The Post-Yeshiva Paradox: Faculty Organizing at NYU

Even before its precedent-setting victory in the spring of 2001, the campaign to unionize New York University's graduate assistants had larger reverberations on campus: it churned up a wave of faculty debate and activism. While the students' mobilization incited adjuncts to move ahead with their own unionization drive, the administration's response was the catalyst that prompted a group of faculty (myself among them) to revive NYU's dormant chapter of the American Association of University Professors. To be sure, the wave is not yet a tsunami. NYU's full-time faculty is spread out over thirteen schools that have little to do with each other, and since the failure of its own unionizing effort in the 1970s, it has been largely depoliticized; adjuncts, who outnumber full-timers two to one, have been even more dispersed and isolated. The public debate on the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) and its implications for the faculty was concentrated in a few schools and, for obvious reasons, almost entirely limited to tenured professors. Still, it was the first time in the ten years I'd been at NYU that a significant number of my colleagues was moved to public passion by a campus issue; and the questions we are struggling with are important to the future of academic labor.

In what follows, I focus on the full-time faculty and its discontents. That's not because I consider adjuncts less important—on the contrary, it's impossible to resolve the problems of the professoriat without attacking the university's exploitation of low-paid, contingent instructors. Nor, for that matter, do I see the issues facing academics as separable from the problems of the workforce as a whole. Rather, the situation of full-time faculty, especially at private universities, makes strikingly visible a paradox so firmly embedded in American labor relations and labor law that it is normally taken for granted. If confronting this paradox is crucial in organizing the academy, recognizing it is the key to developing a new and more effective model for labor organizing in general.

The starting point for this discussion is the Supreme Court's 1980 decision in the case of NLRB v. Yeshiva, which declared full-time faculty at private universities part of management and therefore ineligible to organize a union under the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. It was a ruling grounded in fiction, making a spurious distinction between professors at private and public institutions and invoking a collegial model of university governance that had been radically weakened by the relentless reorganization of the university along top-down corporate lines. But besides effectively inhibiting organizing at private universities, this act of obscurantism has itself shaped perceptions about the role of the faculty. Ironically, the decision has encouraged university administrators to preserve the appearance of shared governance and faculty autonomy even while undermining them in practice. For professors, the logic of the Yeshiva decision poses one of two choices: agree with it and ally with administrators to defend the values of the collegial model—or attack it on the grounds that it denies the corporate reality, dismiss the importance of whatever collegial practices remain, and demand the right to organize on the basis of their abjectness. But suppose our impulse to organize in the first place comes from opposition to corporatization? Suppose we aim to end the erosion of the collegial system, insisting that administrators support the practice of what they continue to preach? Suppose, further, that we interpret the rhetoric of collegial governance and academic freedom to mean that the university should be run according to principles of democratic self-management, with the primary role going to the faculty that fulfills what is putatively the institution's reason for being: the pursuit and transmission of knowledge?

Within the terms of the Yeshiva decision, there is no room for such questions. In eliding them, Yeshiva reflects, indeed further codifies, the dichotomy of labor and management established...