Faculty are not Managers

A Defense of Unionization Efforts in Higher Education

Faculty are not Managers: A Defense of Unionization Efforts in Higher Education

For as long as I have worked in academia (about 20 years), I have not witnessed the kind of autonomy and control among faculty that informed the NLRB v. Yeshiva Univ., 444 U.S. 672 (1980) SCOTUS ruling “that the faculty exercises authority which in any other context unquestionably would be managerial, its authority in academic matters being absolute” and therefore could not unionize. In my professional experience at multiple private and public universities, I have watched as academic freedom, tenure, and faculty governance have been eroded. Faculty control little of what goes on at their institutions and what little autonomy they might presumed to have is coming under ever more direct supervision and control.

Even among tenured faculty, decision making is unevenly shared from university-to-university. While some schools hold to the old agreements that faculty set curriculum, I have watched administrators, and even other faculty, skirt this norm through curricula reviews, department and major dissolution, and other such tactics. The administration does not necessarily need to honor tenure if faculty no longer have home departments. This has led to all kinds of novel ways to control curriculum and, by extension, faculty governance.

But beyond autonomy to set curriculum, we are also seeing attacks on what is termed academic freedom. Instructors, graduate students, and adjuncts are being fired for teaching materials considered banned, like DEI-related topics, or for political speech. Some of these firings have been subsequently overturned, but they lead to chilling effects on what educators teach, assign, and say in the classroom. Many faculty are heading for the exits.

Tenured and tenure-track faculty are also finding themselves at the center of politicized storms wherein their institutional positionality does not necessarily protect them. Multi-year reviews, reportage hotlines, and data scraping teaching materials are relatively new tactics to bring faculty under control. These occur hand-in-hand with state legislatures passing ever-more repressive laws about faculty promotion, tenure, and teaching content.

Yet somehow faculty are still seen as managers—people in control of their work—and therefore are denied the ability to unionize at private institutions around the country. Further, unionized private institutions are using the managerial argument—as well as religious grounds—to dissolve long-standing unions that pre-date Yeshiva.

But faculty are not managers. Many do not have leadership roles that include major decision-making responsibilities or control over much of what goes on at their university. They teach their classes. They conduct their research. They secure grants. And they sit on committees that run the gamut from advisory (and therefore easily ignored) to ones that determine policy (but that can be overturned by administration). Even in the realm of the classroom—student grades, discussion content, and syllabus materials—faculty are increasingly surveilled, policed, controlled, and punished.

Higher education does not function like other workplaces. Kevin McClure (The Caring University) describes its organizational structures as “organized anarchies because goals are ambiguous, decisions are decentralized, and the organizational chart does not necessarily reflect where power resides.” The deep structure of the university is built on increased MBA-ification of all facets of higher education practice and structure.

The daily functions of higher ed.—like other professional industries that have become deskilled, more precarious, and under-staffed—have become bloated with bureaucratic processes. Memos, forms, justifications, annual reports, annual legally mandated trainings, status updates, integrated reportage systems, annual reviews, self-studies, 360 reviews, external reviews, tenure and promotion guidelines, shadow budgets, accreditation reportage, staff-and-student performance trackers, institutional assessment, and countless evaluations drive the treatment, support, and continued employment of higher education workers and how we work with students. This is just a taste of the meta-labor we perform just to do our actual jobs.

Arlene Kaplan Daniels (1987) describes invisible (domestic) work as gendered, uncompensated, and thus unvalued: the university runs on invisible labor—from informal advisement and student mentorship to baking treats for students and colleagues to providing emotional support to co-workers. However, there is a broader gamut of tasks my co-author Dan Lawson and I describe as “meta-labor” which are not job duties per say but tasks we perform nevertheless to then do our jobs. Writing reports, filling out forms, navigating dozens of digital platforms, HR training, productivity tracking, and countless other meta-labor tasks are required of us before we step foot into a classroom, grade a paper, or collect data for our research.

Faculty have little control over their labor, and their treatment is driven by external factors and processes determined by administrators, trustees, “our customers,” and federal and state politics.

There is a gray area to the management question. Are faculty who manage other people—like in laboratories, writing centers, civic centers, etc.—managers? Yet the question of how managerial these roles are is left out of the equation. These faculty are often given static budgets—or do not control their budgets in any meaningful way—they hire contingent student labor, and they have little autonomy or control beyond the confines of their programs. Even then, administration can defund these programs, they can pull staffing lines and director-level compensation, like stipends or teaching releases. In some extreme cases, they can determine programmatic mission, scope, and outputs, even to the detriment of best practices or research-informed decision-making.

Ironically, in unionized institutions, such “administrative” service work is not covered by the collective bargaining agreement. Therefore, even tenured professors are held to the whims of administrators with far more managerial authority.

One’s understanding of a manager might be useful in thinking through the logic of the Yeshiva ruling. What kind of managers are out there? We have high-level managers, mid-level managers, and front-line managers. The addition of the managerial class started over 100 years ago with Taylorism as an attempt to remove autonomy from factory workers. Since then, the managerial class has ballooned so that the position means deeply different things in different contexts. In some ways, faculty who run academic programs resemble front-line managers—like shift managers at a retail store. We keep the lights on, try to put out fires, we might even build amazing programs, but we have little say in the decisions made externally that impact our programs.