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Community College Journal of Research and Practice
ISSN: 1066-8926 (Print) 1521-0413 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ucjc20
Reconcilable Differences: Conflict and Collegiality in a Unionized Community College Environment
Matthew Hartley
To cite this article: Matthew Hartley (2010) Reconcilable Differences: Conflict and Collegiality in a Unionized Community College Environment, Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 34:4, 318-336, DOI: 10.1080/10668920701382427
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10668920701382427
Published online: 03 Mar 2010.
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RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES: CONFLICT AND COLLEGIALITY IN A UNIONIZED COMMUNITY COLLEGE ENVIRONMENT
Matthew Hartley
Graduate School of Education, Higher Education Division, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Faculty unions are a prominent, though a comparatively recent, feature of American higher education. Today, a vast majority of community colleges have a unionized faculty. A number of researchers in the 1970s speculated that the presence of unions signaled the end of collegial shared governance and that interactions between administrators and unions would become increasingly adversarial. Subsequent experience suggests that the dire predictions were overblown. However, little institution-level research has been done to understand how unionization has affected academic governance. This study examines the governance system at a large, urban community college. The findings indicate that though at times relations are contentious, there are levels of conflict. Further there are a number of factors that tend to mitigate conflict and allow for collegial decision making. These include utilizing personal ties between members of the administration and the union, sharing data openly and also working together to collectively make sense of the facts before discussing possible resolutions to the presenting issue, and establishing an institutional norm that values finding solutions rather than scoring political points.
Faculty unions are a prominent, though a comparatively recent, feature of American higher education. In 1935, the U.S. Congress passed the Wagner act, which gave nonmanaging employees the right to organize and to bargain collectively (Garbarino, 1975). However, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s, at precisely the point when the labor movement had begun to show signs of waning, that the
Address correspondence to Matthew Hartley, Graduate School of Education, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216. E-mail: [email protected]
Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 34: 318336, 2010
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1066-8926 print=1521-0413 online
DOI: 10.1080/10668920701382427
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