As public spending for higher education continues its decades-long decline (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014), and university boards and administrators seek ways to balance their budgets, faculty (and staff) labor has been targeted as a way to make ends meet. Attacks on faculty labor can take different forms, such as reducing or eliminating…

Contingent faculty are often under-resourced, suggesting that crucial aspects of our discipline receive inadequate support. Moreover, while the discipline increasingly relies on tenure-ineligible faculty, it has made few contributions to the scholarship on academic casualization, an employment trend in which temporary contracts replace stable…

At the 1986 Wyoming Conference on English, a group of graduate students and part-time and tenure-line faculty formulated a statement known as the Wyoming Resolution, a rallying cry to improve composition teachers' pay, benefits, and working conditions. Adopted by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in 1987, the Wyoming…

The five issues presented here are keys to understanding how collective bargaining affects colleges and universities. (MM)

The role of organizational climate in predicting and explaining faculty attitudes toward collective bargaining at a college facing severe labor problems is assessed. Findings include: perceived power structure is the dominant predictor of attitudes toward unionization and perceived goals do not effect faculty attitudes toward unionization.…

The steady state in Australian higher education has encouraged faculty and nonfaculty unionization. In the former case, if the university is truly a self-governing collegium, there is a question as to faculty simultaneously being employees and employers. Active unionism may have negative and positive consequences. (MSE)