Last week saw the release of an important new report jointly prepared by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions (located at Hunter College, CUNY), and the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom on Academic Freedom and Collective Bargaining.
The report is an effort to collect and analyze statements on academic freedom that have been generated through collective bargaining agreements and then codified contractually. It is intended, for the first time, to show the fruits of bargaining around these issues and the incredible array of different approaches. The information and analysis should be useful for any faculty groups that are engaged in bargaining and provide invaluable insights into a space that has been historically disaggregated and opaque.
Speaking personally, this is one of those moments where I’m proud of being associated with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, even though I have nothing to do with this particular project. I think it’s a demonstration of the principles under which CDAF was conceived and founded that preserving academic freedom is a fundamentally democratic and shared responsibility, and finding strength in partnerships and sharing of resources will help defend what is under concerted attack right now. The report is timely and useful, rooted in scholarly understandings while putting forward a values-based vision for supporting faculty autonomy, which ultimately translates into the right of citizens to learn freely.
I hope folks are moved to share this post and the report as freely as possible to put it in the hands of as many different people working at as many different institutions as possible.
Anyway, before I get further carried away, I wanted to bring in one of the report’s co-authors, CDAF fellow Tim Cain, to answer some of my questions about the report.
Timothy R. Cain is a professor of higher education and the associate director of the University of Georgia’s Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education. He teaches about and studies academic freedom, unionization in higher education, campus activism, and the history of higher education. Among other works, he has published Establishing Academic Freedom (2012), Campus Unions (2017), and, with colleagues at the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education (2015). He is an associate editor of the Review of Higher Education and a fellow at the American Association of University Professors Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
John Warner: Whenever I come across one of these big reports, my first question is “why do this?” It’s a lot of work requiring time, effort, and coordination among many people and across multiple organizations. These things only happen when there’s a real need. What’s the need?
Tim Cain: We undertook the project because academic freedom is vital to the functioning of US higher education, and we need to leverage all the tools that we have to help protect it. For more than 50 years, collective bargaining has been one of those tools, even though, early on, some worried that if academic freedom was something you could bargain for, it was also something you could bargain away. We believe that contract language that strongly supports academic freedom, ideally through the explicit inclusion of the 1940 Statement of Principles, is vital, and we want to facilitate that.
The report is designed to inform those bargaining contracts for academic workers–including graduate student employees, postdoctoral workers, and faculty of all types–of the range of academic freedom language that exists in current and recent contracts. To that end, we provide excerpts from 45 contracts, along with brief analyses of how the language aligns with AAUP principles and the available enforcement mechanisms in the contracts. We also provided some big picture framing in the broader literature on academic freedom language in union contracts, much of which is older, and the arbitration of academic freedom to help contextualize the excerpts and analyses.
We are in a critical moment in which the very relationships between governmental actors, academic institutions, and academic workers are being reshaped. Writing academic freedom into union contracts can help to maintain protections that have existed and establish them where they have been missing.
John Warner: What was the process like? How does this all come together?
Tim Cain: This was a truly collaborative process. Under the auspices of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, Isaac Kamola and I were in the planning stages of a smaller version of this project based just on AAUP contracts when Bill Herbert, Director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, reached out to CDAF and proposed a joint project on the issue. The National Center is a nonpartisan organization founded more than 50 years ago as a place to study bargaining in higher education and also to bring together both unions and management in a shared space. One of the many valuable things that the National Center does is to periodically create a directory of union contracts in higher education. In producing the 2024 version, Bill and his team gathered more than 900 contracts representing faculty, graduate employees, postdoctoral workers, and other closely related workers. That database, which was far larger than what Isaac and I were starting with, became the basis for the report.
Bill and his team spent significant time coding each of the contracts for institutional characteristics, bargaining unit membership, national affiliations, and other important data, eventually creating a massive spreadsheet that included substantial information about each unit, contract, and school, as well as the specific academic freedom language and links to the full contracts. That spreadsheet and the more than 600 linked contracts that included academic freedom language provided the basis for the report.
We are in a critical moment in which the very relationships between governmental actors, academic institutions, and academic workers are being reshaped. Writing academic freedom into union contracts can help to maintain protections that have existed and establish them where they have been missing.
The idea for this report was to provide the range of contract language that included representation from multiple types of units affiliated with a variety of national unions. So, we worked through them and decided on a set of 45 that would accomplish that goal, then reanalyzed and summarized each of those contracts with attention to academic freedom definitions, the inclusion of AAUP principles, the specific mention of different domains of academic freedom, and enforcement mechanisms. Alongside that, we undertook literature reviews on related issues, short versions of which appear in the report to contextualize these contracts; the longer versions will provide a foundation for future scholarship and analysis of the full set of contracts.
As with any project of this size, there was a lot of give and take, and a lot of shared sensemaking. We undertook some of the work individually, but also met every Wednesday for months to discuss what we were seeing, wrestle with questions, and make decisions about how to move forward.
John Warner: When you gather this much information under one umbrella, you often have a chance to see some of it in a new light. One of the benefits of this kind of report is that it will allow others to pore through everything, but what stands out for you?
Tim Cain: I think the first thing to emphasize is that this is a truly great database that Bill Herbert and his team have pulled together, so just getting in and looking at the contracts is amazing. The biggest takeaway is the true range of the language used. Almost 300 contracts don’t mention academic freedom. Others mention it but in passing, maybe in the preamble or as part of another clause but without detail. Others introduce their own idiosyncratic language that does not map onto standard definitions or AAUP principles, or might in some ways but with huge carveouts. Some contracts fully endorse the 1940 Statement. The same thing can be said about enforcement mechanisms.
This situation reminded me of a book that I read when I was just starting to think about unionization and collective bargaining in higher education more than 20 years ago. In the opening pages of The Politics of Faculty Unionization, Gordon B. Arnold (2000) accurately highlighted that unionization is both a local and national event; so, too, is collective bargaining. There are big national issues, and national unions provide input and guidance, but the events at the bargaining table are local. Local agreements don’t always reflect national goals, because local conditions don’t always map onto national conditions or idealized situations.
John Warner: This strikes me as a key. “Academic Freedom” is a principle, but the principle has to be put into practice, and the specific conditions where the principle is put into practice will inevitably vary.
Tim Cain: As such, in the report, while we called for strong language, we were careful not to pass judgment on unions that did not negotiate strong language. What appears to be weak from the outside might actually be a huge win considering the dynamics of the bargaining table at that institution. What appears to be relatively strong might have been made even stronger if the negotiators had prioritized it or pushed harder.
I think the second main issue that stood out is how important enforcement mechanisms are. Contracts with academic freedom language that sounds good but that does not provide clear avenues to defend academic workers might, at first glance, appear to be a success but actually leave them vulnerable.
Lastly, I think as we were finalizing the report, we realized the potential need for training sessions or other opportunities to work with union leaders and negotiators on academic freedom issues and on how and why it should be bargained. There are a lot of people leading union locals or working to form them that are doing really good work but who might not have deep experience with the nuances of academic freedom and how collective bargaining can bolster it.
John Warner: What is it that others can do now that this report is in the world? How do you want to see this put to use?
Tim Cain: I hope that it does three things. I hope that it brings attention to academic freedom clauses in union contracts and encourages both people thinking of organizing and those entering bargaining to recognize the possibilities in front of them. There are a number of issues at play at a bargaining table, but I firmly believe that protecting workers’ academic freedom rights should be at the forefront. This report does not explicitly say that, but it highlights it. Second, I want people to evaluate on their own the contract language presented and to consider what is viable in their own contexts. This report is a resource to be used in drafting proposals and negotiating language on academic freedom protections. Finally, I hope that people make the clear connection between the academic freedom language and the negotiated enforcement mechanism. Both are needed.
I guess, in short, our hope is that union negotiators use the report to see what is possible and then to bargain for the strongest language that they can in their own institutional settings.
John Warner: Sometimes these projects, as comprehensive as they are, also raise additional questions. Has that happened here? What’s the next line of inquiry on this front?
Tim Cain: This report is just a first step. Hopefully, it is an important and useful first step for people actively working in the field, but our plan is to dig into the database more fully. With the report, which is largely descriptive, now out, we are circling back to the contracts in the context of institutional and unit characteristics. We are looking to explore trends by membership type, institution type, national affiliate, union age, and other data points. And we are moving beyond a representative set of contracts in the report to consider more fully the 600+ contracts that include academic freedom language and the almost 300 that don’t. In the next few months, we will be asking questions such as: What, if any, differences exist in contracts negotiated by academic workers at different institutional types or under different types of control? What, if any, differences exist in contracts negotiated by locals affiliated with different national unions? What, if any, differences exist in contracts negotiated by graduate students, postdoctoral workers, and faculty working in different appointment types? And, of course, we will consider these and related issues not as discrete questions but as intersecting and complicated ones.
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