Collective Bargaining

Improving the Legal Landscape for Unionization at Private Colleges and Universities

University and college faculty have a long history of acting collectively. Countering the stereotype of the individual researcher in the lab, the centennial of the AAUP reminds us of the organizational origins of faculty rights of academic freedom and shared governance. Throughout these one hundred years, faculty have organized and acted collectively to protect these rights through faculty senates, college and university committees, AAUP advocacy chapters, and unionization and collective bargaining.

Community Colleges in the AAUP

During my almost thirty years as a professor at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, I have witnessed extraordinary changes. When I began this journey, my institution was a technical college with a mission to teach students who were primarily interested in earning terminal technical degrees to get a job. Our students came from diverse backgrounds and all walks of life. We had recent high school graduates as well as much older students looking for opportunities to be retrained.

From One Bargaining Unit to One Faculty

In fall 2009, representatives of the AAUP, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of Teachers contacted a few faculty members at the University of Illinois at Chicago to set up a meeting about the possibility of organizing a faculty union. Ten or fifteen professors attended, most of them senior, all of them tenured. One of the first questions they asked was who would actually be in the union—was it for tenure-track and tenured faculty only or would it also include non-tenure-track faculty? The answer was that Illinois law made no distinction between the groups.

Professionalism and Unionism: Academic Freedom, Collective Bargaining, and the American Association of University Professors

This article traces the history of the relationship between professionalism and union organizing within the AAUP, whose founders initially eschewed unionism. Interest in unionism did not become a significant force until the mid-1960s, when the AAUP was compelled to respond both to intensified discontent among faculty with their economic status and to increasingly vigorous organizing by union rivals.

Catholicism and Unions: The Case for Adjunct Unions at Catholic Universities

This article addresses recent controversies related to the formation of adjunct unions at several Catholic universities, with a particular focus on Duquesne University in Pittsburgh (the author’s institution). It argues that current efforts underway at several Catholic universities to thwart the formation of adjunct unions are contrary to Catholic teaching and have potentially harmful implications for society as a whole.

Editor's Introduction - Volume 2

Whether by chance or by fate, the Spring 2011 issue of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom has turned out to be rather timely. At a moment when faculty unionization is paradoxically at once resurgent and under assault, Bill Lyne lays out rather clearly what its benefits can be for shared governance. John Champagne and John W. Powell mount philosophical, political, and pedagogical critiques of the relentlessly expanding assessment movement.

Campus Clout, Statewide Strength: Improving Shared Governance through Unionization

In 2002, the Washington State Legislature passed legislation allowing faculty at four-year state universities to unionize. The administration at my university, Western Washington University, took a dim view of the idea of a unionized faculty and launched an energetic, if fairly bumbling, campaign to convince faculty not to vote for the union. In one of their messages, administrators ominously suggested that by unionizing we would be moving from an academic and collegial shared governance model to a corporate and confrontational labor-management model.

What Do Graduate Employee Unions Have to Do with Academic Freedom?

Only a minority of graduate employees in the United States have collective bargaining representation, and for that lucky minority, collective bargaining agreements rarely contain explicit protections for academic freedom. Existing contract language at strong and long-established unions such as my own provides due process protections and guarantees against arbitrary termination; these protections, however, fall very short of securing genuine academic freedom. Graduate employee unions have reasonably focused on economic priorities to ensure continued access to graduate education: improved stipends, health care, and childcare, and security for tuition waivers. However, as academic freedom and shared governance increasingly face renewed challenges from the corporate university, the need to secure academic freedom protections in a binding labor contract has never been more pressing.

Editor's Introduction - Volume 1

With this issue we introduce a new online project: the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom. Scholarship on academic freedom—and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargainingis typically scattered across a wide range of disciplines. People who want to keep up with the field thus face a difficult task. Moreover, there is no one place to track the developing international discussion about academic freedom and its collateral issues.

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