New Unionism and Over-Managed Professors

The National Education Association has been exploring what President Bob Chase calls New Unionism as a means to increase professionalism for teachers at all levels and improve the quality of the education teachers provide. This is a concept with particular relevance of higher education. Higher education faculty and staff are “managed professionals,” as I’ve noted elsewhere,1 and need a public professional unionism that is a more expansive conception of New Unionism and that provides a solid foundation of old unionism’s emphasis on job protections. The New Unionism I’m talking about argues that faculty and staff should participate in institutional decision making about financial and strategic management, as well as decision making about quality and professionalism. This New Unionism calls for higher education unions to pay more attention—in their collective bargaining agreements and beyond them—to the public interest. Let’s take these ideas one at a time. Why be concerned about financial and strategic decision making? There is a clear pattern across the board, in key contractual areas, of extensive, increasing managerial discretion. This discretion is linked to a systematic restructuring of faculty work and the work of the rest of the professional workforce in higher education. In making this point, I want to emphasize that, at their most fundamental level, these managerial restructuring efforts are not about cost, for expenditures and costs continue to rise in higher education. Nor are they about quality, for faculty and student quality are being increasingly assessed but not invested in. Rather, these restructuring efforts are about control, the control of faculty as a workforce, and the restructuring of the terms and THE NEA HIGHER EDUCATION JOURNAL 83