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.
