Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor

Academe, Jul/Aug 1999 by Douglas, Joel M

Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor

Gary Rhoades. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998, 347pp., $24.95

JOEL M. DOUGLAS

THE PAUCITY OF RECENT WRITING and research on collective bargaining in higher education reflects either its legitimacy and acceptability or a lack of interest in the subject. I prefer the former explanation and maintain that collective bargaining, now more than three decades old at some institutions, has matured into a campus system of dual governance that no longer requires special study. Managed ProfessionaL could be viewed by some as the start of a reexamination of collective bargaining, but unfortunately it does not fulfill that expectation.

The book is organized into seven chapters, including one previously published as a journal article, and it has an excellent bibliography and endnotes section that should prove valuable to scholars in the field. The 212 collective bargaining agreements contained in the files of the National Education Association served as Rhoades's database. These files hold contracts from more than 40 percent of all unionized institutions of higher education and, as such, constituted an adequate research foundation for Rhoades's inquiries.

Rhoades, who describes his own experiences at the University of Arizona, a nonunion institution, acknowledges that his own "conditions of employment have been extraordinary." While teaching at a unionized university is not a prerequisite for studying collective bargaining, Rhoades appears to have little direct knowledge of unionized campuses or other elements of the highereducation employment relationship. One need not have fought in the Civil War to be a distinguished historian. Yet the impression left by Managed Professionals is that the author, oblivious to the environment in which his subjects operate, observes laboratory specimens, describes their behavior, and makes antiseptic judgments.

Rhoades begins his investigation with a salary analysis, since he maintains that salary is the topic "most identified with union negotiations and perhaps most dear to faculty." Rhoades relies on anecdotal evidence to support his conclusion, which is wrong. Recent experience suggests that job security and workload are more important than salary in the collective bargaining process. One need only examine recently negotiated agreements at large state universities to see where the unions have placed their bargaining priorities. Plainly it has not been in the area of increased compensation. Rhoades's inquiry examines the influence of merit, market conditions, and equity considerations on salary arrangements. His research, however, yielded only twenty collective bargaining agreements with market provisions, showing the relative lack of importance attached to this factor in salary negotiations.

Most negotiations involve across-theboard adjustments and are not as innovative as Rhoades believes or suggests. To illustrate the need for market salary adjustments, he cites a provision in the collective bargaining agreement for the faculty at the City University of New York that established a committee to explore differential salary arrangements. While this provision is of interest, practical bargaining experience suggests that referring a matter to a committee is often a death knell and not an indication that contract language will be forthcoming in the next round of bargaining. The recently negotiated CUNY agreement contains no such differential salary provision. Rhoades's lack of hands-on labor relations experience is apparent.

Rhoades argues that "academics are managed professionals and are increasingly so," and that "academics are highly stratified professionals and are increasingly so." These propositions are difficult to reconcile, however, with collective bargaining demographics. Of the nearly 500 higher-education collective bargaining agreements in place as of January 1997, approximately 350 were at two-year institutions and 150 at fouryear institutions and university systems. The numbers of faculty members show an almost even division between twoyear colleges, on the one hand, and four-year institutions, on the other. Rhoades seems to be unaware of the large role that two-year colleges play in higher-education collective bargaining, and how professional issues differ between two- and four-year colleges and among research, teaching, and comprehensive institutions.

The selective use of data is also, at times, troublesome. For example, Rhoades devotes a substantial portion of one chapter to intellectual property rights, a subject addressed in only seventy-one of the collective bargaining agreements he examined. Fifty-three of these contracts are at two-year colleges, where intellectual property issues are of minimal concern. Such concerns loom much larger for faculty at research institutions than for teaching faculty at community colleges. To conduct routine contractual analysis in this area contributes little to the field.