The changing working conditions of academic labor—and, especially, the changing demographics and views about organizing and negotiating of the academic workforce—have profoundly influenced academic collective bargaining. As academic workers’ sense of justice and possibility has changed in recent years, so, too, have their perspectives on unions, their views about what can and should be bargained collectively, and their approaches to negotiations. Increasingly, academic workers are not only negotiating with higher education management but also seeking to engage with and persuade the larger society.
Some of the thinking in my contribution to this Academe issue on the (changing) working conditions of academic labor was stimulated by a 2023 conversation at an advisory board meeting of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions (National Center). I further developed that thinking in my recent book, Organizing Professionals: Academic Employees Negotiating a New Academy. In concluding that book, the final proofs of which I submitted to Rutgers University Press not long after the November 2024 presidential election, I wrote that the future would be shaped by academic employees’ willingness to negotiate for respect and for higher education’s public purposes. As I briefly detail below, that is evident in the unfolding relationship between the Trump administration and higher education labor and management, which has been shaped by academic workers in ways that distinguish universities from other major institutions targeted by the Trump administration, including law firms, mainstream media, and corporate business.
The Advisory Board Conversation
In 2023, after a series of major strikes and contract campaigns in higher education the previous year, the National Center’s advisory board—which includes representatives from both labor and management—was discussing the issues being brought to the bargaining table in recent negotiations, particularly by graduate student and postdoctoral employees. In virtually all graduate student and postdoc employee negotiations, sexual and racial harassment and discrimination were central issues. Academic employee units were calling for independent and binding external arbitration in these matters, even as they were making demands regarding more “conventional” issues of wages and benefits as well as appointments, dismissals, and workload. As some management-side representatives on the board phrased it, the former issues went well beyond the traditional “bread-and-butter” union issues that often constitute mandatory subjects of bargaining as defined by law for public higher education institutions.
Relatedly, the conversation addressed how bargaining units, including those composed of contingent and tenure-stream faculty, were increasingly articulating demands connected to work-life balance and family issues such as childcare and the provision of lactation stations. Some campaigns were drawing public attention to the fact that graduate student and postdoc employees could not afford to live where they worked. Again, some management-side representatives spoke about how such demands were beyond the conventional scope of bargaining—and, in one person’s words, were unrealistic, since, as that person asserted, universities have no role in setting local rents. Of course, this is not true insofar as the presence, policies, and practices of colleges and universities do, in fact, influence local rents. Indeed, as a dimension of what Sheila Slaughter and I discussed in our 2004 book Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, colleges and universities have quite literally become landlords—directly through campus housing for students and employees and indirectly through contracts with private entities to provide housing for students and employees.
Responding to the suggestion by some management-side representatives that matters such as sexual harassment and racial and sexual discrimination were outside the scope of bread-and-butter issues, some labor-side representatives pointed out that if one is a person of color or identifies as a woman (or is LGBTQ+), then these matters are a central dimension of working conditions. A few people on the board, including me, argued that bread-and-butter issues were being redefined to reflect and include the lived experiences of increasingly diverse academic employees. Not surprisingly, the academic employee groups that had experienced the most growth in demographic diversity were graduate student and postdoc employees.
"Organizing Professionals"
As I argue in my new book, graduate student workers, postdoctoral fellows, and contingent faculty have become the vanguard of a reenergized academic labor movement. This trend has been evident in the creation of new bargaining units (which since the early 2000s have been led disproportionately by people from those categories of academic employees), in the organizing that has taken place in new sectors such as private colleges and universities (again, particularly involving contingent faculty and graduate student employees), and in the extensive strike activity among these employees.
As labor historian, education, and adjunct faculty activist Joe Berry pointed out two decades ago in Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, and as I underscore throughout Organizing Professionals, the issue of respect is at the core of all organizing. Indeed, the cover of Organizing Professionals—which pictures roses and stalks of wheat—alludes to the classic labor mantra of “bread and roses.” Contingent faculty are demanding bread—improved wages and benefits—but respect (roses) as well. This focus on “bread and roses” has animated the organizing and bargaining campaigns of graduate student and postdoc employees, too, through demands of respect for them (in the case of graduate students, not “just” as students but also as workers) and for their work. It has also applied to units representing tenure-track and tenured faculty, who are increasingly cooperating with contingent academic employees in their organizing and negotiating. And, as documented by the National Center, that cooperation has included the growth of bargaining units that combine different categories of academic employees, especially tenure-stream and contingent faculty.
Underlying much of this contingent academic employee organizing and negotiating for respect is a broader critique of privatization and the corporatization of higher education that also has adversely affected tenure-track faculty by eroding shared governance and de-emphasizing academia’s role as a public good. Academic employees have increasingly demanded respect for and commitment to the public purposes of colleges and universities.
A focus on the public good is of fundamental importance for academic employees in not-for-profit higher education because their unions are not just negotiating with management but also trying to win support from the larger society, the press, local communities, politicians, and, not least, students.
Such broader “negotiation” is obviously not done primarily through collective bargaining. But just as obviously, formal collective bargaining with management is influenced by support for the demands of academic employees—or opposition or indifference to them—among students and other constituencies. Mobilization by academic employees can also shape public critiques of and reactions to governmental policy locally, statewide, and nationally.
In other words, the negotiations between academic labor and management go beyond the two parties at the bargaining table—a fact that is all the more important amid the federal and state policy changes happening now. Already, intersecting and coalescing discourse challenging such changes is leading significant numbers of universities and colleges to take a stand against new governmental attacks on the sector.
Part of the reenergizing that has taken place is related to what has been termed social movement unionism in higher education. The organizing and negotiating campaigns of these unionists have increasingly focused on social justice issues related to the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, and in the second Trump administration they have been connected to large, national demonstrations against authoritarian federal policies.
Demographics, Justice, and Possibility
Fundamental to fully understanding the above developments are the demographic and generational shifts in the academic workforce. I’ve alluded to this point already, particularly in the case of graduate student and postdoc employees. But it applies as well to part- and full-time contingent faculty. If you are a faculty member and you identify as a woman or are a member of a minoritized group, you are statistically most likely to be in a contingent academic position.
Demographics, of course, are not determinative. But neither are they irrelevant. Indeed, generational shifts and some gendered differences have been particularly apparent in the negotiation of distance education and remote work, with younger and female-identified faculty members being more disposed to teaching remote and hybrid classes, in ways that simply were not evident in distance education negotiations in the 1990s (see my 1998 book, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor). Moreover, demographics can become particularly powerful in animating organizing when they are linked to a sense of injustice. Just as the representation of marginalized populations has increased (though it remains insufficient) in the contingent faculty ranks and among graduate student and postdoc employees, the prospects of these academic workers, achieving a tenure-track faculty position have diminished, feeding a growing sense of injustice.
A sense of possibility has also animated recent organizing. It has taken decades of prolific growth of contingent faculty in the academic workforce for the sense of inequity to translate into organizing and successful negotiating, particularly for contingent faculty and graduate student employees in private colleges and universities (and for postdoc employees in elite public research universities). Many years of organizing around the plight of the adjunct faculty member—what adjunct activist Caprice Lawless has called “going from awfulizing into organizing”—preceded successful campaigns by contingent faculty to organize their own bargaining units and to gain a greater voice in bargaining units and in their institutions. But as Bill Herbert of the National Center has documented, organizing among both part-time and full-time contingent faculty has rapidly expanded in the twenty-first century and has taken new forms, such as “metro campaigns” that organize contingent faculty across institutions in a metropolitan area and new organizing led not by the traditional academic unions but instead by the Service Employees International Union; United Auto Workers; United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America; and United Steelworkers.
Similarly, the successful organizing of graduate student employees in private universities and of postdocs in elite public universities (and one private university) happened only after a long struggle to raise awareness of their working conditions. It took a couple of decades for graduate student workers to win recognition as employees with the statutory right under the National Labor Relations Act to form a union and collectively bargain with their employer. Indeed, as I documented in Organizing Professionals, virtually every successful organizing campaign of these employees was preceded by a false start or “failed” campaign, a point that applied as well to several tenure-track faculty organizing campaigns. Similarly, multiple national science agencies spent nearly a decade raising awareness of the plight of postdocs—stuck in a form of purgatory, with limited support and prospects for tenure-track employment as independent scientists—before that sense of injustice translated into a successful unionizing campaign and subsequent negotiation of a first collectively bargained contract.
The eventual successes of these academic employees’ organizing, and even the so-called failures, have built a sense of possibility for them that has grown over time. These workers, particularly graduate student employees, have also proved increasingly willing to engage in more aggressive strategies, such as striking.
Resistance and Power
Such a sense of injustice, coupled with a sense of possibility—and such willingness to take aggressive stances and actions in the face of powerful institutions and adversaries and to address major political issues within and beyond the academy—is all the more important in the context of current state and federal initiatives targeting higher education. As I wrote in the closing of Organizing Professionals, speculating on what the future Trump administration might bring, “the situation and outcomes are contingent” upon the context of and contest for the past, present, and future of higher education, with “a major aspect of the contest being contingent employees’ willingness to organize and negotiate.” We see this playing out now, in real time.
Authoritarian regimes of the sort that the current administration clearly aspires to be thrive on a sense of inevitability, on a perception that it doesn’t matter whether individuals, groups, and institutions resist, and that there are no “realistic” alternatives to capitulating to the demands of the government. In 2025, leaders in too many sectors of American society concluded that the most prudent course was to accede to the demands of the Trump administration. Although there are important exceptions in each sector, that inclination toward capitulation has been all too evident among law firms, in the media, and across various sectors of corporate America, with some sectors in the high-tech industry enthusiastically embracing appeasement and supporting the new administration’s policies.
In the early months of 2025, it appeared that leaders of higher education institutions were similarly inclined, with three Ivy League universities—Brown, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania—cutting deals to pay the new administration in exchange for the restoration of some federal grant funding. The Trump administration’s actions were unprecedented and arguably illegal. But these university administrations believed that there was little choice but to comply, because the government had too many points of leverage, litigation in the courts would take too long to play out and would be costly, and significant financial harm could be incurred by not capitulating. Indeed, some in leadership positions argued that fulfilling the fiduciary responsibilities of their office required compliance.
As I observed in a keynote address for the 2025 conference of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers, it is a shorter step than most people realize from the neoliberalism of academic capitalism to the illiberalism of a federal policy regime that aims to crush free expression, independent and evidence-based inquiry, and social inclusiveness, ideals that are central to liberal education (notwithstanding the ongoing illiberal, classed, raced, and gendered foundations of “liberal education,” “liberal democracy,” and “liberal society”). With the ascendance of academic capitalism over four decades, universities (and colleges) have been framed as and behave like independent firms seeking to optimize their revenues and prestige. They foreground higher education’s economic value, role, and responsibility in ways that internalize a private market logic and involve following and fulfilling governmental priorities in research and education (and service). At the same time, they downplay responsibility for the social functions of higher education. A similar dynamic is at play, for example, in The Washington Post’s shift from being a family-owned to a corporate-owned newspaper with allegiance not to the fundamental role of the media in a democracy but to the bottom line. Corporatization is connected to capitulation, to a mindset that is particularly subject to the intimidation tactics of the Trump administration.
After the “deals” made by Brown, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, it appeared, early on, that Harvard would also cut a deal with the Trump administration. But it didn’t. In fact, it not only resisted the administration’s efforts but also—after the national AAUP and its Harvard chapter filed suit—sued the administration. And it has continued to refuse to cut a deal, as have some other high-profile public and private universities, including Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles.
The decision of some universities to resist is connected to the consistent, vehement resistance to the Trump administration’s policies from faculty, students, and, often, alumni. The institutions that made deals early on came under extensive criticism from these groups. In fact, Harvard’s willingness to resist is partly a function of the reaction to Penn’s capitulation and the pressure from faculty, students, and alumni.
From the very first days of the second Trump administration—and even before then—academic employees and organized academic labor mounted a consistent and strong resistance. For example, faculty senates of leading public universities called for “mutual academic defense compacts” to resist the pressure of the federal government. Union locals and national and international affiliates also have taken strong positions against the efforts of the new administration across a range of policy realms, from science funding to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and admissions practices. The AAUP, the AFT, and the National Education Association have each filed or been party to lawsuits against the Trump administration’s initiatives.
That resistance by faculty and other groups has played out in ways that helped publicly shame the wealthy universities that had initially cut deals with the federal government to restore grant funding—deals that many observers argued sacrificed the independence and integrity of higher education. And that public resistance has helped push other universities to resist the Trump administration’s demands.
As of this writing, for example, seven of the nine universities offered special treatment in exchange for signing the Trump administration’s so-called Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education have publicly declined this offer. In each case, the university was under significant pressure from faculty members (as well as from students, some alumni, and many politicians) not to sign the compact. At my own institution, the University of Arizona, that opposition stemmed from an overwhelming faculty senate vote; a letter to the president by a group of regents and distinguished professors; columns in the local paper as well as in U.S. News & World Report by members of a subgroup of United Campus Workers called Faculty for Academic Justice, UA; and an appearance on Face the Nation by the chair of the faculty.
It is also telling that the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the 111-year-old national advocate for liberal education, has issued three significant statements countering the Trump administration’s efforts. The first, released in April 2025, was “A Call for Constructive Engagement,” which countered the administration’s top-down, nonconsultative, unprecedented, and arbitrary wielding of federal powers. More than 650 college and university presidents signed it. The second, issued on October 3, again was widely endorsed by presidents, reaffirming the earlier call and stating that the Trump administration’s so-called compact was, “in effect, an ultimatum.” Then, on October 17, AAC&U articulated its own compact in a statement titled “Higher Education’s Compact with America: Shared Principles for the Common Good.”
Notably, on a March 2025 National Center plenary panel with AFT President Randi Weingarten, AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella observed that college and university presidents had been reluctant to sign on to a statement opposing the Trump administration’s actions.
What a difference a few months, and grassroots resistance, make.
Following consistent critiques and lawsuits from faculty, academic unions and associations, and other groups, and a series of No Kings protests, the most recent of which involved an estimated seven million participants in more than 2,500 actions in all fifty states, institutional sentiments are shifting. Therein lies the significance, as I have pointed out in Organizing Professionals, of cumulative, iterative actions over time, and of the cumulative, collective nature of resistance and power.
In sum, what happens in the coming months and years will depend on all of us. It will depend on who we are, not just demographically but also in terms of our sense of justice, of possibility, and of whom we should be bargaining with and what we should be bargaining for. It depends on linking our work and goals to larger social movements, to protest movements like No Kings, to larger interests, and to broader conceptions of the public good.
Academic labor is central to resisting the Trump administration’s authoritarian abuse of power. It is central to challenging a “compact” that seeks to eliminate attention to race and gender issues in the name of “equity” and “civil rights” and that ignores higher education’s historical contributions to current inequities—this coming from an administration that has violated the civil rights (by race, gender and gender orientation, and disability status) of individuals and has aggressively targeted entire populations, cities, and institutions. Similarly, academic labor must call out the Orwellian invocation of academic freedom by a presidential administration that has attacked the independence and First Amendment rights of individuals and institutions and given preferential treatment to “conservative” ideas while aggressively denying widely established professional practices in education, medicine, climate science, and other fields. It is up to academic labor to ensure that higher education is neither complicit nor silent, as Trump’s so-called compact demands. And it is up to academic labor not only to define the Trump administration’s actions as unlawful and unacceptable but also to offer a progressive vision of what higher education can and should be.
Gary Rhoades is professor in the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, a former general secretary of the AAUP, and a member of United Campus Workers Arizona, Local 7065 of the Communications Workers of America. His email address is [email protected].