Throughout the country, college and university campuses are being organized by unions. At one university, a colleague of mine who had been teaching without tenure for twelve years was dismissed after his campus was organized by the United Auto Workers. With an increase in labor costs (i.e., salaries, pensions, and health-care benefits), the college could no longer afford to employ him and many other instructors. Popular courses were eliminated. The union, in effect, had diminished the educational opportunities for students.
Private colleges, which are governed by the National Labor Relations Act, and the more than one third of public colleges which are unionized, are institutions that have the capacity to threaten academic freedom, job security, and the education of their students. The very reason for the existence of institutions of higher education is under assault by unions that see professors and instructors as a large sea of dues-paying members who hold the power to alter curriculums, close campuses, and ultimately injure the very reputations of the colleges and universities that have provided them with the privileged platform to stimulate the minds of ambitious students.
Here are three examples of recent union actions:
A strike at a California University was called off at the last minute when both sides came to an agreement.
At one community college in Pennsylvania, the faculty walked off their jobs for two weeks, closing the campus. More than 35,000 students had no classes to attend.
Throughout the state of Pennsylvania, college and university faculties at fourteen schools called for a strike if a new contract is not signed by June 30.
As unions search for new members, they are no longer focusing principally on blue collar workers, they are organizing the country’s intellectual elite, making them a vast “herd of independent minds.”
