Organizing is a democratic form of building and maintaining an active membership base in order to effect change. The main principle behind successful organizing, and behind the formation of AAUP chapters, is collective action. When faculty speak and act with one voice, they demonstrate a large-scale commitment to the issues around which they organize. Effective organizing results in more equitable handbook and contract language, more robust shared governance, and better educational policies.

Organizing takes many forms:

• Increasing membership
• Moving members to be active in their chapter
• Communicating with members
• Planning and carrying out actions to improve conditions for both faculty and students
• Obtaining commitments from members to complete tasks, come to meetings, and participate in actions
• Building reciprocal relationships with allies

Organizing doesn't stop once a new advocacy chapter or union is formed! Ongoing organizing brings members together to collectively determine the direction of their chapter. The most basic building block of organizing is the one-on-one conversation, which ensures that members communicate with one another. When members engage in two-way communications, they are making sure all voices are represented. Inclusive practices—like the organizing conversation—are all the more important in the face of educational policies and trends that divide faculty into different tracks and into many different titles within those tracks.

Where possible, the AAUP strongly encourages unionization of all eligible higher education employees as the best way to secure professional standards and to ensure that effective instruction remains the core institutional focus.

Academic Collective Bargaining

Academic collective bargaining includes the unionization of all sectors of the higher education workforce—from tenure-line faculty to graduate student employees, and from academic professionals to support staff. The growth of academic collective bargaining has occurred in two waves. The first was the expansion of faculty and support staff collective bargaining fueled by the changes in federal and state labor laws during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The second was the rapid increase in graduate-employee unionization during the 1990s in response to the increased use of graduate-employee labor.

Private vs. Public Institutions

In recent years, faculty unionization has occurred primarily at state institutions rather than private colleges and universities. Unionization in the public sector is based on state law, much of which expressly allows faculty to unionize. Formal unionization in the private sector is governed by federal law and the US Constitution, where the ability to unionize is much more uncertain. In 1980 the US Supreme Court, in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) v. Yeshiva University, held that faculty at that institution were "managerial employees" and thus excluded from the coverage of the National Labor Relations Act. This has precluded the unionization of many private sector tenure-track faculty, though many non-tenure-track faculty have been successful at unionizing. Faculty at religiously affiliated institutions may also be precluded from formal unionization due to the 1979 US Supreme Court decision in NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago. Despite the chilling effect of these decisions, a good number of private-sector AAUP chapters continue to maintain the benefits and protections of collective bargaining. Finally, the formal unionization of graduate student employees has been the subject of much turmoil, with the NLRB finding that they could not unionize in 2004, and reversing that position in 2016, and in 2019 proposing regulations that would preclude unionization. 

AAUP Collective Bargaining Chapters

Local AAUP chapters began pursuing faculty collective bargaining in the early 1970s as a means to protect professional standards and improve the economic status of the faculty. In 1973, the AAUP adopted the Statement on Collective Bargaining, recognizing that collective bargaining is consistent with the AAUP’s defense of such important standards as academic freedom, shared governance, and due process. The AAUP’s approach to collective bargaining is unique in its focus on faculty and other academic professionals; its commitment to protecting academic freedom and shared governance; and its emphasis on grassroots organizing and local autonomy. Currently, eighty local AAUP chapters have been recognized as collective bargaining agents representing faculty, graduate employees, academic professionals, and contingent faculty from all sectors of higher education.

Learn more about forming a new union chapter or about our organizing philosophy. To request organizing assistance, contact us at [email protected].