus] while stifling the development of a South Jersey graduate center,” and calls for “relatively equal working conditions within the University? The president of the Newark campus chapter notes “a gross inequity in appointments in NCAS vis-i-vis its counterparts in New Brunswick.” Newark has “a negligible number of professor 11’s and a dispro-

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portionately large number of instructors,” and he calls for a “redress of these imbalances at the bargaining table.”’ Somewhat similar developments may be in the offing at the University of California, where the University Council of the AFT has opposed efforts by the statewide university administration to concentrate university research library resources in the two main centers, Berkeley and Los Angeles. The AFT, disproportionately strong, as we have noted, in the smaller campuses, argues that the university should build strong libraries there as well.* Our discussion of the prospects and impact of unionization has centered on public rather than private institutions. As noted, relatively few private institutions are currently covered by collective bargaining contracts, and half of these are with the AAUF! Although the federal National Labor Relations Board has assumed jurisdiction over such schools, thus permitting elections to be called regardless of state policy, unions have had little success. Evidence drawn fiom Peterson’s 1972 survey of California fac~lty,~ and from the results of union efforts, suggest that collective bargaining has greater appeal within the private sector among faculty at Catholic colleges. Seemingly in spite of the moves toward secularization and internal self-government, the lay staff at these schools feel morg aggrieved toward their administrations and boards than do those at non-Catholic private institutions. But Catholic colleges apart, a variety of other factors assure that the state legislative actions, notably reducing appropriations for higher education below the level faculty deem essential, provide a raison d’ttre for unions and a clarity of focus not present in the possibly more severe financial situation of private colleges and universities. Furthermore, the existence of multicampus state systems, with their extreme heterogeneity in academic standmg and interests, and hence their great variations in orientations toward unionization, creates a potential for conflict not found in the private sector, where institutions internally are far more homogeneous. The greater pressures for unionization in the public sector has led one distinguished student of higher education to anticipate that “private colleges and universities might be able to far outstrip their distinguished public competitors, once unionization has embraced the latter. . . .”lo David Riesman suggests that because unionization results in increased emphasis on adherence to diverse bureaucratic rules and regulations, whereas nonunionized major private universities are able to remain relatively undisciplined aggregates, the latter wdl become much more attractive places for creative scholars to work. More important, perhaps, in fostering a variation in faculty quahty between the upper rungs of the public and private sectors may be their strilungly different personnel policies. Although union contracts have almost invariably made it more CGfficult for schools to turn men down for tenure than previously,

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many of the leadmg private universities have placed an even greater emphasis on scholarly excellence, evaluated in a highly competitive context, as a requirement for tenure. From Stanford to Yale, administrators of such institutions have announced that the percentage of nontenure faculty who may expect to be promoted to a tenure position is to be reduced sharply. In the absence of any faculty union, such proposals have met with little or no objection. Conversely, an effort during 1972-1973 at the University of California to modify the policy that had existed during the decades of continual expansion, a policy under which any nontenure assistant professor could be promoted to a tenure associate professorship if he met the criteria of merit, was blocked, in part at least, because of strong resistance from the AFT. With the cessation of growth, and limitations on state funds, the university proposed to link the number who could get tenure to criteria such as “the availability of funds,” “fiscal considerations,” “the University’s need for an indwidual’s services,” “programmatic restriction,” and “budgetary restriction.” Following strong objections from the AFT, and the senate, the university administration announced in December 1972 that it would withdraw this proposal and seek to find a formula that might be more acceptable to faculty critics.” As noted earlier, union objections to tightening tenure opportunities have been even more overt at less prestigious public institutions, which place less emphasis on research attainments as a criterion for tenure. In the New Jersey State College system, the AFT has bitterly attacked an effort by the chancellor to limit the number who may secure tenure in order to allow for some “institutional flexibility” in making hture appointments. The chancellor pointed to the practice of private universities to justify his proposal, but the comparison was rejected by the AFT, which argues that “there are no limitations on the percentage of tenure faculty” in public institutions. They insisted that higher education should not “operate in a cold and calculating manner towards its people,” that “the traditional humane qualities which have characterized the academic community” call for “a high rate of award of tenure.”12 It should be noted that the president of Rutgers, one of the leading universities to be “unionized,” stressed at the end of 1972 that collective bargaining had not affected the quality of the faculty. He indicated, however, that the Rutgers-AAUP contract had a special character. It &d not affect “appointment and promotion of faculty and the development of most aspects of educational policy.”*3By the spring of 1973, however, this situation had changed. The Rutgers AAUP was involved in a struggle to resist the university’s efforts to tighten up tenure standards, and, as noted earlier, opposed administration proposals for a merit increase package. Professors at the other important sector of public

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higher education in New Jersey, the state college system, recently voted to change its bargaining representative from the NEA to the AFT, in part because the former did not appear sufficiently militant in a period of financial stringency. l 4 From the broadest perspective, the rapid growth of collective bargaining in higher education during the past half-decade should be seen as the extensionto the level of university governance and faculty life--of the powerful trends toward equalization and away from elitism that have characterized many sectors of American society since the mid-1960s. As recently as 1968, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman stressed the extent to which the last several decades had witnessed throughout the entire system the triumph of meritocracy and of the values of the creative-research culture fostered by the leading faculty of the major in~titutions.’~ They called attention to a “redistribution of power” withm the universities that had given the faculty control over courses, curriculum, standards for a h t t i n g students, and most importantly, complete power with respect to selecting and rewarding colleagues. As they noted, at the better schools faculty were appointed “almost entirely on the basis of their ‘output’ and professional reputation. . . . The claims of locahsm, sectarianism, ethnic prejudice and preference, class background, age, sex . . . are largely ignored.”16These emphases and values, first largely centered in the major graduate institutions, permeated out to the lesser ones. As a result, there was “a rapid decline in teaching loads for productive scholars, an increase in the ratio of graduate to undergraduate students at the institutions where scholars are concentrated, the gradual elimination of unscholarly undergraduates from these institutions, and the partial elimination of unscholarly faculty.”” Administrators came to “see their institution primarily as an assemblage of scholars and scientists, each doing his work in his own way. Most university presidents see their primary responsibility as ‘malung the world safe for academicians.””8 By 1973,it is obvious that the scene has changed considerably. The egalitarian pressures of the late 1960s have broken the hold of meritocratic values. Universities have altered their admission policies to give special preference to students from “culturally deprived” backgrounds, defined in ethnic, racial, sex, and class terms. The emphasis on grades as a means of separating students has been sharply reduced, even within the Ivy League, where a school such as Brown has permitted students to take all courses on an ungraded basis. Under pressure from the federal government, and reinforced by the belief of many faculty in liberal-left egalitarian values, affirmative action programs, often including informal but real quotas for people belonging to deprived groups, have been accepted by many leading institutions in their faculty appointment policies. Moreover, the rapid spread of unionization has pressed to

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reduce meritocracy even further as a basis for differentiation within the professoriate itself. Organizations of academics oppose merit increases and seek to reduce the ability of the universities to emphasize competitive judgments about scholarly excellence as a basis for granting or refusing tenure. It may be argued that faculty unionization is part of an effort by the mass of academe to lessen the domination of a relatively small group of dstinguished scholars. Writing in 1968, Jencks and Riesman noted that “in the course of trying to strengthen their faculty, adrmnistrators of upwardly mobile institutions also usually offend many of the ‘weak’ faculty currently on the payr~ll.”’~ They did not anticipate, however, that the offended faculty so soon would be in a position to strike back. A combination of factors-the change in the larger sociopolitical atmosphere from the stress in the 1950s on achievement and meritocracy to that in the 1960s on egalitarianism and particularism, together with the drastic shift in the economic circumstances governing budgets, both for salaries and research-have given academics who are less privileged and less involved in research the opportunity to challenge the main drection of much of higher education.20 Yet the reversal of emphasis was inherent in the earlier commitment of the society to widen access to higher education for the majority of youth, to make the academy a “mass institution.” Since World War 11, the great growth has been (1) in the public as compared to the private sector, and (2) in the “lower-tier” teaching institutions compared to those that are concerned with basic research and the training of scholars. In the prototypical state of California, there are now 96 community colleges with 700,000 students, and 13,000 faculty; 19 campuses of the State University and Colleges system with close to 300,000 students and over 11,000 faculty; and 9 units of the University of California, which have over 100,000 students and 6,000 faculty. The community colleges and the State University and Colleges are explicitly defined as “teaching” institutions; the latter system does not give work beyond the master’s degree. Standards for both student and faculty selection appropriate to graduate and research-oriented universities clearly do not apply to the larger teaching systems. But as noted earlier, many of the policies implicit in unionization do apply to the latter. For them, the need is to institutionalize their relations with public authorities, to bargain collectively, for unlike the ‘‘scholars’’ they have little individual bargaining power. The issues posed by unionization have been confused by the presence of quite disparate schools withm such multicampus state systems as Hawaii, SUNY, CUNY, and the expanded, integrated University of Wisconsin. As two students of the multicampus university note, it is highly dubious “whether the differences . . . among campuses ranging fiom two-year technical schools to

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graduate-dominated university centers can be contained within a single system of collective bargaining.”21There is question, however, whether public authorities are willing to define explicitly and support major public centers of scholarship. At the moment, political pressures seem largely opposed to this. In California, proposals to revise the Master Plan for Higher Education call for increasing the “open enrollment” component of the student body at the University of California. It may be extremely difficult for a publicly supported university, subject to legislative budgetary control, to remain a highly selective institution. Hence, Riesman’s more recent anticipation of a growing gap in scholarly quality between the distinguished public and private universities has a good chance of being confirmed, not only because of changes inherent in unionization, but also because of the increased public support for equality of result. Although we have repeatedly alluded in the body of this volume to the varying appeals of the three major national faculty groupings, and less systematically to their actual policies, we have not attempted to estimate the future of their contest with each other. The NEA, which began with the considerable advantage of widespread backing among faculty in two-year community colleges and among those linked to teacher education in four-year schools, was also able to recruit amates in major universities such as CUNY and S U M . Apparently, it was seen by faculty leaders there as constituting less of a threat to their autonomy than would affiliation with the more union-like AFT, while offering access to the resources of a politically potent and wealthy national organization with over a million schoolteacher members. Faced with &fficult negotiations in a worsening academic economy, however, the d t a n c y identified with the AFT has gradually given that organization increased support, particularly among liberal arts and younger faculty at the less prestigious institutions. The AAUF’, as noted, is increasingly successful among faculty at the middletier, more research-oriented universities, whose faculty stdl feel some qualms about being part of the “labor movement.” These variations in character of support wdl undoubtedly continue to characterize the differences in choice of collective bargaining agent in the near future. Yet, it must be stressed that the policy differences separating the affiliates of the three national groups that secure collective bargaining rights are strilung by their absence. Although the NEA has drawn on more conservative teachers at all levels of education, economic and political circumstances have led it to follow much the same line of action and program as the AFT. And as should be apparent from our references to the activities of AAUP collective bargaining agents, the AAUP also takes on all the characteristics of a union in negotiating situations. The pressures toward common behavior are

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initially apparent in contested elections, in which the Qfferent groups find it necessary to assure the faculty electorate that they can do everything their rivals claim to do, except that they can do it better. The growth of such similarities suggests an inherent pressure toward the eventual merger of all three into one academic union. Countering this tendency, however, may be varying interests and status concerns.Joseph Kauffman, who watched the developments in Rhode Island in 1971-1972 while president of Rhode Island College, suggests that the reason the faculty at his college chose the AFT rather than the NEA was that the Rhode Island Junior College staff, who voted first, opted for the NEA. In New Jersey, a variety of observers agree that one of the main forces impelling the Rutgers faculty to endorse the AAUP was their felt need to find a way of resisting the pressures for equahzation with the state college system, which had chosen the NEA as a bargaining agent. Within each state, therefore, different levels of public higher education may find it worthwhile to choose dfferent representation agents, so as to maintain their ability to compete effectively with other segments, and to emphasize their dstinctiveness. The issues surrounding faculty unionism are far from resolved. Most of higher education is not yet organized. The more “profession-like’’ researchoriented sector, even in public universities, thus far has resisted incorporation into a unionized system. What is clear is that trade unionism, so long considered by professors to be totally inappropriate to their interests and status, will be the focus of major activity and confict throughout academe over the current decade. In those cases where various pressures lead the faculty at major schools to elect a union as a bargaining agent, the stage will be set for a struggle between junior and senior s t a g in statewide systems, the fight will also be between the major center(s) and the lesser campuses. The mere presence of these conflicts, apart from their resolution, will have profound consequences for the future of American higher education. Reviewing this effort to analyze the emergence of collective bargaining and trade unionism among the faculty in higher education, we are conscious of the extent to which the subject lends itself to a narrow Qscussion of benefits and losses, ignoring the special quality of university life. It may be fitting, therefore, to conclude with the comments of a man who has spent his life dealing with problems of collective bargaining-as a labor lawyer, as &rector of the UCLA Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, and most recently as chairman of a special committee set up by the California legislature to advise it on collective bargaining legislation for public employees and faculty. After evaluating some of the changes that are introduced into academe by collective bargaining, Benjamin Aaron noted, and we agree:

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What is missing fiom this vision of the future, or at least dimly perceived, is a quality of life in our colleges and universities in which eccentricity and nonconformity can still flourish; in which distinguished scholarship is honored despite its lack of “relevance”-that mean little word; in which the main ties between colleagues are their intellectual interests; in which costbenefit analysis is not the sole basis on which the value of every course or degree program is judged; and in which these institutions, in addition to administering to the contemporary needs of their students and helping to solve some of the problems faced by the broader community, remain the guardians and transmitters of the world’s cultural heritage.**

NOTES 1. At S U M , the “Negotiations process provides the opportunity for faculty members and NTPs, through their leadership in SPA, to deal directly with representatives of the executive branch of state government. Ths means that established administrative channels leading to the central administration and board of trustees are bypassed. The latter two groups face serious consequences including responsibility for a university governed in a si&cant way by a contract for which they were not completely responsible” (Fisk and Puffer 1973,152). In California, although formal collective bargaining does not yet exist, unions in the California University and State Colleges System have successfdy appealed salary policies adopted by the trustees to the State Finance Office, as noted earlier. 2. Bloustein, Edward J., “Unionization in Academe,” New York Times, February 2, 1973. 3. McDowell, Banks, “Should University Faculties Be Unionized?” The Boston Globe,June 18, 1972. 4. Riesman, David, “Commentary and Epilogue,” in David Riesman and Verne Stadtman, eds., Academic Transformations (New York McGraw-Hill, 1973), 426. 5. Horton, George, “Crisis at Rutgers,” Rutgers AAUP Bulletin, 1972,3. 6. Sigler, Jay, “College Autonomy and Faculty Working Conditions Undermined by Rutgers Administration and DHE,” Rutgers AAUP Bulletin, 1973,3. 7 . Troy, Leo, “Faculty to Be Reduced by 14 Because of Enrollment Drop-AAUP says ‘Faculty Must Be Consulted,’” Rutgers AAUP Bulletin, 1972,9. 8. “UC Library Report Backs Reagan Plan to Cut Graduate Programs,” University Guardian, vol. 2 (January 1973): 1,4. 9. Peterson, Richard E., Goalsfor Calijiornia Higher Education:A Survey .f 1 16 College Communities, The Joint Committee on the Master Plan for Higher Education, California Legislature, Sacramento, 1973. 10. kesman, David, “Commentary and Epilogue,” 427. 11. “AFT-Senate Protests Block ‘Floating Bottom,’” university Guardian, vol. 2 (January 1973): 1,4.

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12. Memorandum to N e w Jersey Board $Higher Educationjom the Council $NewJersey State College Locals N U S F T - A F T November 2,1972,2. 13. Bloustein, Edward J., “Unionization in Academe,” New York Times, February 2, 1973. 14. “N.J. State Colleges Join AFT Trend: Major Election Victory” The U P C Advocate, vol. 3 (February 1973): 11. 15. Jencks, Christopher, and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 15-20. Lee, Eugene C., and Frank M. Bowen, The Multicampus University (New York McGraw-Hill, 1971), 39495. 16. Jencks and Riesman, The Academic Revolution, 17. 17. Jencks and Riesman, The Academic Revolution, 17. 18. Jencks and Riesman, The Academic Revolution, 17. 19. Jencks and Riesman, The Academic Revolution, 17. 20. For a discussion of the shifting semi-cyclical character of the interacting tension between the emphases on equality and achievement in American life, see Lipset, The First N e w Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1967), 140-47. 21. Lee, Eugene C., and Frank M. Bowen, The Multicampus University (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 293. 22. Aaron, Benjamin, “Some P a i d Realities,” UCLA Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, Los Angeles, December 1971,1415.

Everett Carll Ladd Jr., professor of political science at the University of Connecticut at the time of original publication. Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of government and sociology at Harvard University at the time of original publication.

A C A D E M I C P O L I T I C S : FACULTYU N I O N S AND THE ACADEMIC PERCEPTION

William R.Brown

I

n today’s intellectual environment there is a tendency when deahng with speciahzed institutions (and surely a university fits this category) to ask that writers or theorizers test their suppositions, even when these seem reasonable. The critics want proof. Conclusions based on indwidual experience are suspect when any effort is made to draw general propositions fiom them. In concluding this examination of academic politics, a statistical or behavioral summation will not be attempted. Instead, the principles are set forth in preceding chapters will be reviewed within the single context of faculty unions. Perhaps such an exercise will demonstrate little more than that the principles are consistent within this single context. But even that degree of vahdity may help remove any lingering suspicion that the notions presented here could possibly be fancihl. The advent of faculty collective bargaining provides a useful set of confines within which to review the concepts that have been used to explain the academic endeavor. At the outset let us concede that this device offers only a limited group of institutions for analysis. From the nearly two thousand public and private colleges and universities in the United States that offer bachelors This chapter is reproduced with minor alteration from Wfiam R. Brown, “Faculty Unions and the Academic Perception,” in Academic Politicr (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982).Reprinted with permission from the University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

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degrees or better, only about three hundred have collective bargaining units representing faculty.’ At some seventy-five colleges and universities collective bargaining has been rejected. Nevertheless, faculty unionism is contemporary, and it is practiced at a wide variety of institutions in higher education. One view of collective bargaining is that it is antithetical to the academic perception; it represents yet another intrusion of society’s values upon the academy. How could it ever be used, a critic might ask, to demonstrate anything about academia and academicians? Certainly, tensions exist between what traditional industrial unions stand for and how academicians have customarily organized their profession. But often it is at a point of tension that behavior becomes explicit. In the presence of tension, we usually do not have to guess about attitudes by considering what is inferred in a situation. People will say what is on their minds. And so it is with faculty unions. Material for this chapter was drawn fiom eleven collective bargaining agreements. These were selected almost at random, but they can be placed in categories insofar as they include contracts of faculties in private universities, the state’s university, state college systems, and public colleges and universities that have individual rather than systemwide contracts. The contracts also represent a variety of bargaining agents; thus the selection offers a fairly representative sample. INSTITUTION States College and University Systems The State Universities of Minnesota New Jersey State Colleges Pennsylvania State Colleges and Universities The State University The University of Connecticut The University of Maine Public Colleges and Universities with Individual Contracts University of Cincinnati Western Michigan University University of Northern Iowa Private Universities University of Bridgeport Fairleigh Dickinson University St.John’s University

COLLECTIVE BARGAIN AGENT National Education Association P E A ) American Federation of Teachers Independent

American Association of University Professors (AAUP) NEA

AAUP

AAUP

AAUP-NEA

AAUP AAUP AAUP

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Any sample is, of course, open to analysis. Certain things can be said about the conclusions reached from a sample’s data simply by observing the distinctions and characteristics of the colleges and universities that are represented in it. A survey conducted by Seymour Martin Lipset and Carll Everett Ladd Jr., in 1978 suggests some of these distinctions. Unionism has been most acceptable at two-year colleges, which are excluded from consideration in this explanation. Generally it has also seen success at institutions that have experienced the intercession of public sector bureaucratic concepts and where the principal mission is teaching rather than research and scholarship. There appears to be less resistance to collective bargaining among faculty at four-year colleges than at universities having strong graduate components. Individual faculty members who do not join unions, even when their campuses are organized, also appear to be more dehcated to publishng than those who do join the union. Even among bargaining units there are differences. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) finds much more support at universities than at four-year or two-year colleges. The opposite is true for the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Members of AAUP also appear to be much more inclined toward publication than those associated with the other two organizations.2 These data would seem to suggest that faculty unionism might have an inverse “fit” with the academic political perception of our Cartesian. But this is not necessarily the case. The Lipset-Ladd study found that 75 percent of faculty across the country would vote in favor of collective bargaining even though only 25 percent are actually represented by bargaining agents. Moreover, a review of faculty contracts demonstrates that by and large these do not contradict the academic spirit. Whatever the experience with collective bargaining in industry, when this device falls into the hands of academicians, it is used to serve their purposes-a furtherance of the Cartesian principles. Thus, we can expect contracts generally to protect the indwidual by allowing independence in the classroom and freedom of research activities. They will conserve the academicians’ most precious commodity-unencumbered time-and they will do what they can to assure the security of a stable environment. We should also expect the drafters of collective bargaining agreements to be preoccupied with the other three Cartesian attributes-rational consideration in all things, objectivity, and no limit on inquiry. Faculty contracts should also demonstrate both the academician’s preference for collegiality as a means of organizing his efforts and his suspicion of all authority other than h s discipline. The academician’s collective bargaining agreements do, in fact, reveal such proclivities.

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Although a perusal of their contracts is useful, too much should not be made of faculties’ collective bargaining agreements as a guide to how universities operate. In fact, it is not possible to determine procedures and practices at a particular college from a review of the faculty’s contract. A great deal of the actual operations of the university is incorporated in custom, informal practice, and governance systems that are not superseded by a contract. Contracts do, however, tell us a great deal about how the academician sees his situation-his relationship to the college or university with which he happens to be affiliated. They are probably most useful for showing what is on an academician’s mind. For the purposes of this discussion, therefore, contracts wdl be used only to gain access to the academician’s world.

THE ACADEMICIAN’S SYMBOLS A common practice in faculty collective bargaining agreements is to justie the agreement in terms of the mission of higher education and of the university. This is not unusual for a profession that posits its organization on principles rather than goals. In faculty collective bargaining, an underlying supposition is apparently that the contract will contribute to the college’s well-being. Academic freedom is set forth as the principal vehicle by which contract aims wdl be achieved. Thus, in the New Jersey State College system, “It is the responsibilities of these colleges to provide their students a quality education program, to broaden the horizons of knowledge through research and to make available these resources to the needs of the larger community.” The contract continues, “In order to fulfill these obligations, the parties endorse the concepts of academic freedom, professional ethics and resp~nsibilities.”~ Indeed, principles are evoked even to justify collective bargaining. At other institutions the formula does not vary appreciably. Usually academic h-eedom is reaffirmed in the language of the 1940 AAUP statement, even at institutions where AAUP is not the bargaining agent. In a few cases, faculty have managed to extend the sense of the contract beyond fieedom and move toward the prized autonomy of our dependent entrepreneur. Thus, at Cincinnati the contract allows faculty a “h-ee search for truth and its h-ee expression” and provides for ‘‘f fi-eedom d of inquiry, teaching and research not only in the classroom and libraries but in other facets of campus life.”4 The Cincinnati contract does not include the usual admonishment to avoid in the classroom controversial material not an integral part of the course. In the Pennsylvania system, faculty are entitled to 111 h-eedom in research, in the classroom, and in the selection of teachmg ma-

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terials. A ll information related to a member’s work is privdeged and not subject to dlsclosure. On campus there is fieedom to speak, to be heard, to study, to teach, and to ahnister. All members of the academic community have fieedom of movement and pursuit of their righidid Faculty contracts state their purpose in an abstract fashion. Any statement that hinges simply upon academic freedom does not reflect the mission of the university in an institutional sense. By and large, contracts are about the in&vidual academician. In this regard, they are the implement of faculty. At the same time, they are not justified fiom the standpoint of benefits to accrue to faculty themselves. Rather, the benefits are to be enjoyed by a third party-the community in the person of students who are to be afforded academic excellence in teaching as a result of the contract. Thus, the hnction of the academician under the contract is also his guidlng principle. Contracts do not link the interests of the faculty solely to the work of the university. Rather, they tie these interests to its mission, which is then expressed in terms of academic freedom. In this way, contracts affirm the organizing principle of the academician-faculty as university. Contracts are more, therefore, than a recitation of appropriate con&tions of work. They are often highly symbolic and actually embody the academician’s values. Thus, the attention that they devote to the selfless mission of serving the public should not be surprising. The essence of an academic career is independence, buttressed by the ascriptive sanction of a terminal degree. This degree more or less certhes the individual academician not simply to teach and engage in research but to teach and study within an academic dlscipline in some way that allows for a minimum of outside interference. This quality of reserving the position of the individual within an institutional context is found in most faculty collective bargaining agreements. This same primacy of the individual is present in the assignment of courses within the discipline. Most contracts suggest that teaching assignments must be negotiated with the individual. Then there is the selection of faculty to teach summer courses, a continuing hassle at most universities. Clearly, consideration for individual faculty is meant to take precedence over institutional concerns. Such an assertion, of course, is unintekgible to the academician insofar as he sees the faculty as the university. Some contracts go to great length in truly nonenforceable articles to justift the academician’s independence. In a much belabored point, the Cincinnati contract asserts with regard to faculty duties and responsibilities, “It cannot be expected that a bargaining unit member perform to a significant degree in all of the aforementioned areas. Accordlngly, the responsibdities of individual Bargaining Unit [sic] members wdl vary depending upon the specific areas of activity in which they are mainly engaged.”6In short, the independence and

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mix of talents and quahties present in each academician are seen as being unique and virtually sacrosanct. Once again, an effort is made to place the individual above the institution. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of what academicians hope to achieve by building a sometimes elaborate superstructure of individuality in their contracts. A contract is not the self-conscious writing of an inchidual about his profession. It is supposed to be a working document, and whatever the academician hopes to include must have approval of the administrative counterparts at the bargaining table. The drafters are literally writing without a sense of authorship. Contracts are meant to defend and protect the profession. The contract of Western Michigan University makes t h s point. Among its appendixes is the AAUP Professional Code of Ethcs, which states in part: His primary responsibility to his subject is to seek and to state the truth as he sees it. To this end he devotes his energies to developing and improving his scholarly competence. He accepts the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending,and transmitting knowledge. He practices intellectual honesty. Although he may follow subsidiary interests, these interests must never seriously hamper or compromise his firedom of inquiry.’

This statement is noteworthy insofar as it is the description of an obligation-almost an oath. But this loyalty is to the academician’s subject, not his university. Certainly, the Code of Ethics is not simply an allusion to the duties associated with a job, and it is hardly justiciable. The obligation is to grow intellectually without any assurance of ever doing anything other than to teach and to pursue whatever the mind is capable of grasping. Our Cartesian is serious about his creed. There should be little wonder that contracts reflect the unceasing effort to serve the individual. In readmg the AAUP Code, an executive h m industry or government might assume that it is little more than a fancy way of talking about professional development. But academicians “develop” in an unusual way. They do not do so as groups, enrolling in special courses or engaging in special on-the-job training. Professional development is a continuing personal process of working alone, going to professional meetings, or perhaps consulting and workmg in a special nonteaching research institute. Professional development is self-initiated, and faculty contracts devote a great deal of attention to it.Virtually every contract allows for professional travel with some institutional support. There is also the provision for sabbatical leaves-the practice of intellectual renewal by removing oneself fiom the classroom and perhaps fiom the college every so ofZen to engage in selfimprovement. Two of the contracts (the h4innesota system’ and Western Michgan) spec@ that special research funds wdl be available to support this aspect of

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academic Me. In the case of Minnesota, the union helps establish criteria for &stributing funds. At Western Michigan,the faculty research council holds this task, which is the usual practice at universities. The concern of administrators in these matters is obviously with how far a college or university can go in supporting the indwidual perception. Their role is to limit the amount of university resources devoted to personal growth. The academician himself could never put a cap on it. In most contracts, the sums available for research are specified, the amounts and the conditions under which faculty can expect support from the university for professional travel are given, and sabbaticals are either limited by a number or proportion of faculty. Somehow at Fairleigh Diclunson University, administrators permitted themselves to be maneuvered into a costly situation. A quota of sabbatical leaves has been set for each college of the university each year that equals oneseventh of the number of tenured full-time faculty members. In effect, an academic norm has been incorporated into a document that is legally bindmg on the university. Personal services (principally faculty salaries) can account for 80-85 percent of a university’s costs. With perhaps three-quarters of the faculty tenured, t h s sabbatical provision alone could consume close to 10 percent of the budget. The university in this case has indeed made a substantial commitment to the development of the individual faculty member. Some tension is reflected in the agreements over the locus of decision making on these matters. For the most part, faculty committees award sabbatical leaves with the approval of the president or hts designee. The conflict that emerges in deciding how many faculty wdl have sabbatical leaves in a year is between the individual pursuits of the academician and the teaching responsibihties of the university. A compromise between these demands was achteved at the University of Maine,where different categories of sabbatical leave are idended as being granted by the university, campus,division, and department. Decisions can be made at the correspondmglevel provided the campus chief a h s t r a t o r approves and no addhonal costs are incurred. In effect, a sabbatical leave may be given if peers wdl assume the teaching load that would otherwise be carried by the recipient. The same provision applies at Bridgeport.As a result, an element of self-regulation by the faculty is introduced into the process of distributing sabbatical leaves. Less of a sense of institutional control is imposed on the indwidual. When peers are prepared to assume a colleague’s load, a sabbatical leave can perhaps be granted. The compulsion of those who drafi collective bargaining agreements is to enhance the position of the individual while serving the interests of the university. It can lead to ambivalence in some contracts. Uncertainty prevails at Bridgeport on personnel matters pertaining to appointment, reappointment, promotion, and tenure of faculty. Here the presi-

146

Selected Readings

dent’s decisions “shall be based on evidence of merit in the individual’s Personnel File or on institutional need.”’ The two criteria can, of course, come into conflict. The former requires that the individual be assessed only on his personal record measured against what amounts to an abstract standard perceived as “merit”; the latter permits the comparativejudgment that serves the institution but is abhorred by the academician. In following the rational dictates of the material in the personnel file, the president is relieved of any possibility for judgment, but in considering institutional need, personal judgment by someone other than the academician being assessed can be determinant. Presumably, discretion is left to the president with regard to which guidance he will follow, but he can be sure that his decision wdl be greeted with loud complaints if it is against the individual. In these instances, the implied contradctions in the language of the contracts are obvious. It appears that the academician prefers to behave symbolically by enunciating in his contract the independence of the individual even while accepting an operational situation that almost certainly precludes his acheving indwidual preeminence. The only alternative to this confkt is to risk seeing the indwidual perception ignored altogether in the text of the contractsacrificed to the requirements of the group as determined by someone other than hmself. A contradiction in the contract is preferable, even though the academician’s craft normally requires that he trade in logical propositions. The primacy of the indvidual in academia is reflected by contracts in a variety of other ways. In the Pennsylvania system, information the academician may have about students is privileged, depending on how the professor sees the interests of the student. At Bridgeport, any change in office location is subject to an elaborate procedure insofar as “an alteration of the immediate worhng environment of a faculty member . . .may impede the faculty member’s work effectiveness.”1° Primacy is afforded the individual at the University of Connecticut by an unusual means. This institution has no effective salary scale or teaching load. Each individual makes his own arrangements with the university. In concept, at least, this is the height of entrepreneurial behavior. Another example of the individual’s release fiom the constraints of a system is evident at Fairleigh Dickinson, where there is no minimum for the time in rank before being eligible for promotion. A guideline exists, and everyone knows the university’s practice. But provision is made for cases in which indwidual qualities are more important than the orderliness that is sometimes supposed to come from uniformity in practice and procedure. Essentially, all faculty do the same work. Emphasis on teaching as opposed to research will vary from one university to another, but generally the duties are the same. The norms of the profession define them simply as teaching, re-

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search, and university-cum-community service. The contracts that were reviewed demonstrate that although this definition prevails,faculty and administrators can be ingenious in how they phrase the formula. One purpose of enumerating duties in contracts is, of course, to allow for personnel evaluation by the university. Conversely, a common thread in contracts is protection of the individual from institutional judgments when evaluation occurs. This can be done in a number of ways. In the Pennsylvania system it is achieved by setting forth responsibilities separate fiom evaluation criteria. Whereas the former is attached for some reason to the concept of an indwidual’s academic fieedom, the latter is associated mainly with institutional procedure. Any effort to structure individual performance according to an administrator’s interpretation of institutional requirements can be questioned. And here we encounter the preferred means of protecting the individual. It is the practice of stating responsibilities-and presumable criteria for evaluation-as norms that are not enforceable. At Fairleigh Diclunson, under the heading of responsibilities and obligations, a faculty member is called upon to aspire to excellence in teaching, stimulate the intellectual development of his students, strive to keep informed of contemporary developments in his field of specialization,seek to manifest objectivity and fairness in his relations with members of the university community, strive to improve methods of instruction, and recognize diversity. Would any administrator care to deny tenure or promotion because an applicant supposedly did not fulfill one of these obligations?At Cincinnati it is much the same. In this case, the university recognizes “that in the practice of their profession faculty members’ principal academic functions are the teaching, discovery, creation, and reporting of knowledge.”” Could anyone ever be assessed on his discovery of knowledge? As fiustrating as these formulations might be to an administrator, for the academician they are delightful manifestations of his independence. Virtually all definitions of an academician’s responsibihties include the idea of service. The term is used loosely. For academia as a whole, it means activity beyond teaching and research or artistic performance that is somehow considered meritorious. Sometimes it is construed narrowly, within the professional competence of the individual being considered. Sometimes it is not. Whatever the local practice, virtually all institutions continue fiinge benefits during periods of leave without pay when the academician may be working for compensation beyond the confines of the university. The implication here is that the university somehow benefits fiom this activity. It is service. All these stipulations may appear to be n o t h g more than inconsequential personnel business, but they reveal somethmg about the profession that sets it apart. Most important,they emphasize the independent nature of the Cartesian’s

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Selected Readings

work insofar as the sections of contracts devoted to service either define or regulate activity undertaken by the indwidual. Service is not an institutional concept. Outside activity, whether for monetary gain or only for reputation, is actually considered in evaluating an academician’s performance for the rewards of tenure and promotion within the university. It thereby becomes a public trust assumed personally by the practitioner. Ths obligation has very little to do with the university. It is undertaken by the indwidual because it is the culmination of his profession, not of the particular position he may hold. Only a secondary basis of legitimacy for service is institutional-the mission of the university. As we have seen, in virtually all cases this mission in collective bargaining agreements is phrased as service to the community. Thus, when an academician serves the community, even in ways that are outside his institution (and sometimes his profession),he is seen as furthering the objectives of the college. When we examine the concept of community service carefdy, we see that there is a lot more to it than carrying the name of the college. Deeply embedded in the practices and perceptions associated with the idea of service is the core of the profession. The academician and his institution trade on reputation in a way that is distinct from profit. Esteem is an end in itself, and it is a quality of the individual professor. Only to the extent that the indwidual garners reputation can it be attributed to his institution. All these relationships are fashioned to display values rather than to achieve an outcome-something that becomes incidental without them. Within this context, the faculty does become the university and the individual does reach ascendancy over the institution. And this awareness is present in the collective bargaining agreements of academicians.

GUARDING THE ACADEMICIAN’S TIME A major point in this book has been the jealousy with which the academician guards his time. A life of teaching and scholarship often involves a conscious decision to give up prospects for high income in exchange for control over one’s time. Many academicians are defensive about the lack of public understanding of their profession, particularly the erroneous notion that they work only ten to twelve hours a week-the time they actually spend in the classroom. Faculty collective bargaining agreements reflect a preoccupation with time. In fact, one interpretation of contracts is that the entire organizing motive behind them rests on its protection. Some contracts include self-serving statements that are apparently meant to explain the academician’s point of view on this matter. In dealing with fac-

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ulty responsibilities, the Cincinnati contract digresses to state that “any one of these functions can of necessity be very time consuming. For example, a teacher normally spends far less time in the classroom than in preparation, conferences, grading papers and examinations, and supervision of remedial or advanced student work.”12 At Maine the apology takes the following form: “University faculty members’ service is not measured in a fixed number of hours per week. The faculty member is expected to devote as much time as necessary to fulfd his or her resp~nsibilities.’”~ Turning to the Fairleigh Dickinson contract, we find that “teaching load” is set aside for the idea of “academic load, which embraces a much broader range of activities.” Moreover, at Fairleigh Diclunson “fulfillment of professional responsibilities cannot be measured by any single time ~tandard.”’~ The touchstone of faculty time is the teaching load required of an academician, combined with other obligations to the university that can be translated into minutes and hours. The limitations that contracts place on load may be expressed as the number of credit hours to be taught in a semester or quarter, the number of separate courses the academician will teach (preparations), hours in the classroom (contact hours), and even the student-faculty ratio or the number of students who can be in a class. Also mentioned are specified office hours, how many students a faculty member must advise, and how all these duties may be grouped in a schedule. Special activities such as theater productions, the coaching of sports, supervision of student teaching, and science laboratory instruction are often quantified by formulas that de@ extra academic understanding. In most cases cocurricular activities cannot be equated with specific time allotments. Instead, they are listed as an obligation the individual must meet. Surprisingly, three of the contracts that were reviewed made no allusion to workload (Conne~ticut,’~ Maine, and the University of Northern Iowai6).One addressed the matter of overload but not workload (Cincinnati). No conclusion can be reached fi-om these omissions; they reflect local condltions, or “past practice,” as contract jargon would put it. But at every university, we may be assured that a clear concept of load exists. The representatives of the faculty at the time the contracts were negotiated at Connecticut, Maine, Northern Iowa, and Cincinnati no doubt concluded that it was not in their interest to enumerate load. Consideration of the academician’s time is reflected in contracts in a variety of ways other than specified workloads. Some contracts state explicitly that teachmg during summer session and the carrying of an “overload” w d be voluntary, even though this understanding goes without saying at virtually all schools. Among the contracts that make it explicit are those of the New Jersey system, the Pennsylvania system, St.John’s, Bridgeport, and Fairleigh Diclunson.

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Selected Readings

The care that is given to load has ramifications that an outsider often may not fathom. No matter what an academician’s load, he is likely to complain about it. Thrty years ago, standard load was five courses a semester. Currently it is four courses at institutions characterized as “four-year teaching colleges” and three or sometimes two courses at research-oriented universities. Whenever a special assignment outside the classroom is suggested by a dean, faculty usually raise the question of “released time,” that is, a reduction in teaching load commensurate with the additional responsibihties.Six of the contracts reviewed for this chapter, including those of the three private universities, have provisions for reduced load. This is not to say that faculty are naturally lethargic; far from it. The entrepreneurial sense of the academician usually assures a great deal of “selfstarting” activity in any area of university business. The point is that selfallocation of time is a norm of the profession, and faculty pursue this goal almost by instinct-at times without regard for their individual ability to use free time productively in a professional sense. Faculty contracts reflect a dual standard on time. The explicit statement is to assure a prescribed limitation on teaching load, office hours, and the like. But many contracts have an ambivalence about “overloads”when these are tied to extra remuneration. Contracts such as those of Western Michigan, St.John’s, New Jersey, and Fairleigh Dickmson place a limit on the amount of overload a faculty member can be allotted in exchange for added income. Superficially, it may seem that this limitation would be advocated by administrators who can contend that the quality of instruction will suffer when an individual teaches too much. Some faculty attribute administrators’ attitudes on this matter to plain meannessdesire to limit a resourcefd individual’s income. But two other factors can also be involved. First is the sense of equity. To the extent that overload, or what industry refers to as “overtime,” is considered desirable, all faculty must be given comparable access to it. This notion is certainly not unique to academia. Another consideration also often comes into play. A pressure within academia over the years has been to reduce the demand that the university can make on the academician’s time. Now, in the age of collective bargaining, if a particularly rapacious faculty member seeking paid overload demonstrates that five or even six courses can be taught in a single semester, the academicians’ professional argument over the extent to which the university can claim their time is weakened. Perhaps an academician can teach more than three or four courses after all without being overburdened. Thus, sometimes the union itself, representing the collective academic perception, restrains the individual who would otherwise accept “excessive” overload. Someplace

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within this problem we may encounter the academician’s own approach to “featherbedding.” Because an academician d be admonished by peers only under the most severe circumstances, the limitation which faculty unions place on an individual’s accepting unpaid voluntary course load is imposed by embodying the spirit of the academic norm-the protection of time-in the legal h-amework of a collective bargaining agreement. Even then, the union will seldom discipline a member who attempts to exceed the lunit. Rather, the administration is held responsible for allowing the contract to be violated by a member of the union! Our society generally contends that a person cannot rightmy hold two jobs. The assumption behind this view is that one or perhaps both are bound to be neglected and that the employers will not receive their full measure for the compensation they award. In academia this point of view is challenged. The underlying theory seems to be that the classroom is the place where the academician develops knowledge, which he is thereby obligated to take to society beyond the university. Again, values come to the fore, as they always do when social obligation premises action. The result of the academician’s obligation to society is the demand that he be h-ee to determine what he wiU do with his time. It also gives protection against charges of negligence. An inherent conflict exists between the university, which must extract faculty time in order to assure the group endeavor involved in instruction, and the dependent entrepreneur, who operates in terms of the personal prerogatives he associates with f?ee time. The issue that arises can be one of inattention to duties within a university when an academician is too dedicated to activities outside it. In resolving differences over this matter, most contracts place the burden of proof for negligence on the university.

TOWARD A STABLE ENVIRONMENT A review of faculty contracts by someone not familiar with the academic profession can lead to the conclusion that academia provides a turbulent and uncertain career. When the attention @ven in contracts to guarding academic freedom is extended with provisions controlling institutional retrenchment for reasons of financial exigency, or termination of programs for the good of the university, and when these are combined with the assiduous care afforded the rights of the individual in any proceedings of dismissal for cause, the reviewer can picture such events occurring daily amid consternation and conflict.Actually, they are unusual. Nevertheless,the bulk of most contracts is devoted to such matters. In this respect,

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Selected Readings

contracts are not about existing conditions. They reflect the apprehension with which the academician watches over not just h s independence but also h s security. They say something about the torment he experiences by being required to work in an institutional setting. A statement from the Fairleigh Dickinson contract comes close to saying it all: “The University recognizes that its diverse and multifaceted faculty represents a major asset, and that security of employment is essential to preserve the atmosphere of intellectual stimulation vital to its academic mission. The University also reaffirms its concern for the lives and careers of its full-time faculty.”” The individual is of paramount concern in this statement apparently becailse he is the embodiment of the intellect that defines the university’s mission. A major objective of the university is to provide the same tranqudhty for this asset that Descartes sought in Holland in order that he might pursue whatever his mind was capable of grasping. In some respects, the academician’s quest for security is no different from the assurances sought by individuals in other occupations and careers. Security is a personal objective for virtually all persons having the necessity to earn a livelihood. The academician’s purpose, however, extends beyond security. He seeks stability. The discontinuation of programs under condtions other than a financial crisis would be close to impossible. With the academician’s notions of program integrity and given h s tendency to see the benefits of program development without consideration for costs, how could faculty ever be convinced that d s continuing a program actually enhanced the mission of the university as a whole, particularly when financial advantage and temporary variations in enrollment cannot be considered? What we actually see, to the extent that the contract can be interpreted by faculty, is the prescription for a stable environment.

COLLEGIALITY

All faculty contracts focus on the accommodation between institutional authority and the faculty.When faculty can achieve what they wish from a contract, considerations of the collegial department will stand out in this relationship. As we have seen, collegiality is the academician’s preferred method of organizing his efforts when called upon to work in a group. One of the most comprehensive statements reflecting the faculty viewpoint is to be found in the Western Michigan document. By virtue of their command of their discipline,University faculty have as a unique resource the abilities to assist in the governance of departments in

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which they exercise their respective disciplines. Faculty, therefore, should participate in the governance of their departments in order to create and maintain harmonious relationships among colleagues, and to fashion and maintain the departments in such a way as to make them maximally appropriate for instruction, research, service and other professional activities of the dxipline. Fundamentally, what is desirable and what is intended by the sections that follow is to insure meaningful participation by departmental faculties, with the ultimate power of decision-making by Western, but with an assurance of procedural regularity and fair play.” In this statement we confront the academician’s view of suitable institutional practice. Personal identity is to be found in academic Iscipline, not in the university. Discipline is the means by which the academic missioninstruction, research, service, and other professional activities-is to be achieved. Direction within the department is provided by emphasizing harmony among those who share the discipline. With this prescription, the academician achieves the cherished stabihty. But for harmony to prevail in our utopian community, there must be limitations on outside interference. As the Western Michigan contract stated, institutional authority is limited by the necessity for “procedural regularity and fair play,” the antithesis of decisions that are capricious and arbitrary. In effect, it means that lrection for the conduct of the university’s business will come from the affirmation of academia’s norms. Insofar as faculty contracts reflect the academic political culture, they can be expected to include these attributes. In protecting his identity, the academician’s first step is to assure integrity within the discipline. One practice that relates to collegial protection of disciplinary identity is cited in the contracts of Fairleigh Diclunson and the Pennsylvania system, where a department representative periolcally observes the classroom sessions of both tenured and nontenured faculty members. This routine can be controversial insofar as it is seen as trealng upon the independence of the individual academician. Usually, such features of collegiality are not formally established. But if a faculty member is physically or mentally incapacitated and insists upon performing teaching duties anyway, a department will often be stirred to action and observe classroom performances as a step toward removing a colleague from his position. The implication of such a move is that in the final analysis, the integrity of the dscipline must be protected, even at the expense of the individual, and this can be done only by the collegial group. At times a department is hustled into this position when a dean becomes aware of a problem in instruction and insists on entering the classroom himself. Suddenly, disciplinary integrity takes on a new dimension, and the department insists on assuming the responsibility of classroom observation for itself.

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Selected Readings

Under contracts, departments usually retain the right to organize themselves. T h s privilege, too, is inherent in the meaning of collegiality.But in today’s organizationally conscious world, a minimal structure is required by the university. Thus departments do not have exclusive initiative in fashioning their structure. The advent of faculty unions has added a further element of uniformity to organization by requiring some sort of department personnel committee. As in the Pennsylvania system, this committee will often determine its own rules, and when they vary too much &om department to department, trouble is afoot. Contracts generally allow faculty members more leeway in grieving on procedural errors than on matters of substance. Academicians relish the opportunity to make distinctions,and when procedures for reviewing the applications of all candidates for promotion are not uniform (even when it is due to departmental variance),objections will surely surface. Thus, collegial practice can be detrimental to the admmstrative interests of the total university. Beyond preserving academic identity and rights of organization, most contracts deal in some way with departmental authority.At Western Michigan University, the group’s prerogatives are carefully delineated to include not only rights of organization-to establish committee structure, select committee members, and set the terms of departmental officers (except chairmen)-but they also include the privilege of establishing a department’s criteria, policies and procedures for tenure, promotion, appointments, sabbatical leaves, and merit promotions. Degree requirements for students, curricular offerings, budget guidelines,teaching assignments and class scheduling,and the definition of workload are all responsibdities of the departments at Western Michigan. Most actions are h t e d by the necessity to be in accordance with university policy. Simdarly, at Bridgeport, departments determine curriculum, allocations within their budget allotments,requirements for students majoring in their &scipline, and the status of individual faculty members. Perhaps the most collegial approach to organization of the contracts reviewed is at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where a department policy committee appears to share with the chairman the day-to-day direction of the department. The result could be group management,the essence of collegiality. An individual faculty member would seldom transact business with the dean under a strict application of the terms of this contract. In the case of reduced load, for example, the individual does not apply; the department recommendsat least that is how the contract reads. To an outsider it would appear that too much authority vested in departmental committees would be contrary to the independence sought by the individual academician. But with the automatic manner by which work is distributed as a result of prescriptively assigned duties, direction by the department

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becomes secondary. Then, too, all members of the committee directorate at Fairleigh Diclunson are academicians themselves. Such a committee, therefore, will, in all probability, function to assure that protection is afforded the individual. It is much more difficult for a dean to hscipline an academician if the dean must operate through a departmental committee. Without the committee, confi-ontations are between two individuals under condtions in whch one (invariably the faculty member) feels that he has little authority. At Fairleigh Diclunson, the dean, spealung in the name of the university, must confront the department. Somehow the contest seems more even. But fear of punishment or interference is not all that rankles the academician. Administrators are usually identified with judgments by which one academician is selected for special privilege over another. Interpersonal comparison stands out in these decisions. Recognition for a colleague, of course, is not always viewed negatively by a department. Nevertheless, most academicians prefer that any such distinction for a member of the group first have the approval of peers. Contracts provide for this practice. It is the essence of collegiality. Although academicians organize themselves into departments, a repeated theme of this book has been that essentially they work alone. Because of this practice, it has been noted that usually academicians do not vest their organization with a great deal of authority over the individual. They prefer that the institution’s operations be self-regulating with behavior determined by norms rather than rules. In faculty collective bargaining agreements, therefore, much of the authority exercised by departments is not expressed as specified actions that the group will take. Rather, contracts allow departments the privilege of setting criteria for action to be taken by the indwidual. Departmental direction, therefore, is generally expressed in passive ways. In fact, authority is even less direct. Often the criteria are not for what the individual will do. Instead they are for the evaluation of what he does by departmental peers. As a result, it sometimes appears that the academician does not even operate under the direction of the collegial group. He works independently in ways that will elicit its approval. Within this context, the portion of contracts concerned with the department usually centers attention on membership and status (rank) within the group. O n matters pertaining to departmental operations, contracts contain provisions that ward off administrators, confirm accepted practices, and evaluate how closely a member of the department observes norms. Departmental administration can become almost nonexistent. Most contracts devote considerable attention to appointments. Membership, of course, stands at the center of collegiahty. The contracts that are most restrictive in terminology, if not in practice, are at Maine and in the Pennsylvania

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system, where the president may reject any new appointment. The Maine contract specifies somewhat redundantly that this decision is not subject to a grievance. At Bridgeport, a truly cooperative atmosphere is foreseen,in whch “the department and its chairperson, together with the dean, shall make new appointment recommendations to the VF’AA’’19 (vice president for academic affairs). In New Jersey, “the Colleges . . . recognize the value of peer consultation and except in unusual circumstances w d consult with the involved department concerning the procedures to be used in any particular case for appointment and reapp~intment.”~~ The contract of the Minnesota system, which seems to reflect a situation in which the a d s t r a t i o n has held a great deal of authority, simply states that the president shall involve departments in evaluating credentials and in making recommendations for new appointments. The St.John’s contract allows the administration unusual authority and in some respects violates collegiality insofar as initiative does not always rest with the department in faculty appointments. Appointments can be made when “the Ahnistration deems it appropriate to infuse new life into a department.” In this instance, “to solve problems of obsolescence,” the president may request a department to search for a faculty member having specific qualifications. Ultimately, the president may make an appointment without the recommendation of the department.21 Few contracts resolve the matter of the collegial department’s role in the overall business of the university. Generally, when contracts move beyond the status of members and criteria for their professional behavior, there are platitudes. The mood is reflected by the Maine contract, which states, “The departments, divisions, or other appropriate units shall retain their traditional input into academic policy and standards. . . . They shall establish appropriate committees to carry out their responsibihties pursuant to t h s agreement.”22In what amounts to an unenforceable hctum, the Bridgeport contract states that “institutional needs” will be determined by the department and the college.23 At Fairleigh Dichnson, the contract holds that “primary . . . academic responsibhties are in a de~artment.”~~

THE BRIDGE TO UNIVERSITY AUTHORITY The chairmanship of a department is the nexus of collegiahty and institutional authority. The strains inherent in the position often are not apparent &om observing the operations of a college. Nor in the past have some chairmen been able to identifl some of the less comfortable aspects of their situation. Collec-

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tive bargaining,and the attending necessity for specifying the roles of actors on the university scene,have brought a growing conclusion that in many instances the chairman, as neither fish nor fowl, occupies a difficult position. The very citing of the role of the chairman highlights the uneasy feelings of administration and faculty alike over the office. Each can easily conclude that someone fi-om the “other side” is being trusted with its business. The St. John’s contract, a relatively limited document that relies heavily on past practice, goes to some length to explain the position: “The Department Chairman is at the same time a faculty member with respect to his teaching obligations as well as serving as the departmental liaison to the Administration.As the academic leader of his department he is obligated to represent its interests and serve its welfare. In an equal sense, the Departmental Chairman has the professional responsibility to consider the departmental needs in conjunction with the overall interests of the University comm~nity.”~~ The contract of the University of Maine follows much the same formulation with the statement that “chairpersons have both administrative and collegial functions and . . . [department] members have a legitimate concern in the selection, retention and performance of indwiduals serving as chairpersons.”26 At most universities, contracts specify that the appointment of the chairman is a joint responsibdity.Usually, as at Bridgeport, within the New Jersey system, and at St.John’s University, the department initiates the selection and the administration confirms. At St.John’s, the contract also states that appointments of chairmen should normally be in conformity with department members’ judgment. At Bridgeport and also at Fairleigh Diclunson, the dean is expected to approve the nomination if it has the support of two-thrds of the department’s members. In this stipulation, we find the added weight given to a decision by the academicians’ affinity for consensus. Certainly, in the face of a consensus, the administration is less likely to assert itself. On the other hand, mischievous deans are often tempted to play when a department appears to be of two or three minds about the appropriate nominee for chairman. In some cases, the language of contracts reflects greater initiative for the administration in the selection process. It is difficult to determine how a university actually operates fi-om the reading of a contract. Faculty perceptions, however, are explicit in most agreements. To the extent that the chairman represents the administration, he must be viewed distinct fi-om the collegium and its purposes, even though personally he may be a faculty colleague of long standing. The authority of the chairman per se is h t e d by collegiality, whatever his administrative attributes. Much as for the department as a whole, his authority is phrased in terms of the opportunity to comment upon the performance of peers

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rather than to tell them what to do. His influence is in his independent recommendations on appointment, tenure, promotion, and possibly sabbatical leaves. Curriculum remains firmly in the hands of the group, where individual initiative and even license are tolerated on course selection and often in scheduling. But the chairman’s word has weight because of h s access to the admmistrative echelon of the university-often more weight than is afforded faculty committees. A chairman, therefore, who necessarily trades on the authority of the administration, can become intimidating to peers. The kamework of departmental decisions reveals a wide variety of perceptions with regard to what is talung place when a chairman does act. At the one extreme is the Western Michigan contract in which all authority within the university is enumerated under two headings-“administrative” and “faculty.”27The decisions of chairmen are listed with the former. This is consistent with the exclusion of chairmen kom the bargaining unit and a specific prohibition at Western Michigan against faculty considering the selection of chairmen a departmental prerogative. At the other extreme are our collegial kiends at Fairleigh Diclunson. Here the chairman proceeds with the reminder that he is “a facditator and implementor of departmental policies and spokesman for the department withm the University and the larger community. He speaks in the name of the department in responding to inquiries.”28Ths is not exactly an explanation that verifies an authoritative position for chairmen.At St.John’s, the chairman appears to be an integral part of the department’s group process and is expected to operate comfortably without independent judgment. Essentially he is the initiator of departmental business who finctions jointly with committees of h s peers and colleagues. He is the first among equals. The final factor that shows the uncertainty with which departments view their own chairmen is expressed in the agreements of St. John’s, Bridgeport, and the Minnesota system. In these cases, the departments may initiate recall proceedings. At St. John’s, only 30 percent of the faculty need request such an action, and a chairman is removed by a majority vote of the department.

UNIVERSITY AUTHORITY The distinction academicians make in separating a chairman from the collegium only provides the first glimpse of how they treat authority with its institutional features. Once we center our attention on the university itself, collective bargaining agreements truly reveal the suspicion with which administration is held and the uncertainty of faculty over administrators’ intent.

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Contracts are constructed to assure the prerogatives of both academicians and administrators. But the authority claimed by each is not necessarily stated. Usually it is implicit, being defined by what is not rather than what is said in the contract. Agreements have very little to say, for example, about budgets and the financial matters of the university. Yet, we assume these are the responsibilities of the administration. In a somewhat less conclusive manner, contracts say little about academic programs. These, we assume, belong to the faculty. But faculty authority is not exclusive. Budgetary decisions and those who make them will eventually impinge upon the academic program. The lengthy article on the procedure for discontinuation of an academic program found in the contract of the University of Cincinnati points to an administrative transgression across the imaginary line we have just drawn between academic program and institutional finances. Recommending the discontinuation of a program at Cincinnati falls to the administration with the decision being taken by the board of trustees. The best faculty can do to protect themselves in this situation is to require that the arguments used in the recommendation and the reasons for which the act is taken “shall be based entirely on the consideration that the long range educational mission of the University as a whole will be enhanced by the disc~ntinuation.”~~ The weakness of the academician is all too apparent. To give itself some protection, the faculty at Cincinnati has literally invited the administration into an area it would otherwise reserve for itself. Administrators are no longer confined to financial considerations. They are now dealing with the educational mission of the university, and they are malung a qualitative judgment about it. But at least by accepting this degree of administrative intercession, the faculty will assure that the decision on discontinuation of program will be defined in ways that the academician can understand rather than through the alchemy of institutional finance. In the process, faculty will be able to argue more effectively against any proposed discontinuation. Although most of the contracts that were reviewed do not discuss discontinuation of programs as such, they do deal with the matter obliquely in their treatment of retrenchment. And the preferred faculty vehicle in most contracts is to limit retrenchment to discharge of faculty by seniority within programs. Ultimately, the administration makes the decision as to which program is to be affected. Within limits, this decision can be selective with regard to the department that is singled out for special attention. In the final analysis, not even the ascriptive pretensions of an academician toward his discipline are protected. Someone who does not share in it wdl in all probability make the decision on program reduction or elimination.

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Even the symbolism associated with such acts seems to work against the academician. Any retrenchment is a confrontation between the limitations inherent in the administrator’s culture of resources and the expansiveness of the Cartesian’s ever-growing intellectual universe. And in this contest the administration has the advantage of assuming the identity of the college. Thus, in discussing retrenchment, the contract of the Pennsylvania system allows the administration to become the “Commonwealth/Colleges.”30In the New Jersey system, the president suddenly becomes the “college” when drawing the &stinction between his role and that of the faculty on matters of a p p ~ i n t m e n t . ~ ~ The only institutional identity from which the faculty can draw authority is “the department,” hardly a designator reflecting the same power as that claimed by the president. The language of the contract at Western Michigan University clearly shows the real meaning of this lack of equahty in the institutional symbols between faculty and administrators.In discussing departmental governance, the contract ensures “meaningfkl participation by departmental faculties, with the ultimate power of decision-making by Western.”32And who is “Western”? We can only assume it to be the administration operating under authority granted by the board of trustees. This imagery is diametrically opposed to the preferred symbol of the academician-faculty as university. It does, however, confirm a point that was made earlier, namely, that in the public’s eye the administration holds the identity of the university. In this regard, contracts have been damaging to faculty insofar as they serve to confirm the adrmnistrator’s claims. Union contracts are an occasion for all things appearing to be done in the name of the president. Agreements are replete with the phrase “the president or his designee.” The adrmnistration of a college thereby assumes the characteristics of a monolith. Administrative authority is emphasized. In the days before collective bargaining, t h s was seldom the case. Whatever the intent of faculty in organizing for purposes of collective bargaining, they have pushed administrators toward an even greater bureaucratic perception than they might already have held. Unless the contract is unusual, administrators eventually attempt to assume greater responsibility because of it. Somewhere in the process they go beyond the idea of exercising authority with faculty tolerance-a con&tion that upholds faculty imagery. Collective bargaining has made more things explicit, and faculty can no longer claim that they hold a benign but real rein on institutional power. To assure stable and smooth operation of the university, academicians and administrators do work together, even under union contracts. Most contracts condone a practice by which faculty initiate action on matters that concern them and administrators confirm. In these instances, practice does permit the faculty to act out the exercise of benign authority. Matters on which the indi-

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vidual perception of the academician intersect with the institutional outlook of the adrmnistrator are, again, those related to educational policy and personal status-curriculum, graduation requirements, and regulation on grading in the one category and personnel evaluations, appointments, promotion, tenure, and professional leave in the other. In these areas, authority is said to be sharedthe faculty, usually in the form of departments and collegewide committees, is permitted to make recommendations. The procedure used at most universities is one of consultation, and decisions are expected to show some evidence of the exchange of views that takes place. In this process, the niceties or civility of the faculty-administrator relationship are observed. Another practice that no doubt reveals the academician’s discomfort in the presence of institutional authority is the insistence of faculty on some campuses that union representation be introduced into the governance system. Governance, of course, preceded all unions and has been established almost as custom at older universities. Years ago it was codified in the rules and regulation of many colleges. What amounts to a charter can be found in faculty handbooks or the body of documentation developed by a faculty senate, which in its own right may hold the mandate for establishing university committees and maintaining departmental practice. Why, then, blend governance with unions? One answer may be that once collective bargaining is accepted, a dstinction can no longer be made in academicians’ minds between bargaining unit and faculty because of the holistic nature of the academic process. The emphasis the academician places on the style by which things are done within the Cartesian prescription precludes any artificial separation of the conditions fi-om the content of work. Everything must fit together rationally. Thus it must be considered as one. But in addtion, the link between union and governance gives the academician assurance. For faculty, the union is a countervahng expression of authority that balances whatever power they see in the hands of the administration. Hopefdly, the union may allow the academician a greater voice in the operation of the university, or perhaps simply assure his independence for professional pursuits. As a union member, an academician does not operate in an independent, holistic, and ascriptive fashion. He is meant to be “organized.” That is the purpose of a union. With a blurring of the academic identity, primacy is sometimes not given to the mission of our academic practitioner. Attention turns to matters other then devoting one’s life to the development of individual reason. The academician has, of course, adapted collective bargaining to h s style of performance, but little by little unionism leads to nonacademic preoccupations

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outside the classroom, laboratory,or library carrel. However the academician may use it at the outset, unionism, is, in fact, a technique for acquiring authority.Just beyond the faculty’s effort to assure intellectual authority over educational policy is the lunge toward a greater voice in budgets and long-range physical planning. In turn, this faculty preoccupation can lead to resistance &om the admmistration, which becomes intent on preserving its own authority. In the process, faculty can lose much of the benign authority they enjoy within the university. Usually they are no match for administrators in the games of power. AU the while, performance in the classroom may be deteriorating and less research may be completed. In reviewing contracts it is always a temptation to speculate from the contents over the relations that exist between faculty and administrators at a particular university. The lengthy (forty thousand words) and explicit contract at Fairleigh Dickinson, for example, suggests a legacy of bad relations or perhaps a faculty that is uncertain about its role. What sort of atmosphere is conveyed when the contract, in specifjring causes for dlsmissal of a faculty member, includes not just gross incompetence or negligence but also willfull dsregard for scholarly or professional standards, conviction for felony, mental illness, and subverting the rights and welfare of members of the college community? Civility would seem to suggest that these things be left unsaid, The caveat included in the Maine contract to the effect that decisions of the president on some matters are final and not grievable also raises questions. Is the administration uncertain of itself or excessively overbearing? Certainly this wording implies a great disregard for collegiality. Unusual items that are selected for special attention also cast doubts about the relationship between faculty and administration. What real or imagined encroachment prompted one party or the other to insist on including some obscure matter in the contract? Voluntary attendance at commencement and the process for selecting deans at St. John’s, over two hundred words devoted to parking at Fairleigh Dickinson, distinguished faculty awards and the treatment of independent study in the Pennsylvania system, nontraditional assignments at Bridgeport, teaching in outreach centers in Maine, administrative removal of a chairperson in the Minnesota system, and faculty evaluation of administrators or allowances for “nepotism” at Western Michigan all fall into this category. Something surrounding each situation apparently in somebody’s view required regulation if the full rights of faculty or administration were to be protected. The significance of such items need not be monumental for them to find their way into a contract. Any of them could have been viewed as a challenge to academic freedom,

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program integrity, or departmental prerogatives, depending on the circumstances in which they became a subject of contention.

POLITICAL PROCESS-DIRECT PARTICIPATION AND RATIONALITY Earlier, two points were made about academic politics. They are organized around values. The academician is uncomfortable with the representative function in parliamentary bodies; direct and personal communications are preferred. Finally, in his politics the academician has an abiding belief in rational solution. Collective bargaining agreements demonstrate these principles nicely. Out of necessity, the collective voice of the faculty is conveyed in any committee proceedings. Thus, the representative hnction cannot be avoided altogether in academic politics. Nevertheless, emphasis in many contracts is on faculty advice as the preferred means of political expression rather than through the act of electing a representative, which is commonly viewed as political expression in the pluralistic system of our country’s politics. In the academician’s thinlung, there is apparently something personal and, therefore, more acceptable about the first of these two ideas. The compulsion to engage in direct communication derives, of course, fiom the belief that political process rests on rationality. Contracts demonstrate this proclivity on the part of the academician in two ways. First, there is a preoccupation with information-the substance of rational decisions. Contracts generally are intent upon requiring the administration to share with the bargaining unit all varieties of information about the affairs of the college. Information on the meetings and agenda of board of trustees, the university budget, and rules, regulations, and policies of the college must be made available to the union. The Bridgeport contract has a special article entitled “Information to AAUP.” The same concern is found in the contracts of Minnesota, Fairleigh Dickinson, Cincinnati, and others. The one limitation most administrations place on this fiee flow of information is that they not be required to compile special information requested by the union. The bargaining unit must be content with the information and in the form that it is generated by the university for conducting its business. The other aspect of rational process reflected in contracts is the necessity for adrmnistrators to give reasons for their actions. This, too, was considered in the faculty’s view of authority.Just about any candidacy, proposal, or suggestion

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from faculty that is not accepted by the administration requires a reasonable explanation. More can be said about faculty contracts. This review may be sufficient, however, to show that they reflect the academician’s sense of reahty-the Cartesian values. A major purpose of faculty in concluding contracts is to stabllize and protect these values in the presence of pressure for change &om countervding forces in our society. The irony of the situation is that to the extent faculties permit their unions to adopt a collective concept of work, they can create a monster of their own that contradlcts the tradltion of the academic perception. The result can be contrary to the proposition that learning and creativity are inherently linked to the style and symbols of the academic culture. A great deal of the growth and innovation espoused by society for our colleges and universities, and the concomitant centrhzation of the ahnistration of public institutions by state governments, ignore the association of creativity with academic style. The challenge for those who would control the academy &om beyond its walls and convert the curriculum to a relatively narrow social purpose is to recognize that although such an approach may allow for greater efficiency, it can also mean new political problems and new issues of definition for hgher education. As an ever-widening range of forces becomes involved in the university, the academician, for the first time, must concern himself with being politically effective. He is no longer able to rest his claim to preeminence in matters of educational policy on the assertion of the faculty’s hgher mission. Changes forced upon h m necessitate adjustments in h s values. Ultimately he can find himself confronting limitations on h s intellectual pursuits. At that point, the place of creativity can be questioned. Wdl it continue to reside in our universities? No academician can, of course, be left totally unfettered by the concerns of our society for higher education. Nevertheless, the greatest loss for hgher education may occur on that day when conditions compel the academician to abandon his primary symbol-faculty as university.

NOTES 1. Chronicle ofHigher Education, July 26,1978,p. 8;July 7,1980, p. 7;July 27,1981, p. 2. 2. Everett Carll Ladd Jr., and Seymour Martin Lipset, “Faculty Support for Unionization,” Chronicle ofHigher Education, February 13,1978,p. 8; Ladd Jr. and Lipset, “The Big Differences among Faculty Unions,” Chronicle ofHigher Education, March 13,1978,

p. 14.

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3. Agreement, The State o f New Jersey, Council o f New Jersey State College Locals NJSFT-AFTAFL-CIO, State College Units,July 1,1977-June 30, 1979, Preamble, p. 1. 4. University of Cincinnati/AAUe Article 2, p. 2. 5. Association ofFaculties/Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Article 2, p. 3. 6. University ofCincinnati/AAUe Article 7, p. 17. 7. Western Michigan University/AAUc Appendix A, p. 71. 8. Agreement between State University Board for the State .f Minnesota and Inter-Faculty Organization/Minnesota Education Association, Effective through June 30, 1977, Article 25, pp. 26-27. 9. University .f Bridgeport/AAUc Article 8, p. 32. 10. University of Bridgeport/AAUc Article 12, p. 48. 11. University of Cincinnati/AAUl? Article 7, p. 16. 12. University ofCincinnati/AAUc Article 7, p. 17. 13. University of Maine/Associated Faculties, Article 23, p. 38. 14. Fairleigh Dickinson University/AAUe Article 7, p. 25. 15. Collective Bavgaining Agreement between the University o f Connecticut Board ofTrustees and the University o f Connecticut Chapter o f the American Association o f University Professors, July 1,1979-June 30,1981. 16. A MasterAgreement between the State ofIowa Board ofRegents and the UNI-United Faculty (AAUP/IHEA), 1 July 1977-June 1979. 17. Fairleigh Dickinson University/AAUc Article 18, p. 132. 18. Western Michigan University/AAUe Article 22, p. 37. 19. University ofBridgeport/AAUT:Article 8, p. 22. 20. State $New Jersey/NJSFT-AFT Article 13, p. 19. 21. St.John’s University/AAUc Article 5, p. 6. 22. University ofMaine/Associated Faculties, Article 12, p. 19. 23. University ofBridgeport/AAUc Article 8, p. 19. 24. Fairleigh Dickinson University/AAUe Article 8, p. 36. 25. St.John’s University/AAUe Article 9, p. 12. 26. University of Maine/Associated Faculties, Article 12, p. 18. 27. Western Michigan University/AAUe Article 16, p. 24. 28. Fairleigh Dickinson University/AAUe Article 10, p. 77. 29. University of Cincinnati/AAUe Article 29, p. 44. 30. Association of Faculties/Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Article 27, p. 40. 31. State ofNew Jersey/NJSFT-AFT Article 13, p. 19. 32. Western Michigan University/AAUe Article 20, p. 37.

William R. Brown, professor of political science and dean of arts and science at Central Connecticut State College at the time of original publication.

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RESTORING SANITYTO A N ACADEMIC WORLDGONEMAD James E Carlin

I

f someone had predicted fifoj years ago that, in 1999, the primary and secondary schools in the United States would be a mess, and urban public schools an absolute dsaster, most Americans would have called that person an alarmist. Today, when anyone dares to suggest that U.S. hgher education has serious problems, most listeners give the same response. We have the greatest colleges and universities in the world. But if current trends continue, we w d soon face a day of reckoning. Tuition is so h g h that the poor are frozen out of higher education, in spite of expanded scholarship programs. Middle-class parents are having a dfficult time meeting college expenses. They deplete their savings, remortgage their homes, invade their 401(k) plans, and work two and three jobs to pay their children’s college bills. Estimates indcate that about half of graduates leave college with student loans that take years to pay off. In their zeal to bring in dollars, colleges and universities admit students who can’t handle the course work but who may be able to pay the bds. When that happens, everyone suffers-especially the students. But rather than rejecting or expelling those who are ill prepared or lazy, we attempt to remedlate Ths article is reproduced with permission from James E Carlin, “Restoring Sanity World Gone Mad,” The Chronicle $Higher Education, November 5,1999, A76.

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to

an Academic

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them. We make many of our courses too easy, while grade inflation gets students through those that are more difficult. Rigorous core curricula have almost disappeared. Graduation requirements are so relaxed that many employers who seek to fill even entry-level positionsjust shake their heads in disbelief. Political correctness and diversity have taken priority in admissions decisions and in classrooms over experience in calculus, foreign languages, physics, chemistry, and Shakespeare.We emphasize the differences in people rather than what they have in common. We keep adding programs and courses to our already bloated curricula in an attempt to be all things to all people. Meanwhile, faculty members do ever more meaningless research, while spending fewer and fewer hours in the classroom, during an academic year that we have shortened in recent decades. I have been a businessman for over thirty-five years, and I was a trustee of the University of Massachusetts and chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education for a total of twelve years. I am, or have been, a director of eight public corporations, and was chief executive officer of a transit system with an annual budget of $1 billion. I have also founded four businesses, in separate fields, that were recognized by Inc. magazine for their rapid growth and success. I think I’ve learned something about management and controlling costs. Never have I observed anything as unfocused or mismanaged as higher education. Clearly, the reason tuition is high is that college costs are high. Why are costs high? Nobody is in charge. The trustees occasionally have dusions that they have something to say about the way things work-but, in fact, all that the president, deans, and faculty members generally want trustees to do is to raise money and boost the institution’s image. With very few exceptions, the presidents know that they’re not in charge; when John Silber ran Boston University, he was one of the few presidents who had real control over a college or university. The president’s primary job, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, is to raise money for the institution. I think Galbraith’s job description is a little narrow. It’s also the president’s job to handle the news me&a and the politicians, and to try to keep the heat on, the grass cut, and enough parking spaces available. It’s the president’s job to keep the trustees from aslung questions about such matters as teaching loads, tenure, and remedial instruction. The president is supposed to stay away from academic matters, which are the faculty’s turf. That is like tebng Louis V. Gerstner Jr., that-as chairman and chief executive officer of IBM-he’s in charge of everything except the design, manufacture, and distribution of his company’s computers.

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Because presidents rarely are able to take charge, colleges and universities become top-heavy. Academic and administrative staffs have layer after layer of personnel. And, of course, bigger staffs mean higher costs, higher tuitions, and more pressure to raise money for the institution. Another cause of high costs at colleges and universities is tenure-perhaps once a good idea, but one whose time has passed. In my years as trustee and chairman of a governing board in higher education, I never spoke to a single individual outside the academy who thought that the tenure system made sense. Tenured and untenured faculty members know it, presidents and administrators know it, trustees know it. Legislators and students and their parents who pay tuition are tired of providing financial support for tenure. Lifetimejob guarantees border on being immoral. What other professions employing hundreds of thousands nationwide offer the equivalent of tenure? Basically, professors want to be accountable to no one. Faculty members and their unions say, “There are mechanisms in place to terminate a chronically incompetent or non-performing tenured professor.” But out of several hundred thousand tenured professors in the United States, you can count on ten fingers those who have been let go each year because of poor performance or work habits. Tenure rewards the lazy and incompetent. Its costs are enormous. The argument that we need tenure to protect freedom of speech is bogus. Numerous state and federal statutes, commissions against lscrimination, and the vigilant news media protect anyone-in or out of academe-who wants to expound unorthodox beliefs. Post-tenure review programs are in vogue. But they are usually designed by the faculty, and they are a joke. This year the University of Massachusetts, over my strong objections, put into place a post-tenure-review program that specifically prohibits ahnistrators &om using the results of a review for disciplinary purposes. Sponsors of the program are c&ng it a national model. Please! The current typical load of six or so hours a week of classroom teaching, for twenty-nine to thirty-two weeks a year, doesn’t cut it. At our major colleges and universities, nine to twelve hours per week should be the norm. If faculty members wanted to earn more money, they could teach more hours. It would be desirable for campuses to hold classes from 7 A.M. to 10 P.M., five days a week-and preferably until noon on Saturdays-for forty-eight weeks a year. In adltion to increasing productivity and lowering costs, more class hours would give students more scheduling options. We should have two categories of professors: The first would be teachers, who would do only whatever research it took them to be outstanding

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teachers; they would spend nine to twelve hours per week in the classroom. The second would focus on research; its members might spend three or four hours a week with graduate students or doctoral candidates, and perhaps teach one course a year. And the courses that professors teach should be much more demanding. At too many colleges and universities today, if students keep paying and attending, they will usually receive a degree. As for-profit institutions, such as the University of Phoenix, offer college credentials in less time, and often at lower cost, more pressure will be brought to bear on traditional institutions. Throw into the mix the Internet and how it’s changing the way society does nearly everything, and you can almost see the academy turning upside down. We must start making changes now, if we want to keep our educational institutions the best in the world. Trustees and administrators must provide bold, innovative solutions-in spite of faculty members’ objections, and even if, in the short term, those changes run contrary to the faculty’s economic interests. The answer to high tuition is not more loan programs. The cost of higher education must come down, and academic standards must go up. If members of the academy don’t force change, politicians and taxpayers wiU-as they are doing with health care and primary and secondary education. During the past four years, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education has sought to improve the state’s public institutions by setting aside the status quo. We have reduced tuition for four years in a row; made community college free to students whose family income is under $36,000; moved the bulk of remedal education from four-year campuses to community colleges; twice raised adrmssions standards at state colleges and at the University of Massachusetts; created a state-sponsored, matching-gift program that resulted in a 300 percent increase in private funds donated to the state’s public colleges &om 1996 to 1999; eliminated seventy-two low-performing academic programs; and gave boards of trustees more power to choose presidents and set their compensation. To stabilize costs, we have urged a reduction in “public service” projects that have little to do with students or teaching. Administrative costs as a percentage of budgets have come down. And our governor, A. Paul Cellucci, has come out publicly against tenure, calling it a lifetime job guarantee-which it is. Those are a few examples of actions that have led to a dramatic increase in public confidence in the hgher-education system in Massachusetts. To sum up: During the past four years, systemwide tuition has dropped 17 percent, state appropriations have increased 36 percent, and state financial aid to stu-

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dents at public institutions has increased 65 percent. Applications to the state’s public colleges and university are up, acceptance rates are down, and the proportions of accepted students who matriculate are up. One of the wonderful things about a free society is that what is right usually prevails in time. But that does not happen automatically. We’ve got a lot of problems in higher education: exorbitant tuition, tenure, foolish research, bloated bureaucracies, low admissions and graduation standards, too much remediation, too many programs, light teaching loads, lack of accountability, narrow-minded faculty unions, and shared governance that leaves nobody in charge. Change will come, as parents, students, taxpayers, and elected officials learn more about what really goes on behind the ivy-covered walls. For right to prevail, good men and women need to a c t s t a r t i n g now. James F. Carlin is past chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education and former trustee of the University of Massachusetts.

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ARE UNIONSGOOD F O R PROFESSORS? Stan ley A ro nowi tx

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nce a powedd force in the nation’s economic and political life, the American labor movement seems to have become marginal. Conventional analyses fiame trade unionism in narratives of decline and disappearance, pointing out that unions have ceased to grow and that union densities-the proportion of union membership to the paid labor force-are in a virtual fiee fall. In 1953 union members accounted for 38 percent of the private-sector labor force; today they make up less than 10 percent. Moreover, while in absolute numbers union membership is about what it was fifty years ago, the social composition of the labor movement has changed raddly. Public employees, most of them white collar, account for some 40 percent of union membership,while union density among factory workers has slid from 40 to about 20 percent. These figures reflect postwar trends in the American economy. As the economy expanded, blue-collar employment advanced by inches and feet, while professional and technicaljobs advanced by yards. Battered by a militant domestic labor movement and competition from

This article is reproduced h m Stanley Aronowitz, “Are Unions Good for Professors?”Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 12-17. Reprinted with permission from Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors.

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Europe and Japan, American corporations used work reorganization, automation, and, later, computer-mediated machines to reduce costs by increasing productivity and eliminating labor. The goal was to preserve profits against rising wages. By the late 1970s, these labor-saving technologies had begun to take their toll on manufacturing jobs. Between 1978 and 1993, the years of the most intense technological change and organizational consolidation, the number as well as the proportion of production workers declined precipitously. They accounted for 17 percent of the labor force in 1993, down fiom 34 percent in 1953. Over the same period, the numbers of professionals and managers rose; by 1993, they accounted for 9.6 percent of the workforce. Colleges and universities employed as many people in 1990 as the steel and automotive industries combined. For the labor movement to recoup its losses, it must respond to these structural changes in the economy, expanding not only into the South and among the working poor, but also, and especially, among white-collar and professional employees. Knowledge has become crucial to American productivity, and producers of knowledge-scientists, engineers, computer analysts, and researchers-have become more important, particularly in such rapidly expanding sectors of the economy as the communications and information industries. Until recently, however, organized labor has largely shunned educated labor, especially professionals-even as more than eight million factory jobs have disappeared. To justify this neglect, labor has made excuses to itself: professional and technical employees are too well paid, are unsympathetic to collective organization, have too many options. At the bottom of these rationalizations is the still-potent gulf between intellectual and manual labor. As a result of this cultural bias, which pervades all levels of labor’s leadership, unions have watched their organizational base diminish, while the labor movement appears increasingly marginal to American economic, political, and cultural life. Ironically, labor’s organizing achievements over the past twenty-five years have been mainly among professional, technical, and clerical employees. In recent years, millions of public and private schoolteachers have joined unions, while physicians, nurses, and engineers are also seeking union protection as their working conditions deteriorate. Perhaps the most surprising advances have been among professors and administrative and technical employees at colleges and universities. By 1998, some 130,000 academic professionals were working under collective bargaining agreements. In contrast, other professionals, such as physicians, attorneys, and engineers, have seen only modest gains in unionization.

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TWO CULTURES OF TODAY’S LABOR MOVEMENT The gulf that separates manual and intellectual labor is not only an economic division; most labor leaders and activists are in the thrall of what I call “the problem of two cultures.” With some exceptions, until recently only a small group of radical unions was willing to take on the enormous task of organizing professionals.Unlike most other unions, these unions were not imprisoned by the prevailing mindset of the labor movement: the notion that only craft, industrial, and transportation workers can be real trade unionists. Many trade unionists see white-collar employees as adjuncts of management. But besides that, one of the great myths of the industrializing era tied masculinity inexorably to manual work. Though often backbreahng, drty, and dangerous, craft and semislulled labor in the large factories had a special aura. Industrial workers were, and considered themselves, the heart of the economy. Their work was “real” compared with that of pencil pushers and paper shufflers, and it usually paid more. This blue-collar world had little room for pencil pushers, let alone women or “eggheads.” This macho image reflected the genuine clout of unionized workers. Unlike clerical employees and even most salaried professionals, union laborers had real power in negotiating with their employers; to achieve their demands, the workers could dsrupt production at any time. Factory culture could be brutal, but the shop floor was also a place of mutual aid. On days when you did not feel well or screwed up on the job, you could depend on your shop mate to cover your mistakes. Though some workers aspired to management, once a shop was organized, must chose to stay in the ranks. After all, the foreman was employed at the company’s pleasure, but a worker couldn’t be fired except for c a u s e a n d even then a good union could save your job. Moreover, workers’ collective action could seriously cripple production and reduce company profits. How could professional employees accumulate such power? Labor’s top leaders in the postwar period, including George Meany, Jimmy Hoffa, and Walter Reuther, upheld the image of the mascdne, blue-collar worker, codrming the prejudice that unions are exclusively for manual workers. (Reuther was a partial exception, but he was a skilled tool and h e maker.) Even today, most AFL-CIO leaders come &om blue-collar backgrounds or lead unions of industrial, blue-collar service, or construction workers. That includes the AFLCIO’s president, John Sweeney, and its secretary-treasurer, Miners Union leader Richard Trumka, a lawyer. Sweeney, however, is a transitional figure, who clearly understands the importance of the new sectors of the workforce. His own union,

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the million-member Service Employees International Union, began by representingjanitors, but most of its current members hold clerical or professional positions in the public sector or the health-care industry.

THORNY PATH O F PROFESSIONAL UNIONS Most professionals have resisted unionization, but a few groups have organized, including teachers, engineers, architects, and industrial scientists. As salaried employees, these professionals have always been subject to supervision, and their professional autonomy has been far from secure. During the 1930s,when the depression brought salary cuts, layoffs, and mass unemployment, some of these college-educated workers became radcalized. Under the leadership of an engineer named Lewis Alan Berne, a group of architects, chemists, and engineers organized themselves under the blue-collar-dominated CIO and succeeded in demonstrating that at least some professionals were ready for unions. But their union, like some other white-collar unions, had left-wing connections and disappeared during the purges that roiled the labor movement during the McCarthy era. After McCarthy, professional organizing came to a dead halt for more than fifteen years, just at the moment when professional and white-collar workers were becoming crucial to the nation’s economy. Despite their salaried status, most professionals have clung to their identity as autonomous practitioners of their craft or science, believing that their credentials would obviate the need for collective organization. Only public school teachers flocked to organized labor. Most of their unions were left-led, but, after 1939, strongly anticommunist. Between 1945 and 1965, teachers’ salaries languished while those of industrial workers soared. By focusing on their real grievances, these underpaid and overworked teachers, at least temporarily, shelved their adherence to the ideology of professionahm. As a result, beginning in 1960, while other professional unions declined, teachers’ unions began to grow. Today, with 80 percent of their profession organized, teachers have the highest union density in the entire labor movement. Postwar labor simply tuned out the problems of professional and technical employees-but not because of ignorance. I believe that the labor movement was weighted down by its macho culture and by the fact that many of the most active white-collar unions were under communist leadership. The deep cultural suspicion of intellectuals harbored by many veteran labor leaders was augmented by their political hostility to the communists, who had played a leading role in organizing professional and technical groups.

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HIGHER EDUCATION EXPLOSION While organized labor ignored white-collar and professional workers, the educational institutions that produced them expanded enormously. The emergence of the United States after World War I1 as the world’s leadmg economic and d t a r y power and its virtual transformation into a national security state powered much of that expansion. Afier the Soviets beat the Americans to the punch by putting Sputnik into space in 1957, Congress and the administration came to see higher education as a vital component of national security. For the next fifteen years, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) funded hundreds of thousands of science and math students and many in the liberal arts as well. Billions of dollars were appropriated under the act for defense-related research at universities. The NDEA and simdar federal programs were, in fact, the most profigate components of the welfare state; spending under the NDEA far outstripped funding for income supports for indwiduals, veterans’ benefits, or any other social programs. At the same time, the emergence of the knowledge-based economy created a growing demand for professionally and technically trained people. The nation’s system of higher education, which had once been a series of liberal arts colleges serving the upper-middle class, became the main site for training these new professionals and technicians. Businesses that had tradtionally trained workers in their own fachties were happy to have public hgher education relieve them of the costs connected with instructing new employees. In response to its new mission, higher education became a full-fledged industry. By the mid-l960s, half of a l l high school graduates went to college-4.5 million of them, three times as many as there had been twenty years before. The number of colleges and universities doubled, and the professoriate became a major professional group, rivahng the number of accountants and social workers in the labor force. By 1990, there were more than half a d o n full-time college teachers. During this period, the social composition of the student body changed. In 1945 Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill, an unprecedented measure that transformed American education. Among its other provisions, the GI Bill enabled returning war veterans, many of them children of industrial workers, farmers, and low-level service employees, to complete high school and enter college. By 1950, nearly two &on veterans had leapt at the chance. Moreover, as the demand for highly educated workers exceeded the “normal” sources of recruitment among the sons and daughters of middle-class professionals, more and more working-class students

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took advantage of the opportunity to go to college. Most of these students were the first in their families to get a higher education. But when the children of union families entered college, they frequently acquired new values that were not necessarily compatible with those of their parents and grandparents. As budding professionals, they were destined for the middle class with its attendant hostility to organized labor and its attachment to such notions as individual achievement and the value of professionalism. DARK SIDE OF UPWARD SOCIAL MOBILITY The world into which these new professional and technical workers were thrown was often not what it was cracked up to be. Contrary to expectations arising from the complex mythology celebrating the “self-made man,” many of these people discovered that, degree in hand, they could find only salaried employment and not always under good circumstances. Moreover, the technology they had been trained to serve was destroying the blue-collar world of their fathers and would soon affect their own prospects. Many large employers, after reducing factory employment by a third, trained their labor-saving sights on white-collar and high-priced intellectual labor. First to go were the clerical and white-collar service jobs that had grown enormously as a result of the postwar expansion of corporate and government bureaucracies. Office computers, which were introduced in the 1950s in scattered workplaces, are now routinely perched on nearly every desk in both small and large corporate offices. The veritable army of receptionists,secretaries, stenographers, and file clerks who once filled corporate and agency offices are gone or have been retrained to operate word processors. Call almost any business or nonprofit organization. You are likely to get an electronic operator; only under special circumstances might you talk to a live person. Thus, as their fathers’ unionized blue-collar jobs &sappeared along with many white-collar occupations, young American workers had few options other than to train for management, technical work, or the professions.

PROFESSIONAL UNIONS IN THE ACADEMY Ironically,just as their worhng-class students were being forced to become professionals, professors began to unionize. The face of organized labor was

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changing; its restricted blue-collar image no longer corresponded to what was happening in the labor movement. In the late 1970s and 1980s, when union organizing as a whole slowed to less than a crawl, collective bargaining started to catch on in unexpected places: in universities-and not only among clerical workers but also among professors and graduate assistants-and in the offices of physicians and attorneys. The untold story of the 1970s and 1980suntold partly because it doesn’t agree with what the press and the public still believe unions are about-is that the fastest-growing section of the labor movement came to consist of professionals and other white-collar employees. And until the rise of unions among health-care professionals in the 1980s and 1990s, the main leader in this trend was the professoriate. Academic unions have grown since the late 1960s; today, some 130,000 professors and other higher education professionals are under contract, mainly with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT),the AAUP, and the National Education Association. Unions now represent nearly a quarter of all full-time faculty in U.S. colleges and universities, a higher percentage of union density than that found in the labor force as a whole. Unions have bargaining rights for faculty and staff at some of America’s largest public universities, includmg the California State University system, the State University of New York, the City University of New York, and Wayne State, Temple, and Rutgers Universities. The AFT’S SUNY unit is the largest professional union in the country; twenty-two thousand professors, physicians, nurses, and medical technicians in the unit work at the university’s two medical centers. Private schools such as Adelphi, Hofstra, and St. John’s (Long Island) Universities also have unions, as do many smaller four-year and technical colleges. By far the greatest density in faculty unions has been achieved in community colleges, where unions, mostly the AFT, represent about 40 percent of all 111-time faculty. Community colleges in California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York all have large union memberships. The forward motion of unionization among private-school faculty was reversed in 1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in its Yeshiva decision that professors in private schools are managers of curriculum, salary schedules, and other areas of policy. Since managers are excluded fi-om all rights under the National Labor Relations Act, Yeshiva essentially ended attempts to organize professors at private colleges and universities, although some schools retain previously recognized faculty unions. Unhke professors at private institutions, faculty in public higher education are subject to the decisions of their state legislatures, which in most states have found faculty eligible for collective bargaining.

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The most important recent increase in professional union organizing has been among graduate assistants, who are not considered managers under the law. Since many senior faculty members confine their teaching to senior or graduate seminars or buy off their teaching duties with research grants, graduate assistants are rapidly becoming the main instructors of undergraduates in many so-called “research” universities. These part-time teaching assistants, who are paid proportionately far less than beginning assistant professors, argue that universities recruited them as students but really need them as a source of cheap academic labor. Moreover, in the ever-tightening academic job market, many suspect they wdl never get a full-time job. They unionize because they believe that if they stay in the academy, they are destined to become permanent adjuncts. Union experience is, they think, the best way to prepare for a future in which, as contingent employees, they will have more in common with office temps than with career professionals. The first graduate assistants’ association was formed in 1969 at the University of Wisconsin’s Mahson campus. It struck for recognition and won. During the next decade, the union, which enrolled more than two thousand members, struggled to prevent the university adrmnistration &om decerti@ingit as a bargaining agent and rohng back its economic gains. After losing bargaining rights for a brief period, the union regained them. Since the late 1980s, unionism among TAs has spread to many leadmg universities. Teaching assistants have organized unions at CaMornia, Illinois, Indmna, Iowa, Michgan, and other public campuses. Yale’s Graduate Employee and Student Organization (GESO) is perhaps the country’s most celebrated graduate students’ union at a private university. In one of the more highly publicized labor struggles of the 1990s, thousands of graduate assistants at Yale left their classrooms just before final exams in late spring 1996, insisting that they were adjunct instructors rather than teachersin-training as the administration claimed. Even though the Yale adrmnistration has refused to recognize GESO, it remains a force on campus.

SAD PLIGHT OF ADJUNCTS Most professional and technical occupations offer fdl-time work. There is, however, a growing tendency toward part-time, temporary, and contingent work among s u e d white-collar and professional workers. Renewed public focus on higher education has thrown the spothght on the growth of part-time teaching. In many large cities in whch colleges and universities have turned to adjuncts to teach up to half’of their classes, thousands of people have advanced degrees, in-

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cludmg Ph.D.5. These people teach a fill load in some institutions for $15,000 to $20,000 a year, about half the pay of a fill-time beginning assistant professor. They are hired course by course, semester by semester, with no continuity, no job security, and few, if any, benefits. Since most adjuncts are not unionized, and the supply of unemployed academics is on the rise, the rate for teaching a course in many regions has not risen substantially in twenty years. But some adjuncts have unionized, especially at institutions at which the AFT or the AAUP represent fill-time faculty. At Rutgers University and Nassau Community College in Long Island, adjuncts have formed locals separate fiom the full-time faculty and negotiate separate contracts. On other campuses, the regular faculty union represents adjuncts, who negotiate under the fulltime faculty and staff agreement. These arrangements do not, however, take into account the growing tendency of adjuncts to teach at more than one institution. Many adjuncts “make a living” by teaching four to six or seven courses a semester in as many as three or more institutions (in California, they are called “freeway flyers”). Though neither adjuncts nor their unions have found a good way to address this situation, there are models worth investigating. One model, developed in the arts and in construction, is the “hiring hall.” Recognizing that some industries cannot easily accommodate permanent hires, unions have attempted to set wages and working conditions by controlling the labor supply. The hiring hall was first instituted by unions representing groups of temporary and contingent employees, such as construction workers, musicians, and seamen. Later, the practice was adopted by some unions of skilled office and retail employees in New York and Los Angeles. Employers signing union contracts agree to hire employees fiom the hiring hall rather than from the labor market and to observe contract-stipulated wages and worlung conhtions. Upon request, the union “&spatches” a qualified worker. When the job ends, the worker returns to the hiring hall for another assignment. Whether the employer is obliged to hire the dispatched worker depends on the specific provisions of the agreement. But since the credibility of the procedure depends on the union’s ability to ensure quality labor, usually the employer can exercise veto power only under unusual circumstances. Whether a hiring hall is started or not, organizing across institutions is the only way that adjuncts, most of whom work for more than one employer, can improve their salaries and working conditions. This effort would require the kind of support that the Hotel and Restaurant Workers gave to Yale’s GESO: office space and funds for staff and publicity-in short, a real organizing commitment. On the whole, neither the AFT nor the AAUP has been forthcoming in this area; both groups seem reticent about organizing adjuncts. And

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despite the growing chagrin of the professoriate, whose situation is fast eroding, faculty members have not countered the trend toward increased reliance on part-time appointments with a vigorous campaign to convert part-time positions to full-time jobs. As in other industries, the expansion of part-time work has profoundly affected the salaries and working conditions of I11-time faculty and staff at many colleges and universities. For example, in the early 1980s, New York‘s City University employed more than 11,000 full-time faculty members for 200,000 students; by 1996, there were only 5,300 full-time professors for 207,000 students. The gap has been filled by part-time faculty. While adjuncts and other part-time instructors taught less than 30 percent of CUNY’s courses in 1978,by 1996 the overall percentage had risen to 50 percent in the system’s four-year colleges and 60 percent in its community colleges. Srnilarly,reliance on part-time faculty and graduate assistants has p w n in the California State University system, at Rutgers and Wayne State Universities, and at other major urban schools. In these institutions, the salaries of I11-time faculty, adjusted for inflation, have remained stagnant; in the shadow of the two-tier system, full-time h i n g has also lagged far behind vacancies. At the same time, administrations and state legislatures try to accelerate faculty retirements by offering monetary incentives to those over sftyfive. But the lines of many retiring or deceased professors are not used to make room for younger I11-time teachers; instead, they cfisappear with the professors. UNIONS AND ACADEMIC STANDARDS It’s hard to imagine that anyone concerned with issues such as “standards” in higher education could ignore the trend toward increased workloads for fulltime faculty and the steady rise in teacher-to-student ratios in many schools. Nevertheless, almost none of the debate about the quality of America’s colleges and universities has focused on this issue. The responsibdity falls on the academic unions to take up the fight. If labor’s first job is to raise the bottom, it must address the salaries and working conditions of its unionized part-time and adjunct instructors. Closely related is the urgent task of organizing the unorganized. As with “workfare,” the fight must be conducted on the slogan of the Living Wage. A successful campaign would, almost inevitably, destroy the economic advantage of the two-tier system and make academic administrations more receptive to creating more full-time positions. Backs to the wall, many trade unionists are beginning to smell the coffee. Every rank-and-file auto, textile, and steelworker who has been around for the

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past twenty years has witnessed the planned shrinkage or dlsappearance of his or her plant. These men and women don’t need an elaborate guidebook to remind them that the factory of tomorrow will be as close to peopleless as corporate technology can manage-or it won’t stay in the United States. At the same time, their children, spouses, and some fiiends are scrambling to get credentials for a simple reason: even if the squeeze is on in most professions, there are virtually no good new production jobs. But the great dlvide between intellectual and manual labor, between blue- and white-collar trade unionists, has not been closed. For most of labor, the name of the game remains the same: organize people like “us.” From a strategic perspective, labor has little choice but to broaden its vistas to include the knowledge producers at the cusp of the new economy. Walter Reuther foresaw that millions of teachers were ripe for union organization; the United Auto Workers became the virtual patron of the AFT; and New York‘s District 65 performed the same role for the great Hospital Workers Union campaign of the 1960s. Now it is time for contemporary labor to take seriously its responsibdity to all who work for wages and salaries. It’s more than a question of money, although without resources many promising beginnings can falter or fail. Equally important is the recognition that the issues facing white-collar and professional employees are labor’s vital concern. A beginning was made by John Sweeney’s gesture of walking picket lines at Yale University and Barnard College in spring 1996 and the merger of eight physicians’ unions into the Service Employees, which has recently pledged an organizing fund to support the expansion of those unions. But these steps should lead to more varied activities: not since 1983, when the AFL-CIO commissioned a study on the future of work, has the labor movement publicly addressed the broader issues of the impact of technological change on the evolving workplace. Moreover, as health-care workers face layoffs because of hospital closings and reorganizations, privatization, and reduced public fundlng, the AFL-CIO has not intervened in any substantial way in the debate or used its lobbying muscle to contest the growing healthcare catastrophe. Nor has organized labor really entered the debate about the future of higher education except to repeat, as a mantra, its endless plea to keep colleges open to working-class and poor students. Although the higher education unions resist administration-planned workload increases, they have been unable to slow, let alone halt or reverse, the hemorrhaging of full-time jobs and the tendency of a small handfd of institutions to abolish or severely weaken tenure by hiring almost all faculty on substitute or three-year terminal lines. Nor, of course, given the narrow vision of most unionists, are they

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players in the curriculum debate. Yet if public higher education is to survive the onslaughts by the privatizers, vocationalizers, and downsizers, unions, having established an important beachhead, must now tear the scales from their eyes and plunge where others are afraid to tread. They must boldly take responsibility for the future of higher education. Stanley Aronowitz, distinguished professor of sociology at The Graduate School of

the City University of New York at the time of original publication.

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C O L L E C T I V E BARGAINING AND THE P R O F E S S O R I A T E : W H A T T H E LAW SAYS

Deborah C. Malamud

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s college and university professors, who are we? What do we have in common with each other, what makes us different from those who earn their living in other ways, and where do we fit in the social hierarchy-that

implicit ordering that some call “social class” and others, “social status”? In the United States, these questions are not entirely personal or social; they are also legal. The law often draws lines between groups of people in setting out the eligibdity rules for public rights and programs. In so doing, the government commonly uses criteria, such as occupational groupings or income levels, that are salient to Americans’ conception of social class. When eligibhty lines parallel class lines, the legal system becomes a locus for debates over class.’ In areas ranging &om First Amendment law to the law of collective bargaining, professors have taken a public stand on the nature and status of professorial work. For some purposes, professors present themselves as having little in common with ordmary workers. In the First Amendment sphere, for example, professors have invoked the ideal of academic fieedom to gain protections for their speech and beliefi that are the envy of other workers. But for other purposes, professors have downplayed This article is reproduced from Deborah C. Malamud, “Collective Bargaining and the Professoriate: What the Law Says,” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998):18-22. Reprinted with permission from Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors.

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some of the unique features of academic Me in order to safeguard their legal rights. That effort failed when it came to collective bargaining rights in the private sector. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court held in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University that the degree of control that Yeshiva’s Ill-time faculty exercised over academic matters made them “managerial” employees and excluded them from all rights under the federal law of collectivebargaining.2That decision has been widely followed post-Yeshiva, the typical college or university faculty at a private institution has been held to have managerial powers. Why did the Court classift professors as managers-which is hardly how they see themselves? Did the Court do something unusual in restricting professors’ bargaining rights in this way? Or were professors merely the unlucky vanguard of what has become a more sweeping judicial restriction of collective bargaining right^?^

SUPERVISORS, PROFESSIONALS,AND MANAGERS With few exceptions, collective bargaining for private-sector employees is governed by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), a statute enacted in 1935 and amended in important ways in 1947. (State, county, and municipal employees are covered by state law rather than the NLRA.) Section 7 of the NLRA gives employees two vital workplace rights: the right to form and join labor unions for the purpose of collective bargaining and the right to engage in other concerted activity for mutual aid and protection. To have these rights under the NLRA, one must be an “employee.” The 1935 statutory definition was broad-within covered industries, no group of employees was excluded. But in America, statutes do not always mean what their plain language says. The president of the company is an “employee”-he receives a salary and can be fired by the board of &rectors.Did Congress in 1935 really mean to say that the president of the company could join a union and bargain with the board of &rectors? If not, then the word employee must carry with it, at least in this context, a more complex meaning than meets the untutored eye. The use of employee in the collective bargaining context could be said to imply that employees negotiate against some other group of people who are not employees-call them “management.” Indeed, members of Congress were especially concerned that the boundaries between “labor” and “management” be respected under the statute. A system of labor relations could be designed in several ways to deal with this problem of boundary maintenance. The law

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could simply deny certain upper-level employees the right to bargain, and in

so doing, legally declare that these employees must &gn themselves with the

interests of their superiors in company management. Alternatively, the law could allow upper-level employees to negotiate with management on their own behalf, but take steps to ensure that they remain allied with upper management in any conflicts between management and ordinary workers. For example, the law could deny upper-level employees the legal right to honor the picket lines of striking ordinary workers. The first alternative sees upper-level employees as having a single, fixed status: they are part of management. The second alternative sees upper-level employees as having a dual status: they are workers in relation to management and managers in relation to workers below them in the social hierarchy. The task of interpreting the NLRA is in the hands of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the admimstrative agency charged with enforcing the statute, and ultimately of the courts. Which of these alternatives would they follow? When industrial foremen tried to organize in the 1940s, the NLRB had a hard time deciding whether supervisors should be permitted to engage in collective bargaining. If supervisors were part of management, the thnking went, then allowing supervisors to bargain would seem to undermine the boundaries between labor and management. But did lower-level supervisors have sufficient power to jus* denying them the right to bargain? If some supervisors can bargain and others cannot, where do you draw the line? The NLRB w d e d for several years. When the question reached the Supreme Court in 1947, the Court held in favor of supervisors’ organizational rights! The decision was close (5 to 4), and barely survived long enough for its print to dry.A conservative Congress overrode a presidential veto in 1947 to enact the Taft-Hartley Act, one of the provisions of which was a clear exclusion of supervisors 6om protection under section 7 of the NLRA. Congress adopted the single-status alternative: supervisors are deemed part of management, plain and ~irnple.~ Taft-Hartley also made special provision for “professionals.” Like ordinary workers, professionals were accorded the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. But professionals were given greater rights to determine with whom they would organize. The NLRB generally has much latitude in selecting bargaining units-the actual groupings of employees who bargain collectively with the employer. The NLRB may choose any unit in whch it deems the employees to have a “community of interest.”6 But not for professionals. Under Taft-Hartley, professionals are given the right, by majority vote, to opt out of any proposed bargaining unit in which professionals and nonprofessionals are mixed. In exercising this right, professionals essentially determine their own status: they, rather than the NLRBS investigators, determine

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whether their working conditions have become sufficiently debased to break down the social lines that generally separate exalted professionals tiom ordinary workers. After Taft-Hartley, one would have thought that any group of employees that Congress had chosen not to exclude from the statute could safely enjoy its section 7 rights. Not so. Statutes like Taft-Hartley, which aim to amend previous legislation, generally concentrate on reversing administrative or judicial interpretations of a previous statute with which Congress disagrees. Before the passage of Taft-Hartley, the NLRB had excluded “managers” from statutory coverage. Managers were employees who had authority over aspects of production and company administration, but who did not supervise employees. If the problem with supervisory bargaining was that it breached the solidarity of the management team, was not the same true of bargaining by other agents of management? Taft-Hartley said nothing about the bargaining rights of mangers, but its silence is ambiguous. Silence might have meant approval of the NLRB’s practice of forbidding bargaining by managers; it might have meant disapproval; or it might have meant neutrality. Ultimately, the Supreme Court decided the question. More than two decades later, the Court held-again by a 5 to 4 vote-that managerial employees, like supervisors, have no right to ~rganize.~ The case involved buyers in a corporate purchasing department-fairly low-level managers-and thus made clear that the managerial exemption would reach deep into the ranks of administrative workers. MULTIPLE ROLES OF PROFESSORS In this legally mandated classification scheme, what are college and university faculty? Are we ordinary workers? Supervisors?Managers? Professionals? The least secure among us-part-time, adjunct, and untenured faculty members in institutions that rarely grant tenure-might see ourselves as ordinary workers. But most of us see ourselves as professionals. To use the language of TaftHartley, we do work that is “predominantly intellectual and varied in character as opposed to routine”; our work involves “the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment in its performance,” such that “the output produced or the result accomplished cannot be standardzed in relation to a given period of time”; and our work requires “knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction and study in an institution of higher learning.”

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That would be all well and good if the only choice the law offered was that between treating us as professionals or treating us as ordinary workers. But what about the possibhty that professors are supervisors? After all, professors in many fields hire and fire technical staf€and supervise graduate teaching and research assistants. We may see the supervisory work we do as merely a means of accomplishing our highly professional research and teaching goals. But if we kept accurate time sheets, we might be surprised at how much of our time goes into supervisory activities. And what about the possibllity that professors are managers? Yes, we like to think of ourselves as primarily teachers and scholars. That is what we are trained for, and that is what we entered the academy to do. But what about all that time we spend readmg admissions applications and hiring and tenure files? And what about the time we spend preparing for and attendmg faculty meetings and meetings of university-wide committees and governing bohes? Even assuming our teaching and research roles define us as professionals, can we not also be supervisors and managers? And if we are professionals who also manage and supervise, whch legal rule applies to us-the one that allows us to bargain, or the ones that do not? From what standpoint should that question be answered? Based on the activities on which we spend most of our time? Based on the activities that constitute our main value to our institutions? Based on the activities that we view as most significant? Or based on some other criteria? FACULTY AS MANAGERS These questions did not arise under the NLRA until 1970, when for the first time the NLRB determined that higher education’s effect on interstate commerce was important enough to warrant the exercise of NLRB jurisdiction over colleges and universities. The NLRB deemed professors to be professionals and began recognizing faculty bargaining units. But the experiment with private-sector faculty unions was a short one. In 1980 the Supreme Court ruled in the k h i v u case, another 5 to 4 decision, that professors can be simultaneously professionals and managers-and that their status as managers controls and excludes them from the right to bargain.* The Court reached this conclusion by looking only at the faculty’s role in management: The controhng consideration in this case is that the faculty ofyeshiva University exercise authority which in any other context unquestionably would be managerial. Their authority in academic matters is absolute. They decide

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Given the Court’s approach, it would not have made any difference whether each faculty member spent only a fiaction of his or her time involved in these managerial matters. The Court saw professors only in administrative terms, and characterized them as “representatives” of their institutions,bound to them by a duty of undwided loyalty. To make matters worse, managerial status is far fiom exalted; the Court classlfied professors as legally equivalent to buyers in a corporate purchasing department. The picture the Court painted thus bears little resemblance to how academics see themselvesteachers and scholars who shoulder incidental and often unwelcome adrmnistrative responsibhties. That the Court’s image of the professoriate so deviates fiom our perception of ourselves should come as no surprise, considering the Court’s approach. The Court did not see itself as having the job of painting an accurate picture of the nature of professorial work taken as a whole. Its narrow focus was on the managerial interests of the university as an institution-more specifically, on the university’s need for the complete loyalty of those who play a role in its management. All that was relevant to the Court about faculty work was the contribution professors make to managing the university. Yeshiva conceded that faculty members are professionals but argued that the professional status of professors is legally irrelevant. The Court agreed. Under the Yeshiva doctrine, when professionals are also managers, their managerial status alone determines their legal status.

TOTALITY O F PROFESSORS’ WORK The dissenting opinion in the Yeshiva case took a more comprehensive view of the totality of professorial work. The dissent observed that management activities play only a small role in academic l i f e a s reflected in the fact that “[flaculty members are judged by their employer on the quality of their teaching and scholarship” rather than on the quahty of their administrative work.

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Furthermore, the dissent argued that professors participate in university governance in a manner that hstinguishes them from, rather than identifies them with, nonfaculty managers: The premise of a finding of managerial status is a determination that the excluded employee is acting on behalf’ of management and is answerable to a higher authority in the exercise of his responsibilities. ...Yeshiva’s faculty, however, is not accountable to the administration in its governance fimction, nor is any individualfaculty member subject to personal sanction or control based on the administration’s assessment of the worth of his recommendations.When the faculty . . . participates in university decision making on subjects of academic policy, it does not serve as the “representative of management.”

Moreover, the dissent argued that the faculty exercises its power and influence purely in “its own professional interest.” The chssent thus saw professors in the same light as other professionals. It just so happens that faculty members exercise their professional judgment across a wider range of institutional activities. And professors have nothing in common with mangers, because their only duty is to themselves. W e the dissent correctly recognized that faculty members do not act as the agents of university administrators,it fell short of capturing the nature of faculty governance.Even if the faculty comes into the governance process concerned mostly with “its own professional reputation,” it often leaves the process understandmg that its reputation rests on the fiscal and legal health of the universitymatters the dissent claimed as the exclusive responsibhty of pure adrmnistrators. And the faculty, even when it hsagrees with the adrmnistration, purports to be spealungin the interest of “the university” (whch is, after all,the employer)rather than in the narrow self-interest of the faculty alone. The dissent also erred in claiming that faculty members bring purely “professional” expertise to governance tasks. When a biology professor reviews candidates for tenure within her own department, she uses much the same professional expertise that she relies on in her academic work. The same cannot be said when members of a law school faculty form a committee to design a new building, or when members of a liberal arts faculty sit on a university-wide committee to revise the institution’s employee benefits structure. Faculty members are appointed and retained for their particular academic expertise. But in the course of their careers, they are asked to develop new skills-including some generic administrative skds. Furthermore, the hssent overstated the case when it argued that the university adrmnistration exercises no control over faculty administrative activity because participation in faculty governance goes uncompensated. The power

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faculty members are least likely to wield is the authority to set their own salaries and perquisites. Faculty members cannot (or at least should not) be fired for taking unpopular administrative positions. But punishment through the paycheck or through more subtle forms of institutional reprisal happens, though it is hard to detect and to deter. At an institution like Yeshiva, then, faculty members are involved in the enterprise of university management. That we call our role “governance” rather than “management” reflects both real differences between collegial and bureaucratic organizations and real gaps between the administrative roles of faculty and nonfaculty administrators. But our reluctance to be legally categorized as managers does not stem mostly from these differences. It stems, instead, from the fact that we see our administrative work as a necessary but undesirable appendage to our real professional work, as scholars and teachers. Yeshiva feels wrong because it permits the managerial tail to wag the professional dog. The Yeshiva decision did not hold that all or even most university faculties have sufficient managerial authority to render them ineligible for section 7 rights. Indeed, in some respects the Yeshiva faculty seemed to exercise far broader control than is common for university faculties. The NLRB and the courts thus seemed to have room to distinguish other cases from Yeshiva based on their facts. Instead, however, the NLRB and the lower courts have applied the holding of Yeshiva to all but the least collegial colleges and universities. And this trend has not bent to changes in higher education.As the Yeshiva dlssent perceived in 1980, market pressures are causing universities to become “big businesses.” For example, university medical centers now face the competitive threat of managed health care, and the business community plays a growing role in shaping the agenda of scientific research at universities. Finally, the Yeshiva decision has had influence well beyond the confines of the NLRA. State statutes exclusively control labor relations in public universities, and neither state courts nor state legislatures are bound to follow Yeshiva’s analysis. But in some instances, they have done so, and excluded faculties &om bargaining rights as a result.’

YESHIVA AND OTHER PROFESSIONALS If it is any consolation, we are not alone. Yeshiva’s influence has reached beyond university professors to other categories of professionals-for example, lawyers employed as public defenders in Illinois.’o Indeed, we are sitting pretty compared to the latest victims of the Supreme Court’s restriction of bargaining rights: licensed practical nurses. In 1994 the Court held in NLRB v. Health Care G Retirement Corporation ofAmerica-yet another 5 to 4 decision-that li-

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censed practical nurses are supervisors, and therefore lack bargaining rights, if they dlrect the activities of less s u e d employees (nurses’aides, for example) in the course of patient care.l’ The Yeshiva decision was dispositive in the nurses’ case by analogy. Just as the Court rejected the claims in Yeshiva that professors engage in university governance in their own interest and exercise professional rather than managerial judgment, the Court rejected the nurses’ claim that they supervise patient care (rather than supervising employees in the conventional sense) and exercise professional rather than supervisory judgment in doing so. Indeed, the magnetic pull of the Yeshiva decision was so strong that it overcame the fact that in Yeshiva itself the Court had observed approvingly that in the health-care setting the NLRB “asks in each case whether the decisions alleged to be managerial or supervisory are ‘incidental to’ or ‘in addition to’ the treatment of patients.” The disquahfication of professionals who supervise other employees in the course of performing their professional work poses a significant threat to the unionization of all professionals. Doctors, whose encounters with managed care have drawn them to the labor movement in increasing numbers, routinely supervise nurses and paraprofessionals in caring for patients. Lawyers routinely supervise paralegals and secretaries; architects supervise draftspeople; engineers supervise technicians. As demands of economy and efficiency are made on professionals, they have no choice but to delegate work to nonprofessionals. The norms of professional conduct demand that professionals retain ultimate control over their product and therefore supervise those to whom they delegate work. Under these circumstances, professionals are also supervisors almost by definition. For this reason, the logic of the Court’s decisions in the Yeshiva and Health Care cases threatens to make section 7 rights for professionals the exception rather than the rule. Professors are thus hardy unique in their lack of collective bargaining rights. As the NLRB and the courts extend the Court’s Health Care approach to other groups of professionals,professors will probably be among the least aggrieved of professionals.Whatever one calls faculty involvement in institutional governance, professors at least have a voice in managing their institutions. The same can hardy be said of nurses and most other professionals.

BIAS TOWARD MANAGEMENT I have taken care to point out that all of the key Supreme Court decisions that have influenced the legal status of the professoriate were decided by votes of 5 to 4,over vigorous and cogent dissents. I do not mean to suggest that 5 to 4

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decisions are less bindmg than 9 to 0 decisions, or that the Court routinely reevaluates 5 to 4 decisions when its membership changes. Why, then, harp on the fact that all of the cases that brought us to this juncture were decided by a single vote? Because the Court’s decisions reflect the cultural difficulty of answering the questions with which this article began-particularly in the context of legal decision making. Should professors be treated as professionals or as managers? If our self-image and the way others in our society perceive us are the criteria, clearly we are professionals. But the law need not take this approach. It is perfectly legitimate for legal decision makers to answer such questions with reference to the purposes of a statute-even when the result is culturally jarring. But when the legal answer and the cultural answer so clearly conflict-as they do when one asks whether professors are professionals or managers-it behooves those in the legal system to think hard about whether their conclusion is in fact dictated by the purposes of the statute. Here, it is not. The cases I have dmussed focus on the c o d c t between collective bargaining and management’s prerogative to run its enterprise without undue interference with core management hnctions. But protecting management interests is not the purpose--x at least not the sole purpose-of federal labor law. The law also seeks to ensure that employees who have been granted the right to organize be permitted to exercise that right.12 When the Court declared professors managers and nurses supervisors, the management role of these employees was placed in the forefiont of the analysissuggesting that the Court was treating the preservation of management prerogatives as the statute’s dominant concern. Had the Court permitted protection of employee rights to be its dominant concern, its decisions would have been far more harmonious with cultural understandmgs of the work of nurses and professors. And had the Court seen the statute as having dual purposes that must be held in equipoise, it would have done more to work out a compromise--perhaps by adapting section 7 rights to the circumstances of professionals who supervise or manage, instead of ehinating those rights altogether. When conflcting statutory purposes are resolved in a way that needlessly causes social and legal identities to conflict, something has gone wrong. And so it has in the case of collective bargaining and the professoriate.

NOTES 1. An example of this dynamic is laid out in my forthcoming article, “Engineering the Middle Classes: Class Line-Drawing in New Deal Hours Regulation,” Michigdn Law Review 96, no. 8 (1998). See also my “Class-Based Affirmative Action: Lessons and Caveats,” Texas Law Review 74 (1996): 1847.

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2. National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, 444 U.S. 672 (1980). 3. The best extended treatment of the issue of professorial bargaining is found in two articles by David M. Rabban: “Distinguishing Excluded Managers from Covered Professionals under the NLRA,” Columbia Law Review 89 (1989): 1175, and “Can American Labor Law Accommodate Collective Bargaining by Professional Employees?” Yale Lawlournu1 99 (1980):689. 4. Packard Motor Car Co. v. NLRB, 330 U.S. 485 (1947). 5. Under Taft-Hartley, the term supervisor is defined as follows: “The term ‘supervisor’ means any inhvidual having authority, in the interest of the employer, to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees, or responsibly to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action, if in connection with the foregoing the exercise of such authority is not of merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment.” 29 U.S.C. section 152 (11). 6. In practice, this power is exercised by accepting or refusing a bargaining unit proposed by a union. 7. N U B v. BellAerospace Co., 416 U.S. 267 (1974). 8. The Court’s opinion was written by Justice Powell, who also wrote the majority opinion in Bell Aerospace. The Court &d not address whether professors are supervisors, since finding them to be managers was sufficient to oust them from section 7 rights. The Court did note, however, that faculty members at Yeshiva “play a predominant role in faculty hiring, tenure, sabbaticals, termination and promotion,” and that these decisions “have . . . supervisory characteristics.” 444 U.S. at 864 n. 23. 9. See Patrick Nagle, “Yeshiva’s Impact on Collective Bargaining in Public-Sector Higher Education,”]ournal of College and University Law 20 (1994). 10. Chief/”dge ofthe Sixteenthludicid Circuit v. Illinois State Labor Relations Board, 178 Ill.2d 333,687 N.E.2d 795 (1997). 11. 511 U.S. 571 (1994). 12. See James Atleson, Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983).

Deborah C . Malamud, professor of law at the University of Michigan at the time of original publication.

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THEYESHIVAFACULTYUNION: TALES TOLDOUT O F SCHOOL Manfred Weidhorn

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n February 20,1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of National Labor Relations Board yeshiva University.At issue was whether faculty members at the university were “managerial and supervisory” or “professional.” Under the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), managerial employees in the private sector cannot form unions, but professionals can.’ Holdmg that the Yeshiva faculty were managers, the Court, by a vote of 5 to 4, established a legal benchmark that has effectively prevented unionization by faculties at private universities. In the wake of that ruling, unions at the University of New Haven and Villanova University had their recoption peremptorily withdrawn, and unions at other private colleges were placed in legal jeopardy. Yeshva was not the first in line. The administrations of Fordham and New York Universities had threatened to go to the courts to test the applicability of labor laws to faculty at private universities, but union defeats at the polls ended the matter at those institutions. Only at Yeshva did the union win the election and so make the admmstration’s tradblazing appeal to the courts possible. Ever since, the “Yeshiva decision” has become a curse word in faculty circles nationwide. This article is reproduced &om ManGed Weidhorn, “The Yeshiva Faculty Union: Tales Told Out of School,” Academe 84,no. 6 (November-December 1998):24-26. Reprinted with permission from Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors.

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A NONREPRESENTATIVE UNIVERSITY That is ironic, because Yeshiva, as the only university under Orthodox Jewish auspices, was hardly representative of academia. A sizable portion of its faculty consisted of rabbis who received ordination in lieu of academic degrees. It was a relatively young and small school, and its faculty barely had the will or the resources to carry a case all the way to the Supreme Court. The grievances at Yeshiva were familiar: extremely low salaries (some were more than a third less than those at comparable institutions) and lack of faculty involvement in institutional decision making. The age for mandatory retirement, for example, was changed without the faculty’s being formally informed or consulted. The situation was bad enough for it to be studied at Harvard University’s summer Institute for Educational Management as a model of how not to run a university. Yeshiva had seen spurts of activism from time to time; a representative of the big teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), talked to the faculty in spring 1970. In 1974 discontent at two small graduate schools within the university finally crystallized into a nascent union, which later that year grew to include the equally disgruntled faculty of the flagship, Yeshiva College. Elected vice president of the newly constituted Yeshiva University Faculty Association (YUFA), I became the editor of the union newsletter as well as the unofficial spokesman for the organization.

FEAR O F SECULARIZATION At the time ofYUFA’s formation, we faced an important decision: whether to affiliate with a large organization like the AAUP or the AFT or to form an inhouse “faculty association.” O n the one hand, a national organization would bring a large war chest and an experienced legal team to help our cause. But that advantage was canceled by a powerful weapon in the hands of our opponents: fear of secularization. Yeshiva administrators repeatedly warned the rabbinic faculty members that getting into bed with people like the Teamsters would erode the religious atmosphere of the institution. Whether the administrators really believed their own words is not clear; we did find out in later years, however, that they feared the political power of an AFT-affiliated union much more than they dsd a mere faculty association, and so they used the argument about secularization to good effect.

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The leaders of YUFA had, as a result, to go for an in-house union. We were in an honorable tradition: in the American Revolution, northerners who found slavery repellent needed, in order to present a united front against George 111, to accede to the wishes of the southern states. The rabbis were our southern states (that is, very conservative); to bring them on board, we had to allay their fears. That concession to political reality probably weakened us, but without their votes, we might have had no union at all. That the rabbinic faculty had to be coaxed is odd. One of the many ironies in the Yeshiva case is that the rabbis, who are the raison &&re of the university, are the worst-paid (and sometimes the most insecure) members of the faculty.Yet many of these same victims, because of their allegiance to the administration, were inclined to vote for more of the same mistreatment by turning down a union. Perhaps the same situation obtains in other faith-based institutions whose presidents are members of the clergy. It becomes difficult for religious faculty members to see themselves in an adversarial relationship with an administration over which such a president presides. But while they think they trust a religious administration, the reality is that they are dealing with a religious administration. The iron laws of economics and politics, in other words, easily overcome religious ties.

AN UNNECESSARY BATTLE Another irony is that the entire contest at Yeshiva was unnecessary. The faculty members at the university were by nature conservative and passive. It was an open secret that they could be had for very little, to wit, a decent increase that would bring their salaries to the level of a second- or third-tier metropolitan institution. Other matters, such as participation in governance and a flexible retirement policy, while much talked about, aroused no great passion. But we heard time and again that the administration was intent on establishing a principle. As a result, a lot of money was spent in fighting the union all the way to the Supreme Court, when a fraction of that money would have purchased the electoral defeat of the union, avoidance of litigation, and peace on the campus. From the beginning, the university’s hostility to the union was obvious. Yeshiva’s president at the time, Samuel Bellun, initially said that the institution’s already-existing channels for grievances made such a move unnecessary, though he had previously refused to respond to faculty requests and let it be known through intermediaries that “sometimes no reply is also a reply.” Later,

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the administration did everything possible to delay the proceehngs. If there had been an election when we first filed a petition, in November 1974,the administration, like those at neighboring Fordham and NYU, might even have won. But the Yeshiva administration’s legal maneuvers before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the administrative agency charged with enforcing the NLRA, delayed the vote. As a result, the faculty’s morale deteriorated further. While the administration stalled,YUFA sponsored its own unofficial election in April 1976 under the auspices of New York‘s Honest Ballot Association. Its smashing victory (99 to 11 out of some 140 eligible voters) showed that the desire for a union was not just a bee in the bonnet of a few hotheads. Unfortunately, the honest ballot initiative, which had looked like such a brilliant stroke at the time, turned out to be counterproductive. President Bellun had &ed in the meantime, and the administration urged the faculty to give his successor, Norman L a m , a chance before resorting to unionization. As a result, when the NLRB-sponsored election finally took place in December 1976, the union’s 91 to 50 margin seemed quite a comedown rather than the mandate it in fact was. The administrators claimed that the tide was turning in their favor, while Lamm spoke of the “nearly five-fold increase” in the antiYUFA vote and refixed to recognize the union.

EGREGIOUS WORKING CONDITIONS The NLRB then charged the university with an unfair labor practice, and the courtroom odyssey began. Insisting that the NLRA did not apply to faculty at private universities, Yeshiva’s legal brief claimed that the faculty was managerial and supervisory. We could not form a union, it was argued, because we in effect ran the place. That such was not the case had long been obvious to most Yeshva professors, who were horrified, but not surprised, for example, to discover that in a year in which the vice president for business affairs imposed a salary fieeze on us, he himself took a 9 percent increase on a salary that was already larger than those of his counterparts at larger institutions. Outside observers were also aware of how little power the Yeshiva faculty actually held. At Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management, participants &om both sides of the Yeshiva struggle gave their views before classes consisting of presidents, vice presidents, and deans at midsized and small universities and colleges. Conversations with these “students,” as well as with colleagues elsewhere, made me reahze that our worlung conditions (four-and once even

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five-courses a semester, salaries that were abysmal even by non-New York City standards, and little participation in decision making) were unique. As the NLRB case wound its way through the legal system, the negative conclusions that others drew about Yeshiva piled up. The Phi Beta Kappa honor society turned down a request for a chapter at Yeshiva when it studed conditions there and-in spite of feverish “Potemlun-daging” by administratorscited the faculty’s egregiously low salaries, heavy workload, and terrible morale. The AAUP was investigating-and would eventually censure-Yeshiva’s administration for firing three tenured professors without due process. And, at its regular visits, the Middle States accrediting team also took note of poor salaries. Though L a m and the rest of the administration either ignored or downplayed that criticism, the university consistently failed to contribute data to the AAUP’s annual nationwide survey of salaries.

BAD TIMING AND A MISREADING O F FACTS Even as Yeshiva was arguing for the record that the faculty was all powerful, its leaders believed that the case looked hopeless in the courts. They had trouble obtaining amicus briefi h-om other universities, which I d not want to be associated with the Yeshiva record. And some members of the administration conceded in private that the faculty had so little power that a union would hardly be inappropriate. They were fighting a rearguard action, delaying the apparently inevitable, and, except for one lawyer who had had experience at NYU, d d not expect to win in the courts. Whatever they might say for public consumption, they knew that the plight of the faculty was hardly a state secret. The Supreme Court decision, therefore, not only dismayed YUFA and stunned the NLRB, but also thoroughly surprised the victors. The Yeshiva administration won for several reasons. One was timing. Many of the more devastating developments, such as the Phi Beta Kappa rejection and the AAUP investigation, surfaced after the NLRB conducted hearings and thus did not appear in the record perused by the judges. Had they known how conditions at Yeshiva were deteriorating, they might well have come to a different conclusion. On top of that, the NLRB, habituated by then to university unionization and not expecting the matter to go to the courts, ignored the factual record at Yeshiva and made a generalized, perfunctory ruling. When the case I d , after all, go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the presiding judge of a three-judge panel, Hugh Mulligan, ignored the NLRB’s generalizations and studied the “facts” in the record.

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Mulligan, a former professor and dean of the Fordham University Law School, had testified against the unionization effort at Fordham. He had a clear reason to recuse himself, but he chose not to. And the NLRB lawyers,in a fateful decision, decided not to ask him to. They felt assured of winning the case because the courts had been inclined not to interfere with the judgment of federal agencies in the area of the agencies’ expertise. Also in play was the lawyers’ fear that such a request, if turned down, would rub the judge the wrong way. So Mulligan was on board, and, like most people, he was a creature of his own experiences. The full-time Fordham Law School faculty was small, and the school had been run in true collegial fashion. Seeing the Yeshiva situation as similar, he ruled against the NLRB and YUFA. And the majority on the Supreme Court later built on Mulhgan’s reading of events.

MISSING FACTS Another contributor to our defeat had to do with what one might call the faculty’s “hallway heroics.” Both before and during unionization, colleagues with stories of atrocities constantly accosted YUFA leaders in the hallways between classes. That was one of the reasons for our decision to form a union in the first place: the faculty seemed aroused. But then came time for hearings at the NLRB to ascertain whether a collective bargaining unit was needed. Suddenly, when people had to take the stand and bear witness to the atrocities, it was Everyman or High Noon. Person A would be out of town; B was worried over promotion or tenure or retirement; C was ready to martyr himself, were it not for his having a wife and children; and D was on good terms with some administrators and therefore felt inhibited about testifying. So we had to compile a record with a lot of important matter left out. Most infiwiating was the &scovery years later that several faculty members had documents that bore directly on the case. Why had they not turned the material over at the time of the hearings? They did not know that it mattered. . . . As a result, the judges-Mulligan and then the Supreme Court’s conservative majority-bought into the administration’s brief, with its idealized, wholly fictional portrayal of a quasi-medieval institution in whch the faculty shared in power, if it did not run the place. Only the dissenting opinion by Justice Brennan, a moving and insightful document, ripped away the pretenses and the platitudes and described the modern university as it really is.

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FACULTY AMBIVALENCE As I grew more and more disdlusioned about the level of faculty commitment to activism, I came to harbor treasonous thoughts. I came to think that a defeat in the Supreme Court would solve more problems than would a victory. That is a terrible admission for a leader to make, but my intuition has proved to be correct, and it has to do with the supreme irony about the whole sixyear misadventure. Ever since the “Yeshiva decision,” faculty members at Yeshiva have sighed and shrugged, saying, “TOO bad! We tried our best, but the Supreme Court let us down. What an aaction the conservative Court’s ruling proved to be!” That, I submit, is a pipe dream as big as any in The Iceman Cometh. The Court is being made a scapegoat for the faculty’s own impotence. Given its intransigence, I have good reason to doubt whether the administration would have bargained in good faith even if it had been ordered by the Supreme Court to do so. At that point, the faculv would have faced the moment of truth. Would they have been ready to go on strike? I seriously doubt it. The faculty members voted several times for a union and contributed enough money to pay the bulk of a large legal bill. But they did not know what unionization entailed, and they were ambivalent about what they were doing. Collective bargaining, which can be an adversarial relationship, means having weapons in your arsenal and being willing to use them. The ultimate weapon, of course, is the strike, and the Yeshiva faculty (with some noble exceptions) never showed an inclination to go that route. If an administration intuits such reluctance and calls your bluff, you are msarmed. The whole struggle for a collective bargaining unit, therefore, may well have been in vain. And so the Supreme Court, by volunteering to be our lightning rod or scapegoat, allowed us to harbor the illusion that if only we had been enabled all would have been rosy. The Court’s ruling was a blessing in disguise, mercfilly sparing us a confi-ontationwith the truth about ourselves. Considering the psychology of the faculty members, it is a miracle that the YUFA leaders were able to drag them so close to victory. Wending our way through the NLFU3, the appeals court, and finally the Supreme Court was rather like going through a series of championship play-off games. We made it to the finals; we gave the other guys a run for their money; we came within one measly point of winning. And, as a result, because of a misleading NLRB record fashioned by the administration’s misinformation and luck in timing, together with Yeshiva faculty fecklessness, American higher education is saddled with a miserable precedent in labor law.

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NOTE 1. State, county, and municipal employees are covered by state law rather than by the National Labor Relations Act.

Manfred Weidhorn, Abraham and Irene Guterman Professor of English at Yeshiva University at the time of original publication.

SECTION I11 UNIONIZATION AND PART-TIME FACULTY

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To MANYADJUNCTPROFESSORS, ACADEMIC FREEDOMI S A MYTH:AS THE RANKS OF PART-TIMERS SWELL,THEYLAMENTHow EASILYCOLLEGES CANDUMPTHEM Alison Schneider

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ere’s a news flash for people who care about academic fieedom: Half the professoriate does not have it. Adjuncts are getting dumped for things tenure-track scholars do with impunity-teaching controversial material, fighting grade changes, organizing unions. One part-timer was dropped after trying to talk about pornography in an ethics class. Another was dltched h e r racist words came up in a communications course. Then there was the professor who got fired for harassment after he mentioned tampons and anal sex in a pathology class. He sued and won. But more adjuncts are losing when it comes to academic fi-eedom-a worrisome trend now that they make up nearly 50 percent of the professoriate. Academic fieedom for people off the tenure track is a myth, adjuncts say. “It simply doesn’t exist,” a disgruntled lecturer insists. Not everyone is taking the situation lying down. Adjuncts have sued colleges in the name of fiee speech. Academic fieedom is coming up at the bargaining table. And faculty advocates are warning that a dearth of academic fieedom for some professors threatens academic fieedom for all. This article is reproduced &om Alison Schneider, “To Many Adjunct Professors,Academic Freedom Is a Myth: As the Ranks of Part-Timers Swell, They Lament How Easily Colleges Can Dump Them,” n t e Chronicle $Higher Education,December 10,1999,A18. Copyright 0 1999 by the Chronicle $Higher Education. Reprinted with permission.

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But most adjuncts would rather not publicly lscuss the topic at all. Open mouths lead to closed doors, they say. All an institution has to do is not renew their contracts. No explanations required; no grievance procedures provided. Adjuncts just disappear. “I am so beaten down that I’m just hoping I keep the job I have,” says one mathematics instructor who suspects she lost a post over union organizing. “If I’m in this article with my name, they won’t rehire me. They’ll come up with an excuse.” That makes the academic-freedom violations of adjuncts almost impossible to track. “People fall like sparrows,” says Richard Moser, the point man for part-time issues at the American Association of University Professors.Adjuncts on the outs with administrators are told their courses have been canceled, enrollment has dropped, the department is retrenching-if they’re told anything at all, he says. “It’s never done by frontal assault. They’re dead before they know what hit them.” Some professors are hoping the courts can revive their careers. In September, Ken Hardy sued Jefferson Community College in Kentucky for violating his free-speech rights. In a 1998 lecture, Mr. Hardy asked students in his interpersonal-communication course to deconstruct words used to oppress and offend. How did those words evolve? How do they impede effective communication? Examples got bandied about by the students-girl, faggot, bitch, nigger-and Mr. Hardy repeated them during the discussion. One student out of twenty-two took offense. Words like “nigger” have no place in a communication course, the student, who is black, said. Her classmates, not all of them white, disagreed. “Can’t you see what we’re talkmg about?” they told her. The student could not be appeased, even after Mr. Hardy, who is white, told her she could skip the rest of the lecture. She refused and accused Mr. Hardy of violating his own syllabus, which states that there wlll be no “abusive” language in class. Mr. Hardy explained that the clause did not mean that offensive language would not be used in class, only that such words would never be used to demean inlvidual students. He was trying to create a “safe place” where lfficult language could be discussed, he told her, not to prevent those discussions from happening. The student didn’t buy the argument. She took her complaints to a local civil-rights activist, who carried them to the college president, Richard Green. Five days later, Mr. Hardy wound up in the office of the academic dean, Mary Pam Besser. A month later, he was out of a job.

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By most accounts, the conversation with Ms. Besser did not go well. Wes Lites, the head of the humanities division, attended the meeting and resigned as division head three days later. In an affidavit,Mr. Lites said the dean had challenged Mr. Hardy’s use of the word “rigger,” noting that a “prominent citizen” who represented the “Ah-ican-American community” had become involved. Moreover, Mr. Lites said, the dean had stated that enrollment was down, something the “prominent citizen” could exacerbate. The college couldn’t afford to alienate the black community, the dean allegedly said. Mr. Hardy thinks it was easier to alienate him. In August 1998,Ms. Besser left Mr. Hardy a message: There were no classes for him that fall. The news surprised Mr. Hardy. He’d been scheduled to teach three courses in the fall. Instead, he wound up locked in a lawsuit. The college has filed a motion to dismiss the case, claiming that its decision not to rehire Mr. Hardy had nothing to do with his speech and everything to do with his services, which weren’t needed anymore. One of Mr. Hardy’s classes was canceled due to low enrollment; the other two were reassigned to a full-time professor, the college notes. (But adjuncts with less seniority than Mr. Hardy were kept on, the communication professor points out.) Even if speech were at issue, Mr. Hardy’s use of “vulgar language” wasn’t protected, says Quint McTyeire, the college’s lawyer, who is fielding questions on the case because Ms. Besser is named in the suit. “What goes on in the classroom is not protected by the First Amendment. It’s not a matter of public concern. It’s a curricular issue”-Mr. Hardy made it one when he put that language clause in his syllabus. “The college is in control of curriculum.” That argument seems pretty shaky to people in the trenches, especially for a public college. “This is an academic-fieedom issue,” says Thomas Sabetta, who took over the humanities division after Mr. Lites resigned. “Ken’s lesson plan was sound.” Would Mr. Sabetta have tackled the topic? “Absolutely not. It’s valuable to demysti@words, but I wouldn’t have done it. I would have been too a h i d that this would happen to me. He has guts.” These days, Mr. Hardy, an adjunct at the University of Louisville, isn’t feeling gutsy. “I ask myself if I’m getting gun-shy. Am I losing my wdl to teach? I find myself fearful of students. I worry about anything that might upset them.” It’s an all-too-familiar lament, says F! D. Lesko, the head of the National Adjunct Faculty Guild. “People are terrified of being rigorous graders, terrified to deal with complaints about the course materials, terrified to deal with plagiarists. A lot of them are working as robots. They go in, they teach, they leave. No muss, no fuss.” There’sjust one catch, Ms. Lesko adds: “If you’re afiaid to give an honest grade or an honest opinion, you’re not teaching.”

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Selected Readings

Jeffrey A. Schaler gave his honest opinion, but says it cost him his job. Mr. Schaler, a part-time psychology professor at American University and the Johns Hopkins University, ran into trouble after he was hired, in 1997, to teach courses at Chestnut Hill College: one on the spirituality of “Twelve Step” programs, the other on addictive behaviors. But unlike most psychologists, Mr. Schaler doesn’t think addiction is a disease. He believes it’s a choice, and that means people can control the behavior-if they want to. The same goes for mental “illnesses,” he says. As for groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, they’re similar to “cults,” using quasi-religious ideology to deal with addictions. Mr. Schaler backed up his lectures with peer-reviewed articles,but “if you say mental illness isn’t a &sease, it’s like denying the existence of God. It’s forbidden.” In June 1998, he clashed with a tenured colleague, Thomas Klee. In an e-mail, Mr. Klee said he was “deeply offended” that Mr. Schaler seemed to be trying to connect the college with his “political beliefs.” Mr. Schaler had suggested that Mr. Klee link his World Wide Web page to Mr. Schaler’s online syllabi, which are housed on an anti-mental-dlness site. Mr. Schaler can think whatever he wants about mental illness, Mr. Klee wrote, but Chestnut Hill’s psychology department “is on record with a specific theoretical orientation. That is our public position and any implied connection” with opposing views is “confusing and misleading.” The only thing that’s confusing, Mr. Schaler says, is Chestnut Hill’s commitment to academic freedom. He took the matter to his department head. But all the chairman &d, Mr. Schaler says, was grdl him about his beliefs on A.A. and mental dlness. After hearing the answers,Mr. Schaler recalls, the chairman said he didn’t want the adjunct to teach on those topics anymore. Mr. Schaler was not asked back. While some colleagues might think Mr. Schaler deserved to be fired for his unorthodox views, that’s not the college’s position. “At no time was his academic freedom violated, nor were his views the basis for not offering him another course to teach,” says Wdham T. Walker, the vice president for academic affairs. In fact, he says the college “defended” Mr. Schaler’s academic freedom after he set off a hue and cry, in August 1998, by writing a letter to The Philadelphia Inquirer outlining his views on mental illness. The college received complaints, Mr. Walker says, and “in each and every instance” defended Mr. Schaler’s academic freedom. That’s hogwash, Mr. Schaler retorts. Tenured professors with unpopular views are kept on, he says, but “I was done in.” He’s taken his case to the AAUP, but “I’m not optimistic. I see a stone wall.”

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How often do adjuncts cut dicey topics out of the curriculum? A parttime philosophy professor, who spoke on the conhtion of anonymity, got ditched by a religious institution after preparing a presentation on pornography for his ethics class. He wanted to see if students could tell where art ends and porn begins, something difficult to do just by reading articles, he says. That’s why he decided to bring in samples of both. Any students uncomfortable with the topic were told to skip the lecture. The university thought it was the professor who should skip the lecture. After the department head got wind of the idea and mentioned the words “sexual harassment,” the adjunct canceled the lecture. He gave a talk on censorship instead. Midway through the next semester, the adjunct got a death threat in his introductory philosophy course. When asked for informal comments on the class, a student drew a gun with a bullet coming out of it and scrawled the words “I want to kdl you” beside it. The adjunct, who figured out which student had made the threat from his handwriting, wanted him kicked out of the class. The dean refused. “The dean thought I was being overly emotional,” the part-timer says. After he turned in his grades, the dean informed him that there weren’t any courses for him the next semester, even though the registrar had him listed for three. He spent a year unemployed, and now has a full-time post elsewhere. But he hasn’t recovered from the experience. “Prior to this incident, academic freedom had never been a concern,” he says. “I assumed I had it. After this incident, I realized I didn’t. I’ve become very concerned, maybe obsessively concerned, about class content. A lot of self-censorship has occurred. There are topics I won’t discuss.” In fact, he does everything possible to avoid teaching ethics at all. But when ethicists avoid talking about racism and English instructors steer clear of short stories with the “N” word, education isn’t necessarily dumbed down, but it is watered down, critics contend. That makes for a pretty lifeless learning environment, says Randy Vanderhurst, a former instructor at Colorado Mountain College. In 1995, he was fired from the veterinary-technician program for mentioning “tampons” and “anal sex” during a discussion of parasitic diseases. To illustrate the point that water-borne parasites like giarda can survive sewage-treatment plants, he mentioned that he had once seen a tampon floating in water that had passed through a purification system. When the topic of cryptosporidium arose, Mr. Vanderhurst noted that the parasite is a particular problem among gay men because it can be transmitted through oral and anal sex. He also used the term “big chair” to refer to a toilet, and “sinkers” and

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Selected Readings

“floaters” to refer to fecal matter. (“With giardia, there’s a lot of fat in stool, so it floats,” Mr. Vanderhurst says.) “Taken out of context, ‘big chair’ might sound out of line,” Mr. Vanderhurst says, “But in a parasitology class, it’s not. If you lecture for fifieen weeks on parasitology, it gets a little old. Context is everythng.” The college thought Mr. Vanderhurst’s language violated its sex-harassment policy and fired him.Mr. Vanderhurst fired back with a First Amendment lawsuit. He won a $557,100 judgment in 1998. Last month, the college argued its appeal but declined to comment for this article. If he had it to do over again, Mr.Vanderhurst might watch what he says, too: “In hindsight, I probably wouldn’t say a thing, but that would result in a very sterile situation. We’ve all known professors who basically teach by the book. But that means you’re an information-giver rather than a teacher. And that’s disheartening.” What’s really disheartening, some professors say, is how few adjuncts are wikng to stand up for academic freedom. For all the private carping, formal complaints are few. And even when adjuncts do go to battle, allies can be tough to find. Unions have dwided loyalties when part-time professors file grievances against their M-time members. As for the AAUP, its resources are lunited and so are its tactics. All the organization can do is investigate whether a college violated a professor’s due-process rights and censure it when it has. But that’s not much help to adjuncts since few colleges grant them due process. To complicate matters, there’s no consensus on how much due process academe’s day laborers deserve. “If we’re dealing with someone who goes to a university Thursday from 7:30 to 9 P.M. once a week for twelve weeks, and he doesn’t get reappointed and alleges it’s because of academic freedom, can that person invoke the time-consuming and expensive machnery of a M hearing? The AAUP wafnes on that,” says Jordan Kurland, the general secretary of the AAUP’s academic-freedom committee. “He’s entitled to a hearing, but we don’t insist on the same M procedures that a faculty member with more equity in the place has.” Afiter all, what institution could afford it? Universities hire adjuncts to save money, not spend it. “Part of the attraction of adjuncts is that when they’re not effective, you can let them go easily,” says J. Peter Byrne, an associate dean at Georgetown University’s law school who has written about academic freedom without tenure. Sometimes they deserve to get canned. “If their speech is stupid, vulgar, abusive, then eventually it’s appropriate to penahze them,” Mr. Byrne adds. He suggests a lesser form of protection: long-term contracts for adjuncts. Academic freedom can’t exist without them, he says.

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The American Association for Higher Education made a few suggestions, too. Last year, it published a model academic-freedom policy that explicitly applies to part-timers as well as full-timers. Nobody paid any attention to it, says &chard P. Chait, a professor of higher education at Harvard University and a leadmg voice on tenure reform. Was he surprised?Not really. His research center just completed an analysis of 250 college handbooks, he notes. Only ten had academic-freedom policies that explicitly mentioned adjuncts. Protecting the academic freedom of adjuncts could be dangerous, he points out. It might suggest that everyone’s academic freedom could be protected without tenure. And then where would tenure be? Alison Schneider was formerly a senior writer for the Chronicle o f H k h e r Education.

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THEAAUP ORGANIZES PART-TIME FACULTY: AN EXPERIMENT IN COMMUNITY RESPONSIBILIT SUGGESTS THAT PART- AND FULL-TIME FACULTY CANENRICHONEANOTHER’SPROFESSIONAL LIVES Richard Moser

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mong the world’s metropolitan areas, Boston has more institutions of higher learning than anywhere else. For those who follow trends in hgher education, it should come as no surprise then that the city also has more contingent faculty than most other places. Home to over ten thousand part-time professors, Boston is at the center of an AAUP experiment in organizing. The project began in late 1998, when the executive committee of the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress, the Association’s Committee on PartTime and Non-Tenure-Track Appointments, and the Massachusetts conference of the AAUP endorsed a proposal to address the working conditions of adjunct faculty in the Boston area. Members and staff reasoned that Boston’s standing as a premier college town would lend national significance to the Association’s efforts. The project’s first initiative was a comprehensive survey of contract faculty. The survey found that these faculty members earned an average of $2,200 a course. Only a few enjoyed health benefits, and almost none had a role in college or university governance. This article is reproduced from Richard Moser, “The AAUP Organizes Part-Time Faculty,” Academe 86, no. 6 (November-December 2000): 34-37. Reprinted with permission from Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors.

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At the same time that the survey was under way, the AAUP began to build a relationship with the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), a grassroots group of faculty and others strugghng to organize around part-time issues. COCAL was founded by seasoned activists from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. As members of the university’s Faculty Staff Union, an afliliate of the National Education Association, they had waged a victorious campaign for health benefits and decent wages for part-time faculty. In the months before COCAL’s third annual conference, members of COCAL met ofien with AAUP staff and members. The Association provided important financial support for the conference and joined the group’s organizing efforts. At first glance, the regional scope of the Boston project and its reliance on coalition buillng may seem to &verge from the Association’s typical approach to organizing faculty. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the project actually draws on the AAUP’s three decades of experience in collective bargaining and on the traditional Association model of academic citizenship. That model sees faculty as guarlans of institutions of higher education and duty bound to act in the public good. In Boston the AAUP’s aim is both to organize faculty to improve conditions for adjuncts and to educate the public about the importance of preserving quality higher education for future generations.

GROUP EFFORT The third annual COCAL conference was a success for many reasons, but mostly because it helped the AAUP and COCAL fulfill their vision of creating a multicampus organization of activists from colleges throughout Boston. The multicampus approach helps to overcome the challenge of organizing contingent workers, who, as a group, tend to be transient. Many work in isolation and suffer from the absence of community support. In addition, their lack of tenure and due process rights leaves them feeling vulnerable to retribution for taking actions that may not please college or university administrations. The AAUP and COCAL set out to create a new lund of multicampus community by bringing together in COCAL activists from among the ranks of adjuncts, a - t i m e faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and community members scattered throughout the city. In doing so, COCAL builds a crit-

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ical mass of people to focus on specific targets and goals. Just as important, the cityvvlde approach minimizes the risk to faculty participants by allowing them to be activists on neighboring campuses rather than on their own. Bringing scattered constituencies together is a pivotal part of the Boston experiment. The Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University rendered collective bargaining out of the question for professors at most private colleges and universities. And the absence of legislation enabling collective bargaining in twenty-four states means that professors at public institutions of higher education in those states cannot form unions. These burdens on the bargaining rights of full-time faculty weaken the most important potential ally of part-time faculty, and make it all the more important to create innovative forms of community. In its approach to organizing, COCAL borrows a page fkom early U.S. labor history and from the social movements of our own time. In the early twentieth century, when most jobs were contingent and the right to organize was rarely respected, Americans often organized municipal movements to build solidarity among all members of a community. In seeking to build a broadbased coalition of all faculty and campus employees, COCAL models itself on these movements. In its appreciation for the value of “consciousness raising,” and in its belief that important advances can be made even without the legal protections of collective bargaining, COCAL relies on lessons from modern social movements. The Civil Rights, women’s, and peace movements all made historic gains by using tactics grounded in grassroots education and outreach. As business models increasingly shape higher education, corporate principles replace academic values, and making a profit elbows out the public good as the primary goal of colleges and universities. Tenured faculty would seem to be well situated to question this “corporatization” and to articulate alternatives to it, but they find their power compromised as the ranks of tenured professors dwindle. The ascendancy of the corporate view and the weakening of the fulltime faculty have hinged on the replacement of tenured faculty positions with part-time and contract faculty who, admmistrators swear, will never see the light of tenure. These contingent professors now make up approximately 60 percent of all faculty in the United States; their proportion relative to tenured faculty has grown by about 1 percent a year since the early 1970s. As tenured faculty become an increasingly slender minority, academic values, includmg academic fieedom and the right to share in university government, are undermined. The faculty are not alone in the loss; members of every other university constituency,save the admmistration,find their jobs more and more at risk, their work degraded, and their connection to the campus attenuated.

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Although adjuncts account for most of COCAL‘s membership, the group seeks to emphasize the common interests of full- and part-time faculty and graduate assistants. It does so by linking together demands for better compensation and condtions for adjuncts with the need for quahty education for students, the restoration of the academic job market, and the defense of the academic profession. It is the AAUP’s goal to make explicit the connection between the growing reliance on contingent faculty and the corporatization of higher education. In this way, the Association hopes to connect self-interest with high ideals and make the fight for adjunct rights commensurate with the struggle being fought over the soul of the university.

COALITION BUILDING Over the past several years, efforts by COCAL and the AAUP have succeeded in stimulating activities on campuses. Faculty at Suffolk University, for example, revived their AAUP chapter and showed how tenured and part-time faculty can cooperate to win pay raises and governance rights for part-time faculty. As the 1999-2000 academic year began, faculty activists seemed to be everywhere. COCAL organized demonstrations at Emerson College, Northeastern University, and Massachusetts Bay Community College. The demonstrations caught the attention of thousands of students and faculty, and newspapers and radio stations covered the events and interviewed faculty leaders. In addition, COCAL held packed meetings on other Boston campuses and distributed thousands of copies of its newsletter. With the educational campaign in full swing, AAUP and COCAL organizers looked for new alhes. They contacted two Boston-area labor groups with reputations for activism and no-nonsense coahtion building: the Campaign on Contingent Work and Jobs With Justice. Representatives from the four groups agreed to call for a new coalition that would target the university as a site for organizing. The coalition that resulted-the University Organizing Project (U0P)took shape as an umbrella organization of campus unions, student groups, faculty associations,and individuals. The UOP drafted a “campus charter” that establishes standards for fair employment for all campus workers. With its vision of an inclusive campus community, the UOP promises to provide solidarity for university workers seeking economic justice and a voice in their worlung lives.

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Among the most successful UOP activities so far has been the commemoration this past April of the 1979 general strike at Boston University. Representatives of the AAUP, COCAL, the Service Employees International Union Local 925, and the United Auto Workers Local 2324 organized the commemoration as a way to educate the public about the buried history of cross-sector campus activism. They especially wanted to link the 1979 strike to current efforts to organize cafeteria and clerical workers, graduate students, and adjunct faculty,and they highhghted as well the strike’s tie to ongoing student activism, especially Students Against Sweatshops. The 130 union members and activists who attended the event listened to songs sung on the 1979 picket lines and heard the bittersweet stories of faculty and staff strikers. People left the commemoration with a renewed sense that it is possible to fight and win, and that cross-sectoral activism is an effective means for achieving long-term goals. A solid foundation has been created, but the true test lies ahead. Six union drives are now under way on Boston campuses, and faculty at several schools are reviving AAUP chapters. Will COCAL, the UOP, and the AAUP rally to support one another? Thus far the signs are promising at the AAUP. Last spring, the Association’s Assembly of State Conferences and its Collective Bargaining Congress held a regional training workshop in Boston. In addition, the executive committee of the AAUP Council continues to voice support for the multicampus organizing project; the national office has dedicated significant resources to the effort; and the Association has joined other labor and community groups to form the National Alliance for Fair Employment, a network to coordinate activities related to par-time employment across the economy. Academic labor issues have continued to attract the spotlight this fall. In Boston activists in the community used the occasion of the October 3 presidential debates at the University of Massachusetts,Boston, as a focus for continued coahtion building and public education. On November 16 an open hearing in New York City, sponsored by Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice, brought national attention to a campaign to establish fair labor practices for campus employees. And the California Part-Time Faculty Association promises the most dynamic national conference ever on academic labor issues next January in San Jose. In addition, plans are afoot to designate a week next spring as “National Equity Week.” Although these developments are encouraging, AAUP staff still need to search for ways to reach the thousands of adjunct faculty in the difficult-toorganize private sector. If the movement continues to grow, and if an AAUPsponsored health benefits program can be developed, the Association sees a real

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possibility for effective organizing outside traditional collective bargaining. The Association’s Massachusetts conference has established the Council of Contract Faculty as a framework for just such an eventuality. The council has tentative plans to establish a clearinghouse or referral service that posts wage rates and disseminates information on the job market. (As a first step toward this initiative, the AAUP has posted on its website information on salaries and working conditions in the Boston area.) This approach lays the groundwork for the eventual development of a system that would allow adjuncts to exercise real control over the terms and conditions of their employment. As faculty, our first concern is with education. The overuse and abuse of adjunct faculty teaches us all by example that ideas and learning are not highly valued. We are all tarred by that brush. The AAUP and its ahes are setting a different example and teaching a different lesson. Good academic citizenship demands that we become the custohans of our institutions and act in the public good. Intellectual innovation and the free exchange of ideas cannot thrive in an atmosphere chilled by insecurity and the risk of dismissal. The public interest in quality education is best served by stemming the tide of contingent employment and improving the conditions of all university workers, because students learn best in a setting characterized by continuity and coherence. By acting in unison with other campus constituencies and advancing the conditions under which academic fieedom, due process, and shared governance can flourish, we set the example of community and citizenship so strikingly absent fi-om the corporate agenda for higher education. Richard Moser, an AAUP staff member and former associate professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University at the time of original publication.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

T

h e following works are cited in Part I or are of interest relative to some of the topics covered in this book.

Arnold, Gordon B. The Politics of Faculty Unionization: The Experience ofThree New England Universities. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000. Aronowitz, Stanley. “Are Unions Good for Professors?”Academe 84, no. 6 (NovemberDecember 1998): 12-17. Biles, George E., and Howard Tuckman. Part- Time Faculty Personnel Management Policies. London: Collier/Macmillan, 1986. Bloom, Alan. The Closing ofthe American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Blum, Debra E. “Merits of Academic Unionism Still Hotly Debated 10 Years After High Court Limited Faculty Bargaining.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 1990. Bodah, Matthew M. “Significant Labor and Employment Law Issues in Higher Education during the Past Decade and What to Look for Now: The Perspective of an Academician.”]ournal $Law and Education 29, no. 3 (July 2000): 317-31. Bodner, George. “The Implications of the Yeshiva University Decision for Collective Bargaining Rights of Faculty at Private and Public Institutions of Higher Education.”]ournal of College and University LAW 7 (1980-1981): 79-99. Boyer, Ernest L. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton, N.J.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990. 223

224

Selected Bibliography

Bronfenbrenner, Kate, and Tom Juravich. “Universities Should Cease Host Unions.” T h e Chronicle ofHigher Education, January 19,2001,B24. Brown, William R. Academic Politics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982. Cahn, Steven M. Morality, Responsibility and the University: Studies in Academic Ethics. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1990. Carlin,James E “Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad.” T h e Chronicle of Higher Education, November 5, 1999, A76. Chaison, Gary, and Barbara Bigelow. Unions and Legitimacy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. Clark, Burton R. The Academic Lge: Small Worlds, Dgerent Worlds. Princeton, N.J.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1987. Crist, Don, Jeanne Higham, and Fred Wall. “From Adversaries to Allies: How to Build Trust at the Bargaining Table.” The Executive Educator 18, no. 2 (February 1996): 32, 34. Dayal, S. “Collective Bargaining among Academic Professionals: An Analysis of Issues and Outcomes.”]ournal of Collective Negotiations 18, no. 3 (May 1989): 207-16. DeMitchell, Todd A., and Walter Streshly. “Must Collective Bargaining Be Reformed in an Era of Reform?” InternationalJournal ofEducational Reform 5, no. 1 (1996):78-85. Douglas,Joel M. “The Impact of NLRB v. Yeshiva University on Faculty Unionism at Public Colleges and Universities.”]ournal of Collective Negotiations 19, no. 1 (1990): 1-28. D’Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: M a c d a n / F r e e Press, 1991. Duryea, Edwin D., and Robert S. Fisk, eds. Faculty Unions and Collective Bargaining. San Francisco:Jossey-Bass, 1973. Dworkin, James B., and Do-Hwa Lee. “Faculty Intentions to Unionize: Theory and Evidence.” Research in Higher Education 23, no. 4 (1985): 375-86. Elmuti, Dean, and Yunus Kathawala. “Full-Time University Faculty Members’ Perceptions of Unionization Impact on Overall Compensation Dimensions.”]ournal of Research and Development in Education 24, no. 2 (1991): 9-15. Ezorsky, Gertrude, ed. Moral Rights in the Workplace. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Finkin, Matthew. “Collective Bargaining and University Government.” University of Wisconsin Law Review 150, no. 1 (1971). .“The Yeshiva Decision: A Somewhat Different View.”]ournal of College and University Law 7 (1980-1981): 321-27. . The Casefor Tenure. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Finken, Matthew W , Robert A. Goldstein, and Woodley B. Osborne. A Primer on Collective Bargainingfor College and University Faculty. Washington, D.C.: American Association of University Professors, 1975. Franke, Ann H. “Two Trends in Academic Collective Bargaining: A Faculty Representative’s Perspective.”]ournal ofLaw and Education 13, no. 4 (1984): 651-68. Furedy,John J. “Why Graduate Students Shouldn’t Join Unions.” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, September 25,1998, B11.

Selected Bibliography

225

Garbarino,Joseph W., and Bill Aussieker. Faculty Bargaining: Change and Conflict. New York McGraw-Hill, 1975. G e h a n , Estelle S. “Collective Bargaining and the AAUP.” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 38-39. Govea, Rodger M. “The Unionization of Cleveland State: An Insider’s Story.” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 34-38. Guthrie-Morse, Barbara, Larry L. Leslie, and The-Wei Hu. “Assessing the Impact of Faculty Unions: The Financial Implications of Collective Bargaining.” Journal of Higher Education 52, no. 3 (1981):237-55. Hutcheson, Phlo A. A Professional Professoriate: Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Joseph, Tamara, and Jon Curtiss. “Why Professors Should Support Graduate-Student Unions.” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, February 21, 1997, B6. Kearney, Richard C. Labor Relations in the Public Sector, 2nd ed. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1992. Kemerer, Frank R., and J. V. Baldridge. Unions on Campus. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975. Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Cornrpted Higher Education. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Ladd, Everett Carll Jr., and Seymour Martin Lipset. Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education. Berkeley, Calif.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1973. Lee, Barbara A., and James P. Begin. “Criteria for Evaluating the Managerial Status of College Faculty: Application of Yeshiva University by the NLRB.” Journal of College and University Law 10, no. 4 (1984): 515-39. Leslie, David W., Samuel E. Kellams, and G. M. Gunne. Part-Time Faculty in American Higher Education. New York: Praeger, 1982. Levine, Peter. “The Libertarian Critique of Labor Unions.” Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 21, no. 4 (2001): 17-24. Malamud, Deborah C. “Collective Bargaining and the Professoriate: What the Law Says.” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 18-22. Moser, Richard. “The AAUP Organizes Part-Time Faculty.” Academe 86, no. 6 (November-December 2000): 34-37. National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, 444 U.S. 672 (1980). Nightingale, Jack l? “Collective Bargaining and the AAUP” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 39. Ponack, Allen, Mark Thompson, and WiEed Zerbe. “Collective Bargaining Goals of University Faculty.” Research in Higher Education 33, no. 4 (1992): 415-31. Putten, Jim Vander, Michael K. McLendon, and Marvin W Peterson. “Comparing Union and Nonunion Staff Perceptions in the Higher Education Work Environment.” Research in Higher Education 38, no. 1 (1997): 131-49. Rhoades, Gary. Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

226

Selected Bibliography

Schneider, Alison. “To Many Adjunct Professors, Academic Freedom Is a Myth: As Ranks of Part-Timers Swell,They Lament How Easily Colleges Can Dump Them.” The Chronicle ofHigher Education, December 10, 1999, A18. Shapiro,Judith. “Faculty Support of Unions for Graduate Students.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14,2001,B20. Stimpson, Catherine. “A Dean’s Skepticism about a Graduate-Student Union.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5,2000, B7. Suchman, Mark C. “Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches.” Academy ofManagement Review 20 (1995): 571-610. Sykes, Charles. “Profcam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988. Thompson, Karen. “Piecework to Parity: Part-Timers in Action.” Thought and Action 8 (1997): 53-60. Vaughan, William. “Apprentice or Employee? Graduate Students and Their Unions.” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998):43-49. Weidhorn, Manfi-ed. “The Yeshiva Faculty Union: Tales Told out of School.” Academe 84, no. 6 (November-December 1998):24-26. Williams, G. B., and €? A. Zirkel. “Academic Penetration in Faculty Collective Bargaining Contracts in Higher Education.” Research in Higher Education 28, no. 1 (1988): 76-92.

INDEX

Aaron, Benjamin, 136-37 “The AAUP Organizes Part-Time Faculty” (Moser), 217-22 AAUP Redbook, 19,38 Academe, the Bulletin of the AAUP, 5 academic fieedom, 64-66; as goal of collective bargaining, 142-43; and graduate student unions, 92,98,106; and legal rights, 187; for part-time and adjunct faculty, 77,80,209-15; value of, 38-39 “Academic Politics: Faculty Unions and the Academic Perception” (Brown), 139-64 academic values. See values, academic activism, 23,115,220-21 Actors Equity, 127 Adaman, David, 94 Adam, Walter, 130 Adelphi University, 45, 179

adjunct faculty, 180-82; definition of, 76; and emergence of unions, 4,6-7; graduate teaching assistants as, 180; and job security, 209-15; right to unionize, 83; trend toward appointments, 25. See also part-time faculty administrations: and academic values, 38-39; attitudes toward faculty unions, 21,201-2; authority of, 156-64; on faculty evaluations, 61; and faculty overload, 151;faculty relationships with, 16-18,23-24, 32-34,36-37,44n34,65-69,160; and graduate student unions, 98,100-105, 107; and high costs, 169; and loss of faculty autonomy, 22-23; and quality of higher education, 170; at Sage Colleges, 51-52. See also managerial employees; supervisors

227

228

Index

adversity, 32-34,119-20,136; and emergence of unions, 24; in faculty-ahnistration relationships, 65-69; in faculty-student relationships, 37,69-71, 116-17; and undergraduate resident advisers, 114-15. See also collegiality affirmative action programs, 132 AFL-CIO, 12,20,175,183 Alaska, 83, 86 American Association for Higher Education, 215 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 18-20, 179; at Boston University, 129; characteristics of, 135, 136, 141; core values of, 38; on emergence of faculty unions, 24; on faculty-administration relationships, 68-69; on financial exigency, 63-64; goals of, 19,37; on graduate student unions, 96-97; on grievance procedures, 214; literature of, 5; and loss of faculty autonomy, 65; and part-time and adjunct faculty, 25,75,80-81,83-84,181,214, 217-22; at private institutions, 131; Professional Code of Ethics, 144; at Rutgers University, 130-32; salary surveys, 51,58; on shared governance, 32; at University of California, 132; on Yeshiva University, 203 American Federation of Teachers (AFT), 18, 179; characteristics of, 135, 136, 141; on faculty peer evaluations, 61; goals of, 20,21,37; and graduate student unions, 94, 105-6; and loss of faculty autonomy, 65; in Massachusetts,70; and New Jersey state college system, 132-33; and New York University, 83; and parttime and adjunct faculty, 83-84, 181; and salaries, 58; and undergraduate resident advisers, 114; and United

Auto Workers, 182; at University of Cahfornia, 131; on University of Great Falls in Montana, 49; at University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 95; at University of Michigan, 96; at Yeshiva University, 200 American University, 212 appointments, 145, 155-56, 158 “Are Unions Good for Professors?” (Aronowitz), 173-84 Arnold, Gordon: on academic values, 38; on faculty-administration relationships, 23,44n34,67; on history of unions, 7; on resistance to faculty unions, 15 Aronowitz, Stanley:“Are Unions Good for Professors?,” 173-84; on emergence of unions, 6 authority, university, 156-63 autonomy, 64-66; American Association of University Professors on, 38; history of professional, 176; loss of, 17-18,22-23,36; student threats to, 70; and union effectiveness, 35,36; in upper reaches of academe, 14; value of, 12, 16 “Background Characteristics, Work Activities, and Compensation of Faculty and Instructional Staff in Postsecondary Institutions: Fall 1998” (U.S. Department of Education), 75 Barnard College, 183 Belkin, Samuel, 201,202 benefits: for graduate students, 95,97, 98, 100, 103-6; for part-time faculty, 79, 80, 84; for undergraduate resident advisers, 113. See also health insurance benefits, psychological, 101 Berne, Lewis Alan, 176 Besser, Mary Pam, 210-11 Bigelow, Barbara, 39-40,42

Index blue-collar employees, 175,176,178,182 Bodah, Matthew, 24 Bollinger, Lee C., 105 Boston, 81,86,217-22 Boston College, 76,86n4 Boston Medical Center, 92 Boston University, 33,47, 129, 168,221 Brennan, William, 46-47,204 Bridgewater State College, 35 Bronfenbrenner, Kate, 99 Brown, William R., 9,25,63,67; “Academic Politics: Faculty Unions and the Academic Perception,” 139-64 Brown University, 78,94-95,97,99, 133 bureaucratization, 23,33-34,68, 128. See also corporate structure Byrne, J. Peter, 214 California: collective bargaining agents in, 179; community colleges in, 134, 179; educational system, 134; graduate student unions in, 90,97; Master Plan for Higher Education, 135; negotiation process in, 137nl; parttime and adjunct faculty in, 82-83, 181 California Part-Time Faculty Association, 221 California State University, 181 California University and State Colleges System, 137111 Campaign on Contingent Work, 220 Carlin, James E: “Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad,” 167-7 1 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 11-12, 16,60 Cartesian attributes of contracts, 141, 144,147-48,160,161,164 Catholic institutions, 53, 131. See also Manhattan College; University of Great Falls in Montana Cellucci, A. Paul, 170 Central Michigan University, 70

229

Chaison, Gary, 39-40,42 Chait, Richard P, 215 Chestnut Hill College, 212 Chicago, 69,70 child care, 97,98, 104 CIO, 176 City University of New York (CUNY), 13, 179; and American Federation of Teachers, 83; due process at, 60; faculty-administration relationships at, 68; merit system at, 128; as multicampus system, 22, 121, 134; part-time faculty at, 78, 181; student involvement at, 69,70 Civil Rights movement, 23,219 classroom observation, 153. See also evaluations Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 99 coalition building, 22Ck22 Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), 8@82,218-22 Cohen,Jean L., 44n28 collective bargaining: and American Association of University Professors, 18-20,97; attitudes toward, 36,69, 136-37,140; and compensation, 58; expense of, 60; and faculty-administration relationships, 67,160; forms of, 34; and graduate students, 89-94,96-98, 100, 102, 106; history of, 11-13, 133-34; ineffectiveness of, 35; ineligibility for, 46; justification of, 142-43; legislation, 22,45, 187-96; National Education Association on, 20; National Labor Relations Board selection of units, 189; nature of, 205; and nonunion institutions, 120; of part-time faculty, 82-86; and political ideology, 15,23; at private institutions, 49, 131; and professional standards, 62; at public institutions, 128-29, 136, 179; reasons for rise in,

230

Index

22,25; and shared governance, 32-33; statistics, 139-40 collective bargaining agents, 18,65, 135-36,141, 179. See also American Association of University Professors (AAUP);American Federation of Teachers (AFT); National Education Association (NEA) “Collective Bargaining and the Professoriate: What the Law Says” (Malamud), 187-96 collegiality, 32-34,66; and academic values, 38; and faculty-administration relationships, 68, 161; and faculty contracts, 152-58, 162; and graduate student unions, 104,105,107; and group management, 63; at Sage Colleges, 51. See also adversity Colorado Mountain College, 213-14 Columbia College, 83 Columbia University, 94,96-97,99-101, 103,105-6 Committee on the Status of Women in the Academic Profession, 19 Communism, 176 community colleges, 13,76,134,170,179 compensation, 57-60, 113,116. See also benefits; salaries; stipends contracts: comparison of faculty, 140-64; concerns about faculty, 25-26; expectations of, 141-42; and faculty-administration relationships, 67-68; and faculty collegiality, 152-58,162; on faculty time, 148-51; on job security, 63; for part-time and adjunct faculty, 8685,214; symbolism of, 142-48,160; and university authority, 156-63; and working conditions, 151-52 Cornell University, 45 corporate structure, 36-37,119-20, 219-20. See also bureaucratization Council of Contract Faculty, 222

cultural differences, 174-75 curricula, 158, 168,210-13 decertification of faculty unions, 47 departmental structures, 154-56, 160 department chairs, 63,107,156-58 disciplines, 143,144,153 dismissals, 6344,111,113 diversity, 167-68 due process, 60,65,80,214 early retirement programs, 64, 182 economic climate: and emergence of faculty unions, 4,21-22,129-30,134; and graduate student unions, 99-100, 103-7,179-80; and history of unions, 173-74; and job security, 63-64; and quality of higher education, 167-71; and undergraduate resident advisers’ unions, 116; and value of knowledge, 177. See also salaries educational mission, 101-2,143,148, 151,159,161 egalitarianism, 11-13,16,23,128, 133-34 elitism, 61,121 Emerson College, 220 employees: classification under National Labor Relations Act, 188-91; graduate student teaching assistants as, 94-96,98, 103, 112; undergraduate resident advisers as, 112,115-16; value of, 116,121 employment, outside, 21 Enghsh departments, 78-79 enrollment, open, 135 Essopos, Gregory, 111 evaluations, 60-63,70,147-48. See also classroom observation;post tenure reviews faculty: attacks on, 24; attitudes toward unionization, 14-18,22,141;

Index

discrepancies in treatment of, 59,64, 76; on graduate student unions, 98, 100-104,107; power of, 129; relationships with administrators, 16-18,23-24,32-34,36-37,44n34, 65-69,160; relationships with students, 37,69-71,11617; responsibilities of, 147; right to collective bargaining, 22,45, 187-96. See also part-time faculty faculty unions, 11-26; and academic freedom, 64-66; and adversity, 66-71; arguments for and against, 31-42; attitudes toward, 14-18,21,140-41, 201-2; and authority, 156-63; and autonomy, 64-66; benefits of, 8; and collegiality, 152-56; and compensation, 57-60; decertification of, 47; and due process, 60,65; effectiveness of, 7-9, 34-36,71-72; emergence of, 3-7, 11-12,21-25,129-30,134,176, 178-79; goals of, 19-21; and governance,64-66; individuality in, 143-48,150,153,155;and inequality, 133-34; and job security, 6044; literature on, 5; perceptions of, 139-64; and political processes, 163-64; at private institutions, 4554,179; resistance to, 12-13,15,141; scope of, 4-5; statistics on, 13-14,139-40; and tenure, 15-17,2425,6044; and time, 149-5 1; and working conditions, 151-52 Fairfield University, 53 Fairleigh Dickinson University: faculty contract at, 145-47,149,150,152-58, 162,163; representation of, 140 finances: authority over, 159; effect of faculty unions on, 128-29; at private institutions, 53; separation from academic issues, 119-20; and Yeshiva decision, 48,49 financial exigency, 63-64

231

Finkin, Matthew, 69 First Amendment, 187,210-11. See also academic freedom Fordham University, 45,199,202,204 Franke, Ann H., 46-48,63-64 Galbraith,John Kenneth, 168 gender-based equity, 26,59,85. See also women faculty Georgetown University, 79 George Washington University, 79 GI Bill,177 Goddard College, 49 governance: faculty, 24-25,32-33,51, 53,64-66,80,160-61,193-94; of private institutions, 6; student role in, 69. See also National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) (1935);National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); senates, academic Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO),90-91,180,181 graduate teaching assistants (TAs),89-108; academic freedom of, 92,98,106; benefits for, 95,97,98,100,103-6; and economic climate, 99-100,103-7, 179-80; effects of unionization on undergraduates, 115; and emergence of unions, 4,7,179-80; as employees, 94-96,98,103,112; history of unionization, 98,102; opposition to unionization of, 95,98,102-5; at private institutions,90,91,93,95-97; and psychological benefits of unions, 101; at public institutions,91,93,97; scope of unions, 94,97,98,102,106; strikes, 90,95,97; and United Auto Workers, 83,89-92,94,96,103,105-6 Green, Richard, 210 grievance procedures, 80,214 Hampshire College, 76 Hardy, Ken, 210-1 1

232

Index

Harvard University, 78,200,202 Health Care G Retirement Corporation of America, National Labor Relations Board v., 194-95 health-care workers, 183,194-95 health insurance, 93,97, 104. See also benefits higher education: growth of, 176-77; quality of, 167-71,183 hiring halls, 181 Hoffa,Jimmy, 175 Hofstra University, 179 Honest Ballot Association, New York, 202 Hospital Workers Union, 183 Hotel and Restaurant Workers, 181 Hutcheson, Philo A., 17-18,24 identity of university, 160 Illinois, 83,86,95, 109n18, 179 independence. See autonomy; individuality Indiana University, 180 individuality, 143-48,150,153,155, 161-62 institutional need, 146, 147, 156 integrity, academic, 104-5 intellectual property rights, 21,26 International and Public Affairs, school of, at Columbia University, 96 Internet, 170 Jefferson Community College, 210-11 Jencks, Christopher, 133,134 job security: and faculty unions, 16,24, 3 4 , 6 0 4 4 ; and graduate student unions, 97; and part-time and adjunct faculty, 77,80,209-15 Jobs With Justice, 220 Johns Hopkins University, 212 KaufKnan,Joseph, 136 Keene State University, 83

Kingsborough Community College, 78 Kinney, Elizabeth, 52 Klee, Thomas, 212 Kreisberg,Jonathan, 52 Kurland, Jordan, 214 labor movement, 173-78,219 Ladd, Everett Carl1 Jr., 11-12; on faculty-administration relationships, 67; on faculty attitudes toward unions, 15-16, 141; on faculty-student tensions, 70, 71; on negative aspects of faculty unions, 13; on peer evaluations, 62; on power of management, 60; Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education: “Concluding Observations,” 127-37 Lamm, Norman, 202,203 layoffs, 64 legal rights, 99, 103, 187-96 legislation, 22,45, 187-96 legislatures: economic power of, 128, 130; faculty attitudes toward, 17-18; and graduate student unions, 91; and loss of autonomy, 22-23,36 legitimacy, 39-42 Lesko, P. D., 211 liberalism, 15 licensed practical nurses, 194-95 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 11-12; on faculty-administration relationships, 67; on faculty attitudes toward unions, 15-16, 141; on faculty-student tensions, 70, 71; on negative aspects of faculty unions, 13;on peer evaluations, 62; on power of management, 60; Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education: “Concluding Observations,” 127-37 Lites, Wes, 211 Los Angeles, 181

Index Malamud, Deborah C., 23; “Collective Bargaining and the Professoriate: What the Law Says,” 187-96 managerial employees, 188-94,196. See also Yeshiva University v. National Labor Relations Board Manhattan College, 49-50,54 Massachusetts,70-71, 170-71,217-22 Massachusetts Bay Community College, 220 Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, 170 Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission, 82, 111, 112, 114, 116 McCarthy era, 176 McTyeire, Quint, 21 1 Meany, George, 175 merit, 35,57-59,70, 127-29,133-34, 146. See also salaries Michigan State University, 93, 129-30 Middle states accrediting team, 203 Minnesota, 140, 156, 158. See also University of Minnesota minorities, 37 Modern Language Association (MLA), 78,81 Montana Federation of Teachers, 49 moral legitimacy, 40-42,72,122; of graduate student unions, 101-2, 106-7; of part-time faculty, 82,85; of undergraduate resident advisers’ unions, 116 Morningside Heights campus, Columbia University, 96 Moser, Richard, 210; “The AAUP Organizes Part-Time Faculty,” 217-22 Mulligan, Hugh, 203-4 multicampus systems: administrations of, 22-23; complications of unionizing, 121; disparity in, 130-31, 134-35; part-time faculty in, 86,218-21

233

National Adjunct Faculty Guild, 211 National Alliance for Fair Employment, 22 1 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), 177 National Education Association (NEA), 18, 179; characteristics of, 135, 136, 141; goals of, 20,21,37; and loss of faculty autonomy, 65; in Massachusetts, 70,218; and New Jersey state college system, 133; on part-time faculty, 25,75,83-84; and pressure tiom below, 22; at Sage Colleges, 52; and salaries, 58 “National Equity Week,” 221 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) (1935), 6, 45; classification of employees under, 188-91; impact on private institutions, 179;jurisdiction of, 53; and part-time faculty, 83; at Yale, 90; and Yeshiva University, 202. See also managerial employees National Labor Relations Board (NL-), 6; decerthcation of faculty unions, 47; function of, 189-90; on graduate student unions, 90-96,98,99,103, 106; and health-care workers, 194-95; jurisdiction of, 52-53; on part-time faculty unions, 82,83; and private institutions,45; recognition of faculty bargaining units, 191. See also National Labor Relations Board u Yeshiva University National Labor Relations Board u Health Care G Retirement Corporation of America, 194-95 National Labor Relations Board u Yeshiva University, 6, 199-205; and bureaucratization of universities, 23; and emergence of unions, 7; and graduate student unions, 91; impact on public and private institutions, 45-54, 179, 195,219; and right to collective bargaining, 188, 191-95

234

Index

Neff, Jeanne H., 50 New Caucus, 68 New Hampshire, 83 New Jersey: community colleges, 179; state college system, 132-33, 136, 140,142,149-50,156-57,160 New Jersey Constitution, 50 New York, 179,202 New York City, 181-83,221 New York University: adjunct faculty at, 83; graduate students at, 91-94,97, 98, 100, 1'06;union vote at, 199,202 nonunion institutions, 8,59,65,120 Northeastern University, 76,86n4,220 Orthodox Jewish institutions. See Yeshiva University overload, 150-5 1 part-time faculty, 75-86, 180-82; American Association of University Professors on, 25,75,80-81,83-84, 181,214,217-22; benefits for, 79,80, 84; contracts, 84-85,214; definition of, 75-76; and emergence of unions, 4,6-7; exploitation of, 83-85; and job security, 77,80,205-15; trend toward, 25. See also adjunct faculty Pennsylvania: contracts in, 142, 146-47, 149,153-56,160; faculty-student tensions in, 70; representation of state colleges and universities, 140 Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, 93 Pennsylvania State University, 94,96 Phi Beta Kappa, 203 The Philadelphia Inquirer, 212 Policy on Representation of Economic Interests (American Association of University Professors), 19 political change, 4 political correctness, 167-68 political ideologies, 15,23 political processes, 163-64

post tenure reviews, 66,731119, 169. See also evaluations Powell, Lewis, 46,197n8 pragmatic legitimacy, 40-42,71-72, 122; of graduate student unions, 100,101, 106-7; of part-time faculty, 82,85; of undergraduate resident advisers' unions, 116 presidents, 160, 168-69 pressure fiom below, 22 Princeton University, 100,103 principles, 142-43 private institutions: American Association of University Professors at, 131; attitudes toward faculty unions, 16; comparison to public institutions, 135; effect of Yeshiva decision on, 45-54,179, 199,219; emergence of unions at, 4; faculty unions at, 45-54,179; governance of, 6; graduate student unions at, 90,91, 93,95-97; loss of autonomy at, 17-18; salaries at, 58 professional development, 144-45 professionals: rights of, 84, 189-90; status of, 15,17-18; and Yeshiva decision, 194-95 Professors, Unions, and American Higher Education (Ladd Jr. and Lipset), 11-12, 127-39 programs, discontinuation of, 152,159 promotions, 145,158 protests. See activism public institutions: budget cuts at, 35; in California, 134; collective bargaining at, 128-29, 136, 179; comparison to private institutions, 135; concerns of, 130-32; defense of unions at, 68; emergence of unions at, 4; graduate student unions at, 91,93,97; salaries at, 58; tenure at, 132; and Yeshiva decision, 48, 179, 195,219. See also state colleges and universities

Index public sphere, 44x128 Purdue University, 102 rabbis, 200-201 rational decisions, 163 reappointments, 60-63, 145,156 regional groups, 86 released time, 150 religious institutions, 53,200-201. See also Catholic institutions; Yeshiva University research, 129, 134, 144-47, 170 responsibilities of faculty, 147 “Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad” (Carlin), 167-71 retention, 63 retrenchment, 53,6344, 159-60 Reuther, Walter, 175, 182 Rhoades, Gary, 9,59,64-65,77,84-85 Rhode Island, 130, 136 Rhode Island College, 136 Rhode Island Junior College, 136 Riesman, David, 129, 131, 133-35 Roosevelt University, 83 Rorty, Richard, 32 Rupp, George, 105 Russell Sage College for Women, 51 Rutgers University, 70, 130-32, 136, 179,181 sabbatical leaves, 145, 158 Sabetta, Thomas, 21 1 Sacred Heart University, 50,52 Sage Colleges, 50-52 Sage Evening College, 51 Sage Faculty Association, 52 Sage Graduate School, 51 Sage Junior College, 51 salaries, 26,34-35,57-60, 182; and competition between union and nonunion institutions, 8; and faculty attitudes toward unions, 16, 17; in Massachusetts,71; of part-time

235

faculty, 78-80,181-82; at Sage Colleges, 51; student attitudes toward faculty raises in, 70; for undergraduate resident advisers, 112-14,116; and workloads, 15C51; at Yeshiva University, 203. See also economic climate; merit; stipends San Jose State University, 78 Scanlon, Brother Thomas J., 50 Schaler,Jeffrey A., 212 Schneider, Alison: “To Many Adjunct Professors, Academic Freedom Is a Myth: As the Ranks of Part-Timers Swell, They Lament How Easily Colleges Can Dump Them,” 209-15 Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice, 221 Schumer, Charles E., 99 Scott, David K., 112 Screen Writers’ Guild, 127 senates, academic, 32-34,65,66, 161. See also governance seniority system, 102 service, 147-48,151, 170 Service Employees International Union, 175,183,221 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1945), 177 Seton Hall University, 50 sexual harassment, 213-14 Silber,John, 33,168 Silverman, Daniel, 49-50 social change, 3-4 social class, 187 social mobility, 178 Sputnik, 177 St.John’s University, 179; faculty contract at, 149,150,156-58; representation of, 140 St.Joseph’s University, 78 staff employees,220-21 standards, academic, 182-83 Stanford University, 78, 100, 103

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Index

state colleges and universities: autonomy at, 17-18,36; New Jersey, 132-33, 136,140,142,149-50,156-57,160; tendency toward unionization, 14. See also public institutions State University of New York (SUNY), l3,22,70,134,137nl State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, 95 stipends, 91,93,95,97-100,1044 strikes, 36; at Boston University, 221; by graduate student teaching assistants, 90,95,97; UPS, 44n33; and Yeshiva faculty, 205 students, 37,69-71,104,116-17, 220-21. See also graduate teaching assistants (TAs);undergraduate resident advisers @As) Students Against Sweatshops, 221 Suffok University, 220 supervisors: definition of, 195,197n5; faculty as, 191; right to collective bargaining, 189-90. See also Yeshiva University Supreme Court cases, 83, 189-90, 194-96. See also Yeshiva University v. National Labor Relations Board Swarthmore College, 78 Sweeney,John, 175,183 Tafi-Hartley Act (1947), 189-90,197n5 teaching, 101, 102, 143, 146-47, 149. See also workloads teaching institutions, 134 technology, instructional, 26 Temple University, 93-94,97,106, 109n14,179 tenure, 15-17,24-25,60-64; and academic fkeedom, 214-15; and contracts, 145, 158; and discrepancies in treatment of faculty, 76; and economic climate, 169; Massachusetts governor on, 170; and part-time

faculty, 219; and power of faculty, 129; requirements for, 131-32; students on, 70; value of, 34-35. See also post tenure reviews time, 148-51 “To Many Adjunct Professors, Academic Freedom Is a Myth: As the Ranks of Part-Timers Swell, They Lament How Easily Colleges Can Dump Them” (Schneider),209-15 Trumka, Richard, 175 trustees, 168, 170 truth, search for, 39 Tufts University, 94,96,97 tuition increases, 70, 104, 167, 170 two-year colleges, 13-14,76,79 undergraduate resident advisers (RAs), 4, 7,111-17 undergraduate students, 104 union afiates, national, 18-20. See also American Association of University Professors (AAUP);American Federation of Teachers (AFT); National Education Association (NW unions: emergence of, 24,173-74,178; images of, 33, 175; resistance to, 12-13,121,175-76 United Auto Workers (UAW): commemoration of Boston University strike, 221; and emergence of academic unions, 182; and graduate student unions, 83,89-92, 94,96,103,105-6; and New York University, 83; and undergraduate resident advisers, 111, 113, 116 United States Department of Education, 75,76,79 University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, 78 University of Bridgeport: faculty contract at, 14546,149,154, 156-58, 163; representation of, 140

Index University of California, 70,90,131-32, 135,180 University of California, Berkeley, 90,97, 98 University of California, Los Angeles, 90, 98 University of California, Santa Barbara, 61,103 University of Chicago, 78 University of Cincinnati: faculty contract at, 142-43, 147, 149, 159, 163; representation of, 140 University of Connecticut, 23, 102, 140, 146,149 University of Great F d s in Montana, 49, 52-53 University of Hawaii, 130,134 University of Illinois, 95,97,180 University of Iowa, 90,180 University of Kansas, 90 University of Louisville, 21 1 University of Maine: faculty contract at, 145, 149, 155-57, 162; representation of, 140 University of Maryland at College Park, 96 University of Massachusetts, 169, 170 University of Massachusetts, Amherst: graduate students at, 89,97, 102, 103; part-time faculty at, 84; undergraduate resident advisers at, 7, 111-17; votes at, 23 University of Massachusetts,Boston, 218, 221 University of Michigan, 89,95-96,98, 100,106,180 University of Minnesota, 95,144-45, 163. See also Minnesota University of New Haven, 199 University of Northern Iowa, 140, 149 University of Organizing Project (UOP), 220-21

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University of Pennsylvania: graduate students at, 94,96, 100, 103; salaries at, 78 University of Phoenix, 170 University of %ode Island, 23 University of San Francisco, 83 University of St. Francis, 52 University of Washington, 91,97 University of Wisconsin, 89, 134 University of Wisconsin, Madison, 98, 180 U P S strike, 44n33 values, academic, 7,31,37-39,41-42, 148,151; and merit, 120; and parttime faculty, 219-20; and political processes, 163-64; shared faculty, 44n34 Vanderhurst, Randy, 213-14 Vietnam War, 23 Villanova University, 53,78,199 votes, 23,34,37, 199,202 Wagner Act. See National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) (1935) Walker, William T., 212 Washington (state), 130 Washington State University, 70 Wayne State University, 179, 181 Weidhorn, M d e d “The Yeshiva Faculty Union: Tales Told Out of School,” 199-205 Western Michigan University: faculty contract at, 14445,150,152-54, 158,160; representation of, 140 white-collar employees, 175, 176, 178, 182,183 Williams, Marcellete G., 112 women faculty, 16,17,79. See also gender-based equity working conditions, 34-35,151-52,182; and faculty attitudes toward unions, 16; for graduate students, 105; in

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Index

multicampus systems, 130; for parttime faculty, 181-82; for undergraduate resident advisers, 113, 116; at Yeshiva University, 202-3 workloads: Carlin on, 169-70; and faculty contracts, 149-50; of graduate students, 97,99-100, 103, 105, 106; of part-time faculty, 77-78,80; and salaries, 150-51; and Yeshiva decision, 48-49 Yale University: graduate students at, 90-91,97-98,100,103-4,180-81; and Modern Language Association salary survey, 78; Sweeney at, 183

“The Yeshiva Faculty Union: Tales Told Out of School” (Weidhorn), 199-205 Yeshiva University, 6,7,23,45-54,91, 179,188,191-95,199-205,219 Yeshiva University Faculty Association (YUFA), 200-205 Yeshiva University v. National Labor Relations Board, 6, 199-205; and bureaucratization of universities, 23; and emergence of unions, 7; and graduate student unions, 91; impact on public and private institutions, 45-54,179,195,199,219; and right to collective bargaining, 188, 191-95

ABOUTTHE AUTHOR

Judith Wagner DeCew is professor of philosophy and former associate dean at Clark University. She is the author of In Pursuit ofPrivacy:Law, Ethics, and the Rise ofZchnology (1997) and co-editor of Theory and Practice (1996).

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