On March 14, the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation to expand collective bargaining rights for more than half a million public service workers. While librarians, firefighters, and home-care professionals celebrated, there was one key group not invited to the party: Virginia’s higher education professors.
The exclusion of higher education professors is more than just a political snub; it reflects the growing identity crisis over the function of professors within a university. Over the past three years, the authority of Virginia faculty members has eroded. External pressures, including investigations by the United States Department of Justice, have expanded administrative power under the pretext of reforming the state’s public universities. The result? A wave of faculty dismissals, administrative overhauls, and program cuts that have left the ivory tower standing on shaky foundations.
Groups such as the United Campus Workers of Virginia are turning to collective bargaining to put professors back in the driver’s seat. However, extending collective bargaining rights will not restore professors’ lost authority and would only formalize negotiations within the same structure that weakened them in the first place.
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Collective bargaining is seen as a tool to correct for administrative overreach, but it is a false flag. A push for collective bargaining only further cedes power away from university professors and harms their ability to act independently.
If faculty authority is eroded, contractual employment protections alone cannot preserve academic independence. To put it simply, under labor law, you are either designated as a manager or as a professional laborer. While the National Labor Relations Act grants union rights to professional employees, the Board and courts may deny such rights to managerial employees. By fighting to be included in collective bargaining units, professors must legally argue that they have no “managerial” power over the university’s mission.
But for decades, Virginia universities have operated under a “shared governance” system where governing responsibilities, arguably managerial responsibilities, were shared among faculty, administrators, and governing boards. These entities worked together and had sovereignty over their respective fields.
For example, professors had input over their curriculum, subject matter, and methods of instruction. As shared governance norms erode, however, faculty sentiment shifts toward collective bargaining to protect their authority, resulting in a surge in faculty unionization rates across the country. Collective bargaining alters professors’ legal status and threatens the very authority they aim to protect.
By formalizing governance processes as part of a binding contract, shared governance is no longer an autonomous process but one that requires negotiation via a collective bargaining party. An individual professor is no longer treated as an expert with unique insights into the governing process based on their own subject knowledge, but must now function as a professional employee negotiating the terms of their employment. This seesaw between collective bargaining and shared governance only gives discretionary power to university administrators whose interventions into university practices have been criticized for discouraging open inquiry and academic freedom.
Academic tenure, a permanent and guaranteed appointment, is marketed as a safeguard against the administrative or political scrutiny that professors worry about. The permanence of tenure, in theory, protects academics from retaliation for their speech or research interests. In practice, however, tenure can serve to insulate professors.
Complaints against tenure usually reference the reduced scholarship of tenured professors, diminishing trust in higher education, and push for increased accountability to the students the university serves. These concerns have inspired legislators and administrators to reduce tenure appointments, weaken tenure protections, or even repeal the system altogether.
But excess administrative overreach that ignores due process only exacerbates discontent.
Take the case of the “Fired Six” at Virginia State University: Dr. Harbans L. Bhardwaj, Dr. Adnan Beker Yousuf, Dr. Vitalis W. Temu, Dr. Maru K. Kering, Dr. Toktam Taghavi, and Dr. Molla Fentie Mengist. The group of five tenured professors and one tenure-track assistant professor was called into a meeting and told that, despite their tenured status, they were terminated immediately. With tenure no longer serving as a check on administrative power, it is no wonder that faculty seek alternative arrangements, such as collective bargaining, to protect their sovereignty.
Administrators are not wrong to have concerns over the curriculum and return on investment of university education. Especially in public institutions, administrators have a responsibility to organize budgets to promote the value of funding higher education to their taxpayers, especially as costs continue to climb. Increased intervention into curricula and attacks on tenure’s due process, however, only create a chilling effect where professors and students alike self-censor in fear of retaliation. Instead of purging trustees, cutting funding, or dismissing professors without due process, policymakers should recommit to the core ideals of shared governance, as Virginia is attempting to do.
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The push for faculty collective bargaining rights in Virginia ultimately reflects a broader challenge facing public higher education governance. The central problem is not whether professors should have stronger employment negotiation tools, but whether academic authority should continue to centralize within administrative and political structures.
If policymakers wish to protect academic freedom and institutional stability, they should focus on strengthening shared governance mechanisms and clarifying the role of faculty in academic decision-making rather than relying solely on labor negotiation frameworks. Or better yet, get state funding out of higher education entirely.
Priyanka Venkat is a researcher, Young Voices contributor, and an alumnus of George Mason University in Virginia. Her work has appeared in DC Journal and the Mutual Persuasion Substack. You can find her on X.