Union tries to woo faculty at University of Minnesota

With one win and one loss, the campaign to unionize college professors hasn't exactly caught fire in the Twin Cities.

Now, the Service Employees International Union is taking on an even bigger challenge: to organize thousands of professors and instructors at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus.

Even supporters say they're facing an uphill battle.

"It's a long shot," says philosophy Prof. Naomi Scheman, who supported the last attempt to form a faculty union on campus in 1997.

Several months ago, SEIU organizers quietly started knocking on doors at the university's largest campus, trying to build support for a faculty union.

"We really are, I would say, in the fairly early stages at the U," said Carol Nieters, executive director of SEIU Local 284. It's so early, she said, that no one on the faculty organizing committee is ready to speak publicly yet. "They really want to grow support among themselves before they go too public," she said.

The union hopes to gather enough signatures to trigger a union election, and has set up a website, uofmacademicsunited.org, to promote it.

The move is part of the union's Adjunct Action campaign, which has been crisscrossing the country trying to organize adjunct faculty — essentially low-paid temporary instructors. In Minnesota, the union vote succeeded at Hamline University, lost at the University of St. Thomas and was postponed at Macalester College.

At the U, it's more complicated, union officials acknowledge. Unlike private colleges, it can't create a bargaining unit just for adjunct faculty. By state law, it would have to include tenured professors, who already receive the kind of pay and benefits that adjuncts are demanding.

That, observers say, could make it even tougher to win a union ­election.

"To me, it's a surprising strategy," said Mark Mathison, a labor lawyer with Gray Plant Mooty, who advised the University of St. Thomas in its successful campaign against the SEIU's unionizing effort.

"You'd have to think, well, they're sputtering a little bit in their attack on this region," Mathison said. If they try and fail at the U, "that would seem to me as, boy, they're just dead in the water in Minnesota."

For now, university officials have declined to comment on the union campaign, saying they're taking a wait-and-see approach.

Sociology Prof. David Pellow, who supports the union drive, says he thinks it will appeal to many colleagues alarmed by the shifting trends in higher education.

"There are fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs because universities across the country are hiring more temporary and adjunct folks," he said. "We see ourselves as having overlapping interests. We want to see fewer adjunct positions and more tenure track positions."

At the same time, he said, many professors — tenured or not — share concerns about increasing class sizes and threats to academic freedom.

"I'm hearing more support for the idea of a union than I've ever heard," said Pellow, 45, who has been at the university since 2008.

But some faculty leaders are skeptical.

"Unfortunately, I have to say that I don't see this endeavor as having a chance of success," said Eva von Dassow, vice chair of the Faculty Senate, and an associate professor of Classical and Near Eastern studies. She noted that the union failed to consult with faculty leaders before launching the campaign, and that there's been no apparent groundswell among the faculty itself. "They are kind of mystified by this particular organizing effort," she said. "It hasn't started from us."

Only two U campuses, Duluth and Crookston, have faculty unions.

1997 was different

In 1997, the Twin Cities campus came close to forming a faculty union, losing by only 26 votes.

"We came as close as we did in the '90s in large part because that was at the height of what was called the 'Tenure Wars,' " said Scheman, the philosophy professor, who is now president of the U's American Association of University Professors chapter.

At the time, she said, the faculty was up in arms over a proposal by the Board of Regents to weaken tenure rules.

Now, she said, there's nothing similar driving a union effort, although she says concerns about equity — and the treatment of adjunct instructors — could still galvanize faculty.

"Would [we] have started a drive? Probably not," she said. "But this is something that's happening nationally. It's a recognition that something huge and largely terrible is happening to higher education … And that as faculty, we sort of take ourselves to be the keepers of that flame."

Pellow, the sociologist, says there's no way to predict how a union vote might turn out. "It always has the potential to unite people and to divide people," he said. "But I don't think there's any inherent reason why a union can't work."

Maura Lerner • 612-673-7384