On September 12, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing that focused on the subject of unionization of graduate students. Inside Higher ed covered the story. Here is the issue. Private colleges and universities are subject to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which permits employees to seek to unionize through […]
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A central mantra of the PSC–the City University of New York’s hapless faculty union–is a complaint about defunding CUNY, as part of an alleged plot (by whom and for what reason we never learn) to “defund” public higher education. Yet over the past several months, the most aggressive advocates of “defunding” CUNY have been none […]
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A story today at insidehighered.com has a hole in it: the faculty is missing. Entitled “So Close,” the piece covers unionization efforts at University of Michigan by graduate research assistants, those efforts recently blocked by state legislation, signed by the governor, preventing the union from happening. The story contains viewpoints from research assistants, union advocates, […]
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Some two-thirds of America’s college students are taught by adjuncts, and now the battle is on over whether these low-paid, low-status workers should be unionized. Adjuncts, also called contingent faculty, are teachers hired without tenure, paid a small fraction of those on tenure-track positions, (typically $2700 per course, with minimal benefits). All three college faculty […]
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As K C Johnson noted here yesterday, Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels have a conversation at the New York Timesopinionator blog in which both advocate unionization (see here). Their immediate target is an op-ed by Naomi Schaefer Riley in USA Today entitled “Why Unions Hurt Higher Education” (see here). It should be noted that Michaels and Fish are both English professors, which puts them in […]
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In Monday’s edition of The Hill, Juan Williams penned a column advocating defunding NPR. There are lots of reasons why such an approach might be a good idea–we’re in very tough budget times; credible allegations of bias have been made against the organization; a far wider array of media outlets exists now than when NPR […]
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The activities of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker have brought unusually high public attention to the status of public employee unions. Few, if any, public employee unions could withstand intense media focus less han those representing higher education: too often these unions provide a caricature of the critics’ vision—organizations that seek to use the public dime […]
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After decades of trying, the Democrat-controlled Wisconsin legislature, with the encouragement of the union-backed governor, passed a statute allowing unionization of faculty in the University of Wisconsin system. Recently the first campus, Superior, voted to unionize their faculty by a 75-5 vote. I believe that ultimately faculty unions will seriously damage public universities in Wisconsin […]
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The New York Times recently brought news that that the union and faculty activists determined to establish a graduate student union at NYU have renewed their crusade. I use the phrase “union and faculty activists” deliberately, since it’s hard to imagine that any of the graduate students actually involved in the original controversy remain at […]
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One of the more heroic acts in the recent annals of American higher education came from NYU president John Sexton, who stood up to the faculty radicals within his midst and (thus far successfully) fought creation of a graduate student “union” on his campus. There are lots of reasons why academic unionization is problematic, but […]
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I have written elsewhere on how academic unions tend to attract the most extremist voices even in an academy that overwhelmingly tilts to one side ideologically. Within the category of extremist academic unions, however, the CUNY union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), stands out. Since 2000 headed by a faction called the New Caucus, the […]
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Labor unions have suffered a number of defeats in recent years, but they hope to regain momentum by gaining passage of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier to secure votes for unionization, mainly through a mechanism called “card check.” Card check would replace the traditional method of unionization by eliminating […]
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