Note: With interest in Higher Education Labor United (HELU) growing among higher education workers, The National Council of Faculty Senates requested that a representative from HELU address their Annual Meeting. I spoke at their hybrid meeting originating from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and began by introducing myself and HELU. What follows is a lightly edited version of that presentation. – Mike Budd
Faculty Senates, Higher Education Unions and HELU: Organizing to Meet the National Crisis in Our Colleges and Universities
Presentation to National Council of Faculty Senates
June 6, 2024
Hello, I’m Mike Budd, and I’m here on behalf of HELU, Higher Education Labor United.
I’m a retired faculty member from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and active in the United Faculty of Florida, a statewide union local affiliated with AFT, NEA, AFL-CIO and AAUP. United Faculty of Florida has 34 chapters representing more than 25,000 full time faculty members at all 12 public universities, 16 of 28 state colleges, 4 graduate worker chapters and faculty at 1 private university, plus a retired chapter. UFF has been an organizational member of HELU since 2022, paying our annual solidarity contribution and participating in HELU committees, where most of HELU’s work is done, as well as our new Delegate Assembly, which meets quarterly.
Founded in 2021, HELU is a growing national organization of higher ed unions and labor organizations that represent staff, student workers, adjunct, contingent and tenured faculty, postdocs, university health system workers, and others. In other words, organizing campus workers wall to wall. HELU is strongest where unions are strongest, on the west coast, in the northeast and industrial states of the upper Midwest. Fifty local and statewide higher ed unions and labor organizations have now joined HELU, and more are joining as well. Here’s why UFF and others are joining.
The Need for HELU: A Fragmented Higher Education Work Force
UFF’s affiliates, like those of most higher ed unions, are large K-12 educators’ unions. Many other higher ed unions are organizing with large national unions that are not predominantly made up of educators but have strong organizing traditions, for example the UAW, Steelworkers, Teamsters, SEIU, Communication Workers, and others. Our affiliates are generally doing a good job of supporting us, esp. in a continuing crisis like the one in Florida now. But higher ed is a national industry with millions of workers, a distinctive set of institutions with its own goals, issues and problems – including labor issues. There are thirteen major unions and other smaller ones organizing higher ed workers. For virtually all of those unions, higher education workers are only a small proportion of those they represent, and those unions aren’t able to pay enough attention to specific higher ed issues.
When it comes to all the things UFF and other higher ed unions do – organizing, bargaining, contract enforcement, political action, and the many informal ways our unions improve our institutions – many of those things are like what other unions do, but many things are also very different in important ways. U.S. workers generally are fighting for more job security and against precarity and contingency, multitiered wage structures and the gig economy. In higher ed, we’re fighting similar battles, but they’re specifically about tenure, academic freedom and job security, promotion structures, multiyear contracts, state legislatures and contingent faculty, grad assistants and postdocs not making a livable wage. HELU is starting to bring higher education workers together across union and job category lines to talk about our common issues, learn from one another, organize and build solidarity, fight against higher education’s distinctive forms of contingency and exploitation, and for more, and fairer, state and federal support and regulation. To build toward HELU’s wall to wall goal that is already nearly a reality in a few progressive places, and also to build toward HELU’s other goal, linking up our organizing coast to coast.
For example, HELU has begun a series of national zoom events on strategies to confront contingency and precarity, one of the central labor issues in higher ed today. Speakers, discussions and breakout rooms focus on both broad issues and specific problems in different places; we have had events focused on contingency generally and in community colleges, and are planning events on student debt and on the multi-tier structure of faculty employment and ways to fight it. These events have attracted hundreds of new participants, including from Florida, and begun to build a more extensive and coherent national higher ed labor movement.
The voice and power of higher ed workers is too often fragmented; our divisions by job category and union diminish our collective power and public voice, and make it easier for managers to divide us. We can be part of many different unions in the labor movement and also organize around issues specific to a higher education labor movement.
Maybe you’ve heard of Labor Notes, the organizing conference and newsletter, which works “to put the movement back in the labor movement.” If you haven’t, I highly recommend it; labornotes.org. From my viewpoint, HELU aspires to be like Labor Notes for a developing higher education labor movement. HELU is primarily for unions and labor organizations, but we are attracting a growing group of individual members in higher ed who are isolated and want to participate. As with a union, it’s not a transactional relationship where you purchase services from an outside agent; it’s a grassroots organizing opportunity, and HELU is a growing organization that does valuable things no other labor organization does. HELU complements, supplements and helps build our existing unions and labor organizations. Our budget comes entirely from the solidarity contributions of our member organizations and individuals, and goes almost entirely to pay a couple of part time staff; we are now hiring an executive director as well.
The Need for HELU: A History of Escalating Attacks on Higher Education
Another way to look at the need for HELU and the program set out in our vision platform is historically. HELU responds to the growing crisis in U.S. higher education.
Here I want to address the escalating, coordinated and deeply damaging attacks on higher education that have been going on for decades, and building a movement and a coalition that’s adequate to meet those attacks, and what’s at stake.
Most faculty want our students to learn critical thinking, the historical values of free speech and democratic discourse, to question authority locally, nationally and globally, to understand how arguments are constructed and the techniques of propaganda. But the example of recent public events at many universities seems to indicate that, when our students attempt to apply these values in the real world, they are met with punishment and even police violence, even when the real world is right outside the classroom.
Recently students at both elite and non-elite universities have, with faculty, staff and community support, mounted sustained protests at over a hundred campuses around the country. These protests and encampments were overwhelmingly peaceful, educational and nonviolent; on the other hand, responses by police and others, authorized and often directed by university presidents, were too often unnecessary, disproportionate and violent. The message from university authorities was usually anti-educational, the opposite of what faculty at our best try to teach our students: to apply what we’ve taught them in the real world, including to challenge authority and test received wisdom.
Meanwhile, and in response to these protests, the public was treated to the performative spectacle of Republican House members grilling Presidents of elite universities to demand more authoritarian and punitive responses to the exercise of freedom of speech and assembly and academic freedom on their campuses. And the response of these supposedly exemplary University Presidents was mostly shameful capitulation. Many of us who work in higher education were ashamed that our leaders were largely unable or unwilling to stand up to the bullies, talk back and articulate the public values of democratic higher education. Behind the scenes, and occasionally in public, faculty governance and faculty union leaders were working and speaking out, but the collective action by workers that demands public attention was mostly missing, especially but not only in the corporate media.
To anyone with a sense of history, these events are no surprise. They are symptomatic of larger changes, the culmination of decades in which conservatives gradually withdrew support from public higher education and public institutions generally. While our higher education institutions have become bigger, richer and apparently more powerful, they have also often succumbed to pressures to conform to every wish of every ignorant donor, trustee, state legislator or governor. Many commentators have pointed to the resemblance of this media spectacle to the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy period. But as historian Ellen Schrecker has pointed out, the right wing bullies of that period were mostly after individuals; now, the Stefaniks and the DeSantises are attacking whole disciplines, departments and universities.
What has led up to this point? For more than a half century, the institutional foundations of U.S. higher education have been eroding even as that higher education system maintained its reputation as one of the best in the world. Powerful U.S. conservatives never accepted the growth of accessible, quality, multi-racial public higher education based in the liberal arts and sciences just as they never accepted the growth of the liberal state that made such higher education possible. Those conservatives chipped away at state support for higher education, especially during the tax revolts and racial reaction that escalated during the seventies, causing tuition and fees to rise faster than inflation, universities to spend big money to attract the wealthiest students, who can pay out of state tuition, and student debt and institutional debt to balloon. Like many other institutions, colleges and universities became financialized, the educational experience more commodified, and boards of trustees and governors, now increasingly dominated by neoliberals with little knowledge or interest in the distinctive values and culture of public higher education, gradually took more direct control over the priorities and decisions of individual institutions and whole systems. For them, higher education is not a public good but a form of private property, and its institutional values flow from that hierarchical, authoritarian and antidemocratic view. Universities and colleges have lost much of their relative autonomy, too often acting like hedge funds or private equity firms with universities attached, in imitation of elite institutions like Harvard.
The Need for HELU: Organizing Wall to Wall and Coast to Coast
This historic shift has not gone unnoticed among faculty, students and staff paying attention to the institutions where we work and study, to the steady erosion of the power and voice of those whose work constitutes the work of the institution itself. There was no romantic golden age of faculty or worker power, but the erosion is real to anyone who’s been around for a while. Most important, it’s increasingly clear that our bosses are mostly abdicating their responsibilities as leaders and stewards. Organized faculty and other campus workers, whether organized through shared governance, unions or both, in coalition with students, parents, and the community, are likely the only ones who can take responsibility for restoring our colleges and universities to the values of real diversity, equity and inclusion that so many of our bosses now largely abandon. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
As we say in our unions, this university only works because we do. And of course that applies to everyone who works in higher ed, staff, student workers, adjunct, contingent and tenured faculty, postdocs, university health system workers, and others.
That erosion of power has not gone unnoticed, but campus workers are fragmented and divided in ways that strongly inhibit collective action to claim that power and reassert the best values of public higher education. An example: faculty, especially tenured and tenure track faculty, are often among the best organized workers on campus, but we are also often committed to a defense of a deeply flawed meritocracy along with our own relative status and privilege against those who are paid less and whose employment is more likely to be precarious, which is almost everyone else. Sometimes it seems like curriculum is one of the last areas left to faculty control, and the tenured faculty often seem to be defending that control against both administrators above and non-tenure track and adjunct faculty below. The extravagant and dysfunctional hierarchies of academic life serve mainly to make it easier for our bosses to divide us.
On campuses where non-supervisory workers are organized mostly or entirely wall to wall, that is virtually everyone, the conflicts and divisions among workers on campus can be reproduced within the unions that represent them, as workers in California, New York and other strong union states are reporting.
This is another issue that divides campus workers and that our unions and faculty governance organizations have trouble engaging. This is exactly the kind of issue that HELU takes on. It has already become a major topic of discussion in HELU workshops and events that bring together campus workers from around the country to focus on issues distinctive to higher ed, issues that our otherwise strong local unions are not designed to deal with. One of the major committees in HELU is the Contingency Task Force. With around 75% of the faculty and many non-teaching staff contingent, the gig economy is a major issue in higher education as in the larger society. Since faculty (and staff) working conditions are our students’ learning conditions, academic freedom is meaningless for teachers and researchers who have no job security. The firing of contingent faculty or staff for political reasons, or for no stated reason at all, destroys academic freedom for everyone.
The Need for Solidarity: How Can Unions, HELU and Faculty Governance Bodies Work Together?
Now I want to turn to how unions, HELU, faculty governance bodies and the National Council of Faculty Senates might be able to work together to help build a higher education coalition adequate to the size of the problems we face.
HELU has no magic answers to the many ills of U.S. higher education. But as an organization of unions and labor organizations, we do have tools that we are adapting from union and other issue-centered organizing. One of them is to ask people about the issues they care about, just as we do when we have one on one structured organizing conversations with faculty and staff to recruit them into our unions around issues that they and others care about. We also use surveys. When we see many people with similar problems and issues, we organize around those issues, including taking them to the bargaining table. The more workers who participate in this organizing, the stronger the union and the power of the workers becomes.
Since HELU brings together faculty and other campus workers across state, job category and union lines, HELU is able to focus on the distinctive problems of higher ed workers in a crucial supplement to our union organizing. We’ve already sponsored several zoom events with speakers and discussions on various aspects of contingency, and are starting to focus on more specific dimensions of contingency, such as in community colleges. We are identifying other divisive higher ed issues, such as the conflicts around meritocracy between tenure track and non-tenure track faculty.
Tenured and tenure track faculty are, understandably, more likely than adjunct and non-tenure track faculty to believe that the hiring and evaluation system is fair and meritocratic, since we are the ones who got the jobs out of fifty or a hundred candidates. This doesn’t mean that tenured faculty are wrong or selfish, but that meritocracy can be a challenging and divisive issue for campus workers and our unions, just as it was for the old American Federation of Labor versus the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the early twentieth century. If our unions and labor organizations are going to build solidarity, we need organizing beyond the boundaries of individual unions, job categories and states, organizing that looks for opportunities through wide-ranging comparison of best practices and new ideas. One of HELU’s goals is to build understanding and solidarity among categories of faculty and other campus workers who now appear to have very different interests.
The Need for Cooperation and Solidarity Among All Campus Workers: Some Concrete Issues
One of the salient issues that HELU could explore in a future event is the relation between faculty senates and faculty unions, shared governance and collective bargaining. For other HELU events past or planned, HELU partners with other organizations like The Debt Collective (on student debt) or individual union locals like the Massachusetts Teachers Association. While I can’t speak for HELU at this point, I hope that we can explore the possibility of HELU and the National Council of Faculty Senates co-sponsoring a zoom event, with speakers, discussion and breakout rooms, on interactions between faculty senates and faculty unions. Under what circumstances can faculty senates and faculty unions cooperate informally, within different “lanes” or organizational locations and positions, when we often have such different relations to administrative and managerial authority? Can faculty union organizing and bargaining help build faculty power through strengthened roles in shared governance?
It’s important to remember that much of the work of shared governance goes on in important committees like promotion and tenure. For example, at Florida Atlantic University, where I taught for 32 years, a lot of the same faculty were active in the Faculty Senate and the union. And this was true in other Florida universities, too. When we were building our first statewide collective bargaining contracts in the seventies, eighties and nineties, we noticed that most of the grievances were for contract violations around promotion, tenure and annual evaluation. It turned out that both faculty and administrators were confused about the evaluation process since they had no agreed-upon criteria by which faculty would be evaluated. The university promotion and tenure committees weren’t up to the task, and the union grievance committees had to deal with the messes left by confused or inadequately shared governance. So the union started having promotion and tenure workshops every year to help faculty prepare their portfolios. Then after many meetings with and much education of both faculty and administrators, we negotiated departmental and college criteria and guidelines into our collective bargaining agreements, forcing both faculty and admins to define what they expected from candidates. That didn’t solve every problem, but it greatly improved the processes, creating more accountability from those being evaluated and also from those doing the evaluating. And it was the result of close cooperation and increased trust among leaders of the faculty union, promotion and tenure committees, and associate provosts – sometimes they were the same people. Eventually administrators took on the responsibility for the promotion and tenure (and annual evaluation) workshops, but they could as easily have been run by the union or the chair of the university promotion and tenure committee.
Many of you may have had similar experiences. If you have a reasonably effective union and a functional shared governance structure, are there ways to strengthen the faculty’s role in governance through the union, either formally through negotiations or informally, through social networks that build solidarity and trust to fix practical problems?
But if you don’t have a union with bargaining rights, can you still solve problems within the relatively narrow confines of so-called shared governance? Again, I don’t have all the answers. Right now HELU is understandably strongest where unions are strongest, but a long range goal is working with allies and affiliates to gain collective bargaining rights for public employees generally and higher ed workers specifically. Shared governance is arguably stronger where unions are stronger; have you found that to be the case?
Meanwhile, though, how can you improve your advocacy without collective bargaining rights? Let’s talk about the United Campus Workers, a union sponsored by the Communication Workers of America to organize campus workers in states without collective bargaining rights. I’m learning more about UCW through its members and organizers getting involved in HELU. UCW started in Tennessee in 2000 and has spread, mostly to other southern states, and now has around 7000 dues paying members, and paid and volunteer organizers. UCW is playing a vital role by organizing in an underorganized region and, like HELU, aspires to organize wall to wall, that is, all the workers on campus. Joining and getting active in UCW seems like a good option for higher ed workers in states that deny campus worker collective bargaining rights.
Finally, another issue is that HELU, UCW and many faculty and other campus workers want non-tenure track faculty, including adjuncts, and non-teaching staff, included in decision making. This doesn’t necessarily mean expanding faculty senates to include all campus workers, but the issue is very much worth discussing as part of larger initiatives to democratize workplaces as they have in Germany and elsewhere. Here’s the section on shared governance from HELU’s Vision Platform in 2022, which will be revised and presented at another HELU Delegate Assembly in six months:
“We call for coordinated nationwide action to move our upper administrators and boards to:
- Engage in collaborative shared governance in which all categories of faculty and staff, student groups, and unions participate at all levels and have decision-making power and key leadership roles, and surrounding communities have avenues to participate in balanced collaborations and partnerships.”
This is an ambitious but necessary vision. How would contingent and part time faculty and other workers participate in collaborative shared university governance along with the organizing necessary to build and sustain an activist union? Are people in shared governance and in NCFS thinking about these issues?
HELU is ambitious, and it will take ambition to match the scale of the challenges facing those of us organizing to rebuild our higher education institutions for a multi-racial democracy. I hope that HELU and the NCFS can work together to find and advance common goals. Thank you.