Dive Brief:
- Duke University’s non-tenured faculty, both full- and part-time, have voted to join the Service Employees International Union, joining a number of other campuses across the country.
- The News & Observer reports the Duke vote was the first union election at a private university in the South in decades, but this group of faculty joins 10,000 other instructors in what has become a national movement toward better pay and working conditions for non-tenured employees.
- The union organizing came as Duke increasingly relies on contingent faculty, and while a university representative says 80% of the 3,500 faculty members are tenured, on the tenure track or on multi-year contracts, SEIU counts 41% of faculty as having no access to tenure.
Dive Insight:
Higher education institutions across the country have come to rely more heavily on non-tenured faculty, choosing greater flexibility to change academic offerings as well as a less expensive teaching force overall. While nearly 60% of faculty were tenured in 1975, that portion is less than one-third now. But these faculty, who went through years of schooling to cobble together a living without benefits, have captured national attention for their plight. Several Boston schools, including Tufts, Northeastern, and Lesley University, have organized with SEIU, along with the University of Chicago and Georgetown.
A recent paper by economists has been slammed for its conclusion that paying adjuncts more would be too expensive for higher education, overall, but faculty continue organizing on individual campuses to secure better pay, arguing it will be better for students and their institutions.