On 9 April 2023, Rutgers University and three unions representing roughly 9,000 full-time faculty, graduate workers, part-time lecturers, and health sciences faculty failed to reach agreement, and thousands walked off the job. It was the first faculty strike in Rutgers' 257-year history. Within five days, a framework agreement suspended the strike and settled core issues over pay and job security for non-tenure-track faculty, along with multi-year graduate funding guarantees that had been missing from the prior offer.
Four months earlier, 48,000 academic workers across the University of California ended a six-week strike, the largest academic labour action in United States history. Those two events did not happen in a vacuum. They arrived after a decade in which the legal status of graduate employees changed and faculty senates lost ground to governing boards, while collective bargaining moved from a niche concern into the main current of campus decision-making.
The National Labor Relations Board's 2016 Columbia University decision reversed a 2004 ruling and recognized teaching and research assistants at private universities as employees under the National Labor Relations Act. That single administrative ruling opened a door long closed. Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, Brown, and other private research universities subsequently saw graduate employees form unions, while public systems such as the University of California and Rutgers already had bargaining units with decades of history.
What changed after 2016 was not the presence of unions but their density in the institutions where doctoral training concentrates. A university that once could treat graduate teaching as an apprenticeship now faces a legally enforceable contract over stipends, child care, visa support, workplace safety, and protection against retaliation. The governance question follows quickly: if a contract governs so much of academic labour, what remains for the faculty senate to decide?
The bargaining table is now a climate instrument
The National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College has tracked the expansion of academic bargaining units across both public and private institutions. Each contract carries line items — paid family leave, housing supplements, workload caps, appointment length — that shape whether early-career scholars can stay in their programmes long enough to finish.
Those line items do more cultural work than most recognition schemes. After the University of California strike ended in December 2022, the ratified contracts included child care reimbursements and improved paid medical leave. Workers read those provisions as institutional recognition, not the chancellor's thank-you email. The lesson for administrators is straightforward: a service award programme displayed at the annual picnic cannot substitute for a contract that changes a graduate assistant's rent burden.
For institutions that want to understand how climate shapes recruitment, the bargaining disputes offer a harder test than the familiar branding advice on employer branding. Candidates now ask about contract status and shared governance in first-round interviews, a shift search committees across North America have noticed.
Shared governance disputes run parallel in the public systems
West Virginia University's Board of Governors voted in September 2023 to eliminate 28 academic programmes and 143 faculty positions to close a $45 million structural deficit. The vote followed a Faculty Senate vote of no confidence in President E. Gordon Gee. Whatever the fiscal arithmetic, the sequence matters: a board treated the faculty's primary role in curriculum as advisory, and the faculty treated the board's decision as a breach of the university's own governance norms.
The same breach appeared at New College of Florida after newly appointed trustees in early 2023 replaced the president and dismantled the diversity, equity, and inclusion office before denying tenure to five faculty members. Faculty responded with no-confidence votes. In both cases, the dispute was not merely about money; it was about whether shared governance is a governing principle or a courtesy extended when convenient. The American Association of University Professors has held since its 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities that faculty should exercise primary responsibility for curriculum, subject matter, methods of instruction, and faculty status. When a board ignores that norm, it does not simply reorganise a budget; it resets the climate of the institution in ways that outlast the deficit.
The administrators' argument deserves a fair hearing
Presidents and chancellors point to state appropriations that have not recovered from the 2008 recession and enrolment declines in the Midwest and Northeast, along with tuition discount rates that climb because institutions compete for a shrinking pool of traditional-age students. They argue that multi-year union contracts with annual raises, reduced teaching loads, expanded benefits, and automatic re-appointment clauses commit an institution to costs it cannot forecast. A governing board that cannot adjust its academic portfolio, the argument runs, will simply defer bankruptcy until it becomes less manageable.
It does not follow, however, that fiscal strain justifies unilateral programme elimination. The same budget data can support a slower, more consultative process; shared governance is not a luxury that applies only in surplus years. Cornell University's ILR School maintains a Labor Action Tracker that documents how work stoppages cluster in workplaces where management bypasses established deliberative bodies. The correlation is not accidental. Cuts imposed after closed-door board deliberation produce anger; the same cuts reached after faculty committees weigh programme quality, local labour markets, student demand, and regional workforce needs produce a different kind of loss, one an institution can explain to itself.
The generational split is written into separate contracts
Tenured professors, full-time non-tenure-track lecturers, adjunct faculty, and graduate workers often sit in different bargaining units with different priorities. Senior faculty defend retirement and sabbatical protections. Mid-career lecturers press for multi-year appointments and promotion lines. Graduate employees ask for child care, visa assistance, housing stipends, and emergency travel funds. Administrators watch bond ratings and state subsidy formulas. Those multiple interests do not automatically conflict, but when a university treats bargaining as zero-sum, they do.
This is where campus recognition programmes meet their limits. A peer-to-peer thank-you platform or a years-of-service luncheon cannot reconcile a flat adjunct conversion budget with a graduate worker's demand for paid medical leave. Recognition works when it follows material change: the University of California's post-strike contracts changed pay scales and added child care support, and those changes were read as respect. Where recognition is offered before material change, it is often read as deflection.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
What these cases leave behind
The Rutgers strike ended with a framework, reported by Reuters, that the unions and administration both claimed as a step forward. The University of California's contracts were ratified in early 2023, though some locals continued to bargain over implementation. The West Virginia University cuts took effect, and faculty there moved into a smaller institution with fewer language majors. New College of Florida's transformations continued through accreditation reviews and faculty departures. None of these outcomes is straightforwardly a win for one side, but each sets a precedent for how the next dispute will be read.
The question campus leaders should ask is not whether unions or boards won a particular round. It is what signal they sent to the people who remain: whether faculty and graduate workers are participants in institutional decisions or inputs to be managed. That signal, repeated across hundreds of meetings and contracts, is the actual organisational climate. A university cannot fix it with an engagement survey if the governance structure underneath keeps delivering the same answer. The precedent being set is already visible: boards that move without faculty consent teach future faculty to treat governance as a public relations exercise.