The Maryland General Assembly is considering a bill to give state university faculty the right to form a union. Currently, staff at the state’s colleges and universities are unionized, but faculty and graduate workers are not.
I have been a faculty member at unionized and nonunion universities. I also served as an associate dean at the University of Maryland College Park. In that capacity, I witnessed a system in which faculty were treated very differently depending on their ability to self-advocate; the predisposition of their dean, department chair, and colleagues toward their area of expertise; the faculty member’s prestige; and perhaps most importantly, their supervisor’s idiosyncratic interpretation of university policy.