On February 19, 2026, an email arrived in the inboxes of more than a thousand St. John's University faculty members. The message, sent by university President Rev. Brian Shanley, carried news that was equal parts blunt and historic: the Catholic institution in Queens, New York, was withdrawing recognition of its two faculty unions — the SJU chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the Faculty Association — ending a collective bargaining relationship that had existed for 56 years.
No faculty vote. No legislative process. No court order. Just an email, and a half-century of labor history erased overnight.
“The administration, by de-recognizing this long-standing pair of unions, has taken away faculty control over their working conditions and the learning conditions of students," said Dr. Sophie Bell, acting president of SJU-AAUP and a professor and chair of the Department of Core Studies in St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, who has been at the university since 2007. “It is very disastrous.”
Bell's assessment captures not just the shock of the moment but the scope of what is at stake in a much larger national debate. What does the return of faculty unions to American private campuses actually mean, and when those unions are gaining ground, do institutions find ways to make the gains cost more than workers bargained for?
To understand what is happening at St. John's, it helps to understand how rare and how hard-won faculty union recognition at private universities is in the first place.
Between 2012 and 2024, the number of faculty represented by unions at private colleges and universities increased by 56 percent, according to the 2024 Directory of Bargaining Agents and Contracts in Institutions of Higher Education, published by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College. Overall, 27 percent of all U.S. faculty are now unionized, a rate that runs counter to the broader national trend, where union membership in the private sector fell from 12.5 percent in 2012 to 11.2 percent in 2023.
