For years, faculty members at Harris-Stowe State University, a small HBCU in St. Louis, Mo., had complained about what they called a lack of shared governance; an iron-fisted, top-down management; low wages; limited resources for students; and a tenure and promotion system that they viewed as inconsistent.
They were angered three years ago when they say the university’s board effectively shut them out of the presidential selection process. After the new president abruptly resigned two years into the job, they were particularly outraged when the university’s acting president promoted four people to vice president, says Gregory Carr, a speech, English, philosophy and theater instructor at Harris-Stowe.
“They were giving them pay raises yet we were on a pay freeze,” says Carr, who has taught full time at the school of approximately 1,700 students since 2007.
So they decided to fight back. Last year, full-time faculty at Harris-Stowe became members of the first union at a public university in the Show Me State. About 80 percent of the faculty voted to join the Missouri National Education Association. A few months later, the new collective bargaining unit negotiated a new two-year contract that included a 3 percent raise for faculty members. It was their first raise in seven years, according to Carr, the union’s interim president.
Faculty unions are rare at HBCUs. Fewer than 10 percent of the nation’s 105 HBCUs have faculty unions. But that may be changing—due to increasing angst among faculty and greater demands for shared governance.
Howard University made history a few months ago when its adjunct faculty voted overwhelmingly to unionize, making them the first part-time faculty at a historically Black college to do so.
The approximately 170 adjuncts at Howard are affiliated with Service Employees International Union, which has been aggressively organizing adjunct faculty at colleges and universities in Washington, D.C., and Maryland. Adjunct faculty at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) system are having talks with representatives from SEIU about unionizing. UDC’s full-time faculty members are represented by the NEA.
