Two years ago, lecturers and other nontenure-track faculty in the University of San Diego’s College of Arts and Sciences quietly began efforts to unionize.
On Thursday, after encountering obstacles, they go “nuclear,” as one advocate put it. They will stage a 1 p.m. rally at Colachis Plaza — near the Immaculata Church.
A labor union would be a first for the 75-year-old private school affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church.
Soroya Rowley, a theatre department lecturer, is co-lead of a 13-member organizing committee — working for a collective bargaining unit under Service Employees International Union Local 721.
She says her 19-department unit of 200-plus teachers (a USD official says 300) is already seeing support from some of the 12 other schools on the hillside campus overlooking Mission Bay and Mission Valley.
Her group wants higher pay and better job security.
“At the rate I’m being paid as a lecturer to teach one class, which is 3 units, it’s $6,500 for the semester,” Rowley said in a phone interview Wednesday. A full load for a nontenure-track faculty member — four classes a semester — translates to $52,000 dollars a year, she said.
“And that’s well below what is considered low income in San Diego — and we’re talking people with Ph.Ds,” she said. “You know, we’re in the new Gilded Age and yeah, the wealth disparity is worse than it’s ever been.”
The majority of nontenure-track faculty, also called adjunct professors, are on semester-to-semester contracts, she added.
“Our job is possibly not going to be there anymore, depending on the whim of the chair usually, so if you have a good chair and a good relationship with your chair, that’s your only job security,” she said. “There’s nothing in writing that says that you’re going to have an income in six months.”
USD’s response includes a website — usdfacts.com — created March 18. (Union organizers launched their own site as well.)
And on Tuesday, USD’s associate vice president and chief human resources officer sent email with the subject line: “Important Message to USD Faculty Regarding Collective Bargaining.”
“The organizers and SEIU allege that ‘the administration is refusing to meet with us to negotiate the terms of a free and fair election,'” wrote Karen Haggenmiller, the official. “This is untrue and misleading.”
She said that at a March 7 meeting of the University Senate, a union organizer was asked by a faculty senator if the group had attempted to meet with administration to discuss its concerns prior to launching its effort.
“The representative clearly and unequivocally stated that the group made the deliberate decision to unionize first, and then demand that the administration enter into negotiations,” Haggenmiller said.
Organizers of Thursday’s rally say they will call on USD President James Harris and other university leaders to “commit to a fair union election for NTT instructors and an end to the college’s recent anti-worker tactics.”
They also worry about interference or retaliation against instructors for union activity.
Lecturer Rowley recalls a 2021 move by USD clerical workers to organize, “and that movement was suppressed by union-busting tactics of holding meetings and sending emails with misinformation, which they’ve already begun to do with this campaign.”
“So our ask with the election agreement is that they put in writing that they’re not going to continue to do that,” she said.
Union advocates say they’re being told that President Harris can’t meet with them on the legal advice of USD General Counsel Thomas Skinner.
In response to my questions, Skinner wrote:
“We would have been grateful for the opportunity to meet with the faculty members who organized the campaign prior to the formal launch of their unionization effort, to discuss their concerns. Unfortunately, as one of the organizers stated in a recent University Senate meeting, they chose to ‘have the union recognized’ first, and approached the administration afterward.
“Once the organizers chose that path, NLRB rules and case law kicked in. USD is being very careful to follow the letter of both in order not to interfere with the process.
“We believe that each of the 300+ nontenure track faculty members in the College should have a voice and make their own decision. Under some interpretations of current law, an employer meeting with organizers could be construed as recognizing the group as a collective bargaining unit, without a card count or a vote by all prospective members. Therefore, I have advised the administration that in order to best protect the process, and to ensure all NTTs have a chance to weigh in, we should not meet at this stage.”
Skinner added: “They very clearly state that they want the administration to take a stand on a ‘free and fair election.’ The NLRB exists for exactly that reason — to conduct and ensure the integrity of the election process. Neither the employer nor the organizers set those terms.”
Times of San Diego shared Skinner’s 350-word note with Rowley, who shares co-lead status with Meghan Donnelly, an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology.
Rowley responded: “We are heartened to hear that USD officials believe that faculty should make the decision to unionize through an election process, and that they won’t take any action to delay or obstruct a fair election — which we know some higher education employers across the country have done.
“Whether to unionize is NTT faculty’s choice to make, and we’re glad they agree with that principle. We call on USD to commit to neutrality during the election and to refrain from disseminating misleading information about our working conditions and our campaign generally.”
Before she saw the Skinner note, Rowley told me that their group’s lawyer informed them there was no legitimate legal reason for them not to meet, “and that this is a stalling tactic.”
“They don’t want to agree to a free and fair election,” she said. “They would rather continue doing what they’re doing, which is sending out misinformation and trying to suppress the movement.”
For public school and university teachers, the chief labor unions are the AFT, NEA and AAUP.
But a 1980 Supreme Court ruling — NLRB vs. Yeshiva University — barred tenured professors at private schools from unionizing, deeming those teachers “managerial employees.”
Private school nontenured-track employees have unionized for decades, however, including the Catholic University of San Francisco and, in 2022, Santa Clara University.
Rowley says her group contacted SEIU — which boasts 95,000 workers, making it “the largest public-sector union in Southern California” — after about a year of growing the school’s pro-union numbers.
SEIU “had just unionized Santa Clara, which is a really similar institution to USD…. So that’s why we reached out to them,” she said. “And at first they said: Oh, well, we need you to build your numbers a little bit more and then we can afford to commit some resources to you.”
A “Dear Colleagues” pitch posted on the SEIU website notes labor progress at other private schools, including Occidental College and Georgetown, Tufts and Fordham universities.
“Our NTT colleagues at Loyola Marymount University are also forming a union to win worker rights and protections,” the letter says, “and we stand in solidarity with their effort.”
In her Tuesday email, Hagenmiller wrote that a decision to bring a union to USD for the first time holds enormous consequences.
“It has cultural ramifications well beyond the specific proposed CBU, or the school in which it is located,” she said. “I would like to remind everyone to please fact-check any information that you receive — including this email — and ask any questions you may have before you decide whether and how to vote or support the effort.”
Organizer Donnelly said in a statement: “USD holds itself out to the community as a moral leader and encourages students to become changemakers. However, the working conditions of non-tenure track faculty at USD are fundamentally in contradiction with the university’s stated values and mission.”
She added: “President Harris and the administration know that our union campaign has a lot of support, and that this is a grassroots movement that has been led by NTT faculty from day one. However, they have persistently mischaracterized our union drive as the result of outside efforts — a classic anti-union tactic. In reality, we NTT faculty began this movement because we believe that collective bargaining is the best way to substantially improve our working conditions at USD, and our lives.”
Rowley said she’s seeing backing from sister colleges — “and so this is definitely the beginning of a labor transformation at USD.”
