I am the president of the Henry Ford Community College Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 1650, in Dearborn, Michigan. The AFT chartered our local in February 1966, which means that we are celebrating our sixtieth anniversary in 2026.
Local 1650 represents all full-time classroom teachers, librarians, counselors, and career service officers at Henry Ford College (Henry Ford Community College until 2014) as well as several full-time nonteaching positions at HFC. When we were chartered in 1966, public employees in Michigan had just been given the legal right to organize under the state’s Public Employee Relations Act. Prior to that time, HFC faculty were represented by the Dearborn Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 681, the union representing teachers in the K–12 school district. Once public employees were guaranteed collective bargaining rights in Michigan, the faculty at HFC sought to form their own local. In the years since, Local 1650 and Local 681 have maintained a close working relationship even as we’ve bargained for separate units. We also work closely with the Adjunct Faculty Organization, AFT Local 337, our part-time siblings at HFC, who organized in 2008.
Over the sixty years of our existence, hundreds of faculty members at HFC have been members of Local 1650. Our union’s founders focused on securing a meaningful system of shared governance at HFC, as I discuss below. In the decades since, generations of members have expanded and strengthened that system to ensure that the faculty voice remains at the center of the institution’s academic life. Now, with a mature contract that secures our role in shared governance at HFC, a new generation of our members is fighting for more inclusion and greater equity in our contract and in how we operate as a local union. The evolution and growth of our union demonstrates how colleagues who have arrived recently have made us even stronger.
Shared Governance
The primary focus of the founders of our local was not pay and benefits, though those issues were certainly important to them. What motivated them to seek a separate bargaining unit for the faculty at HFC was a desire to have a meaningful voice in governance at the institution. In fall 1966, HFC faculty went on strike to secure shared governance. Our 1966 strike was the first by an AFT higher education local, and it garnered national media attention. The strike was successful, resulting in the approval of the Constitution for the College Organization by the union and the HFC board. This document, now called the Constitution for the Faculty Organization, codifies the centrality of faculty members (both full-time and adjunct) in recommending all academic policies at the institution and guarantees faculty seats on search committees for the college president, several vice presidents, and any director, dean, or associate dean with supervisory authority over faculty members.
While the AAUP was not affiliated with the AFT in 1966, the AAUP’s statements on shared governance and academic freedom inspired my local’s founders and were the basis for our shared governance system at HFC. We have amended the constitution since 1966, but it has remained the primary governing document for academic policy at the college for sixty years. The Local 1650 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) gives us the right to grieve violations of any provision of the constitution. The constitution is a strong governing document with real teeth.
Under the Local 1650 CBA, one of the key responsibilities of all faculty members is to be involved in the shared governance structure of the college. To achieve tenure, probationary faculty members must demonstrate meaningful involvement in the structure. Once tenured, our members must continue to be involved in committees of the faculty senate. However, our contract also allows members to fulfill their shared governance commitments by joining union committees. Shared governance is in the DNA of our institution and union, and the local reinforces its importance with all new members.
In Local 1650 and at HFC, we understand that faculty members are the experts on academic policy, and our expertise needs to be part of every decision the administration makes on curriculum, pedagogy, and what happens in the classroom and online. Our faculty take pride in their central role in shared governance. That is the main reason so many full-time faculty members have spent decades at HFC and retired after satisfying careers. Of course, they enjoyed their professional work as professors and in other roles at the college. But most important, they felt respect as well-compensated professionals who were able to recommend policies to the administration through a democratic process.
Since 2011, many of our most senior faculty colleagues have retired. About half of the total current membership of Local 1650 today came to the college in the last fifteen years. We have welcomed scores of new members in the local, and we’ve spent considerable time orienting them to the shared governance culture at HFC. These new voices and faces have brought new ways of thinking and teaching to our campus. We are grateful that so many academic professionals have made HFC their home and hope that they stay for many years.
The generational change that has occurred in our membership in recent years has refreshed our system of shared governance. Our new members have different ways of communicating, and their professional backgrounds as well as their lived experiences have shaped their approach to issues at the college. They ask more questions about how and why we operate as we do, causing those of us who have been at HFC longer to think more deliberately about our work. We have become more flexible in our approaches to shared governance without abandoning the core principles that undergird our system.
The COVID-19 Pandemic
Our membership growth has also changed how we interact with one another and approach our jobs. At the same time, external events have forced us to rethink our work. In March 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic compelled every member of our local, regardless of seniority, to move our classes to a virtual mode. As in every other occupational sphere, the change was not welcomed by all but was necessary for our collective safety. The faculty senate and other organizations on campus, including Local 1650, made quick but considered recommendations to the college administration about the least disruptive way to shift to online modalities. The HFC administration largely agreed to the faculty’s course modality proposals in the early weeks and months of the pandemic.
During the COVID years, the college continued to appoint new faculty members. Now, many of these members are at the end of HFC’s four-year probationary process, making them eligible for tenure. They are far more adaptable to change than those of us who have been around longer. Like other long-time members of Local 1650, I have learned a lot from these newer colleagues.
These new union siblings have changed how we communicate. Though COVID forced us to move many meetings to a virtual format, we now use hybrid modalities by choice for our professional and union work. Even as life has returned to “normal” in the last few years, we have not gone back to the traditional face-to-face meetings of the past. Our newer members made clear that though the pandemic may have subsided, our new ways of communicating should not go away. We have invested in technology for the union that gives us more flexibility, allowing for greater participation than ever before by rank-and-file members in the committee structure of the union as well as in our monthly membership meetings. We can serve our members better because of these changes.
The greater adaptability we’ve witnessed in recent years has not been just about how we operate as a union. It also applies to how we approach making academic policy recommendations to our administration and to the substance of those recommendations. Our newer faculty are not shy in meetings with administrators and their colleagues. When our administration pushes back against the faculty, they ask why—they want to know the purpose of the policies we discuss, and they seek creative ways to implement them. It’s easy sometimes to get caught up in questions about process when engaged in academic governance. Our younger colleagues have helped to keep us focused on the goal and why we’re doing our work.
Artificial Intelligence
Technology has changed rapidly in recent years. When I started at HFC in 2004, most of our classes were taught in person on campus in a traditional classroom format. We did offer “distance ed” courses through a learning management system, but those were almost entirely asynchronous, and most faculty members did not teach online. By the 2010s, more of our members had taken required training courses at HFC to learn how to teach online. When COVID struck in March 2020, we already had a significant cohort of faculty members teaching online, which mitigated some of the difficult impact of shifting our entire course schedule online when the shutdown orders came. Over the past few years, our faculty have created more synchronous, hybrid, and “HyFlex” courses at HFC.
Since 2022, rapid advances in artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, have affected all of us, regardless of our preferred teaching modality. As at every other college or university in the country, our faculty have had mixed opinions about the expansion of AI. Some have embraced the technological changes as challenges to be met. Many have incorporated AI into their classrooms or online classes, focusing on productive uses of this new technology.
Others have seen the growth in generative AI as a major threat to our work. Even those who have embraced AI have sought to address the increasing prevalence of academic dishonesty in our classes as the technology has become more refined and accessible.
As our members have done with other difficult issues since 1966, we met the AI challenge head-on. In 2023, the faculty senate created an AI task force to focus on the challenges and opportunities created by AI. This task force was made up of faculty members from all academic areas and ranks. The task force created a document to address the issues surrounding AI and to propose solutions or ways to handle them. This report highlighted the need to address academic honesty issues with our students as AI tools continue to proliferate, foster critical thinking skills among our students to help them understand how AI is being used in the world today, and provide adequate technical support to both students and faculty members as they decide when or if to use AI in their classes. Our newer faculty had a strong influence on this work.
In May 2024, the HFC Faculty Organization—the body of full-time and adjunct faculty—approved the establishment of a permanent standing committee of the faculty senate on AI with the authority to recommend academic policies to the college administration. Once again, the newer members of Local 1650 led the way, recognizing that AI is here to stay and that faculty need to provide leadership in dealing with it. This leadership has extended to professional development, with several conferences and webinars on the topic being held on campus (and virtually), all presented by our faculty. Both the union and the faculty senate have sponsored these events.
Systematic Racism and Societal Inequality
Another external development that our members have faced is the growing recognition of systemic racism and structural inequities in our society. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 occurred at the height of the pandemic, when we were all working virtually. This did not stop our members from insisting that HFC address the issues facing our society, our community, and our campus, which serves a highly diverse student population, including many Black students and the largest Arab American population outside the Middle East. HFC faculty led online sessions to tackle difficult questions of race and ethnicity.
In the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, members of Local 1650 discussed how our union could engage in the debates around systemic racism and inequality. By the end of 2020, we had changed our local’s constitution and bylaws to create the Social Justice and Equity Committee. Newer members of the local, in particular, saw the need for this committee, and John McDonald, the local’s president at the time, agreed. The new committee began to look at issues of racial equity, not just at HFC but also within the local itself. We reviewed union policies and our own CBA to root out anything that would perpetuate structural inequities while putting pressure on the college to do the same.
The Social Justice and Equity Committee also recommended the creation of a new position on Local 1650’s Executive Board: an officer for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In 2022, we amended our constitution to establish this position. The DEI officer is one of two members of the leadership team (along with the president) who is guaranteed a role on the union’s negotiating team. This new officer is elected at large from the membership every two years and oversees the Social Justice and Equity Committee.
At a time when DEI initiatives are under attack across the country under the current federal administration, Local 1650 has not shrunk from standing up for diversity, equity, and inclusion on our campus and in our contract. Without a doubt, our newer members have led the way on these issues. Our first DEI officer was appointed during the pandemic and recently achieved tenure. She and those in her cohort understood the significant problems facing our society and pushed our local leadership as well as HFC to face these issues in a meaningful way. HFC’s administration has largely maintained its commitment to support diversity efforts.
Parental Leave
When we went to the negotiating table in late 2022, the Local 1650 negotiating team asked our members, as we always do at the beginning of a new contract campaign, what issues needed to be addressed in the contract. Our newer members, who also tend to be younger, pointed out that our existing contract did not provide dedicated leave for parents of new children. If a parent had a child, they could only use the sick-leave provisions of our contract to care for the new child. This often forced parents to use up much of their bank of sick days, particularly when they had more than one child in a short space of time. Like the decision to create a DEI officer position within the local, the focus on parental leave coverage in our contract was about equity. Younger faculty members wanted to make the contract fairer and more inclusive.
So, our negotiating team put paid parental leave on its list of demands in late 2022. While administrators on the management team were amenable to adding a new parental leave policy to the CBA, they worried about the pressure from other bargaining units on campus if they agreed to it in our contract. We argued that it was the right thing to do for everyone, though of course we could bargain only for our members.
As part of the contract settlement in 2023, the administration and the union agreed in principle to the addition of parental leave benefits in our contract. Over several months in late 2023 and early 2024, a subset of our negotiating team met with administrators to hammer out a final agreement. We finally reached agreement in spring 2024 on a comprehensive and inclusive parental leave policy that covers not only births but also adoptions and provides equal benefits to new mothers and new fathers.
Lessons Learned
The establishment of a DEI officer in our local, the creation of a faculty senate committee on AI, and the addition of an inclusive parental leave policy in our CBA all came about because of the activism of our newest members. Their activism has been about what’s right, and all of us have benefited. For our younger colleagues, this means making our contract, and our union, more inclusive. They want not to supplant the great work of past generations of members and leaders but to expand it. Operating within a long-established system of shared governance and a strong CBA, the younger generation has found ways to bring about positive change in our academic structure and within our local.
As our country moves through unprecedented, difficult times, we must be adaptable in how we communicate and work if we’re going to be successful. I’ve seen our new members tackle these challenges without flinching, leading to the creation of more inclusive policies.
Local 1650 has been successful over its six-decade history because it has never lost focus on what’s important—to serve students, the faculty must drive academic policies at the college. We have insisted over the years that our administration listen to us and respect our professional standing. Some college leaders have seen the wisdom of this style of governance, while others have resented it. Yet the members of our union have never shirked their responsibilities to lead and speak out.
Tenured faculty members have an obligation to inculcate an appreciation of the principles of shared governance among our junior colleagues: We must make sure that they understand the history of governance at our institution and why it’s vital to maintain and strengthen the faculty voice. At the same time, our seasoned members and leaders need to be open to new ways of operating and communicating as a union. We cannot rest on our laurels. We need to listen to the concerns of the people who have recently joined our ranks and find out what their life experiences have taught them.
We have a lot to learn from the people who are new to our ranks. At HFC, they have helped to pioneer more inclusive ways of communicating and operating. The most obvious example is the use of technology to conduct meetings both online and in person, which also makes the union more inclusive. Attendance at membership meetings rose during the pandemic when we moved online, and that high level of participation has continued since the pandemic ebbed. While COVID forced us online and led us to adopt new technologies, our newer members have made clear that we cannot go back to the old way of doing business.
The changes to our work also include how we engage in shared governance. We don’t engage in committee and college-wide discussions and debates simply because a governing document tells us to do so. Our newer members have frequently reminded us to focus on the purpose of our work and not get bogged down in arguments about process.
Every local needs to be conscious of the future while respecting the past. The loyalty of our members—those with decades of service as well as those who came to HFC more recently—is the strength of our union. The people joining the faculty today will eventually be the leaders of our local. Respecting and listening to them now will make them want to stay. Just as those of us who have been around for a while have built on the work of our predecessors, newer faculty will build on our work in the years to come.
Based on the growth we’ve experienced in Local 1650 over the past fifteen years, I am confident our local will continue to thrive in the years ahead.
Eric Rader has taught political science at Henry Ford College since 2004 and has served as president of AFT Local 1650 since February 2022. In addition to his work at HFC, he serves as cochair of the AFT Higher Education Program and Policy Council and as an AFT Michigan vice president.