ABSTRACT
The steady corporatization of American higher education has threatened to relegate faculty governance, never strong, to the historical archive. Broadly speaking, it may be argued that, in keeping with the corporate nature of the institution, academic administrators have become a part of the professional and managerial class. In public institutions, faculty disempowerment has been codified by law; legislatures, the governor or county executive, and their staffs or state boards of higher education reserve all rights except those that have been wrested by academic unions, which, alone in the academic community, still possess formal if not substantive autonomy. During the period of growth and consolidation, academic unionism faced a series of constraints dictated by state law and by the unions’ acceptance of traditional trade-union culture. Today, in terms of density—the proportion of union members to the labor force—academic labor is among the highest represented in the union movement.
