From the Editor: The State of Faculty Unions

Recently released data from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Educa­tion and the Professions brought good news for the academic labor movement: After adjusting for growth in the number of faculty members, the rate of faculty unionization in the United States has increased by 4.5 percent over the past twelve years, continuing a long-term trend that contrasts with the declining rate of union representation in the US workforce as a whole. Overall, 27 percent of US faculty members are now unionized, the 2024 Directory of Bargaining Agents and Contracts in Institutions of Higher Education reports.

The broad trend in union density, however, belies stark differences by region and institutional type. Faculty members in more than a third of states lack any union representation, and the US Supreme Court’s 1980 NLRB v. Yeshiva University ruling imposed significant barriers to faculty unioniza­tion at private colleges and universities. While faculty everywhere can organize—indeed, AAUP advocacy chapters have led the way in demonstrating how to wield collective power outside of union contexts—whether fac­ulty can bargain collectively with their employer remains highly dependent on where they work.

This issue of Academe explores the evolving opportunities for academic collective bargaining. The issue opens with labor-law expert Risa L. Lieberwitz’s reexamination of the legal constraints on faculty unionization in the private sector. As Lieberwitz notes, National Labor Relations Board decisions over the past decade have made possible an expansion of non-tenure-track faculty unions at private institu­tions as well as the rapid growth of graduate student employee unions, and new precedents have even been set for voluntary recognition of faculty unions. In the public sector, where the path to faculty collective bargaining rights runs through state legislatures, long political struggles in a handful of states may be poised to bear fruit. AAUP and AFT faculty activists report for this issue from Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Maryland about ongoing efforts in those states to pass enabling legislation or expand union rights through other channels.

This issue also includes a pair of articles high­lighting recent accomplishments of AAUP-AFT unions—one new, the other well-established. Theresa A. Kulbaga, looking back at the challenges that the Faculty Alliance of Miami has had to overcome in its first year of negotiating a first contract, describes how her union has learned that “organizing never ends, because solidarity wins” in the face of management hostility. Hank Kalet and Howard Swerdloff, mean­while, tell the story of the 2023 Rutgers strike and the years of organizing across bargaining units that made its success possible. What happened at Rutgers, they suggest, points to the potential of “wall-to-wall” organizing.

Rounding out the features in our print edition are Afshan Jafar’s thoughtful critique of the use of Robert’s Rules of Order in higher education and Malick W. Ghachem’s reflections on the crackdown on student protests and the McCarthyite congressio­nal hearings of the 2023–24 academic year—part of a culture war that, like the future of labor in higher education, could be profoundly affected by this year’s elections.