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In light of the Administration’s refusal to allow a democratic decision by our non tenure track colleagues whether or not to form a union on campus, it may be helpful to recall the importance of collective bargaining generally and, in particular, on college and university campuses today.
The AAUP did not start out as a union or as an advocate of collective bargaining. But faculty unionization has long been the norm, not the exception. In fact, in California, our campus should be seen as a laggard in this area. There are active longstanding faculty unions, going back to the 1960’s at least, at the University of California and at the state college and community college system. Far from interfering with the shared governance and academic freedom norms that are at the heart of the work of AAUP, collective bargaining is viewed at those institutions as a valuable form of support for the effective functioning of the university.
Consistent with this experience, the AAUP initially issued a Statement on Collective Bargaining in 1973, updating it periodically (including as recently as 2017) in reaction to changing trends in the higher education environment. The full statement can be found here.
Perhaps the most relevant part of the statement for our situation at Santa Clara is the following (emphases added):
Tenure-line and non-tenure-line faculty, graduate employees, and academic professionals at both public and private institutions are entitled to choose to engage in collective bargaining in order to ensure an effective role in the governance of the institution. Trustees and administrators should maintain neutrality and allow academic workers to determine for themselves whether they would like to be represented by a union. They should not resort to litigation or other means having the purpose or effect of restraining or coercing the faculty in its choice of collective bargaining.
The logic of the AAUP’s support for collective bargaining should be apparent to all: the monastic character of American academia is an illusion long since dispelled by the emergence of what Clark Kerr infamously called the “multiversity.” Universities are an integral part of the wider world and while we may annually wear academic garb, in the meantime we have to put food on the table and roofs over our heads for our families just like everyone else.
And when a corporate and Wall Street funded institution like ours relies heavily on contingent and insecure labor to fill more than half of our teaching responsibilities, it should not be a surprise to anyone that unionization emerges as a necesary response. If academic freedom and shared governance are to survive and flourish, they must be rooted in security, in trust, in faith. But if insecurity and bad faith prevail, then those core institutional norms begin to fall apart.
We have now, it seems, reached that point.
The Administration’s decision to block a fair and democratic election (the bedrock of national labor policy in the United States since 1935) is inconsistent with the AAUP Statement. In other words, the Administration’s obstructionist approach, bolstered by its engagement of a notorious union busting law firm, can be considered a breach of the norms of shared governance and academic freedom.