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Tag: faculty union

  • UC, CSU released troves of personal employee information to the feds. Now the backlash

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    California universities are facing intense backlash for handing over employees’ personal contact information to the Trump administration as it investigates allegations of campus antisemitism, amping up tensions over government incursions into higher education.

    At Cal State, a faculty union filed suit Friday in state court after learning the personal phone numbers and email addresses of 2,600 Los Angeles campus employees were turned over to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is investigating employee complaints of campus antisemitism. In addition, the EEOC is contacting Jewish faculty across the 22-campus system, prompting campus demonstrations against cooperating with Trump.

    At UC Berkeley, protesters recently converged on campus after University of California leaders said they released files from their civil rights office and UC police incident reports containing the names and contact information of 160 faculty and staff to the Education Department, which is also investigating alleged campus antisemitism.

    UC-wide faculty senate leaders are demanding to know whether there have been other campus disclosures. UC has not publicly announced similar actions outside of Berkeley — but has not denied the possibility.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom has intervened. The governor said he received a report last week from UC leadership on the data release that made a “compelling case” that UC was legally required to share information with the government. Newsom said he was still “reviewing” the report. The governor also said he may similarly scrutinize CSU’s actions.

    Federal requests for campus data are not unusual in civil rights or employment discrimination investigations, legal experts say. But what is exceptional is the large-scale nature of the demands. CSU was ordered under subpoena to release employee information. UC says it negotiated over government asks to provide employee data — first offering redacted files — before relenting.

    The orders come against the backdrop of President Trump’s aggressive campaign to force higher education institutions to align with his conservative agenda. The administration has suspended billions in research grants and has offered to absolve alleged campus violations in exchange for hefty fines and sweeping policy changes.

    Broad size and scope

    Legal experts said they were not surprised investigations were taking place, citing campus civil rights complaints over the years and Trump administration declarations that prioritize combating antisemitism.

    Brian Soucek, UC Davis law professor, worried the antisemitism investigations — which involve nearly every California public university — are “a witch hunt.”

    The EEOC has powers to subpoena relevant information needed “to advance some lawful purpose,” said Soucek, who teaches about equality and free speech law. “The question is whether these [actions] are overly broad.”

    Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said “asking for information about individuals and groups of individuals in the course of an investigation is about as unusual as traffic on the 405. But it is entirely appropriate to mistrust the Trump administration.” Mitchell, whose group represents 1,600 campuses, said schools are “between a proverbial rock and hard place.”

    Spokespeople for the Education Department and EEOC did not reply to requests for comment.

    UC and CSU’s views

    Caught between the government and faculty are campus administrators, some who have expressed distrust of Trump’s civil rights investigations. But they fear that resisting would not only be illegal but could result in devastating funding cuts.

    In recent faculty meetings, UC President James B. Milliken has declined to say whether other campuses aside from Berkeley have shared personal information of employees or students. Speaking at a UC-wide academic senate meeting Thursday, Milliken said he understood employee concerns and argued that data sharing was routine across presidential administrations.

    He said the university was not handing over lists of faculty names but that broader documents shared with the government contained personnel information.

    Milliken said UC is also working to fulfill data sharing requirements under a December 2024 agreement with the Biden administration that has carried over to this year.

    That agreement resolved civil rights complaints — over antisemitism and bias against Muslim, Arab and pro-Palestinian students — at the Davis, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz campuses. It required UC to share “an electronic sortable spreadsheet” with details on who reported civil rights complaints and who they were lodged against for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years.

    “Failure to comply with government oversight could result in a very significant loss of funding, potentially jeopardizing tens of thousands of jobs, the education of our students, the research careers of thousands of faculty, and the care afforded by our health enterprise,” Milliken recently wrote to campuses.

    Administrators at both systems said they tried to resist or minimize government requests and have made strides to protect privacy while complying with the law.

    At CSU, officials told the EEOC that the Los Angeles campus would only turn over publicly available data — such as university email addresses. But then the campus was subpoenaed for personal data.

    Over the spring, the EEOC also subpoenaed UC for information on hundreds of employees who had signed letters in 2023 and 2024 expressing concern about the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the campus climate for Jewish people, according to faculty contacted by EEOC investigators who they said informed them about the legal order.

    The EEOC’s systemwide CSU investigation has not yet involved a subpoena for other Cal State campuses.

    Tensions grow

    Faculty, staff, students and unions have pushed back, saying university leaders should have rejected government demands, moves many say weaponize antisemitism charges for ideological goals.

    “Rather than taking a stance against an authoritarian regime, CSU leadership has chosen to be complicit,” said the California Faculty Association, which represents 29,000 employees.

    The union’s suit in state court asks for a judge to order CSU to avoid disclosing union members’ personal information in response to federal subpoenas without giving notice to affected employees and offering a chance for faculty to reject the request.

    Peyrin Kao, a pro-Palestinian electrical engineering and computer science lecturer, was among those who UC Berkeley notified that their names were in files given to the government.

    “They didn’t tell me why I was reported,” said Kao, who suspects the move was tied complaints in 2023 over an optional lecture he gave against Israel’s war in Gaza and UC’s investments in weapons companies. After the lecture, the university issued him a warning about potential violation of a policy against “political indoctrination.”

    “Showing everyone that you can get reported for pro-Palestine speech does have a chilling effect,” Kao said.

    Jewish voices

    Ryan Witt, president of the CSU Channel Islands chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, agreed. Witt, who is Jewish and organized a recent protest against the investigation and “repressive” CSU free speech policies, felt that antisemitism was not a “major issue” on campus.

    Other Jewish community members elsewhere differed.

    Jeffrey Blutinger, director of Jewish Studies at Cal State Long Beach, filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against the university.

    (Gary Coronado/For The Times)

    Referring to Trump’s higher education policies and antisemitism, Cal State Long Beach Jewish Studies professor Jeff Blutinger said he “shouldn’t be required to choose which threat I ignore.”

    Blutinger made a report last summer to the commission about a February 2024 an incident where police shut down a guest lecture he presented at San Jose State University after protesters demonstrated in the hallway outside the classroom. He laid blame on the university and police for not protecting his right to speak about Israelis and Palestinians.

    But he said the EEOC investigator he spoke to last month told him the probe was not tied to that complaint, which was closed for being too old. Instead, it was about a May 2024 public letter to CSU leaders that Blutinger signed, expressing worry over the “well-being of Jewish and Israeli students, staff, and faculty.”

    Another signatory the EEOC contacted last month is Arik Davidyan, an assistant professor of physiology at Sacramento State University. Davidyan said he told the investigator that “our administration has worked a lot with the Jewish community to address our concerns.”

    Tackling discrimination

    Some leaders at UC and CSU have expressed frustration, saying efforts to combat discrimination and anti-Israel sentiment have gone unnoticed by the government.

    At UC, protest rules have been revamped with bans on encampments, masking to hide identity while breaking the law, and student government boycotts of Israel. New training programs on antisemitism are underway.

    CSU also revamped protest policies and in the last fiscal year spent nearly $16 million to expand systemwide and campus-level civil rights programs. In the coming months, it is rolling out a new case management system to track discrimination complaints.

    “We’re working as hard as we possibly can to address antisemitism and to address any of the protected characteristic discrimination issues that may arise,” said Dawn S. Theodora, the system’s interim executive vice chancellor and general counsel. “We take it very seriously.”

    Staff Writer Howard Blume contributed reporting.

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    Jaweed Kaleem, Daniel Miller

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  • Loyola Marymount abruptly rescinds recognition of faculty union after months of negotiation

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    After 10 months of negotiations, Loyola Marymount University abruptly announced it would no longer recognize its faculty union.

    The news, delivered in an email to students and employees on Friday, sent shock waves through the union, which represents nearly 400 part-time and full-time educators who do not hold tenure-track positions.

    Paul S. Viviano, chairman of the university’s board of trustees, said in the email that the university was ending its engagement with the union by invoking its “constitutionally protected religious exemption” from the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board, which governs collective bargaining for private employers.

    “I was floored,” said Maureen Gonzales, 35, who has worked part-time as a dance instructor on campus since 2016 and serves as an elected member of the union’s bargaining team. “It’s outrageous.”

    The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that religious colleges are not under the purview of federal labor laws and need not recognize unions. Many religious colleges have chosen to do so voluntarily anyway.

    But in recent years, several educational institutions — now including Loyola Marymount — have claimed the religious exemption suddenly and without warning, effectively using it to shut down established faculty unions that they had previously recognized.

    Loyola Marymount’s announcement has sparked protest and drawn allegations of union-busting from faculty members as well as leaders of Service Employees International Union Local 721, the labor group that represents them. Unionized employees have accused the university of aligning with Trump administration efforts “to stomp out the labor movement,” and plan to file an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB.

    “Let’s be clear: This action is illegal,” said David Green, president and executive director of SEIU 721. “[F]aculty members will fight this with everything we have. LMU messed with the wrong union.”

    Administrators are defending the move, arguing that getting rid of the union will help support the university’s financial health, and thus “protect [its] Catholic mission.”

    Kat Weaver, the university’s interim executive vice president and provost, said that after months of bargaining and modeling the union’s proposals, the board of trustees found that the changes would force an 18% tuition increase, 300 layoffs and cuts to student programs, and determined “the responsible path was to invoke the religious exemption.”

    The university’s move is “firmly grounded in law and the U.S. Constitution,” Weaver said in a statement to The Times. “This right cannot be waived and may be exercised at any point.”

    Faculty members voted overwhelmingly last summer to join SEIU, citing issues of low pay and precarious job status. Many work on short, semester-long contracts across three colleges at the university: the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, the College of Communication and Fine Arts and the School of Film and Television.

    They teach subjects such as animation, communications, dance, English, music, philosophy, photography, political science and screenwriting, among others.

    On Tuesday, scores of staff members and union organizers rallied outside the entrance to the university’s campus in Westchester, which sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Armed with signs reading, “LMU: Back to the table now,” and, “Union busting is not a Jesuit value,” they marched back and forth across Loyola Boulevard.

    Bryan Wisch, a 33-year-old rhetorical arts instructor and alumnus of the university, said 75% of faculty in the union work part time on semester-long contracts for “poverty wages.” Those who work full time typically have slightly longer contracts that last one to three years, he said.

    Wisch said he’s “one of the lucky ones” who works full time. Still, he said his annual pay of $68,000 isn’t sufficient to live in costly Los Angeles, and he’s taken on a second job to make ends meet.

    Wisch said the university has disingenuously characterized the union as an outside party, even though the bargaining committee is made up of 15 employees elected from the three colleges.

    The university said it is still committed to working with non-tenure-track faculty to improve conditions, but wanted to remove the “third-party intermediaries of SEIU and NLRB.” The university said it has already implemented salary and merit wage increases for non-tenure-track faculty that amount to an average 7.8% pay raise, retroactive to August.

    “We are expanding full-time positions, strengthening contracts and promotion pathways,” Weaver said. “Respecting workers and workers’ rights and choosing a different governance path are not contradictions.”

    Many Catholic universities teach social justice doctrines of the Catholic Church, which have a long history of support for organized labor. Pope Leo XIII in 1891 used the platform of the papacy to offer a spirited defense of unions and the rights of workers in his seminal encyclical, “Rerum Novarum.”

    But while some Catholic universities embrace unions in line with such doctrines, others still object, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, City University of New York.

    Typically, universities raise objections at the beginning of the union process, Herbert said. He called it “peculiar” that Loyola Marymount made an about-face after negotiating for months.

    “It raises questions as to the actual motivations. Is it a sincere belief unionization will interfere with the religious education of the school? Or is it to avoid having to engage in collective bargaining?” Herbert said. “It does not sound to me that they’re concerns of religious liberty.”

    Joshua D. Nadreau, an attorney and regional managing partner at the law firm Fisher Phillips, said the motivation may not ultimately have weight, since the labor board, even with a Democratic majority, has sided with universities on this issue in recent years.

    “I don’t foresee a real avenue for actual relief here,” Nadreau said “Courts are incredibly reluctant to weigh in on the authenticity of religious practices.”

    Some 600 Catholic institutions across the U.S., including universities, hospitals and other medical facilities, are unionized, according to a 2024 report by the Catholic Labor Network.

    A 1979 Supreme Court decision regarding the Catholic Bishop of Chicago ruled that the NLRB should not seek to regulate religious institutions, arguing that problems with religious freedom protections enshrined in the First Amendment can arise when a government office tries to determine if certain activities are religious or not.

    In the decades since, rulings by federal courts and the NLRB have focused on creating a standard to deem whether a school is a religious institution, and whether the labor board can assert itself when it comes to employees who are not involved with its religious mission.

    Recent rulings have further curtailed the NLRB’s reach. A U.S. Court of Appeals in 2020 blocked the board from requiring that Duquesne University, a Catholic institution in Pittsburgh, recognize an adjunct faculty union because it could lead to an “intrusive inquiry” that could infringe on the institution’s religious protections.

    In 2021, St. Leo University in Florida moved to nix its 44-year-old faculty union. The union contested the withdrawal of recognition, arguing the university changed the terms and conditions of employment without the union’s consent in violation of federal labor law.

    But in 2024, the NLRB sided with St. Leo, saying it could not exercise oversight at the religious institution.

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    Suhauna Hussain

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  • Cal State faculty just got a 5% raise. Here's why they're upset.

    Cal State faculty just got a 5% raise. Here's why they're upset.

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    California State University officials are unilaterally raising faculty pay by 5%, rejecting demands for much higher increases and ending contract negotiations with the faculty union, a move that has ramped up labor strife as a systemwide, weeklong walkout approaches.

    The pay hike effective Jan. 31 is far from the 12% increase for the 2023-24 academic year sought by the California Faculty Assn., which represents professors, lecturers, counselors, librarians and coaches. University officials said Tuesday the union’s salary demands were not financially viable and would have resulted in layoffs and other cuts.

    “With this action, we will ensure that well-deserved raises get to our faculty members as soon as possible,” Leora Freedman, vice chancellor for human resources, said in a statement. “We have been in the bargaining process for eight months and the CFA has shown no movement, leaving us no other option.”

    Charles Toombs, president of the California Faculty Assn., lambasted the university’s decision to end contract talks.

    “CSU management expressed nothing but disdain for faculty,” he said in a statement. “CSU management has never taken seriously our proposals for desperately needed equity transformation for CSU students, faculty, and staff.”

    The divide over pay had reached an apex in recent weeks, with faculty staging one-day strikes at four campuses in early December to voice dissatisfaction with the university system’s pay proposals. A weeklong strike is planned at all 23 of the system’s campuses starting Jan. 22, which marks the beginning of the spring semester for most students.

    The CSU and faculty union were engaged in so-called reopener bargaining, in which parts of the existing contract can be negotiated before it expires in June. Bargaining sessions were scheduled for this week, but university leaders imposed their final offer during a session Tuesday, according to the union.

    Toombs said the union, which represents 29,000 workers, had planned to “bargain in good faith” and explore a solution that could avert a strike. Instead, he said, they were met with “disrespect from management.”

    “Management’s imposition gives us no other option but to continue to move forward with our plan for a systemwide strike,” he said.

    Before Tuesday’s session, the sides had reached an impasse, meaning they could not reach an agreement on their own. That triggered a report from an independent fact -finder, who recommended the sides agree to a 7% increase.

    Having exhausted the negotiation process without an agreement, the system was permitted to impose a final offer during bargaining. Faculty members may strike to protest the system’s decision, though the union has not yet said if they will extend the walkout planned for this month beyond a week.

    Throughout negotiations, union leaders have called on the CSU to draw on money from its reserves to pay for increases, accusing the system of “hoarding billions of dollars in reserves instead of investing in faculty and staff.” An Eastern Michigan University professor commissioned by the union to conduct a financial analysis of the CSU found the system is “in very strong financial condition” with “a high level of reserves.”

    But university officials have disputed the union’s findings, contending that they need to maintain the reserves to pay for short-term or emergency expenses. They also said some of the money the union says is part of the university’s reserves cannot be used on salaries.

    “We are committed to paying fair, competitive salaries and benefits for our hard-working faculty members, who are delivering instruction to our students every day and are the cornerstone of our university system,” Freedman said. “But we must also operate within our means to protect the long-term success and stability of the university, our students and our faculty.”

    Freedman noted the 5% raise aligns with increases given to unions representing other CSU workers.

    In addition to across-the-board increases, the union had also sought to raise the salary floor for its lowest-paid workers to $64,360 from $54,360. During the one-day strikes last month, lecturers said they live in financial precarity, with many having to teach classes at multiple campuses or take on debt to pay for basic living expenses.

    The faculty association also sought other improvements, including caps on class sizes, an expansion of paid parental leave to a full semester, accessible lactation rooms, and gender-inclusive restrooms and changing rooms.

    The CSU’s move is unlikely to stem disagreements over pay. With the current contract set to expire in June, both sides will probably begin negotiations over the next contract in the coming weeks or months.

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    Debbie Truong

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