Between 2012 and 2024, the number of faculty represented by unions at private colleges and universities increased by 56 percent. For graduate student workers, the growth has been even more explosive, with a 133 percent increase over the same period.
Long before St. John's University decided to dismantle its faculty union, American higher education had already undergone a seismic structural shift in who teaches. Since the 1970s, the share of faculty off the tenure track has risen relentlessly. Today, full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty make up barely a quarter of the instructional workforce. The rest — adjunct professors, lecturers, visiting instructors, and graduate teaching assistants — constitute what critics have called a shadow faculty: doing the work of the university at a fraction of the cost, with little job security, few benefits, and no meaningful path to permanence.
The Paradox of Realignment
The rise of unions was supposed to arrest that trend. In some respects, it has. Collective bargaining agreements have lifted wage floors, standardized per-course pay rates, extended health care access, and created grievance procedures for contingent workers who once had almost no recourse.
But unions have not reversed the fundamental shift. Scholars who have studied the question reach a sobering conclusion: faculty unions have largely been unable to prevent the use of adjunct labor to replace tenure-track lines. In some cases, by formalizing and codifying the positions of lecturers through contract language, unions have inadvertently rationalized a two-tiered academic workforce — one that treats tenured and non-tenure-track faculty as separate and unequal.
Federal Paralysis and the State Response
When non-tenure-track faculty at the University of San Diego walked off the job in spring 2025, the SEIU Local 721 alleged that roughly a quarter of those who had taught in fall 2024 were not listed for classes the following semester, a development the union attributed to retaliation for organizing. USD denied it. But the pattern — organizing, followed by course cuts, followed by denial — has become familiar enough across campuses that it demands structural analysis, not just case-by-case adjudication.
The organizing surge has collided with a hostile federal environment. In January 2025, President Trump's return to the White House effectively paralyzed the National Labor Relations Board. By firing a Biden-appointed board member, the administration left the NLRB without the three-member quorum required to issue rulings — a condition that lasted 345 days. During that period, unfair labor practice cases stalled, and the total number of NLRB-overseen union elections fell 30 percent in 2025. Roughly 59,000 fewer workers participated in union elections.
For faculty and graduate student workers at private universities — whose rights flow through the NLRA rather than state public-employee bargaining laws — this represents an existential vulnerability. A reconstituted, management-friendly NLRB could roll back the Pacific Lutheran precedent, restrict who qualifies as an employee, or slow-walk certification processes until organizing drives lose momentum.
States are attempting to fill the gap. Rhode Island enacted trigger legislation in summer 2025 guaranteeing graduate student workers' ability to collectively bargain under state law, even if the NLRB reverses course. Massachusetts, California, and New York have considered similar measures. The SJU faculty's decision to file with PERB rather than the NLRB is itself a reflection of this new reality: in an era when the federal labor board cannot be relied upon, state-level protections have become the primary battlefield.
Toward a Wall-to-Wall Future
The most dramatic recent demonstration of what organized faculty power can achieve came in April 2023 at Rutgers University, where three separate unions coordinated a joint strike that forced the university to negotiate meaningfully, drew in the governor, and produced gains across multiple bargaining units.
Rutgers has since been held up as a model of “wall-to-wall” organizing — a strategy that refuses to accept the hierarchy between tenure-track and contingent faculty as fixed. But Rutgers is a flagship public research university in one of the most union-friendly states in the country. Replicating that model at a Catholic university claiming religious exemptions while sitting on a near-billion-dollar endowment is a different proposition entirely.
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, rejects any counsel of pessimism.
"It's an exciting time to be unionizing faculty on any campus," she said. "But on private schools, I feel good about it. I think it's a battle between an attack on higher ed — an attack on faculty — versus the really growing energy around unions in this moment. And I actually feel very heartened."
This article is the second in a two-part series. Read part one here.
