Revitalizing Scholarship on Academic Collective Bargaining (original) (raw)

Interest in unions by those teaching in colleges and universities can be traced to the early 1900s when faculty locals were started at institutions in the Pacific Northwest and at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s (Cain, 2017). Later in the 1940s, professors at the New School for Social Research and Howard University initiated organizing efforts and managed to form bargaining units. A first time contract covering faculty dates to 1949 at the New School (Herbert, 2017). Laborers and other craft workers were engaged in collective bargaining (without the federal legislation and legal protections in place now) a decade earlier, painters at Columbia University for example. However, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that collective bargaining as we know it today gained a permanent foothold commencing at Wayne State University and at several public community colleges in Michigan and in the City University of New York. This era witnessed an onslaught of initial studies discussing unions in academe, including some excellent research, heralding what collective bargaining may portend for the American university (Julius & DiGiovanni, 2019). Research on unions in academe continued as greater numbers of faculty organized into the 1980's but then declined in the 1990s, with the exception of a small group of scholars who continue to study and comment on labor management relations in post-secondary education. However, many prognostications, originally put forward in the 1970s and 1980s remain unexamined. The last two decades in particular, have seen less attention focused on unions in academe. Organizing efforts continue to be robust, and advocates from all vantage points continue to offer arguments both in favor or against collective bargaining. Yet we really know very little about the impact unions have on academic organizations. Much of what is said about the outcomes remain unsubstantiated in peer-reviewed journals or other "non-advocate" scholarly work. In fact, there are few objective and defensible research studies to substantiate