The National Labor Relations Board asserted the right of non-tenured faculty members at private colleges to collectively bargain and unionize in a December ruling, rejecting claims by Pacific Lutheran University that its faculty occupies managerial positions. The ruling is unlikely to affect proceedings at Dartmouth, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences Michael Mastanduno said.
The NLRB also offered a set of standards for assessing whether or not faculty members serve in managerial roles, in contrast to the 1980 Supreme Court decision in NLRB v. Yeshiva University. That decision, in which justices voted five-to-four that faculty members of the university served in managerial roles and were excluded from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, led to a decline in efforts made by faculty members at private colleges and universities to unionize for subsequent decades.
Executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions William Herbert said that the decision and the new standards reflect the NLRB’s recognition of major changes that have occurred in higher education in the years since the Yeshiva decision.
“They’re expressly recognizing that there’s been a change in how higher education is administered, and since the Yeshiva University decision, that change on a national level has taken power away from faculty and centralized it with the central administrators,” he said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Herbert said that the decision presented important standards for the analysis of future cases involving petitions for unionization and collective bargaining.
A second portion of the decision stated that the religious affiliation of a college or university does not exempt its faculty from unionization, determining that adjunct professors at Pacific Lutheran University did not perform religious work and are thus entitled to unionize.
Mastanduno said that Dartmouth attempts to treat its non-tenure track faculty fairly and competitively “to the extent that the market allows,” and that he is unsure whether or not unionization is a popular notion among Dartmouth adjuncts.
“As far as non-tenure track or adjunct faculty go, I suppose it opens the door in a more explicit way than it had before to the question of unionization,” he said. “I frankly don’t know if that’s been a burning topic in the minds of adjunct faculty.”
President of the California Faculty Association Lillian Taiz said that the decision is an exciting reversal of the Yeshiva decision, and that she and her organization, which is comprised of more than 25,000 faculty members in California, believe that adjunct professors at private institutions are entitled to unionize.
The evolving role of faculty at private higher education institutions sits at the core of the December decision, Herbert said.
“How much say in defining and determining issues that are mission-related to a university do the faculty have?” he said. “That’s the crux of the inquiry that would occur under the new standards that the NLRB set forth. Those standards are particular to the issue of what the role of faculty is at a particular institution with regard to shared governance.”
While Herbert said this ruling opens the door to unionization, it still depends on the role of faculty at individual universities.
“At Dartmouth, it could be a scenario that’s similar to what the facts were at Yeshiva University as to the faculty’s involvement in the day-to-day decision making for the college,” Herbert said.
Mastanduno said that, unlike at other colleges and universities at which the faculty play a minimal role in central government, the decision will likely have a minimal impact at Dartmouth, where that is not the case.
“To me it’s all the more important that [the ruling] highlights the fact that faculty members have a governance role in what is essentially a shared-governance model,” he said. “It may be that there are national trends out there suggesting that faculty play less and less of a role in the governance of academic institutions, but at Dartmouth, I think faculty governance is still an important principle.”
