A tenured faculty union at Michigan State University appears to be on the cusp of recognition without the need for a formal election.

On Dec. 22, the Michigan Education Association (MEA) filed a petition with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) on behalf of the Union of Tenure Stream Faculty (UTSF), which seeks to represent more than 1,700 tenure system faculty and librarians at MSU. The union also asked MSU for voluntary recognition under terms of a 2021 collective bargaining policy which says the university “will accept the bargaining unit proposed by the union as long as the proposed unit is reasonable.”

That “reasonable” threshold appeared to have been met by last Friday’s Board of Trustees meeting when Trustee Brianna Scott indicated they planned to voluntarily recognize the union, after organizers said 54% of faculty members had expressed support.

“I think most of us up here, and I’m looking at you Trustee Kelly, most of us up here are pro-union, I would say,” Scott said, referencing Trustee Dan Kelly, the board’s lone Republican.

The remark drew laughter from the audience, as well as a smile from Kelly. 

“I just want to make sure that people feel that they’re heard in this process,” Scott continued. “That’s all we asked for, I think as a board, is that this process is a fair process and everyone understands it. So we will support you all. I don’t think you’re going to get any pushback, at least from seven of us.”

Afterward, board Chair Rema Vassar told reporters she didn’t believe even Kelly would oppose recognizing the union, which she said should come sometime in the next four to six weeks.

“I think that we’ve been briefed over and over, and updated on how things are developing, but I think you heard the faculty say that they would like that before the next meeting we have in April. I think we’re on the clock,” said Vassar.

The board’s next meeting is April 12 and if the UTSF is granted recognition before then, it will avoid the more formal MERC process, according to MSU spokesperson Emily Guerrant.

“For the MERC election process, the union must demonstrate more than 30% support of the bargaining unit, the verification is conducted by MERC and MERC then administers a confidential ballot election,” she told the Michigan Advance. “If the union obtains more than 50% of the votes in the election, MERC certifies the union as the representative of the bargaining unit.”

Among the union organizers is Professor NiCole Buchanan from MSU’s Department of Psychology.

“I have personally talked with hundreds of faculty about our union,” she said. “They have been impressed with our forward-thinking Board, proactively agreeing that if a majority of the faculty support a union, the board would voluntarily recognize us.”

While employee unions are a fact of life for any major public university, as demonstrated in last year’s strike by undergraduate employees at the University of Michigan, organizing by tenured track faculty is less common. 

According to statistics from the Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education at Hunter College in New York City, over the past 50 years, less than a third of the 480 higher education collective bargaining units have represented tenure-track faculty.

However, William Herbert, the center’s executive director, tells the Advance that doesn’t necessarily mean there is less urgency by that group for collective bargaining rights.

“Over the past half-century there has been a major restructuring in faculty positions, with tenure track positions now constituting less than a third of all faculty,” said Herbert, who noted that unionization among tenure track faculty slowed considerably following the Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in NLRB vs. Yeshiva University, which found that faculty at private institutions were managerial employees and thus ineligible to unionize. 

With that said, Herbert said the overwhelming majority of those who teach in higher education today do so on a contingent basis and are appointed per course, per semester, or per academic year.  

“For the tenured and tenure track faculty, the more they are marginalized in decision making, the more likely they will support unionization,” he said. “Keep in mind that it is common for those in the public sector to have some form of job security based on statute or regulation.  History has shown that the mere existence of that type of job security rights has not deterred those working in public sector occupations to unionize.”

That is borne out in a 2020 Gallup poll which found that just 20% of tenured faculty members strongly agree that their employer “would do what is right” if they raised a concern about ethics and integrity. Those issues have a definite resonance at MSU in the wake of the Larry Nassar scandal and continued controversy over Title IX investigations

In addition, a 2021 survey by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that faculty participation in presidential searches had declined, from 94% to 88% since 2001. MSU recently appointed University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz as its new president, effective March 4. Guskiewicz is the university’s sixth president in the last six years. 

Meanwhile, at the University of Michigan-Flint, approximately 16 organizers are seeking to form a union among the 164 tenured faculty through an affiliation between the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers.

Efforts to obtain comment from either the AAUP or AFT were unsuccessful. However, an article in the April 2023 edition of the Flint-based East Village Magazine quoted organizers as saying they were “propelled by concerns about work load, campus climate, pay equity and alleged administration attempts to quash dissent.”

UM-Flint, which has struggled with declining enrollment, is currently searching for a new permanent chancellor following the departure of Debasish Dutta, who left in September for a position at the University of Illinois. Donna Fry, current dean of the College of Health Sciences, was appointed as interim chancellor of the Flint campus. 

If tenured faculty at both MSU and UM-Flint are successful in unionizing, they would join tenured faculty at 10 other Michigan public universities, including Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Wayne State and Western Michigan universities, that have formed a union.

Advance reporter Anna Liz Nichols contributed to this story.