Panel: Current Issues at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Faculty governance is experiencing new pressures as a result of changes in established practices in higher education. As a result of salary compression and inversion and increased workloads and non-optimal working conditions, faculty is seeking alternative ways to impact decision-making in higher education. Union activists on higher education campuses are energized by these efforts as they seek new and comparable salaries for faculty as a result there is a renewed interest in collective bargaining .1 Staff and faculty collective bargaining is heightened by the attention on salary requests. Therefore, faculty unions have kept collective bargaining rights as the nucleus of a national discussion of these issues. The increased dissatisfaction of college and university faculty and staff, that has translated into a heightened level of unionization of higher education faculty. As a matter of fact, because of the heightened attention to higher education faculty unionization, I was elected as a National Education Association (NEA) University and College Director at-Large at the last representative assembly. In fact, my, and the three other College and University Directors –at-Large’s, election was due to the immense growth in faculty unionism