By Brendan McGovern, UUP Binghamton Chapter President
As higher education unions prepare to gather in Chicago on October 24, groundbreaking protections negotiated by United University Professions are helping shape a national labor response to artificial intelligence.
When higher education union members from across the country gather at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) on October 24 for “Against the AI Campus: Building Power in Higher Ed,” they will confront an increasingly urgent question: Who will control the future of our work as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in teaching, research, and university operations?
The day-long conference, organized by HELU and UIC United Faculty (UIC-UF AFT Local 6456), will bring higher ed workers together to examine artificial intelligence (AI) and educational technology (EdTech) through the lens of collective bargaining, organizing, and worker power. Participants will examine existing contract language, develop strategies for stronger protections, explore legislative approaches, and discuss how unions can coordinate nationally as colleges and universities rapidly adopt new technologies.
Among those attending will be Alissa Karl, Vice President for Academics of United University Professions (UUP), the union representing more than 42,000 academic and professional employees at the State University of New York (SUNY). Karl served on the UUP Negotiations Team that recently secured significant contractual protections addressing AI.
UUP’s newly ratified five-year agreement with New York State makes artificial intelligence an explicit contractual issue. New Article 44 establishes that ultimate accountability for work completed or actions taken by or in conjunction with AI systems must rest with human beings. It also establishes an important protection for instruction: SUNY courses remain under the direction and responsibility of a human instructor of record or other human instructional personnel. Humans continue to be accountable for the work and responsible for instruction.
This contract’s implications extend well beyond the classroom. UUP members work in libraries, advising, research, health care, student services, information technology, and numerous other areas where AI could be used to perform, evaluate, restructure, or eliminate work. The agreement comes at a time when technology companies aggressively market AI systems to colleges and universities.
UUP Chief Negotiator Bret Benjamin said the union “went into contract negotiations with the strong conviction that AI poses profound dangers for higher education and its workers. AI is built on stolen past labor, including the intellectual property of our members, turning a common intellectual heritage into a private source of wealth and power for a few big tech companies.”
Benjamin also pointed to the potential for AI to displace workers whose specialized knowledge and expertise have historically provided some protection against automation. He noted that UUP was instrumental in securing passage of New York State’s LOADinG Act, which includes protections against AI-related job displacement.
UUP began confronting these questions well before the latest round of negotiations. “There’s a lot we could potentially learn from other sectors of laborers who have dealt with automation in the past,” Karl told Inside Higher Ed in 2024. As SUNY subsequently explored expanded uses of AI, UUP continued emphasizing a basic labor principle: bargaining unit work should remain bargaining unit work.
By the time negotiations with New York State opened in February 2026, AI protections stood alongside compensation, health care, and job security among UUP’s major bargaining priorities. The resulting agreement reflects that commitment.
UUP President Fred Kowal has described the AI provisions as groundbreaking and made clear that the union views them as a foundation for further protections. “One of our biggest concerns entering into negotiations was the threat of artificial intelligence to our members and to the quality of a SUNY education,” Kowal said following ratification. He also emphasized that UUP intends to build upon these protections in future negotiations.
The agreement’s influence is already being felt beyond SUNY. “As soon as word of our contract got out, higher ed unions across the country began reaching out to ask for our AI language,” Benjamin said. “This is not an issue that one union can solve on its own.”
UUP’s approach also reflects the exchange of bargaining strategies already taking place across higher education. Benjamin credited the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York (PSC CUNY), units at the University of Michigan, and other unions whose earlier work helped inform UUP’s proposals. “UUP hopes that other unions will be able to echo and build upon the AI provisions in our contract, just as we drew upon language negotiated by our colleagues at PSC CUNY, several bargaining units at the University of Michigan, and others,” Benjamin said.
Hofstra University provides a recent example of that exchange. Hofstra AAUP ratified a new five-year agreement in September following an intense contract campaign that brought faculty to the brink of a strike. According to Benjamin, Hofstra’s bargaining team contacted UUP to obtain its AI language. The resulting agreement includes provisions modeled directly on UUP’s language.
“This sort of education and support among higher ed unions is part of the reason why UUP has been so enthusiastic about HELU, and why we are excited about the Against the AI Campus event in Chicago,” he said. Karl shares that enthusiasm and sees the conference as an opportunity to move beyond individual contract victories toward protections that extend across the sector. This will be “a place where higher ed labor can strategize about establishing sectoral rights and protections around AI,” Karl said.
The concerns confronting higher education workers extend well beyond whether AI can perform particular tasks or replace individual positions. The growing involvement of private technology companies in higher ed raises questions about who owns the knowledge produced at our institutions, who controls how it is used, and whether decisions traditionally made by educators and researchers will be shaped by corporate interests in the future.
“Higher ed workers are up against nothing less than an attempt to capture our entire sector by the most powerful and well-resourced tech companies on the planet,” Karl said. Big tech “wants to extract the knowledge that we produce – they want to control what registers as knowledge, they want to monetize that knowledge for their private gain, and they want to assume control of how we circulate, teach and disseminate knowledge in higher ed.”
The effects of AI will vary considerably across occupations, since academic and professional employees perform different kinds of work. Unions need to develop responses that account for those differences. Beyond protecting existing positions, Benjamin sees an opportunity. “I am cautiously hopeful that the outsized and nakedly expropriative role played by a few extraordinarily wealthy AI tech companies may provide us with an opportunity to push back against the tendency towards the privatization of higher education that has been ascendant since the 1980s,” he said. “I see a political opportunity to claw back some sense of education as a public good.”
Universities are being encouraged to adopt technologies that promise greater efficiency, lower costs, and new ways of delivering instruction and services. Yet decisions about those technologies are frequently made without meaningful participation from the people whose work will be transformed.
“I would like to see more contractual and statutory language that secures workers’ rights to autonomy in the face of AI,” Benjamin said. “Unions always fight for the principle that workers should have agency in decisions that most directly affect them, and about which they have the most experience and expertise.”
HELU and its partners are developing bargaining strategies, organizing models, and legislative frameworks that can be adapted across higher ed. UUP’s new agreement establishes that higher education remains fundamentally human work. Its protections demonstrate that unions can negotiate meaningful limits on the use of AI while preserving the professional responsibilities of the workers who make colleges and universities function. “Against the AI Campus” offers an opportunity to build upon those gains, share lessons from bargaining tables across the country, and develop a coordinated labor response to technologies that are already reshaping the sector.
Brendan McGovern is President of the United University Professions Binghamton Chapter and serves on UUP’s Statewide Executive Board. He was a member of the UUP Negotiations Team that negotiated the union’s landmark 2026 agreement with New York State, including its contractual protections addressing artificial intelligence. He also serves on the Media and Communications Committee of Higher Education Labor United.