Part-time faculty members have made major progress in gaining collective-bargaining rights, although their success, compared with full-timers’, varies greatly by sector of higher education, a new analysis of federal data has found.
Over all, about a fourth of the nation’s full-time faculty members and about a fifth of its part-time faculty are now represented by collective-bargaining units, according to the analysis, which was conducted by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. The center plans to formally release the findings at its annual conference in April.
In terms of their likelihood of being unionized, the two subsets of faculty members are closest to parity at four-year public colleges, where 27 percent of all part-time faculty and 29 percent of all full-time faculty are represented in collective-bargaining units, the center’s analysis found.
Part-timers continue to lag behind in terms of unionization at public two-year colleges, where about 56 percent of full-timers and 31 percent of part-members are represented in collective-bargaining units, the center found.
At nonprofit, private four-year colleges, however, part-timers are more than twice as likely to be represented in collective bargaining. A chief explanation for that pattern is a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, which allowed private colleges to preclude tenured and tenure-track faculty members from forming unions by classifying them as managers. About 8 percent of part-time faculty and 3 percent of full-timers at such institutions are represented in collective-bargaining units, the center found.
The center, which is housed at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, based its analysis on its own survey data and on faculty data from the 2008-9 academic year gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Education Department’s statistical arm. The center’s analysis excludes data on medical schools and two-year private colleges, and does not take into account the long-term impact of recent developments such as Wisconsin lawmakers’ adoption this year of a measure curtailing the collective-bargaining rights of public employees.
Because the federal government counts full-time and part-time faculty based on data provided by colleges that differ in how they define the two groups, and college administrations can make their institutions look better by broadly defining “full time” faculty to inflate counts of them, the center cautions that its analysis might overestimate full-time faculty numbers and underestimate part-timers. The ranks of full-time faculty can include both contingent faculty members and those who are tenured or on the tenure track.
