Empowering our professors

As one of the top 10 universities in the United States, Duke is responsible for the cultivation of the next generation of philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. Through its liberal-arts curriculum, Duke aims to instill in its students the values of innovation, leadership, and accountability. Duke is not about just about creating professionals; it’s about creating engaged global citizens. That is why Duke invites speakers like Patrisse Cullors and facilitates early voting on campus; Duke understands that civic engagement and self-expression are key to a thriving student community.

Sadly, Duke’s professors are being treated in ways that undermine our university’s commitment to these progressive values. Since a group of professors announced their intent to organize a union last September, the Duke administration has been anything but neutral. They have created a website called “Duke: One-to-One,” dedicated to countering the narratives of organizing professors, hired an elite law firm that specializes in union-busting, and sent ceaseless emails to professors in an attempt to dissuade them from voting for the union.

Duke claims that union representation will prevent faculty from being able to negotiate individually for higher pay and benefits and that the union is a “third party” that will only degrade the relationship between faculty and administrators. The result, Duke claims, is that faculty wages might actually go down. This is simply untrue. Union contracts create wage and benefit floors, not ceilings, and usually include flexibility for additional raises and benefits for individuals. Moreover, the union is not a third party but is simply a legally recognized and protected organization of workers that lends them a collective voice through elected representatives. Unionization is simply the democratization of the workplace.

The communications from the Duke administration on the union election all claim that administrators and individual professors can best handle the business of negotiating pay and benefits “one-to-one”, but this idealized conception of the relationship between employee and employer ignores the lopsided power dynamics at work. The goal of a union is to correct the imbalance between these two sides, keeping administrators accountable for the way they treat employees and providing legal protection from unfair or unjust actions.

Duke faculty is organizing to realize the power of a collective voice. Individually, workers have no power against arbitrary and unfair treatment, but by coming together with common goals, they can create real change. Professors at universities from Georgetown to Tufts are coming together to form a union for many different reasons, but at its core, this union election is not about pay, contracts, or benefits. Professors want self- determination in their departments, in their classrooms, and in their academic work. What professors want and deserve is a voice in their workplace.

Jillian Johnson, Trinity '03, is a Durham City CouncilWoman and junior Zoe Willingham is the president of Duke United Students Against Sweatshops.