Amid growing concerns about shared governance at the University of Utah, some career-line and tenure-line faculty have decided to join labor unions to advocate for greater self-determination and involvement in academic affairs. Groups such as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) work to facilitate relationships between university employees, the state legislature and upper campus administration.
United Campus Workers of Utah (UCW) is a labor union for campus workers and faculty at the University of Utah and Utah State University. According to Carlos Hernandez, the local organizing director of UCW, several hundred employees across multiple departments at the U are members.
Faculty perspectives and advocacy
Professor emeritus Stephen Downes told The Chronicle that much of his work with UCW involves advocating for career-line faculty, staff and students out of “solidarity.”
“You join because you believe that the things that the folks in the union are saying, for example, the wages are unfair and we’re being treated poorly. Although you might not be being treated that way, you join to stand together with them,” Downes said. “The more people who are there, the more the organization has to listen.”
The union also reportedly works to make university wages competitive. According to Downes, he retired as a full professor after over 30 years at the U with a “third or a quarter” of the salary of peers in the business school. “We generally are paid lower than our counterparts in California, Michigan and North Carolina. I mean, it’s kind of funny,” Downes said. “They think we don’t know this. We have friends in California and Michigan and North Carolina, and guess what? They’re professors.”
U English Professor Craig Dworkin, another member of UCW, said that the “self-determination of the union” acts as a “viable replacement for the so-called shared governance that’s been denied to us.”
“I’ve heard from faculty who joined the union that they felt the castration of the faculty senate risked making it a mechanism of co-option rather than a meaningful voice for faculty, and saw the union as a way to amplify the voice that had been taken from us,” Dworkin said. “People are afraid,” he added.
Other factors
Hernandez said larger, more significant changes from the administration can be attributed to overall political pressure. “The administration seems to be in kind of an overdrive to make big, quick, fast changes because of the political pressure they’re receiving.”
“I think that’s leaving a lot of people feeling like, ‘whoa, things are happening really fast,’” Hernandez added.
Chapman Waters, an associate philosophy professor at the U, said he joined UCW as a way to “exercise power,” since “going through institutional channels is no longer really an option” for university workers. “The shared governance element has been curtailed through legislative measures and there’s no way to talk to even the upper administration, it seems, in a way that’s meaningful,” Waters said.
Micah Rollins, a data analyst in Graduate Studies, said that his membership in UCW helped “break down the silence” of administration on issues they are “purposefully unclear about.”
“If upper administration will not allow university workers to address their concerns in these bodies that are, in theory, designed entirely for that purpose, then either we have to find some other way to address them,” Rollins said. “In this case, unionizing is one of the directions that we’re going in.”
Hernandez said that the “number one pressing issue” facing both faculty and students is “clawing back some power and agency from the workforce to the administration.”
“Whether that’s at the faculty level … or student level, people are being affected by these big, sweeping changes and are concerned about the actual deliberation and considerations in order to make those decisions happen,” Hernandez said.
Alternatives
President of the Academic Senate Richard Preiss said the administration “recognizes fundamentally” that faculty buy-in and general consensus are necessary to keep the university running smoothly.
Preiss said the Senate has adapted its procedures in response to increasing institutional pressures, particularly by rethinking how it structures its agenda. “It’s taken a lot of work to kind of manage the workload of the Senate and to streamline what are the less important things that we need to devote less discussion time to, and what are the really complex issues of institution-wide significance that we need to devote serious discussion time to,” he said.
According to Preiss, both campus unions and faculty senates fight for shared governance. However, they “drive very similar solutions from different angles.”
“The Academic Senate is a representative body that works best as part of the institution and inside the institution. Unions are not part of the institution,” he said. “They apply external pressure, and sometimes external pressure is required to bring a matter of urgency to the attention of the administration, and sometimes solutions inside the institution are necessary.”
Preiss said that differing roles between unions and shared governance bodies have contributed to misconceptions about the role of shared governance at the U. “I think there’s a temptation for unions to recruit new membership now based on a perception that shared governance has weakened, that the this administration is less committed to shared governance than past administrations, or that shared governance processes have been infringed or compromised in some way,” Preiss said. “I’m working very hard to demonstrate that neither of those is is the case. Shared governance is the kind of thing that if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
Successes and goals
According to Hernandez, many of the union’s achievements were “smaller departmental changes.” Recently, UCW won parking stipends for about 8,000 healthcare workers. With a larger membership base, Hernandez said, more broad changes could be made. “It’s really hard to make systemwide demands or systemwide wins without having the density in every department or every major department,” he said.
Waters also emphasized that successes come from the union’s ability to stay organized. “[The university] depends on us, students, staff and grad students. We hold the institution up on our shoulders. And if we’re organized, we can force them to listen to us,” he said. “We’re one variable in the equation, and so in that sense, I think we are having an impact.”
At the end of the day, Waters said, he unionized to advocate for his students. “I love this institution, I love my job and I love serving my students here,” Waters said. “I don’t want to leave because serving these students has been the greatest honor of my life, and I want to keep doing that. That’s why I joined [the union], because I’m gonna fight like hell, and that’s the only way I can see to do that.”
