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PARITY OR PARADOX? FACULTY COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IN THE POST-'YESHIVA' ERA
Abstract
University faculty bargaining remains popular in spite of a general decline in power and prestige of the American labor movement and the negative effects of the Supreme Court's decision in N.L.R.B. v. Yeshiva University holding that faculty at private universities are managerial employees not entitled to bargain. While the impulses that draw faculty into bargaining are varied, one theme--governance prerogatives--predominates. Careful examination reveals, however, that faculty assertions of protected status contradict traditional labor law precepts that stress creation of a system to secure industrial peace and assert that the faculty role in institutional management removes them from the legal definition of an "employee." This study first examines the major pro-bargaining arguments from the perspective of those matters bearing most directly on a university as an educational enterprise. The major pro-bargaining arguments are found to be inconsistent with traditional governance theory and actual practice. The second objective was to determine if there was nevertheless a legal basis for preserving faculty bargaining rights. Two conclusions emerged. First, bargaining rights may be protected if faculty reexamine their insistence on bargaining governance. Careful separation of bargaining topics reveals that "mandatory" topics subsume matters traditionally associated with bargaining, while "permissive" subjects include most areas within the category of governance. Under this approach, limited bargaining rights are preserved. A second approach recognizes that industrial democracy theory protects faculty claims to a bargainable role in institutional decision making. While the Court is not favorably disposed toward an industrial democracy paradigm, and most commentators argue that meaningful industrial democracy has not been realized, this theory preserves full bargaining rights. The study's examination of bargaining justifications in the contexts of the mission of universities rather than their structure is unique. Further, both the mandatory/permissive distinction and industrial democracy applications are injected into the faculty bargaining dialogue for the first time as one way to create an objective analytic framework for resolution of often subjective and emotional disputes.
Subject Area
School administration
Recommended Citation
KILLENBECK, MARK ROBERT, "PARITY OR PARADOX? FACULTY COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IN THE POST-'YESHIVA' ERA" (1987). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8717258.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8717258