The University of Colorado’s Board of Regents could vote in the coming months on whether to grant collective bargaining rights to the university’s 48,000 faculty, staff and graduate workers. Colorado remains the country’s bluest state that has not extended these rights to public university employees.
The stakes extend well beyond campus. CU is one of Colorado’s largest employers. Its researchers bring in federal grants that fund laboratories, public health work and engineering projects statewide. Its graduate students and instructors educate many of the nurses, teachers, engineers and entrepreneurs who anchor Colorado’s economy.
When CU can’t recruit and retain talented people because it can’t match the stable wages, protections and voice that peer institutions provide, that loss ripples across the state. Collective bargaining is how CU closes that gap through enforceable contracts, not the vanishing courage and ephemeral promises of administrators.
The second Trump administration has aggressively weaponized federal research funding, student visas and accreditation to shake down American universities. Targeting universities and intellectuals is a textbook maneuver for authoritarians consolidating power.
University administrators across the country have demonstrated a troubling pattern of anticipatory obedience by preemptively ending equity programs and policing speech to avoid becoming targets. Collective bargaining is one of the few tools to stop this backsliding by guaranteeing employee protections to speak up.
CU’s unilateral deployment of ChatGPT over faculty and student objections illustrates this pattern of pantomimed shared governance. Decisions about major policies and investments get made for faculty, staff and students rather than with them, especially when speed or caution makes consultation inconvenient.
As Sam Whitaker, an academic adviser and CU employee who spoke at February’s regents meeting, put it: “When hard decisions must be made, that is the time to have more voices in the room, not less.” Collective bargaining is what ensures those voices are in the room by right, not by invitation.
Regents Elliott Hood and Ilana Dubin Spiegel have proposed recognizing bargaining rights for all CU employees and won the support of Regent Wanda James. They need two more votes to pass it.
Those undecided regents, including Democrats Callie Rennison and Nolbert Chavez, have heard arguments for delay, most recently from former regent Jim Martin. His March 1 column argues that creating a collective bargaining system is a legislative prerogative, not a board one.
Martin’s column makes a telling concession at the outset: This debate “is not about whether collective bargaining is sound policy.” But his preferred policy venue has already failed the workers.
In 2022, a broad coalition advanced legislation to extend bargaining rights to public university faculty. The effort faltered and four years later, the legislature has not returned to the question. Telling CU’s workers to wait for a process that has already stalled is a justification for more delay.
Colorado’s Constitution already grants the regents sweeping autonomy over university governance, a deliberate choice to insulate CU from legislative fluctuations. The regents already set employment policies like compensation, grievance procedures, evaluation systems and employment conditions across the entire university workforce. Employment relationships is precisely what the regents’ autonomy was envisioned to govern and is the proper venue for employees to seek their collective bargaining rights.
The American Association of University Professors has argued for decades that collective bargaining and shared governance reinforce each other, rather than undermining each other as some opponents argue. In the AAUP’s 2021 national shared governance survey, the majority of measures showed no difference between unionized and non-unionized campuses.
Collective bargaining increases influence over institutional decisions beyond compensation by locking in the consultation requirements, protections against arbitrary reassignment and fair procedures for discipline that make shared governance real rather than aspirational.
Shared governance fails when it lacks enforcement mechanisms. It fails when participation becomes risky, when crushing workloads make service impossible, when faculty consultation is treated as courtesy instead of duty. Informal norms hide these weaknesses during calm times but collapse under pressure. Shared governance works best when it rests on enforceable rights, not informal customs and transient norms.
University leaders cannot celebrate shared governance in speeches while denying workers the means to enforce it. The more than 100 workers and community members who filled the regents meeting in February and the 1,500 CU employees who signed authorization cards in a single semester are not asking the regents to write statewide labor law.
If the regents value shared governance, they should adopt a framework that protects it through enforceable procedures. Consideration of collective bargaining unfortunately slipped from the Regents’ April 16 agenda but we expect it to receive a full hearing this summer.
History does not kindly remember university leaders who kept their heads down during crises. When antidemocratic politics target universities, universities need more democracy, not less, to protect themselves. Contact your regent and encourage them to recognize the collective bargaining rights of Colorado’s public university employees.
Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D., of Boulder, is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a member of the tenured and tenure track caucus of the United Campus Workers CWA Local 7799.
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